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From Hierarchy To Anarchy - Larkins PDF
From Hierarchy To Anarchy - Larkins PDF
jeremy Larkins
pal grave
macmillan
2009
Contents
List ofIllustrations ix
Acknowledgments xi
Notes 201
Bibliography 245
Index 263
Illustrations
T his book has taken far too long to reach completion and in the pro-
cess I have incurred a considerable number of debts. Some of the
ideas presented here first saw the light of day during my graduate
studies at the London School of Economics. During the enjoyable years
I spent at the LSE many people contributed to my intellectual journey.
My greatest debt is to my teacher and supervisor Mr. Michael Banks who
encouraged my forays into pastures new while reigning in some of my wil-
der impulses. Several other members of the department of International
Relations at the LSE also offered valuable support and encouragement. In
particular I would like to mention Chris Coker, Mark Hoffman, Justin
Rosenberg, and Hayo Krombach. My examiners David Campbell and Chris
Brown provided many insightful comments and criticisms that have been
incorporated into the present work. The graduate community at the LSE in
the mid-1990s was remarkable in many ways and Molly Cochrane, Joal de
Almeida, Eddie Keene, Bernice Lee, Mairi Johnson, Bice Maiguashca, and
Agostinho Zacarias were sources of inspiration and friendship.
In recent years colleagues in several institutions have made me feel welcome.
Despite our differences over the nature of research methods, Yossi Mekelberg at
Regents' College has been instrumental in my return to teaching. I also appre-
ciate the warmth shown to me by the members of Department of Politics at
Goldsmiths, in particular fromJasna Dragovic-Soso, Richard Greyson, Branwen
Gruffydd Jones, Gonzo Pozzo, and Sanjay Seth. My future research ambitions
have in no small way been inspired by the department's intellectual ethos.
Within the broader International Relations community, Mats Berdal, Stephen
Chan, James Der Derian, Mervyn Frost, Nick Renegger, Hidemi Suganami,
and Rob Walker have all contributed in various ways to the project. I would also
like to thank the members of the Warburg Institute of the University of London
for allowing me to use their wonderful library.
xii Acknowledgments
the later sixteenth century was a response to the emergence of the "new phenom-
enon of the territorial state. It referred in legal terms to the elemental political fact
ofthat age-the appearance of a centralized power that exercised its lawmaking
and law-enforcing authority within a certain territory." 5
a chronicle of the waning of the medieval and the waxing of the modern
spatialization of the world, an effect so powerful that, ever since, people pur-
suing statecraft have been able to subjugate and direct ecclesiastical author-
ity on behalf of policy that unfolds within a horizontal, desacralized world.
Indeed, much of the subsequent history of world politics involves the demise
of the authorities connected to a vertical world and the ascension of those
connected to a horizontal, geopolitical one. 10
Shapiro's observations raise two fundamental questions. First, under what cir-
cumstances, within what set of intellectual and cultural conditions could this
transition from a hierarchical to an anarchical territorial order be conceived
and represented? Second, when did this transformation occur? With respect
to the first question, one of the working premises of this book is that, contrary
to the implicit claim of the territorial a priori, ideas of sovereign-territoriality
are not universal, fixed and objective, but particular, transitory and subjective;
they are embedded in a culture's collective imagination and become manifest in
its representations of its being-in-space. The transformation from hierarchy to
anarchy was, maintains Shapiro, primarily derived from changes in the way that
the relationship between space and politics was imagined: "the separation of the
world into kinds of space is perhaps the most significant kind of practice for
establishing the systems of intelligibility within which understandings of global
politics are forged." 11 How we imagine our being-in-space has consequences for
politics and vice-versa. Concepts of space and political ideologies combine in
practices of representation, made manifest in texts and images, which do not
simply reproduce the truths of some pre-existing reality. They are discourses
understood not as "groups of signs (signifying elements referring to contents
or representations)" but in Michel Foucault's sense as "practices that systemat-
ically form the objects of which they speak." 12 Thus when we examine texts or
images that convey, implicitly or explicitly, particular notions of territoriality
we must, as David Campbell warns, be mindful of the political consequences
of "adopting one mode of representation over another." 13 Thus territory must
Introduction 5
The real break, prepared through the fourteenth century, becomes manifest
in the fifteenth. In the fifteenth century the old constitution of the Respublica
Christiana finally breaks down. The attempt at its constitutional reform in
the Conciliar Movement is a failure. The papacy is transformed from an ecu-
menical theocracy into an Italian great power. The assertion of sovereignty
by the secular powers, growing since the thirteenth century, becomes nor-
mal. The first lamentations about international anarchy are heard. To miti-
gate the anarchy, the first attempts at collective security are made. To assist
them, the new invention of reciprocal resident embassies becomes general. As
collective security proves itself unworkable, because demanding too much,
the simpler system of a balance of power grows up. 17
presented as curios that serve to illustrate the distance that the civilized mod-
ern world, imbued with Enlightenment ideals, has taken from the passions and
doxas of medieval Christendom. As Wight observes "[t]he Westphalian inter-
pretation of the history of the states-system fits in with the doctrine that the
Scientific Revolution marks a more important epoch in the general history of
Europe than does the Renaissance." 18 Of course history is rarely so neat. As
Krasner points out both the Papacy and the Holy Roman Empire remained sig-
nificant international actors after 1648, and several medieval political entities
(the independent city states of northern Italy, the realm of England and some
German city states) were de facto if not de jure sovereign institutions with effec-
tive control over their territories from as early as 1300. 19
In many ways the Westphalian narrative dovetails with the ideal of moder-
nity as Cosmopolis. As described by Steven Toulmin, Cosmopolis was the uto-
pia of seventeenth century rationalists, an order combining nature (cosmos) and
human society (polis) in which the perceived structure of nature reinforced a
rational social order according to the dictates of reason. 20 The intellectual archi-
tects of Cosmopolis, motivated by faith in science and the dictates of natural phi-
losophy, set out to distance their society from the values, principles, and ideals
of an earlier Renaissance humanist tradition of modernity. Toulmin, however,
makes too much of the Renaissance/Cosmopolis distinction. Not all Renaissance
thought was as open-minded and as 'sceptically tolerant' of plurality and ambi-
guity as his reading of Montaigne, Rabelais, Shakespeare, and Erasmus implies.
Conversely, many Classical minds were opposed to the rationalist architectonic
projects of Galileo, Descartes, and Newton. Indeed, with respect to space and
territoriality the conditions of possibility for a Cosmopolitan imaginary in which
space could be known rationally, ordered systematically and rendered the object
of man's desires, was established during the European Renaissance of the fif-
teenth and early sixteenth centuries. Renaissance texts and images reveal that
in terms of space and territoriality it was during this period and not during
Cosmopolis that the rupture or break with the medieval territorial imaginary was
initiated. It was during the Renaissance that the hierarchical arrangement of
medieval culture, structured by the prevalent spatial figure of above and below,
was undermined. The medieval mind conceived of sovereign-territoriality
through a prism in which order was determined by rigid perpendicular chains
of being. The multiple overlapping jurisdictions and allegiances of the medi-
eval political world were structured vertically through hierarchies of political
authority that extended up far beyond the temporal authorities of Emperor and
Papacy to culminate in the ethereal realm of the Civitas Dei. This whole edifice
was destabilized by the Renaissance re-imagining and reconstituting of the rela-
tionship between man and his being-in-space. In terms of political territoriality
this resulted in the gradual delegitimization of any claims to sovereignty located
Introduction 7
above the state. The Renaissance established the modern territorial imaginary
in which territorial sovereignty is parceled out over a horizontal plane and the
dominant spatial motif opposes inside and outside. This transformation from a
medieval to modern political cosmology, from a vertical and hierarchical order
of sovereign-territoriality to a horizontal and anarchic order, is the subject of
this book.
international order" it serves to "reinforce if not reify ... a status quo diplomatic
system.' 25 Second, it reinforces this tradition's evolutionist historical narrative
that records the gradual refinement and improvement of diplomatic practice.
Nevertheless, Der Derian agrees that the establishment of permanent residences
during the Italian Renaissance was an important innovation, especially in the
context of the humanist revival of the classical doctrine of raison d'etat. Just as
Meinecke's diplomat was "the discoverer of the interests of states" so Machiavelli
posited raison d'etat as the state's "intelligence," which allowed it to form an
objective awareness of its environment. 26 However, for Der Derian neither
Machiavellian raison d'etat nor the institution of permanent residences qualify
as instances of "diplomacy" understood as the "mediation of mutual estrange-
ments between states." 27 Renaissance practice "corresponded to an extreme state
of anarchy and estrangement of the city states from hegemonic empires' and
is thus a manifestation of "proto-diplomacy" or a one sided mediation, whose
genealogy can be traced back to St. Augustine. 28 Although for Der Derian the
gaze of Renaissance is primarily directed to the past, occasionally it glimpses
the future. For, like Boucher and Knutsen, he credits Machiavelli with sweeping
away "the remnants of a mythical Christian unity to open the way for a system
of diplomacy based on states' interests." 29 This work will share Der Derian's
suspicion of evolutionist narratives, but whereas for Der Derian the Renaissance
is still predominantly an expression of medieval thought and practice, I shall
contend that the modern territorial imaginary had its genesis during this trans-
formational epoch in European cultural history.
DerDerian's refusal to enfold Renaissance diplomacy within an evolution-
ist historical narrative is echoed in Christian Reus-Smit's comparative study
of international societies in The Moral Purpose of the State. 3 For Reus-Smit
the primary institutions of international society are historically and culturally
contingent. Their differences are derived from the fundamental set of core val-
ues or constitutional structures that the states that comprise each international
society look to when justifying their right to exist and act as sovereign entities.
International society is ordered by these "coherent ensembles of intersubjective
beliefs, principles, and norms" because they determine which actors are legiti-
mately recognized as states and the limits to their actions. 31 Of these, the moral
purpose of the state is the fundamental normative criterion: it determines the
basis upon which sovereign rights are established, the organizing principle of
sovereignty, the norm of procedural justice, and ultimately the nature of an
international society. Reus-Smit argues that the social structure of Renaissance
Italy was constituted by patronage, which had arisen as a response to the anx-
ieties generated by the erosion of guild-based corporate structures and the
retreat of papal and imperial sources of authority. Relations of patronage bound
"patrons and clients in a web of mutual obligations, established and maintained
10 From Hierarchy to Anarchy
through rhetorical speech and ritual gesture." 32 All authority claims were
grounded in "appeals to honorific grandeur," which engendered a specific ratio-
nal for sovereignty-"the pursuit of civic glory, or grandezza, was celebrated as
the city-state's primary raison d'etre." 33 The realization of grandezza, required
the nurturing of concordia whereby individuals would place the common good
before their own self interest or factional advantage. Although the humanists
promoted concordia as substantive justice, rewarding virtue and rectifying vice,
in practice the values of patronage prevailed in "the ritual enactment of virtue,
through ceremonial rhetoric and gesture, determining patterns of social and
political interaction, individual worth and entitlement, and the distribution of
social goods." 34 In the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries as city states moved to
seigniorial or oligarchic rule, these ritual norms and practices not only shaped
relations between individuals but also came to determine those between rulers
and subjects and were adopted by political elites "to establish the social identity,
legitimacy and status of their city states within the interstate system, and when
courting cooperative relations with other states." 35 Thus resident ambassadors
served as the conduits for "oratorical diplomacy" or the presentation and pro-
motion of civic grandeur as a key element of a state's identity and an essential
element in the balance of power.
