title: Ryan Babel

text: On 19 August 2010, Babel scored the winner against Trabzonspor in the Europa League qualifier first leg, it was his first game of the 2010–11 season. He started his first match in the Premier League at Anfield against Aston Villa and scored his first goal in the Premier League with a right-footed volley that beat former Liverpool goalkeeper Brad Friedel.


title: Ryan Babel

text: Babel gained further notoriety amongst fans when, on transfer deadline day 31 August 2010, it was reported that the player was travelling by helicopter between Liverpool and an unspecified London location as possible transfer talks with Tottenham and West Ham were ongoing, and there was speculation about his true destination. No transfer actually occurred and the helicopter story may be apocryphal, but the image stuck and the term "Babelcopter" became a metaphor for players with an uncertain destination on future transfer deadline days, with the player himself promoting the use of the hashtag #BabelCopter.


title: Ryan Babel

text: One of the first Premier League players to use Twitter to communicate with fans, in January 2011, Babel posted a photoshopped image on Twitter of referee Howard Webb in a Manchester United shirt following Liverpool's 1–0 defeat to United in the FA Cup. He was subsequently charged by the F.A. with improper conduct and fined £10,000.


title: Ryan Babel

text: On 18 January, Liverpool agreed a fee believed to be in the region of £7 million for Babel from TSG 1899 Hoffenheim. On 24 January, Kenny Dalglish said that Babel would be staying at Liverpool, but the next day Babel flew to Germany to finalise the deal to sign with Hoffenheim.


title: Ryan Babel

text: On 25 January 2011, it was confirmed that Babel had left Liverpool to join German side TSG 1899 Hoffenheim for a reported fee of £8 million, signing a two-and-a-half-year deal.


title: Ryan Babel

text: His first competitive match was on 26 January 2011 in the DFB Cup quarter final match against FC Energie Cottbus. He is well known for his 'left little finger out' celebration, in support of disadvantaged youths in Amsterdam.


title: Ryan Babel

text: In the 2011–12 Bundesliga season, Babel netted his first league goal of the season on 20 August 2011 against Augsburg in a 2–0 away win. On 10 September 2011, he scored his first brace for 1899 Hoffenheim in a 4–0 win against Mainz 05 and scored again in the next game on 17 September in a 3–1 win over VfL Wolfsburg.


title: Ryan Babel

text: After playing for Hoffenheim for 18 months, scoring six goals in 51 matches, he was released by the club on 31 August 2012.


title: Ryan Babel

text: After personally buying off the remaining year of his contract with Hoffenheim, he returned to his old club Ajax on a one-year deal. Wearing shirt number 49, the same number he wore when he made his first ever appearance for the first team at Ajax, he made his debut with Ajax for the 2012–13 season on 15 September 2012, in a regular season match against RKC Waalwijk. He came on as a substitute for Derk Boerrigter in the second half, assisting Jody Lukoki on the second goal in the 2–0 home win for the Amsterdam side. He scored his first goal since returning to Ajax in a match against ADO Den Haag on 23 September 2012.


title: Ryan Babel

text: Struggling with a slight injury midway through the season, Babel managed to play a total of 16 league matches for Ajax, scoring four goals in total in the Eredivisie. He also made four appearances in the 2012–13 UEFA Champions League, as well as two more appearances in the 2012–13 KNVB Cup, where he scored the second goal in the '15-minute of the second round fixture against FC Utrecht, with the match ending 3–0 for the Amsterdam side prior to his injury. He would return to action after being sidelined to help his side secure their 3rd consecutive national title and 32nd overall.


title: Ryan Babel

text: Opting not to extend his contract with Ajax in order to make way for the next generation, Babel decided to join Turkish side Kasımpaşa where former Ajax player Shota Arveladze was the current manager. He was joined in Turkey by fellow Amsterdam-born defender Ryan Donk who made the transfer from Belgian side Club Brugge.


title: Ryan Babel

text: Babel signed a contract with UAE Arabian Gulf League champions Al Ain to replace the outgoing Miroslav Stoch. He signed the contract after passing a medical test on 2 July 2015. In December 2015, Al Ain and Babel were involved in a conflict over Babel's disciplinary issues with the club's hierarchy and regarding his use of social media. The club demoted him to the reserves citing poor performance.


title: Ryan Babel

text: Babel joined Deportivo de La Coruña in La Liga on 17 September 2016, having been without a club since leaving the UAE. His contract was set to last for the rest of the calendar year. On 22 December, after three goals in the last four games helped "Depor" out of the relegation zone, he said that he would allow his contract to expire due to overseas offers that would be more convenient to his family.


title: Ryan Babel

text: In January 2017, Babel joined Beşiktaş on a two-and-a-half-year deal. Despite only joining the club in January, Babel became a crucial member of the squad that season, making 18 league appearances and scoring 5 goals as he helped Beşiktaş secure their fifteenth league title.


title: Ryan Babel

text: On 15 January 2019, Babel signed for Premier League club Fulham on a contract until the end of the 2018–19 season. In June 2019, he agreed to join Galatasaray on a three-year deal.


title: Ryan Babel

text: On 9 January 2020, it was announced that Ajax would receive Babel on loan until the end of the season.


title: Ryan Babel

text: Babel was born in the Netherlands and is of Surinamese descent. He took part in the 2005 FIFA World Youth Championship. Babel scored two goals in four games as the Netherlands reached the quarter-finals. There they were defeated by Nigeria, 10–9 in a penalty shoot-out (Babel scored his penalty).


title: Ryan Babel

text: Later that season, Babel made his international debut on 26 March 2005, away against Romania. He entered the game as a first-half substitute for Arjen Robben and went on to score the second goal in a 2–0 victory. The goal made Babel the youngest goalscorer in 68 years for the Netherlands and the fourth-youngest of all time. Babel had been a first team regular with Ajax in 2004–05 and finished with seven league goals in 22 appearances.


title: Ryan Babel

text: In 2006, Marco van Basten included Babel in the Dutch squad for 2006 FIFA World Cup. Due to a knee injury however, Babel only featured once, as a second-half substitute for Ruud van Nistelrooy in the group match against Argentina. Van Basten has been quoted as saying Babel "has all the potential to become the next Thierry Henry".


title: Ryan Babel

text: In June 2007, Babel was part of the Netherlands under-21 team competing in the UEFA Under-21 Championship, being held in the Netherlands. In the group stage, Babel scored a penalty against Portugal, helping the Dutch to secure a semi-final spot and thus qualifying for the 2008 Summer Olympics in Beijing. His second tournament goal came during his man of the match performance in the final as the Netherlands defeated Serbia 4–1 to retain their title.


title: Ryan Babel

text: In May 2008, Babel was selected for the Dutch squad which would compete in the UEFA Euro 2008 tournament. On 31 May, it was announced that Babel had been withdrawn from the squad after tearing ankle ligaments in training. Van Basten added then-Chelsea defender Khalid Boulahrouz to his squad in place of Babel.


title: Ryan Babel

text: Babel was included in the preliminary squad for the 2010 FIFA World Cup in South Africa. On 27 May 2010, Netherlands manager Bert van Marwijk announced that the player would be part of the final squad of 23 participating in the competition. Though the Netherlands reached the final, Babel did not appear in any of the matches during the tournament.


title: Ryan Babel

text: Babel returned in Oranje after an absence of almost a year on 11 November 2011 as a starter in the pre Euro 2012 0–0 drawn friendly against Switzerland.


title: Ryan Babel

text: On 29 September 2017, Babel was recalled to the Oranje squad after a six-year absence for the 2018 FIFA World Cup qualifiers against Sweden and Belarus. The Netherlands failed to qualify for the tournament; despite this, Babel was regularly called up for the upcoming inaugural UEFA Nations League campaign. He scored the equaliser in a 2–1 away defeat to France in the Netherlands' first Nations League match.


title: Succession of the Roman Empire

text: The continuation, succession and revival of the Roman Empire is a running theme of the history of Europe and the Mediterranean Basin. It reflects the lasting memories of power and prestige associated with the Roman Empire itself.


title: Succession of the Roman Empire

text: Several polities have claimed immediate continuity with the Roman Empire, using its name or a variation thereof as their own exclusive or non-exclusive self-description. As centuries went by and more political ruptures occurred, the idea of institutional continuity became increasingly debatable. The most enduring and significant claimants of continuation of the Roman Empire have been, in the East, the Ottoman Empire and Russian Empire which both claimed succession of the Byzantine Empire after 1453; and in the West, the Holy Roman Empire from 800 to 1806.


title: Succession of the Roman Empire

text: Separately from claims of continuation, the view that the Empire had ended has led to various attempts to revive it or appropriate its legacy, notably in the case of Orthodox Russia. The vocabulary of a "Third Rome", the "First Rome" being Rome in Italy and the "Second Rome" being Constantinople in the Byzantine Empire, is often used to convey such assertions of legitimate succession.


title: Succession of the Roman Empire

text: In Western Europe, the view of the Deposition of Romulus Augustulus in 476 CE as a historic watershed, marking the fall of the Western Roman Empire and thus the beginning of the Middle Ages, was introduced by Leonardo Bruni in the early 15th century, strengthened by Christoph Cellarius in the late 17th century, and cemented by Edward Gibbon in the late 18th century. It is, however, little more than a historiographic convention, since the Imperial idea long survived the Western Roman Empire in most of Western Europe, and indeed reached territories that had never been under Roman rule during classical antiquity.


title: Succession of the Roman Empire

text: The fall of Constantinople in 1453 is historically and broadly accepted as the end of the Eastern Roman/Byzantine Empire and the end of the Middle Ages. However, two notable claims to succession of the Eastern Roman Empire arose in the centuries after the fall of Constantinople: the Ottoman Empire and the Russian Empire; notably, Mehmed II, the Ottoman sultan who captured Constantinople, justified his assumption of the title of Emperor of the Romans ("Kayser-i Rum") by right of conquest, which was consistent with Byzantine imperial ideology which believed that control of Constantinople constituted the key legitimizing factor for an emperor and also was supported by contemporary historiographer George of Trebizond. Mehmed II's claim was also recognized by Gennadius Scholarius after Mehmed II installed him as ecumenical patriarch of Constantinople in 1454, the year after the fall of Constantinople. Mehmed II's claims were not accepted by the Roman Catholic Church or the Christian states of Europe at the time, and though Mehmed II intended to follow through on his claims by launching a conquest of Italy, his death in 1481 signaled the last time the Ottoman state attempted to conquer Italy or Rome itself; rather subsequent Ottoman emperors instead fought rival claimants to the Roman title (the Holy Roman Empire and the Russian Empire). As the Ottoman Empire continued its break with Greco-Roman legitimacy in favor of strengthening its Islamic legitimacy, Ottoman claims to the Roman Empire faded; the last official use of the title "Kayser-i Rum" was in the 18th century.


