Indiana Romes and the Last Emperor
When I was in Jordan, seeing my dad, we shot around the country looking at slices of the glorious archaeological heritage. It was the first time I’d ever been to the Arab world or seen a desert in real life. My memories of Petra feel almost unreal. But the thing that surprised me the most? The Romans. Far stranger than the country around me was the realisation that the damp and leafy York whence I’d come once belonged to the same Empire that cut an amphitheatres into the Jordanian hills. You can look at the Roman Empire on a map but it wasn’t until I’d had this experience that I really appreciated just how massive it was.
Not just long geographically, either. We’re talking about Emperors today but Rome had been a kingdom and a Republic too. Even with the Empire, that’s hundreds of years, even millennia. The Empire that (effectively) fell in 1453 CE, as Constantine XI fought hand to hand with the Ottoman army as they swept up the walls of Constantinople, was surely very different to the one in 475, a year before the hapless Romulus Augustus was deposed by the Ostrogoths. That’s without mentioning the Empire that Augustus Caesar made magnificent in the first century.
With such a vast legacy, can we ever answer the question: who really was the last Roman Emperor? The short answer is no. For the longer answer, keep reading.
There are many different possible arguments, and that’s what’s interesting. I’m not interested in a technical discussion about legal successors and the variety of minor figures who held onto tiny scraps claiming to be the Empire. After all, if you make a legal argument, you’re saying that the important bit to you is that the Empire was a set of continuous institutions. That’s a fair argument, but it’s avoiding the real question: why does the Roman Empire mean that, to you?
We can use the question of the Last Emperor to dig into the delightfully variegated issue of what Rome really means. I want to propose three kinda provocative candidates to highlight powerful aspects of what Rome was and, in a way, still is.
Let’s begin the Game of Romes.
Contender the First: Mehmed VI and Inclusivity
Bedraggled and bullied, the Ottoman Empire had managed to survive a steep decline from the mid-1800s. Backing the wrong horse in the WW1 race was what finally did for them and their last Padishah, or Emperor, Mehmed VI. Six hundred years of Ottomans were wiped away in the Treaties of 1919.
What does the Ottoman Empire, and unlucky Mehmed, have to do with the Roman Empire? Well, when the Empire was dissolved, the last state claiming to be the successor of the Roman Empire went with it.
Way back at the beginning of those six hundred years, the Seljuk Turks pushed into modern day Turkey, driving the Romans before them. We remember that Greek-speaking Empire as Byzantium. However, Roman is what they called themselves and it’s what the Turks called them too. A brilliant warrior called Osman came to carve out lands for a dynasty in what he called Rum. Fast-forward just a little and we find Osman’s successors, the Osmalı or Ottomans, capturing Constantinople. That was it. They were now by right of conquest the successors of Roman Empire. The Padishah continued to use that in his title right up until the end.
I suspect the notion that the Ottomans might be the legitimate successors of Rome will piss a few Classicists off. So let me put it to you that the gap between Islam and Christianity is rather smaller than that between Christianity and Hellenic beliefs. Moreover, the Empire in the east had long switched its language to Greek from Latin. Can’t the Empire change its language and its religion again? Let me also stress that for many hundreds of years the Ottoman Empire was a cultural powerhouse and a dominating military machine, the site of a glittering golden age. Is it so much a stretch to call them the successors of Rome?
Well, maybe. This was right of conquest, like we said, rather than a reform movement from the inside. The Turks brought with them a wealth of influences beyond the pale of the Roman world — the term Padishah, for instance, is derived from the Persian tradition. Then there’s how the Ottomans were a dynastic state. It was all the family lands of a single family and no one but that family could ever rule it. Such a concept never existed for Julius Caesar or Constantine the Great. You might fairly argue, then, that this was an external force patting itself on the back by claiming to be the New Rome.
