Chapter 51 - The War for the World

The peace of the Augusti, a brittle truce signed in the blood of their own soldiers, had lasted nearly eight years. By the spring of 324 AD, that peace was a forgotten memory. The plains near Thessalonica became a vast, sprawling city of arms. From every province in the West, the legions had come. There were the weathered cohorts from Britannia who had first acclaimed him, marching alongside the Gallic legions he had won in his first continental campaign. He saw the grim, disciplined soldiers recruited from the Pannonian frontier, men who had once fought for Licinius but now served a harder, more successful master. Spanish cavalry, African skirmishers, and Crocus's fierce Alemanni all swelled the ranks. It was a force of more than one hundred and twenty thousand men, the unified might of an entire half of the Empire, brought together by his singular, unyielding will.