Dominus Mundi: The Law, Politics and Theology of Empire

A Catalogue Raisonné

Rérum gestárum díví Augusti, quibus orbem terrarum ímperio populi Rom. subiécit (“The deeds of the Deified Augustus, by which he subjected the whole world to the sovereignty of the Roman People”)

— Res Gestae of Augustus, 14 A.D.

“In the twenty-sixth year of his rule, [the First Emperor of Qin] for the first time unified all under Heaven, and there were none who did not submit… [He] brought peace to all under Heaven.”

— Imperial tablet erected on Mount Tai in 221 B.C., quoted in Sima Qian (司馬遷), Records of the Grand Historian (史記) (Raymond Dawson & K. E. Brashier tr.)

“The history of the world is both a history of empires competing for hegemony, and a history of the changing forms of empire.”

— Jiang Shigong (强世功), “Empire and World Order” (translated by David Ownby)

Empire is always a relevant topic, and the current moment is no exception. Recently, Pope Francis, reflecting informally on the transformation of “the Rome of the Caesars” into “the Rome of the Popes,” observed that “since its birth some 2,800 years ago [Rome] has had a clear and continuing vocation of universality.’” Francis here offers a traditionally Catholic view, but there has always been a dissenting counter-tradition as well, reflected in two conversations I had with Peter Thiel — one publicly recorded for a conference, one at a private seminar for Harvard students — in which the topic of empire came up several times. Thiel is intelligently and powerfully skeptical of empire and of political universalism, and especially of Rome in its many senses and forms — a skepticism that, I cannot help adding, may well derive in part from Thiel’s evangelical background.

I do believe, however, that Francis’s view rather than Thiel’s represents the mainstream or consensus view of the Western legal and theological traditions, broadly speaking. In an era of resurgent nationalism — nationalism in a specifically modern sense, as I explain below — it bears recalling that major strands of classical law, political theory, and political theology support empire and political universalism as the ideal political form. On this view, empire rightly understood promises universal peace as its consequence and fruit - peace in the rich classical sense of tranquillitas ordinis, the tranquility of just order. That ideal is both Roman and Christian, but has analogues in other major traditions as well; consider the idealized state or era of 大同 or “Great Unity” in the Book of Rites (禮記), in which “a public and common spirit ruled all under Heaven” (天下為公).

It is a simple mistake, both conceptually and historically, to understand this empire of peace as intrinsically homogenizing, as hostile to the distinctiveness of peoples (gentes), nations in the classical sense (nationes), and cultures. Rather, empire rightly understood is itself founded upon appropriate subsidiarity that respects the particular peoples, histories, organic cultures, and political forms determined in particular societies; and empire rightly understood is itself the overarching structure needed to protect local variation and local cultures. Only if we first understand the complex ideal of universal-peace-with-subsidiarity are we entitled to consider the debunkings of that ideal in the tradition — perhaps most famously the acid critique of the Pax Romana that Tacitus, in his De Vita et Moribus Iulii Agricolae (On The Life and Death of Gnaeus Julius Agricola), puts into the mouth of the Caledonian leader Calgacus: Auferre, trucidare, rapere, falsis nominibus imperium, atque, ubi solitudinem faciunt, pacem appellant (“To plunder, to butcher, and to rob, they falsely name empire, and where they make a desert, they call it peace.”).

A few preliminary points need stating, even though (or because) some of the points should be obvious:

First and foremost, one must always keep in mind that “empire” fundamentally equivocates between a domestic sense and an external sense. In the first sense it refers to a domestic political regime-type, while the second sense it refers to a supranational structure of relationships between or among polities, which may themselves take various regime-types within the larger order. (Consider, for example, the enormous variety of political and juridical arrangements within the disparate jurisdictions comprising the Holy Roman Empire). Thus republics can have empires in the second sense, although a republic cannot be an empire in the first sense. It is perfectly coherent to maintain, and is in fact true, that the Roman republic had an empire in the second sense long before it became an empire in the first sense. So too the United States today undoubtedly has an empire, albeit of a peculiar form, even though it is not (yet?) an empire in the domestic sense.

