Birthday Greetings #74

Happy birthday to Maximinus II, Roman emperor.  The third century was a great time for anyone wanting to be Roman emperor.  All you really had to do was join the army and wait, first for your elevation and then your almost inevitable overthrow and death.  At least it took the worry out of planning for retirement.

As a response to the somewhat musical chairs nature of imperial tenure at the time a more than usually competent emperor by the name of Diocletian decided to lay down some rules about the imperial succession.  He took a colleague and they divided the empire between them.  Then each of them took a junior colleague to help them run the place.  After a period of time the senior emperors would retire, the junior ones would step up and appoint two more juniors in their place and so on.  This worked about as well as you might expect.

It did seem to work briefly for our boy Maximinus though.  Diocletian chose Galerius, Maximinus's uncle as his colleague so the future for boy should have been bright.  When Diocletian retired Galerius stepped up to the top job and made Maximinus junior emperor with responsibility for Syria and Egypt (nowadays that would look like a bad joke but at the time it was a plum posting).  Over in the western part of the empire Diocletian's careful success arrangements had resulted in a murderous free for all from which two people emerged triumphant.  Constantine and Licinius.  Constantine settled down as emperor of the West while Licinius took on the role in the east after the unlamented (at least by Christian historians) death of Galerius.

Apparently Licinius and Maximinus came to some sort of understanding which allowed Maximinus to keep his job and neither of the two had to kill the other.  This lasted about eighteen months.  Constantine and Licinius each had their problems and made common cause to help each other against their enemies.  Uneasily aware that he was, at the very least, a potential enemy Maximinus made common cause with a usurper in Italy currently exercising Constantine's mind and gathered together an army thus becoming an actual enemy.

As policy decisions go this turned out to be as disastrous for his present prospects as his persecutions of Christians were for his historical reputation.  Licinius promptly beat up on his army, chased him through Asia Minor, beat up on his army again, chased him some more until finally Maximinus took the hint and died. 

Just before he died Maximinus reversed his actions against the Christians and accepted an edict of toleration issued by his uncle Galerius but it was too late.  The Christians were not letting him get off that easily.  Maximinus was accused of greed, superstition and living a life of such depraved degeneracy that it was amazing he ever had time to persecute anybody.  This is what happens when you piss off the people who will be writing the history.  President Trump, take note.

With their respective opponents off their hands Constantine and Licinius could settle down and address the dangers threatening the empire.  Each rapidly came to the conclusion that the principal threat to peace was the continued existence of the other.  They were probably both right.