title: Succession of the Roman Empire

text: What modern historiography calls the "Byzantine Empire" never used that expression, and kept calling itself the "Roman Empire", "Empire of the Romans", or "Romania" until the fall of Constantinople. Following the establishment of the Holy Roman Empire in 800, Christian Western Europeans were reluctant to apply the "Roman" epithet to the Eastern Empire and frequently called it "Empire of the Greeks" or "Greek Empire", even though they also used "Romania" – the latter also for the Latin Empire of the 13th century. By contrast, Muslims in the Levant and farther east typically referred to the people of the Eastern Empire as "Romans" ("Rum"), and to Western Europeans, including those from the Holy Roman Empire, as "Franks" ("Farang").


title: Succession of the Roman Empire

text: The name Byzantium refers to the ancient city on the Bosporus, now Istanbul, which Constantine renamed Constantinople in 330. It was not used thereafter, except in rare historical or poetic contexts, until it first took its new meaning in 1557 – when the German scholar Hieronymus Wolf published his "Corpus Historiæ Byzantinæ", a collection of historical sources about the Eastern Empire. Then from 1648 onwards, Philippe Labbe and fellow French Jesuits published the 24-volume "De Byzantinæ historiæ scriptoribus", and in 1680 Du Cange produced his own "Historia Byzantina". These endeavors further entrenched the use of the "Byzantine" label among French authors, including Montesquieu in the 18th century. Outside France in the Western world, it only came into general use around the mid-19th century, after Barthold Georg Niebuhr and his continuators published the 50-volume "Corpus Scriptorum Historiae Byzantinae".


title: Succession of the Roman Empire

text: Similarly, what historians call the "Carolingian Empire" and "Holy Roman Empire" – in French and Spanish, "Holy Roman Germanic Empire" ("Saint Empire romain germanique", "Sacro Imperio Romano Germánico") was the "Roman Empire", "Empire of the Romans" or simply "Empire" to their own subjects and rulers, with "Frankish" or "of the Franks" sometimes added depending on context. Only in 1157 did the twists and turns of the Investiture Controversy lead to the practice of calling the Empire, though not the Emperor himself, "holy" ("sacrum"). The reference to Germany ("Heiliges Römisches Reich Deutscher Nation", "Sacrum Imperium Romanum Nationis Germanicæ"), which first appeared in the late 15th century, was never much used in official Imperial documents, and even then was a misnomer since the Empire's jurisdiction in Italy had not entirely disappeared. Other colloquial designations in the early Modern era included "German Empire" () or "Roman-German Empire" ().


title: Succession of the Roman Empire

text: In 1773, a few decades before the Holy Roman Empire's demise, Voltaire made the famous quip that it "was in no way holy, nor Roman, nor an empire."


title: Succession of the Roman Empire

text: In the early decades of the Roman Empire, legitimacy was largely defined by the institutions inherited from the Roman Republic, initially together with a form of hereditary succession within the Julio-Claudian dynasty. As the old Republican institutions gradually lost relevance, many later Emperors derived their legitimacy from acclamation by the army, and during the Nerva–Antonine dynasty, adoption by their predecessor. The Roman Empire itself was long defined by its eponymous capital, but this equation became blurred after the crisis of the Third Century as the administrative center was moved to Mediolanum (Milan), then further fragmented into various locations (e.g. Nicomedia, Sirmium, Augusta Treverorum, Serdica) before being reconsolidated by Constantine the Great in Byzantium, renamed and dedicated as Constantinople in 330 - while Ravenna replaced Milan as Western political capital in 402. Meanwhile, the Empire was Christianized in the course of the 4th century, which partly redefined the authority of the Emperor as he became the protector of the new state religion.


title: Succession of the Roman Empire

text: Thus, the Imperial identity, and therefore the question of which polity could rightfully claim to be the Roman Empire, rested not on a single criterion but on a variety of factors: dominant territorial power and the related attributes of peace and order; rule over Rome and/or Constantinople; protection of justice and of the Christian faith (against paganism, heresy, and later Islam); as well as, albeit only intermittently, considerations of dynastic succession or of ethnic nationalism.


title: Succession of the Roman Empire

text: The multidimensionality of the imperial claim, together with the unique prestige of the imperial title, explains the recurrence of often intractable conflicts about which polities and rulers could rightfully assume them. These conflicts lost their potency in the course of the Early modern period, however, as improved communications and literacy increasingly undermined any claim of universal supremacy.


title: Succession of the Roman Empire

text: A letter of Carolingian Emperor Louis II to Byzantine Emperor Basil I, probably drafted in Roman circles close to the Papacy in response to a lost original and surviving in 13th-century copy kept at the Vatican Library, articulates how the debate was framed in its time (ca. 871). The following quotes are from a full translation by scholar Charles West.


title: Succession of the Roman Empire

text: While the Empire as an idea is unitary, there is no established doctrine that there should be only one Emperor at any time, especially if the two Emperors are on friendly terms. Whether on purpose or not, Louis's description of two Emperors of a single Empire matches the doctrine underlying the Tetrarchy or the division between Eastern and Western Empire between 395 and 476:


title: Succession of the Roman Empire

text: Louis's claim is ancient enough to be justified by tradition since it has already held for several generations:


title: Succession of the Roman Empire

text: Louis defends the Carolingian principle of dynastic succession as validated by tradition. Furthermore, Louis thinks that there should be no exclusive ethnic criterion for the Imperial dignity. Here Louis apparently refers to a claim by Basil that the Emperor should be a Roman and not from a non-Roman ethnicity ("gens"):


title: Succession of the Roman Empire

text: Using a modern vocabulary, Louis thought that those populations (gens) he cited (e.g. Spaniards, Isaurian etc.) were not Romans and that only the inhabitants of the city of Rome were Romans, not recognizing that those populations would have been seen as Romans, being citizens of the empire. While for Basil, the population (gens) of the Franks would not make good emperors because they were not citizens of the empire.


title: Succession of the Roman Empire

text: Since the 4th century and particularly since the Edict of Thessalonica in 380, the defense and promotion of Christianity has been a key driver of Imperial identity. After that date, however, the territorial scope of the Empire or any of its continuating entities has never exactly coincided with that of Christendom, and the discrepancies led to enduring conflicts of legitimacy. The most consequential of these was the East-West Schism, which crystallized in 1054 as a consequence of longstanding fights over governance and jurisdiction (known as ecclesiastical differences) and over doctrine (theological differences), and can be fairly viewed as a delayed effect of the problem of two emperors arising from the creation of the Carolingian Empire in 800.


title: Succession of the Roman Empire

text: Earlier examples include the preference of several "Barbarian" kingdoms during the Migration Period for Arianism after the competing Nicene Creed had regained dominance in Constantinople: the Burgundians until 516, Vandals until 534, Ostrogoths until 553, Suebi until the 560s, Visigoths until 587, and Lombards intermittently until 652. The adoption of Arianism protected these kingdoms' rulers from the religious disputes and policy initiatives of Constantinople, while being more acceptable to their majority-Catholic subjects than paganism.


title: Succession of the Roman Empire

text: On two occasions, the Eastern (Byzantine) Emperors reunited their church with its Western (Roman Catholic) counterpart, on political motivations and without durable effect. At the Second Council of Lyon in 1274, Emperor Michael VIII aimed to appease the Papacy to keep his "Frankish" adversaries in check, particularly Charles I of Anjou's plans to (re-)invade the Empire; the union was never widely accepted in Constantinople, and was reversed at the Council of Blachernae in 1285 after both Michael and Charles had died. At the Council of Ferrara/Florence in 1438–39, Emperor John VIII negotiated under the threat of Ottoman conquest, but the union agreement was again resisted in Constantinople and only proclaimed by Isidore of Kiev in December 1452, four years after John's death and too late to prevent the fall of Constantinople a few months later.


title: Succession of the Roman Empire

text: Conversely, the Ottoman Sultans' policies as self-proclaimed Emperors of the Romans (i.e. in the language of the time, of the Eastern Orthodox Christians) supported the independence of the Orthodox Church from Rome and occasionally favored reforms to keep religiously inspired separatism in check, e.g. the revival of the Serbian Patriarchate of Peć in 1557. The initial instrument of that policy, Gennadius Scholarius, had been a prominent opponent of the union of the Eastern and Western churches in the 1440s and early 1450s.


title: Succession of the Roman Empire

text: The link between Empire and Christianity has a durable legacy: to this day, Rome remains the seat of the Catholic Church, and Constantinople (Istanbul) that of the Ecumenical Patriarchate with a widely recognized status of "primus inter pares" within the Eastern Orthodox Church. (In 2018, the negotiations over autocephaly of the Orthodox Church of Ukraine led to a schism between Moscow and Constantinople as the Russian Orthodox Church unilaterally severed full communion with the Ecumenical Patriarchate. A similar schism had occurred in 1996 over the Estonian Apostolic Orthodox Church, but unlike in 2018 it was resolved after a few months.)


title: Succession of the Roman Empire

text: The Imperial connection extends, through the legacy of the Ottoman Empire, to Islam as well. Istanbul was also until 1923 the seat of the only widely recognized Caliphate of the last half-millennium, and keeps most of the surviving Relics of Muhammad as the Sacred Trust in Topkapı Palace, close to the location of the former Roman Imperial palace.


title: Succession of the Roman Empire

text: There is seamless continuity between the Roman and Byzantine Empires, to the extent that the date at which the former ends and the latter begins is essentially a matter of historiographical convention. The Byzantines consistently and near-exclusively called themselves Romans, before and after they adopted Greek as principal state language in the 7th century.


title: Succession of the Roman Empire

text: Traditional Western European historiography retains 395 as the date of beginning of the Byzantine Empire, when Theodosius I was succeeded by Arcadius in the East and Honorius in the West. Alternative conventions date the transition from Rome to Byzantium at the translation of the imperial capital from Rome to Constantinople in 330, or at the reign of Heraclius marking the end of late antiquity.


title: Succession of the Roman Empire

text: Even though the Byzantine Empire went through numerous political upheavals, and faced periods of dramatic contraction in the 7th and late 11th centuries, it exhibited unquestionable institutional continuity until 1204, not least because its central and defining seat of power, Constantinople, was never conquered during this period.


title: Succession of the Roman Empire

text: Conversely, in the Eastern Mediterranean territories that ceased being part of the Empire during that period, there emerged almost no competing claim of Imperial legitimacy. In their different ways, the Avars and Slavs in the Balkans, and the Sasanians and Muslims in the Levant and Northern Africa, had different models of governance and no appetite for posing as Romans. This may also be linked to their inability to conquer the Imperial capital despite numerous attempts, as is suggested by the counter-example of the Ottoman Sultans claiming the Imperial title after 1453.


