The transfer doctrine is genuine medieval statecraft: Constantinople styled itself New Rome (330 CE founding), Charlemagne took the imperial crown from the Pope (Christmas 800), and the Holy Roman Empire, Voltaire's joke about it notwithstanding, claimed direct Roman succession until Francis II dissolved it (1806). The Russian 'Third Rome' doctrine appears in Filofei of Pskov's epistles (early 16th century): two Romes have fallen, the third stands, a fourth shall not be.
Conspiracy literature, Jordan Maxwell prominent among its lecturers, upgrades the translatio into continuity of control: the empire survives through the Vatican, through law, through symbols on currency and architecture. The documented version is less tidy: Rome's legal and symbolic forms persist because institutions copy successful forms, a diffusion pattern, not a command structure.
The translatio reveals what empires actually are at death: a transferable claim, crown, title, and legal vocabulary that any ambitious capital can assume. Rome's genius was making itself heritable; the conspiracy reading mistakes the will for the executor. The empire survives exactly the way Latin survives: everywhere, in pieces, ruling nothing.
If empire is a flame passed between capitals, whose hands hold it now?