And no matter who you were in world history, if you wanted to make a name for yourself in terms of war, you really needed to be up against the Persians. Even if you were the Mongols. Not this time, friends. As the political center of the Roman Empire shifted east, Constantine also tried to reorient his new religion, Christianity, toward the east, holding the first church council in Nicaea in 325. The idea was to get all Christians to believe the same thing. That worked, but it did mark the beginning of the emperor having greater control over the church. That trend would, of course, later lead to tensions between the church centered in Constantinople and the one centered in Rome, but more on that in a bit.