ABSTRACT

The relationship of Byzantium and Rome has generally been regarded from the Western or Roman Catholic point of view. New Rome was entitled to all the powers of old Rome, but at the same time she was Christian Rome and exercised the might of the Roman Empire according to the law of Christ. The collapse of Rome was explained as the rightful vengeance of God upon the metropolis of the pagan Empire which for so many centuries had persecuted the Christian Church. Russian national and ecclesiastical pride received an enormous impetus from the notion that Moscow had become the "third Rome." Even as the West began to comport itself as a new Holy Roman Empire, the Byzantines asserted that Constantine had transferred the entire Senate and the entire official hierarchy of Rome to Constantinople and that nothing of the imperium was left to Rome after the foundation of Constantinople.