Empire and Order: The Concept of Empire, 800–1800 (review)

Empire and Order: The Concept of Empire, 800-1800. By James Muldoon. (New York: St. Martin's Press. 1999. Pp. viii, 209. $65.00.)

This helpful work of synthesis--a short book on a vast topic, as the author says--distills into a readily accessible form a considerable body of earlier technical scholarship in the field. Some readers may be surprised but medievalists will rejoice that the book is mainly concerned with the centuries before 1500 and that within that period the author pays particular attention to the works of the medieval canonists. Their complex writings, mostly known only to specialists, do indeed present the most interesting and varied discussions on medieval concepts of empire.

At the outset, the author criticizes a common assumption about the transition from medieval to early modern forms of government. In the medieval world, according to this view, an ideal of universal empire--ecclesiastical or secular--coexisted with a reality of extreme political fragmentation. In contrast, the early modern period saw the emergence of separate states with effective centralized governments but without pretensions to universal jurisdiction. An underlying argument of Muldoon's book is that this contrast between empire and state is too simplistic. The idea of universal empire was contested in the Middle Ages, and the early modern period saw the rise of great new empires.

The author emphasizes that there was not just one idea of empire in the Middle Ages but several. From a high papalist point of view the empire was an office within the Church, deriving its authority from the pope. For the German emperors it was essentially a title to rule Germany and Italy, derived from God through election by the princes. From the revived Roman law came the idea of the emperor as dominus mundi, a lord of all the world, and Dante transformed this legal rhetoric into a vision of a universal Christian empire of peace and justice, with an emperor, not the pope, as its head. But the claim to universality, echoed by the Hohenstaufen emperors, evoked protests from canonists in England, France, and Spain. They defended the sovereignty of their own monarchs by asserting that "a king is an emperor within his own kingdom." So here the language of empire was used to defend the national monarchies that would grow into early modern states. Finally, Renaissance humanists often treated empire as a corrupt from of government and contrasted it with the virtuous republican form.

In considering the transition to the early modern world, Muldoon points out that the medieval language--or languages--of empire survived into the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. But medieval concepts were not adequate to justify or explain the new realities, the dynastic European empire of the Hapsburgs and the overseas empires of England, France, and Spain. Instead, persisting atavistically, they impeded the development of a new kind of constitutional thinking that might have shown how power could be distributed equitably between a central government and its distant possessions. And the lack of such a constitutional solution helps to explain the revolutionary movements that reshaped the political structure of the Americas from the 1770's onward. This is a thoughtful, stimulating book that will interest many students of medieval and early modern political theory.

Brian Tierney
Cornell University

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