Rome didn’t have an official state religion in the modern sense. Classical Roman recognition of a religion was to add it to the list of gods that were offered official government sacrifice. Sol Invictus was added during Constantine’s reign but he didn’t supplant older gods like Jupiter.
Judaism and Christianity were considered to be unusual because they insisted that only one God could be worshipped. Judaism was accepted by the Romans because the Jews had been following their religion for centuries and the Romans respected old traditions. But once Christianity was seen as distinct from Judaism, it ran into various levels of intolerence.
Constantine’s big change was to legalize Christianity - but he did not give it any official preferential treatment. Officially, Christianity was just one of many legal religions in Constantine’s time. (Unofficially, Constantine showed favoritism to Christians so it became a popular religion during his reign.) Christianity was briefly outlawed again under Emperor Julian but it had become too firmly entrenched for it to stick (and Julian only reigned for two years). After Julian, Christianity was re-legalized and it was declared the offical religion of the Empire by Emperor Theodosius.
Right, sorry I was jumping ahead, but presumably a lot of senators and minor nobles and freedmen would have adopted Christianity believing it would win them favour with the emperor. Similarly, there was continuity when the Ottoman’s took over, they left the Patriarch in place, supported Orthodox Christianity as an official religion and presumably a lot of minor nobles converted to Islam to stay in power.
In fact there’s a famous quote “better the sultans turban than the cardinals hat”, indicating that the Orthdox church felt they were less persecuted under the Ottoman empire than they would have been if Catholicism had gained control.
I’m currently researching who the current (be heredity) Emperor of Byzantium is. Some called Moscow “the Third Rome” based on one of Constintine XI daughter marrying an eventual Czar but that only lasted a few generations until that branch of the family died out.
While we’re nitpicking, “SPQR” is used oddly in the title here. It stands for Senātus Populusque Romanus (“the Senate and People of Rome”) and it denotes the authority of the state, not the state itself.
If you accept the logic that the Holy Roman Empire was the successor state to the Roman Empire, then the Principality of Liechtenstein is arguably the last remaining polity of the Holy Roman Empire.
Another candidate is the Empire of Trebizond (outlasted the Byzantines, fell to the Ottomans in 1461), which is now the Turkish province of Trabzon.
But they were more an ally of the Byzantine Empire than a part of it. I tracked down the title of a book called “The Immortal Emperor” written by a leading Byzantologist (now deceased) that supposedly traced out various claimants to the throne. Now I just need to find a copy of it.
It was part of the Byzantine state until 1204 when it split off as part of a dynastic dispute. They were ruled by a branch of the Komnenoi dynasty that had ruled Byzantium from 1057-1058, then again more firmly from 1081-1185 until they were ousted from power at the center. As the BE per se had gone under to the 4th Crusade in the same year ( 1204 ) and wasn’t resurrected formally until 1261, they can be regarded as a legitimate successor state along with the Greek states of Epirus and Nicaea ( and very arguably, Bulgaria ). Epirus and Nicaeas were eventually re-incorporated back into the Byzantine polity, Trebizond was not, outlasting its parent state by a few years.
Got distracted but probably should have mentioned its not directly related to the OP. Though I do seem to remember them mentioning an old Greek dialect spoken in the region that is called as ‘Roman(in Greek of course)’ by its speakers, emphasizing the Roman identity of the Byzantines.
Once the Eastern Empire fell in 1453 the ruling Palaiologos dynasty survived as the Despots of Morea for a few more years (they became tributary states to the Ottomans and then through misrules they ran out of money so couldn’t pay their tribute and the Ottomans ended up taking their lands at that point.)
My understanding is that the “legal” crown then changed hands a few times before being sold to the Spanish Habsburgs. So in a sense you could maintain the legal fiction that the Spanish Habsburg line continued on the legal mantle of the Empire.
Greeks of Trebizond and nearby areas on the Black Sea coast are called Pontikoi. Pontus being the name for the Black Sea. European Turkey, which was part of ancient Thrace, is now called Rumeli, which means the Country of Rome, because it included Constantinople.
Erzurum in eastern Turkey means ‘the Land of Rome’. The 13th-century Selçuk kingdom in Konya was called the Sultanate of Rum. (Pronounced like room.)
It’s pronounced like room because the name came into Turkish as a loanword from Arabic, which has no /o/ sound and converted it to the nearest vowel available, /u:/.
Some would claim (certainly the czars would) that Russia became the new Rome through the marriage of Zoe Palaiologina to Ivan III, a branch that eventually died out. I am not convinced of that. I am researching what happened to the Byzantine Lines and I believe the throne would have passed through an older sister and that line is still in existence making the current emperor Carlo IV Tacco in pretense. I am still researching it as the family geneologies get very spotty. I think it says a lot about the view of the Byzantine Empire that not a lot of care was taken to keep track of the Palaiologos even immediately after the Fall of Constantinople.
Also, the Valois pretender could theoretically put forth a claim since the Byzantine Emperorship was sold to Charles VIII of France, or maybe not as the Byzantines did not use a strict Salic law. Either way, no one takes that claim very seriously.
