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Concept
Succession of the Roman Empire
Summary
The continuation, succession, and revival of the Roman Empire is a running theme of the history of Europe and the Mediterranean Basin. It reflects the lasting memories of power and prestige associated with the Roman Empire.
Several polities have claimed immediate continuity with the Roman Empire, using its name or a variation thereof as their own exclusive or non-exclusive self-description. As centuries went by and more political ruptures occurred, the idea of institutional continuity became increasingly debatable. The most enduring and significant claimants of continuation of the Roman Empire have been, in the East, the Ottoman Empire and Russian Empire, which both claimed succession of the Byzantine Empire after 1453; and in the West, the Holy Roman Empire from 800 to 1806.
Separately from claims of continuation, the view that the Empire had ended has led to various attempts to revive it or appropriate its legacy, notably in the case of Orthodox Russia. The vocabulary of a "Third Rome", the "First Rome" being Rome in Italy and the "Second Rome" being Constantinople in the Byzantine Empire, is often used to convey such assertions of legitimate succession.
Historiography of the fall of the Western Roman Empire
In Western Europe, the view of the deposition of Romulus Augustulus in 476 CE as a historic watershed, marking the fall of the Western Roman Empire and thus the beginning of the Middle Ages, was introduced by Leonardo Bruni in the early 15th century, strengthened by Christoph Cellarius in the late 17th century, and cemented by Edward Gibbon in the late 18th century. In practice, it is little more than a historiographic convention, since the Imperial idea long survived the Western Roman Empire in most of Western Europe, and reached territories that had never been under Roman rule during classical antiquity.
The fall of Constantinople in 1453 is historically and broadly accepted as the end of the Eastern Roman/Byzantine Empire and the end of the Middle Ages.
Official source
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