Falk’s Reviews > Constantine the Great: The Man and His Times > Status Update

"The decurions [town councillors] suffered from an initial disadvantage, because of Constantine's tendency to take a proportion of civil, local taxation for himself, in order to meet his own expensive needs. Moreover, at the end of his reign all municipal indirect taxation was confiscated by the government; and, in addition, civic taxes were often channelled into the lavish construction of churches.
But quite apart from this particular difficulties, the position of the decurions were a miserable one. Indeed, the ruin which these enforced taxation duties brought upon them, largely as a result of the policies of Constantine, meant the virtual destruction of the entire middle class of which they were the backbone – the class to which the Roman world had owed so much." p. 91