Imperial leapfrogging: How empires anchor their rule in the past

How did premodern Afro-Eurasian empires anchor their rule in the past, and how did they position themselves vis-à-vis the empires that they conquered or came to replace? After an introductory discussion of the Roman appropriation of the figure of Alexander the Great, this paper aims to answer these questions through two case studies: (1) the Macedonian takeover of Babylon from the Persian Empire after 331 BCE, and (2) the Ottoman conquest of Constantinople in 1453. We end with a shorter discussion of the replacement of the Parthian Arsakid dynasty by the Sasanian kings in third-century CE Iran. It will be shown that in all these cases the conquerors employed a policy of "jumping over" their immediate predecessors in order to connect to a more distant past - a past that could be rewritten to resemble the post-conquest present. This enabled them to portray their precursors as unworthy, incompetent tyrants that had rightfully been removed from power to allow the beginning of a new Golden Age. Paradoxically, new imperial rulers habitually continued using the institutions, networks and even personnel of the former empire. For instance: despite the fact that the fifteenth-century Ottoman monarchy was in many respects a continuation of the Late Byzantine Empire, Mehmet II, the conqueror of Constantinople, "leapfrogged" over more than a thousand years of Byzantine rule to present himself as a new Constantine who had restored the Roman Empire to its former glory.