PART TWO

PAGANISM

How doth the city sit solitary, that was full of people! how is she become as a widow! she that was great among the nations, and princess among the provinces, how is she become tributary! She weepeth sore in the night, and her tears are on her cheeks: among all her lovers she hath none to comfort her.

Lamentations, 1.1–2

Even while Jerusalem was still standing and the Jews at peace with us, the practice of their sacred rites was at variance with the glory of our empire and the customs of our ancestors.

Cicero, Pro L. Flacco

It is better for a person to live in the Land of Israel in a city entirely of non-Jews than to live outside the Land in a city entirely Jewish. He who is buried there it is as if he were born in Jerusalem and he who is buried in Jerusalem, it is as though he were born under the throne of glory.

Judah ha Nasi, Talmud

Ten measures of beauty descended upon the world, nine were given to Jerusalem and one to the rest of the world.

Midrash Tanhuma, Kedoshim 10

For the freedom of Jerusalem.

Simon bar Kochba, coins

Thus was Jerusalem destroyed on the very day of Saturn, the day which even now the Jews reverence most.

Dio Cassius, Roman History

AELIA CAPITOLINA

AD 70–312

TITUS’ TRIUMPH: JERUSALEM IN ROME

A few weeks later, once the city had been destroyed and he had completed his round of bloody spectacles, Titus again passed through Jerusalem, comparing her melancholy ruins with her vanished glory. He then sailed for Rome, taking with him the captured Jewish leaders, his royal mistress Berenice, his favourite renegade Josephus, and the treasures of the Temple – to celebrate the conquest of Jerusalem. Vespasian and Titus, crowned with laurel and clothed in purple, emerged from the Temple of Isis, were greeted by the Senate and took their places in the Forum to review one of the most extravagant Triumphs in the history of Rome.

The pageant of divine statues and gilded floats, three or even four storeys high, heaped with treasure, afforded the spectators both ‘pleasure and surprise’, noted Josephus drily, ‘for there was to be seen a happy country laid waste’. The fall of Jerusalem was acted out in tableaux vivants – legionaries charging, Jews massacred, Temple in flames – and on top of each float stood the Roman commanders of every town taken. There followed what was for Josephus the cruellest cut of all, the splendours of the Holy of Holies: the golden table, the candelabra and the Law of the Jews. The star prisoner, Simon ben Giora, was paraded with a rope around his neck.

When the procession stopped at the Temple of Jupiter, Simon and the rebel chieftains were executed; the crowds cheered; sacrifices were consecrated. There died Jerusalem, mused Josephus: ‘Neither its antiquity, nor its deep wealth, nor its people spread over the whole habitable world nor yet the great glory of its religious rites, were sufficient to prevent its ruin.’

The Triumph was commemorated by the construction of the Arch of Titus, which still stands in Rome.* Jewish spoils paid for the Colosseum and the Temple of Peace, where Vespasian displayed the prizes of Jerusalem – except for the Law scrolls and the purple veils of the Holy of Holies that were placed in the imperial palace itself. The Triumph and remodelling of central Rome celebrated not just a new dynasty but a rededication of the empire itself and victory over Judaism. The tax paid by all Jews to the Temple was replaced by the Fiscus Judaicus, paid to the Roman state to fund the rebuilding of the Temple of Jupiter, a humiliation fiercely enforced.* Yet most Jews, surviving in Judaea and Galilee, and in the populous communities of the Mediterranean and Babylonia, lived as they had lived before, accepting Roman or Parthian rule.

The Jewish War was not quite over. The Masada Fortress held out for three years, under Eleazar the Galilean, as the Romans raised a ramp to storm it. In April 73, their leader addressed his men and their families about the realities of this darknew world: ‘Where is this city that was believed to have God himself inhabiting therein?’ Jerusalem was gone and now they faced slavery:

We long ago my generous friends resolved never to be servants to the Romans nor to any other than God Himself. We were the first that revolted against them; we are the last that fight against them and I cannot but esteem it as a favour that God has granted us that it is still in our power to die bravely and in a state of freedom, in a glorious manner, together with our dearest friends. Let our wives die before they are abused and our children before they have tasted slavery.

So the ‘husbands tenderly embraced their wives, and took their children into their arms, giving the longest parting kisses to them with tears in their eyes’. Each man killed his wife and children; ten men were chosen by lot to slay the rest until all 960 were dead.

