The Church and the Multistate System

Abstract

AbstractThis chapter shifts attention to the multistate system. It argues that the European multistate system was set in train when the fusion of lay and religious authority came to an end in the eleventh and twelfth centuries. The chapter first shows how around ad 1000 everything favoured the opposite: hegemony or empire. The chapter next shows that this changed due to the conflict of church and state in general and the Catholic Church’s persistent interest in avoiding that one secular polity outmatched the others in particular. This is most spectacularly illustrated by how the late medieval papacy denounced the old notion, going back to Rome but revived by the popes and the Carolingians in the ninth century, that other lay rulers were subordinated to the Western (German) Emperor. In the place of this venerable idea, churchmen formulated and spread the exact opposite doctrine: that ‘the king is emperor within his own realm’ (Rex in regno suo imperator). Beginning with Gregory VII, they also provided support to new states arising on the periphery of the Latin West to balance the older states closer—and more threatening––to Papal Rome. This is where we find the origins of the modern notion of the equality of states in international relations. The chapter ends by tracing these developments up until the Reformation.