title: Succession of the Roman Empire

text: In the period before 1204, the only significant competing Imperial claim in the East appeared in 913, when Simeon I the Great, ruler of Bulgaria, was crowned "Emperor and Autocrat of all Bulgarians and Romans" ("Car i samodǎržec na vsički bǎlgari i gǎrci" in the modern vernacular) by the Patriarch of Constantinople and imperial regent Nicholas Mystikos outside of the Byzantine capital. The decade 914–927 was then spent in a destructive Byzantine–Bulgarian war over the Imperial claim and other matters of conflict. The Bulgarian monarch was eventually recognized as "Emperor of the Bulgarians" ("basileus tōn Boulgarōn") by the Byzantine Emperor Romanos I Lakapenos in 924, following the convention also adopted with the Carolingian Empire that "basileus" (a Greek word that can translate as "king" or "emperor" depending on context) was not an equal title to that of the Emperor as long as it did not explicitly confer authority over the "Romans". Constantinople's recognition of the "basileus" dignity of the Bulgarian monarch and the patriarchal dignity of the Bulgarian patriarch was again confirmed at the conclusion of permanent peace and a Bulgarian–Byzantine dynastic marriage in 927. The Bulgarian title "tsar" ("Caesar") was adopted by all Bulgarian monarchs up to the fall of Bulgaria under Ottoman rule.


title: Succession of the Roman Empire

text: During the Second Bulgarian Empire, 14th-century literary compositions portrayed the then capital of Tarnovo, now Veliko Tarnovo, as successor of both Rome and Constantinople. Bulgarian contemporaries called the city "Tsarevgrad Tarnov", the "Imperial city of Tarnovo", echoing the Bulgarian name then used for Constantinople, Tsarigrad.


title: Succession of the Roman Empire

text: The Fourth Crusade and sack of Constantinople in 1204 marked a major rupture in the history of the Eastern Roman/Byzantine Empire, and opened a period of fragmentation and competing claims of Imperial legitimacy. The crusading ("Latin") invaders divided most of the Empire among themselves by a formal treaty of partition, under which the Latin Empire of Constantinople's direct rule did not extend greatly further than the city itself. It included the Straits and their immediate hinterland, e.g. Adrianople and Nicomedia, but neither Salonica nor Nicaea. Other territories of the former Empire were not conquered by the Latin crusaders, and remained held by various holdovers of the former ("Greek") Empire.


title: Succession of the Roman Empire

text: Several of the polities emerging from that fragmentation claimed to be the rightful successor of the prior Empire, on various motives: the Latin Empire held the Imperial capital; the rulers of the Empire of Trebizond stemmed from the formerly Imperial Komnenos family; those of the Despotate of Epirus (briefly the Empire of Thessalonica) were from the Angelos family, even though they renounced the imperial claim by accepting Nicaean overlordship in 1248; the Empire of Nicaea successfully claimed the patriarchate in 1206, and eventually prevailed through skillful management of alliances and its recapture of Constantinople in 1261.


title: Succession of the Roman Empire

text: The Latin Empire had its own line of Imperial succession, initially dominated by the House of Flanders then by the French House of Courtenay. It was embattled almost from the start, however, as the city was never able to recover from the trauma of 1204. Despite its theoretical suzerainty, the Latin Empire was not even politically dominant among the crusader states, which were referred to as Latin or Frankish by Easterners.


title: Succession of the Roman Empire

text: After being expelled from Constantinople in 1261, its titular Emperors occasionally held territorial power in parts of modern Greece. Jacques des Baux was Prince of Achaea in 1381–83, and the last recorded claimant to the Latin Imperial title.


title: Succession of the Roman Empire

text: The Palaiologos dynasty prolonged the Roman Imperial experience from its recovery of Constantinople in 1261 until the Ottoman conquest in 1453. The Empire shrunk considerably during that period, however, and at the end it was only the imperial city itself without any hinterland, plus most of the Peloponnese (then referred to as Morea) typically under the direct rule of one of the Emperor's sons with the title of Despot. This line of Imperial succession ceased in 1453: even though the Despotate of the Morea lingered on a few more years, until the Ottomans conquered it in 1460, its rulers at the time did not claim Imperial authority.


title: Succession of the Roman Empire

text: In 1345, the Serbian King Stefan Dušan proclaimed himself Emperor (Tsar) and was crowned as such at Skopje on Easter 1346 by the newly created Serbian Patriarch, as well as by the Patriarch of All Bulgaria and the Archbishop of Ohrid. His imperial title was recognized by, among others, the Bulgarian Empire, much diminished following the Battle of Velbazhd in 1330, albeit not by the Byzantine Empire. In Serbia, the title of "Emperor of Serbs and Romans" (in its final simplified form; "цар Срба и Римљана" / "car Srba i Rimljana" in modern Serbian) was only employed thereafter by Stefan Dušan's son Stefan Uroš V until his death in 1371. A half-brother of Dušan, Simeon Uroš, and then his son Jovan Uroš, used the same title until the latter's abdication in 1373, while ruling as dynasts in Thessaly.


title: Succession of the Roman Empire

text: The Empire of Trebizond, one of the entities that had emerged from the fragmentation of the early 13th century, survived until Ottoman conquest in 1461. Its Komnenos rulers claimed the Imperial title for themselves in competition to the ones in Constantinople, even though they did not receive any meaningful international recognition.


title: Succession of the Roman Empire

text: A separate polity on the Crimean coast of the Black Sea, the Principality of Theodoro, only fell to the Ottomans in 1475. There is no indication that its rulers made any claim of being Roman Emperors.


title: Succession of the Roman Empire

text: Andreas Palaiologos, a nephew of the last Byzantine Emperor Constantine XI Palaiologos and the head of what remained of the Palaiologos family, started calling himself Emperor of Constantinople in 1483 and, possibly childless, sold what he viewed as his imperial title to Charles VIII of France in 1494. The following Kings of France kept the claim until Charles IX in 1566, when it went into disuse. Charles IX wrote that the imperial Byzantine title "is not more eminent than that of king, which sounds better and sweeter."


title: Succession of the Roman Empire

text: In his last will in 1502, Andreas Palaiologos again ceded his self-awarded imperial title, this time to Ferdinand II of Aragon and Isabella I of Castile. Other pretenders to the Byzantine throne have appeared following his death that year, with increasingly dubious claims as centuries went by. Charles I Gonzaga, Duke of Mantua, who also claimed descent from the Palaiologos family, declared in 1612 his intent to reclaim Constantinople but only succeeded in provoking an uprising in the Mani Peninsula, which lasted until 1619.


title: Succession of the Roman Empire

text: After the fall of Constantinople in 1453, Mehmed II declared himself Roman Emperor: "Kayser-i Rum", literally "Caesar of the Romans", the standard title for earlier Byzantine Emperors in Arab, Persian and Turkish lands. In 1454, he ceremonially established Gennadius Scholarius, a staunch antagonist of Catholicism and of the Sultan's European enemies, as Ecumenical Patriarch of Constantinople and ethnarch ("milletbashi") of the Rum Millet, namely Greek Orthodox Christians within the Empire. In turn, Gennadius endorsed Mehmed's claim of Imperial succession.


title: Succession of the Roman Empire

text: Mehmed's claim rested principally with the idea that Constantinople was the rightful seat of the Roman Empire, as it had indeed been for more than a millennium even if the 1204-1261 period is subtracted. Contemporary scholar George of Trebizond wrote that "the seat of the Roman Empire is Constantinople (...) and he who is and remains Emperor of the Romans is also the Emperor of the whole world". An additional though questionable claim of legitimacy referred to the past alliances between the Ottoman dynasty and Byzantine Imperial families. Byzantine Princess Theodora Kantakouzene had been one of the wives of Orhan I, and an unsupported but widespread story portrayed Mehmed as a descendant of John Tzelepes Komnenos.


title: Succession of the Roman Empire

text: Mehmed's imperial plans went further and aimed at conquering Rome itself, thus reuniting the Empire in a way it hadn't been for nearly eight centuries. His Italian campaign started in 1480 with the invasion of Otranto, but was cut short by Mehmed's sudden death on 3 May 1481. None of his successors renewed that endeavor. Instead, they repeatedly (albeit never successfully) attempted to conquer the capital of the rival contenders to the Imperial Roman title, with a first siege of Vienna in 1529 and a second one in 1683.


title: Succession of the Roman Empire

text: Being the rightful heir of the Roman/Byzantine Empire became part of the identity of the Sultanate, along with its Turkish and Muslim heritage, even though that dimension was played down by Western observers. According to Turkish scholar F. Asli Ergul:


title: Succession of the Roman Empire

text: Additionally, over the centuries, many Greeks abandoned Orthodoxy and embraced the Islam, to the point that today, in part because of the intermingling of ethnic Greeks with Turks in the Ottoman Empire, genetic studies have found that modern Turks are closer, genetically, to Mediterranean and Middle Eastern people than to Central Asians.


title: Succession of the Roman Empire

text: In diplomatic exchanges with the Holy Roman Empire, the Ottomans initially refused to acknowledge the latter's Imperial claim, because they saw themselves as the only rightful successors of Rome. In the Treaty of Constantinople (1533), the Austrian negotiators agreed not to make any mention of the holy Roman Empire, only referring to Ferdinand I as King of Germany and Charles V as King of Spain. The Ottomans, however, abandoned that requirement in the Treaty of Sitvatorok in 1606, and similarly to the Russian Empire in the Treaty of Küçük Kaynarca in 1774.


title: Succession of the Roman Empire

text: Chinese usage during the Ming dynasty referred to the Ottomans as Lumi (魯迷), derived from Rûmi, literally "Roman". Presumably thought that it was still Byzantine empire of the Greeks.


title: Succession of the Roman Empire

text: By the start of the 5th century, the Western Roman Empire remained close to its maximum territorial extent, notwithstanding the loss of the "Agri Decumates" during the crisis of the Third Century, but Roman rule had become fragile and many areas were depopulated. In the early years of the century, the Empire withdrew from Great Britain, leaving it open to Anglo-Saxon settlement. Mounting foreign incursions soon resulted in permanent settlement of Germanic and other ethnic groups into territories that became gradually autonomous, were sometimes acknowledged or even encouraged by treaty ("foedus") by the Western Empire, and often embarked on expansion by further conquest.