To most Romans, the Masada suicide confirmed Jews as demented fanatics. Tacitus, though writing thirty years later, expressed the conventional view that the Jews were ‘sinister and revolting’ bigots, with bizarre superstitions including monotheism and circumcision, who despised Roman gods, ‘rejected patriotism’ and ‘have entrenched themselves by their very wickedness’. Yet Josephus collected the details of Masada from the handful of survivors who hid during the suicide and could not conceal his admiration for Jewish courage.

BERENICE: THE JEWISH CLEOPATRA

Josephus lived in Vespasian’s old house in Rome. Titus gave him some of the scrolls from the Temple, a pension and lands in Judaea, and commissioned his first book, The Jewish War. The emperor and Titus were not Josephus’ only source. ‘When you come to me,’ wrote his ‘dear friend’ King Herod Agrippa, ‘I’ll inform you of a great many things.’ But Josephus realized that ‘my privileged position exacted envy and brought danger’: he needed the imperial protection he received up to the reign of Domitian, who solicitously executed some of his enemies. Yet even as Josephus basked in Flavian favour in his last years – he died around ad 100 – he hoped the Temple would be rebuilt, and his pride in the Jewish contribution to civilization surged: ‘We’ve introduced the rest of the world to a very large number of beautiful ideas. What greater beauty than inviolable piety? What higher justice than obedience to the Laws?’

Berenice, the Herodian princess, stayed in Rome with Titus but she offended the Romans with her flashy diamonds, her royal airs and the stories of her incest with her brother. ‘She dwelt in the palace cohabiting with Titus. She expected to marry him and was already behaving in every respect as if she were his wife.’ It was said that Titus had the general Caecina murdered for flirting with her. Titus loved her but the Romans compared her to Antony’s femme fatale, Cleopatra – or worse, since the Jews were now despised and defeated. Titus had to send her away. When he succeeded his father in 79, she returned to Rome, now in her fifties, but such was the outcry that he again separated from the Jewish Cleopatra, aware that the Flavians were far from secure on the throne. Perhaps she rejoined her brother, almost the last of the Herodians.*

Titus’ reign was short. He died two years later with the words: ‘I have only done one thing wrong.’ The destruction of Jerusalem? The Jews believed his early death was God’s punishment.1 For forty years, a tense exhaustion reigned over blighted Jerusalem before Judaea again exploded in a final and disastrous spasm of rage.

DEATH OF THE JESUS DYNASTY:
THE FORGOTTEN CRUCIFIXION

Jerusalem was the headquarters of the Tenth Legion, whose camp was set up in the present-day Armenian Quarter around the three towers of Herod’s Citadel – the base of the last of them, the Hippicus, stands today. The Legion’s rooftiles and bricks, always emblazoned with its anti-Jewish emblem, the boar, have been found all over the city. Jerusalem was not totally deserted but had been settled with Syrian and Greek veterans, who traditionally hated the Jews. This barren moonscape of gigantic rockheaps must have been eerie. But Jews must have hoped that the Temple would be rebuilt as it had been once before.

Vespasian allowed the rabbi Yohanan ben Zakkai, who had escaped Jerusalem in a coffin, to teach the Law at Yavneh (Jamnia) on the Mediterranean, and the Jews were not formally banned from Jerusalem. Indeed many of the wealthier Jews had probably joined the Romans, as Josephus and Agrippa had done. Nonetheless, they were not allowed onto the Temple Mount. Instead, pilgrims bitterly mourned the Temple, praying next to the Tomb of Zechariah* in the Kidron Valley. Some hoped for the Apocalypse to restore God’s kingdom, but for ben Zakkai the vanished city assumed an immaterial mysticism. When he visited the ruins, his pupil cried, ‘Woe to us!’ ‘Be not grieved,’ replied the rabbi (according to the Talmud, compiled several centuries later). ‘We have another atonement. It is acts of loving-kindness.’ No one realized it at this time, but this was the beginning of modern Judaism – without the Temple.