Reus-Smit makes an important claim, one fully endorsed here, that the
political institutions of the Renaissance need to be understood within a broader
matrix of social relations and normative values. This contextual approach has
some affinity with historical sociological studies of the development of the mod-
ern states-system, such as Justin Rosenberg's historical-materialist critique of
Realism's "transhistorical theory of states-systems sui generis" in The Empire
of Civil Society. 36 For Rosenberg because Realists isolate geopolitical structures
from the social relations within which they are embedded, they reify what are
historically specific social forms of sovereignty and anarchy and reduce interna-
tional history to recurrent power struggles between sovereign states operating
within anarchy. This impoverished historical imagination occludes the differ-
ences between different historical state systems and could be enriched by adopt-
ing a historical-materialist method that recognises how the prevailing forms of
the relations of production constitute social and political institutions, includ-
ing those underpinning the international system. Since relations of production
change across time so do political structures and the nature of the relations
between them. Thus with respect to the Renaissance, Rosenberg takes issue with
Mattingly's assertion that "Italy first found the system of organising interstate
relationship[s] which Europe later adopted, because Italy, towards the end of
the Middle Ages, was already becoming what later all Europe would become." 37
Mattingly fails to acknowledge that the autonomous political institutions of
the Italian city-state arose as particular responses to "a radical institutional
Introduction 11
with the new urban configurations of social and economic power. The ulti-
mate victory of the sovereign state was not due to superior war-making as many
historical sociologists have contended. For although the Hanseatic League and
Italian city-states had effective command of money, warfare and security, it
was the ability of the larger territorial states to deploy their superior organiza-
tional capabilities to provide the higher degree of standardization and certitude
required for the expansion of commerce that secured their victory. As regards
Italy, Spruyt shares Rosenberg's interest with the emergence of the two to three
hundred independent communes that dominated Italy around 1200. By 1450,
however, this political landscape had changed profoundly for the ascent of the
signoria, tougher market conditions and foreign interventions had reduced their
number to a handful of territorial city states that in many ways "resembled the
sovereign, territorial state. Like the French monarchy, the city-state had devel-
oped notions of sovereignty and the public realm. Roman law figured predom-
inantly. And like the sovereign state, the city state had territorial parameters.'>4 1
However, the Italian city-states cannot be considered as fully fledged sovereign
territories because many of the previously independent towns within their ter-
ritories retained considerable degrees of independence and factional struggles
within the cities prevented the emergence of a sovereign authority analogous
to the French king. Spruyt is correct that Renaissance city-state territoriality
was structured in terms of centers and peripheries. However, this did not pre-
clude Renaissance political thinkers like Machiavelli from articulating an idea
of sovereign territoriality that, while it may have been a more apt description of
the northern states at the time, did nevertheless establish the conceptual and
ideological premises underlying the modern discourse of sovereign territoriality.
Since Spruyt, like Rosenberg, favors a methodology that tends to pass over pri-
mary source material in favor of secondary interpretations, these expressions of
the modern territorial imaginary in Renaissance discourse are overlooked.
Chapter Outlines
The next chapter, "International Relations, Political Theory, and the Territorial
State," considers the place and role of the territorial a priori in International
Relations theory. It argues that International Relations theory, from Realism
to Constructivism and from Liberal Institutionalism to International Society,
implicitly endorses an ideal of the territorial a priori that is derived from an
"absolutist" tradition of political theory reaching from Hobbes to Hegel.
Since Max Weber's theory of the state established the paradigm of the mod-
ern territorial a priori and its attendant geopolitical sensitivity it is discussed in
detail. Finally, the poststructuralist critics of the "sovereignty problematic" in
International Relations is considered as a starting point for further investigation
Introduction 13
into the workings and provenance of the modern territorial imaginary. Building
on this discussion of post-structuralism, chapter 3, "Theorizing Territoriality:
Discourse, Culture, History," establishes the theoretical or methodological
premises that underpin the subsequent inquiry into the cultural history of space
and territoriality. Drawing on a wide body of work that has addressed the intel-
lectual, social, cultural, and political nature of space, the chapter defines three
aspects of the "territorial imaginary" that serves as the primary heuristic concept
used throughout this work. First, the "territorial imaginary" recognizes that
the idea of state territoriality is a representation of space, a product of various
discourses of knowledge and power that order political space. Second, the con-
cept of the "territorial imaginary" alert us to the fact that political discourses
of sovereign territoriality are informed by a broad matrix of ideas and practices
that together constitute a society's culture of space. This culture, comprising
various discourses of space, determines the epistemic field of possibility within
which representations of territoriality come to have meaning and value. Third,
the "territorial imaginary" refuses the claim that territoriality is a primordial or
transcendent feature of all human social formations. Territorial imaginaries are
historically and culturally contingent. New configurations of spatial discourse
and practice produce new frameworks for understanding man's being-in-space.
With the theoretical framework in place, the next two chapters move to
the historical account of the transformation of the European territorial imagi-
nary. The medieval culture of space was dominated by the episteme of hierar-
chy. Chapter 4 begins by outlining the writings of Diortysius the Areophagite
on the celestial and ecclesiastical hierarchies, for they established the para-
digm of hierarchy within which the medieval understanding of man's political
being-in-space was articulated. The Dionysian hierarchical order of space was
made manifest in medieval society through the structures of feudalism, notably
vassalage and fief-holding, in the codes of chivalry and, in particular, in feudal-
ism's legitimizing "mental representation" of the three orders. Dante's Divine
Comedy is read to demonstrate how the medieval culture of space interwove
physical and political cosmology within a shared spatial episteme determined
by the figure of above and below. Scholastic theological discourse, which rein-
forced the hierarchical structure of being, also impacted on medieval geogra-
phy. In the famous T-0 maps, the earth's spaces were not, as in modern maps,
defined in terms of abstract mathem~tical coordinates, but were distributed in
places that were allocated different values according to hierarchical principles.
Chapter 5, "Christanitas, Hierarchy, and Medieval Political Discourse," builds
on this general account of the medieval culture of space to argue that its hierar-
chical architectonics determined the possibilities for thinking about territorial-
ity within medieval political discourse. This claim is made with reference to the
tripartite power struggle between Papacy, Empire, and Monarchy that defined
14 From Hierarchy to Anarchy
medieval international relations. At stake was not only the right to rule over but
the ability to determine the nature of European political society. However, the
differences between the ideals of Ecclesia or Christianitas promoted by the papal
doctrine of plenitudo potestatis, Dante's imperial ideal of humana civilitas, or
John of Paris's Capetian-sponsored advocacy of civitas were less significant than
their shared territorial imaginary. All were premised on the understanding that
sovereign-territoriality was not restricted to the horizontal plane of the earth's
surface but was structured hierarchically, extending from the Civitas Terrena to
the Civitas Dei, the divine font of sovereignty. The spaces of the medieval world,
including its territorial imaginary, were structured according to the episteme of
hierarchy.
Chapter 6, "The Renaissance Critique of Hierarchy," begins the task of iden-
tifying in the Renaissance culture of space those ideas that would challenge the
hierarchies of the medieval order. The meaning of the Renaissance is conten-
tious and the chapter begins by acknowledging the difficulties in defining its
contours and determining its relationship to medieval and modern cultures.
An important challenge to the medieval episteme of hierarchy was mounted
in the Renaissance cosmologies of Ficino and Pica della Mirandola that devel-
oped a recognizably modern notion of sovereign identity. Their promotion of
the "dignity of man" not only released man from his lowly fixed position in
the cosmos and thereby destroyed the pivotal foundation of the hierarchical
universe, but also asserted that man as self-fashioner was capable of shaping
and ordering nature and its spaces, rather than being shaped and ordered by
them. Machiavelli's realism also assisted in dismantling the hierarchies of the
medieval political cosmos. Machiavelli not only situated politics within a new
conception of time, but also resited politics in the space of modern territorial
sovereignty. In maintaining that religion had no purpose other than to cement
solidarity within political society and by castigating Christianity as an espe-
cially ineffective form of state religion, Machiavelli brought down territorial
sovereignty from the celestial spaces of the Civitas Dei to the mundane world
of terrestrial politics. Machiavelli is also the main subject of the next chap-
ter, "Machiavelli, Territoriality, and Lo Stato", which explores the modernity of
Machiavelli's territorial imaginary in terms of his promotion of the secular state.
Starting with a consideration of the various meanings of lo stato in Renaissance
political discourse, the chapter then identifies in Machiavelli's discussion of the
state in The Prince and The Discourses three elements of the modern territo-
rial imaginary. First, Machiavelli's emphasis on the legal concept of dominion
embodies a distinct sense of sovereignty as the extension of political authority
over a defined territory. Second, Machiavelli's distinction between the internal
and external exercise of political violence legitimizes the spatial figure of inside/
outside. Finally, Machiavelli's evocation of italianita, articulated in terms of
Introduction 15
The first section looks at state theory in International Relations and argues
that it tends to be underpinned by, what I term, the territorial a priori. The
second section will trace the emergence of the idea of the territorial state in an
absolutist tradition of political theory that, reaching from Hobbes to Hegel,
reaches its apotheosis in Weber's famous definition of the modern state as an
institution laying legitimate claim to the means of violence within a defined
territory. Section three frames this paradigm of state territoriality within the
Cosmopolitan tradition of modernity. Finally, I shall discuss how the poststruc-
turalist critique of the "sovereignty problematic" in International Relations
unsettles the assumptions that underpin the idea of the territorial state.
Third, because we can only represent one space to ourselves "space is essentially
one" rather than multiple. It is pure intuition rather than a general concept
that requires thought to impose limitations on it. Finally, space is represented
as an "infinite given magnitude" containing an infinite number of representa-
tions within it. 9 Space then in Kant's idealist framework is an a priori intuition
located within the subject. It precedes objects and allows the concept of the
object to be determined a priori. 10
I shall return to Kant presently, but at this stage I want to advance the prop-
osition that territory in international theory has a status analogous to space
in Kant's transcendental aesthetic. Just as for Kant space is the condition of
possibility for sensible intuition of the world, so territory serves as an a priori
condition underpinning state theory in International Relations. The territorial
a priori takes many different forms in International Relations theory ranging
from crude associations with some physical or material reality to more pro-
found, but nonetheless still unsatisfactory, attempts to understand territory in
terms of the institutional determinants of sovereignty.
The most explicitly materialist statements of state territoriality tend to be
made by Classical Realists who argue that the power of the state is dependent
on the material resources at its disposal.U According to John Herz the modern
nation-state has an underlying essence that is found "in its physical, corporeal
capacity: as an expanse of territory encircled for its identification and its defense
by a 'hard shell' of fortifications." 12 Reflecting on the state of the state at the
beginning of the Cold War, Herz forecast the "passing of the age of territoriality"
as the state's space became penetrated by economic forces and by psychological,
air, and nuclear warfare. However, ten years later, he expressed renewed confi-
dence in the ability of the territorial state to survive. The "new or neo-territorial"
state was now capable of resisting both nuclear attack and the forces of transna-
tionalism.13 Herz also maintained that the state's territorial impermeability was
the underlying foundation of the classical system of international relations and
its institutions of international law, the balance of power, and war. Accordingly,
now that the state's territorial integrity was guaranteed he did not foresee any
imminent structural changes to the contemporary states-system. 14 Raymond
Aron also emphasized the material reality of the state's territory, claiming that
a state's authority was dependent on its possession of "a fragment of the earth's
20 From Hierarchy to Anarchy
crust, with the men and objects thereon." 15 Because the space or milieu a state
occupies is an important source of its power-it provides the resources and
manpower required for defense-it is in the interests of states to increase their
space. Thus the history of the international system has been driven by conflict
over space, as states, seeking to increase their power, dispute the territories occu-
pied by some and desired by others. The consequence of this Darwinian strug-
gle for possession of the earth's physical space is that "[e]very international order,
down to our own day, has been essentially territorial. It represents an agreement
among sovereignties, the compartmentalization of space." 16
In Kenneth Waltz's structural neorealism the territorial a priori is less explicit.