title: Succession of the Roman Empire

text: Thus, the Vandals crossed the Rhine in 406, the Pyrenees in 409, the Strait of Gibraltar in 428, and established the Vandal Kingdom in Northern Africa and the Western Mediterranean islands by the mid-5th century; the Suebi, initially moving alongside the Vandals, established their Western Iberian kingdom in 409; the Visigothic Kingdom was initially established by treaty in 418 in the Garonne Valley, and soon expanded into the Iberian Peninsula; the Alemanni expanded into Alsace and beyond, from their initial base in the "Agri Decumates"; in the 440s, the Kingdom of the Burgundians was established around the Rhone; an autonomous Kingdom of Soissons was carved out from 457 by Roman military commanders between the Seine and Somme rivers; last but not least, the Franks, which had been established north of the Rhine in 358 by treaty with Emperor Julian, expanded into what is now Belgium and Northern France. As a consequence, when the last Western Emperor Romulus Augustulus was deposed by military commander Odoacer in 476, his direct rule did not extend much beyond the current Northern borders of Italy. Another military leader, Julius Nepos, briefly Romulus Augustulus's predecessor, held territory in Dalmatia and kept the Imperial title until his assassination in 480.


title: Succession of the Roman Empire

text: In a symbolic act that would fascinate later historians, Odoacer sent back the Imperial "regalia" or accessories of Romulus Augustulus to the Eastern Emperor Zeno in Constantinople. Far from signaling the end of imperial rule in Italy, however, this meant that Odoacer acknowledged Zeno's overlordship and did not claim full sovereignty. Like previous "foederati" leaders, he adopted the title of King ("Rex") and ruled in the name of the remaining Emperors, namely Zeno and also Julius Nepos while the latter was still alive. This arrangement was kept by Theodoric the Great, who vanquished and killed Odoacer in 493 and replaced him as King of Italy.


title: Succession of the Roman Empire

text: Political boundaries kept moving in the later 5th and 6th centuries. Clovis I, king of the Franks (d. 511), conquered Alemannia, the Kingdom of Soissons and most of the Visigothic Kingdom north of the Pyrenees, and his sons conquered the Kingdom of the Burgundians in 534, thus creating a vast kingdom of Francia, which was however periodically divided between various members of the Merovingian dynasty. Meanwhile, Eastern Emperor Justinian I reestablished direct Imperial rule in Southern Spain, North Africa and especially Italy, reconquered during the hard-fought Gothic War (535–554). Later in the 6th century, Emperor Maurice sponsored Gundoald, a member of Clovis's Merovingian dynasty, in his claim to the Frankish kingdom, which however ended unsuccessfully in 585 at Saint-Bertrand-de-Comminges.


title: Succession of the Roman Empire

text: Even though it was out of the Empire's direct military reach, Francia kept acknowledging the overlordship of Constantinople throughout the 6th century. At a ceremony in early 508 in Tours, Clovis received the "insignia" sent by Emperor Anastasius I which established his service to the Empire as Consul. Similarly, in the early 6th century, King Gundobad of the still-independent Burgundians, despite being an Arian, was "Magister militum" in the name of the Emperor. The "Gesta pontificum Autissiodorensium", a compendium of information about the Bishops of Auxerre first compiled in the late 9th century, keeps referring to the reigning Roman Emperor up to Desiderius (d. 621), listed as bishop "in the reigns of Phocas and Heraclius" ("imperantibus Foca, atque Heraclio"). No such deference appears to have existed in the Visigothic Kingdom at the same time, however. Chris Wickham portrays the Visigothic king Euric (466-484) as "the first major ruler of a 'barbarian' polity in Gaul - the second in the Empire after Geiseric - to have a fully autonomous political practice, uninfluenced by any residual Roman loyalties." A century and a half later, in the 620s Isidore of Seville articulated for the Visigothic Kingdom, by then a Catholic monarchy following the conversion of Reccared I in 587, a vision of Christian monarchy on an equal status with the Eastern Roman Empire that would have seminal influence on later Western European political thinking.


title: Succession of the Roman Empire

text: Imperial rule in the West eroded further from the late 6th century. In Britain, to the extent discernible from scarce documentation, Roman rule was at best a distant memory. In Francia, references to Imperial overlordship disappear at the time of Merovingian renewal in the early 7th century under Chlothar II and Dagobert I. In the Iberian Peninsula, the Visigothic King Suintila expelled the last Imperial forces from Southern Spain in 625. In Italy, the Lombards invaded in 568, and the resulting Kingdom of the Lombards was hostile to the Empire whose territorial footprint shrunk gradually.


title: Succession of the Roman Empire

text: The Roman Papacy was to become the instrument of the Imperial idea's revival in the West. Rome was increasingly isolated from Constantinople following the devastations of Gothic War (535–554), subsequent imperial choices to favor Ravenna over Rome, and the Lombard invasion of Italy starting in 568, which limited its communications with the main imperial outposts in Ravenna and Sicily. The Column of Phocas on the Roman Forum, dedicated in 608, counts among the last monumental expressions of (eastern) imperial power in Rome. In 649, in breach of tradition, Pope Martin I was elected and consecrated without waiting for imperial confirmation. Constans II was the last (eastern) emperor to visit Rome for centuries, in 663, and plundered several of the remaining monuments to adorn Constantinople. Meanwhile and for various reasons, Catholicism finally triumphed over Arianism in the Western kingdoms: in the Visigothic Iberian Peninsula with the conversion of Reccared I in 587, and in Lombard-held Italy, after some back-and-forth, following the death of King Rothari in 652. Pope Gregory I (590-604) established the foundations for the papacy's incipient role as leader of Christianity in the West, even though at the time there was no conception of an alternative imperial authority to be established there in competition with Constantinople.


title: Succession of the Roman Empire

text: The promotion of iconoclasm by Emperor Leo III the Isaurian from 726 led to a deepening rupture between the Eastern Empire and the Papacy. Pope Gregory II saw iconoclasm as the latest in a series of imperial heresies. In 731, his successor Pope Gregory III organized a synod in Rome which declared iconoclasm punishable by excommunication. Leo III responded in 732/33 by confiscating all papal patrimonies in south Italy and Sicily, and further removed the bishoprics of Thessalonica, Corinth, Syracuse, Reggio, Nicopolis, Athens, and Patras from papal jurisdiction, instead subjecting them to the Patriarch of Constantinople. This was in effect an act of triage: it strengthened the imperial grip in Southern Italy, but all but guaranteed the eventual destruction of the exarchate of Ravenna, which soon occurred at Lombard hands. In effect, the papacy had been "cast out of the empire". Pope Zachary, in 741, was the last pope to announce his election to a Byzantine ruler or seek their approval.


title: Succession of the Roman Empire

text: The Popes needed to quickly reinvent their relationship to secular authority. Even though the neighboring Lombard kings were no longer heretical, they were often hostile. The more powerful and more distant Franks, which had by and large been allies of the Empire, were an alternative option as potential protectors. In 739, Gregory III sent a first embassy to Charles Martel seeking protection against Liutprand, King of the Lombards, but the Frankish strongman had been Liutbrand's ally in the past and had asked him in 737 to ceremonially adopt his son. The Papacy had more luck with the latter, Pepin the Short, who succeeded Charles in October 741 together with his elder brother Carloman (who withdrew from public life and became a monk in 747). Pope Zachary was pressed into action by the final Lombard campaign against the exarchate of Ravenna, whose fall in mid-751 sealed the end of Byzantine rule in Central Italy. He was in contact with the Frankish ruling elites through the venerable Boniface, Archbishop of Mainz, and other clerics such as Burchard of Würzburg and Fulrad. In March 751 he moved to depose Childeric III, the last Merovingian King, following which Pepin was dedicated as King of France in Soissons. In 754, Zachary's successor Pope Stephen II undertook the first-ever papal visit north of the Alps, met Pepin in Ponthion and anointed him as king at Saint-Denis on July 28, setting the template for later rites of coronation of French Kings. Stephen further legitimized the Carolingian dynasty by also anointing Pepin's sons Charles and Carloman, by prohibiting the election of any non-descendant of Pepin as king, and by proclaiming that "the Frankish nation is above all nations". This in return prompted the Donation of Pepin in 756, cementing the Popes' rule over the Papal States over the next eleven centuries. Subsequently, in 773–774, Pepin's son and successor Charlemagne conquered the Lombard Kingdom of Italy.


title: Succession of the Roman Empire

text: The coronation of Charlemagne by Pope Leo III, in Rome on Christmas Day 800, was explicitly intended as establishing continuity with the Roman Empire that still existed in the East. In Constantinople, Irene of Athens had blinded and deposed her son Emperor Constantine VI a few years earlier. With no precedent of a woman being sole holder of the imperial title, her critics in the West (e.g. Alcuin) viewed the imperial throne as vacant rather than recognizing her as Empress. Thus, as Peter H. Wilson put it, "it is highly likely Charlemagne believed he was being made Roman Emperor" at the time of his coronation. Charlemagne's imperial title, however, rested on a different base from any of the Roman emperors until him, as it was structurally reliant on the partnership with the Papacy, embodied in the act of his coronation by the Pope.


title: Succession of the Roman Empire

text: If we accept that Charlemagne was indeed made Roman Emperor, we would have to go with the line of Holy Roman Emperors. This would make Karl von Hapsburg the heir to the Roman Empire. Of course, this assumes that the Holy Roman Empire was the successor to the Roman Empire and not the Byzantine or Ottoman Empires.


title: Succession of the Roman Empire

text: Meanwhile, the accession to the Byzantine throne of Nikephoros I in 802 confirmed the conflict of legitimacy between the Frankish and Byzantine incarnations of the Roman Empire, known in historiography as the problem of two emperors (in German, "Zweikaiserproblem"). According to Theophanes the Confessor, Charlemagne had attempted to prevent that conflict with a project to marry Irene, but this was not completed. The territorial conflicts were addressed in the following years through a series of negotiations known as the "Pax Nicephori", but the broader conflict with Constantinople about Imperial legitimacy proved extremely durable.


title: Succession of the Roman Empire

text: Political authority fragmented within the Empire following Charlemagne's death. The eventual outcome was an association of the Imperial dignity with the easternmost ("German") lands of the Carolingian geography, but that was not self-evident at the start and took a long time to happen. From 843 to 875, the holders of the Imperial title only ruled over Northern Italy and, at the start, the "middle kingdom" of Lotharingia. On Christmas Day 875, exactly 75 years after Charlemagne, Charles the Bald of West Francia was crowned Emperor in Rome by Pope John VIII, adopting the motto "renovatio imperii Romani et Francorum", which raised the prospect of an Empire centered on what is today France. But Charles died soon afterwards in 877. His successor Charles the Fat only briefly managed to reunite all the Carolingian domains, and after his death in 888 the Western part of Francia was dominated by the non-Carolingian Robertians, later the Capetian dynasty. For over seven decades the Emperors' authority was then mostly confined to Northern Italy, until Otto I revived the Imperial idea and was crowned by Pope John XII in Rome in 962. From then on, all Emperors had dynastic roots in the Germanic-speaking lands (even though Frederick II was born in Italy, Henry VII in Valenciennes, Charles IV in Prague, Charles V in Ghent, Ferdinand I in Spain, Charles VII in Brussels, Francis I in Nancy, and Francis II in Florence).