The Jewish Christians, led by Simon son of Cleophas, Jesus’ half-brother or cousin, returned to Jerusalem where they started to honour the Upper Room, on today’s Mount Zion. Beneath the present building lies a synagogue, built probably with Herodian debris from the Temple. Yet the growing number of gentile Christians around the Mediterranean no longer revered the real Jerusalem. The defeat of the Jews separated them for ever from the mother-religion, proving the truth of Jesus’ prophecies and the succession of a new revelation. Jerusalem was just the wilderness of a failed faith. The Bookof Revelation replaced the Temple with Christ the Lamb. At the End of Days, golden, bejewelled Jerusalem would descend from heaven.

These sects had to be careful: the Romans were on guard against any signs of messianic kingship. Titus’ successor, his brother Domitian, maintained the anti-Jewish tax and persecuted the Christians, as a way of rallying support for his own faltering regime. On his assassination, the pacific, elderly Emperor Nerva relaxed the repression and the Jewish tax. Yet this was a false dawn. Nerva had no sons, so he chose his pre-eminent general as heir. Trajan, tall, athletic, stern, was the ideal emperor, perhaps the greatest since Augustus. But he saw himself as a conqueror of new lands and a restorer of old values – bad news for the Christians, and worse for the Jews. In 106 he ordered the crucifixion of Simon, the Overseer of the Christians in Jerusalem, because, like Jesus, he claimed descent from King David. There ended the Jesus dynasty.

Trajan, proud that his father had made his name fighting the Jews under Titus, restored the Fiscus Judaicus, but he was another Alexander hero-worshipper: he invaded Parthia, expanding Roman power into Iraq, home of the Babylonian Jews. During the fighting, they surely appealed to their Roman brethren. As Trajan advanced into Iraq, the Jews of Africa, Egypt and Cyprus, led by rebel ‘kings’, massacred thousands of Romans and Greeks, vengeance at last, possibly co-ordinated by the Jews of Parthia.

Trajan, fearing Jewish treason in his rear and attack from Babylonian Jews as he advanced into Iraq, ‘was determined if possible to destroy the nation utterly’. Trajan ordered Jews to be killed from Iraq to Egypt, where, wrote the historian Appian, ‘Trajan was destroying totally the Jewish race.’ The Jews were now seen as hostile to the Roman Empire: they ‘regard as profane everything we hold sacred,’ wrote Tacitus, ‘while they permit all we abhor’.

Rome’s Jewish problem was witnessed by the new Governor of Syria, Aelius Hadrian, who was married to Trajan’s niece. When Trajan died unexpectedly without an heir, his empress announced that he had adopted a son on his deathbed: the new emperor was Hadrian, who devised a solution to end the Jewish problem once and for all. He was a remarkable emperor, one of the makers of Jerusalem and one of the supreme monsters of Jewish history.2

HADRIAN: THE JERUSALEM SOLUTION

In 130, the emperor visited Jerusalem, accompanied by his young lover Antinous, and decided to abolish the city, even down to its very name. He ordered a new city to be built on the site of the old one, to be named Aelia Capitolina, after his own family and Jupiter Capitolinus (the god most associated with the empire), and he banned circumcision, the sign of God’s covenant with the Jews, on pain of death. The Jews, realizing that this meant the Temple would never be rebuilt, smarted under these blows, while the oblivious emperor travelled on to Egypt.

Hadrian, now aged fifty-four, born in Spain to a family rich from the production of olive oil, was a man seemingly designed to rule the empire. Blessed with a photographic memory, he could dictate, listen and consult simultaneously; he designed his own architecture and composed his own poetry and music. He existed in perpetual movement, restlessly travelling the provinces to reorganize and consolidate the empire. He was criticized for withdrawing from Trajan’s hard-won conquests in Dacia and Iraq. Instead he envisaged a stable empire, united by Greek culture, a taste so marked that he was nicknamed the Greekling. (His Greek beard and hairstyle were groomed with curling irons by specially trained slaves.) In 123, on one of his tours in Asia Minor, he met the love of his life, the Greek boy Antinous, who became almost his consort.* Yet this perfect emperor was also an unpredictable control-freak. In a rage, he once stabbed a slave in the eye with a pen; and he opened and closed his reign with blood purges.

