Maxentius

• 1. Introduction

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  Rome itself recognized Maxentius as emperor. Every other emperor in the empire refused to. He ruled from 306 to 312, holding the ancient capital while the rest of the empire called him a usurper. The man who finally defeated him spent years reshaping the official record of those six years. How does a ruler hold Rome and still lose history? And how much of that history can still be recovered?

• 2. The Excluded Heir

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  In 305, Diocletian and Maximian abdicated together, and the succession passed over Maxentius entirely. Two men with no dynastic claim, Valerius Severus and Maximinus Daza, were appointed Caesars instead. Lactantius records that Galerius used his influence with Diocletian to ensure Maxentius was ignored, possibly on the grounds that he lacked the military qualifications for imperial office. Maxentius retreated to an estate outside Rome.

  When Constantius died in 306, his son Constantine was crowned emperor on the 25th of July. Officers of Rome's city garrison saw the precedent. Zosimus names three of them: Marcellianus, Marcellus, and Lucianus. They approached Maxentius, son of a former emperor and son-in-law of another, and offered him the purple. He accepted, and on the 28th of October 306, Rome's soldiers publicly acclaimed him emperor. Zosimus records only one death in the entire takeover.

  Rather than claim the title Augustus immediately, Maxentius styled himself princeps invictus, or "undefeated prince." The phrase was calculated diplomacy. He hoped Galerius would grant him formal recognition and avoid conflict. Galerius refused. He had practical reasons beyond personal dislike. Accepting Maxentius would signal to every ambitious officer that seizing a capital city was a viable path to the throne. The Tetrarchy, already stretched by Constantine's accession, could not survive another unilateral emperor. Galerius reckoned that Maxentius had few enough troops to be easily crushed and sent the Augustus Severus south toward Rome early in 307.

• 3. Wars and Alliances

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  Early in 307, the western Augustus Valerius Severus marched on Rome with a large army. The plan looked reasonable on paper. It collapsed on contact with history. Most of Severus's soldiers had served under Maxentius's father Maximian for years. When Maximian came out of retirement to stand beside his son, those soldiers defected to Maxentius and accepted a large payment. Severus retreated to Ravenna and surrendered on a promise that his life would be spared. He was later put to death at a place near Rome called Tres Tabernae.

  Galerius tried next, marching to Italy in the summer of 307 with an even larger force. The same process repeated itself. Money and the authority of Maximian pulled Galerius's soldiers away. Galerius retreated, plundering Italy on his way out. Maxentius now controlled Italy, North Africa, Corsica, Sardinia, and Sicily.

  In April 308, Maximian tried to strip his own son of power in an assembly of soldiers in Rome. The troops refused to abandon Maxentius, and Maximian fled to Constantine. Later that year, Domitius Alexander was proclaimed a rival emperor in Carthage, and Africa seceded from Maxentian control. Africa supplied Rome's grain. A small army under Maxentius's praetorian prefect Rufius Volusianus crushed Alexander around 310 and returned large quantities of grain to the city.

  Relations between Maxentius and Constantine deteriorated sharply after Maximian died in 309 or 310. Maxentius declared war on Constantine in the summer of 311, announcing he intended to avenge his father's "murder." Constantine responded by negotiating a marriage alliance with Licinius over the winter of 311-12, offering his sister Constantia to cement it. Maximinus Daza viewed the arrangement as a threat and sent ambassadors to Rome, offering political recognition to Maxentius in exchange for military support. Two coalitions now faced each other across the empire. The spring of 312 would settle which one survived.

• 4. Builder of Rome

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  The Basilica of Maxentius in the forum Romanum illustrates a pattern his successor established. Constantine completed it after Maxentius's death and attached his own name to the structure. Many buildings in Rome commonly associated with Constantine were in fact Maxentian projects.

  The most personal of his buildings was the Temple of the Divine Romulus, dedicated to his eldest son. Valerius Romulus died in 309 at approximately fourteen years of age and was deified. He was buried in a mausoleum at the Villa of Maxentius along the Via Appia. Beside that villa, Maxentius also built the Circus of Maxentius.

  Maxentius was forced to resume direct taxation in Italy to fund both his army and his building programs. Without the revenues that empire-wide authority would have provided, the money had to come from the city itself. His early popular support dissolved into open protest, and ancient accounts describe him, by 312, as barely tolerated by the city he ruled.

