The Rest Is History - 157. Byzantium and the Ghosts of Rome

Episode Date: March 1, 2022

What happened to the Roman Empire after its fall? In the second of two episodes, Tom and Dominic discuss where Rome endured, how its ghost still haunts 21st century geopolitics, and which member of the British Royal Family Tom thinks is the last true Roman! Join The Rest Is History Club for ad-free listening to the full archive, weekly bonus episodes, live streamed shows and access to an exclusive chatroom community. Producer: Dom Johnson Exec Producer: Jack Davenport *The Rest Is History Live Tour 2023*: Tom and Dominic are back on tour this autumn! See them live in London, New Zealand, and Australia! Buy your tickets here: restishistorypod.com Twitter:  @TheRestHistory @holland_tom @dcsandbrook Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Thank you for listening to The Rest Is History. For weekly bonus episodes, ad-free listening, early access to series, and membership of our much-loved chat community, go to therestishistory.com and join the club. That is therestishistory.com. Hello, welcome to The Rest is History. In the year 629 AD, the Roman Emperor Heraclius restored the true cross to Jerusalem in one of the greatest ceremonies in the history of the Roman Empire. Heraclius, having defeated the Persians, now took for himself the title King of Kings. He also gave himself the Greek word basileus, which means sovereign or king. In some ways, Rome seemed to have never glittered so brightly. But Tom Holland, you could say that

this is pretty much the moment when the Roman Empire is going to end. Because last time on The Rest is History, we started talking about when the Roman Empire ended. And you could say, couldn't you, that Heraclius is the last Roman Emperor. Do you think? You could. I think it would be wrong. But you're right that the reign of Heraclius is it's a reign that is both glorious and prostratingly disastrous. It's the biggest game of two halves that you can come across in Roman history.

Is it not a game of three halves? I mean, he loses to the Persians, he beats the Persians, and then the Arabs basically wipe the floor with him. I suppose that's true. So what we were doing for those people who didn't listen to our last episode, I mean, first of all, listen to the last episode, because what we've been doing is we've been talking about when the Roman Empire fell.

So we've gone through a series of dates. You may remember we talked about the Edict of Thessalonica in 380. We talked about the death of Theodosius the Great in 495. We talked about the famous date in 476, where Tom, I think, fairly comprehensively proved that the Roman Empire did not fall. And now we've moved on. So the Eastern Roman Empire, I mean, they don't call themselves the Eastern Roman Empire. They just call themselves the Roman Empire. They're still going very strong. They've lost war to the Persians. The Persians have basically hammered them. But then Heraclius has carried the fight to the Persians.

He has this tremendous sort of triumph and stuff. Then the Arabs come famously out of the desert. Or do they? Yeah, well, exactly. Check out our episode on Muhammad. Exactly, under the banners of Islam. Or maybe they don't. Or do they? Yes, exactly. Check out our episode on Muhammad. Exactly, under the banners of Islam, or maybe they don't. Or do they?

Yes, okay. And this is the point, Tom. Now, when I studied this as a student, this was sort of the point where all the textbooks said, you know, something changes here. This really is a punctuation point, because there has been a series of kind of terrible climactic events in the 6th century. There has been a general economic crash. There's been a plague, an absolutely devastating pandemic.

On top of this, you have the rise of Islam. And at the end of all this sort of swirl, the Roman Empire is very, very very different it's a different kind of society different civilization the greek has taken prominence over latin christianity has driven out the kind of roman civil religion of the past so so is that all true do you think or do you think that's overstated no i think it's a it's an absolute rupture point. Oh, I thought you were going to argue the opposite. No, no, no, no. I've set that up very badly. No, not at all. I agree.

I mean, so historians will often describe the Roman Empire up until the coming of the Arabs as East Rome, as the East Roman Empire. And then it becomes, it conventionally comes to be called Byzantium. And, you know, they're artificial. It's not what the Romans themselves would have called themselves. But I think it does convey the degree to which this is an absolutely radical break, because the implications of the Arab conquests is that Byzantium, Constantinople, loses its wealthiest provinces. So it loses Syria. It loses Egypt. It will come to lose North Africa. And at the same time, it is also being battered by invasions through the Balkans. So it's absolutely staggering, really, that Constantinople doesn't fall, that the empire kind of staggers on. So large numbers of immigrants from the Balkans settle right the way down into the Peloponnese in Greece.

