They couldn't. The idea that the Roman Empire would be revived (at least in Western Europe) was too strong to resist - hence the HRE and the hope that Justinian's ERE would make its way westwards. For peripheral regions, such as Ireland and Scandinavia, it was all about integrating themselves into a wider European culture. Even in the 19th century, Greek independence was predicated not on the legacy of Ancient Greece (which the Ῥωμαῖοι /ro'me.i/ rejected outright) but instead on reviving the ERE, with Constantinople at its capital and not Athens or Nafplio. So for many Europeans, Rome was considered (at least until the Renaissance) the high point of European civilization, and then afterwards as harkening back to an idealized golden age. Why make oneselves less European by rejecting Rome's all-pervasive influence?
Could any medieval European state have rejected the legacy of Rome?
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Rome was the first large empire based on the european continent (though it was a mediterranean one rather than an all-european one), Greece excluded, thus when europeans looked to build their own empires the Roman Empire was pretty much the only example they had avaliable, that's how you did Empire from a european perspective. There was no other empire to draw inspiration, and thus legitimacy from.
There need to be some other large state for europeans to base their own countries on for there to be an alternative source of legitimacy. Say there arose an empire in Gaul before Rome could conquer it, or one in Germania, adjacent people could look to them as somehting to base their own states on. But this needs to happen early enough that this Gallic/Germanic state isn't itself drawing too much inspiration from the Roman Empire.
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This thread made me realize that Roman influence very much mirrors China’s outsized cultural influence over east Asia for millennia. Is this just how every region in human history works, people just claim descent or influence from whatever was top dog there in the past?
I guess somehow being on this forum for years and years, and playing games like Crusader Kings, has somehow failed to properly convey that fundamental lesson to me.
On the other hand, living in post-modernity it’s hard to grok how seriously feudal people took lineage.
I guess somehow being on this forum for years and years, and playing games like Crusader Kings, has somehow failed to properly convey that fundamental lesson to me.
On the other hand, living in post-modernity it’s hard to grok how seriously feudal people took lineage.
As a very much weird and probably not very plausible possibility is a TL where the Byzantines abandon Greece for whatever reason and a state arises in Greece that tries to be a descendant of ancient Greek states rather than Rome.
Absolutely yes; people love success stories and even more tying them into their own.
Mesopotamian rulers claimed descent from Sargon for many centuries; Iranian rulers often reclaimed the proud legacy of Cyrus; Greek people genuinely flirted with Byzantine legacy for a whole century after independence; only powers like Rome who had more difficulty reclaiming earlier legacy usually default to mythos.
Do keep in mind that Pdox games are, well, games; they need a semblance of balance and diverse goals for all, but they promote a grand strategy vision, based on clear goal and pretty perfect information, that is very distant from how polities of the time worked.
And yes, shared identity worked very differently in the ages before modernity's many game changers.
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Rome appropriated the gods of the Greeks and was itself a partly Hellenized Etruscan outpost. Rome further developed its own writing system. It also had the army and navy to legitimize itself that medieval European polities did not.
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It's certainly an interesting question, and our modern conceptions of the state probably do a lot more harm than good when it comes to thinking about the political ideas/realities of ancient or medieval peoples. Especially so when it comes to the type of binary political decisions that are used in a video game like Crusader Kings II where you either "create de jure empire" and resurrect something that already ostensibly existed, or you "found a new empire" which you can customize yourself.
Personally, I think some of the explanations given in this thread are a tad reductive. It imply that it was a conscious decision to "choose" to claim the mantle of the Roman Empire as a pragmatic form of realpolitik to gain political clout and/or legitimacy. This naturally leads you to ask "Why?" Why didn't they just choose to base their legitimacy on something different, like the older Germanic traditions of the Franks. I would say that this wasn't really an option for a number of reasons. First off, much of Western Europe had experienced centuries of Roman rule and/or contact. The time of Caesar Augustus to the "official" end of the Western Roman Empire was a span of nearly five hundred years. That's about twenty generations of imperial rule. If you were living at the time we deem the end of the Western Roman Empire and if every man in your direct paternal line lived an average of 45 years, then your great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great grandfather could have been living in Imperial Italy around the time of Jesus' death!!
Hell, the entire concept of an empire was tied to the Roman Empire itself. Today, we know a lot about world history and have seen countless empires come and go, but to people at the time, Rome was indivisible from the concept of an empire. It colored their entire conception. One cannot exactly 'start your own empire' on entirely new foundations unrelated to Rome when Rome informs your entire perception of what an empire can and should be.