• 5. The Christian Question

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  Maxentius allowed the Christians of Italy to elect a new Bishop of Rome during his reign, choosing Eusebius for the position. The appointment had limited effect. The Diocletianic Persecution had fractured the Italian church over the question of apostasy, producing the split known as Donatism. No single episcopal appointment could bridge those factions.

  Studies conducted between 2021 and 2022 identified the manuscript tradition of his epistles in the Biblioteca Marciana in Venice. Compared against Roman law, the reconstruction mirrors what Eusebius of Caesarea, Optatus of Milevi, and Saint Augustine report about his policies. What that reconstruction revealed was striking: Maxentius had ended the Diocletianic Persecution in his territories at least five years before the Edict of Milan.

  His first epistle made Christianity a lawful religion within his domains, welcoming it formally into the Pax Deorum. That same document abolished the Diocletianic edict of persecution by law and threatened serious punishment for anyone who continued to persecute Christians. A second epistle addressed the Donatist controversy in Africa, firmly siding with the Church of Rome. The pro-Constantinian history that followed his death had reshaped these letters through forgery and interpolation. That process concealed a ruler whose religious policies ran ahead of his conqueror's. According to the sources, the Diocletianic Persecutions were the last, the largest, and the bloodiest official persecution of Christians in the empire. They ran in every province except those under Maxentius.

• 6. The Fall at Milvian Bridge

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  Maxentius had roughly a hundred thousand soldiers available against his opponents in the north. Constantine could muster somewhere between twenty-five and forty thousand men. Against the recommendations of his advisers and generals, Constantine struck first.

  Late in the spring of 312, Constantine crossed the Cottian Alps at the Mont Cenis pass. His first target was Segusium, known today as Susa in Italy, a heavily fortified town whose garrison shut its gates to him. Constantine ordered his forces to set the gates on fire and scale the walls. He took the town quickly and then forbade looting. Approaching Turin, his forces encountered a large Maxentian cavalry force of heavily armed cataphracti. Constantine spread his line to allow the cavalry into the middle of his formation, then attacked the flanks with his own horsemen using iron-tipped clubs. The panegyrist who describes the battle says the victory came easily. Turin refused to shelter Maxentius's retreating troops and opened its gates to Constantine. He moved on to Milan, where the gates opened and the crowd received him with rejoicing.

  The strategy that had worked against Severus and Galerius was to remain behind Rome's walls. Maxentius abandoned it. On the 28th of October 312, his dies imperii, he marched out to meet Constantine. The armies met on the Via Flaminia north of Rome, beyond the Tiber. Christian tradition, recorded by Lactantius and Eusebius of Caesarea, holds that Constantine fought under the labarum, a standard revealed to him in a dream. Constantine's forces defeated Maxentius's troops. As the Maxentian army retreated toward the river, Maxentius fell into the water and drowned. His body was recovered the following day and paraded through Rome. It was then sent to Africa as proof that he was genuinely dead. His entire family, including his two orphaned children, was executed.

• 7. The Buried Emperor

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  Constantine issued a damnatio memoriae against Maxentius after the battle, the formal legal erasure of a person's name and memory from public record. His buildings were claimed or ignored. The basilica he had built in the forum Romanum carried Constantine's name for centuries. His image was struck from coins and monuments.

  In December 2006, Italian archaeologists announced a find made beneath a shrine near the Palatine Hill. Workers had uncovered wooden boxes with contents wrapped in linen and what appeared to be silk. Inside were three complete lances, four javelins, a base for standards, and three glass and chalcedony spheres. The most significant object was a sceptre holding a blue-green globe. The archaeologist Clementina Panella stated: "These artifacts clearly belonged to the emperor, especially the sceptre, which is very elaborate. It's not an item you would let someone else have." Panella noted that these were the only imperial insignia ever recovered from the ancient world, previously documented only through coins and relief sculptures.

  Clementina Panella concluded that Maxentius's supporters had buried these objects near the Palatine Hill to preserve his memory against the erasure that followed. The items were restored and placed on temporary display at the Museo Nazionale Romano at the Palazzo Massimo alle Terme. His supporters could not have known that concealment would hold for roughly seventeen hundred years. That is how long it took for the truth of his reign to begin emerging again.