In what follows, my main interest is in the second sense, empire as a supranational structure of relationships among and above subsidiary polities. I shall however have to glance occasionally at empire in the first sense, as a domestic regime-type. Although the conceptual distinction between the two senses is clear in principle, and although the fundamental legal categories of the juristic tradition could be and were applied mutatis mutandis to empires, national monarchies, and city-state republics, many have argued that there are causal or historical processes that tend to relate the two senses of empire in predictable ways. There is, for example, a venerable tradition of argument holding that republican empires tend to become empires in the domestic sense as well — an idea arguably pioneered in Sallust’s Bellum Jugurthinum, which suggested that Rome’s final defeat of Carthage in 146 B.C. and its ongoing external commitments tended to produce a series of Marius-type figures who destabilized the republic’s internal political structure.

Second, the juristic tradition was of course always internally complex and evolving, and does not always speak with one voice on the question of empire (or on the related but distinct question of the relationship between temporal empire and the spiritual power). In the medieval period, a major question for lawyers was always to figure out the relationships among the Holy Roman Empire, the semi-autonomous city states of Lombardy and elsewhere, and royal realms such as France, as well as the relationship of the Emperor to the Papacy. The arguments of the lawyers were as usual nearly infinite, pressing into service a host of distinctions and precepts, such as the distinction between de jure subjection to the Empire and de facto autonomy, or the claim that Rex in regno suo est imperator (the King [of e.g. France] has the legal status of emperor in his own kingdom). In the early modern period, new questions arose, such as the status of non-Christian inhabitants of the New World under natural and divine law and imperial civil law. And so forth.

Third, no one sensible defends or rejects empire as such; in the temporal order, every political form is ultimately to be judged by its fruits, by its tendency to expand the domain of peace, legal justice, due subsidiarity, the common good of ordered civilization, and most generally human welfare and human flourishing. Some empires have done better than others in this regard, to say the least. The questions are historical and substantive, not conceptual or juridical. Although I cannot argue the issues here, I believe for example that Spanish empire in the Americas was a far better thing, on the whole, than British empire in Ireland or in Asia — not least because the major polities that the Spanish empire overthrew were profoundly depraved, living offenses to natural and divine law, while by contrast British imperialism in Asia destroyed some of the highest achievements of human civilization. Others may make different judgments. The point is that the classical conception of empire is a regulative ideal, which real empires may or may not fully instantiate. To make judgments about real cases, and to avoid nirvana fallacies, one must always ask what the alternatives are or were; we must always ask “Which empire? And compared to what?”

Fourth, and related to the previous point, classical sympathy for political universalism by no means entails a defense of liberal universalism, a recent, unique and in my view uniquely toxic political form. Least of all does it entail a defense of the particular forms of Anglo-American liberal imperialism, which have in many ways taken the vices of liberal universalism to an extreme. As I have argued elsewhere, the populist nationalism currently resurgent in various European polities and in the United States is best understood and defended in non-ideal terms, as an entirely sensible second-best reaction to the destabilizing and homogenizing imperialism of transatlantic liberalism, which lacks appropriate subsidiarity. Not every form of empire is better than modern nationalism; it is entirely sensible to think that although a suitably revived, adapted and translated version of the classical ideal of empire would be better than modern nationalism, the latter is still better (in the second-best sense) than the distorted version of empire currently on offer.

Indeed, the current opposition between nationalism and liberalism is historically novel, a kind of intra-family quarrel. A venerable observation is that liberalism and nationalism (in the modern sense) were born twins in the 19th century, and that liberal nationalism has been a far more homogenizing force than classical empires ever were. Liberal nationalism has relentlessly stamped out organic local traditions and cultures that classical empires left in place, and indeed protected through an overarching framework of peace, subsidiarity and legal justice. As the “Librarian of Celaeno” observes, for example, “[t]he French nation … was not wholly French-speaking until long after WWII, with successive governments making great efforts to stamp out regional identities…. [National homogeneity] was very much the conscious project of liberal reformers bent on centralizing power at the expense of organic cultures.” Similar accounts hold for many polities.

