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Message:: [QUOTE="kirispupis, post: 8135968, member: 118780"]Interesting coin. It's true that you don't often see Constantine issues in silver. However, I often find it misleading when someone's listed as "founding" a city. Such is the case with Constantine, who didn't really "found" Constantinople. He captured the existing city of Byzantion and renamed it. Even the name Byzantion, supposedly, only goes back to 667 BCE, at which point it was called Lygos. I'm sure that wasn't the first name, either. Here's my coin from when it was called Byzantion.[ATTACH=full]1417690[/ATTACH] Constantine was a remarkable general with a keen understanding of how to control both the borders of a large empire and its inhabitants. I also disagree with the statement of a progression from a "pagan" Roman Empire to a "Christian" one, as that's a gross simplification (and kind of demeaning given that a fair percentage of those "pagans" were Jews and Christians). While within Rome itself the Religio Romana dominated, that wasn't the case for the entire empire, which tolerated a great many religions. In fact, a more correct transition is from an empire that more-or-less placed the utmost importance on loyalty to the emperor, with little care to individual religious preferences, to one that demanded absolute adherence on both accounts. In that respect, Constantine was crucial, as he was the first to combine the two in one person.[/QUOTE]