The frontier with what becomes Islam, the Taurus Mountains in what's now southeastern Turkey. I mean, very, very bloody. Constantinople itself just about survives two very, very menacing sieges by the Arabs, which is one of the kind of inspirations for Tolkien's portrayal of the siege of Minas Tirith. That's the kind of the measure of how close Constantinople comes to falling. The emperor's holdings in Italy and Sicily come under constant threat, kind of fragment and large chunks of it dissolve away. So essentially, it's very much on its uppers. Yeah. And it's able to claw its way back until in the 10th and 11th century. It's it's successfully-established itself absolutely as a kind of major, major regional power. And Constantinople by that point has become,

you know, very, very wealthy again. And it's absolutely a Roman empire. They still see themselves as the heirs of the line of the Roman emperors. The measure of that is that with Charlemagne, we'll probably come to Charlemagne, people in the Latin West claim that the Western empire has been restored. And the Romans in the East, the Byzantines are furious about this, very, very upset about it. So the name of Romans still matters to them very, very deeply. What has changed however is that you know as you said a sense of the kind of organic continuity has gone so that when people in the 10th 11th 12th century in byzantium in constantinople look at the um the statues of emperors set up in the fourth century or the

fifth century or the sixth century or freezes they don't know what they are they can't remember them often they assume that these are statues of demons or portrayals of the world that is to come um but what they still very much have is and this is also true of people in the West, is that Rome's empire is eternal. Their empire is eternal, that it has a key role to play in the apocalyptic drama that Christians believe is destined to happen. But they think it's eternal, though, Tom, do they? Because it's Christian rather than because it's Roman. That's a slight difference, isn't it? Now I know that in the previous episode,

we talked about how some theologians and obviously emperors and so on had, had, had kind of entangled the two, the idea that Rome was the essential vehicle for Christianity. But am I right in thinking in this sort of later medieval period, people who think that Rome is eternal, think it's eternal purely because it's Christian rather than, I mean, they don't care about Cato and Octavian. No, absolutely. They're not interested. They're not interested in Augustus or Trajan. They are interested, you know, the scholars are interested in Constantine or Theodosius or Justinian. Most

people don't even remember them. So these are the people for whom these statues are kind of potentially necromantic figures. But there are prophecies in which it is the dignity of Rome that it will essentially, when everything is going tits up, you have this prophecy that supposedly had been written by a guy called Methodius three centuries previously. It was a saint and a martyr, supposedly, in which he says that at the end of days, the world will be invaded by Gog and Magog, who are biblical kind of tribesmen who lurk on the end of the edges of the world and this is obviously a representation of the arabs of the the balkan tribes um the sense that you know the civilized world is being overwhelmed by vast waves of barbarians from the outer limits of the world so there's this sense that at the end of the day gog and magog will invade. The last Roman emperor will fight them and will hurl them back and will wall them up behind great gates of brass. And having done that, the last Roman emperor will then travel to Jerusalem. He'll arrive in Jerusalem. And when he does, suddenly seated on Temple Mount, so where the Jewish temple had stood in Jerusalem, Antichrist will appear enthroned in dark and terrible splendor like Sauron.

And the last Roman emperor will then climb the hill of Golgotha. And when he does so, the cross on which Christ had been crucified will appear. The Roman emperor will kneel before it, will die. The cross will be raised up to heaven and the darkness of antichrist will cover the whole world but this will presage the last coming and it's a kind of fantastical image of the future that has an unbelievable potency both in in in constantinople and in the lands of the latin west because it it it kind of restores to the roman empire what augustine had taken away from it saint augustine who we talked about in the Roman Empire what Augustine had taken away from it.

St. Augustine, who we talked about in the first episode. Augustine's take is that Roman Empire is nothing special. It doesn't matter. It can crumble away. Unimportant. What matters is that the church endures. But this kind of, this myth of the last Roman Emperor, it serves as a kind of lightning rod

for those who want to believe that the Roman Empire must survive because it has this kind of eternal destiny. Okay. That's weird and fascinating. It is weird. But I just want to rewind for a second to the 7th century. So to that punctuation point we talked about. So I suppose the conventional date, we didn't mention it, which was my folly,

is August 636, which is the Battle of the Yarmouk, which is when the Byzantine army lose to the Arabs, don't they? I mean, it's this absolutely landmark kind of defeat. Now, at that point in the 7th century, Tom, in the West, in the former Roman provinces, nobody at that stage thinks they're still living in the Roman Empire, do they? I mean, they're very conscious that they are living in kingdoms. Well, the Pope does, for instance.