The closest comparison I can think of is if I asked you to think of a brand new political ideology in which none of its major ideas are inherited from something already existing. Next to impossible, no? Because all ideas are built on the shoulders of other ideas down back to the very first thoughts and shared knowledge. You can't really conceive of something radically new that is entirely independent of the world around you, and this was the case for medieval rulers. They lived in the aftermath of the Empire. The people spoke languages derived from Latin or influenced by it, they practiced a religion intrinsically tied to the Roman legacy, and their political practices (think Carolingian 'feudalism') were directly the result of the collapse of the Western Roman political system. So, it would seem that to break free from the legacy of Rome and step outside its shadow was essentially undoable because they lived in a society colored in every way by Roman history.
Even the official language of the post-Roman imperial polities, going straight on into the High Medieval Period, was Latin. One might be tempted to see the etymology of the word Reich in German and point out it’s proto-Germanic rather than Latin roots (although it comes from realm which was merely a local equivocation to imperium rather than an organic conception of it with equal meaning), but you have to remember that the Holy Roman Empire legally wasn’t the Heiliges Römisches Reich or the early Medieval Germanic equivalent. It was the Imperium Sacrum Romanorum. Latin ideas weren’t only just transmitted into Germanic languages during this period, Latin instead replaced them as the language of administration, power, and authority for these incoming peoples and I think this is significant to everything else I’ve mentioned.
You also might reasonably ask about other “organic” empires outside of the Roman context. China is an obvious one that is very similar to the Romans in their lasting power, their expression as an “idea” as well as a lasting material polity, and their culture that was able to absorb invading peoples. But for others, the situation is somewhat different. In an lot of cases, things we call an empire are sometimes just historiographical terms imposed on peoples who might not necessarily have thought of themselves in the same way that a Roman or Han Chinese might have. For instance, the Mongol peoples created what we refer to as the Mongol Empire. Yet in their own language it is yeke Mongγol ulus or roughly the Great Mongol Nation. I’m no great expert to talk about this, but from what I understand and assume, it was a confederation of tribal peoples that incorporated tributary and subject states who paid homage to the Khan. While they had sophisticated administration and a universalist claim in common with other empires, they had a unique cultural conception of what that actually meant. It wasn’t necessarily something radically new and created from nothing, but instead a much larger and more developed form of previous steppe confederations and tributary arrangements. So essentially, it evolved organically from Mongol specific ideas and was not adhering to some universal definition of empire that exists abstractly. The same would go for any “new” medieval empire, it was born from its circumstances, which I hope to demonstrate were absolutely steeped in the Roman legacy.
To get back on track, I mentioned it in the previously, but Christianity also played a huge part in this. Christianity integrated itself directly into the fabric of the Roman Empire and, by the end, was essentially inseparable. So, of course, when the Western Roman Empire 'dissolved', the Pope in Rome and the Church was able to assume some of the former clout. They were the only institution that officially had a network all over the former empire and so it was natural that this process would occur. The Donation of Constantine, though a 9th century forgery, officially cemented this. Constantine bestowed upon the Roman Curia, "power, and dignity of glory, vigor and imperial honor." They were given, as the story goes, imperial insignia, lands, and the right to preside over the entire Christian world (inseparable, in their eyes, from the world itself). This further bound medieval polities into the Roman legacy, by supporting the Papacy (or, with the Pope's blessing, themselves) as the successors of imperial power. Charlemagne and the Carolingian dynasty was the prime example of this process. I don't think one could reject the legacy of Rome without rejecting the Christian Church itself at this time, even in the Eastern Roman Empire. The concept of translatio imperii is also useful in understanding this. Imperial power of Rome never 'ended' even though the polity that we retroactively identify as the Western Roman Empire fell. It was transferred from the Western Roman Empire on to new and emerging polities naturally, according to the perceptions of the time.
I'm swiping this from the Wikipedia page on translatio imperii for the sake of brevity, but:
"The translatio imperii idea didn't separate "divine" history from the history of "worldly power": medieval Europeans considered divine (supernatural) and material things as part of the same continuum, which was their reality."
So the divine conference of imperial power on the Papacy was not taken 'separately' from the collapse of the Empire itself. So the Pope was invested with imperial power, and could confer it as he did to Charlemagne in 800. This would maintain itself during the entirety of the medieval period.
I feel as if I'm rambling without getting my point across so I'll just say that 'an empire' and 'the Roman empire' were indivisible concepts to the people of the medieval period, and it colored the entire framework of society and their religion, and so 'breaking' with Rome was essentially impossible. They could not just formulate a new empire outside of this conception nearly as easily as we can today with our understanding of many world empires who are entirely independent of Rome. I think a comparison to China is very useful, as you yourself made earlier. I would hesitate to say people just 'claim influence from the past' as if it's a conscious process, when I think it is more useful to think of it as something that undergirded their entire social and political thoughts and realities.
