In early January 1996, a fierce blizzard had just blanketed Washington DC in snow. Icy winds howled outside the narrow, Gothic windows that encircled my tiny study, perched high up in one of the fairytale towers of the Smithsonian Castle. While I tried to stay warm in that dilapidated but charming relic of the nineteenth century, my mind was a world away. I was pondering “the social history of the Deccan” on a cold day, part of a year spent as a fellow with the Woodrow Wilson Center for Scholars.

I first had to resolve some knotty conceptual problems, one of which was geographic in nature. Most historians of India write about, or simply presume, coherent core regions – that is, areas characterized by stable, long-term political and cultural institutions. Like magnets, nucleated political cores attract armies, scholars, foreign visitors, long-distance merchants, and crucially, court chroniclers. Ultimately, owing to the considerable data left behind by such groups, these regions also attract modern historians. This might explain why core areas like north India, Bengal, or the Tamil south are comparatively well covered in the historical literature.

But the Deccan is a relatively understudied region, partly because it has no enduring political or cultural center. To be sure, one finds sporadic periods of imperial rule from capital cities like Kalyana under the Chalukyas, Bidar under the Bahmanis, or Vijayanagara under its first three dynasties. But in history's larger sweep, this dry and mainly undifferentiated upland plateau never possessed a single, perennial political core, no lasting hub of imperial rule on the order of Delhi or the Kaveri delta.

When Apharban, envoy from the Persian king Narseh, came before the Caesar Galerius Maximianus to beg favourable terms for his defeated sovereign, his rhetoric met an angry rejoinder from the Caesar:

Thus, at his moment of triumph, the Caesar referred back to one of the darkest episodes of recent imperial history. In ad 260, between Carrhae and Edessa, Narseh’s father, Shapur I, had decisively defeated a Roman army and captured the emperor Valerian (see Map 2). He recorded these deeds for posterity in both words and images at Naqsh-i Rustam and on the Kacba-i Zardušt near the ancient Achaemenid capital of Persepolis, preserving for us a vivid image of two Roman emperors, one kneeling (probably Philip the Arab, also defeated by Shapur) and the second (Valerian), uncrowned and held captive at the wrist by a gloriously mounted Persian king (Fig. 6). The equally decisive victory of Galerius over Narseh in 297 marked a dramatic reversal of fortune and can indeed stand as symbolic of how the rulers of the first Tetrarchy and their immediate predecessors had managed to regain firm military and political control over the empire.

Rome’s northern frontiers, running the length of the Rhine and Danube rivers from the North Sea to the Black Sea, faced outwards towards a world filled with peoples not subject to Roman government. In the century that separated the reign of Gallienus from the reign of Julian, we hear of more than a dozen barbarian groups along the Rhine-Danube line: Iuthungi, Franci, Alamanni, Iazyges, Vandali, Carpi, Sarmatians, Goths, Tervingi, Taifali, and so on. Collectively we may refer to them as “barbarians,” a term of art that, despite its pejorative connotation in Greek, Latin, and English, has the signal advantage of making no assumptions about ethnicity. This is important, because the nature of barbarian ethnicity is nowadays a matter of considerable controversy, and the relationship of different barbarian groups to one another is often unclear. The one thing that unites third- and fourth-century barbarians, both as an object of study and as a historical phenomenon, is their collective designation in the sources by the Graeco-Roman idea of the barbarian - the uncivilized “other” outside the borders of the civil world of the empire, the externae gentes (external peoples), who were to be subdued and turned from savagery to gentleness, or harried from imperial territory like wild beasts.

The age of Constantine is one of the most fertile periods of historical change in all of antiquity. By itself, his elevation of the Christian faith from the depths of the persecution it suffered in his youth to the religion of his imperial household testifies to the growth of a new genus of government and a new sort of emperor. Cast by Constantine into the open light of toleration and imperial support, Christianity blossomed into a thriving offshoot of Mediterranean religious life. By the mid-fourth century, it had grown broad enough to cast its shadow over not just religious matters but art and architecture, philosophy and thought, literature and learning, politics and foreign relations, law and social practice. To be sure, Constantine was never so revolutionary that he turned up the roots of what had gone before and planted the field of history afresh. Rather, much of what he accomplished was to bring to fruition trends and tendencies that had sprung up long before his reign. Yet it was Constantine’s genius to have distinguished between productive cultural strains and the infertile tares that were doomed by the climate of history to die out. The age of Constantine thus witnessed not so much a re-creation of the historical landscape as a new emphasis on the cultivation of those features that had previously been pruned back. The result was the growth of the period now referred to as late antiquity - roughly the fourth through sixth centuries ad - a period that has aroused tremendous interest among the present generation.

On September 18, 324, at Chrysopolis, just across the water from Byzantium, Constantine’s army won a decisive battle. This victory over the emperor Licinius (who had ruled most of the eastern half of the empire since 313) established Constantine’s control over a reunified Roman world. It effectively doubled his domains. But like all military successes - no matter how glorious or divinely inspired - the reconquest of the eastern Mediterranean posed a series of difficulties: practical, political, administrative, economic, and ideological. This chapter looks at one particular problem which might confront any government attempting to assimilate a large and recently subdued territory. The challenge Constantine and his advisers faced was, of course, not how to “Romanise” or “civilise” the eastern provinces - the very idea would have seemed farcical - but rather how to control and exploit its resources. One tactic was to strengthen the apparatus of central government control. The evidence is patchy and unsatisfactory, but it does seem that both after the victory at the battle of the Milvian Bridge in 312 (which confirmed Constantine’s rule in the west) and especially following the defeat of Licinius, a series of reforms significantly altered the duties of the empire’s most important civil and military officials. These innovations saw the consolidation and systematisation of distinct areas of responsibility under the supervision of high-ranking office-holders closely associated with the emperor himself.

During the reign of Constantine, Christianity was the religion of the emperor but not yet the religion of the empire. His policies and enactments on behalf of the church established the conditions in which Christianity could flourish and thus prepared his subjects for the Christianizing measures of his successors. If it were true, as some contend, that Christianity was but one of many converging “monotheisms,” the present chapter would not need to be carried beyond the first section. In the second, however, I shall argue that - considered as a cult, if not as an intellectual system - Christianity took on features under Constantine that precluded assimilation to its rivals. In the third, I shall follow the advance of synodal government and the rise of the episcopal grandees, who, as I argue in the fourth and final section, repaid the patronage of Constantine by hallowing his ambitions and endorsing a tacit parallel between earthly despotism and the monarchy of God.

Conversion: From What to What?

It is probable that by the mid-fourth century Christians made up more than half the entire population of the empire. The sociologist R. Stark has tentatively proposed that if the church had grown at a constant rate of 40 per cent each decade since the time of the apostles, it would have arrived at this preponderance without incurring any debt to Constantine.