So the Pope in Rome is a subject of the emperor in Constantinople. But not in Gaul. Ravenna is in Spain or certainly not in Britain. So it's all gone there. But obviously the idea of Roman-ness and of the Roman Empire continuing, that does endure. And it obviously endures in Constantinople. But as you said, it's different. So for example, there's a historian who's published a couple of books in the last few years called Anthony Kaldelis, I think his name is, or Kaldelis. And he argues

that there was a kind of Roman nation state, that a Byzantine empire is basically a Roman nation state. Everyone thinks of themselves as Roman. You said they call themselves Romoi. He says they're not a sort of woolly multicultural empire. They are Roman and they're a nation. That's how we should think of them. Do you buy that argument? I think that one of the ways that Byzantium is able to survive is by forging a very coherent sense of a kind of embattled Christian people who have a key role to play in the great supernatural drama of the future,

and whose city is the capital of the world. And if you want to call that a nation state, I mean, I think nation state would be an anachronistic way of framing it. But absolutely, it's that sense of kind of centralized identity that is key to it. The confusion is that people in the West call them Greeks because they speak Greek. And if you want to call it a nation state, this is the model for Greece as it will emerge in the 19th century, the independent nation state of Greece. But of course, to them, they remain Romans. And they use the word, even though they don't speak Latin.

Yeah. And they don't see any contradiction between the fact that they don't speak Latin. They see none of that. And they don't live in Rome. No, no, none at all. None at all. And this sense is influential, not just on the Byzantines themselves, but on their neighbours. So I mentioned how they kind of claw their way back. They are absolutely a regional superpower in the 10th and 11th centuries then you get and we talked about this in the 12 days of christmas the battle of manzikert and the civil war that follows that

and that's disastrous because the the kind of the great recruiting ground for byzantine armies was asia minor um anatolia what's now. And it's now called Turkey because it's the Turks who win at the Battle of Manzikert. And they start kind of infiltrating, taking advantage of the civil wars that follow Manzikert and increasingly kind of occupying it. And you get this Islamic sultanate parking itself in the middle of what had been this Christian heartland. And it calls itself the Sultanate of Rome. So as in Rome. Yeah, the Sultanate of Rome. But they don't call themselves Romans. No, they don't. But they look to Constantinople as being a worthy capital of the world. And

one of the things that is really interesting is that for the Muslims, they look back to sayings that are attributed to the prophet, which derived from an age when Constantinople was the one great city that defied the caliphate, defied the world of Islam. And so for the Muslims as well, Constantinople has a key role to play in this kind of apocalyptic imagery. So for them, there are sayings of Muhammad that says, Constantinople will be the first to fall, then Rome will fall. But the Romans are a people who will be fighting you till the end of days. And these are prophecies that kind of motivate, you know, in due course, you have Manzikert, you have the Turks starting to move into Anatolia. Then in 1204, you have this calamitous intervention by the Crusaders when they capture Constantinople. on the Byzantine Empire as an absolute shadow of itself. And you start to get the Ottomans, who are, again, a Turkic people,

who managed to cross the straits from Asia into Europe. And so increasingly, Constantinople comes to be surrounded. And they are eyeing Constantinople up as a worthy capital of what will become their sultanate in the long run, their caliphate. And when in 1453, which is the traditional date for the end of the Byzantine Empire, and therefore for the end of the Roman Empire, when that happens, Mehmed II, the Ottoman sultan who captures Constantinople, his mother is Greek.

He is aware of these kind of traditions. And in the great portrait that is made of him by bellini there are three crowns in the high corner and these symbolize the three continents that that memet ii uh is ruling and he does have a consciousness of himself as the heir of the roman empire but the heir of the roman empire the christian roman empire no so yeah so all gone all gone yeah so in that sense 1453 again is a very you know i mean that is the terminus i don't think it's the complete terminus before we get back to 1453 i just want to dig into a previous date you mentioned which is 1204 because 1204 occurred to me is quite a nice contender for this crown because that's the point at which isn't it's absolutely arguably one of the single most disgraceful episodes in european history the crusaders

