The year is 410, and in the city of Rome, panic has swept the streets. Panic has not been known since the last time a foreign army marched to the eternal city nearly 800 years prior.
In the madness of the death gripped the city, a call for human sacrifice and the reinstatement of pagan rituals were called for as the Army of the Visigoths under Alaric loomed outside the Salarian gates.
These desperate acts would be for nothing as after every pound of gold had been extorted from the city. The legions of the emperor had been smashed in the field, Visigothic slaves opened the gates of the city and for three nightmarish days, the city was plundered.
The sack of Rome, a cataclysmic event, marked the irreversible destruction of the power of the Western Roman state and military. Yet, the Rome that fell was not the Rome of Augustus, Hadrian, Trajan, Aurelian or Diocletian. Despite the fracturing of the empire and the West’s steady decline, the omnipresence of Roman influence, even in the modern day, is a testament to the awe-inspiring heights the empire once reached.
After the fall of the empire and into the Medieval Age, there was much to be gained in the ways of political power by claiming to be the rightful successor of the empire to legitimize one’s rule.
Given the multitude of claimants to the legacy of Rome, there is no definitive date when the Roman Empire fell. Even in 476, when the Western Roman Empire fell and its last emperor was deposed, the dispute continued as Byzantium in the east remained strong.
To navigate this complex history and determine the rightful successor of imperial Rome, we will start at the fall of the Western Roman Empire and trace the lineage of both the East and the West, ultimately identifying the most legitimate modern claimants.
After the collapse of the Western Roman Empire, the last vestige of the old imperial authority was that of the pope in Rome, whose religious authority still maintained sway over the Christianized barbarians. In the year 800, 400 years after the fall of the Western Empire, the pope crowned Charlemagne as the Roman Emperor. His authority was derived from his territorial control of much of Western Europe and the approval of the Pope. The legacy of the Frankish claim was diminished over the centuries.
However, the French claim was picked up by Napoleon, a man fascinated by antiquity, and he gave himself the symbolic title of Roman Emperor after the conquest of the Papal States. He styles himself as an Emperor of Rome in other ways, such as the architecture he commissioned and the self-aggrandizing statues he had made. On the German side of the Rhine, was the Holy Roman Empire, which gained its legitimacy by having its Empeoros crowned by the Pope, which ended with the dissolution of the HRE with the interference of Napoleon.
It is a stretch, but by proxy of the Holy Roman Empire’s claim, it could be inherited by the Austrian Hapsburg royal family as it was the senior most member of the Holy Roman Empire. In a cultural sense, there is also an argument to be made that the Spanish Kingdom is one of the Western Roman successors.
In the East, the Byzantine Empire and the Eastern Roman Empire would endure this significantly longer than the West. During this time, the Byzantine Empire would face incursions from the North, continued strife over imperial succession, Sassanid invasions and eventually, it would lose all territory South of Asia Minor to the Arab Conquests of the 600s.
The Empire would gradually chip away in its centuries until all that remained was the capital city of Constantinople. During these times, short-lived successor states rose, such as the Latin Kingdom and the Sultanate of Rum.
However, the death blow to Byzantium would come from the Ottoman Turks, who laid siege to the once impenetrable city and, with great effort, unseated and conquered the last truly Roman state in 1453.
From this point, the inheritance of the Roman identity would be split in the East, by rite of conquest and by rite of faith.
From that point, the Ottoman Empire claimed to inherit the Roman Empire by the rite of its conquest. In contrast, the Orthodox Christian nations of the Russian Empire would claim the inheritance of Rome because they inherited the Orthodox faith from the Byzantines.
So, what can be concluded about the succession of Rome? The biggest takeaway is that these convoluted lines of succession really speak to the failure of the Roman Empire to ever, in its hundreds of years of existence, make coherent succession laws.
What is even crazier is that for as coveted as the title Roman Emperor was after its collapse, before then, it was a title being sold to the highest bidder, or whoever the senate wanted to save them, or whoever was declared imperator by their troops or basically by anyone stupid enough to trust the praetorian guards.
The imperatorship, by its end, was as flimsy and weak as the Roman state around it became. And at that point, why even stop?
At this point, who can not just get creative and make up some convoluted claim to the former Roman throne? Not only do I crown myself as the emperor of Rome, but I encourage everyone to do the same thing.