The consequence is that from the French Revolution onwards, and especially after the “Springtime of the Nations” in 1848, liberal constitutionalism and liberal theory have lurched between two poles, a false conception of universalism and a false conception of nationalism. On the one hand, they advance a corrupted form of human-rights universalism that neglects or indeed affirmatively attempts to eliminate subsidiarity, to stamp out legitimate differences in the determinationes of political forms in various polities around the globe, tempered by particular histories, conditions, and organic traditions of civilization. Liberal universalism, while it sometimes speaks of peace, is rather transparently and often quite openly a destabilizing and disruptive force, one that restlessly pursues a historically peculiar and highly contestable conception of human “liberation” and imposes that conception through both hard and soft power. On the other hand, liberalism, as the major opponent of the Holy Roman Empire, the Austrian and Austro-Hungarian empires, and the other empires of the ancien regime, grew in tandem with modern nationalism - a form of nationalism that imagines constitutions solely as positive written instruments, denies the fundamental role of the ius gentium (law of peoples) as the constitutional basis of states (on which see below), and imagines nation-states as autonomous legal entities cooperating, if at all, solely on the basis of a network of positive laws, treaties, and customs, which liberalism calls “international law.” In this sense, liberal nationalism is the collective political correlate of individualism and the social contract, founded on individual wills, in the domestic sphere.

Neither liberal universalism nor liberal nationalism captures the rich and internally complex classical ideal. When Benedict XVI famously spoke in favor of a “true world political authority,” he meant neither the rule of a single hyperpower enforcing a liberal conception of progress on supposedly backwards peoples (a vision that aroused the enthusiasm of John Stuart Mill), nor a simple aggregation of the preferences of autonomous nation-states through positive treaties and customs, but rather a genuine world community supporting authority “regulated by law” that “observe[s] consistently the principles of subsidiarity and solidarity” and that “seek[s] to establish the common good,” in order to “secur[e] authentic integral human development.”

Fifth, and finally, any discussion of this sort will inevitably be described by a few bad-faith readers as a proposal to restore some specific empire of the past — a proposal for simple-minded reaction. On the contrary, however, the aim is sophisticated reaction, a paradoxical forward-looking version of reaction. The regulative ideals inherent in the classical understanding of empire provide general principles that can be revived, translated and adapted to new circumstances, preserving the essence of those principles while their application changes - non nova, sed nove (not a new thing, but in a new way). For penetrating discussions of what a suitably translated and feasibly attainable version of the classical ideal might look like under current conditions, see both the links to Benedict XVI’s discussion above and to P.G. Monateri’s work below. For an online seminar about the future of postliberalism that included substantial discussion of the relative merits of political universalism and nationalism, see here.

With these preliminaries firmly in mind, I thought it might be useful to compile a kind of catalogue raisonné, comprised of both classical legal and political sources and select modern treatments, on the broad and admittedly ill-defined topic of empire as an ideal political, constitutional and political-theological form - with special attention to the Empire, the Sacrum Imperium Romanum. (Pace a scurrilous French intellectual, the Holy Roman Empire was all three, and hence correctly named).

Obviously one might spend a lifetime and still not scratch the surface of the available work. Hence what follows does not even pretend to be comprehensive. Indeed my presentation is flagrantly tilted towards sources that present the classical conception of empire as a regulative ideal, in its best possible light — understanding as I said that the point of understanding the classical ideal is not a simpleminded attempt to restore any particular empire of the past, but to translate and adapt the underlying principles of political universalism to new circumstances, in feasible ways. I focus here on the Roman and Holy Roman Empires; in subsequent posts, I hope to do something similar for later empires. Finally, I focus on linkable sources either in English or with easily available translations into English, although in a few places necessity forces me to link to untranslated Latin texts. The overall aim is by no means to offer a full scholarly bibliography, but merely to provide a series of initial footholds on the sprawling topic.

I. Legal Background

For basic background on the constitutional institutions of the Roman Republic and the Roman Empire (and yes, the Empire did have a constitution, albeit not in the modern written sense), a pair of volumes by Andrew Lintott are helpful: The Constitution of the Roman Republic and Imperium Romanum: Politics and Administration. On the Augustan settlement(s) of 27-23 B.C., and the transition from Republic to Empire, a useful collection of documents is Ronald Mellor, Augustus and the Creation of the Roman Empire, and a useful collection of interpretive studies is Kurt A. Raaflaub and Mark Toher, eds., Between Republic and Empire. I repeat that the conventional names of Republic and Empire are somewhat misleading, because republican empire (in the second sense of empire I identified above) is a venerable political form. As Lintott explores, Rome had an empire when it was still a republic — as the United States does today, in part by annexation and control of overseas territories, in part by a global network of “consensual” alliances and (hence) a global network of military bases.