Now in Jerusalem, on the wreckage of the Jewish city, he planned a classic Roman town, built around the worship of Roman, Greekand Egyptian gods. A splendid three-gated entrance, the Neapolis (today’s Damascus) Gate, built with Herodian stones, opened into a circular space, decorated with a column, whence the two main streets, the Cardines – axes – led down to two forums, one close to the demolished Antonia Fortress and the other south of today’s Holy Sepulchre. There Hadrian built his Temple of Jupiter with a statue of Aphrodite outside it, on the very rock where Jesus had been crucified, possibly a deliberate decision to deny the shrine to the Jewish Christians. Worse, Hadrian planned a shrine on the Temple Mount, marked by a grandiose equestrian statue of himself.*Hadrian was deliberately eradicating Jerusalem’s Jewishness. Indeed he had studied that other Philhellenic showman, Antiochus Epiphanes, reviving his plan to build an Olympian temple in Athens.

On 24 October, the festival in which the Egyptians celebrated the death of their god Osiris, Hadrian’s lover Antinous mysteriously drowned in the Nile. Did he kill himself? Did Hadrian or the Egyptians sacrifice him? Was it an accident? The usually inscrutable Hadrian was heartbroken, deifying the boy as Osiris, founding a town Antinopolis and an Antinous cult, spreading statues of his graceful face and magnificent physique all over the Mediterranean.

On his way home from Egypt, Hadrian passed through Jerusalem, where he probably ploughed the furrow around the city-limits of Aelia Capitolina. Outraged by the repression, the paganization of Jerusalem and the obligatory nudes of the boy Antinous, the Jews stashed weapons and prepared underground complexes in the Judaean hills.

Once Hadrian was safely on his way, a mysterious leader known as the Prince of Israel launched the most terrible of the Jewish wars.3

SIMON BAR KOCHBA: THE SON OF THE STAR

‘At first the Romans took no account of the Jews,’ but this time the Jews were well prepared under one capable commander, Simon bar Kochba, self-declared Prince of Israel and Son of the Star, the same mystical sign of kingship that marked the birth of Jesus, prophesied in Numbers: ‘There shall come forth a star out of Jacob, and a sceptre shall rise out of Israel and shall smite Moab.’ Many hailed him as the new David. ‘This is the King Messiah,’ insisted the respected rabbi Akiba (in the fourth-century Talmud), but not everyone agreed. ‘Grass will sprout on your chin, Akiba,’ answered another rabbi, ‘and the Son of David will still not have appeared.’ Kochba’s real name was bar Kosiba; sceptics punned that he was bar Koziba, the Son of the Lie.

Simon swiftly defeated the Roman governor and his two legions. His orders, discovered in a Judaean cave, reveal his harsh competence: ‘I shall deal with the Romans’ – and he did. He wiped out an entire legion. ‘He caught missiles on his knee then hurled them back and killed some of the enemy.’ The prince tolerated no dissent: ‘Simon bar Kosiba to Yehonatan and Masabala. Let all men from Tekoa and other places who are with you, be sent to me without delay. And if you shall not send them, you shall be punished.’ A religious zealot, he supposedly ‘ordered Christians to be punished severely if they did not deny Jesus was the Messiah’, according to Justin, a contemporary Christian. He ‘killed the Christians when they refused to help him against the Romans’, added a Christian, Eusebius, writing much later. ‘The man was murderous and a bandit but relied on his name, as if dealing with slaves, and claimed to be a giver of light.’ He was said to have tested his fighters’ dedication by asking each to cut off a finger.

The Son of the Star ruled his State of Israel from the fort of Herodium, just south of Jerusalem: his coins announced ‘Year One: The Redemption of Israel’. But did he rededicate the Temple and restore the sacrifice? His coins boasted ‘For the Freedom of Jerusalem’, and were emblazoned with the Temple, but none of his coins have been found in Jerusalem. Appian wrote that Hadrian, like Titus, destroyed Jerusalem, implying that there was something to demolish, and the rebels, sweeping all before them, would surely have besieged the Tenth Legion in the Citadel and worshipped on the Temple Mount if they had had the chance, but we do not know if they did.

Hadrian hastened back to Judaea, summoned his best commander Julius Severus all the way from Britain, and mustered seven or even twelve legions who ‘moved out against the Jews, treating their madness without mercy,’ according to Cassius Dio, one of the few historians of this obscure war. ‘He destroyed in heaps thousands of men, women and children and under the law of war enslaved the land.’ When Severus arrived, he adopted Jewish tactics, ‘cutting off small groups, depriving them of their food and shutting them in’ so that he could ‘crush and exterminate them’. As the Romans closed in, bar Kochba needed severe threats to enforce discipline: ‘If you maltreat the Galileans with you,’ he told a lieutenant, ‘I will put fetters on your feet as I did to ben Aphlul!’

