[wbarmy]

Sir, the point was that there were a lot of Christians and Constantine could have stuck his political finger into the wind and saw which way it was blowing.

Personally, I think it was much higher because of the reactions of different provinces. All of them saw that the number of Christians in their regions was high and sought to either get rid of them or befriend them. But nobody ignored them.

And all I said was that there were studies done. You might disagree with them, but studies were one and I showed one of them.

[Antoninus]

Sir, the point was that there were a lot of Christians and Constantine could have stuck his political finger into the wind and saw which way it was blowing.

Sorry, I don't agree. That's a 20/20 hindsight position. For most of Constantine's youth, Christianity was verboten and from at least AD 303 to AD 311, it was actively and violently persecuted across the empire. If anything, by AD 311, there were probably less practicing Christians than there were in AD 300. Aside from those who were outright killed or driven into exile, many Christians became apostates during the Great Persecution -- sacrificing to the gods rather than suffering.

What Constantine did in AD 312 was something counter-intuitive, politically crazy, and made little sense to many of his contemporaries. He truly believed he was acting as instructed by the God of the Christians. On a more pragmatic level, things worked out for him because he allied himself with a group that offered not numbers but spiritual and cultural dynamism within an empire that was otherwise socially enervated. If you read Julian the Apostate's advice to a pagan priest written ca. AD 364, it becomes pretty clear what made Christianity so attractive.