On the legal foundations of the Roman Empire, in both senses, the secondary sources are almost infinite. A.J.B. Sirks provides an indispensable introduction to the public law of the Empire. A good recent overview of the juridical functions of the Emperor is Kaius Tuori, The Emperor of Law: The Emergence of Roman Imperial Adjudication. On the role of jurists within the imperial legal order, a classic treatment is Tony Honoré, Emperors and Lawyers. On the issues that the pervasive legalism of the Empire, and of the classical tradition generally, pose for liberal constitutional theory, I argue here that it is perfectly possible to have the rule of law without separation of powers at the apex of the constitutional order.

As for primary sources, it goes without saying that the Corpus Iuris Civilis, in particular the Codex (newly translated in full here by Bruce Frier, with parallel Latin and Greek text) and the Digest (original text here, and translated by Alan Watson), contain a number of evocative texts that are foundational to all subsequent legal debates over empire, in both senses. As to legal and political universalism and subsidiarity, and their reconciliation in a larger structure of legality, consider two texts:

(1) Gaius’ statement (Dig. 1.1.9) that populi, qui legibus et moribus reguntur, partim suo proprio, partim communi omnium hominum iure utuntur (“all peoples who are governed by laws and customs use partly their own law, partly law common to all mankind”) [but note that due to the deficiencies of English, “law(s)” here translates two different Latin words with different import, lex/legibus and ius/iure];

(2) Hermogenianus’ statement (Dig. 1.1.5) that ex hoc iure gentium introducta bella, discretae gentes, regna condita, dominia distincta (“as a consequence of this ius gentium, wars were introduced, peoples were separated, kingdoms were founded, and dominions were distinguished”) - a fundamental text for the constitutional grounding of distinct nations, peoples and states in the ius gentium, rather than in a single act of written constitution-making.

As to the legal position of the Emperor in particular, both domestically and universally, consider three further texts:

(1) A rescript of Antoninus Pius (recorded at Dig. 14.2.9), which supplied the fundamental legal basis for imperial claims to universal sovereignty. Originally in Greek, the key part of the passage was later given a conventional translation into Latin as: Ego quidem Mundi Dominus, lex autem maris lege. The traditional translation is “I am the Lord of the World, and the law of the sea” — although see the article by P.G. Monateri below for a number of complications and variant readings.

(2) The Lex Regia (Dig. 1.4.1pr and versions elsewhere in the Corpus Juris), which summarizes the delegation of the sovereign authority and power of the Roman people to the Emperor, and which I discuss here with citations to the voluminous literature. Later jurists argued about whether that delegation was revocable or irrevocable, but most agreed that imperial power was derived proximately from the sovereignty of the Roman people, and ultimately from God.

(3) The observation or claim in Pomponius’ Enchiridion (recorded at Dig. 1.2.2.11) that “under the dictate of circumstances … affairs of state have had to be entrusted to one man, for the Senate had been unable to govern all the provinces honestly. An emperor, therefore, having been appointed, to him was given the right that what he had decided be deemed law” (emphasis added). Like Sallust, Pomponius here relates the domestic and external senses of empire, although with a somewhat different argument: the corrupt external governance of the Senate made the transition to imperial rule in my first sense necessary and, perhaps, desirable.

The gloss and commentary on these and related texts is of course endless. Two great medieval jurists, Bartolus de Saxoferrato and his student Baldus de Ubaldis, offered especially sophisticated views on the legal foundations of empire. (For background on both figures, see this volume edited by Orazio Condorelli and Rafael Domingo, part of an outstanding series on the great jurists of the tradition). As to Bartolus, a classic study is C.N.S. Woolf, Bartolus of Sassoferrato: His Position in the History of Medieval Political Thought. As to Baldus, equally indispensable is Joseph Canning, The Political Thought of Baldus de Ubaldis. Both books, despite referring to “political thought,” have extensive legal detail on imperialist legal theories and claims, and indeed both explain that according to Bartolus’ and Baldus’ own views the whole relationship between political and legal is cast differently than under modern legal positivism. Yet more material can be found in a helpful overview of the legal issues surrounding empire, and more broadly of the relationship between imperial authority and law: Kenneth Pennington, The Prince and the Law 1200-1600: Sovereignty and Rights in the Western Legal Tradition.

