In the Fourth Century, when the Emperor Constantine made the Roman Empire Christian, he created an unstable amalgam. The tenets of Christianity could only be made to support the exercise of political power through torturous forms of theology and logic. Fifteen centuries of violence would eventually cause the combination of Christianity and the state to decompose, forming secular nations in the process. Nationalist leaders, their authority upheld by the gospels of power written by Machiavelli and Nietzsche, could wield military violence without being accused of hypocrisy.