Succession of the Roman Empire

• 1. Introduction

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  Succession of the Roman Empire is a story that has never truly ended. In 476 AD, a military commander named Odoacer deposed the last Western Roman Emperor, Romulus Augustulus, and sent the Imperial regalia back to Constantinople. It was an act that later historians would call the fall of Rome. But the man who performed it did not see it that way at all. Odoacer adopted the title of King and ruled in the name of the Eastern Emperor, just like dozens of leaders before him had done. The empire, in his mind, was still there.

  That ambiguity has haunted European and Mediterranean history ever since. Who inherited Rome? Who had the right to call themselves Emperor of the Romans? A monk in Pskov, Russia, was absolutely certain in 1510. So was a sultan in Constantinople in 1453. So was a Spanish king whose lawyers traced his lineage through Visigothic law. So was the leader of a unified Italy in the 19th century. None of them agreed with each other.

  What follows is the story of how Rome became the most contested inheritance in world history, an idea that empires fought over for more than a thousand years, and that still echoes in the flags, laws, and churches of countries today.

• 2. What It Meant to Be Roman

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  The empire that historians call the Byzantine Empire never once called itself that. Until the fall of Constantinople in 1453, it consistently referred to itself as the Roman Empire, the Empire of the Romans, or Romania. The word "Byzantine" itself comes from Byzantium, the ancient city on the Bosporus that Constantine renamed Constantinople in 330. The term sat largely dormant until 1557, when a German scholar named Hieronymus Wolf used it in a collection of historical sources. French Jesuits and later scholars picked it up, and it only became common outside France around the mid-19th century, after the 50-volume Corpus Scriptorum Historiae Byzantinae was published.

  In the Islamic world, there was no such confusion. Muslims in the Levant consistently called the people of the Eastern Empire "Romans" and called Western Europeans, including those in the Holy Roman Empire, "Franks." When Mehmed II captured Constantinople in 1453, he took the title Kayser-i Rum, literally "Caesar of the Romans," which had long been the standard Arabic, Persian and Turkish rendering of the Byzantine imperial title.

  Legitimacy for the Roman Emperor was never a single thing. Early emperors inherited the institutions of the Republic and the dynasties of Rome. Later ones derived authority from the army's acclamation or from adoption by a predecessor. The administrative center shifted from Rome to Milan to various cities before Constantine consolidated it in Constantinople in 330, and Ravenna replaced Milan as the Western political capital in 402. When the Empire was Christianized through the 4th century, the Emperor became the protector of the state religion too. By the end, Imperial identity rested on at least four distinct pillars: military dominance and order; control of Rome or Constantinople; protection of Christianity; and sometimes dynastic succession or ethnic heritage. That complexity was precisely what made the question so durable. No single test could settle it.

• 3. The Problem of Two Emperors

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  On Christmas Day 800, Pope Leo III crowned Charlemagne in Rome, intending to establish continuity with the Roman Empire that still existed in the East. At that moment in Constantinople, a woman named Irene of Athens held the throne after blinding and deposing her own son, Emperor Constantine VI. Western critics, including the scholar Alcuin, argued that the imperial throne was therefore vacant. Charlemagne, according to historian Peter H. Wilson, likely believed he was being made a genuine Roman Emperor.

  The people in Constantinople had a different view. The accession of Nikephoros I in 802 hardened the conflict that historians call the problem of two emperors, or in German, Zweikaiserproblem. Theophanes the Confessor recorded that Charlemagne had tried to resolve the conflict by proposing to marry Irene, but the plan came to nothing. A series of negotiations called the Pax Nicephori addressed some territorial disputes, but the underlying question of legitimacy proved far harder to settle.

  A remarkable letter survives from around 871, written by the Carolingian Emperor Louis II to the Byzantine Emperor Basil I. Translated in full by scholar Charles West, it offers a window into how the argument was framed at the time. Louis denied that holding Constantinople was the only valid basis for an imperial claim. He pointed out that Roman emperors had historically come from people of many ethnic origins: Spaniards like Theodosius I, Isaurians like Leo III, and Khazars like Leo IV. His conclusion was blunt: "if we were not emperor of the Romans, we should not be emperor of the Franks either." The title, in Louis's view, came from Rome, not from blood. That argument would echo for centuries afterward.