An excellent, recent and serious scholarly treatment of the Roman Emperor as dominus mundi is P.G. Monateri, “Dominus Mundi: Land, Sea and Global Sovereignty.” Monateri argues, in the end, that the image of the (or a) dominus mundi “present[s] us with the haunting ghost of our times: the very possibility of a unitary and legitimate global world order.” For the book-length version, see P.G. Monateri, Dominus Mundi: Political Sublime and the World Order.

Subsidiarity. It is important to note, in light of occasional misconceptions, that it is not true that Roman law and legal institutions were “homogeneous and repetitive [in] application to each and every subjugated territory…” Quite to the contrary, “[m]any variations existed in the relationship of local communities to central government.” Again, empire and subsidiarity are complements, not competitors. It is the City that protects the locality (or, for the Tolkien fans, it is Gondor that protects the Shire). The confusion here is basically conceptual; that sovereignty is ultimately vested at the highest level of the constitutional order does not necessarily entail either legal and institutional centralization or uniformity of arrangements at every level. For both good reasons and out of practical necessity, the ultimate sovereign may, should and inevitably will leave more or less freedom of action and local jurisdiction to lower levels of the system. Consider, for example, that China “remains, by quantitative measures, among the most decentralized political systems in the world”, and folds several different types of political systems into one overarching structure.

On the relationships among universalism, subsidiarity and natural law, Pater Edmund Waldstein offers extensive excerpts by the Thomistic manualist Henri Grenier, and an illuminating introduction, in “World Government is Required by Natural Law,” on the indispensable Josias site. There is also an excellent Josias podcast episode on the topic of empire.

II. Sacrum Imperium Romanum

The providential status of the Roman Empire as a divine vehicle, granted imperium sine fine (“sovereignty without limit”) is a major theme of Virgil — of course in pagan register, unless the poet wrote better than he knew, as Christian authors later argued. The theme was baptized by any number of Church Fathers and later writers, who argued that Christ himself had blessed and legitimated imperial rule, in part by freely submitting His person to the census and rule of Augustus. Worth quoting here is a passage from Orosius’ Historiarum Adversum Paganos Libri VII (“Seven Books of History Against the Pagans”), an influential work by a student of St. Augustine:

“At that time, that is, in the year when Caesar, by God's ordination, established the firmest and truest peace, Christ was born, whose coming that peace waited upon … It was also in this year when God had deigned to assume the appearance and nature of man, that this same Caesar, whom God had predestined for this great mystery, for the first time ordered a census to be taken of each and every province and that all men should be enrolled. In these days, then, Christ was born and His name was entered in the Roman census list immediately after His birth. This is that earliest and most famous acknowledgment which designated Caesar first of all men and the Romans lords of the world; for in the census list all men were entered individually, and in it the very Maker of all men wished to be found and enrolled as a man among men…. Neither is there any doubt that it is clear to everyone from his own knowledge, faith, and investigation, that it was by the will of our Lord Jesus Christ that this City prospered, was protected, and brought to such heights of power, since to her, in preference to all others, He chose to belong when He came, thereby making it certain that He was entitled to be called a Roman citizen according to the declaration made in the Roman census list.”

Incidentally, one should not be surprised to hear such a view from a student of Augustine — who, contrary to misinformation one sometimes encounters, wrote in praise of both Constantine and Theodosius.

