Signifying Gender and Empire

Ideas of empire

"The course of civilisation, like that of empire and the sun itself, moves inexorably from East to West," argues Anthony Pagden in The Idea of Europe and, within that trajectory of east to west, there is plenty of evidence for empires and for empire-building in the early medieval world. ¹ Within Europa , the imperial coronation of Charlemagne on Christmas Day in 800 is a well-known reference point for thinking about models of expansion and domination in the post-Roman world. Familiar too are the aggressively imperial dynasties of Byzantium and the Ottonians. ² Yet classical culture, and medieval culture following it, conceived of the world as tripartite, and transforming the dialectal interplay between Europa and Asia , we find the "Africa" of the Islamic and Arabic worlds. ³ In this regard, the case of the Umayyad dynasty in Islamic Iberia (or al-Andalus) is crucial, as D. Fairchild Ruggles's essay here points out. The Hispano-Umayyads, initially an "offshoot" (as Ruggles puts it) of the Syrian Umayyad dynasty, challenged and transformed both Roman and Byzantine models of world-building, and produced a uniquely dynamic culture on the Iberian peninsula as a consequence of its engagement with Islamic, Christian, and Judaic cultures. The emirate of al-Andalus was independent enough to ignore, and ultimately challenge, the Abbasid caliphate in Baghdad, build its own remarkable culture in early medieval Iberia, and tend, at the same time, its relations with the empires of Byzantium and Ottonian Germany. East and West met in the Iberian peninsula, but many of the inheritors of the classical model of the world (Europe, Asia, Africa) were aware of, and made use of, imperial ideas and ideologies.

The case of the Iberian peninsula reminds us how dialectical the trajectory of empire could be. Indeed, across the dialectic of east and west plays another, that of north and south. The worlds of early medieval Iberia are the result of its traffic—cultural, economic, social, and political—with the lands of the Mediterranean basin, continental Europe, and with the Near East, which brought east, west, north, and south into new alignments. Another region, which sometimes thought of itself as residing on the edge of the known world, Brittania , looked at various times to Europa (and Byzantium) in the east and to Ireland in the west; it also drew on Germania , and on the so-called Northern world and the centers of Christendom (Rome, Jerusalem, Constantinople). Within the island itself, however, the movement of empire could run equally often along a north-south axis (as it still does); the early hegemony of the kingdom of Northumbria with its imperial pretensions gave way to a south equally eager to stamp its territories with an imperial symbolic (and ultimately more successful in so doing). Northumbria makes rich use of Roman, British, Germanic, and Anglo-Saxon symbols in its bid for territorial domination and imperial identity—a similar repertoire is consciously used to bolster the idea of England by the later West Saxons. ⁴

To such fluid mappings of space—north, south, east, and west—that are the matter of empire and the result of the interplay between physical and cultural geographies, we might add an equally fluid mapping of time. Empires are marked by chronologies as much as geographies. Bede, the earliest historian of the English church and its territorialization of the British Isles—its place-by-place marking of space by (Roman) church and monastery—is also the first historian to adopt the system of dating from the Incarnation. ⁵ Where time is structured according to Christian accounting or liturgy, regnal chronologies, or Islamic calendar, it is subject to, and influenced by, ideas of empire—both spiritual and political. Ideas of empire also structure modern chronologies: historiography, periodization, and postcolonial theory alike, whether by omission...