Different Imperial Designs: 'The West after the Carolingians

Clashing at Antioch were not only two armies and two religions, but also two po­litical units that can with some reservations be called empires, the Papal Empire and the Great Seljuq Empire.

But first, it must be clearly stated that classic, archetypical, imperial power is dif­ferent from royal power. Not only is it supra-regional (in contrast to regional royal power); it is, in its classic expression, universalistic, with an ambition of legitimate rule over the whole world. Because it is universalistic, it is not easily balanced with other formal bodies of authority. In the Islamic tradition, this power is vested in the Caliphate which, as we shall see, was claimed by a number of powerful rulers after the de facto fall of Abbasid power.^[1565] In post-Roman Christian Europe this power was claimed by the Byzantines,^[1566] then from 800 ce also by a number of Frankish sovereigns. In the second half of the eleventh century, yet another claimant arrived, the Roman pontiff.^[1567] Despite all claims of universal power, both the Christian and the Islamic Ecumene ended up as commonwealths rather than empires.^[1568] The ne­gotiation between regional and universalistic power in the two commonwealths had many things in common, but also significant differences. Many regional rulers aspired to conquest over as many territories as possible. At some point, they either had to be absorbed by or to challenge universal power.

In the nineteenth century, the division of Charlemagne’s empire between his grandsons in 843 was widely conceived as the birth of France and Germany as sepa­rate and equal entities.^[1569] This is completely ahistorical. The emperor remained em­peror even though the area controlled by him was effectively reduced in stages: first to around a third of the Carolingian inheritance, then to Italy, then to smaller parts of Northern Italy, before Otto I, king of the Eastern Franks, assumed the imperial title in 962.

If something was new in the Ottonian period compared with the days of Charlemagne, it was the rapidly expanding Christian Church. Charlemagne’s em­pire was almost congruent with Latin Christendom if the most loosely attached re­gions are included (like the Lombard duchy in Southern Italy and the kingdom of the Asturias). But by the late tenth century, Roman Christianity was definitely outpacing the Roman Empire.^[1570] It has never been satisfactorily explained why Christianity ex­panded only extremely slowly for half a millennium (450-950), then extremely fast for half a century (950- 1000), and then again very slowly for another halfmillennium (1000-1500). But within a lifetime, the elites of Iceland, Norway, Sweden, Denmark, Poland, Bohemia, Moravia, Hungary, and Croatia converted to Christianity, thereby roughly doubling the land area of the Roman Church (though not its population). It is difficult to investigate the reasons for this expansion, since the countries in ques­tion did not yet produce much written material. We know that it was a conversion of elites. We also know that little emphasis was put on personal conviction, but far more on outer appearance. Norwegian historian Sverre Bagge noticed that the conversion of elites happened at a time when there was a sort of balance between Christian and pagan Europe.^[1571] The Christian center was sophisticated enough to act as a model for ambitious rulers in the pagan periphery.

How did the bishop of Rome become a contestant in the pursuit of universal power? There were no such ambitions before the eleventh century.

In the Dictatus papae, a document issued by the pope in 1075, he claimed for himself universal power with the right to depose emperors or bishops at will; it stated that he could absolve subjects from the fealty to their superiors and that princes should kiss his feet.^[1575] In other words, the pope, Gregory VII, had tried to become a real sovereign over Western Christendom—a classic emperor. Gregory failed in his endeavor and died in exile, after which followed a short reign by the weak suc­cessor Victor III. Then, Urban II was elected in 1088. During the following years, he consolidated and expanded his power and finally returned to Rome in triumph. Synods held at Piacenza and Clermont in 1095 marked his ascendance to undis­puted leader of the Roman Catholic Church. The hegemony also had secular po­litical aspects, but of a less ambitious kind than Gregory's.

The request for military aid to the East was accepted with an enthusiasm of to­tally unexpected proportions. A handful of armies, each of them large by the standards of the day, deployed the following autumn. An even larger but some­what disorganized popular host went before them, only to be almost completely annihilated in Asia Minor. In the spring of 1097, the Crusaders, with their entou­rage of civilians and pilgrims, were ferried over to Asia Minor in what was offi­cially a Byzantine army. As it advanced, the army scored a string of victories. But they could not hide that the Byzantines and the Crusaders had very different goals. The Byzantines wanted to regain and consolidate their Anatolian provinces, the loss of which had led to the requests for help in the first place. The Crusaders wanted to head for Jerusalem. To them, Asia Minor was only a passage to the Holy Land.

The battle against Kerbogha not only gave the victors a much needed psycho­logical boost, it also supplied them with food, fodder, and horses. The army then managed to proceed to Jerusalem, even though the provisional situation remained very difficult. What is moreover significant in the Antioch events is that they turned a (heterogeneous) Byzantine army into an army of the Papal Empire, an entity that had hardly existed before.

The victory at Antioch led to the establishment of a principality, not subjected to the emperor in Constantinople, but only to the Roman Church. The Principality of Antioch was soon joined by the Kingdom of Jerusalem and both became as sov­ereign of higher secular powers as any kingdom in Europe.^[1577] Not only were these new formed polities shaped by the crusades, the long established kingdoms back in Europe were also, in turn, profoundly influenced by the new movement and its successes in the Holy Land.^[1578]