basically you know completely breaking their promises and stuff and sacking constantinople kicking out now that's a huge punctuation point because that's the i mean the romans have had two capitals in their long history in rome and in constantinople they've now lost both of them because the crusaders take charge in constantinople um the the remaining romans as they are called as they would have called themselves they basically go off to to trebizond greece to they sort of scattered and they um but then they get they do get it back but the the after they get constantinople back the game is kind of up it's a spectral thing yeah it's their sort of ghostly presence so do you think 1204 would be a good uh is a good no because because as you said they do manage to claw it

back uh and so there is you know and they you know there are that there is the continuous line of emperors is preserved there's there's a fracture point. There's not a break. And so when they recapture Constantinople from the Latin occupiers, they're simply restoring a capital to an empire that they felt had continued. I think that 1453, when Constantinople falls, is the obvious terminus. But it's not conclusively the terminus because there is one last holdout, which is Trebizond,

which is on the Black Sea, which falls in 1461. And I think if you wanted to be strictly accurate, that would be the date that you would give. So just as you, it's not when Romulus Augustulus gets deposed that you have the last emperor in the East, it's when Julius Nepos in 480 gets deposed. So likewise, 1453, although it's the obvious, obvious date, it's actually 1461. But the fall of Trebizond is obviously that much less dramatic. And I think

that that is then the Roman Empire is dead. Well, I was going to say, in the world's imagination, Tom, does 1453 loom that large at the time? Do people sort of say, gosh, the Roman Empire has come to an end? Completely. Yes, it's a terrible, terrible shock. A terrible shock. It reverberates throughout Christendom. One of the measures of that is that a romance is written, Tiron Leblanc, I think in Catalonia, a couple of years, a few years after the fall of Constantinople, in which the shock is so great that they recapture it. And it's a kind of counterfactual in which the Roman Empire carries on. And I think it's, yes, I think it's an absolutely devastating moment. But the Roman Empire that people think has fallen,

so we're in the age of kind of very much still the age of Christendom, the empire that they're mourning, they're mourning the empire of Constantine, aren't they, rather than the empire of Augustus and Hadrian and Claudius? Yeah, they're mourning the great bulwark, the great Christian bulwark against Islam. It's not that they don't think that what has fallen is the empire of, that was set up by Augustus. Or do they?

I think some scholars do. Yeah. Some scholars do. But I think it's, the fame of Constantinople is very, very great. And I think there is a sense that something, you know,

very ancient has, has, has gone. Yeah. Has gone or has it gone, Tom? Because don't you have a whole theory about undead Rome and zombies, which I've been greatly looking forward to,

the sort of walking dead of Roman history. Well, I mean, because the truth is that there have been many attempts to dig the corpse of the Roman Empire out of its grave and to reanimate it. Yeah, you haven't talked about the Roman Empire at all. Yeah. So I think we should have a look at those attempts in the second half. Excellent.

And maybe decide which is the most convincing. I look forward to it. Okay, see you after the break. I'm Marina Hyde. And I'm Richard Osman. And together we host The Rest Is Entertainment. It's your weekly fix of entertainment news, reviews, splash of showbiz gossip, and on our Q&A we pull back the curtain on entertainment and we tell you how it all works. We have just launched our Members Club. If you want ad-free listening, bonus episodes and early access to live tickets,

head to therestisentertainment.com. That's therestisentertainment.com. Welcome back to The Rest Is History. Tom Holland has spent the break vigorously digging up the corpse, the rotting corpse of the Roman Empire, and he's about to present us with a series of zombie figures. So we did promise that we would talk a little bit about the Holy Roman Empire, Tom, and that's the Empire of Charlemagne, who you mentioned earlier, but we never really got into. So tell us a little bit about this and, well, tell us about why this is or isn't the

Roman Empire. Right. So when the Roman Empire in the West falls, left hanging is the possibility that perhaps it might be revived. And the Byzantine emperors themselves, as we said in the first episode, you know, they do pander to the kind of various barbarian warlords and kings who've taken over chunks of former Roman provinces by kind of handing them out titles and imperial robes and all that kind of stuff. So it is hanging in the air. We did an episode on this, actually the first of our 12 days of Christmas, wasn't it? So if you're interested in more on this, do check that out. But very briefly, Charlemagne, Frankish king,