For Waltz, who resists any reductionist explanations of the international system
in terms of the nature of the units that make it up, the question of state terri-
toriality takes a back seat. 17 Because all international systems are structured by
anarchy the actors are logically undifferentiated and functionally equivalent,
meaning that the only significant variable of concern to international theory is
the distribution of power. Analysis of international politics must "abstract from
every attribute of states except their capabilities." Territory is simply a compo-
nent of a state's material power resource or capability. States can thus be ranked
according to "how they score on all the following items: size of population and
territory, resource endowment, economic capability, military strength, political
stability, and competence." 18 In contrast to Waltz, Robert Gilpin offers a more
rigorous and historically sensitive neorealist account of state territoriality. Gilpin
acknowledges that the state has taken on many different forms in practice and
that only the modern state embodies complex class and social structures, asserts
a claim to national identity, and exercises a distinctive means of controlling its
territory. 19 The modern state is the only state form characterized by "a strong
central authority that is differentiated from other social organizations" and is
capable of exercising "control over a well-defined and contiguous territory." 20
For Gilpin a state's territoriality has a functional role similar to that of property
rights in the domestic realm. Resources in international politics are distributed
in terms of relative territorial extension and just as the redistribution and redef-
inition of property rights signals fundamental transformations in domestic pol-
itics, so the redistribution of territory following major wars indicates significant
transformation in the realm of international politics. 21
Contemporary realism has adopted some of the theoretical premises of con-
structivism. Alexander Wendt rejects both the neorealist insistence that anarchy
forces states into self-interested behavior resulting in conflict, and the neoliberal
hypothesis that states in anarchy can learn to cooperate with one another in
the pursuit of absolute gains. For Wendt anarchy is a fluid concept determined
by the "inter-subjectively constituted structure of identities and interests in the
system." 22 Anarchy is the product of the practices of state interaction. Although
IR, Political Theory, Territorial State 21
that space within which, in principle, one state, the state to which the ter-
ritory belongs, is entitled to carry our coercive acts, a space from which all
the other states are excluded. It is the space for which, according to general
international law, only one definite national legal order is authorized to pre-
scribe coercive acts, the space within which only the coercive acts stipulated
by chis order tnay be executed. It is the space within the so-called boundaries
of the state.35
In sum we can endorse John Agnew and Stuart Corbridge's observation that
international theory, or at least states-system theory, is floundering in a "terri-
torial trap." They argue that International Relations' geographical imaginary
divides the world up into mutually exclusive territorial states, thereby restricting
the discipline's potential field of enquiry. This territorial trap is set by three
related intellectual dispositions. First, the assumption that state territoriality
is always and everywhere coterminous with state sovereignty has the effect of
sanctifying the sovereign territorial state as a "sacred unit beyond historical
time."36 The second presumption, derived from the mercantilist subordination
of economics to politics, posits territorial states as the primary nodes of interna-
tional economic exchange. Finally, the social is subsumed within the political
in so far as the only social groups (nations) viewed as being significant are those
coterminous with the boundaries of the territorial state. Unable to see beyond
the walls and bars of the architecture of its incarceration, mainstream theory
is, they argue, unable to account for the emergent phenomena of globalization
such as population movements, capital mobility, environmental insecurities and
the chronopolitics of the modern military: "(s]ocial, economic and political life
cannot be ontologically contained within the territorial boundaries of states
through the methodological assumption of'timeless space'." 37
by opposing it to the state of nature represented as its other. The architects of the
new sovereign state presented it in its modernity. It was bounded, abstract, insti-
tutional, demythologized, and secular. 38 At the same time "a number of princes
sitting in a field uttering the words, cuius regia, eius religio" invented interna-
tional relations as a state of nature. 39 Many of these princes represented the
emerging absolutist states, the archetypal political projects of Cosmopolis. For
Zygmunt Bauman the absolutist state, with its projection of an image of order
and security, offered a palliative to the pervasive sense ofinsecurity and fear that
swept though early modern culture as the theocratic hierarchies of the medie-
val world were swept away by the new spirit of rationalism. The Cosmopolitan
search for order manifested itself in spatial projects that sought to substitute the
chaotic and disorderly space of the medieval town for the linear purity and per-
fect order embodied by Versailles. 40 This new order was designed, created and
legitimized by a modern "space-managing state" that set about "landscaping the
wasteland ... subjecting all local features to one unifying homogenizing princi-
ple of harmony.'>4 1
The Cosmopolitan opposition between the absolutist state and the state of
nature replicates the inside/outside dichotomy characteristic of modern political
discourse. Thomas Hobbes' Leviathan neatly sets up the opposition between
the state of nature and the sovereign state. 42 Rob Walker argues that Hobbes's
political theory is infused with a desire to overcome the temporal and contin-
gent nature of politics by fixing it to a secure and permanent space. 43 Hobbes
believed that through the application of science and geometry to politics
"man could construct a political order as timeless as a Euclidean theorem.'>4 4
Nevertheless, Leviathan does not contain an explicit statement of modern sover-
eign territoriality. The Common-wealth's territoriality is only addressed in the
context of a discussion of the rights that the European Commonwealths have
over their colonies. Since God allocated raw materials to different parts of the
earth Commonwealths must by necessity trade with one another. These bodies
are partially distinguished by their dominion over different territories: "[t]his
Matter, commonly called Commodities, is partly Native, and partly Forraign:
Native, that which is to be had within the Territory of the Common-wealth:
Forraign, that which is imported from without.'>4 5 Perhaps the most striking
representation of sovereign territoriality in the Leviathan is the famous image
adorning the frontispiece. Here the Leviathan, made up of the members of the
commonwealth and brandishing a scepter of justice and a sword, towers over the
city and its surrounding countryside that he both protects and controls.
A more direct engagement with the spatial aspect of politics can be found
in Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Following Aristotle, Rousseau in the Social Contract
seeks to establish the optimum size for a state. A successful political community
must maintain an appropriate balance between the size of its territory and the
IR, Political Theory, Territorial State 25
number of people that inhabit it. Men "make up the State and the land feeds
the men.'>4 6 Rousseau's admiration for the ancient polis and the Renaissance
city-state led him to conclude that social harmony is to be found in small com-
munities and to doubt the benefits of expansionist policies. The larger a state
grows the more protracted the social bond becomes and the greater the chance
of" deficient government" and the suppression of freedom. 47 Further, the social
contract is forged in a bond that unites individual private property with state
territory. In order to establish a political community each individual must give
himself, "his force and possession," to it. "Each of us puts his person and all his
power in common under the supreme direction ofthe general will; and in a body we
receive each member as an indivisible part ofthe whole. 4B Under such an arrange-
ment it is understandable
how the combined and contiguous lands of private individuals become pub-
lic territory, and how the right of sovereignty, extending from the subjects
to the ground they occupy, comes to include both property and persons,
which places those who possess land in a greater dependency and turns even
their force into a guarantee of their loyalty. This advantage does not appear
to have been well understood by ancient monarchs who, only calling them-
selves Kings of the Persians, the Scythians, the Macedonians, seem to have
considered themselves leaders of men rather than masters of the country.
Today's kings more cleverly call themselves Kings of France, Spain, England,
etc. By thus holding the land, they are quite sure to hold its inhabitants. 49
With respect to colonial territories, Rousseau argues that the European powers
do not have the right to dispossess the indigenous inhabitants of their lands
even if these people have no recognizable state institutions. The inhabitants
of a land are protected by the right of first occupant secured through private
property. However, certain conditions must be met for this right to be rec-
ognized: the first inhabitants must only occupy previously uninhabited land,
they may only take the amount ofland required for subsistence, and possession
must be taken by labor and cultivation rather than by "vain ceremony.'' From
these premises Rousseau, with an eye to the exclusion of the French from the
conquest of South America, criticizes the territorial claims of the European
colonial powers.
How can a man or a people seize an immense territory and deprive the whole
human race of it except through punishable usurpation, since this act takes
away from the remaining men the dwelling place and foods that nature gives
them in common? When Nunez Balboa, standing on the shore, took posses-
sion of the South Sea and all of South America in the name of the crown of
26 From Hierarchy to Anarchy
Castile, was this enough to dispossess all the inhabitants and exclude all the
Princes of the world?5
By the time Immanuel Kant published Perpetual Peace the idea of the terri-
torial state was firmly established in European political thought. 51 Kant, like
Rousseau, accepted that the legitimate actors of international politics were inde-
pendent sovereign territorial states. Yet he considered the Ancien Regime practice
of acquiring states by "inheritance, exchange, purchase, or gift" to be illegiti-
mate because
a state, unlike the ground upon which it is based, is not a possession (patri-
monium). It is a society of men, which no-one other than itself can command
or dispose of. Like a tree, it has its own roots, and to graft it on to another
state as if it were a shoot is to terminate its existence as a moral personality
and make it into a commodity. 52
the master of space was the state. Space perfected the rational and the real-
simultaneously."58 Certainly in his writings on international law, Hegel affirms
the individual subjectivity ofindependent territorial states. In order to be auton-
omous they can and should meet their needs within their own borders.59 The
individual state, like the individual human being, is a subject to the extent that
it is aware of its own existence "as a unit in sharp distinction from others. It
manifests itself here in the state as a relation to other states, each of which is
autonomous vis-a-vis the others."60
[A] state is a human community that (successfully) claims the monopoly ofthe
legitimate use ofphysical force within a given territory. Note that "territory"
is one of the characteristics of the state .... The state is considered the sole
source of the "right" to use violence. 61
The particular potency of the modern territorial state derives from its capac-
ity to command the forces of rationalization, nationalism and geopolitics. In
modernity the eclipse of value rationality by purposeful rationality, evident
from the scientific mastery of nature to the bureaucratic control of society,
make most human life, motivated only by instrumental goals, drearily pre-
dictable.63 An important aspect of bureaucratic rationalization was the use of
discipline or "the consistently rationalized, methodically trained and exact exe-
cution of the received order, in which all personal criticism is unconditionally
suspended and the actor is unswervingly and exclusively set for carrying out the
28 From Hierarchy to Anarchy
develops between state and nation. The state provides the protection necessary
for safeguarding Kulture, while national communities generate the feelings of
solidarity that reinforce the state's legitimacy. However, while state and nation
are ideally coextensive, Weber recognized that this was not always so. "There
are three rational components of a political boundary, military security, eco-
nomic interest, community of national culture; the three do not just coincide
like that on a map." 72
Weber's desire to fix national identities within bounded territories was a
typical response to the sense of insecurity generated by transformations in the
European experience of space during the fin de siecle. The development of the
new technologies of railways, telegraphs and telephones had two important
consequences for Europeans. First, places that had previously been experienced
as distant appeared to become more proximate as exchanges between them
increased in volume. Second, the idea that the European heartland constituted
the centre of the world was undermined by an increased awareness of the exis-
tence of other places and cultures. The combination of collapsing distances and
the decentering of Europe led to what David Harvey has called the "insecuri-
ties of a shifting relative space." 73 This cultural unease precipitated measures to
reaffirm personal and communal identities in place. Indigenous traditions were
reinvented and local cultural memory affirmed in museums, libraries, exhibi-
tions, and ruins. The perception that the world's spaces were shrinking and
combining revitalized the European desire "embedded in their historical con-
sciousness" to take command of space. 74
This desire to master space imbued much contemporary geopolitical writ-
ing that asserted that politics and history were ultimately determined by
spatial factors such as states' size, location and the distance between them.
