Constantine and Helena.
He stopped the persecutions, called the council at Nicaea, and made the executed man's sign into a military standard. The East canonised him as equal to the apostles. The West has spent a century and a half arguing about whether that year was the church's rescue or its capture.
Constantine is the most consequential convert in Christian history and the tradition has never agreed what to make of him. The facts are not much disputed: a vision or dream before the Milvian Bridge in 312, toleration in 313, patronage, enormous church building, the summoning of the council at Nicaea in 325 which he attended and steered, and baptism only on his deathbed in 337 by a bishop of the Arian party. His mother Helena's pilgrimage to Jerusalem in the 320s produced the Church of the Holy Sepulchre and the relics of the True Cross, and started the Christian pilgrimage industry. The East made both of them saints titled equal to the apostles and has never been embarrassed about it. Western Christianity since the nineteenth century, and especially the peace churches and the post-colonial theologians, has used Constantinian as an insult meaning a church that has traded its witness for access. He also had his wife and eldest son executed in 326, which the hagiographies handle by not mentioning it.
The same ground, other faiths
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