becomes sufficiently powerful that he can legitimately, as he sees it, be crowned as emperor actually in Rome. So the first emperor to be crowned in Rome since Julius Nepos, the previous emperor of the West. And one of the reasons why this happens, or in fact, the key reason why this happens, is that the pope in Rome, so the most significant figure in the Latin church, had previously looked to Constantinople for protection. And the emperor in Byzantium is no longer able to do that. So the pope is looking to essentially to kind of big up Charlemagne so that he'll be in a position to do what the pope

thinks emperors should do, which is to look after popes. This becomes one of the kind of great dynamos of medieval history, what the relationship of the emperor and the pope should do, which is to look after popes. Right. You know, this becomes one of the kind of great dynamos of medieval history, what the relationship of the emperor and the pope should be, who should have primacy, is the argument that the emperor has a key role in the history of the apocalypse, you know, the last Roman emperor, that kind of figure, you know, does that, in other words, is the figure of the emperor the key one? Or do you go with the kind of more, the approach argued by Augustine that the Roman Empire in itself and of itself is not particularly significant, what matters is the church, and that therefore the empire should be subordinate to the church. And there's heated debate. Let's put it that way. Let's not get into it. I mean, we'll never get out of that rubber hole if we go down there tom i know once you get into canossa there's no there's no turning from that but essentially the holy roman empire i mean people the voltaire's joke is that it's neither holy nor roman nor nor an empire uh it is actually holy i mean right if it weren't holy it

wouldn't you know that it has a sacral quality don't it oh very nice sacral quality and i suppose you're now going to tell me that it is also Roman, because the idea of Roman-ness matters so much to it, right? Yes, exactly. I mean, I know there are Germans who rule it, but I suppose you would say, going back to the first podcast we did on this topic, that the Roman Empire was often ruled by, you know, as you said, barbarians. Novak Djokovic kind of types.

Yeah. And it is, but it's not an empire, the Holy Roman Empire. Well, it's an imperium. I mean, it claims power. So I think in that sense, it is an empire. Yeah, fair enough. All right. So Voltaire has been comprehensively, you know,

has been beclowned. Well, let's say it's Roman-ish. Okay, very good. And empire-ish, I suppose. It's Roman-ish, empire-ish, and holy-ish. And you're going to,. It's Roman-ish, empire-ish, and holy-ish. But it's not the only kind of imperium that thinks itself a successor to the Romans. I mean, the Ottomans, in a sense, think of themselves as successors. I think less so.

Well, they're surrounded by the monuments. Yes, but they change them, don't they? So they have Hagia Sophia, the great cathedral built by Justinian, but they convert it into a mosque. Right, but they don't tear it down. No, they don't. They convert it. Yeah. And the cathedrals of Roman Christian Constantinople are monuments that bear witness to the triumph of Islam.

Yes. So it's, you know, Rome is conquered. Yeah. That's the point. It's subdued. So in that sense, it's not Roman. And the sense of being the heir of the Roman Empire fades pretty quickly in Constantinople. But there is another Eastern power where the sense of continuity with

um with rome and particularly with the second rome is very very strong and um it's a part of the world that we've been talking about quite a lot recently and that of course is muscovy right is what becomes russia so that comes i mean you're right we have done quite a lot on this recently so for those of you who don't know the vik sailed down the Volga and the Dnieper, these rivers in the 8th, 9th, 10th centuries. They basically kind of co-found Kiev. Their society ends up coming into the orbit of Constantinople. They adopt Byzantine Orthodox Christianity, don't they?

They do. And at what point, Tom, do they, do these, well, who is it that first talks about a third Rome? It's not, is it, because Kiev isn't the third Rome, is it? It seems to be a Russian monk called Philotius, who writes in 1510 and he's writing to um a prince called vasily and vasily is the son of ivan the third of moscovy but crucially is also the son of the niece of the last emperor of constantinople constantine palaiologos who died fighting the turks so so it's not just an ideological link. There's a kind of blood link as well.