Fine, but I’d like to complicate the picture. It’s what I do. We’ve mentioned how Rome switched its religious and linguistic identity. It could do that, in my view, because the idea of being a Roman was really quite an inclusive one.
I don’t mean inclusive like we’d think of it. Rome conquered and subjugated a lot of people, often keeping them in effective servitude for centuries. What I’m saying is that the difference between them and almost everyone else who has done that throughout history is that Rome was far more happy to let new people join the fold. This is a really complicated story. For our purpose, suffice to say that in some ways, for some people, it was possible to become Roman without entirely giving up whoever you were before. There’s a curious strain of cosmopolitanism within Roman identity. In world history terms, we might call it freakish. I think it’s a strain that gave the Empire great strength.
Perhaps it’s not so terribly wrong to let the mantle fall on the Padishah. Let us take this spore and let it grow to its fullest possibility, let Rome be for all peoples and all religions. If we do that, then Mehmed VI is the Last Emperor.
(The Muscovite Russians, too, used the ‘fall’ of Constantinople to justify a claim to be the inheritors of Rome. They called Moscow — ruled by its Tsar, derived from Caesar — the Third Rome, after Constantinople and the Holy City itself. But I thought Mehmet VI the more controversial figure and, besides, the Ottomans outlasted their Russian rivals by a couple of years. One last laugh for the Sultan.)
Contender the Second: Charles V and Universal Monarchy
Charles inherited most of western Europe and South America. The world of gunpowder and Popes was shaken to the core by the fruition of Habsburg marital policies. Now a single man was in charge of both Spain and Germany. Silver from the New World, woven cloth from Flanders, heaps of ripe produce from the Danube, he really hit the jackpot. Tu Felix Austria nube indeed.
The most prestigious title Charles bore was that of the Holy Roman Emperor of the German Nation. As King of the Romans — it’s a long story — Charlie was claiming to be the next in line of Roman rulers. I’ve written about this ad nauseum elsewhere. It’s enough for us to say that way back in the 800s, Charlemagne and the Pope had pioneered the restoration of a Roman Empire for what we now call Western Europe. The mediaeval princes were nominally united by an Empire, an Empire that represented their shared culture and Roman Catholic faith.
I know people who are for whatever reason personally disgusted by the notion that the Holy Roman Empire succeeded Rome. If you can hold your nose and struggle through, the point is that the idea of universal monarchy, the encompassing power above all other powers, was a thoroughly Roman legacy. At some point along the line, the Romans started believing their own hype. They boasted theirs was imperium sine fine: empire without limits, raised by Jupiter himself to be glorious, all-conquering, ever-victorious. This isn’t to say that they invented the idea. I always enjoy how Babylonian rulers claimed ‘King of the Universe’ among their titles. Still, it was the Romans Charlemagne and the Pope were thinking about, especially Constantine and his successors. One (Christian) God in heaven, one representative ruling Earth. It was the Roman symbol of the orb, representing rulership of the world, that they used in the coronation ceremony.
It wasn’t all never setting sunshine for our Charlie, though. The funny thing is that by the 16th century, Charles’ time, that idea had rather diminished. The Holy Roman Empire was relegated to a loose feudal federation that had only a ceremonial authority over other Western kingdoms. Big Blue France was not only firmly independent but even a potential rival for dominance. That isn’t to say that the Holy Roman Empire was an empty title, but the idea of a universal monarchy was seriously in doubt… that is, until Charles resurrected it.
After his election as Holy Roman Emperor, Charles sought to position himself as a kind of neutral arbiter. That was his response to the protestant Reformation too. His goal was a kind of unity in diversity within a common Christian framework he represented. With so much territory under his command, it seemed for a shining moment as if the grand project might be credible.
Charles died after abdicating his many thrones to various of his relations. The strain of such a vast office defeated him. The Habsburgs, Charles’ family, shared Roman ambitions without Roman institutions. Reminds me of another dynasty. Now fractured, they would never again reach such heights of power and prestige. The Imperial dignity faded in the eyes of foreigners and was, finally, smuggled out of existence to prevent Napoleon getting hold of it.