After the vacancy of the Byzantine throne in 797 and the translatio imperii of 800, when Leo III crowned Charlemagne as Emperor, Orosius’ view of the Empire as divinely sanctioned was carried forward by Otto of Freising in a work called Chronica de Duabus Civitatibus, translated as The Two Cities: A Chronicle of Universal History to the Year 1146 A.D. by Charles Christopher Mierow. As we put it in an earlier New Digest reading list: Otto, a Cistercian, was himself both a bishop and a prince of the Empire, a son of Leopold III, Margrave of Austria. Otto’s majestic theme is that both the temporal and spiritual powers, both regnum and sacerdotium, are constituent parts of a well-ordered imperial polity that restrains, at least for a time, the forces of chaos and disintegration.

That the two powers each and independently derive from God - a cornerstone of imperialist political theology — was declared in ringing terms by Frederick Barbarossa in a declaration of 1157, in response to an ambiguous suggestion by (H)Adrian IV that the Emperor held in fief from the Pope: “The kingdom, together with the empire, is ours by the election of the princes from God alone.” Needless to say, there are many debates to be had about that claim, which it is not my purpose to address here. More detail on Barbarossa and his conception of empire, heavily influenced by civilian jurists, is found in another work of Otto of Freising, The Deeds of Frederick Barbarossa.

The theme of the Empire, Holy Roman Empire, or indeed the Papacy as the universal katechon that restrains the forces of chaos - and ultimately the coming of Antichrist - has its own vastly complex history. A useful scholarly overview is Marc de Wilde, “Politics Between Times: Theologico-Political Interpretations of the Restraining Force (katechon) in Paul's Second Letter to the Thessalonians.” Cardinal Manning, writing in the shadow of Italian nationalism and Risorgimento in 1861, argued in The Pope and the Antichrist that the Pope had inherited the katechontic mission from the Empire, and must retain a terrestrial dominion to carry out that mission. Alan Fimister, The Iron Sceptre of the Son of Man: Romanitas as a Note of the Church, offers a recent restatement of the thesis that Rome, once baptized, is elevated from the purely temporal to the spiritual order and is vested with a universal and katechontic mission. See also this review of a recent re-issue of Henri Daniel-Rops’s History of the Church of Christ, which argues that “the universalist—in the sense of world-spanning—religion of this new church was from the ­beginning suited to and even prefigured by the political universalism of the Roman Empire.”

On a more secular note, a good modern historical overview of the Sacrum Imperium Romanum is Peter Wilson, Heart of Europe: A History of the Holy Roman Empire. For those who prefer podcasts, there is an excellent series on The History of the Germans — which covers the Empire in depth, drawing liberally on some indispensable works (linked in the podcast notes). Among these are Ernst Kantorowicz’s classic biography of the greatest of the Hohenstaufen Emperors, Frederick II, called by his contemporaries Stupor Mundi, the wonder of the world.

The Empire had a constitution, but no comprehensive written Constitution in the modern sense. One should mention, however, the Golden Bull, an imperial constitution of Charles IV, promulgated in 1356, which regulated the procedures for imperial elections and related matters. The full text is available here in translation. One should also mention the Liber Augustalis, the law code promulgated by Frederick II in 1231 for his Sicilian domains, translated here by James M. Powell (although the translation has been criticized). A treasury of riches, the Liber Augustalis provides, inter alia, a basic argument for the combination of powers at the apex of the juridical order and thus for empire in my first, domestic sense (an argument that you will, I promise, never encounter in liberal constitutional theory):

“It was not without great forethought and well-considered planning that the Quirites [citizens of Rome] conferred the jus et imperium [right and sovereign authority] for establishing law on the Roman Princeps by the lex regia. Thereby the source of justice might proceed from the same person from whom their defense proceeded…. [W]hen the sources of justice and of protection are both united in the same person, enforcement will not exist apart from justice, and justice will not exist without enforcement. Therefore, it is proper that Caesar should be the father and the son, the lord and the minister of justice.” Pascal later summarized the point in a famous dictum: la justice sans la force est impuissante; la force sans la justice est tyrannique (justice without force is powerless; force without justice is tyrannical).

Both Empire and Church, in different ways, contributed to the growth and development of the medieval bureaucratic state, the ancestor of today’s administrative state. On these themes, see our previous annotated reading list on “The Origins of the (Western) Administrative State.”