The Jews retreated to the caves of Judaea, which is why Simon’s letters and their poignant belongings have been found there. These refugees and warriors carried keys to their abandoned houses, the consolation of those doomed never to return, and their luxuries – a glass plate, a vanity mirror in a leather case, a wooden jewellery box, an incense shovel. There, they perished, for the possessions lie beside their bones. Their fragmented letters record the terse semaphores of catastrophe: ‘Till the end … they have no hope … my brothers in the south … these were lost by the sword …’

The Romans moved in on bar Kochba’s last fortress, Betar, 6 miles south of Jerusalem. Simon himself died in the last stand at Betar, with a snake around his neck according to Jewish legend. ‘Bring his body to me!’ said Hadrian, and was impressed by the head and the snake. ‘If God had not slain him, who would have overcome him?’ Hadrian had probably already returned to Rome but, either way, he wreaked an almost genocidal vengeance.

‘Very few survived,’ wrote Cassius Dio. ‘Fifty of their outposts and 985 villages were razed to the ground. 585,000 were killed in battles’ and many more by ‘starvation, disease and fire’. Seventy-five known Jewish settlements simply vanished. So many Jews were enslaved that at the Hebron slave market they fetched less than a horse. Jews continued to live in the countryside, but Judaea itself never recovered from Hadrian’s ravages. Hadrian not only enforced the ban on circumcision but banned the Jews from even approaching Aelia, on pain of death. Jerusalem had vanished. Hadrian wiped Judaea off the map, deliberately renaming it Palaestina, after the Jews’ ancient enemies, the Philistines.

Hadrian received acclamation as imperator, but this time there was no Triumph: the emperor was tarnished and exhausted by his losses in Judaea. When he reported to the Senate, he was unable to give the usual reassurance, ‘I am well, and so is the army.’ Suffering from the arteriosclerosis (flagged by the split earlobes depicted on his statues), swollen with dropsy, Hadrian killed any possible successors, even his ninety-year-old brother-in-law, who cursed him: ‘May he long for death but be unable to die.’ The curse came true: unable to die, Hadrian tried to kill himself. But no autocrat has ever written as wittily and wistfully about death as Hadrian:

Little soul, little wanderer, little charmer,

Body’s guest and companion,

To what places will you set out for now?

To darkling, cold and gloomy ones —

And you won’t be making your usual jokes.

When he eventually died – ‘hated by all’ – the Senate refused to deify him. Jewish literature never mentions Hadrian without adding, ‘May his bones rot in hell!’

His successor, Antoninus Pius, slightly relaxed the persecution of Jews, allowing circumcision again, but Antoninus’ statue joined Hadrian’s on the Temple Mount* to emphasize that the Temple would never be rebuilt. The Christians, now fully separated from the Jews, could not help but crow. ‘The House of Sanctuary’, wrote the Christian Justin to Antoninus, ‘has become a curse, and the glory which our fathers blessed is burned with fire.’ Unfortunately for the Jews, the settled politics of the empire for the rest of the century discouraged any change in Hadrian’s policy.

Aelia Capitolina was a minor Roman colony of 10,000, without walls, just two-fifths of its former size, extending only from today’s Damascus Gate to the Gate of the Chain, with two forums, the Temple of Jupiter on the site of Golgotha, two thermal baths, a theatre, a nymphaeum (statues of nymphs around pools) and an amphitheatre, all decorated with colonnades, tetrapylons and statues, including a large one of the Tenth Legion’s very unkosher boar. Gradually the Tenth Legion was moved away from Jerusalem as the Jews, no longer a threat, came to be regarded more as an irritant. When the emperor Marcus Aurelius passed through on his way to Egypt, ‘being often disgusted with the malodorous and disorderly Jews’, he jokingly compared them to other rebellious tribes: ‘Oh Quadi, oh Samaritans, at last I have found a people more unruly than you!’ Jerusalem had no natural industries except holiness – and the absence of the Tenth Legion must have made her even more of a backwater.