Essentially, the Roman Empire was an idea as well as a polity. I think one of the best summations comes from Crassus in Stanley Kubrick's Spartacus (1960): "Rome is but an eternal thought in the mind of gods."
EDIT: a couple more paragraphs of thoughts against my better judgement
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"There was once a dream, a dream called Rome"
"Rome was a poem, pressed into service as a city"
But yeah, the Roman Empire was a culture-ideology as much as an institution
And Rome the city itself was seen as the capital of the world by europeans
So why would you want to break away from it? That's what they'd think
Charles the Bad declares the Basque Empire, and through an implausible chain of events involving the Spanish, English, and French all holding the idiot ball, fulfils his claim on the crown of the last.
It depends on the situation, I definitely think it was was for the West, but when Bulgarians claimed the title of tsar it was different, they were indeed emulating the Byzantine empire but it's not like they were claiming succession, they just adopted the political ideology(or part of it) while still not really becoming Roman or Greek, I think this is a huge difference which is underappreciated when we focus on post-Carolingian Europe.
Except they did just that, did the Franks go around dress like classical elite Romans(because there wasn't a huge difference with other late Romans and barbarians of course), name their kids with Latin names and abandon their Frankish identity? In reality the exact opposite happened.
Is the Merovingian long hair some secret Christian or Roman tradition as well?
3.5 centuries of Roman rule were forgotten pretty quickly in Anglo-Saxon Britain outside the learned elites that had contact with Gaul.
Can you elaborate on this? What does it mean to "start" an empire? Why are people forced to think a certain way and care about the Romans, I mean that in concrete terms.
Clearly direct political inspiration from Rome was fairly shallow because most European empires didn't not operate like Rome in terms of army, provinces and so on, but if you see any concrete way that looking at imperial Rome actually shaped medieval polities feel free to show it.
There is a difference between "something being a source of inspiration" and "not being able to branch away and start a new independent way of thinking" after centuries of separation.
Post Carolingian feudalism has very little to do with Late Roman systems, you might argue Diocletian started the trend towards tying up labor but the actual decentralized political system came way later and showing a causal link doesn't actually say that the original Roman system informed every single step of the process by means of inspiration or emulation, it was only the starting point.
This is because Catholicism, Latin essentially died out in the East despite it staying politically Roman. We already know that Latin isn't automatically going to become a prestige language of all Romance speakers either, just look at Romanian.
Once again that was result of Charlemagne, not the direct result of Rome existing 3-4 centuries prior.
Proof?
The thing is you can still stop caring or thinking about the original thing, yes any post-Roman state will gradually modify the late Roman society they inherited but this shouldn't automatically result in neo-classicism or they way some Renaissance era people thought about the past.
Do you see any differences between early modern people directly emulating certain well known Roman motifs and figures and Germanic-Roman kingdoms simply evolving out of late Roman society without identifying as Romans? I think there is a huge difference here and Charlemagne by 800 CE was already more on the side of emulating that "basing himself off of what existed" given that by 800 CE very little was left structurally of the Western Roman state and how much of the actual Roman nobility survived in a direct fashion is to be debated.
To me "breaking off" means when you stop trying to be directly connected to the original thing and stop ignoring all changes in between(which necessarily influenced you more, you are more connected to your parents than your grand parents).
I feel like the best analogy is how early modern French people "re-latinized" the spelling of their words without actually changing anything else. Despite it accomplishing nothing people still did it because they had this idea in their head that it was "proper", I really don't see this in the same light as early post-Roman people not radically abandoning all of their culture and way of doing things over-night. One thing is to gradually evolve out of the existing situation, another is trying to directly recreate certain parts of an essentially centuries dead culture because of prestige.
I guess another analogy would be the difference between "respecting conventions of a genre that originally was influenced by show X" and "trying reboot show X or constantly reference it directly in your new show".
This is just an idea some 8th century people came up with and purely a result of Charlemagne and no, the argument to be had is why exactly was this "natural" when no one else tried to do this after maybe the Ostrogoths?
I think history has proven they could literally formulate new empires with new territories with completely different social and political systems and so on, what really remains "classically " Roman was prestige language, political names and general "references" to imperial Rome, but really what's there beyond this that actually archons back to Rome beyond the late imperial period?
You can have a Europe where people still gradually grew from a Roman basis and NOT have it be full of conscious revivals of classical motifs and not have people be obsessed with republican or early imperial Rome.
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So, basically, modern Greece? EDIT: That's pretty much what happened IOTL.
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