I made reference to the fact that the medieval Greeks believed themselves to be the “only true Romans” due to their politico-religious ideology according to which Constantinople was the ‘New Rome’ founded by Constantine in opposition to ‘Old Rome’.
This Byzantine doctrine of translatio imperii was itself an exemplary illustration of historical revisionism employed by the Greeks to justify their exclusive claim to the Roman imperial title. The claim relied on the fabricated story that Emperor Constantine had deliberately abandoned his capital in Italy and transferred the whole apparatus of the empire from Rome to Constantinople, bringing with him the entire Senate and administration, and renaming the city ‘New Rome’. None of which was actually true.
Constantine, in fact, never moved the capital to Constantinople; he merely moved the seat of his own court and primary residence there, a move which was ignored by his immediate successors. At most, Constantinople became one of multiple administrative centers (like Milan, Ravenna or Trier), never the sole capital of the Roman Empire and never equal in status to Rome.
Moreover, Constantine never called it ‘New Rome’ (a name later invented by the Greeks); he named it Constantinople, after himself. This myth of ‘New Rome’ derives from the fact that: 1) the 4th century poet Porfyrius rhetorically referred to Constantinople as altera Roma (“a second Rome”), a poetic phrase used also in 357 AD by Themistius; and 2) in 381 AD the Greek clergy assembled at the Council of Constantinople informally — and in an ecclesiastical context — described the city as ‘a new Rome’, in an attempt to equate the Bishop of Constantinople with the Bishop of Rome. However, this was never the name of the city; Constantine never called it by that name; and the city was never given any special status or prerogatives by Constantine.
Also, he did not transfer the Roman Senate (which survived all the calamities and continued to exist at Rome until at least 603 AD); what Constantine did was created a secondary senate at Constantinople, which did not have any more authority nor power than the one in Rome, and which was composed by Roman men from the West who spoke Latin — just as Constantine himself did.
For that matter, what existed at Constantinople was not even a ‘senate’ in the proper sense, as its members only held the rank of clari — not clarissimi as the Roman senators, thus was clearly of inferior status to the Roman Senate, whose rank and authority was superior to that of Constantinople. The clari of Constantinople in reality were city councillors, not senators, and they only had authority over the eastern provinces while the Roman senate held authority over the whole empire. The notoriously unreliable Byzantine chronicler John Malalas wrongly ascribed to Constantine the construction of the Senate House of Constantinople; however there is no mention of a senate house (or any senate at all) by Eusebius, nor by Aurelius Victor, nor does it appear in Zosimus’ list of Constantinian monumental buildings. Moreover the city did not have a praefectus urbanus (urban prefect) before 359 AD — 22 years after Constantine’s death.
In his first panegyric to Constantius, dated 356 AD, Emperor Julian said that Constantinople is “inferior to Rome” and “second to Rome”. He also called Rome the “reigning city” or “city that rules over them all”. There can be no doubt that to Julian’s mind, Rome — and not Constantinople — was the capital of the Roman Empire. Even the pro-Constantinian historian Eusebius, writing after Constantine’s death, still refers to Rome as the Imperial City.
From all this it is evident that neither Constantine nor his immediate successors intended for Constantinople to supplant Rome as the capital of the Empire. The development of Constantinople into a new and rival capital is something which occurred in the decades after Constantine. It was only with Emperor Theodosius I and the subsequent administrative partition of the Roman Empire into Eastern and Western halves in 395 AD — which, though theoretically one polity, then functioned de facto as two separate states — that Constantinople assumed definitive rank as capital of the Eastern Roman Empire (not of the Western Roman Empire, nor of the whole Roman Empire).
It must be emphasized again that the first time the term ‘New Rome’ appeared in history was at the aforementioned Council of Constantinople (381 AD). The name of Constantinople was never ‘New Rome’. Constantine did not call it that; the Roman emperors never called it that; no state document ever referred to it by that name. It was a title invented by Greek bishops at an ecclesiastical synod; the expression is not found in any documents or historical texts prior 381 AD. And even there, the bishops did not claim that it was named such by Constantine. It was the 5th century Greek historian Socrates Scholasticus who first asserted that Constantine had issued a law which established the name ‘New Rome’. No such edict has ever been known to exist, however.
Later Byzantine authors such as John Malalas invented even greater legends to justify Constantinople’s claims to primacy. It was Malalas, for example, who first asserted that the mythical Trojan Palladium — the symbol of Rome’s claim to eternal power and preservation — had been transferred from Rome to Constantinople by Emperor Constantine, who had it buried beneath the Constantine’s Column, thus passing the eternal power to ‘New Rome’, i.e. Constantinople. This legend is one of the foundational myths of Byzantine hagiography, later repeated by Procopius and by the Chronicon Paschale. Except there is no evidence that this transfer ever occurred; it is an invention of 6th century Byzantine Christian writers. Excavations in the 1930’s turned up nothing; a previous necropolis was unearthed, but no palladium.