Friedrich Ratzel, the discipline's founder and Weber's contemporary, drew on
Darwinian evolutionary theory to represent national struggles for survival as
conflicts over space. States were rooted, living organisms that had to evolve
by increasing their territories. National cultures were grounded in the "spa-
tial unity of life" or the land (culture meaning literally the tillage of soil) and
cultural development was dependent on territorial expansion. The larger a
state became the more civilized it could become and, conversely, "[a]ll people
who remain at lower stages of cultural development are also spatially small
(kleinriiumig)." 75 Ratzel, implicitly justifying imperialist expansion, argued
that the development of all states "stands under the law of progress from
small to big spaces." 76 This Darwinian geopolitical discourse, premised on
the assumption that the state is an organic body that must necessarily evolve
to greatness, is also found in Weber's writings on geopolitics which, while
critical of the cult of Machtpolitik, betray grandiose aspirations for Germany.
All political organizations seek to reach their full potential and Germany was
30 From Hierarchy to Anarchy
Ashley and Walker stress that the sign of sovereignty does not just condition
modern political and international relations theory and practice but regulates
the epistemological and ontological possibilities of modern Western thought
per se. 93 Representations of the sovereign state mirror the desired ideal of
Western man as a rational, sovereign, self-identical presence. At the heart of
the paradigm of sovereignty is a set of preconceptions and assumptions about
space. Modern philosophical epistemology is predicated on an a priori spatial
separation between the autonomous knowing subject and the known object.
Walker claims that modern philosophical categories are attempts to overcome
"a metaphysics of distance, a dialectics of here and there, the delineation of
presence and absence in the stately measure of eternal geometry." 94 Sovereign
identity is secured through the establishment of difference; it is derived from
the "claim to be able to fix a point of identity-a universality in space and time
against which all differences in space and time can be measured, judged and
IR, Political Theory, Territorial State 33
Ashley does not specify which particular themes in Descartes' work lead him
to the notion of Cartesian practice of spatialization. Descartes' major contri-
bution to the mathematical understanding of space was to advocate the use
of coordinates to determine the position of a point in a plane by its distance
from two fixed lines. However, it is likely that Ashley is referring to the phi-
losopher's famous dualism of mind and matter as the two mutually exclusive
divisions of the universe. Walker also hints at a broader frame of reference by
suggesting that the combination of the political doctrine of state sovereignty
with certain "spatial constructs associated with Euclid and Newton" produced
a "sense of inviolable and sharply delimited space." 97 By drawing Descartes
and Newton into the frame of reference Ashley and Walker imply that the dis-
course of territorial sovereignty cannot be accounted for exclusively within the
terms of politics. Walker suggests that discourse of sovereignty fed off a spatial
consciousness that extended "from Descartes' philosophy to Mercator's car-
tography, from Galilean mechanics to the magnificent constructions of Isaac
Newton and Immanuel Kant." 98
Following Ashley and Walker this work will seek to identify significant
correspondences and relays between overtly political conceptions of space,
such as state territoriality, and ideas and representations of space generated in
fields outside of the political sphere. However, it will reject Ashley's notion of
Cartesian practice with its implicit claim that the territorial a priori emerged
with the Cosmopolitan modernity of Descartes. Rather, it will argue that the
origins of the territorial a priori are to be found in the widespread revolution
in the conceptualization and representation of space that occurred during the
34 From Hierarchy to Anarchy
Territorial Discourse
These three heuristic principles-territory as an idea rather than an objective
material reality, territory as related to cultural representations in non-political
spheres, and territory as historically contingent rather than universal-are implied
in Robert Sack's work on territoriality as the geographical manifestation of social
power. Territoriality, for Sack, is a geographical strategy that controls people and
36 From Hierarchy to Anarchy
things by controlling the area they are located within. Territoriality is "the means
by which space and society are interrelated. Territoriality's changing functions
help us to understand the historical relationship between society, space and time." 1
The designation of an area as a territory involves more that simply circumscribing
things in space or on a map. Territoriality is a social practice through which an
individual or group aims to "affect, influence, or control people, phenomena, and
relationships, by delimiting and asserting control over a geographic area." 2 A terri-
tory is a place that needs to be maintained through constant vigilance and whose
boundaries must be permanently policed. Territoriality produces three effects:
classification by area; the communication of the limits of that area by physical or
verbal boundary markers; and control over access to the area and things in it. As
a social practice, territoriality has different historical meanings depending on the
extent to which societies maintain different degrees of access to people, things,
and relationships. It is a form of power that is not limited to the political sphere
but is exercised in every arena in which humans interact in space: from a parent
restricting a child's access to certain parts of the kitchen, to the layout of desks in
offices, or to the zoning strategies of city planning. Nevertheless, the most effec-
tive instrument of territorialization is the modern state which is able to control a
society in which different classes pursue distinctive economic activities abstracted
from place. The state itself is an abstracted form of power and in order for it
to appear "more accessible, visible or 'real'" it is "endowed with the most basic
attribute of objects-location and extension in space. In civilisation, the political
power of the state is areal or territorial. The state is reified by placing it in space.
Whatever else a state may be or do, it is territorial." 3
Sack's theory of territory as a historically contingent product of social prac-
tice is insightful. However, it retains elements of the territorial a priori. First,
Sack insists that in order to explain complex interactions a theory of territo-
riality must disclose a set of propositions which are logically and empirically
linked. 4 As such he remains committed to what David Campbell has termed
an epistemic realism, which assumes that "the world comprises objects the exis-
tence of which is independent of ideas or beliefs about them" and which locates
the explanations of action and events in material causes. 5 Second, Sack's con-
tention that territoriality as a social construct is willed into being can be con-
strued as remaining beholden to the discourse of sovereign presence, in so far
as a territory is envisioned as the desired outcome of a process orchestrated by a
fully constituted sovereign being (parent, chief, city-authority or state bureau-
cracy) whose identity is secured prior to its deployment of territoriality-the
regulation of behavior within defined boundaries. 6 Such a utilitarian notion of
territoriality as a form of social control at the service of an already constituted
power does not allow for the possibility that the subjectivity or identity of the
body exercising territoriality is itself produced by such practices.
Theorizing Territoriality 37
Sack's theory of territoriality then retains a place for the humanist ideal of a
fully constituted subject able to know and control its world. This humanist sub-
ject is rejected in historical materialist geographies, like that of David Harvey,
which class space and time as epiphenomena that express the dominant rela-
tions of production. Harvey argues that material practices of capitalism repro-
duce the structures of social life, including the categories of time and space.
Every mode of production incorporates "a distinctive bundle of time and space
practices and concepts." 7 Furthermore, contemporary consumer capitalism is
particularly adept at restructuring geographical space in order to both widen
and deepen markets so as to fulfil its inherent logic of expansion. 8 Yet, not all
historical materialist geographers are as economically determinist as Harvey.
Indeed the pioneer of historical materialist geography, Henri Lefebvre, argues
against such determinism, claiming that the relays between space and social
production are complex, with neither having ultimate priority over the other.
Relations of production both produce and are produced in space. While each
mode of production has a distinctive space, it is not possible to assert that the
forces of production necessarily give rise to particular configurations of space or
time. 9 The production of social spaces from the raw material of nature involves
many layers of mediation from economics to technology and from politics to
culture. Social space for Lefebvre
Indeed, Lefebvre insists that although space is formed out of natural and his-
torical elements it is also profoundly political: "it is a product literally filled
with ideologies." 11 In order to expose these ideologies Lefebvre's methodology
differentiates three moments or modalities of social space: the perceived, the
38 From Hierarchy to Anarchy
conceived, and the lived. Perceived space is embodied in spatial practice or the
time-space routines and spatial structures through which social, political, and
economic life is produced and reproduced. Spatial practice can be observed
empirically. It is the material expression of social relations in space as manifest
in architecture, city-planning, classrooms, marketplaces, factories, and in every-
day life. 12 By contrast, lived or representational spaces are those appropriated by
the imagination to give physical space meaning by way of historically embedded
signs and imagesP Representational space "is alive: it speaks, it has an affec-
tive kernel or centre: Ego, bed, bedroom, dwelling, house; or square, church,
graveyard. It embraces the loci of passion, of action, and of lived situations ..." 14
Further, it is often a place of resistance where cultural and artistic movements
oppose the spatial practices of the dominant social order.
For our purposes the most important of Lefebvre's three modalities is con-
ceived space or representations of space. These are the conceptual abstractions,
the frames of knowledge (savoir) that configure spatial practices. Representations
of space are the abstract, visual, and imaginary spaces of social engineers, urban
planners, architects, and cartographers who materially inscribe the dominant
social order's relations of production. They are the conduits through which
knowledge of space leads to the production of space in practice. Representations
of space intervene and modify spatial textures and have a substantial role in the
production of space. Their intervention occurs "by way of architecture, con-
ceived of not as the building of a particular strUcture, palace or monument, but
rather as a project embedded in a spatial context and a texture which calls for
'representations' that will not vanish into the symbolic or imaginary realms." 15
Lefebvre's concept of representations of space has some similarity with
Michel Foucault's theory of discourse. To be sure, Lefebvre refused any such
association and regarded Foucault as an intellectual sophist, purveying idealist
conceptions of space premised on the mistaken ontological assumption that the
mental realm envelops the social and physical worlds. For Lefebvre, Foucault's
use of spatial metaphors-for example where Foucault writes "knowledge
[savoir] is also the space in which the subject may take up a position and speak
of the objects with which he deals in his discourse"-lacked intellectual rigor.
It failed to specify either the nature of the spaces being considered or how
the gap between epistemology and the social use of space could be bridged. 16
Nevertheless, Foucault's investigation into the discursive production of space,
especially in the later genealogy with its concern with the political mapping of
forms of power, has more affinity with the notion of representations of space
than Lefebvre seems to allow for. In the earlier archaeology, which sought to
reveal how knowledge in diverse systems of thought was conditioned by com-
mon figures and tropes, Foucault rejected the standard epistemological assump-
tions that discourse denotes "the sign of something else" of "things" which are
Theorizing Territoriality 39
"silently anterior to it," and that words are linked to things by relations such as
symbolization, reference, or truth. 17 As it is not possible to decipher the truth
of the world through signs, any representation of the world does violence to
things. 18 Discourse is not a "groups of signs (signifying elements referring to
contents or representations)," but "practices that systematically form the objects
of which they speak." 19 Foucault's increasing awareness of the institutional con-
straints and controls exercised over the formation of discourses led him toward
the genealogical concept of the dispositif or apparatus. As a heterogeneous
matrix of discourse and institutional practices the dispositif arises at a given
historical moment in response to a particular need, it "has a strategic function
and manipulates specific relations of force." 2 For example, the apparatus which
identified and controlled madness and neurosis arose as a response to the mer-
cantilist economy's need to assimilate the mobile population. 21 In the dispositif
fluid relations of power and knowledge combine to reproduce idc;as of truth
and subjectivity. 22 Two important consequences derive from the concept of the
dispositif First, the subject is unable to speak truth to power. There is no privi-
leged position outside of power from where its hidden effects can' be uncovered
by truth. Truth in all societies is the effect of an accepted truth regime in which
certain discourses, reproduced by institutions and techniques, are validated as
being true. 23 Second, discourses of power/knowledge create subjectivity and
identity. They categorize and define the individual qua individual and produce
the individual's identity as a subject. 24
Although Foucault does not offer a systematic method for analyzing the rela-
tionship between space and discourse he is acutely aware of its importance.
