Succession of the Roman Empire
The continuation, succession, and revival of the Roman Empire is a running theme of the history of Europe and the Mediterranean Basin. It reflects the lasting memories of power, prestige, and unity associated with the Roman Empire.
Several polities have claimed immediate continuity with the Roman Empire, using its name or a variation thereof as their own exclusive or non-exclusive self-description. As centuries went by and more political ruptures occurred, the idea of institutional continuity became increasingly debatable. The most enduring and significant claimants of continuation of the Roman Empire have been, in the East, the Ottoman Empire and Russian Empire, which both claimed succession of the Byzantine Empire after 1453; and in the West, the Carolingian Empire and the Holy Roman Empire from 800 to 1806.
Many of these claims were monarchist in nature, with the ethnic or national identity of the Ancient Romans never actually becoming established among the common people of these empires, the idea of succession being restricted to niche groups of intellectuals and members of the elites. Thus, when these empires were replaced by successor states that are republics there was an abandonment of these claims.
In relation to ethnic and national identity, the Italians of Rome continue to identify with the demonym 'Roman' to this day. The vast majority of the Western Romance peoples diverged into groups that no longer identify as Romans. The Romansh people of Switzerland however, identify as Romans, and similar subnational "Roman" identity exists in the case of Romagnol. Roman identity is claimed by several Eastern Romance peoples. Prominently, the Romanians call themselves români and their nation România. And the modern Greek people still sometimes use Romioi to refer to themselves, as well as the term "Romaic" to refer to their Modern Greek language.
Separately from claims of continuation, the view that the Empire had ended has led to various attempts to revive it or appropriate its legacy, notably in the case of Orthodox Russia. The vocabulary of a "Third Rome", the "First Rome" being Rome in Italy and the "Second Rome" being Constantinople in the Byzantine Empire, has been used to convey such assertions of legitimate succession.
Historiography and nomenclature
In Western Europe, the view of the deposition of Romulus Augustulus in 476 AD as a historic watershed, marking the fall of the Western Roman Empire and thus the beginning of the Middle Ages, was introduced by Leonardo Bruni in the early 15th century, strengthened by Christoph Cellarius in the late 17th century, and cemented by Edward Gibbon in the late 18th century. In practice, it is little more than a historiographic convention, since the Imperial idea long survived the Western Roman Empire in most of Western Europe, and reached territories that had never been under Roman rule during classical antiquity.The fall of Constantinople in 1453 is historically and broadly accepted as the end of the Eastern Roman/Byzantine Empire and the end of the Middle Ages. Nonetheless, two notable claims to succession of the Eastern Roman Empire arose in the centuries after the fall of Constantinople: the Ottoman Empire and the Russian Empire; notably, Mehmed II, the Ottoman sultan who captured Constantinople, justified his assumption of the title of Emperor of the Romans by right of conquest, which was consistent with Byzantine imperial ideology which believed that control of Constantinople constituted the key legitimizing factor for an emperor and also was supported by contemporary historiographer George of Trebizond. Mehmed II's claim was also recognized by Gennadius Scholarius after Mehmed II installed him as ecumenical patriarch of Constantinople in 1454, the year after the fall of Constantinople. Mehmed II's claims were not accepted by the Roman Catholic Church or the Christian states of Europe at the time, and though Mehmed II intended to follow through on his claims by launching a conquest of Italy, his death in 1481 signaled the last time the Ottoman state attempted to conquer Italy or Rome itself; rather subsequent Ottoman emperors instead fought rival claimants to the Roman title. As the Ottoman Empire continued its break with Greco-Roman legitimacy in favour of strengthening its Islamic legitimacy, Ottoman claims to the Roman Empire faded; the last official use of the title Kayser-i Rum was in the 18th century.
