ABSTRACT
As Western civilization took shape during the Middle Ages, its position in the world gradually, though incompletely, changed as well. The Roman Empire, one of the great assemblages of power in world history – comparable, at the time, only to the Han empire in China – was a hard act to follow. Many European leaders have wished they could project the power in the world that Rome had conveyed for several centuries. How active this sentiment was as a motive for aggressive action is hard to assess. Interestingly, a similar desire to emulate Rome (and Byzantium) has been attributed to the Russian tsars as they launched a process of expansion from about 1450 onward, and again it is not easy to say how much the Roman example was window dressing, how much real impulse.
