Austria: Petronell-Carnuntum

(Again I have used a YouTube video to provide some background, since I am ignorant of the history – perhaps this is one of the major reasons I am on this interrail trip!)

Petronell-Carnuntum (Bad Deutsch Altenburg)

“The magpies that flew to and fro in the thin yellow sunshine were beyond all joy-and-sorrow computation and all other thoughts were chased away, as I approached the little town of Petronell, by wondering what a distant object could be that was growing steadily larger as I advanced. It turned out to be a Roman triumphal gateway standing in the middle of a field like a provincial version of the Arch of Titus; alone, enormous and astonishing. The vault sprang from massive piers and the marble facings had long fallen away, laying bare a battered and voluminous core of brick and rubble. Rooks crowded all over it and hopped among the half-buried fragments that scattered the furrows. Visible for miles, the arch of Carnuntum must have amazed the Marcomanni and the Quadi on the opposite bank. Marcus Aurelius wintered here three years, striding cloaked across the ploughland amid the hovering pensées, alternately writing his meditations and subduing the barbarians on the other side of the Danube. His most famous victory – fought in a deep canyon and celestially reinforced by thunder and hail – was known as the Miracle of the Thundering Legions. It is commemorated on the Antonine Column in Rome”  A Time of Gifts, Patrick Leigh Fermor 

The Importance of the Carnuntum Conference 308

At the entry to the site a major statement is made  concerning the importance of Carnentum in terms of world history of which  Paddy would not have been aware:  in November 308 a conference was held here in Carnentum between the Augustus ruler of the East, Galerius, the Augustus of the West, Maximinus and Diocletian, the retiring Emperor.  Their purpose was to work out who was to rule as Augustus and Caesar in the East and in the West.  The major winner anyway, was Constantine who was voted co-ruler of the West, but following the death of (Augustus of the East) in 3011, and civil war, he became  Constantine the Great and Augustus of the whole.  Galerius had already issued an Edict of Tolerance from Nicomedia, and in 313, Constantine published the Edict of Milan, thus ending the persecution of the Christians, thus allowing the rise of Christianity as one of the major religions of the world.