title: Succession of the Roman Empire

text: During the millennium of the Holy Roman Empire, several specific attempts were made to recall the Empire's classical heritage. Emperor Otto III reigned from Rome from 998 to his death in 1002, and made a short-lived attempt to revive ancient Roman institutions and traditions in partnership with Pope Sylvester II, who chose his papal name as an echo of the time of Constantine the Great. Frederick II took a keen interest in Roman antiquity, sponsored archaeological excavations, organized a Roman-style triumph in Cremona in 1238 to celebrate his victory at the battle of Cortenuova, and had himself depicted in classical imagery. Similarly, Maximilian I was highly mindful of classical references in his "memorial" projects of the 1510s that included the three monumental woodblock prints of the "Triumphal Arch", "Triumphal Procession" and "Large Triumphal Carriage".


title: Succession of the Roman Empire

text: According to his biographer Einhard, Charlemagne was unhappy about his coronation, a fact that later historians have interpreted as displeasure about the Pope's assumption of the key role in the legitimation of Imperial rule. Instead of the traditional recognition by popular acclamation, Leo III had crowned Charlemagne at the outset of the ceremony, just before the crowd acclaimed him. In September 813, Charlemagne tried to override that precedent by himself crowning his son Louis the Pious in Aachen, but the principle of Papal coronation survived and was renewed in 962 when Otto I restored the Empire and its rituals after decades of turmoil and received the Imperial Crown from Pope John XII.


title: Succession of the Roman Empire

text: The interdependence between Pope and Emperor led to conflict after the Papacy started asserting its position with the Gregorian Reform of the mid-11th century. The Investiture Controversy (1076-1122) included episodes of dramatic confrontation, in which the pope attempted to deprive the emperor of his imperial dignity. The "Dictatus papae", a papal document issued in 1075 shortly after the election of Gregory VII, states that the pope "alone may use the Imperial Insignia", that "All princes shall kiss the feet of the Pope alone", and that "It may be permitted to him to depose emperors". Following Emperor Henry IV's walk to Canossa in January 1077, Gregory VII pronounced his absolution but referred to him as "rex Teutonicorum" ("king of the Germans"), thus omitting the imperial title and the fact that Henry was king ("rex") of several realms, including Burgundy and Italy. Wars of Guelphs and Ghibellines, the respective partisans of the Pope and the Emperor, lasted until the 15th century. In 1527, the Pope's involvement in the Italian Wars led to the traumatic sack of Rome by Charles V's imperial troops, after which the Papacy's influence in international politics was significantly reduced.


title: Succession of the Roman Empire

text: Early in the Empire's history, Louis the Pious formally established the supremacy of the Empire over Catholic kingdoms through the document issued in 817 and later known as "Ordinatio Imperii". The view at the time was that the Empire covered all Western Christendom under one authority. (The British Isles, Brittany, and the Kingdom of Asturias were omitted in this vision.) Under Louis's arrangement, only his elder son Lothair would hold the title of Emperor, and Lothair's younger brothers Pepin and Louis should obey him even though they were kings, respectively, of Aquitaine and Bavaria. That document was controversial from the start, however, not least as it did not conform to Frankish succession law and practices. Following Louis the Pious's death in June 840, the Battle of Fontenoy (841), Oaths of Strasbourg (842) and Treaty of Verdun (843) established a different reality, in which the Imperial title remained undivided but its holder competed with kings for territory, even though at the time all were still bound by the family links of the Carolingian dynasty and the bounds of Catholic Christianity.


title: Succession of the Roman Empire

text: Following the gradual demise of the Carolingian dynasty in the late 9th and 10th centuries, the rivalry between the Empire and individual kingdoms developed on these early precedents. The Kingdom of France, developing from Charles the Bald's West Francia, was continually reluctant to acknowledge the Emperor's senior status among European monarchs. As Latin Christendom expanded in the High Middle Ages, new kingdoms appeared outside of the Empire and would similarly bid for territory and supremacy. France itself was instrumental in the developments that led to the Empire's political decline from the 16th to the early 19th centuries.


title: Succession of the Roman Empire

text: A number of political regimes have claimed various forms of successorship of the Roman Empire, even though they acknowledged a significant time lag between what they viewed as the Empire's extinction and their own efforts to revive it. These attempts have increasingly been framed in nationalist terms, in line with the times.


title: Succession of the Roman Empire

text: Despite its name, European imperialism has typically not invoked the memories of the Roman Empire, with the only exception of Italy for a few decades in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Thus, European colonial empires are not mentioned in this section.


title: Succession of the Roman Empire

text: Ivan III of Russia in 1472 married Sophia (Zoé) Palaiologina, a niece of the last Byzantine Emperor Constantine XI, and styled himself Tsar ("Царь", "Caesar") or "imperator". In 1547, Ivan IV cemented the title as "Tsar of All Rus" ("Царь Всея Руси"). In 1589, the Metropolitanate of Moscow was granted autocephaly by the Patriarchate of Constantinople and thus became the Patriarchate of Moscow, thanks to the efforts of Boris Godunov. This sequence of events supported the narrative, encouraged by successive rulers, that Muscovy was the rightful successor of Byzantium as the "Third Rome", based on a mix of religious (Orthodox), ethno-linguistic (East Slavic) and political ideas (the autocracy of the Tsar). Supporters of that view also asserted that the topography of the seven hills of Moscow offered parallels to the seven hills of Rome and the seven hills of Constantinople.


title: Succession of the Roman Empire

text: In 1492 Zosimus, Metropolitan of Moscow, in a foreword to his "Presentation of the Paschalion", referred to Ivan III as "the new Tsar Constantine of the new city of Constantine — Moscow." In a panegyric letter to Grand Duke Vasili III composed in 1510, Russian monk Philotheus (Filofey) of Pskov proclaimed, "Two Romes have fallen. The third stands. And there will be no fourth. No one shall replace your Christian Tsardom!"


title: Succession of the Roman Empire

text: Italy's nationalist visionary Giuseppe Mazzini promoted the notion of the "Third Rome" during the Risorgimento: "After the Rome of the emperors, after the Rome of the Popes, there will come the Rome of the people", addressing Italian unification and the establishment of Rome as the capital. After the Italian unification into the Kingdom of Italy, the state was referred to as the Third Rome by some Italian figures. After unification, Rome was chosen as capital despite its relative backwardness as it evoked the prestige of the former Empire. Mazzini spoke of the need of Italy as a Third Rome to have imperial aspirations, to be realized in the Italian Empire. Mazzini said that Italy should "invade and colonize Tunisian lands" as it was the "key to the Central Mediterranean", and he viewed Italy as having the right to dominate the Mediterranean Sea as ancient Rome had done.


title: Succession of the Roman Empire

text: In his speeches, Benito Mussolini echoed the rhetoric of the "Risorgimento" and referred to his regime as a "Third Rome" or as a New Roman Empire. "Terza Roma" (Third Rome) was also a name for Mussolini's plan to expand Rome towards Ostia and the sea. The EUR neighbourhood was the first step in that direction.


title: Succession of the Roman Empire

text: Several political regimes in the 19th and early 20th centuries defined themselves with reference to continuators of the Roman Empire, but not to the (Classical) Roman Empire itself. They all assumed nationalist reinterpretations of those continuators, and underplayed the extent to which the latter had portrayed themselves as Roman.


title: Succession of the Roman Empire

text: In the 20th century, several political thinkers and politicians have associated the multi-level governance and multilingualism of the Roman Empire in its various successive incarnations with the modern legal concepts of federalism and supranationalism.


title: Succession of the Roman Empire

text: French historian Louis Eisenmann, in a 1926 article titled "The Imperial Idea in the History of Europe", portrayed the newly created League of Nations as the modern expression of an "imperial idea" that had been degraded by the nationalistic drift of the German Empire, Habsburg monarchy and Russian Empire. He argued that the three empires' final demise and the League's establishment represent a renewal of the Pax Romana imperial idea.


title: Succession of the Roman Empire

text: Memories of the Roman Empire have accompanied the European Union since its inception with the 1950 Schuman Plan.


title: Succession of the Roman Empire

text: The Roman Empire has provided the European Union, like many countries, with Roman legal concepts and their language, Latin. As such Latin has been used in some circumstances as one non-official "lingua franca" in the European Union, for example by EU Institutions using Latin concepts in texts and titles.


title: Succession of the Roman Empire

text: The comparison of the European Union with the Holy Roman Empire, in a negative or positive light, is a common trope of political commentary.


title: Succession of the Roman Empire

text: The European Union has been viewed as a reincarnation of a foreign and overbearing Roman Empire in some European countries, particularly the United Kingdom. The 2020 withdrawal of the UK from the Union, or Brexit, has been variously compared with the Boudica Rebellion or with end of Roman rule in Britain.


title: Succession of the Roman Empire

text: A different negative view of the European Union as new Roman Empire has been regularly formulated in Christian fundamentalist circles, principally in the United States. According to that view, the EU, like other supranational endeavors such as the United Nations and World Bank, by attempting to revive the Roman Empire, signals the approaching end time, rapture or Second Coming. Occasionally, the European Union is portrayed as a "Fourth Reich", further emphasizing its demonic nature. This critique is often portrayed as fringe despite its widespread following among American Evangelicals for several decades.


title: Sinatraa

text: Jay Won (born March 18, 2000), better known as Sinatraa, is an American professional "Valorant" player for Sentinels. Won began his esports career as a competitive "Overwatch" player for Selfless Gaming, before signing with the San Francisco Shock of the Overwatch League (OWL) in the league's inaugural season. In his time with the Shock, he was named the league's most valuable player and won the 2019 Overwatch League Grand Finals. Internationally, he won the 2019 Overwatch World Cup (OWWC) as a member of Team USA and was named the 2019 OWWC most valuable player.


title: Sinatraa

text: Won left the competitive "Overwatch" scene in April 2020, signing with Sentinels to pursue a career in "Valorant". Won was suspended from competitive play for six months in March 2021, after sexual abuse allegations arose.


title: Sinatraa

text: After being ranked second in North America and fifth in the world on "Overwatch" competitive mode, Won was invited to tryout for Selfless Gaming, an esports team based in Georgia, United States; however, he did not make the team. A few weeks later, Selfless invited Won to another tryout, and after head coach and co-owner Brad Rajani viewed his play, he was signed to the team. He left the team after it disbanded on July 7, 2017.


