Death near Nicomedia and Burial in Constantinople

The end came far from the Tiber, near the court he had made his own. On May 22, 337, Constantine died near Nicomedia, the eastern city that had long served as an imperial base. News moved fast along the roads to Constantinople, where the Great Palace looked over a city he had hammered into form. The emperor’s body, wrapped in purple, returned to a capital that bore his name [14].

The burial was staged as a statement. In the Church of the Holy Apostles—Constantinople’s royal mausoleum—Constantine’s sarcophagus stood among columns and under lamps that cast amber light on porphyry and marble. The sound was a low murmur of prayers and the soft shuffle of courtiers in the nave. The man who fought under a new sign lay “among the apostles,” his chosen resting place performing the alliance he had forged [14].

Outside, the city kept working. Ships slid along the Golden Horn; petitions entered the chancery; the Hippodrome’s track waited for another day’s races. The machinery he had built did not stop. It shifted to the hands of his heirs: Constantine II, Constantius II, and Constans. Their elevation fulfilled the succession logic he had pursued since York and hardened after the palace crisis of 326 [14].

In Rome, where the arch still praised “instinctu divinitatis,” and in Nicaea, where canons lay in codices, the news of his death closed a chapter and left instruments still in tune: law, patronage, council, and a capital that would outlast empires. Constantine’s life moved from act to memory, from policy to precedent [4][6][14].