Birthday Greetings # 56

Happy birthday to Constantius Chlorus, Roman emperor.  Constantius was one of those people unfortunate enough to have whatever claim to fame they might have had utterly overshadowed by the achievements of their children.  Constantine, the son of our birthday boy, fought a bunch of civil wars, reunited the Roman empire, introduced Christianity as its official religion and put the rather rocky empire back on an even keel for a few centuries.  Against a CV like that Constantius Chlorus sort of fades into the shadows.

Which is a pity because he was a highly capable operator on his own account.  I've mentioned before how the emperor Diocletian chopped the empire up into manageable bits and then set up emperors to rule each bit.  Maximian was given control of the western half of the emperor which had a few problems, barbarian raiders, pirates, treacherous generals.  This really came to a head when one of the treacherous generals made an alliance with the barbarian raiders and started on a career of piracy thus neatly combining all of the threats to the empire into one handy package.

To deal with this Maximian turned to his top soldier, a former imperial guardsman by the name of Constantius Chlorus.  Maximian arranged for Constantius to be elevated to the rank of junior emperor and then gave him responsibility for those parts of the western empire no longer controlled by the western empire.  Constantius proved up to the challenge (possibly to Maximian's chagrin), he beat the barbarians, then defeated the leader of the military rebels.  Said leader was then murdered by one of his subordinates who took his job (promotion through homicide was rapidly becoming the preferred Roman method of career progression).  Nothing daunted Constantius invaded the new rebel's headquarters in Britain.  His forces defeated the rebels and for good measure massacred the Frankish mercenaries that the rebels had hired but forgotten to pay.

With Britain subdued (it was really the army in Britain who revolted, the actual population didn't seem to care much one way or the other) Constantius returned to mainland Europe and spent the next few years battling various barbarian tribes in an attempt to reassert the Rhine as the border of the empire.  In this he was largely, if temporarily, successful.  Meanwhile over in the east Diocletian was waxing wroth over all the irritating Christians that suddenly seemed to be infesting the empire and started a major persecution.  Possibly seeing how the wind was blowing Constantius didn't really do much in the way of persecuting although he did knock down a couple of churches.  This restraint enabled his son's Christian biographer to claim he was a closet Christian thus providing a religiously appropriate parent for the emperor.

In 305AD Diocletian resigned and forced Maximian to resign with him.  Constantius now stepped up into the senior emperor role in the west although he wasn't able to get his son the junior emperor gig.  With a fancy new purple robe about his shoulders Constantius went back to Britain to beat up some Picts.  The Picts were duly beaten but Constantius himself sickened and died at York barely a year after gaining the title of senior emperor.  As he was dying he persuaded the soldiers around him that his son would make a bang up emperor and that they shouldn't pay any attention to the silly appointments that had been made previously.

The achievements of his son, Constantine, were staggering but if it hadn't been for Constantius Chlorus he might have lived out his days running a pub on the Black Sea coast.