There is absolutely a blood link. And, of course, Vasily is a Russification of Basileus, who, as you mentioned, the Greek word for emperor. So this monk, Volotius, writes to Vasily, Basileus, the son of the niece of the last emperor of Constantinople. And he says that two Rome's have fallen. The third Rome though stands, nor will there ever be a fourth. And he says that no one shall ever replace your Christian Sodom. He says this to to vasily um and it's that idea that uh you have a kind of um translatio imperi it's called the movement of the capital of the empire so from

rome to constantinople and now from constantinople to moscow which kind of undergirds i guess you could call it the conceit of the Tsars. And of course, the Tsar... I was about to say the name, the very name. The name itself kind of bears witness. So, you know, the irony is, obviously, the territory of Russia is as far from Rome as you can get in Europe, really. And yet Moscow, probably more than any other european capital you know has has the kind of the bragging rights to the to to be the heir of rome um and this is this is something that is

i think taken seriously uh and again to kind of touch on the theme of of last week's um special that we did on ukraine we talked about crimea yeah um crimea matters because it is it was it was the seat of classical greek civilization so you have the the city of chersonis um founded by greeks back in the 6th century bc it had been a part of the roman empire under the under you know the heyday of the caesars in the first second centuries a.d and then in the 10th century when vladimir the the prince of kiev who again i think now has to rank as a friend of the show he's been on so many recent episodes he gets baptized that's in chersonisa so the sense of of crimea as the link joining the lands of Muscovy to the north, to the Roman world, is very, very strong.

And the measure of this is that in 1783, under Catherine the Great, as in the great Hussar, Potemkin, her advisor and her lover... Did you have to say that in that kind of gluso accent i mean this has been a very accent free podcast no it's yeah i i couldn't resist it so for temkin for temkin who basically uh supervises the annexation of crimea under under catherine the great he writes to uh to catherine and says to her you have attached the territories which alexander and pompey so alexander the great pompey the great great rival of julius caesar just glanced at to the

baton of russia and cherson of tarida so that's cherson isis the source of our christianity and thus of our humanity is now in the hands of its daughter so russia is now joined to the first rome in the form of these lands that pompey the great had had ruled and to the second rome because now you know this is where vladimir became was baptized who married the daughter of the byzantine emperor so that is the sense in which the sars do take this seriously yeah so you could argue you know that maybe a date for the end of the Roman Empire, if one buys into this Tsarist propaganda and accepts it, would be with the execution, you know, the termination of Tsarist Russia.

Of the aptly named Romanov dynasty. Yes, exactly. So 1917, 1918. Exactly. So that's interesting. And just to go back to the Crimea, so 1783, you said that Catherine the Great absorbs it. So what's interesting about that, Tom, is that that is precisely the moment at which our group of very different people on the other side of the world are also kind of laying claim to Roman heritage, which are the Americans. So the sense of the American Republic being the heir to the Roman Republic, sort of fascination with cincinnatus and with these kind of great characters but i suppose you would

say well would you that the russia is different from america and indeed from let's say france in that regard because the americans and the french are laying claim to the ideals of rome and to the iconography and stuff but they don't genuinely think they're romans no but the russians i think that is the difference but there are some russ, but they don't genuinely think they're Romans. No. I think that is the difference. But there are some Russians, you're saying, who genuinely think there is an absolutely organic, unbroken continuity and that they are the genuine heirs because of orthodoxy, because of Kievan Rus'

and all that history, that they are the heirs to, that they are Romans. They're not the heirs to Rome. That's the wrong way of putting it, that they are the Romans. I mean, it has a quality of paradox, because you look at Washington with all its, you know, the Capitol and the Senate and its Roman architecture, and you say, well, of course, it's much more Roman city. But it isn't, because it doesn't have that sense of itself as being literally descended from Rome, as having a kind of supernatural degree of continuity,

which I think how seriously people have taken it over the course of history could be debated. But I think it does hang in the air as something that can be invoked at certain stages. And perhaps the most fascinating witness for that is not actually with the Romanovs, but with Stalin. Because there are enduring stories, and I think that they are mythical, but the very fact that they exist is in itself telling. That when the Nazis reached the outer limits of Moscow, Stalin, who of course is a committed atheist, profoundly anti-clerical, takes the most sacred icon and he puts it in a plane. It's an icon of the Virgin. and the plane then circles around the city limits of uh moscow

and in doing that they're echoing what the byzantines did when they were besieged by pagan enemies that they would take the icon of the virgin and carry it around the city walls and it was said that the virgin herself would appear which in turn is an echo of stories told by athenians that the the virgin the virgin goddess Athena would walk around the walls of Athens. So there is a kind of, you know, it's a very, very distant sense of continuity, but a very, very faint sense. And I would say that there are people around Putin who do seem to be taking this seriously. So in 2008, there was the head of a monastery in Moscow who was the spiritual advisor to Putin's then wife, directed a film for Russian television that was about the fall of of constantinople um and the the blame for the fall of constantinople was laid less on the turks than on the crusaders who um this the head of this monastery father ticon shevkunov says that they are crude ignorant primitive whose chief occupation