title: Sinatraa

text: With the creation of the Overwatch League in 2017, scouts for the twelve franchises looked to sign players to fill their teams. After a bidding war between NRG Esports and Cloud9, Won decided to sign with the London Spitfire, Cloud9's "Overwatch" team. However, after more discussions with NRG and his parents, he changed his decision and signed a -per-year contract – three times the league's minimum salary – with NRG's San Francisco Shock. The signing reunited Won with head coach Rajani, who was the head coach of the Shock. However, as he was only 17 years old at the time, Won would not be eligible to play in league matches until he turned 18. Won made his Overwatch League debut on March 21, 2018, against the Florida Mayhem; the Shock lost the match, 2–3. Despite a meager performance in his debut, he soon established himself as one of the top damage players in the league. With himself and teammate Matthew "super" DeLisi becoming eligible to play around the same time, the team finished the second half of the season with a 11–9 record.


title: Sinatraa

text: In the 2019 season, the compositions that teams primarily ran throughout the first three quarters of the season was three tanks and three supports; Won, who would usually play as the damage hero Tracer, transitioned to playing as the tank Zarya during this time. Through the first three stages, he helped the team post a perfect +28 map differential in Stage 2, reach all three stage finals, and win one stage title. In July 2019, just prior to the final stage of the season, the league implemented a role lock, in which teams were required to run a composition of two tank, two support, and two damage players, and Won primarily played as the damage hero Doomfist thereafter. He ended the season leading the league in hero damage dealt per 10 minutes and helped the team claim a second-best 23–5 regular season record, he was awarded the Role Star commendation for DPS and won the OWL Most Valuable Player award. After losing to the Atlanta Reign in the first round of the 2019 season playoffs, the Shock ran through the lower bracket to reach the 2019 Grand Finals. Won played in two of the four maps in a 4–0 win over the Vancouver Titans in the Grand Finals on September 29, 2019.


title: Sinatraa

text: The Overwatch League released a commemorative, in-game skin for Zarya on June 16, 2020, in honor of his MVP award. However, the OWL offered refunds for the skin and removed the OWL Championship and MVP badges on the skin in March 2021 after sexual assault allegations arose.


title: Sinatraa

text: Won was selected as a member of Team USA for the 2017 Overwatch World Cup (OWWC). Despite losing to Team South Korea in the quarterfinals, Won's performance throughout the World Cup led to NRG Esports CEO Andy Miller signing him to the Shock. Won was again selected for Team USA in the 2018 OWWC. The team claimed the top seed after the group stage, but they fell in the quarterfinals to Team United Kingdom.


title: Sinatraa

text: In the 2019 OWWC, Won was selected for Team USA for the third consecutive year. Playing with his Shock teammates Matthew "super" Delisi and Grant "moth" Espe, Team USA ran through the tournament, not losing a single match, and swept Team China in the OWWC finals on November 2, 2019, to claim USA's first OWWC title. Won was named the OWWC most valuable player, and, along with super and moth, became one of four people to win both Overwatch League and Overwatch World Cup titles.


title: Sinatraa

text: Won joined the Sentinels "Valorant" team in April 2020. Within a few months, Won solidified himself as one of the top players in the scene. Heading into the PAX Arena Invitational finals, the second-ever North America Ignition Series event, he led all players in assists with 122, the only player at the event with over 100 assists, and had the fourth most kills-per-round at 0.90. Sentinels capped off the tournament by defeating Cloud9 in the final on July 26, 2020. He found another tournament win on August 2, as Sentinels defeated Team SoloMid at 30Bomb Summer Cup final. In Pop Flash, the fourth and final North American Ignition Series tournament, Won had his best performance in the group stage against Immortals, where he had an Average Combat Score of 402, 32 kills, and 11 first bloods. Won secured another tournament title after Sentinels defeated Team Envy, 3–0, at the Pop Flash grand final on August 30. At that point in his career, he had over 700 assists in professional play and was the only player in the world to record over 600. He went on to secure two more tournament titles with Sentinels, winning the JBL Quantum Cup in December 2020 and the Valorant Champions Tour North America Challengers One in February 2021.


title: Sinatraa

text: After sexual abuse allegations arose against Won in March 2021, he was suspended by Riot Games, as they worked through their investigation of the matter. The Sentinels also suspended Won until their own internal investigation had concluded. On May 17, 2021, Riot announced in a competitive ruling that Won would remain suspended for a total period of six months, which would end on September 10, 2021, for "failing to fully cooperate" with their investigation. Sentinels picked up Tyson "TenZ" Ngo shortly after, replacing Won in the starting roster.


title: Sinatraa

text: Won was born on March 18, 2000, in Shoreline, Washington. His love for video games started at a young age, specifically with first-person shooters such as "Halo 3", "Call of Duty" and "Counter-Strike". The first time he made money playing esports was in 2014, when he won $200 in a "Counter-Strike" tournament. Won played baseball in high school and was going to play varsity as the starting second baseman, but he dropped out of traditional high school to pursue esports. He chose the name "Sinatraa" as his online name after rapper Logic fourth mixtape "", appending an "a" at the end, since "Sinatra" was already taken.


title: Sinatraa

text: In March 2021, Won was accused by his ex-girlfriend of sexual abuse; Won denied the allegations. A police investigation followed, but there has been no advancement since Won's suspension from "Valorant" concluded.


title: Beyond the Valley of the Dolls

text: Beyond the Valley of the Dolls is a 1970 American satirical musical melodrama film starring Dolly Read, Cynthia Myers, Marcia McBroom, Phyllis Davis, John LaZar, Michael Blodgett, and David Gurian. The film was directed by Russ Meyer and screenwritten by Roger Ebert from a story by Ebert and Meyer.


title: Beyond the Valley of the Dolls

text: Originally intended as a sequel to the 1967 film "Valley of the Dolls"—"dolls" being a slang term for depressant pills or "downers"—"Beyond the Valley of the Dolls" was instead revised as a parody of the commercially successful but critically reviled original. "Beyond" met a similar fate; it was initially panned by critics but became a box office success. The film later developed a cult following in subsequent decades, and earned some critical reappraisal for its satirical and metafictional elements.


title: Beyond the Valley of the Dolls

text: Three young women—Kelly MacNamara, Casey Anderson, and Petronella "Pet" Danforth—perform in a rock band, the Kelly Affair, managed by Harris Allsworth, Kelly's boyfriend. The four travel to Los Angeles to find Kelly's estranged aunt, Susan Lake, heiress to a family fortune. After Susan promises Kelly a third of her inheritance, Porter Hall, her sleazy financial advisor, discredits Kelly as a "hippie" to dissuade Susan from dividing the fortune he secretly wants to embezzle.


title: Beyond the Valley of the Dolls

text: Undeterred, Susan introduces the Kelly Affair to a flamboyant, well-connected rock producer, Ronnie "Z-Man" Barzell, who coaxes them into an impromptu performance at one of his outrageous parties (after a set by real-life band Strawberry Alarm Clock). The band is so well-received that becomes their svengali manager, changing their name to the Carrie Nations and starting a long-simmering feud with Harris.


title: Beyond the Valley of the Dolls

text: Kelly drifts away from Harris and dates Lance Rocke, a high-priced gigolo, who has his own designs on her inheritance. After losing Kelly, Harris is seduced by the sexually aggressive porn star Ashley St. Ives. She soon tires of his conventional nature and waning libido due to increasing drug and alcohol intake. Harris's further descent into drug and alcohol use leads to a fistfight with Lance and a one-night stand with Casey which results in pregnancy. Kelly ends her affair with Lance after he severely beats Harris.


title: Beyond the Valley of the Dolls

text: Casey, distraught at getting pregnant and wary of men's foibles, has a lesbian affair with fashion designer Roxanne, who pressures her to have an abortion. Pet has a seemingly enchanted romance with law student Emerson Thorne after a meet cute at one of parties. Their fairy-tale romance frays when Pet sleeps with Randy Black, a violent prize fighter who beats up Emerson and tries to run him down with a car.


title: Beyond the Valley of the Dolls

text: Porter offers Kelly $50,000 to relinquish any claim to Susan's inheritance. When Kelly angrily rejects his offer at one of parties, Susan learns of his underhanded ploy and severs her ties with him.


title: Beyond the Valley of the Dolls

text: The Carrie Nations release several records despite constant touring and drug use. Upset at being pushed to the sidelines, Harris attempts suicide by leaping from the rafters of a sound stage during a television appearance by the band. Harris survives the fall but becomes paraplegic from his injuries.


title: Beyond the Valley of the Dolls

text: Kelly devotes herself to caring for Harris and Emerson forgives Pet for her infidelity. Casey and Roxanne share a tender romance and Susan Lake is reunited with her former fiancé, Baxter Wolfe. This idyllic existence ends when invites Casey, Roxanne, and Lance to a psychedelic-fueled party at his house. After tries to seduce Lance, who spurns him, he reveals that he has breasts and is a female in drag. goes on a murderous rampage: he kills Lance with a sword, stabs his servant Otto to death, and shoots Roxanne and Casey, killing them.


title: Beyond the Valley of the Dolls

text: Responding to a desperate phone call Casey made shortly before her death, Kelly, Harris, Pet, and Emerson arrive at house to subdue him. Pet is wounded in the melee, which ends in death. Harris is able to move his feet, the start of his recovery from paralysis. Three couples—Kelly and Harris, Pet and Emerson, and Susan and Baxter—wed while Porter watches from outside the courthouse window.


title: Beyond the Valley of the Dolls

text: "Beyond the Valley of the Dolls" was originally intended as a straightforward sequel to the 1967 film "Valley of the Dolls".


title: Beyond the Valley of the Dolls

text: Jacqueline Susann, author of the novel "Valley of the Dolls", had come up with the title while she was writing her second novel "The Love Machine". She wrote a treatment and in June 1968 Fox wanted Dorothy Kingsley to write a screenplay but she was busy on "Bracken's World". In November, it was reported that Barbara Parkins would return in the film, but Patty Duke and Sharon Tate would not.


title: Beyond the Valley of the Dolls

text: In June 1969 Fox announced the film would be made in the next 18 months and would come from Irving Manfield Productions. A script was written by Jean Holloway.


title: Beyond the Valley of the Dolls

text: Two months later Fox decided that the film would no longer be made by Irving Mansfield. Instead they hired Russ Meyer, whose recent movie "Vixen!" had been a commercial success. Holloway's script was discarded and the film critic Roger Ebert took a five-week leave of absence from the "Chicago Sun-Times" to write a script. Parkins was no longer attached to the film.