• 4. Faith as a Battleground

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  Since the Edict of Thessalonica in 380, defending Christianity had been part of what it meant to be Roman Emperor. That link created a second arena of conflict running alongside the political one. Several Germanic kingdoms during the Migration Period adopted Arianism, a theological position that had been outcompeted by the Nicene Creed in Constantinople. The Burgundians held it until 516, the Vandals until 534, the Ostrogoths until 553, the Suebi until the 560s, the Visigoths until 587, and the Lombards intermittently until 652. By holding a different theology, those kingdoms could distance themselves from Constantinople's religious authority while still being acceptable to their largely Catholic populations.

  The sharpest rupture came in 1054 with the East-West Schism, which split Catholic and Orthodox Christianity in ways that are still visible today. The source of that schism can be traced partly to the creation of the Carolingian Empire in 800 and the resulting tension between the two emperors. On two occasions Byzantine emperors tried to reunite the churches for political reasons. At the Second Council of Lyon in 1274, Emperor Michael VIII wanted to neutralize Charles I of Anjou's plans to re-invade. The union was reversed at the Council of Blachernae in 1285, after both Michael and Charles had died. At the Council of Ferrara and Florence in 1438-39, Emperor John VIII negotiated under the immediate threat of Ottoman conquest; the agreement was finally proclaimed only in December 1452, four months before the fall of Constantinople, far too late to bring any military relief.

  After 1453, the Ottoman sultans made a strategic choice. As self-proclaimed Emperors of the Romans, they supported the independence of the Orthodox Church from Rome, and occasionally intervened to manage religious tensions within their domains, including reviving the Serbian Patriarchate of Pec in 1557. The man they installed as first ecumenical patriarch, Gennadius Scholarius, had been a leading opponent of union with Rome in the 1440s. In that sense the Ottoman Empire became the guarantor of Orthodox Christianity's independence, even as it claimed Roman imperial succession. Istanbul remains the seat of the Ecumenical Patriarchate to this day, holding a widely recognized status of first among equals within the Eastern Orthodox Church.

• 5. The Ottoman Claim

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  Mehmed II moved quickly after the conquest of 1453. Within a year, he had ceremonially established Gennadius Scholarius as Ecumenical Patriarch of Constantinople and leader of the Rum Millet, the Greek Orthodox Christians within the Empire, and in exchange Gennadius endorsed Mehmed's claim of Imperial succession. The contemporary scholar George of Trebizond put it plainly: "the seat of the Roman Empire is Constantinople... and he who is and remains Emperor of the Romans is also the Emperor of the whole world." George addressed Mehmed directly in verse, leaving no ambiguity about where he thought legitimate authority now resided.

  Mehmed's ambitions went further. He aimed to conquer Rome itself, which would have reunited the Empire for the first time in nearly eight centuries. His Italian campaign began in 1480 with the invasion of Otranto, but his sudden death on the 3rd of May 1481 ended the effort. No Ottoman sultan after him attempted the same. Instead, subsequent rulers turned toward rival claimants to the Roman title. The first Ottoman siege of Vienna came in 1529, and a second in 1683.

  Christian Europe never accepted the Ottoman succession claim. But outside Christendom the picture looked very different. Documents from the Mughal Empire titled the Ottoman sultan as Qaiser-i-Rum, Caesar of Rome. The Persian chronicler Firishta, writing around 1570-1620, referred to him as Sultan-i-Rum and Khunkar-i-Rum, Lord of Rome. Chinese usage during the Ming dynasty called the Ottomans Lumi, derived from Rumi, meaning Roman. As the Ottoman Empire deepened its Islamic identity over time, the Greco-Roman dimension of that claim faded. The last official use of the title Kayser-i Rum was recorded in the 18th century.

• 6. Russia and the Third Rome

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  In 1472, Ivan III, Grand Prince of Moscow and all Russia, married Sophia Palaiologina, a niece of the last Byzantine Emperor Constantine XI. The marriage was more than a dynastic arrangement. Ivan adopted Byzantine court ritual and began styling himself Tsar, derived from Caesar, and also imperator. His grandson Ivan IV solidified the title in 1547 as "Tsar of All Rus."