Names
The empire that modern historiography calls the "Byzantine Empire" never used that expression, and kept calling itself the Roman Empire, Empire of the Romans, or Romania until the fall of Constantinople. Following the establishment of the Holy Roman Empire in 800, Christian Western Europeans were reluctant to apply the "Roman" epithet to the Eastern Empire and frequently called it "Empire of the Greeks" or "Greek Empire", even though they also used Romania – the latter also for the Latin Empire of the 13th century. By contrast, Muslims in the Levant and farther east typically referred to the people of the Eastern Empire as "Romans", and to Western Europeans, including those from the Holy Roman Empire, as "Franks".The name Byzantium refers to the ancient city on the Bosporus, now called Istanbul, which Constantine renamed Constantinople in 330. It was not used thereafter, except in rare historical or poetic contexts, until it first took its new meaning in 1557 when the German scholar Hieronymus Wolf published his Corpus Historiæ Byzantinæ, a collection of historical sources about the Eastern Empire. Then from 1648 onwards, Philippe Labbe and fellow French Jesuits published the 24-volume De Byzantinæ historiæ scriptoribus, and in 1680 Du Cange produced his own Historia Byzantina. These endeavors further entrenched the use of the "Byzantine" label among French authors, including Montesquieu in the 18th century. Outside France in the Western world, it only came into general use around the mid-19th century, after Barthold Georg Niebuhr and his continuators published the 50-volume Corpus Scriptorum Historiae Byzantinae.
Similarly, what historians call the "Carolingian Empire" and "Holy Roman Empire" – in French and Spanish, "Holy Roman Germanic Empire" was the Roman Empire, Empire of the Romans or simply Empire to their own subjects and rulers, with "Frankish" or "of the Franks" sometimes added depending on context. Only in 1157 did the twists and turns of the Investiture Controversy lead to the practice of calling the Empire, though not the Emperor himself, "holy". The reference to Germany, which first appeared in the late 15th century, was never much used in official Imperial documents, and even then was a misnomer since the Empire's jurisdiction in Italy had not entirely disappeared. Other colloquial designations in the early Modern era included "German Empire" or "Roman-German Empire".
In 1773, a few decades before the Holy Roman Empire's demise, Voltaire made the famous quip that it "was in no way holy, nor Roman, nor an empire."
Roman imperial legitimacy
In the early decades of the Roman Empire, legitimacy was largely defined by the institutions inherited from the Roman Republic, initially together with a form of hereditary succession within the Julio-Claudian dynasty. As the old Republican institutions gradually lost relevance, many later Emperors derived their legitimacy from acclamation by the army, and during the Nerva–Antonine dynasty, adoption by their predecessor. The Roman Empire itself was long defined by its eponymous capital, but this equation became blurred after the crisis of the Third Century as the administrative center was moved to Mediolanum, then further fragmented into various locations before being reconsolidated by Constantine the Great in Byzantium, renamed and dedicated as Constantinople in 330 - while Ravenna replaced Milan as Western political capital in 402. Meanwhile, the Empire was Christianized in the course of the 4th century, which partly redefined the authority of the Emperor as he became the protector of the new state religion.Thus, the Imperial identity, and therefore the question of which polity could rightfully claim to be the Roman Empire, rested not on a single criterion but on a variety of factors: dominant territorial power and the related attributes of peace and order; rule over Rome and/or Constantinople; protection of justice and of the Christian faith ; as well as, albeit only intermittently, considerations of dynastic succession or of ethnic nationalism.
Conflicting claims
The multidimensionality of the imperial claim, together with the unique prestige of the imperial title, explains the recurrence of often intractable conflicts about which polities and rulers could rightfully assume them. These conflicts lost their potency in the course of the Early modern period, however, as improved communications and literacy increasingly undermined any claim of universal supremacy.A letter of Carolingian Emperor Louis II to Byzantine Emperor Basil I, probably drafted in Roman circles close to the Papacy in response to a lost original and surviving in 13th-century copy kept at the Vatican Library, articulates how the debate was framed in its time. The following quotes are from a full translation by scholar Charles West.
Territorial rule over Constantinople is not the exclusive criterion for a rightful Imperial claim:
While the Empire as an idea is unitary, there is no established doctrine that there should be only one Emperor at any time, especially if the two Emperors are on friendly terms. Whether on purpose or not, Louis's description of two Emperors of a single Empire matches the doctrine underlying the Tetrarchy or the division between Eastern and Western Empire between 395 and 476:
Louis's claim is ancient enough to be justified by tradition since it has already held for several generations:
Louis defends the Carolingian principle of dynastic succession as validated by tradition. Furthermore, Louis thinks that there should be no exclusive ethnic criterion for the Imperial dignity. Here Louis apparently refers to a claim by Basil that the Emperor should be a Roman and not from a non-Roman ethnicity :
Using a modern vocabulary, Louis thought that those populations he cited were not Romans and that only the inhabitants of the city of Rome were Romans, not recognizing that those populations would have been seen as Romans, being citizens of the empire. While for Basil, the population of the Franks would not make good emperors because they were not citizens of the empire.