Among the decisions made by the secret priestly organization straight after Constantine's victory, there is one in particular that has always escaped the attention of historians, but which had consequences of extreme importance. We have no direct proof of this decision, but on the basis of an examination of subsequent historical events it is certain that it was made at that time. It was probably in Milan, on the occasion of the encounter between Constantine and Licinius in 313, at that Sol Invictus meeting that had attributed the imperial office in perpetuity to the Gens Flavia. As a collateral measure it must have been established that the seat of the Emperor and his administration would remain forever a long way from Rome.
It is an incontestable fact that from that moment on no “Roman” Emperor ever resided again in Rome, not even when the West had a separate Emperor from the East. The last Emperor to reside in the capital was Maxentius. Constantine, before having a tailor-made capital built for him on the Bosporus, lived in Milan, Arles, Trier, Aquileia, Sirmium and Serdica. Meanwhile, however, he continued to lavish enormous resources on embellishing Rome with monuments, basilicas, churches and other grandiose public buildings.[1] There was a frenzy of building the likes of which few had ever seen before, which constituted the clearest demonstration that the city continued to be the real capital of the Empire; and its position was never in question, and the flow of supplies needed to maintain its exuberant population was never cut.
So what was it that stopped Constantine establishing himself in Rome? And why did the Western Emperors decide in the end to make a little city in the middle of the swamps, like Ravenna, their administrative seat, while continuing to pour enormous amounts of money into the defense and maintenance of Rome? The explanations in history books that we find for this important fact are always vague, generic and unconvincing, and in any case are tied to the preferences of this or that person, or to contingent situations in that moment. Apart from Diocletian, who lived there for only four weeks, before Constantine all the Roman emperors, whatever part of the Empire they came from, had always placed their capital in Rome. How do we explain that after him no-one ever thought of establishing their seat in what was still and would remain the “caput mundi”?
Was it a free choice of all the “Roman” emperors from Constantine onwards, made independently of each other, or was it an imposition by the secret priestly organization? The first alternative seems unlikely and to be excluded a priori. That leaves the second. In attributing the imperial office in perpetuity to the Gens Flavia, the secret priestly organization must also have taken measures to safeguard its independence and power. It was a decision that can only be explained by the existence of two powers: one public, constituted by the Emperor, who was head of the army and the civil service. The other secret, constituted by the priestly organization itself, endowed with an exclusively moral power, exercised by means of the Mithraic lodge system, with each lodge presided over by a Pater, who recognized the authority of the Pater Patrum, who resided in Rome, in the Vatican Grotto. Strictly related to the latter was the religious power of the Catholic Bishop of Rome, who from the same Vatican exercised his primacy over all the bishops in the Empire.
The two powers could not co-exist in the same seat. The secret organization was the expression of the priestly families as a whole and it therefore claimed superior power to that of the Emperor, who belonged to just one of those families. Not filling any public office of a political, administrative or military nature, it tried to ensure its own existence and independence by literally keeping its distance from the seat of the imperial administration. Rome, moral capital of the Empire, was and had to remain the property of the priestly family as such, not of individual emperors, who would inevitably have fought and neutralized (as Diocletian did and as the Byzantine emperors would do) a power outside of their control and capable of influencing them. The only way to avoid this very real risk was to physically separate the civil and religious authorities, giving Rome a sort of extraterritoriality in comparison with the remains of the Empire; that is to say, making it a sort of modern Vatican ante litteram, with moral authority over the whole Empire, and especially in its western part, where it also had a sort of political primacy.
A precise and detailed reference to this decision is probably constituted by a famous document of the eighth century, known as the “Donation of Constantine”, which is presented as a decree by Constantine addressed to Pope Sylvester. In it the Emperor grants the Pope and all his successors a higher status than his own “secular throne”, imperial honors and revenues (insignia et regalia). He gives the Pope the Lateran Palace (this has been historically verified), the city of Rome and “all the provinces, places and cities of Italy and of the western regions”. As a result of this donation he moved his capital to the East. He also declares the supremacy of the Pope over the Eastern patriarchs.
This document was almost certainly written around 754, during the pontificate of Stephen II and is therefore unanimously considered a fake, which is certainly true with regard to the form, but not the content. The historical evidence demonstrates that it faithfully reflects a decision made at the time of Constantine, in that fateful year of 313, because from then on the de facto jurisdiction over Rome and central Italy was always exercised by the Senate and the Church. Moreover, the historical evidence shows that from then on the whole Western Empire was an “area of influence” reserved for the pope in Rome, and the imperial authorities limited themselves to providing for its defence against internal and external enemies.
