The Dominate: How Constantine and His Heirs Turned Rome into a Christian Monarchy (E-book, PDF)

In September 324, Constantine stood as sole ruler of a reunified Roman Empire. What he built over the next thirteen years, and what his sons and successors built across the six decades that followed, transformed Rome more completely than anything examined earlier in this series: a new imperial capital raised from nothing on the Bosporus, a gold coinage that would outlast the western empire by a thousand years, and an alliance between the emperor and the Christian church that moved from cautious toleration to compulsory orthodoxy within a single lifetime.

This is an original, ground-up e-book — not a collection of site articles — written exclusively for this series. Book Three of The Shape of Roman Power, completing the trilogy that began with The Principate and The Tetrarchy. Ten chapters trace the founding of Constantinople, the Council of Nicaea and the Arian controversy, the massacre and civil wars that followed Constantine's death, the twenty-month reign of Julian the Apostate, and the Battle of Adrianople and Theodosius I's Edict of Thessalonica — plus a full chronology and a chapter on the historiographical debate over whether "the Dominate" is a coherent system at all.

Word count: approximately 11,100 words · Format: PDF and EPUB download.