(January 28, 2014 at 5:07 pm)Minimalist Wrote:Quote:I just can't understand how it became one of the largest religions in the world?
Meet Constantine.
Sleazebag politician and murdering thug. He made two serious mistakes.
One was demolishing the Roman military machine which had kept the empire for 3 centuries and the other was legitimizing a bunch of nutty old fucks with a silly superstition and thinking he could use them to "unify" the empire.
In fairness to Constantine:
1. The roman military machine that had built the empire had already more or less been subsumed by less professional forces of the civil war 50 years before Constantine, and same military force which then saw through the reign of Constantine proved adequate for the defense of the empire until battle of Adrianople almost 50 years after his death.
2. It has to be admitted a whole lot of other nutty fucks and silly superstitions had already been regarded as legitimate in the empire for a long time. Hard to blame Constantine for thinking one more can't hurt.