title: Beyond the Valley of the Dolls

text: Meyer said Richard Zanuck, head of Fox, gave him a weekend to come up with an idea of how it could be done "stressing budget strongly in line with the whole ideas of making movies more cheaply" and encouraging him to "make an R film smashing against an X rating".


title: Beyond the Valley of the Dolls

text: Meyer says he and Ebert wrote a 127-page treatment in 10 days and the script in three weeks. Neither of them had read the novel but they watched the 1967 film and used the same formula: "Three young girls come to Hollywood, find fame and fortune, are threatened by sex, violence, and drugs, and either do or do not win redemption", according to Ebert. He later added: "We would include some of the sensational elements of the original story- homosexuality, crippling diseases, characters based on 'real' people, events out of recent headlines - but, again, with flat-out exaggeration".


title: Beyond the Valley of the Dolls

text: The script was not only a spoof of the original film, but also, in Ebert's words, "a satire of Hollywood conventions, genres, situations, dialogue, characters, and success formulas, heavily overlaid with such shocking violence that some critics didn't know whether the movie 'knew' it was a comedy".


title: Beyond the Valley of the Dolls

text: Ebert said the plot was derived in collaboration "by creating characters and then working out situations to cover the range of exploitable content we wanted in the film. Meyer wanted the film to appeal, in some way, to almost anyone who was under thirty and went to the movies. There had to be music, mod clothes, black characters, violence, romantic love, soap opera situations, behind-the-scenes intrigue, fantastic sets, lesbians, orgies, drugs and (eventually) an ending that tied everything together".


title: Beyond the Valley of the Dolls

text: Meyer's intention was for the film to "simultaneously be a satire, a serious melodrama, a rock musical, a comedy, a violent exploitation picture, a skin flick, and a moralistic expose (so soon after the Sharon Tate murders) of what the opening crawl called 'the oft-times nightmarish world of Show Business'".


title: Beyond the Valley of the Dolls

text: At the time we were working on BVD I didn't really understand how unusual the project was. But in hindsight I can recognize that the conditions of its making were almost miraculous. An independent X-rated filmmaker and an inexperienced screenwriter were brought into a major studio and given carte blanche to turn out a satire of one of the studio's own hits. And BVD was made at a time when the studio's own fortunes were so low that the movie was seen almost fatalistically, as a gamble that none of the more respectable studio executives really wanted to think about, so that there was a minimum of supervision (or even cognizance) from the Front Office.


title: Beyond the Valley of the Dolls

text: Meyer said when Fox offered him the film "I felt like I had pulled off the biggest caper in the world".


title: Beyond the Valley of the Dolls

text: He described the film as "a soap opera for young people, a cornocopia of wild, way-out now entertainment".


title: Beyond the Valley of the Dolls

text: Roger Ebert revealed that many of the film's themes and characters were based upon real people and events, but because neither Ebert nor Russ Meyer actually met these people, their characterizations were based on pure speculation.


title: Beyond the Valley of the Dolls

text: The cast was composed almost entirely of unknowns. Meyer said that ""Valley of the Dolls" plus my own name will be enough".


title: Beyond the Valley of the Dolls

text: Meyer said even if Parkins had wanted to do the film they would not have used her because she was too costly to hire.


title: Beyond the Valley of the Dolls

text: Cynthia Myers was a playboy playmate hired to play one of the girls who realizes she's a lesbian. In Meyer's comment: "It's a loving and tender thing. It's not "The Killing of Sister George"".


title: Beyond the Valley of the Dolls

text: Meyer and Ebert kept the costs down by writing "97 percent of the film" for existing sets on the Fox backlot. Ebert said that "Beyond the Valley of the Dolls" seemed "like a movie that got made by accident when the lunatics took over the asylum". Ebert says Meyer "directed his actors with a poker face, solemnly discussing the motivations behind each scene. Some of the actors asked me whether their dialogue wasn't supposed to be humorous, but Meyer discussed it so seriously with them that they hesitated to risk offending him by voicing such a suggestion. The result is that BVD has a curious tone all of its own... from actors directed at right angles to the material".


title: Beyond the Valley of the Dolls

text: Because the film was put together so quickly, some plot decisions, such as the character Z-Man being revealed as a woman in drag, were made on the spot, without the chance to bring previous already-shot scenes into alignment with the new development. As they were shooting, the cast was uncertain whether the dialogue was intended to be comic or not, which would alter their approach to acting it. Because Meyer always discussed their roles and the film so seriously, they did not want to unintentionally insult him by asking, so they broached the question to Ebert, instead. Meyer's intention was to have the actors perform the material in a straightforward manner because "if the actors perform as if they know they have funny lines, it won't work". Ebert described the resulting tone as "curious".


title: Beyond the Valley of the Dolls

text: I think of it as an essay on our generic expectations. It's an anthology of stock situations, characters, dialogue, clichés and stereotypes, set to music and manipulated to work as exposition and satire at the same time; it's cause and effect, a wind-up machine to generate emotions, pure movie without message.


title: Beyond the Valley of the Dolls

text: Most of the film's music was written by Stu Phillips. Phillips adapted Paul Dukas' "The Sorcerer's Apprentice" for the psychedelic scene at Z-Man's house near the film's end.


title: Beyond the Valley of the Dolls

text: Members of the fictitious Carrie Nations neither sing nor play their own instruments in the film. Vocals for the lip-synced songs were performed by Lynn Carey (Mama Lion), a blue-eyed soul singer based in Los Angeles, together with Barbara Robison, the lead singer of Peanut Butter Conspiracy. Carey's and Robison's voices are showcased on the apocalyptic rocker "Find It" (by Stu Phillips and Carey), the earnest folk anthem "Come With the Gentle People" (by Stu Phillips and Bob Stone), the raunchy R&B of "Sweet Talking Candyman" (by Phillips and Stone), the lilting ballad "In the Long Run" (by Phillips and Stone), and the soulful strut of "Look On Up At the Bottom" (also by Phillips and Stone). She also sings "Once I had Love", written by Stu Phillips and herself.


title: Beyond the Valley of the Dolls

text: Strawberry Alarm Clock performed their 1967 hit "Incense and Peppermints", the mid-tempo rocker "Girl from the City" (written by Paul Marshall), and the power pop anthem "I'm Comin' Home" (also by Marshall) during the first party scene at Z-Man's house. The film's title song was performed by A&M artists The Sandpipers and is heard twice near the end of the movie. The group released the song as a single and on their 1970 "Come Saturday Morning" LP.


title: Beyond the Valley of the Dolls

text: Different versions of the soundtrack album exist because of disputes over royalties. The original vinyl soundtrack, reissued in the early 2000s, substitutes Ami Rushes' vocals for Lynn Carey's originals, and includes one song, "Once I Had Love", not on the 2003 CD reissue. However, the CD edition of the soundtrack (Soundtrack Classics SCL 1408 and Harkit Records HRKCD 8032) contains 25 songs compared to the 12 songs on the vinyl version, with the original film versions plus Lynn Carey and Barbara Robison bonus tracks. Both labels also released vinyl editions with different covers and extended songs compared to the 1970 LP.


title: Beyond the Valley of the Dolls

text: The song "Once I Had A Love" was released on the CD "Beyond The Valley Of The Dolls/Groupie Girl (Screen Gold Records SGLDCD00010)" along with the songs from the LP from 1970. The CD does not contain the original film versions, only the new recordings for the LP from 1970, with four songs by Ami Rushes and two by Barbara Robison. For the first time, all original film song versions are included, with original versions sung by Carey and Robison.


title: Beyond the Valley of the Dolls

text: "Incense and Peppermints", some incidental music, and the Strawberry Alarm Clock's Hammond organ instrumental "Toy Boy" are missing from all soundtrack releases.


title: Beyond the Valley of the Dolls

text: The film had its world premiere at the Pantages Theatre in Hollywood on June 17, 1970. Jacqueline Susann, author of the unconnected novel "Valley of the Dolls", sought an injunction against its release but failed.


title: Beyond the Valley of the Dolls

text: Initially the film was given an X rating by the MPAA; in 1990, it was reclassified as NC-17. Meyer's response to the original X rating was to attempt to re-edit the film to insert more nudity and sex, but Fox wanted to get the movie released quickly and would not give him the time.


title: Beyond the Valley of the Dolls

text: Susann sued Fox for $10 million for damaging her reputation by making the film, saying that the "sex exploitation film, employs total nudity and is scandalous of content".


title: Beyond the Valley of the Dolls

text: As a result, the studio placed a disclaimer at the beginning of the film informing the audience that the two films were not intended to be connected. Posters for the movie read, "This is not a sequel—there has never been anything like it".


title: Beyond the Valley of the Dolls

text: The suit did not go to trial until after Susann's death in September 1974. Her estate won a $2 million verdict against the studio in August 1975.


title: Beyond the Valley of the Dolls

text: "Beyond the Valley of the Dolls" was released as a two-disc, special-edition DVD set on June 13, 2006, which is now out of print.


title: Beyond the Valley of the Dolls

text: 20th Century Fox re-released it on the second disc of the four-disc variety feature pack, "Studio Classics: Set 9", which also includes "All About Eve", "The Inn of the Sixth Happiness", and "Valley of the Dolls", on May 4, 2010.


title: Beyond the Valley of the Dolls

text: In the UK, Arrow Video released the film on Blu-ray on January 18, 2016, in a special edition with "The Seven Minutes".


title: Beyond the Valley of the Dolls

text: In the US, The Criterion Collection released the film on DVD and Blu-ray on September 27, 2016, along with "Valley of the Dolls".


title: Beyond the Valley of the Dolls

text: Despite YouTube's policy of not carrying NC-17 movies, the film is available to rent and purchase on YouTube, although the rating isn't mentioned.


title: Beyond the Valley of the Dolls

text: The film was initially critically panned. Upon release, Ebert's future TV co-host Gene Siskel gave the film zero stars out of four, writing in the "Chicago Tribune" that the film "unfolds with all of the humor and excitement of a padded bra ... Boredom aplenty is provided by a screenplay which for some reason has been turned over to a screenwriting neophyte". He later put it on his list of the 20 worst films of the year.


title: Beyond the Valley of the Dolls

text: Vincent Canby of "The New York Times" wrote that the film "comes off with a slightly higher rating" than the original "Valley of the Dolls" book and movie, but thought that by "quite consciously attempting to parody his earlier movies" Meyer had "become patronizing".


title: Beyond the Valley of the Dolls

text: "Variety" wrote that it was "not much of a film. Producer-director Russ Meyer, who once made low-budget sex pix which had a crude and innocuous charm but not much of a story, this time around spent between 20 and 30 times the money he used to have, and got less for it".


