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That's correct [Constantius I Chlorus]. After the crisis of the 3rd century, the Emperor Aurelian defeated a huge barbarian invasion after recovering from a defeat by those very same barbarians, defeated his Roman rivals, put the Empire back together, sobered everyone up something wonderful, built the Aurelian Wall around Rome (parts still exist and visible), defeated a rebellion in the east, consolidated borders, and did all of it in five years, despite his humble birth. Oh, and was assassinated by one of his aides who apparently thought his own corruptions had been found out. This brief respite in the Empire's troubles were followed by a few more years of much better organized troubles.

The next effective leader was Emperor Diocletian. The D man reestablished central imperial control, then, for the first time in Roman history, set up a system to regularize the succession process, making Emperor more frankly and openly a hereditary office. He divided the Empire into two parts, and each of the halves into two parts, so that there were two emperors and two heirs apparent running things in a coordinated fashion. Then Diocletian built a self-sufficient retirement villa (still stands in Split, Croatia) and retired, compelling his eastern colleague to retire at the same time, leading to the first test of the system. Each of their designated heirs rose in rank, then named their own successors. After a couple of bumps in the road, it worked out.

The Roman commander Carausius was under a cloud when he led his legions and the Atlantic navy over to Britain, creating the first independent "united kingdom". Eventually he got murdered by his short-lived successor, who apparently thought he'd get back into the good graces of Rome if he did in his boss (or perhaps had connived with Rome), but that really didn't work out for him. It's possible that Carausius or Allectus constructed the still-mysterious Wansdyke.

There was an ongoing climate event, the Roman Cooling, during which Central Asian ethnic groups were migrating out along the steppes, which are like the North American Great Plains, but instead of N-S they go E-W. This resulted in generations of pressure on the Roman polity in northern and western Europe, and large shifts and new layers of paint as it were. But everything had to work out the way that it did to result in my own rather unremarkable and mostly unremarked existence, so I'm okay with this. :^)

Emperor Constantine wound up ruling the entire Empire, which was beset on all sides, and did a pretty good job. He stopped wasting resources on persecution of Christians, who made up a very large part of the population by that time. He publically converted (although he continued to revere Mars and Apollo), wound up executing various members of his family, and replaced the old Greek city Byzantium with the remarkable Constantinople. The "Engineering an Empire" episode about Constantinople is well worth seeing. In a way, he's the Henry VIII of the Roman Empire; he converted to a new faith, but still did observations in the old one, he used the power of the state and supremo of his religion to confiscate treasuries from the pagan deities' temples, and demolishing same, analogous to Viii's dissolution of the monasteries.

It's strange to consider that the final fall of the Roman Empire took place about 40 years before Columbus set sail in the Santa Maria.