Ottoman claim to Roman succession

This claim was based on the right of conquest and mainly rested on possession of Constantinople, capital of the Byzantine (Eastern Roman) Empire for over a millennium.

The claim of succession to the Roman Empire was also used to justify campaigns of conquest against Western Europe, including attempts to conquer Italy.

[1] Constantinople was established by Emperor Constantine I (r. 306–337) as the new capital of the Roman Empire and had by 450 eclipsed the original Rome in both size and status.

Throughout its history, the populace of the Byzantine Empire continuously maintained that they were Romaioi (Romans) and not Hellenes (Greeks), even as the imperial borders gradually reduced to only encompass Greek-speaking lands.

The Ottoman expansion reduced the Byzantine Empire to the imperial capital of Constantinople itself, the Peloponnese, and a handful of islands in the Aegean Sea.

The fall of Constantinople is often regarded to have marked the definitive end of the Roman Empire,[1] as well as the final and decisive step in the Ottoman conquest of its core lands and subjects.

The sultan emulated himself on Julius Caesar and Alexander the Great, and is known to at one point have visited the city of Troy to see the graves of the mythological Greek heroes Achilles and Ajax.

[11] In pre-1453 sources, the Ottomans used tekfur for Byzantine government servants of all ranks, thus giving it a demeaning connotation when applied to the emperor.

The Ottoman capital was moved to Constantinople due to its imperial history and strategic location[28] and the city was repopulated and thrived under Mehmed and his successors.

[22] Similar to the Byzantine emperors, Mehmed also appointed a new Patriarch of Constantinople, Gennadios II Scholarios, which garnered the sultan further legitimacy in the eyes of his Christian subjects as well as a certain level of control over the Eastern Orthodox Church.

[30] In 1480, Mehmed used his claim to be Roman emperor to justify an unsuccessful invasion of Italy,[31] the intended first step in a campaign to eventually capture Rome itself.

[37] This title was also assumed by both Selim I and Suleiman I,[34] rendered as padişah-i Kostantiniye (پادشاهی قسطنطنیه) in Turkish,[22] and was sometimes extended to "Emperor of Constantinople and Trebizond".

[22] In Latin documents issued for diplomatic correspondence with Western European rulers, the sultans frequently used the title imperator.

[32] The contemporary Italian writer Paolo Giovio believed that Suleiman thought all of Western Europe was rightfully his as the legitimate successor of Constantine I.

[16] In the early sixteenth century, the Ottomans conquered vast territories in the Levant, Arabia and North Africa, leaving the empire with a majority Muslim population.

[27] The Ottoman sultans claimed to be caliphs since 1517,[40] the custodian of the holy cities (Mecca and Medina),[40] and khan[41] or khagan[42] alongside other titles from Turkic, Persian, Central Asian and Islamic traditions.

[43] In 1525, the Ottoman court ceased to issue official documents in scripts other than Arabic, a further step towards Islamic political identity.

[45] The sultans continued to deny other monarchs the style of padişah in diplomatic correspondence, which meant that the implications of their imperial role was not forgotten.

[44] Ottoman sultans after Suleiman I at times still stressed that they were Roman emperors[c] and the style kayser or kayser-i Rûm remained in use as late as the eighteenth century.

[50] Among sultans and the general populace, "Turk" and "Turkish" became derogatory terms, used by the imperial elite for nomadic Turkic peoples and the Turkish-speaking peasants in Anatolia.

[51] In the early modern period, many Ottoman Turks, especially those who lived in cities and were not part of the military or administration, self-identified as Romans (Rūmī, رومى), as inhabitants of former Byzantine territory.

[60] The Ecumenical Patriarchate of Constantinople had officially recognized Mehmed II as basileus by 1474, as a synodal register from that year applies this title to the sultan.

[12] Byzantine refugees who fled after the fall of Constantinople, such as Doukas and Bessarion, generally held that the Ottomans were infidels, barbarians, and illegitimate tyrants.

[4] Some Greek historians promoted the idea that Ottoman rule was illegitimate but nevertheless divinely ordained to punish the sins of the Byzantine populace;[4] one theological explanation for Constantinople's fall was that the sultans had been sent by God to safeguard the people against the attempts by the last few Palaiologoi emperors of reunifying the Eastern Orthodox Church with the Catholic Church.

[68] Johannes Cuspinian, who served under Maximilian I lists Ottoman sultans alongside Holy Roman, Byzantine and emperors from the Antiquity in his book Caesares.

[67] The Ottoman sultans regarded few foreign monarchs as their equals, a development stemming from their claim to emperorship and universal rule.

Holy Roman emperors were typically referred to by the Ottomans as "kings of Vienna" and requests from monarchs to be treated as equals were either ignored or rejected.

[72] In the 1606 Peace of Zsitvatorok, Sultan Ahmed I was forced to concede that the Holy Roman Emperor Rudolf II was an imperator.

Although a symbolic victory for Rudolf, the treaty did not establish the two rulers as equals since Ahmed continued to reserve the titles kayser and padişah solely for himself.

[74] Especially in the sixteenth through eighteenth centuries, Ottoman administrators in Egypt and Arabia are almost always referred to by contemporary Arab writers as arwam.