Conclusion

The battle of Antioch was not a battle between two classic empires. To understand international politics in the Middle Ages—both in the Christian and in the Islamic parts of the world—we need to use a weaker and more flexible definition of em­pire than centralized government and incoming taxes.

The story of the “decline and fall of the caliphate” has been written by historians, Arab and Western, who mourned this development.^[1618] In contrast to this, the story of the “decline and fall of the medieval European empire” was written by historians who welcomed this because it was the birth of regional kingdoms that later became nation-states. Or, in the case of Germany, by historians who blamed the emperors for not being German monarchs.

This is a fundamental historiographic difference between the two cases presented here. It should also be noted, however, that this historiographic difference only has materialized because the actual political development in the two Ecumenes in the years 1000-1500, in spite of all similarities, turned out differently.

In the Islamic ecumene, universal empire eventually saw a resurgence especially with the Ottoman and Mughal empires (chaps. 26 and 27). By contrast, at the time of the Crusades, the most ambitious imperial dreams in the Holy See were never even close to being realized, not only because papal hegemonic ambitions were bal­anced by the emperor, but especially because pontifical imperialism all by itself had serious built-in contradictions. The church was supporting the hereditary regional monarchy, a contradiction by its very existence, to real political universalism.

Moreover, ecclesiastical power was curtailed by other centrifugal powers within the Church. According to canonic law, the pope could neither collect a part of the general tax (the tithe) nor install or depose provincial governors (bishops and archbishops) at will. During the later part of the Middle Ages, there were several examples of pontifical bypassing of the canonic principle of investiture, but these examples were still aberrations from the norm. The Church collected large revenues from the tithe, but these resources did not reach Rome (some other revenues did, but on a far smaller scale). The pope had less similarity with a classic emperor than had the Church as a whole with a classic empire.

Back at that hot and dusty battle at Antioch, we saw two hegemonic powers with many similarities, and also some interesting dissimilarities. By the thirteenth cen­tury these differences were more visible in political and legal institutions. We should not hastily conclude that these traits laid the foundation for the Great Divergence. Rather, the institutional anatomies of the Catholic and the Islamic Ecumene attest to the fact that pre-modern political organization can be different without occupying different steps on the same staircase.

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