"There is an administration of knowledge, a politics of knowledge, relations of
power which pass via knowledge and which, if one tries to transcribe them, lead
one to consider forms of domination designated by such notions as field, region
and territory." 25 In Discipline and Punish Foucault shows how, in the Classical
era, incarceration and surveillance were enabled by the discovery of the "docile
body" as an object of power to be appropriated, taken apart, and reconstituted
for speed and efficiency. 26 Disciplinary power constituted individuals in space
by means of several strategies: enclosure within confined spaces such as col-
leges, schools, barracks, workshops, and factories; partitioning or the assignment
of individuals to separate places; the production of functional sites or "useful
spaces" coded for particular operations; and classification which allocates places
in a system of ranking. 27 Although Foucault was at pains to distinguish dis-
ciplinary power from sovereign power, Michel de Certeau observes discipline
producing and organizing space at all levels of society. Disciplinary power per-
vades science, politics, and military strategy. It can be deployed by any subject
power willing and able to designate a place as its own from which relations with
"an exteriority composed of targets or threats" can be managed and controlled.
40 From Hierarchy to Anarchy
It is the vital concern of every State not only to vanquish nomadism but to
control migrations and, more generally, to establish a zone of rights over an
entire "exterior," over all of the flows traversing the ecumenon .... There is
still a need for fixed paths in well-defined directions, which restrict speed,
regulate circulation, relativize movement, and measure in detail the relative
movement of subjects and objects. 37
that perceptions of space were not, as Kant had asserted, based on some innate
understanding shared by all men, but were culturally determined. 39 These intel-
lectual reconceptualizations of space mirrored profound transformations in
social relations. The Cubist leveling of the traditional aesthetic hierarchy, which
had prioritized the subject over its background, found its social equivalent in the
leveling of aristocratic society, the emergence of democracy, and the collapse of
the distinction between sacred and profane spaces in religion.
Kern's work is important in that it promotes the idea of an overarching cul-
ture of space in which common vocabularies of space are to be found across a
wide range of knowledges. The implication for our study is that political the-
ories of territoriality are likely to be conditioned by spatial categories that per-
meate representations of space throughout the culture of modernity. However,
Kern's vivid descriptions of changes in the way in which space was thought
about are not complemented by a coherent explanatory methodology. How do
changes in one sphere impact on another? Is there a deep underlying struc-
ture that determines the conditions of possibility for thinking about space that
somehow straddles diverse branches of knowledge? In this respect, Lefebvre is
perhaps bolder when he asserts that modernity has one dominant spatial code,
one language of space, derived from classical perspective and Euclidean space
that arose out of "a specific relationship between town, country and political
territory.'>4 These codes produce a space of
John Ruggie is one of a few International Relations scholars who has sought
to explain transformations in the international system with reference to how
changes in territoriality reflect broader developments in the cultural repre-
sentation of space. 42 For Ruggie the transformation from the medieval to the
modern international system was premised on a profound re-imagining of
territoriality, itself a response to an equally fundamental transformation in
the principle of socio-political individuation. Ruggie, as a social constructiv-
ist, opposes the neorealist view that all international systems are functionally
similar. Rather, he sees the modern system of states as embodying a distinctive
territorial order. Its social construction drew upon the raw material found in
three irreducible dimensions of European collective experience: first, the mate-
rial environment constituted by eco-demographics, relations of production and
Theorizing Territoriality 43
function to the sedentary roads imposed by state bodies which parcel out a closed
space to people, assigning each person a share and regulating communication.
The nomad's trajectory "distributes people (or animals) in an open space, one that
is indefinite and non-communicating." 59 While sedentary space is striated by
"walls, enclosures, and roads between enclosures", nomadic space is smooth,
"marked only by 'traits' that are effaced and displaced with the trajectory."60
Just as the state perpetually seeks to striate space so the nomad deploys the
war machine "the constitutive element of smooth space" to continually expand
smooth space, to "increase the desert."61
form of property, embodying the right to exclude others from possession, with
a form of authority based on the total integration of all legal authority into
one public realm: "the modern system of rule consists of the institutionaliza-
tion of private property within mutually exclusive jurisdictional domains." 71 In
modernity the principle of homonomy structures political space into "territori-
ally disjoint, mutually exclusive, functionally similar, sovereign states." 72 These
sovereign territories evolved hand in hand with the consolidation of parallel
spatial distinctions between public and private and internal and external. The
"modern system of rule has ... differentiated its subject collectivity into territo-
rially defined, fixed, and mutually exclusive enclaves of legitimate dominion." 73
Although the heteronomy-homonomy opposition does not prioritize the reori-
entation of territoriality from a world of vertically structured hierarchies to a
horizontal order, it is implicit throughout. The presence of overlapping jurisdic-
tions implies a hierarchical stratification of authority, while independent terri-
torial states exist side by side on a horizontal spatial plane.
Ruggie's work highlights the historicity of practices of territoriality. The uni-
versalist pretensions of the territorial a priori are also challenged by Deleuze
and Guattari's comprehensive history of territorialization in the Anti-Oedipus,
which traces, over an extensive temporal horizon, the lines of flight along which
vectors of de-territorialization pass and the efforts of striating institutions to re-
territorialize these flows.74 The Anti-Oedipus proposes that primitive, despotic,
and capitalist "social machines" are distinguished by three distinctive modali-
ties of territorialization.7 5 Of these only the primitive machine is literally terri-
torial for it inscribes bodies onto an indivisible earth. It controls the productive
forces by "tattooing, excising, carving, scarifying, mutilating, encircling and
initiating" bodies.76 In primitive society the enjoyment of rights and the assign-
ment of duties are legitimized by symbolically marking bodies and consigning
organs and their exercise to the collectivity. The first signs in human history are
"territorial signs that plant their flags in bodies" and which attach and inscribe
the primitive's body onto "the undifferentiated, undivided earth." 77
When these primitive rural communities are overcome by barbarian des-
potic states a new modality of territorialization comes into play. The earth is
divided and segmented by a landed and residential administration. This is less
a promotion of territoriality than the first moment of de-territorialization. "The
immanent unity of the earth as the immobile motor gives way to a transcendent
unity of an altogether different nature-the unity of the State; the full body
is no longer that of the earth, it is the full body of the Despot ..."78 The des-
potic State machine overcodes the territorial codes and filiations of the primitive
machine and transfers them to the despot's body, which becomes the focus .of
desire and production. Advanced forms of the despotic state take advantage of
developments in the sciences of mathematics and. geometry to promote rational
50 From Hierarchy to Anarchy
Both analogical and cosmological space are absolute and iconic. They do not
refer to or symbolize any reality outside of or beyond themselves. For its citizens
"the city constituted their representation of space as a whole, of the earth, of the
world." 83 Political and religious spaces, set apart from the mundane, are simul-
taneously imaginary and real. "The 'mental' is 'realized' in a chain of 'social'
activities because, in the temple, in the city, in monuments and palaces, the
imaginary is transformed into the real." 84 Everything in these societies was sit-
uated, perceived, and interpreted in terms of such places. Absolute space was
thus more than just a collection of signs or sites but "a space, at once and indis-
tinguishably mental and social, which comprehends the entire existence of the
group concerned." 85
With the decline of the ancient civilizations and the emergence of the feudal
mode of production in Western Europe absolute space was replaced by sym-
bolic space. Symbolic space literally de-crypted the subterranean spaces of death,
the catacombs and burial chambers that had embodied the cosmos in the early
Christian imaginary. From the twelfth century onward space was turned on its
head and inverted. The darkness and descent of tombs and crypts give way to
the illumination and elevation of the monumental Gothic cathedrals. These
buildings were the built archetypes for the hierarchical spatial idi.aginary of
medieval culture and we shall explore how they both expressed and legitimized
religious and political hierarchies in chapter 5. Gothic cathedrals were vast sym-
bolic spaces whose architectonics, structured according to the hierarchical allo-
cation of horizontal layers, conveyed two important motifs. The first was, of
course, the dominion of heaven. On entering these cathedrals the observer's
thought was inexorably drawn up from the mundane world of appearances to
contemplate the wonders of the divine order. Second, these were also socio-
political spaces suffused with signs of power. The vertical towers and emblem-
atic facades signified the prestige and authority of"Church, King and city to the
crowds flocking to the porch."86
Lefebvre's fourth spatial order is that of abstract space, which is aligned to
the capitalist mode of production. Lefebvre, as we have already seen, considered
the modern codes of space to be underpinned by the criteria of classical perspec-
tive and geometry. While the symbolic spaces of the feudal order were partially
constituted through a visual logic, which combined the abstract language of
geometry and logic with theocratic authority, the abstract spaces of capitalism
are constituted by an all-encompassing logic of visualization, embedded in the
regime of linear perspective. 87 By the end of the twentieth century the spread of
late capitalism had ensured the global triumph of abstract space. These spaces of
late capitalism are constituted by representations of space that are complicit with
the complementary processes of commodification and bureaucratization. The
commodification of space imposes a geometric grid of property relations and
52 From Hierarchy to Anarchy
I deas of territorial-sovereignty are not universal and fixed but historical and
fluid. They are the products of particular, arbitrary, and ever-changing dis-
cursive conjunctions of politics and space. Histories of territorial-sovereignty
must therefore avoid two temptations: either to write a progressive history in which
sovereign-territoriality achieves its telos in modernity, or to assume that absolute
discontinuities or ruptures exist between different modes of territorialization.
Both of these tendencies are present in the Westphalia narrative that represents
medieval international politics as other to the modern international system of
sovereign territorial states. This dichotomy between medieval and modern must
be set aside and attention paid to the complex and often contradictory processes
of transition, some evolutionary, some caesural and some continuous between the
medieval spatial political order of hierarchy and the modern territorial order of
anarchy. Accordingly the Renaissance, an era that is at once both medieval and
modern and neither of these, becomes a legitimate locus of enquiry. However, the
immediate task at hand is to familiarize ourselves with the medieval landscape of
hierarchy and its manifestations in the medieval discourse of territoriality.