III. Dante

Dante warrants his own section. His masterwork on empire, De Monarchia, is translated by Prue Shaw under the somewhat misleading title “Monarchy,” which in current English somewhat distorts Dante’s meaning; Dante is not arguing in favor of monarchy as one possible political form at the national level, but in favor of universal empire. De Monarchia is the great theological and political case for universal empire as the highest political form, and, in Book II of the work, argues for the sanctity of the Roman Empire as a fitting cradle for the birth of Christ and as a vehicle chosen by Providence for the nurturing of the faith. Indeed Dante writes that existens sub monarcha est potissime liberum (“to live under universal empire is the greatest freedom”). The tranquillitas ordinis, the justly ordered peace, of rightful empire liberates mankind to live for divinely ordained ends — and, in a more pragmatic register, liberates its subjects from private violence and local warfare, and enables the spread of civilization. As Phillip Blond, a Dantean in spirit and in method, argues in “Empire, Nationalism and Christianity,” empire is the motive force in human history and the engine of civilization; “the formation and drive of Empire is what has formed and driven human development over time.” See also the important essay by Jiang Shigong on this theme, quoted above. (But consider here as well another of Tacitus’s acid comments about the effects of empire on the inhabitants of Britain: “Step by step they were led to things which dispose to vice, the lounge, the bath, the elegant banquet. All this in their ignorance they called civilization, when it was but a part of their servitude.”)

De Monarchia was placed on the Index in 1585 because of its political theology of the relationship between Empire and Papacy as co-equals with differing spheres of authority — two suns (as Dante puts it elsewhere) rather than, as in papal political theology, moon and sun, an image critiqued in Book III of De Monarchia. But the work was de-Indexed in 1881 and later rehabilitated. In 2021 Pope Francis, in an apostolic letter in praise of Dante, significantly quoted a passage from Paul VI: “The peace of individuals, families, nations and the human community, this peace internal and external, private and public, this tranquillity of order is disturbed and shaken because piety and justice are being trampled upon. To restore order and salvation, faith and reason, Beatrice and Virgil, the Cross and the Eagle, Church and Empire are called to operate in harmony” (emphasis added).

Several other works should be read in conjunction with De Monarchia. One is Henry VII’s Ad Reprimendum (given here by Charles Donahue along with Bartolus’ commentary, both in Latin) — an imperial constitution issued at Pisa on April 2, 1313, during the Emperor’s campaign, only partly successful, to receive the imperial crown in Rome and to pacify the city-states of northern Italy and return them to their de jure allegiance. The constitution adopts various legal measures to promote the divina precepta quibus iubetur quod omnis anima Romanorum principi sit subiecta - “the divine precepts which command that all souls are to be subject to the Roman prince.” It is the temporal counterpart, and perhaps contrast, to the better-known Unam Sanctam of Boniface VIII issued in 1302 (translated here by the ultra-ultramontanist Cardinal Manning himself), with its famous hierocratic statement that “every human creature is subject to the Roman pontiff.” Another important text is Dante’s public letter to Henry, written in 1311 and available here, which urges Henry not to delay in assuming and enforcing the rightful prerogatives of universal rule. Again, it is not my purpose here to express a view on these debates; see The Josias site for a wealth of further information and argument.

The Ius et Iustitium site has published two lovely pieces by Anibal Sabater on emperors portrayed in Dante’s literary works: one on Justinian, one on the Optimus Princeps, Trajan. Speaking of Trajan, an excellent corrective for the glib view that imperial power inevitably corrupts is to read Trajan’s extensive official correspondence with Pliny, when the latter served as imperial governor of Bithynia. Trajan’s wisdom, prudence, magnanimity, and moderation are everywhere on display. And see as well an excellent recent essay on Augustus by the legendary intellectual historian James Hankins, who argues that “everyone knows the famous dictum of Lord Acton: ‘Power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.’ In Octavian’s case, however, the opposite seems to have occurred. Once he had taken complete control of the Roman state, his actions changed for the better. After Actium he gradually, to all appearances, became a model prince, wise and moderate. Power became a means to the end of restoring public order and prosperity, not the end itself.”

Finally, enjoy the massive erudition of Charles Till Davis, Dante and The Idea of Rome, a classic that treats Dante’s ideas in the context of imperial, papal and communal accounts of Rome as the urbs aurea.

Phew. Hope you enjoy!