New Rome
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- This article is about the concept of New Rome in Western Civilization; for the dissolved village in Ohio, see New Rome, Ohio
New Rome is a term that can be applied to a city or a country. It can be used to express connection with or discontinuity from the "old" Rome, depending upon context. New Rome has been a cultural, historical, and theological concept within much of Western culture (as far east as Russia) for centuries if not millennia. The term "New Rome" can be used as insult and as praise. Its oldest use may be in reference to Constantinople, since Nova Roma or Νέα Ρώμη was an alternate name for the city. This particular New Rome served as the capital of the Roman Empire from the 4th century until the fall of the Western empire and for nearly a millennium afterwards for the Empire as it survived in the east. In 451 the Council of Chalcedon gave New Rome and its Patriarch equal ecclesiastical status with Old Rome.
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New Rome in the "East"
Byzantium
As Nova Roma, Byzantine writers contrasted their city from the "old" Rome by pointing out how Byzantium had always been a Christian city, while Old Rome had pagan roots. Polemical writings after the Great Schism even claimed that Old Rome was too stained by the blood of martyrs to lead Christianity. To the present day, the Patriarch of Constantinople includes "of Constantinople, New Rome" in his full title.
Moscow as the "Third Rome"
Within decades after the Fall of Constantinople to Mehmed II of the Ottoman Empireon May 29, 1453, some were nominating Moscow as the "Third Rome", or new "New Rome". Stirrings of this sentiment began during the reign of Ivan III, Grand Duke of Moscow who had married Sophia Paleologue. Sophia was a niece of Constantine XI, the last Eastern Roman Emperor and Ivan could claim to be the heir of the fallen Eastern Roman Empire.
The idea crystallized with a panegyric letter composed by the Russian monk Filofei in 1510 to their son Grand Duke Vasili III , which proclaimed, "Two Romes have fallen. The third stands. And there will not be a fourth. No one will replace your Christian Tsardom!"
Since Roman princesses had married Tsars of Moscow, and, since Russia had become, with the fall of Byzantium, the most powerful Orthodox Christian state, the Tsars were thought of as succeeding the Byzantine Emperor as the rightful ruler of the (Christian) world. The word "tsar," like kaiser, is derived from the word "caesar".
Grand Duke Ivan IV was proclaimed the first Russian Tsar on January 16, 1547. The Tsars ruled until November 2, 1721. The last Tsar Peter I abandoded his title in favor of the title "Emperor". Reflecting both the traditional claims of his predecessors and his success in establishing Imperial Russia.
This "Muscovite Third Romism" persisted into the October Revolution, beginning of the Bolshevik era in the Soviet Union. At the time Nikolai Berdyaev wrote, "Instead of the Third Rome in Russia, the Third International was achieved and many of the features of the Third Rome pass over to the Third International." Some scholars have seen Muscovite Third Romism as the Russian equivalent of the United States' Manifest Destiny, and other concepts used to rationalize imperialism.
New Rome in the "West"
On the other hand, for countries that underwent the Protestant Reformation, "New Rome" became a pejorative description, applied to nations or cities that earned a reputation for rapacity, immorality, or other social or political faults. This may have its roots in virulently anti-Roman propaganda against "papists" and the city of Rome, home of the Pope and heart of the Roman Catholic Church, which drew the ire of many a Reformation author. In the present day, "New Rome" is used in this form mostly to refer to "political immorality", casting any large and powerful country into the role of an oppressive and expansionistic empire. "Babylon" is often used in a similar sense.
In Fiction
In the 1959 post-apocalyptic science fiction novel A Canticle for Leibowitz by Walter Michael Miller, Jr., first published in 1959, the residence of the post-nuclear holocaust Pope is called New Rome. In the sequel Saint Leibowitz and the Wild Horse Woman, New Rome was revealed to have been founded on the site of St. Louis, Missouri.
Nova Roma is the name of a fictional country of the Marvel Universe, first appearing in New Mutants #8 (October, 1983). The comic book was written by Chris Claremont and drawn by Bob McLeod. This colony of the Roman Republic was reportedly founded shortly after the death of Julius Caesar in 44 BC. The colony is hidded in modern Brazil. The psychic vampire Selene was the de facto ruler of the city for centuries. Her alleged descedant Magma would leave the city to join the New Mutants, (briefly) the X-Men and the New Hellions.
Reference
- Dmytryshyn, Basil (transl). 1991. Medieval Russia: A Source Book, 850-1700. 259-261. Harcourt Brace Jovanovich. Fort Worth, Texas.