The parts of domestic political systems stand in relations of super- and subordi-
nation. Some are entitled to command; others are required to obey. Domestic
54 From Hierarchy to Anarchy
its manifestation of divine light to the stage below. The creations of the divine
ray are finite mirror images (speculum) of God, a theophany or manifestation of
the divine, whose position within the hierarchy are determined by their relative
degree of perfection. 5
Medieval scholastics reinforced the Dionysian hierarchy by combining it
with the doctrine of analogy, which denoted a proportional relationship between
God and his creations. The universe is ordered by analogy: all created things
are images (aenigmata) or symbols of a divine reality, which they can indicate
but not have a pure sense of. Even forms drawn from the lowliest matter can
have correspondence with heavenly beings, for matter "owes its subsistence to
absolute beauty and keeps, throughout its earthly ranks, some echo of intelligi-
ble beauty. Using matter, one may be lifted up to the immaterial archetypes."6
These archetypes or ideas (paradeigmata), which determine the order of the uni-
verse, exist only in God in whose being they are united. The relationship of the
divine to created effects is one of manifestation. Conversely effects are related
to their cause by imitation (mimesis) or participation (methexis). The models
are thus both causal principles and goals toward which created things strive.
Analogy denotes the possible degree of imitation any particular being can have
to the absolute, its place and role in the hierarchy of reality. Driven by love all
things seek assimilation or union with the divine. Yet even after achieving such
union they retain their place in the hierarchical order, for the degree of perfec-
tion they can achieve by becoming themselves is a relative state of perfection as
established by the divine idea. Salvation does not result in a thing losing its iden-
tity through assimilation with God, but is a perfect correspondence between a
thing and its archetype.?
For Dionysius hierarchy is a trinity: it is "a sacred order, a state of understanding
and an activity approximating as closely as possible to the divine." 8 Its goal
establishes between the ranks. Order pertains to hierarchy in the senses of both
arrangement and commandment. The structure of the universe and the place
of beings in it are fixed absolutely by divinely establisl).ed laws. An order of
being can only partake of divine illumination through the mediation of the
order above, for each rank not only has its own illumination and powers but
incorporates the attributes of those lying below: "[h]ierarchy is thus a 'scale of
forms,' each higher form transcending but including the functions and powers
of the forms below." 10
The highest hierarchy, which most nearly attains to perfection, is the heav-
enly hierarchy of angels or intelligences. They have no need of mediation
through other forms and therefore surround God.U The nine intelligences are
grouped into three triads, positioned in ascending ordet according to their func-
tions of purification, illumination, and perfection. The first triad, which "circles
in immediate proximity to God," comprises, starting with the most perfect,
seraphim or perpetual warmth, cherubim or "the power to know and to see
God,'' and God-bearing thrones. Seraphim, closest to God, is able to absorb
divinity perfectly and can hold the divine light unveiled and undiminished;
it is aflame with love for God. Second, cherubim, able to contemplate divine
power in its primordial essence, is radiant with light derived from its knowl-
edge of God and his mysteries, with which it seeks to enlighten others. Finally,
thrones, which are free of all earthly passion and material concern, can receive
god's justice in its divine essence, glorify in it, and transmit it to rulers on earth.
The middle ranks of heavenly intelligences, which "indicate ways in which God
is imitated and conformed to," include dominions, the virtues and the powers.
Dominions are unfettered by earthly tendencies toward the tyranny of dissim-
ulation or slavery and send down power to assist temporal authorities to gov-
ern prudently. The virtues, looking directly to the transcendent power, receive
divine enlightenment with courage and determination. They are filled with a
divine strength which allows them to perform great miracles. Third, the powers
or holy authorities receive God in a harmonious and uniform way and embody
the orderly nature of celestial and intellectual authority. They have power over
the devil and can help people resist the temptations offered to them by demons.
The final triad comprises the "godlike principalities, archangels and angels." It
is closest to the world and is primarily concerned with revelation. The principal-
ities, imbued with princely powers, command the lower angels and direct them
to the fulfillment of divine orders. The archangels and angels "take care of our
own hierarchy." Archangels, the guardians of nations and individuals, oversee
prophecies, knowledge, and the understanding of God's will. At the bottom of
the heavenly hierarchy and closest to men are the angels. Angels are appointed
as men's guardians. They announce the lesser mysteries and intentions of God
and teach people how to live virtuously and righteously before God. Each of the
Medieval Hierarchy, Order, and Space 57
heavenly powers have specific functions and, as movers of the spheres, rule over
natural processes. However, for Dionysius their most important role is as media-
tors and transmitters of light as grace, knowledge, being and beauty. They are
intermediary beings between god and man, representing degrees of knowledge
and consciousness, which radiate truth and grace down to the place where the
celestial and ecclesiastical hierarchies converge.
In De ecclesiastica hierarchia, Dionysius reaffirms that "every hierarchy is
divided in three" but recasts the division in terms of sacraments, initiators and
initiated. 12 Divinity extends its sacred gifts into the human domain through the
lowest order of hierarchy: that of the Law. In this hierarchy truths are contained
in symbolism, enigmas, and imagery, for men's "weak eyes" would be harmed
if they looked directly upon the truths contained in the divine light. The legal
hierarchy described by Dionysius is that of the Jewish rite which preceded the
ecclesiastical hierarchy of the Christian rite. It comprises three elements: sacra-
ments or an "uplifting to worship in spirit; the initiators or those men whom
Moses initiated into the holy tabernacle; and the initiated or those whom these
symbols of the law lift up." 13
Between the heavenly hierarchy and the hierarchy of the law stands the eccle-
siastical hierarchy. It shares with the celestial hierarchy the "contemplation of
understanding" and with the hierarchy of the Law "the use of varied symbolism."
While the pure intelligences of celestial hierarchy function according to spiri-
tual principles, the ecclesiastical hierarchy is composed ofincarnate intelligences
that transmit spiritual truths and powers via sensible agencies such as the sacra-
ments and teaching. The members of the ecclesiastical hierarchy have special
knowledge of the Scriptures and transmit this knowledge through language and
rites to men. As with the other two hierarchies, the powers are ordered accord-
ing to functions of purification, illumination and perfection. Deacons oversee
purification by providing ethical instruction to those who do not carry "God's
likeness within them," i.e. catechumens, penitents, and the possessed. 14 Once
purified, these souls are then lifted up to the "light-bearing order of priests"
which "guides the initiates to the divine vision of the sacraments." However,
only the "divine order of hierarchs," the highest within the human hierarchy,
who are able to contemplate the intelligible realm directly have the powers of
consecration. The rites of bishops "are images of the power of the divinity, by
which the hierarchs perfect the holiest of symbols and all the sacred ranks."
All the hierarchs from pope to bishops have spiritual plenitudo potesttt,tis, or the
power to sanctify, instruct and govern. The pope is the sole ruler of this monar-
chical structure. We shall return to a consideration of the role of the papacy in
this hierarchical structure, and in particular to the question of the relationship
of the pontiff to the heavenly hierarchy, in the next chapter. However, for now
it is enough to recognize that this vertically ordered Dionysian hierarchy served
58 From Hierarchy to Anarchy
In religious life we find the ecclesiastical hierarchy that reaches from the
Pope at the summit, to the cardinals, the archbishops, the bishops down
to the lower degrees of the clergy. In the state the highest power is con-
centrated in the Emperor, who delegates this power to his inferiors, the
princes, the dukes, and all the other vassals. This feudal system is an exact
image and counterpart of the general hierarchical system; it is an expres-
sion and a symbol of that universal cosmic order that has been established
by God and which, therefore, is eternal and immutable. 15
Drawing on this observation, and in accordance with our working principle that
territorial imaginaries are produced in heterogeneous discourses of space, this
section will discuss how the hierarchical spatial imaginary was manifested in
feudalism and its ideology of the three orders.
Feudalism was the dominant social order across much of Europe from the
mid ninth to early thirteenth centuries. As in Marc Bloch's classic definition,
feudalism denotes
A subject peasantry; widespread use of the service tenement (i.e. the fief)
instead of a salary ... ; the supremacy of a class of specialized warriors; ties
of obedience and protection which bind man to man and, within the war-
rior class, assume the distinctive form called vassalage; fragmentation of
authority .... 16
The celestial people then form more bodies, and the people of the earth are
arranged in its image .... The house of God, which is, believed to be one, is
therefore divided into three: here below, some prey (orant), others fight (pug-
nant) and others still work (laborant). These three parts co-exist and cannot
be separated; the services rendered by one provide the conditions by which
the others can operate. 28
human species has been divided into three: between the people of prayer (ora-
toribus), the cultivators (agricultoribus) and the warriors (pugnatoribus); he pro-
vided the self-evident proof that each is the object of a part and at the same time
of a reciprocal care." 29 Duby maintains, following Georges Dumezil, that the
bishops' scheme is derived from the prevalence in Indo-European civilizations
of a tripartite structure of sovereignty in which jurist, warrior and prie,st consti-
tute its three different aspects of law, violence and religion. Other cu'itural his-
torians, such as Jacques Le Goff, claim that the three orders imagery was derived
from the Roman structure of]upiter, Mars and Quirinus. 30 The French bishops
may also have drawn on Anglo-Saxon images in which the three orders serve as
the pillars of monarchical authority. In Boethius' De Consolatione Philosophiae,
authored or inspired by Alfred around 892, it is noted that for a king to sustain
his power he must be able to call upon "sceal habban jebedmen & weorcmen"
and in Wulfstan's letters to Aelfric he states that "every throne that rules effec-
tively, bases its rule on three pillars: the men of prayer, the men of work and the
warriors." 31
The three orders imaginary replaced the idea of a concentric order, pro-
moted by the Carolingian authorities, in which the Empire was envisaged as
the terrestrial reflection of the kingdom of God. Just as God ruled from the
centre of the civitas Dei so the Emperor occupied the centre of his kingdom.
"In this sphere, one unique centre, the king; anointed by Christ, image of a
single God, he presided over the destinies of all Christian people to whom he
had the responsibility to guide them towards their salvation." 32 With the demise
of the Carolingian empire this monarchical imagery became obsolete and was
replaced by a plethora of diverse imaginaries promoting the legitimacy of the
different groups-heretical orders, the Cluniacs etc.-which proliferated in a
world of feudal structures based in lordship and church authority. Whereas the
concentric model had assigned the Church a privileged position at the king's
side, now it was just one, albeit the wealthiest, of several competing seignior-
ies. The new social status of the Church as an enriched part of the seigniory
required the elaboration of a new mental representation: a modified Carolingian
model. Adalberon and Gerard did not totally abandon the idea of monarchy;
it could not be dismissed entirely for just as there was only one sovereign in
the civitas Dei so there should be only one supreme ruler on earth. However,
they transferred sovereign authority "into the realm of the unreal, no longer
conserved in the realm of appearance but in the powers of the supe"".p.atural." 33
If the three orders model was only incidentally an instrument of mbnarchical
ideology, it was very much a hierarchy. The priests resided at the top and the
peasants endured at the bottom. In the era of bastard feudalism, however, the
institution of monarchy could not function as a viable pivot upon which this
hierarchy could be supported and so its proponents turned toward the Christian
62 From Hierarchy to Anarchy
I mean to say that those who are at the apex of the pyramid are those who
pray; and since some among them are married, therefore we have nominated
both men and women. The labourers, men and women, are to the left of the
pyramid. To the right are the warriors, again both men and women. 39
Images and texts representing the three orders appeared up to the Renaissance.