was sacking and pillaging and that is um very much but know, it's a commentary on American fund managers and asset strippers and all those kinds of people. So it's casting, again, Moscow as Constantinople and, yeah, as kind of Western capitalists, as the Crusaders. And the Russian foreign minister in 2016, when, of course, Putin ordered the annexation of Crimea from Ukraine, I mean, he, you know, as Putin has been doing, he gives this history lesson. And he says that Russ was the successor to the Byzantine Empire. You know, he's saying this.

So this is, you know, it's Lavrov, isn't it? Yeah, Sergei Lavrov. I mean, you've written about this, haven't you? I'm reading your essay here. Rus bent under, but was not broken by the heavy Mongolian yoke

and managed to emerge from this dire trial as a single state, which was later regarded by both the West and the East as the successor to the Byzantine Empire that ceased to exist in 1453.

I mean, Tom, Liz Truss doesn't write essays like this. No, no. And, you know, there were famous images when the Russian jets were taking off with the annexation of Crimea of priests casting it, you know, blessing them, putting holy water on it and so on, as priests would have done in Byzantium.

And the parallel was very deliberate. It was kind of very conscious. So I think that, you know, it is, you know, we call this episode undead Rome, kind of zombie Rome. But I mean, there's a kind of sense in which it's not entirely dead. And I thought also the other, so that's one way in which I think this kind of the ghost of Rome haunts geopolitics, even into the 21st century. And the other one, which was very, very striking while it was around, was the use that the Islamic State put the Roman Empire to

when it was kind of going strong. Because we talked about how for Muslims, the idea of Rome is very important because you have these hadiths, these sayings attributed to Muhammad in which it's said that Islam will conquer first Constantinople and then Rome, which therefore means that Rome must still be going. That's the kind of the logic. And the hadith that the Islamic State picked on was that the last hour will not come until the Romans landed Al-Amakh or in Dabiq. And Dabiq is a small town in northern Syria. And they called their propaganda magazine Dabiq. So they put it out every kind of month, I think.

And one of those editions had on the front of it the great obelisk that Caligula had brought to Rome that then got put up in the centre of St. Peter's Square in the Vatican. And they showed this with the Islamic state flag flying from it. And they had this kind of editorial where they said, we will conquer your Rome, break your crosses, enslave your women by the permission of Allah the Exalted. This is his promise to us. He is glorified and he does not fail in his promise if we do not reach that time then our children and grandchildren will reach it and they will sell your sons as slaves at the slave market oh my god so this was um you know resuscitating this sense of the west as a roman empire and using it as a kind of motivation and it's it's not just you, this is not a perspective that's confined

just to the ideologues of Islamic State, who are obviously the most brutal and unpleasant of the lot. But there's also Yusuf al-Karadawi, who's a very, very significant Muslim scholar. He was chairman of the International Union of Muslim Scholars. He was a trustee of the Oxford Centre

for Islamic Studies. And he took this hadith that Islam will conquer Constantinople and then Rome. And he says that Islam will come to Rome as a conqueror and a victor. And he's taking this very, very seriously. And Rome there means what, Tom? Literally Rome. It literally means Rome. So there was, and you can see this from what an imam at one of the defense academies in Saudi Arabia said.

Again, he's talking about this hadith. He says, we will control the land of the Vatican. We will control Rome and we will introduce Islam to it. So weirdly, the Roman Empire's greatest enemy, enemy the caliphate kind of keeps the ghost alive so i was going to say you know rome there is doing the fulfilling the function of babylon and we talked about babylon and yes absolutely but it but it isn't it isn't because when we talk about babylon now when i don't know when rastafarians talk about babylon i mean they're not literally talking about yeah you're right babylon yeah This has a different dimension, doesn't it? Which is, you're right,

it is the same dimension of its luxury, its wealth, its wickedness and corruption. But they also literally mean the city in Italy. It has a geopolitical dimension as well. Yes, they literally mean the city. And they literally mean that, you know, for the Islamic State, the United States and its allies are Rome and they're also crusaders.

