(5) RUSSIAN EMPIRE (1472-1917)

The second of the two most enduring and significant claimants of continuation of the eastern Roman Empire – and the one which managed to pull it off without conquest or even any of the same territory of the former empire (except for the most far flung parts at its greatest extent in the Crimea and the Caucasus).

Indeed, it didn’t even have my foremost criteria for top-tier or high-tier claimant to succession from the Roman Empire by having either Rome or Constantinople, instead breezily styling Moscow as the third Rome – a lesson in audacity for any claimant as heir to the Roman Empire. Just style your capital as the fourth Rome. What next? London? Tokyo? Canberra, seat of the Tsar of all the Australias?

In fairness, the Russian Empire did set its sights on Constantinople in its foreign policy – and more to the point, did have a tenuous claim to dynastic succession from the eastern Roman Empire. “Ivan III of Russia in 1472 married Sophia (Zoé) Palaiologina, a niece of the last Byzantine Emperor Constantine XI” and styled himself Tsar, adapted from Caesar. It also claimed a more abstract succession as the new Orthodox empire, champion of that religious denomination elsewhere.

So now we can add another date to those proposed for the fall of the Roman Empire – 1917, when the last ‘Roman’ emperor fell to the ultimate plebeian revolt in the Russian Revolution.

RATING: 4 STARS****

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