This year, and this month of this year, mark 1700 years since the Council of Nicaea. On May 20, AD 325, the Emperor Constantine opened the Council with an address to the 318 bishops assembled. He was not a bishop and thus not a voting member of the council, but it was he who had urged the bishops to come together to sort through what was becoming an urgent problem in his empire.
He was 53 years old and had been on the throne for 19 years at this point, having been crowned—oddly—in the English city of York, 1600 miles from his birthplace in what is now Serbia. The Empire still stretched that far North and West, though it would not do so for much longer. The council itself was held closer to the empire’s heartland: Nicaea is now called Iznik, in Turkey, and, five years afterwards, Constantine would move the capital from Rome—which was feeling shabby and depopulated—to a city on the Bosporus Strait, the divide between Europe and Asia. He called that city New Rome; we call it Istanbul. For the 1600 years between its founding and 1930, it was called after him: Constantinople.
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