He originally chose the site of Troy on the Dardanelles, replete with I lomcric asso¬ciations, lor his new capital; the walls were nearly complete when he changed bis mind (thanks, he said, to angelic intervention) and selected provincial Byzantium instead. Divine inspiration was to remain a leitmotif of the Christian world thereafter.
No sooner was the city established in 324 than courtiers and senators moved in. Dedicated in 330 and extravagantly decorated with stolen treasures from all over the classical world, the city became the seat of Christianity and the venue of the numerous acrimonious fights over the nature of the True Faith.
The horror of heresy
Christians had been at loggerheads with each other from the very beginning. In 1st century Kphesus, the Apostle John was seen retreating hastily from the baths to avoid Cerinthus, a heretic who believed that Christ was a spirit, not a man. A generation later, Marcion from Sinop was promoting a brand of Christianity which rejected the Old Testament and its God. Between AD 160 and 170 in Phrygia, Monlanus, a former priest of the goddess Cybele, converted to Christianity, and two women friends developed a theory of ecstatic prophecy which
LEFT: 8th-century Italian mosaic of the Byzantine
Emperor Justinian I (527-65).
RIGHT: detail with cross, Basilica of St John, Selc.uk.
held that the Holy Spirit was speaking through them. The movement was banned, but it spread rapidly right across the Roman Empire.
For most of its history, the Roman and later Byzantine Empire was beset by problems of theology which sapped the energy of emperors and scholars, causing sometimes unbridgeable
political and social divisions. Yet these disputes are often virtually impossible to understand.
What was the fuss about? Basically, the new church was being forced to thrash out agreed explanations of its central truths - against the rationalisations of phi losophers and diverse cultural and linguistic communities with their own vested interests to defend, The core issue was whether Jesus Christ was God or man, or (as orthodox Christians held) both at once.
At the two extremes were Monophysitism and Arianism. Arius was an Egyptian priest who believed that Christ was not God but more a heroic superman. The Monophysites arose as a reaction, stressing the divinity of Christ.
Hos geldiniz!"- Welcome to Turkey.