The Roman Empire as universal monarchy in Europe. Scholars and warlords were preoccupied with that legacy, bound up with Christianity, for many centuries. Deny that the Pope and Charlemagne had the right to restore the Empire if you wish, but for the people at the time and for long afterwards they certainly restored the idea, and transplanted it from the Mediterranean to a north and western corner of Eurasia. Charles was the last to embody that idea. That is why he is the Last Emperor.
Contender the Third: Justinian and Civilisation
So, we’ve seen the Western Roman Empire fall to be (falsely?) rekindled in the Holy Roman Empire, and the East eventually subsumed (or destroyed?) by the Ottomans. But there was a time when there was still warm and vital blood in the veins of the idea of a united Empire.
Justinian is perhaps the most obviously Roman of my candidates. Even as the Empire in the West fell, the East survived and thrived — they were long divided in its administration by various, earlier reforms. Emperor Justinian, in the 6th century CE, ruled over a Roman Empire that could trace its institutions back to the earliest days of the Empire and even beyond. He was intuitively Roman in a way that my Renaissance Prince and 20th century Sultan are not.
For Roman fans, I think he is also much more famous. Justinian was a wildly successful, hugely energetic figure with an infamous cast around him. Empress Theodora who rose from a lowly actress-prostitute to the imperial dignity. Belisarius the ingenious tactician. Procopius the official historian whose glowing account is contradicted by the skullduggerous secret history that stayed hidden away for a century.
But I promised controversy, didn’t I? The question is not whether Justinian was a legitimate Emperor but he might be the last one. The city of Rome had already been occupied by Ostrogoths and the Empire was more or less dead in the West. On the other hand, it was nearly a millennium after his rule that Constantinople ‘fell’ to the Turks. So he was neither the last Emperor of the whole of the Empire nor of its Eastern continuation. What gives?
The way I see it, Justinian was the last Emperor not to think in terms of an Eastern and a Western Empire. I’m not saying those categories didn’t mean anything to him, of course, but that he still saw the possibility of a united whole. Not two separate empires going their separate ways, or a smaller, eastern Roman Empire without Rome within its borders, but one spectacular, continent-spanning Roman unit. Rome as a civilisation. Neither the narrower, Greekified civilisation of the Byzantines nor Holy Rome’s loose, ostensible leadership of the European world, but Rome restored to the power and glory of Constantine or Augustus.
That’s what it’s all about. All these legacies, these influences scattered across the planet, these inheritances so in-grained that we barely even notice them, come from Rome’s civilisation. It was more than a state, more than a culture, it was just… more. Like the Wari for the Inca or the Zhou for later Chinese dynasties, it is this vision of a Roman world that provided the bedrock for so many cultures that came after.
I think Justinian was the Last Emperor to think like a Roman. He spoke Greek but thought in Latin. By his will, legions of Romans again marched in the old province of Africa and up and down the Italian peninsula. It had only been fifty years since the fall of Western Rome and it seemed, for a time of magnificent anticipation, as if that tragedy was nothing but a blip in imperium sine fine. Justinian combined a dream of Rome as it was with a seemingly credible plan to do it. As far as I know, no Emperor, anywhere, ever, came that close again.
Soon enough, Rome was reduced to that Greekified Empire in the Eastern Mediterranean. Emperors lost Justinian’s vision just as they lost his Latin. If Rome is a state of mind, then Justinian was its Last Emperor.
Coda
I can’t pick. I suppose the point is that I can’t pick. Rome is just so big, in so many different ways, that it can’t help but contain an impossible puzzle of tensions and contradictions. With such an Empire, there can only ever be a small army of Last Emperors battling it out. A glacial impact too vast to ever take in, casting a mountainous shadow down across history. That is what Rome means to me.
