What nation, today, is the successor state to Ancient Rome? Italy? Greece? France? Turkey? All of them?
The Holy Roman Empire had at least some claim, but it got finished off by Napoleon.
I guess you could claim the Vatican is sort of kind of a successor. The pope has a title that used to be claimed by the Emperors (Pontifex Maximus). And the Popes occasionally claimed that Constantine had made them the heirs to the secular Empire. This was based on a probably made up story and definitely forged document, but then plenty of Roman Emperors got to the head of the Empire with claims based on sketchy or falsified evidence.
Italy. If you were asking about the predecessor state, you’d consider the one that had the city of Rome physically in it, so the successor state would have that as well.
The Roman Empire ended on 29 May 1453 with the capture of Constantinople by the Ottoman Empire. So perhaps the Ottoman Empire, and then Turkey, are successor states, though I don’t think they are normally thought of that way.
How do you figure that? Nearly fourteen centuries passed between the dissolution of the (western) Roman Empire and the creation of the modern-day Italian state. Where’s the intermediate chain of successor states linking the two?
A successor state, in case it isn’t clear, isn’t just whatever state happens to occupy the same geographical territory of a past one; it’s whatever state inherits the rights and obligations of its predecessor. I think you’d be hard-pressed to point to any Ancient Roman-era treaties, for example, that the modern-day Italian Republic has agreed to honour.
Russia, maybe?
Why does there have to be a successor? I say none.
Even that’s a stretch. The relationship of the Byzantines to Rome was thin at best. They had neither shared language, nor culture, nor even much in the way of common writing, learning, or history. And of course, they began dissolving almost the minute the western Romans fell as well. It’s more logical to say that the division of ROme created a new state - the Eastern Empire - altogether.
Agreed. I’m with John Mace here - there are none at this point. Though Vatican City is an intriguing anachronism.
But I gotta disagree here. At least a little bit. I’d say the Byzantine state, wherever you want to draw an arbitrary line between it and the East Roman Empire ( I usually go with Heraclius ), was a pretty unequivocal successor to the earlier state. They definitely considered themselves Romans.
Certainly there was increasing cultural divergence between Rome and Constantinople over time, but it was all on a continuum. And I’d say it is awful hard to argue that they didn’t have a shared history, when you have one deriving directly from the other ;).
Yup. The Byantine Emperors consistently use the title “Emperor of Rome” and could trace an unbroken success of Emperors doing that. The Byzantine state operated a system of Roman law. At some point they switched from using Latin to using Greek for official purposes, but I’ve never heard it suggested that a change of language creates a new state.
Furthermore, after the Ottoman Sultans took Constantinople in 1453 they assumed and used the title “Emperor of Rome”, and continued to do so until 1923.
Yeah, saying the Byzantine Emperor was barely even Roman is just not accurate. If anything was ever Roman outside of Italy then I don’t see how you get to exclude the eastern half of the Empire.
Remember, the Roman empire was never a nation, it was an ancient empire. Empires aren’t the same as nations. Empires don’t tend to have a universal culture, language, and sometimes don’t even have a universal legal system (look at what the British Empire was.) Sure, for purposes of government and trade a certain common language would be used, and the Romans did have a somewhat standardized legal system. But the Latin guys living in the Italian peninsula had no goal or desire to convert Greece, Anatolia, Egypt etc culturally. They were interested in maintaining the Empire, which typically relied on the locals accepting Roman rule, authority, law, and some Roman practices but otherwise the local culture and practice remained.
When the Empire became too unwieldy for one man to effectively rule and it was split up, the Eastern half was still considered just as much a part of the Roman Empire as the Western half. Once the Western Empire actually fell to the barbarians over time the Eastern half developed a different system of government but it was still Roman-inspired. The rulers of the Eastern Empire still considered themselves Roman Emperors. While Greek was always the more commonly spoken language in the East, and replaced Latin in the courts eventually, that still can’t be thought of as the Roman Empire ending, that’s just a language change (and a relatively minor one, even during the unified Empire the Eastern half which had been somewhat Hellenized by Alexander and his successor states had been using Greek as a sort of ancient lingua franca for a long time before the Romans took over.)
A side note is the term “Byzantine Empire” was never used by the Byzantines, or any of their peers. Up until 800 AD even the Western Christian nations viewed the Byzantine Emperor as the undisputed “Roman Emperor.” It gets murkier after 800, because the Byzantines had a woman (Irene) on the throne, and Charlemagne was getting crowned “Roman Emperor” by the pope as the papacy decided to adopt the legal fiction that the Roman Imperial seat was now empty because it was being held by a woman. So after that point the Western Christian states no longer clearly viewed the Byzantine Emperor as “the” Roman Emperor, but they would still refer to them as such so I think tacitly they continued to accept the Byzantine monarch as “a” Roman Emperor if not “the” Roman Emperor.
