The civil war of the Tetrarchy was the first case of kinnie discourse boiling over
to explain this is pretty long but also neat
basic context time!! the executive power in the Roman Empire went through various stages of development, starting with the principate where the Emperor was simply First Citizen, just A Guy, then that slowly morphed into the Emperor being just a guy but now with the backing of the senate/army/pretorian guard, or ect, then there was The Crises of The Third Century where executive legitimacy was earned simply by having the backing of the army which,,, there's a lot of army and the only way to form consensus as an army is uh,, war, so,, that's not great. they averaged a new emperor every 2 years during that century.
finally, Rome was led out of those crises years by Diocletian who ruled for 20 years and created The Tetrarchy. in this system there were two senior emperors (titled Augusti) who had the assistance of two junior emperors (titled Cesars) each ruling over a portion of the empire. issues had just gotten So big and So complicated that you could not have one man ruling everything. wherever he wasn't was a place where either things could fall apart or the person keeping things from falling apart would be hailed as a rival emperor as his reward for success, so four emperors were needed
Diocletian also ushered in the next phase in imperial justification - the Domenate. Emperors were now to be styled as unto gods with all the gravity and majesty a demigod deserves. far fucking cry from the principate of old lol. this would with time lay the groundwork for the Mandate of Heaven shit you see in feudal europe. he would also institute guild and tax laws that would grow into serfdom so, yeah, the all the main early foundations for feudalism are more or less built here
but the thing that's noteworthy for our conversation is that Diocletian utilized the pagan cultural model of the time to justify the stability of the Tetrarchy, so each member was not just styled as a god but rather as one of the gods in an imperial pantheon so to say instead of the old imperial dynasties. and it worked! after a hundred years of a constant cycle of invasion begetting civil war begetting forces being pulled from the boarder to fight civil wars begetting invasions, Rome finally had some stability.
unfortunately Diocletian uhhh retired??? he just,, abdicated the throne and became a cabbage farmer???? his co-Agusti also abdicated and Diocletian thought that he had pulled it off, that men would rule for twenty years before retiring and selecting capable men to replace them. he thought that he had built a system which could justify itself without the need for constant civil wars,. unfortunately he had not. he had built something that could justify and propagate itself so long as he was there to drive it, but he was gone, so things quickly spiralled.
and the way it spiralled is that there were two men, sons of the Agusti and the Cesar, who had been passed over and left out. after generations of blood being what dictated succession this was very, very dangerous. or, from their perspective, useful. one of those two, Constantine, snuck in through the back door and had himself named Agustus. yes it is that Constantine so as you can imagine how things go.
but that inevitability was not apparent at the time, and Constantine needed to build up a power base and to do so fast. at this time monotheism was starting to become in vouge. about 10% of Romans were Christians, and they were concentrated in the urban areas so had a large sway over culture/politics, and even among pagans it was becoming fashionable to pick a single god to worship instead of the typical polytheism. Monotheists at large, and Christians in specific, were persecuted at this time for all the predictable reasons, but the public was loosing its taste for persecutions and monotheistic sympathy was growing, but they were still marginalized from society and from power
anyways!! so yeah! Constantine needed a political base to draw from and found that in monotheists. furthermore, he was able to therefore style himself not as a god, but rather as Sol Invictus, the deity of a popular monotheistic faith. this acted as justification for his overthrowing of the Tetrarchy as yeah he kins a monotheistic deity so it's really invalidating to have to rule with other godkinies, ya know, uhh, yeah that's the joke lmao