(For those who gave credence to the legends, how much it must fluster them to realize that Rome is still here, while the vaunted ‘New Rome’ — Constantinople — has been Turkish for nearly 600 years.)
The entire narrative of Constantine and ‘New Rome’ is based on medieval Byzantine fabrications, earlier Greek Christian embellishments and Greek clerical power grabs, fashioned in the context of crafting a new politico-religious ideology around Byzantium. Almost every aspect of the conventional story — from the supposed transfer of the senate by Constantine, to the legend of the palladium, to the name ‘New Rome’ itself — is demonstrably untrue and unsupported by contemporary testimonials. Yet these claims are still repeated ad nauseum on Wikipedia and by lazy historians who accept the Byzantine accounts as fact, without any scholarly criticism.
The mythos surrounding Constantinople has been dealt with in a somewhat indirect way by historians like Muriel Moser. But it seems that the only notable English author to recently tackle this myth in a direct and explicit way is Professor John Melville Jones, in his work Constantinople As ‘New Rome’, in which he concludes the following after critically examining the sources:
“In modern works it is often stated that Constantinople was called ‘New Rome’ (or ‘Second Rome’), with the implication that this was an official title. This incorrect statement is particularly common in works written by scholars whose first, and perhaps only, language is English... Some ancient authors (writing long after the foundation of the city) do in fact say or imply that Constantinople was formally named ‘New Rome’ or ‘Second Rome’, but this claim is, as Franz Dölger wrote a long time ago, ‘auf einer Fiktion beruht’ [based on a fiction]. These expressions belong to laudatory rhetoric and elevated historical prose and poetry, and are never found in official documents or on the coinage. Also, who could believe that Constantine I would ever have allowed any name other than his to be the official name of his new city? The present study examines the relevant evidence in order to demonstrate that it is wrong to say that Constantine’s city was ever officially called anything other than ‘Constantinople’.”
“Did Constantine intend from the first that his new foundation should be an eastern capital for the empire, or even that it should replace. Rome? No contemporary evidence bears on this subject, except for one possible reference in a Latin poem, and there is nothing on Constantine's coinage that supports this suggestion. The supposed 'evidence' is provided by much later [Byzantine] written sources.”
“Not surprisingly, Constantinople is not called 'Nova Roma' in western sources, and this phrase appears in Latin literature only in the work of a sixth century African author who was resident in Constantinople.”
“To recapitulate what I have said, and to state my conclusion, there is no evidence from Constantine's own time to show that he decided to call Constantinople 'New Rome'. The phrases 'second Rome' and 'new Rome' appear (with one possible exception) later, mostly in literary texts written by ecclesiastical writers who were writing in Greek and copied one another.”
“The claim that either of these phrases ['second Rome' or 'new Rome'] was an officially given name for Constantinople, and might have been used in this way in official documents or public inscriptions, should be rejected. This false claim is a result of the emphasis placed on the phrase 'New Rome' in the decision of the Oecumenical Council of A.D. 381 that related to the relative status of the major Christian churches, which led to the use of this phrase by later [Greek] writers. ... But this does not mean that an official title of 'New Rome' was ever given to it. This is an expansion of the facts, partly inspired by the desire of the Church of Constantinople to increase its status in relation to the other major Christian churches.” (Source: John Melville Jones, Constantinople as 'New Rome', 2014)
The only reason why Latin Catholics later partially conceded to the Byzantine myth, is because the Byzantine version of events also indirectly supported the bishop of Rome’s own claims to temporal political power outlined in the ‘Donation of Constantine’ (which itself was an 8th century forgery). Thus you had two opposing sides more or less agreeing to the same fiction: on the one side the Byzantine Greeks, who falsely claimed that Constantine abandoned Rome in order to create ‘New Rome’ as the capital of a new Christian Empire; and on the other side the Latin West which, several centuries later, partly embraced the false Greek account because it served to reinforce the equally false papal claim that Emperor Constantine had transferred the empire to the East and relinquished all western lands to the temporal sovereignty of the pope (thereby establishing his function as temporal prince or political ruler, distinct from his spiritual or religious functions).
The whole narrative, however, is a revisionist fiction which originated with Greek writers and ambitious Greek clergy in Constantinople. And it completely altered the course not only of real historical events, but continues to influence the way history is written and viewed today: incorrectly.
All of this obfuscates the real point here, though: namely that the Greeks are not Romans, yet for nearly 1000 years they usurped the Roman name and robbed the Roman legacy, and still today there are many Greeks and Eastern Orthodox people who seek to define themselves as the “true heirs” of Rome, while at the same time hating Rome and despising the Latins who made Rome.
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