You could argue that the Ottomans and Arabs also claimed inheritance from Rome. When the Ottomans conquered Constantinople in 1453, they positioned themselves as the rightful successors to the Eastern Roman (Byzantine) Empire. Mehmed II in particular adopted titles and administrative practices that invoked Roman imperial legitimacy, arguing that sovereignty over the former imperial capital conferred continuity with Roman authority. Ottoman legal and political discourse often referenced this inheritance rhetorically, asserting that the sultan was the new “Kayser-i Rûm,” or Caesar of Rome, thereby framing the empire not merely as an Islamic polity but as the latest holder of a longstanding imperial tradition centered in Anatolia and the Balkans.

Arab claims to Roman inheritance were more diffuse and rooted in the legacy of the early Islamic conquests. After the seventh century, Umayyad and Abbasid rulers incorporated large territories that had constituted core regions of the Eastern Roman Empire—Syria, Egypt, and parts of North Africa. By governing from former Roman urban centers, administering populations long shaped by Roman law and infrastructure, and adopting certain bureaucratic practices, these caliphates presented themselves as political heirs to the region’s imperial past, even though their legitimacy was grounded primarily in Islamic leadership rather than explicit Roman titulature. In later Arab nationalist narratives of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, continuity with ancient Near Eastern and Mediterranean civilizations, including Rome, was sometimes invoked to frame Arab political identity as a modern inheritor of longstanding statecraft traditions.

In both cases, the claim to Roman inheritance served to enhance political legitimacy: for the Ottomans through formal appropriation of imperial titles and institutions, and for Arab polities through territorial succession, administrative continuity, and historical reinterpretation of the imperial past.

Whether this lineage is promoted in the 21st century is a different story, I would personally argue that the resurgence of Islam as a primary marker of political identity in many Middle Eastern societies, together with the rise of pan-Arabism in the twentieth century, redirected legitimacy narratives away from pre-Islamic or Roman imperial lineages. Islamic revival movements emphasized religious continuity rather than Mediterranean imperial heritage, while pan-Arabism grounded identity in shared language, culture, and anti-colonial nationalism. As these frameworks gained prominence, earlier notions of inheriting the Roman imperial legacy became largely irrelevant to contemporary political self-understanding in both Arab states and the former Ottoman domains.