title: Beyond the Valley of the Dolls

text: Charles Champlin of the "Los Angeles Times" panned the film as "a treat for the emotionally retarded, sexually inadequate and dimwitted. It is a grievously sick melange of hypermammalian girls, obvious double-entendres and sadistic violence".


title: Beyond the Valley of the Dolls

text: Gary Arnold of "The Washington Post" declared it "a mess, a disaster, a stinkeroo, the most wretched of wretched movies. Disregard anything you hear in the so-bad-it's-good or it's-all-a-put-on veins. It's a depressing picture — witless, hysterical, gratuitous, technically inept, needlessly brutal". Mike Wallington of "The Monthly Film Bulletin" called it "corny, moralising, guileless, and visually about as appealing as a Christmas wrapper. It is also perversely enjoyable if one is prepared to laugh at it as well as with it".


title: Beyond the Valley of the Dolls

text: Since its release in 1970, the film has acquired a cult following and has even been included in various "best of" lists by movie critics. The reviews have improved to become more mixed at the present, with critics agreeing it was much better than the film it parodied. In 2000, Canadian magazine "Take One" included it in their "Best Films of the 1970s" critics poll. In 2001, the "Village Voice" named the film #87 on its list of the 100 Greatest Films of the Century. On Rotten Tomatoes, the film holds a rating of 77% from 30 reviews. The critical consensus reads: "Confidently campy and played with groovy conviction, "Beyond the Valley of the Dolls" is an exuberant expression of both the hilarity and terror that comes with free love".


title: Beyond the Valley of the Dolls

text: According to Fox records the film required $4,100,000 in theatrical rentals to break even. By December 11, 1970, it had made $7,000,000, more than enough to be profitable for the studio.


title: Beyond the Valley of the Dolls

text: Despite an X rating and a modest budget of $900,000, "Beyond the Valley of the Dolls" grossed 10 times that amount in the U.S. market, qualifying it as a hit for Fox. In 1997, when Roger Ebert & Gene Siskel were guests on Howard Stern, Ebert claimed it made $55 million. In 2004, Ebert claimed it had grossed $40 million.


title: Beyond the Valley of the Dolls

text: The production of the film, along with "Myra Breckinridge", helped lead to the ousting of Richard Zanuck from Fox.


title: Rain gauge

text: A rain gauge (also known as udometer, pluvia metior, pluviometer, ombrometer, and hyetometer) is an instrument used by meteorologists and hydrologists to gather and measure the amount of liquid precipitation over a predefined area, over a period of time. It is used for determining the depth of precipitation (usually in mm) that occurs over a unit area and thus measuring rainfall amount.


title: Rain gauge

text: People living in India began to record rainfall in 400 BCE The readings were correlated against expected growth. In the Arthashastra, used for example in Magadha, precise standards were set as to grain production. Each of the state storehouses were equipped with a rain gauge to classify land for taxation purposes. In 1247, the Song Chinese mathematician and inventor Qin Jiushao invented Tianchi basin rain and snow gauges to reference rain, snowfall measurements, as well as other forms of meteorological data.


title: Rain gauge

text: In 1441, the Cheugugi was invented during the reign of Sejong the Great of the Joseon Dynasty of Korea as the first standardized rain gauge. In 1662, Christopher Wren created the first tipping-bucket rain gauge in Britain in collaboration with Robert Hooke. Hooke also designed a manual gauge with a funnel that made measurements throughout 1695.


title: Rain gauge

text: It was Richard Towneley who was the first to make systematic rainfall measurements over a period of 15 years from 1677 to 1694, publishing his records in the "Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society". Towneley called for more measurements elsewhere in the country to compare the rainfall in different regions, although only William Derham appears to have taken up Towneley's challenge. They jointly published the rainfall measurements for Towneley Park and Upminster in Essex for the years 1697 to 1704.


title: Rain gauge

text: The naturalist Gilbert White took measurements to determine the mean rainfall from 1779 to 1786, although it was his brother-in-law, Thomas Barker, who made regular and meticulous measurements for 59 years, recording temperature, wind, barometric pressure, rainfall and clouds. His meteorological records are a valuable resource for knowledge of the 18th century British climate. He was able to demonstrate that the average rainfall varied greatly from year to year with little discernible pattern.


title: Rain gauge

text: The meteorologist George James Symons published the first annual volume of "British Rainfall" in 1860. This pioneering work contained rainfall records from 168 land stations in England and Wales. He was elected to the council of the British Meteorological Society in 1863 and made it his life's work to investigate rainfall within the British Isles. He set up a voluntary network of observers, who collected data which were returned to him for analysis. So successful was he in this endeavour that by 1866 he was able to show results that gave a fair representation of the distribution of rainfall and the number of recorders gradually increased until the last volume of British Rainfall which he lived to edit, for 1899, contained figures from 3,528 stations — 2,894 in England and Wales, 446 in Scotland, and 188 in Ireland. He also collected old rainfall records going back over a hundred years. In 1870 he produced an account of rainfall in the British Isles starting in 1725.


title: Rain gauge

text: Due to the ever-increasing numbers of observers, standardisation of the gauges became necessary. Symons began experimenting on new gauges in his own garden. He tried different models with variations in size, shape, and height. In 1863 he began collaboration with Colonel Michael Foster Ward from Calne, Wiltshire, who undertook more extensive investigations. By including Ward and various others around Britain, the investigations continued until 1890. The experiments were remarkable for their planning, execution, and drawing of conclusions. The results of these experiments led to the progressive adoption of the well-known standard gauge, still used by the UK Meteorological Office today, namely, one made of "... copper, with a five-inch funnel having its brass rim one foot above the ground ..."


title: Rain gauge

text: Most modern rain gauges generally measure the precipitation in millimetres in height collected during a certain period, equivalent to litres per square metre. Previously rain was recorded as inches or points, where one point is equal to 0.254 mm or 0.01 of an inch.


title: Rain gauge

text: Rain gauge amounts are read either manually or by automatic weather station (AWS). The frequency of readings will depend on the requirements of the collection agency. Some countries will supplement the paid weather observer with a network of volunteers to obtain precipitation data (and other types of weather) for sparsely populated areas.


title: Rain gauge

text: In most cases the precipitation is not retained, but some stations do submit rainfall and snowfall for testing, which is done to obtain levels of pollutants.


title: Rain gauge

text: Rain gauges have their limitations. Attempting to collect rain data in a tropical cyclone can be nearly impossible and unreliable (even if the equipment survives) due to wind extremes. Also, rain gauges only indicate rainfall in a localized area. For virtually any gauge, drops will stick to the sides or funnel of the collecting device, such that amounts are very slightly underestimated, and those of .01 inches or .25 mm may be recorded as a "trace".


title: Rain gauge

text: Another problem encountered is when the temperature is close to or below freezing. Rain may fall on the funnel and ice or snow may collect in the gauge, blocking subsequent rain. To alleviate this, a gauge may be equipped with an automatic electric heater to keep its moisture-collecting surfaces and sensor slightly above freezing.


title: Rain gauge

text: Rain gauges should be placed in an open area where there are no buildings, trees, or other obstacles to block the rain. This is also to prevent the water collected on the roofs of buildings or the leaves of trees from dripping into the rain gauge after a rain, resulting in inaccurate readings.


title: Rain gauge

text: Types of rain gauges include graduated cylinders, weighing gauges, tipping bucket gauges, and simply buried pit collectors. Each type has its advantages and disadvantages while collecting rain data.


title: Rain gauge

text: The standard United States National Weather Service rain gauge, developed at the start of the 20th century, consists of an funnel emptying into a graduated cylinder, in diameter, which fits inside a larger container that is in diameter and tall. If the rainwater overflows the graduated inner cylinder, then the larger outer container will catch it. When measurements are taken, then the height of the water in the small graduated cylinder is measured, and the excess overflow in the large container is carefully poured into another graduated cylinder and measured to give the total rainfall. A cone meter is sometimes used to prevent leakage that can result in alteration of the data. In locations using the metric system, the cylinder is usually marked in mm and will measure up to of rainfall. Each horizontal line on the cylinder is . In areas using Imperial units, each horizontal line represents inches.


title: Rain gauge

text: The pluviometer of intensities (or Jardi's pluviometer) is a tool that measures the average intensity of rainfall in a certain interval of time. It was initially designed to record the rainfall regime in Catalonia but eventually spread throughout the world.


title: Rain gauge

text: It consists of a rotating drum that rotates at constant speed, this drum drags a graduated sheet of cardboard, which has the time at the abscissa while the y-axis indicates the height of rainfall in mm of rain. This height is recorded with a pen that moves vertically, driven by a buoy, marking on the paper the rainfall over time. Each cardboard sheet is usually used for one day.


title: Rain gauge

text: As the rain falls, the water collected by the funnel falls into the container and raises the buoy that makes the pen arm rise in the vertical axis, marking the cardboard accordingly. If the rainfall does not vary, the water level in the container remains constant, and while the drum rotates, the pen's mark is more or less a horizontal line, proportional to the amount of water that has fallen. When the pen reaches the top edge of the recording paper, it means that the buoy is "up high in the tank" leaving the tip of the conical needle in a way that uncovers the regulating hole, "i.e.", the maximum flow that the apparatus is able to record. If the rain suddenly decreases, making the container (as it empties) quickly lower the buoy, that movement corresponds to a steep slope line that can reach the bottom of the recorded cardboard if it stops raining.


title: Rain gauge

text: The rain gauge of intensities allowed precipitation to be recorded over many years, particularly in Barcelona (95 years), apart from many other places around the world, such as Hong Kong.


title: Rain gauge

text: A weighing-type precipitation gauge consists of a storage bin, which is weighed to record the mass. Certain models measure the mass using a pen on a rotating drum, or by using a vibrating wire attached to a data logger. The advantages of this type of gauge over tipping buckets are that it does not underestimate intense rain, and it can measure other forms of precipitation, including rain, hail, and snow. These gauges are, however, more expensive and require more maintenance than tipping bucket gauges.


title: Rain gauge

text: The weighing-type recording gauge may also contain a device to measure the number of chemicals contained in the location's atmosphere. This is extremely helpful for scientists studying the effects of greenhouse gases released into the atmosphere and their effects on the levels of the acid rain. Some Automated Surface Observing System (ASOS) units use an automated weighing gauge called the AWPAG (All Weather Precipitation Accumulation Gauge).


title: Rain gauge

text: The tipping bucket rain gauge consists of a funnel that collects and channels the precipitation into a small seesaw-like container. After a pre-set amount of precipitation falls, the lever tips, dumping the collected water and sending an electrical signal. An old-style recording device may consist of a pen mounted on an arm attached to a geared wheel that moves once with each signal sent from the collector. In this design, as the wheel turns the pen arm moves either up or down leaving a trace on the graph and at the same time making a loud "click".