Rex imperator in regno suo est

Denmark was not the only country to use pontifical universalism to escape im­perial universalism. So did the Teutonic Order State, Poland, Hungary, and Sicily. Portugal and Aragon used the papacy to escape Castilian hegemony, and England used it to avoid French dominion.

In the peripheral kingdoms, whose territories had not been a part of the Holy Roman Empire, a close correspondence was established between kingdoms and archdioceses. A sovereign kingdom and an independent archdiocese be­came semantically connected. Lund in Denmark, Uppsala in Sweden, Nidaros in Norway, Cracow in Poland, and Budapest in Hungary were examples of such archdioceses associated with corresponding kingdoms. Within the old Roman territory, the situation was more complicated, since the borders of the archdioceses reflected old political and administrative borders that were not easily manipulated. Nevertheless, when the upper hierarchy of the Catholic Church was established in new areas, there was still room for maneuver. The formation of a Portuguese county in the late eleventh century led to a recrea­tion of the old archdiocese of Braga, which later provided the ecclesiastical in­frastructure for the independent Kingdom of Portugal some decades later.^[1615] By arranging the upper clergy the way it did, the papacy did what it could to secure a geopolitical situation with a concert of sovereign kingdoms rather than a hege­monic constellation under the emperor.

Most of the political theorists of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries discussed the issue of government within the paradigm of Augustine; that is, as a matter of the two swords or regimes. Within this paradigm, it made sense to speak of the empire versus the church (secular regime versus ecclesiastical regime).