When the peaceful succession in Rome ended in civil war in 193, the Jews, who now lived mainly in Galilee and around the Mediterranean coast, began to stir, either fighting their local enemies the Samaritans or perhaps rising in support of the ultimate winner of the throne, Septimus Severus. This led to a softening of anti-Jewish policy: the new emperor and his son Caracalla visited Aelia in 201 and seem to have met the Jewish leader, Judah haNasi, known as ‘the Prince’. When Caracalla succeeded to the throne, he rewarded Judah with estates in the Golan and Lydda (near Jerusalem) and with the hereditary power to adjudicate religious disputes and set the calendar, recognizing him as the community leader – the Patriarch of the Jews.

The wealthy Judah, who seems to have combined rabbinical scholarship with aristocratic luxury, held court in Galilee with a bodyguard of Goths while he compiled the Mishnah, the oral traditions of post-Temple Judaism. Thanks to Judah’s imperial connections, and to the passing of time, Jews were allowed, after bribing the garrison, to pray opposite the ruined Temple on the Mount of Olives or in the Kidron Valley. There, they believed, the shekinah – the holy spirit – resided. It is said that Judah won permission for a small ‘holy community’ of Jews to live in Jerusalem, praying in the one synagogue on today’s Mount Zion. Nonetheless, the Severan emperors never reconsidered Hadrian’s policy.

Yet the Jewish longing for Jerusalem never faltered. Wherever they lived in the following centuries, Jews prayed three times a day: ‘May it be your will that the Temple be rebuilt soon in our days.’ In the Mishnah, they compiled every detail of Temple ritual, ready for its restoration. ‘A woman may put on all her ornaments,’ instructed the Tosefta, another compilation of oral traditions, ‘but should leave out one small thing in remembrance of Jerusalem.’ The Passover seder dinner ended with the words: ‘Next Year in Jerusalem’. If they ever approached Jerusalem, they devised a ritual of rending their garments on catching sight of the ruined city. Even Jews who lived far away wanted to be buried close to the Temple so that they would be the first to rise again on Judgement Day. Thus began the Jewish cemetery on the Mount of Olives.

There was every chance that the Temple would be rebuilt – indeed it had been before and very nearly was again. While the Jews were still formally banned from Jerusalem, it was now the Christians who were seen as the clear and present danger to Rome.4

From 235, the empire suffered a thirty-year crisis, shattered from inside and out. In the east, a vigorous new Persian empire, replacing Parthia, challenged the Romans. During the crisis, the Roman emperors blamed the Christians for being atheists who refused to sacrifice to their gods and savagely persecuted them, even though Christianity was not so much a single religion as a bundle of different traditions.* But Christians agreed on the basics: redemption and life after death for those saved by Jesus Christ, confirming the ancient Jewish prophecies which they had commandeered and adopted as their own. Their founder had been killed by the Romans as a rebel, but the Christians rebranded themselves as a faith hostile to the Jews, not to the Romans. Hence Rome became their holy city; most Christians in Palestine lived in Caesarea on the coast; Jerusalem became‘the heavenly city’, while the actual place,Aelia, was just anobscure town where Jesus had died. Yet local Christians kept alive the tradition of the site of the Crucifixion and Resurrection, now buried under Hadrian’s Temple of Jupiter, even creeping inside to pray and scratch graffiti.*

At Rome’s nadir in 260, the Persians captured the emperor (who was forced to drink molten gold, and was then gutted and stuffed with straw) while the entire East, including the unwalled town of Aelia, was lost to a short-lived Palmyran empire led by a young woman, Zenobia. But within twelve years Rome had recovered the East. At the end of the century, the emperor Diocletian successfully restored Roman power and revived the worship of the old gods. But the Christians seemed to be undermining this resurgence. In 299, Diocletian was sacrificing to the gods at a parade in Syria when some Christian soldiers made the sign of the cross, at which the pagan diviners declared that the divination had failed. When Diocletian’s palace burned down, he blamed the Christians and unleashed a vicious persecution, martyring Christians, burning their books, destroying their churches.

When Diocletian abdicated in 305, dividing the empire, Galerius, new emperor of the East, intensified the butchery of Christians by axe, roasting and mutilation. But the emperor of the West was Constantius Chlorus, a sturdy Illyrian soldier, who assumed the purple in York. Already ill, he died soon afterwards but in July 306 the British legions hailed his young son, Constantine, as emperor. It would take him fifteen years to conquer first the West and then the East, but Constantine, like King David, would change the history of the world and the fate of Jerusalem with a single decision.5

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