And there's a sense in which these various enemies from Islam's history are still kind of roaming around like the undead. Yeah. Roaming around, Tom. Very good. Roaming, roaming around. Very good. It's always good to get a pun in. Before we finish, there's one last, perhaps, heir to the Roman Empire, which I think is an unexpected one, but quite a fun one. Go on, go on. And this is to go back to the Roman Empire in the West. So the question is, and I'm sure you'll have the answer to this. What is the last territory of the Roman Empire in the West where people feel that they are Roman to succumb to barbarian invaders? Oh, my word, Tom.

I'm going to say it is Sicily. No, you see, I think there's a very strong case for saying it's northern Wales. There speaks a man who's never been to Wales so Britain notoriously is the first province in the west to slip Roman imperial control yeah but um it's clear that there are people in Roman Britain who continue to feel that they are roman and um among these are various princes who claim descent from um an authentic roman figure called magnus maximus so he's the most he's a modest name in yes what's his name mean the great the greatest great the greatest great the greatest i think i might that's donald trump's name surely yes i know at least he hasn't picked up on that um so he yeah so he's a

usurper who gathers together all the um all the various kind of uh legions and and and reserving uh remaining garrisons and takes them to the continent where he briefly flourishes as a would-be emperor and then gets killed and that essentially is the end of Roman centralized power in Britain but what he's done is that he has endowed various kind of chiefs, big men with imperial authority. So in that sense, all these guys are endowed with their Roman office holders. And over the course of the centuries that follow, these lines of princes preserve a sense of themselves as licensed you know as as licensed by by rome as roman officials and as descendants of of magnus um maximus whom they come to call max and gledig and max and gledig

is and i apologize to any welsh listeners my welsh welsh yeah max and gledig uh and he is the founder of the lines of all these various welsh princes right And he appears in the Mabinogion. He's a kind of big figure to play with. He's the kind of ancestral head of all these various princes who, in the long run, Edward I will terminate. So Edward I is a hammer not just of the Scots, but of the Romans. So you could say that Edward I is the kind of the last barbarian conqueror to subdue a region of the Western Empire that still feels itself to be Roman. But there's a further twist. There's a further twist.

So in 1301, what does Edward I do with his son? Make some Prince of Wales, Tom. Even I know that. Prince of Walesales because the welsh supposedly have said we want a prince and so edward makes his son prince of wales to restore the line that had been broken that's line of descent from max and gledig magnus maximus latter days of roman britain and to say it is revived so the prince of wales in that sense is the heir to the roman empire in the west meaning you could argue yeah that the law the last person in public life

with a line of descent from the roman empire is none other than charles prince prince charles prince of wales The last Roman. Oh, that bombshell. Well, Tom, I think that is an absolutely ridiculous argument. So when I think of people dining on stuffed thrushes on golden plates, watching gladiatorial games, I don't think of the people of Barmouth or i mean are people in i don't know i'm trying to think of welsh places are people in landudno in the 12th century calling themselves romans and surely they're not welsh listeners please address your remarks to tom holland and

tell him whether or not you feel roman prince charles if you're listening do likewise well prince william as well yeah. Yeah, of course. Yeah. Of course. Maybe they should have a sort of – well, of course, you're great pals with Prince William, Tom. Yeah. You met him at that charity, do you? Both Aston Villa supporters, like David Cameron.

And maybe you should recommend that they have a kind of Roman investiture ceremony rather than – But I think it's exciting that maybe the two figures with claims to be Roman are Vladimir Putin and Prince Charles. Two very different... The Emperor of the East, the Emperor of the West. Right. Maybe they should just carve up the world between them. I wouldn't put too much money on Prince Charles in that kind of mano a mano.

No. I wouldn't send him into the conference chamber. No. Right. On that bombshell, as you rightly said um i think we've completely you know it took edward gibbon 20 years but it's taken us two hours two less than two hours uh and edward gibbon did not end on a welsh note which i think is greatly discredit so we've got all kinds of treats coming up um the assassination of jfk um can't remember what. Lethal fashion. Lethal fashion, killer fashion,

and fashion. Oil. Stuff about energy union. Yeah. Yeah. Lots of stuff. Loads of stuff. So thank you very much for listening

and we will see you next time. Bye-bye. Bye-bye. Thanks for listening to The Rest Is History. For bonus episodes, early access, ad-free listening, and access to our chat community, please sign up at restishistorypod.com. That's restishtertainment.com