Imperial Leapfrogging: How Empires Anchor Their Rule in the Past

Description

Modern historiography has described Alexander the Great as ‘the last of the Achaemenids’, the Persian dynasty he overthrew. Indeed, much of the empire-building done by Alexander and his principal successors, the Seleukids, was in fact a continuation of previous Achaemenid practices. Yet Alexander rather saw himself as the direct successor of Cyrus the Great, the legendary but long-dead founder of the Persian Empire.
There are many more examples of conquerors in premodern Afro-Eurasia who jump over their immediate predecessors to whom they are most of all indebted in order to associate themselves with legendary figures from a more distant past. Thus they were able to present regime change as a restoration of an imperial Golden Age—a past that could be manipulated to resemble the post-conquest present—while the rulers they had defeated were made to look like insignificant, incompetent kinglets who had been rightfully replaced. This is for instance what Republican Roman leaders did to the Hellenistic kingdoms they subdued by idealizing the long-dead Alexander (the epithet ‘the Great’ is a Roman innovation).
In this paper we will look at the ideological strategy of ‘imperial leapfrogging’ and its effects by examining two case studies from different times and places: the Seleukid ‘invention’ of Nebuchadnezzar and the Golden Age of Babylon in the third century BCE; and Mehmet II’s association with Constantine the Great and his alleged restoration of the Roman Empire after the conquest of Constantinople in 1453.

Period	2 Dec 2022
Event title	Politics of Pasts and Futures in (Post-)Imperial Contexts: First Annual Conference of the RTG 2571 "Empires".
Event type	Conference
Location	Freiburg-im-Breisgau, Germany, Baden-WürttembergShow on map
Degree of Recognition	International