  The theological framework arrived in a panegyric letter written in 1510 by a Russian monk named Philotheus of Pskov, addressed to Grand Duke Vasili III: "Two Romes have fallen. The third stands. And there will be no fourth. No one shall replace your Christian Tsardom!" Earlier, in 1492, Zosimus, Metropolitan of Moscow, had already called Ivan III "the new Tsar Constantine of the new city of Constantine, Moscow." Supporters of the Third Rome narrative also noted that Moscow, like Rome and Constantinople, was built on seven hills.

  In 1589, through the efforts of Boris Godunov, then serving as regent of Russia, the Patriarchate of Constantinople granted the Metropolitanate of Moscow its own patriarchal status, becoming the Patriarchate of Moscow. That ecclesiastical upgrade gave the political claim an institutional foundation. The argument rested on three pillars simultaneously: Orthodox religious continuity, East Slavic ethnic heritage, and the autocratic power of the Tsar. When the Soviet Union replaced imperial Russia and the Russian Federation later succeeded the Soviet Union, both as republics, the succession claim was abandoned. The monk's vision had an expiration date attached to the form of government that carried it.

• 7. Nationalism and Modern Claims

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  In the 19th century, several nations reached back toward Rome, but many of them were reaching toward Rome's successors rather than Rome itself, then framing those successors in nationalist terms. The Austrian Empire, and later the Austrian Republic, borrowed imagery from the Holy Roman Empire after its dissolution in 1806. The double-headed Imperial eagle remains a symbol of the Austrian government to this day, as it does in Germany. When Germany unified in 1871, propaganda and public works including the restoration of the Imperial Palace of Goslar in the 1870s drew explicit links to the Holy Roman Empire's heritage.

  In Italy, the nationalist visionary Giuseppe Mazzini promoted the idea of a "Third Rome" during the Risorgimento. He envisioned three stages: the Rome of the emperors, the Rome of the Popes, and then what he called the Rome of the people. After unification, Rome became the capital of the Kingdom of Italy partly because its imperial associations outweighed its economic backwardness at the time. Mussolini later picked up that same language, using the phrase "Third Rome" for his regime and also as the name of his plan to expand Rome toward Ostia and the sea, with the EUR neighborhood as its first physical expression.

  In Greece, the Megali Idea, or Great Idea, first appeared in debates preceding the 1844 constitution and drove foreign policy for much of the following century. The aspiration was to recreate a Byzantine Empire understood as an ethnic-Greek state centered on Constantinople, encompassing what its supporters called the Greece of Two Continents and Five Seas: Europe, Asia, and the Ionian, Aegean, Marmara, Black and Libyan seas. That project ended in catastrophe with the Greco-Turkish War of 1919-1922. In Spain, the inheritance of Roman imperial prestige was argued through a different chain: from Roman emperors to Visigothic kings, then to the Catholic Monarchs, then to Charles I, who in 1519 added the title of Holy Roman Emperor to the Spanish crown, the first time since 800 that the Germano-Roman and Byzantine crowns had been held by one person simultaneously.

• 8. The Inheritance Nobody Finished

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  In 1773, a few decades before the Holy Roman Empire finally dissolved in 1806, Voltaire made the observation that the empire "was in no way holy, nor Roman, nor an empire." The quip has lasted longer than many of the institutions it described. It captures something true about the whole succession question: the more seriously each claimant pressed the Roman label, the more the label itself revealed its limits.

  The European Union's connection to Rome runs in several directions at once. The 1950 Schuman Plan, which started the process of European integration, drew on Roman legal concepts and Latin as a shared intellectual language. The comparison between the EU and the Holy Roman Empire, flattering or hostile depending on the speaker, became a recurring feature of political commentary. When Britain left the European Union in 2020, commentators reached for Roman analogies on both sides: the Brexit as Boudica Rebellion, or as the end of Roman rule in Britain.

  A different strand of the legacy bypasses politics entirely. Istanbul still holds most of the surviving Relics of Muhammad as the Sacred Trust in Topkapi Palace, close to the site of the former Roman Imperial palace. Istanbul was also, until 1924, the seat of the only widely recognized Caliphate of the previous five centuries. The city that Constantine dedicated in 330 as the seat of the Roman Empire became the hinge on which Islamic, Orthodox Christian and Catholic succession claims all turned, simultaneously and in competition. That is a harder fact to reduce to any single national narrative, and it is why the question of Rome's succession has never produced a final answer.