Well, if you find Roman antiquities in international waters, Italy will probably be the entity that lays claim to them. What modern state honors treaties from any classical issuing authority?
A very similar thread to this one occurred about three years ago. In it, one poster pointed out that officials in Rome after the generally-acknowledged “fall date” of 476 AD considered themselves to be the Roman Empire and were open for business. Medieval Italy was a mish-mosh of city-states, Papal states and the occasional “Kingdom of Two Sicilies,” but the city of Rome was a constant and its residents were, if not the Empire, certainly its grandchildren.
The Catholic Church isn’t a successor to the Empire, although structurally, it could be considered a successor to the Roman army. That’s not my observation, it’s one I’ve heard some priests make.
It’s no stretch to say the Byzantine Empire was a successor state to the Roman Empire. Arguably, it wasn’t even a successor state - it was the Roman Empire with its capital city relocated. The Empire itself considered this to be the case - they called their country the Roman Empire (the name Byzantine Empire is a latter invention).
The connections between the Imperial regime in Constantinople and the Dominate of Diocletian were more direct than the connection between Diocletian’s regime and the Principate of Augustus (or the Roman Republic). But I’ve never seen anyone claim that Diocletian’s regime wasn’t a direct successor to Augustus or the Republic.
As for the Eastern Empire falling apart as soon as the West collapsed, I’d say that’s an even bigger stretch. The Eastern Empire lasted a thousand years after the west fell. That adds up to a lot of minutes. Looking at the history of the Empire as a whole, the capital was located in Constantinople considerably longer than it was located in Rome.
As for the current successor state, I don’t think there is one. As Jormungandr posted, the Russian Empire made an explicit claim to be the successor state to the Roman Empire when Constantinope fell in 1453 and there was a dynastic claim (when the Byzantine Emperor died, his closest surviving heir was part of the Russian Imperial family).
But the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics specifically stated the it was not the successor state to the Russian Empire when it was founded in 1922. So any residual claim to the Roma succession would have also been renounced. As far as I know, the Russian Federation did not make any attempt to reclaim the title when it succeded the Soviet Union in 1991.
No, that’s only true of Italian Roman-era artifacts. Greece and Spain and Judea were all parts of the Roman Empire, but any Roman Empire artefacts clearly emanating from those places would be claimed by modern Greece or Spain or Israel, not modern Italy.
So the possible contenders are:
- France (via Charlemagne and the Holy Roman Empire)
- Germany (via the Holy Roman Empire)
- The Holy See (pontifex maximus = the pope)
- Italy (because it contains the city of Rome)
- Russia (via the Byzantine Empire)
- Turkey (via the Byzantine Empire and the Ottoman Empire, and because it contains Constantinople/Istanbul)
Too many contenders, none with a really strong claim, so there really is no successor state.
The Byzantine Empire under Justinian managed to reconquer a lot of the territory of the West, well after 476 AD.
As for successor states, I really don’t think that there can be any such state existing today as I don’t think there is any modern state which owes its current form to any manifestation of Rome. If the above are example, why not Egypt as it contained the second largest city of the Empire before Constantinople and was the richest province? Iraq? Jordan, Syria or Saudi Arabia, hey there was even an Emperor who was Arab? Or Libya, Tunisia, Britain, Austria, Switzerland, Romania (!)?
I’d say this is more GD than GQ territory, but if I had to pin down an answer I’d say Turkey. It was the Roman Empire with a Roman Emperor up until 1923. Change of language or religion doesn’t mean a change of state, otherwise the Roman Empire ended with Constantine/Heraclius. Being deposed by a military leader who then crowns himself Emperor and reigns the same state doesn’t change it either, otherwise the Empire ceased to be even before Constantine. With the Byzantines the legitimate successor to the Romans, and the Ottomans the legitimate successor to the Byzantines, and the Turks the legitimate successor to the Ottomans, that makes Turkey the modern remains of the Roman Empire. Note that the Byzantines and Ottomans didn’t consider themselves successors either, they considered themselves Romans, and in their position that’s good enough for me. You can make up arbitrary distinctions, but then you begin to enter the No True Roman territory.
What about looking at treaties that are still in force in Europe today, and determining which ones have some explicit or implicit reference to obligations carried by one of the above iterations of the Roman Empire? E.g., if France made a point of honoring some defense or trade obligations of the Holy Roman Empire but Germany had renounced such treaty obligations, could you say France had a stronger claim as a successor state to the HRE and by extension the SPQR?
I thought Turkey was a new secular republic, but apparently they did claim to be the successor state to the Ottoman Empire when founded. So yeah that means basically Turkey = Ottoman Empire = Byzantine Empire = SQPR.