The decision to separate the seat of the imperial administration from Rome was always respected. And it certainly changed the course of history in ways that we cannot even begin to imagine. It is a sterile exercise for the imagination, agreed, but let us try for a moment to think how things might have been different if Constantine had placed his capital in Rome and if Rome had remained forever, as it had once been, the imperial seat. Would an Eastern Roman Empire ever have existed? Would the barbarians ever have prevailed over the West? Would the Roman Empire ever have fallen? And whatever would have happened to the papacy and Christianity? It is pointless to hypothesize. These questions, in any case, give an idea of the historical significance of that decision, of which no contemporary document gives the slightest mention, but which the evidence of the facts shows to have been made on that occasion.
This separation led to the division of the Empire into two parts, one subject to the religious authority of the Church (or rather, initially to the priestly organization that controlled it), the other to the political authority of the Emperor of the East; although, formally, the authority of both extended to the whole Empire. It was a compromise that for a long time seemed as though it might work. For centuries, in fact, relations between the family's political leader, the Emperor, and its religious leader, were very good, albeit often conflictual, and the two leaders sustained and legitimized each other, but in two worlds that were politically and territorially distinct and separate.
It was inevitable, however, that sooner or later they would separate completely and go their own separate ways. It cannot be doubted that that decision, made as we have seen in all likelihood in Milan in 313, which forbade “Roman” emperors to reside in Rome, was the main cause of the so-called fall of the Western Roman Empire, which occurred just a century and a half later. Historians are almost unanimous in attributing the fall of the Western Empire to the incursions within its frontiers of an uninterrupted series of barbarian populations. But an objective analysis of the facts shows a completely different reality. The deposition of Romulus Augustus, in 476, was the final act in the crisis of the imperial institution in the West that had begun at the moment that Constantine had built his new capital on the Bosporus. Or rather, in the moment that the decision was taken to physically separate the political/administrative elite from the religious elite of the state. From then on the Emperor of the West, when there was one, always had limited authority, completely subjugated, even from a purely civil point of view, to the interests of the Church of Rome and the families that controlled it, i.e. the great landowners that constituted the new omnipotent Senatorial class in that part of the Empire.
This is evident right from the death of Constantine. On that occasion, Rome imposed as Emperor of the West Constantine's youngest son Constans, a Catholic, in place of his brother Constantine II, an Arian, appointed by his father. And his successors Valentinian and Gratian were dominated by the Church, and in particular by Pope Damasus and by Ambrose of Milan, who among other things forced Gratian to lay down the pontifical mantle and subsequently to co-opt Flavius Theodosius, champion of Catholic orthodoxy, as Augustus.
Though Spanish, elected in the West, Theodosius moved to the East as soon as he could. He was the last Emperor to unite the whole Roman Empire under his dominion. On his death in 395, that Empire was divided up between his two sons Arcadius, who got the East, and Honorius, who got the West. This had been the usual way to do things since the time of Diocletian, but this time the division was definitive, although at that moment no-one realized it. From then on, the destinies of the priestly families that were under the Emperor, on one hand, and the Pope on the other, began to take different roads.
In the East the priestly family came up against a progressive loss of power and autonomy in favor of the imperial office. The Eastern Church became completely subjugated to the Emperor, who of course tended to eliminate any power capable of influencing his own personal power. The secret priestly organization, therefore, assuming it had a network of “lodges” in the East, was progressively deprived and emptied of significance, and ended up by disappearing.
In the West, however, it was the imperial office that progressively lost importance and power until it disappeared completely, leaving power entirely in the hands of the organization of the priestly families and the pope in Rome who was its expression. Honorius (395-423) and Valentinian III (423-455), were Emperors more in name than in practice, because political power was actually in the hands of the army and those who commanded it, the three greatest military figures of the century: Flavius Stilicho, Flavius Constantius and Flavius Aetius, who were the expression of the interests of the great landowners of Italy and Gaul, the greatest of which was the Catholic Church. The emperors of the following 21 years were transient and insignificant figures, who exercised no real power, but were in fact constant sources of instability and conflict.
In the end it was the Roman Senate that decreed the “fall” of the Western Empire, as we shall see. The imperial office “died” without trauma, leaving a West that was apparently broken up and sub-divided among various independent barbarian entities, but which was actually more united and autonomous than it had ever been, under the guidance of the Church of Rome, which all the Western bishops continued to be under. This is clear testimony to the fact that the end of the Empire did not mean the end of the privileges of the families of priestly origin, but it heralded the beginning of a new phase in their history, in which their power, no longer influenced by the charismatic figure of an omnipotent emperor, became complete and stable in a way that it had never been in the past, under the protective umbrella of barbarian armies which defended it against threats from any direction.
[1] Richard Krautheimer, Rome – Profile of a city, pp. 312-1308, Princeton University Press; chap. 1