Power and Religion beyond Theory and Text

The divine authority or sacred status enjoyed by the ruler and religion's role as an ideology of empire represented in literary, historical, and religio-juridical discourses had limited traction before literacy became more widespread.

The Byzantine emperor functioned as the paterfamilias of the empire's peoples, as an active participant in church councils, and as the promulgator of numerous laws related to religion. Indeed, it was at the emperor Theodosius's behest that Orthodox Christianity became the faith of empire in 381 CE. As the code states:

It is our will that all the peoples who are ruled by the administration of Our Clemency shall practice that religion which the divine Peter the Apostle transmitted to the Romans, as the religion which he introduced makes clear even unto this day.^[708]

The classical Islamic caliphs aspired to a similar role but in the absence of an insti­tutionalized clerical hierarchy over which they could preside, they were ultimately forced to cede it to the amorphous body of scholars known as the ‘ulama’.

Rulers and their supporters also used an array of ceremonies, monuments, and other public demonstrations of power to persuade their subjects of their re­ligious legitimacy. One of the advantages of such forms is the possibility of using analogies, hyperbole, and hints, rather than spelling things out in a manner that could be deemed inappropriate. A rock relief or mosaic may depict a ruler in the same manner as a god without actually stating the ruler is a god; verses recited at ceremonies may describe the ruler with a high degree of hyperbole acceptable as poetic license; and sacred ceremonial objects such as crowns, thrones, and weapons may generate important associations with the divine without directly invoking that link.^[710]

The enduring association of kingship with divine order and justice was often physically implanted in the form of pillars inscribed with law codes in the ruler's name. The most famous such stele are those of Hammurabi (r. ca. 1792- 1750 bce) in Mesopotamia and Ashoka (r. ca. 269-232 bce) in India, but the value of the symbol was such that Firuz Tughluq, a much later Muslim ruler in India, inscribed Shari‘a law on a tower to visually remind his subjects of his adherence to a particular tra­dition in a familiar way.^[711] More surprisingly perhaps, a nineteenth-century British judge of Fatehpur adopted the same local idiom by placing four pillars engraved with the ten commandments at the city gates.^[712]

Depictions of rulers in rock, mosaic, or paint carefully linked them to the divine and enhanced the aura around them.

From this perspective, the strongly aniconic tendency of classical Islam stands out but accounts of court gatherings indicate careful attention to creating temporary tableaux in which the caliph's religious status was signaled by sacred items—Qur'ans often attributed to the third caliph ‘Uthman; the staff of the prophet; ceremonial swords to defend the faith, and so on.^[713] The famous medieval mystic from Iberia, Ibn al-Arabi, described the Umayyad caliph of Cordoba, ‘Abd al-Rahman III (r. 912-961) meeting Frankish delegates dressed in simple white robes with a Qur'an, a sword, and a brazier in front of him to signify his piety, his God-given authority, and the hell-fire awaiting his opponents.^[714] In general, court gatherings and cere­monies were a highly effective way of conjuring up the god-like nature of kingship. This could take widely divergent forms, including demonstrations of magnificent luxury, complicated court protocols, the immobility or rare visibility of the mon­arch, and sometimes his use of theatrical violence, power over life and death being indubitably god-like.^[715] Mawlay Isma‘il, ruler of Morocco from 1672 to 1727, was infamous among Europeans of the time for killing Christian captives and slaves for minor infractions in order to demonstrate his power.^[716]

One of the most effective ways for a ruler to demonstrate his attitude toward a religion or religions was by the proffering or withdrawal of patronage to re­ligious sites.

As Hillenbrand points out, the first generation of mosques were extremely simple spaces, often delineated by no more than a stockade or a line of stones.^[718] This phase coincided with a period in which the character of the Islamic state remained close to its Arabian tribal origins and an ethos of empire had not yet developed. However, with the maturing of the Umayyad Empire in the early eighth century ce, several monumental religious buildings were founded, including the Dome of the Rock and the great mosque of Damascus. Using Byzantine prototypes and often craftsmen, they were designed to assert Islamic religious but also imperial dominance, and to give the frail Muslim ruling elite religious buildings to be proud of that could be compared favorably with Christian churches.^[719]

Transfers of power from one imperium to another, and from one religious idiom to another, often required physical alterations to the landscape, sometimes violent but sometimes self-consciously “legal” and respectful, depending on the message to be conveyed. In the empires of Antiquity where multiethnicity went hand in hand with polytheism, the need to desecrate religious sites was limited and new temples could be constructed alongside the old. For the Sasanians, the construction of new dynastic fire temples celebrating their kingship in a Mazdaean idiom went hand in hand with subtle attempts to diminish the prestige of other temples representing other deities and communities within their empire. In India, the third-century bce Mauryan rulers did not replace Brahmanical orthodoxy or its temples, but they did find it expedient to also favor other sects whose wandering monks (sramanas) were much closer to the lived experience of the population than the Brahmans.^[720] In par­ticular, Ashoka patronized Buddhist monasteries and sponsored the construction of Buddhist shrines.^[721]

The purported replacement of pagan temples in Jerusalem with churches attributed to Constantine (r.