However, its influence waned from the second half of the twelfth century as it
was gradually replaced by a hierarchy in which the ranks were distinguished
Medieval Hierarchy, Order, and Space 63
axis of being. Above was associated with God, nobility, purity, and goodness and
below with Satan, baseness, evil, and coarseness. 45 The text which most explic-
itly inscribes this spatial value system into the cosmological landscape is Dante's
Divine Comedy. In Inferno the hierarchy of sins is symbolized by the correspond-
ing position of the sinner. Men are already judged and "put in the place that is
theirs forever; the physical character of each station accords with the ethical worth
of its inhabitants."46
The medieval cosmological imagination combined elements of Aristotelian
physics, Ptolemaic astronomy, and Christian theology. From Aristotle came the
assumption that "an unbridgeable gap separates the 'above' from the 'below,' the
'higher' heavenly world from the 'lower' sublunar world.'>47 The universe takes
the shape of a sphere, the perfect solid form, eternal and finite. However, as
Johannes de Sacrobosco states in De Sphaera (c.1230), the eternal and perfect are
placed over and above the mutable and imperfect.
The machine of the universe is divided into two, the ethereal and the ele-
mentary regions. The elementary region, existing subject to continual alter-
ation, is divided into four. For there is earth, placed, as it were, as the centre
in the middle of all, about which is water, about water air, about air fire,
which is pure and not turbid there and reaches to the sphere of the moon, as
Aristotle says in his book of Meteorology. 48
In the sublunar world nature is corruptible and objects are impermanent. The
elements are ordered into concentric circles according to their relative degrees
of baseness: the earth at the centre is surrounded by water, then air and, finally,
fire. Dante's depiction of the sublunar world follows this pattern precisely. At
the centre of the universe is the Earth, "the bedrock of the elemental core"
(although, as Arthur Lovejoy points out, strictly speaking Dante's universe is
diabolocentric in that its core is Lucifer's abode at the bottom of the upturned
funnel extending into the interior of the northern hemisphere). 49 Above Earth lie
the waters or oceans which cover three quarters of the world. Above the waters
is the sphere of air, untainted by any cold vapors from the sea or Earth. Dante
and Virgil enter this sphere while climbing Mount Purgatory "that soars highest
to Heaven from the sea." 50 On reaching the summit Dante enters the bounteous
Garden of Eden and inhales "that free air open to heaven and earth." 51 Then,
accompanied by Beatrice, he ascends the sphere of fire'to the moon, the lowest
sphere of the heavens.
In the heavens, by contrast, the celestial bodies are made of quinta essen-
tia or imperishable substance and revolve for eternity through geometrically
perfect cycles: "all is changeless, eternal, divine. Motion is in circles, space is
filled with ether, the heavenly bodies as well as their spheres are of an ethereal
Medieval Hierarchy, Order, and Space 65
substance." 52 Beatrice tells Dante that because the heavenly bodies are made up
of ether they are neither heavy nor light. 53 In the heavens the rotating spheres
carry along the stars and planets which have no motion themselves. Above all
is the Prime Mover, primum mavens immobile, who is one and eternal and upon
whom the whole of heaven and all of nature depends. According to Beatrice
the hierarchical structure reaches from the very top of the universe to its low-
est place. She tells Dante that although men's souls, the spheres and the angels
were created directly by God and are thus immortal, the elementsfand their
compounds, as well as the souls of plants and animals, were created by the
intermediate agencies of the heavenly bodies.54 The order of thi-?gs is tightly
circumscribed:
In the Almagest Ptolemy had positioned the seven planets according to the rela-
tive time they took to rotate the Earth. The fixed stars were assigned to the out-
ermost sphere and Saturn, Jupiter and Mars, whose motions were most similar
to them, were placed furthest from the earth. The moon, whose motion was the
most dissimilar to that of the stars, was placed nearest the earth. The remain-
ing three planets, Sun, Mercury and Venus all shared an annual orbit around
the earth. Their relative positions were assigned in accordance with astrolog-
ical tradition. The Sun was allocated to the middle sphere, which left Venus
and Mercury beneath it. Christian theologians adapted the Ptolemaic system
to make the cosmos comply with the description of the heavens in Genesis.
The biblical firmament was identified as the eighth sphere of the fixed stars.
The waters above the firmament, which were understood to be hard and made
of crystal, became the crystalline heaven. The heaven created on the first day
was allocated to the outermost sphere, the motionless Empyrean, the ultimate
container of the universe and the dwelling place of God and the elect. Dante's
cosmological landscape accurately represents this composite scheme, combing
ancient wisdom and Christian dogma.
The moon is "Ia prima stella," Mercury "il secondo regno," Yen& "il terzo
del," the spirits met in the sun are "la quarta famiglia," Mars is "questa
quinta soglia," and "piu levato" than the last heaven, Jupiter ;s the "stella
sesta," Saturn "il settimo splendore." The starry heaven is alluded to as "la
66 From Hierarchy to Anarchy
spera ottava." The Primum Mobile is "il cile velocissimo," "il maggior corpo."
The Empyrean, "il ciel ch' e pura luce," is called "l' ultimate spera," .. .56
In Canto XXVII of Paradiso Dante and Beatrice reach the Primum Mobile,
the sphere "that spins with it as it goes all of the universe." 57 The ultimate
source of the motions of the planets and starry skies is God the Prime Mover.
It was thought that the spheres moved due to one of two causes. Either each
of Dionysius' nine orders of angels had responsibility for the movement of one
sphere which they imparted through fervor and adoration. Or, the ardent long-
ing of "every particle of the crystalline heaven to be united with every particle
of the most divine tranquil heaven" causes an intense gyrating movement that is
passed on to the other spheres. 58 It is love or the striving for perfect union that
sets the spheres in motion. All such movement proves the existence of a First
Mover who is "loved, I desired by all creation, sole, eternal I who moves the
turning Heavens, Himself unmoved." 59 As one progresses down through the
ranks of the hierarchy so one encounters less movement. Finally, at the bottom
there is the heavy immobile earth that is the domain of the geographers.
W. G. L. Randles maintains that the discourse of medieval geography enter-
tained an uneasy synthesis between the Christian chorographical representa-
tion of the world as the flat oecumene and the classical a,stronomical theory of a
round earth. 60 The notion of a spherical terraqileous globe was of ancient prov-
enance. Aristotle had hypothesized that the earth was a sphere from the premise
that all objects fall to the earth's centre to find their natural location. Building
on Aristotle, Crates de Mallos (c. 180-50BC) proposed the four island theory.
Crates had noted a contradiction between estimates of the circumference of
the earth's sphere by mathematicians, such as Eratosthenes, and the empiri-
cally known extent of the oecumene which, lying between the Ganges and the
Pillars of Hercules, could, at best, only account for a quarter of the sphere. In
order to counter this imbalance in the sphere, which offended the Greek sense
of symmetry, Crates drew a globe with three other "continents." Crates' scheme
was subsequently outlined in Macrobius' fifth century Commentary on Cicero's
Dream of Scipio.
Then referring to our quarter, indeed, and speaking about those who are
separated from us and from each other, he [Cicero] says, Some nations stand
obliquely, some transversely, and some even stand diametrically opposite us;
hence not only the barriers that separate us from another people but also the
barriers that separate all of them from each other are intended. They must be
divided as follows: those who are separated from us by the torrid zone, whom
the Greeks named antoikoi, the Antoeci; next, those who live on the under-
side of the southern hemisphere, the Antipodes, separated from the Antoikoi
Medieval Hierarchy, Order, and Space 67
by the south frigid zone; next, those ["Perioikoi"] who are separated from
their Antoeci, that is, the inhabitants of the underside of zone, by their torrid
zone; they are in turn separated from us by the north frigid zone. 61
You can also make out certain belts, so to speak, which encircle the Earth;
you observe that the two which are furthest apart and lie under the poles of
the heavens are stiff with cold, whereas the belt in the middle, the greatest
one, is scorched by the heat of the sun. The two remaining belts are habit-
able: one, the southern, is inhabited by men who plant their feet in opposite
direction to yours and have nothing to do with your people; the other, the
northern, is inhabited by you Romans. 64
Macrobius' assumption in this passage that the antipodes were inhabited was
not universally accepted in medieval geography. The four island theory cer-
tainly implied that it was likely that men lived in other continents than the
Orbis Terrarum. This conclusion was uncontroversial for the ancients but posed
a dilemma for the Christian theologians who had to resolve it with the scrip-
tural doctrine that all mankind was descended from Adam. Their solution was
to confine humanity to the Orbis Terrarum and to declare the other continents
uninhabitable on the basis of their inaccessibility. Thus, a hierarchical division
68 From Hierarchy to Anarchy
of the earth's sphere emerged in which one of the four continents came to have
greater value than the others. Gradually the four islands combined into two,
forming a simple opposition: the oecumene in the temperate boreal zone and an
antipodal continent in the temperate austral zone. St. Augustine was happy to
dismiss "the fable that there are Antipodes, that is to say, men on the opposite
side of the earth, where the sun rises when it sets to us, men who walk with
their feet opposite ours" as being "on no ground credibie."65 It was absurd, he
conjectured, to suggest "that some men might have taken ship and traversed the
whole wide ocean, and crossed from this side of the world to the other, and thus
even the inhabitants of that distant region are descended from that one first
man." 66 Later St. Isidore of Seville, rather less adamantly, admitted there could
be a body of land in the southern hemisphere but denied it could be inhabited.
Dante seems to have adopted a similar position. Before he begins his ascent out
of the lower depths of hell by climbing up the cavern formed by Lucifer's fall,
Virgil explains to him that,
The implication being that apart from Mount Purgatory, which was pushed up
by the force of Lucifer's fall, no dry land exists in this hemisphere. Randles notes
that the views of more modern thinkers like Roger Bacon in his Opus Majus
(1264/67) and Albert LeGrand in De Natura Locorum (first printed 1514) that
the Torrid Zone could be crossed and that the austral hemisphere was not only
habitable but inhabited, were sidelined due to a lack of supporting empirical
evidence.
In so far as the Scriptures made no mention of land in the southern hemi-
sphere, St. Augustine readily concluded that it was entirely covered by water.
This relates to another topic of contention in medieval geography concerning
the relative proportions of land and water that covered the earth's sphere. Here
medieval thinkers faced a paradox. An axiom of Aristotelian physics was that
lighter elements entirely enclose heavier ones. Therefore logically all land should
be immersed under water. How then to explain the prese:Ptce of those lands that
rose out of the seas? In the Imago Mundi (1410) Pierre d'Ailly offers a possible
Aristotelian explanation: "the Water does not surround all the Earth, but leaves
a part uncovered for the habitation of animals. There is a part of the Earth
which is less heavy than the other; this is why it is higher and farther from the
Medieval Hierarchy, Order, and Space 69
centre of the Earth. The rest, besides the islands, is entirely covered by water
according to the common opinion of the philosophers."68 However, a more pop-
ular explanation was provided by the creation narrative in Genesis.(Psalm 103),
which recorded how, on the third day, God ordered the waters to assemble in one
location (congregatio aquae). Although Aristotle's Physics had not specified the
proportional relations that existed between the elements, medieval philosophy
of the natural world established a ratio of 1:10 between the volume of one and
the next in decreasing order of density. According to this principle the surface
area of earth left uncovered by the water, which corresponded to the 'hristian
oecumene, remained insignificant with respect to the immensity of the sphere of
water and as such "pouvait-elle etre representee comme plate."69
As medieval voyagers began to travel further, recording ever extending coast-
lines, one solution to the problem of the antipodal lands was to maintain that
the Orbis Terrarum was considerably larger than had been previously thought.