The Ottomans reacted in a similar way after their conquest of Constantinople in 1453. The circumstances of Constantinople’s transformation into Istanbul are well known, but what remains most intriguing is the fact that the great Ottoman archi­tect Sinan, himself of Christian origin, chose a Byzantine basilica, Hagia Sophia, as the starting point for Ottoman architecture in its imperial form. Thus at the same time as the great Ottoman religious complexes along the ridge of the city proclaimed the arrival of a new imperial order, they also constantly evoked the imperial order which had been replaced, in a way reminiscent of Umayyad adaption of Byzantine architecture in Syria, three-quarters of a millennium before.^[724]

European colonial empires also involved themselves in religious building projects, particularly the construction of disproportionately large cathedrals and

churches to serve minority expatriate Christian congregations in non-Christian territories. One such construction was the French-built Cathedral of Notre Dame d’Afrique, consecrated by Bishop Lavigerie in 1872, on a high point dominating the Bay of Algiers. It was deeply resented by Algerians at the time as part of the French mission civilisatrice, which included the physical insertion of Catholicism into the Muslim environment, alongside attempts to weaken the population’s attachment to Islam and pave the way to conversion.

An often forgotten aspect of the construction of monuments and the many other religious buildings sponsored by imperial rulers is the socioeconomic impact they had, which could significantly ameliorate relations between rulers and ruled by providing employment, or conversely strain them in the case of high taxation and corvee labor. The Mamluk Empire in Egypt and Syria (1260-1517) provides an example of sustained investment in the religious infrastructure which gave a warrior elite of non-Islamic origins religious credentials while also contributing significantly to the efflorescence of urban culture in Egypt and Syria. The high number of complexes composed of a mausoleum and a theological college (ma­drasah constructed during Mamluk rule generated steady employment for master craftsmen, for religious personnel, and even for ancillary workers such as cleaners, even though the actual construction was often carried out by prisoners of war and corvee labor.^[725]

In addition to the construction of major urban monuments, many rulers also created sacred itineraries and patronized pilgrimage routes, thereby linking the political and the sacred by their own passage along sanctified routes and their amelioration of the experience of other pilgrims. Constantine’s mother, Helena, played a major role in linking the new emperor to Christianity by means of her pilgrimage through the Holy Land to find holy relics in 326-328, which also in­volved the construction of several churches and shrines. Several Abbasid caliphs had wells and pilgrim facilities built along the desert routes from Baghdad to Mecca as a mark of their piety and, on occasion, traveled these routes themselves as pilgrims. The Ottomans also invested heavily in the pilgrim route,^[726] a form of patronage that culminated with the construction of the Hijaz railway from 1900 to 1914.

For the Shi‘i Safavids in Iran, access to Mecca was often impossible due to mili­tary hostilities with the Ottomans, therefore Shah Abbas (r. 1587-1629) created an alternative Shi‘i pilgrim route to Mashhad, burial place of the eighth imam ‘Ali al- Rida, to which he himself then walked on foot in 1601. Textual accounts compared this to a purported walk by Heraclius from Constantinople to Jerusalem, but it also echoed the renowned contemporary pilgrimages of the Mughal emperor Akbar (r. 1556-1605) to the Chishti shrine at Ajmir in the 1560s and 1570s,^[727] indicating the persistence of this form of religio-political performance. On a smaller scale, from 1514 the accession of each Ottoman sultan came to include a visit to the shrine of Eyüp in the suburbs of Istanbul, the purported burial place of Ayyub, a companion of the Prophet who fell during an attack on Constantinople. While at the shrine, the new sultan was girded with a sword, thereby signaling the dynasty's supreme religious and military achievement—the capture of Constantinople—an act both desired and envisaged by the Prophet himself.^[728]

Another potent display of imperial and religious synergies occurred in the theory and practice of war, which entailed placing huge stresses on any subject population in terms of mobilization, taxation, and the requisitioning of supplies for passing armies. It was therefore helpful for rulers to adduce religious as well as practical justifications for military campaigns. The preaching of the Crusades was a papal in­itiative at the outset but over time it proved very useful to the Christian monarchies of the Iberian Peninsula and became an important strand in early modern Spanish imperialism. During the so-called Reconquista, a term which invested territorial rivalry in the Iberian Peninsula with a religious color, mobilization of the local population, who were used to intermingling with Muslims in march areas, was often difficult. The fortuitous discovery of the body of Saint James, the develop­ment of the pilgrim route to Santiago de Compostela, and his reinterpretation as “Matamoros” (Muslim-killer) helped to attract outside Crusader settlement and to cultivate a war ethos along the frontier. Subsequently, declaring a Crusade gave the crown significant advantages by endowing military activity and associated tax collection with papal authority and by attracting outsiders more disposed to see Muslims as enemies to fight.

In Islamic lands, jihad or ghaza played an equally powerful role in legitimating a wide range of military activities from empire formation along Khaldunian lines to the quelling of rebellion, and even anti-colonial resistance and self-strengthening in the nineteenth century. All these modes were linked by the underlying meaning of the term jihad (striving) with the adjunct phrase “in the path of God” assumed. Particularly in frontier zones such as the early Islamic-Byzantine frontier in Syria and Asia Minor, the Muslim-Christian frontier in Iberia and North Africa, or the Ottoman-Christian frontier in Anatolia and the Balkans, the notion of the ruler as a holy warrior (mujahid, ghazi) had heightened significance, and rulers tended to justify military activity as jihad or as necessary to unify the community for jihad. In Umayyad Iberia, for instance, the caliph or an important family member rode out from Cordoba for an annual summer expedition of raiding into Christian territory conceptualized as jihad. As he progressed, local lords had to offer their allegiance and supply extra troops and those who refused could be accused of religious as well as political disobedience. In the Ottoman case, the idea that the sultan was a holy warrior (ghazi) and the descendant of generations of such warriors was a significant mobilizing tactic regardless of later debates about the ghazi origins of the Ottoman Empire.^[729]