The authority invoked to support this thesis was the Book of Esdras which
claimed, contrary to Aristotle, that the ratio of land to sea was 6:1. If this was
the case it could be surmised that the Orbis Terrarum was an island of such mag-
nitude that some of its inhabitants could have reached the antipodes by land and
therefore justifiably claim descent from Adam. Columbus would cite Esdras
as proof that a sea voyage was possible from the western (Iberian) to eastern
(Chinese) shores of the island earth. However this was a minority view and the
standard view of the Orbis Terrarium, as expressed by Sacrobosco, held that it
was located "between the semicircle drawn from east to west along the equator
and the semicircle carried from east to west through the Arctic pole." Not all of
it was inhabited, however, "since that zone which lies between the tropics is said
to be uninhabitable because of the fervour of the sun ... those two zones which
are described by the Arctic Circle and the Antarctic Circle about the poles of the
world are uninhabitable because of too great cold." 70 Pierre d'Ailly writes that
This landmass, Dante's "gran secca," consisted of the dry land God '&ad gath-
ered together, as recorded in Genesis I: 9. According to Ptolemy's calculations
it extended about 180 degrees oflongitude and, apart from a small meridional
70 From Hierarchy to Anarchy
strip, was confined between the equator and arctic pole .. Dante's oecumene had
an "extension less than one seventh of the entire terraqueous surface." 72
In cartography the land that made up the oecumene was traditionally rep-
resented by the T-0 motif of the mappae-mundi. The boundaries of the Orbis
Terrarum were determined by the Ocean Sea-the 0 on the maps.Y3 For Dante
"the sea that girdles all the land" was the only limit to the Empire's potential
extension. 74 Since man possessed a material body it was natural that his world
should be located on the soil of the oecumene. However, this correspondence
implied that the rest of the universe comprised foreign or alien spaces. The
Ocean was certainly regarded as a hostile environment. Although it formed part
of the terraqueous globe, it also symbolizes the limits of man's world. In terms
of geography "the Ocean was nothingness or a void; it was not considered sus-
ceptible of juridical possession or ofbeing an object on which the sovereignty of
princes could be exercised." 75 Consequently, argues O'Gorman, the world was
not just man's home in the cosmos but also a jail with impregnable boundaries.
Furthermore, it was only because God had ordered the congregatio aquae that
the world existed at all. As such the world really belonged to God and man was
little more than a tenant or serf on land over which he had neither absolute pro-
priety nor usage.
The crossbar or T of the mappae-mundi was formed by the intersection of
the Tanais and Nile rivers. It divided the upper semi-circle of Asia from the
lower quarter-circles of Europe and Africa, which were!,themselves separated
by the Mediterranean, the T's down-stroke. This perpendicular arrangement
evoked the form of the Christian cross. This Christian symbolism was further
reinforced by the location of}erusalem at the heart of the mappae-mundi. In the
ancient, or at least Roman, geographical imaginary, Rome, the Eternal City,
was situated at the centre of the world. However, as the pagan religions of Rome
were gradually replaced by Christianity the focal point moved east and by the
time of the Crusades Jerusalem was the fulcrum of the world. The appropriate-
ness of this was signaled by the fact that on midsummer's day at twelve noon the
sun casts no shadow. Dante, for example, placed Jerusalem directly beneath "the
high point of its [the sun's] meridian circle." 76 We have seen how in Christian
cosmology space is ordered hierarchically: different places within the hierar-
chy have different values. The same principle underpinned the arrangement of
geographical space. Jerusalem was the sovereign centre of medieval space, the
place to which all other spaces were orientated. On the extraordinary Ebstorf
map which incorporates the entire oecumene into Christ's body, Christendom's
orientation toward the Holy City is symbolized by an image of the resurrection
in which the omphalos of Christ's body and the site of the Holy Sepulchre share
the same coordinates. The representation of the eastern landmass as the site of
spiritual journeys of enlightenment in the mappae-mundi was replicated in the
Medieval Hierarchy, Order, and Space 71
Sacerdotium
The meaning that medieval actors gave to their political actions and sought to
convey in their political tracts can only be understood within the context of
the hegemony of Christianity, which permeated every aspect of medieval life.
Knowledge was produced in, communicated through, and controlled by eccle-
siastical institutions. Therefore it makes sense to start our investigation into the
hierarchical conditions of possibility within which the medieval discourse of
territorial sovereignty could be articulated with the doctrines of papal univer-
salism which, while contested, largely determined the parameters of political
debate in the first centuries of the second millennium.
The doctrine of papal universalism, initially developed during the pontificate
of Pope Gregory VII (1073-85) and promoted by Canonists well into the four-
teenth century, is a substantial and complex body of thought. 2 Nevertheless, its
essence is conveyed by the Skrziczick miniature, which appears in a fourteenth
century Czech edition of Gratian of Bologna's Decretum (c. 1140). Gratian had
standardized medieval canon law and subsequent editions of the Decretum con-
tained further commentary by the Decretists on the basic principles he had set
out. In the opening Distinctiones Gratian discusses the proper limits of ecclesi-
astical power and concludes from the fact that the Church was founded on the
rock of faith by Christ "who conferred simultaneously o'n the blessed key-bearer
of eternal life [Peter] the rights over a heavenly and an earthly empire" that the
Emperor's imperial power was ultimately derived from the pope. 3
The Skrziczick miniature (figure 5.1) is a representation of the Dionysian hier-
archical principle of emanation in the political register. Christ's celestial sover-
eignty is transmitted first to the pope, as Peter's successor, and then on to the
lower ecclesiastical and temporal authorities on earth. 4 The miniature empha-
sizes a rigid spatial division between the upper and lower realms. The upper
level shows the civitas Dei in heaven, signified by a background of stars. Christ,
Figure 5.1 The Skrzicziek Miniature, in Gratian of Bologna, Decretum:
Distinctiones 9, Pars 1, c. 1140. Archives of the Prague Castle, Prague, Czech
Republic. Archives of the Prague Castle.
76 From Hierarchy to Anarchy
enthroned and holding a papal tiara, is flanked by two kneeling angels bearing
a scepter and a crown, symbols of temporal authority. Heaven and earth are
separated by a neutral area of floral motifs that signify the atmosphere of the
universe. The Perrine throne, placed near the apex of the Earth's hemispheric
curve, is occupied by the pope in his capacity as vicarius Christi. The exten-
sion of the pope's halo into the heavenly sphere illustrates the direct passage of
Christ's authority to the pope. Within his person, it becomes bifurcated and then
passed on down to the ecclesiastical and temporal authorities. The pope hands
the book conveying the truths of the eternal scriptures to, a cardinal and gives a
sword indicating the duty of material protection of the Church to the emperor.
By depicting the moment when the emperor accepts the gladius materia/is from
the pope at his investiture this image reinforces the message that the emperor is
an ecclesiastical ruler, a minister and servant of God who receives his authority
from the pope rather than directly from Christ. The rest of the lower level shows
the structure of the hierocratic system on earth. In the ecclesiastical hierarchy
authority passes down from the cardinal to two bishops and then on to a monk
and priest in accordance with Dionysian principles. Beneath the emperor are two
kings, one holding a royal staff indicating legislative power and the other wield-
ing a sword symbolizing executive power. These, in turn, have as their subordi-
nates a knight and noble. The miniature presents the societas Christiana as being
contained within the greater political organization of the civitatis rex Christus.
Christ resident in the celestial realm is the ultimate source of sovereignty and the
emperor as an ecclesiastical ruler is subordinate to papal authority.
The spatial composition of this image conveys a clear hierarchy of powers:
the emperor in the lower position is the servant or vassal of the pope who occu-
pies a more elevated place. This hierarchical imagery was complemented by the
canonist representation of Christendom as one body, with the pope as its head.
In his controversial bull Unam Sanctam (1302) Boniface VIII (1294-1303)
asserted that there is only one holy Catholic Church outside of which there can
be no remission of sins. This church "quae unum corpus mysticum repraesentat,
cuius caput Christus, Christi vero Deus" ("represents one mystical body whose
head is Christ, while the head of Christ is God.") 5 This body is a unity, the
seamless garment of the Lord which was not cut but fell by lot. Therefore
there is one body and one head of this one and only church, not two heads as
though it were a monster, namely Christ and Christ's vicar, Peter and Peter's
successors, for the Lord said to this Peter, 'Feed my sheep.'(John 21: 17). 6
Prior to Gregory VII's pontificate the Church was identified as corpus Christi,
the Body of Christ, "besides which or in which the 'states' functioned as govern-
ments rather than as autonomous bodies." 7 As Bishop Jonas of Orleans insisted
Christendom, Hierarchy, Political Discourse 77
in De institutione regia (c. 830) "[a]ll the faithful must know that the Universal
Church is the Body of Christ, that the same Christ is its head and that there
are in it mainly two exalted persons, the priestly and the kingly." 8 The implica-
tion being that political authority was derived from and exercised within rather
than over or besides the Church. In the twelfth century, as states began to refer
to themselves as bodies politic, the Roman Church reasserted its status as the
supreme political corporation by deploying the formula corpus Christi mysticum,
with its connotations of spiritual foundation and divine status.9
During the period of the crisis of church and state, two traditions of hiero-
cratic thought emerged: Ecclesia and Christianitas, each of which promote<;i a
different understanding of the corporational nature of the Church. 10 .Drawing
on the Carolingian view of the functional nature of government, ther~otion of
Ecclesia, which persisted into the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, presented
regnum and sacerdotium as two dignitaries, two spiritual eyes, within one body,
unum corpus.U Within Ecclesia the temporal and spiritual constituted two sides
of the same body, two aspects of one power, potestas duplex. Lay power could
have no autonomy or independence from spiritual power: it is a subordinate
part of the whole that exists to bring into being the Augustinian pax terrena.
Michael Wilks argues that until around 1300 societas Christiana tended to be
equated with Ecclesia so that all Christians, and potentially all men, formed
one indivisible corporate entity, unum corpus, animated by Christian faith but
existing as a universal body politicP Ecclesia was equivalent to a Platonic ideal
whose universal essence in Christ was reflected by the organization of human
society on earth. It embraced all men and corporate institutions in a hierarchi-
cal structure.
The Ecclesia is both a single corporation itself and the greatest of a hierarchy
of corporations stretching from the whole world down to the lowest political
unit, the village or manor, by way of the kingdom, the province and the city.
Each of the communities is at the same time as much a civil as an ecclesias-
tical corporation: the universal church is the universal empire; the kingdom
is equally an episcopal province, the city is a bishopric, and the village is a
parish. 13
fidelium, forming the single polity of Christendom, will achieve its end by being
received into the civitas Dei. Without such hierarchy, writes the anonymous
author of the Disquisitio theologico-iuridica, "ordine mundus stare non possit nee
homines vivere." 14
According to Walter Ullman, the Canonist argument that the political was
intrinsically inferior to the spiritual was primarily derived from the ancient
binary opposition, found in Aristotle's de Anima, in which anima, mind or
spirit, the realm of the divine, was set over and above corpus or matter, the realm
of the mundane. For canonists there was an obvious analogy between the pope's
superiority over the emperor and the soul's priority over the body. 15 Gerhardt
Ladner argues that Ullman focuses too much on the more extreme canonists
and consequently tends to oversimplify the relationship between temporal and
spiritual authority in hierocratic thought. 16 In particular Ullman downplays the
contributions of those who conceived of Christian society as Christianitas rather
than Ecclesia. Etienne Gilson points out that if "Christendom (Chretiente)
appears initially as the society formed by all the Christians, spread out over the
whole world, unified by the spiritual sovereignty of the Pope" and "[f]rom this
aspect it is no different from the Church," there is one significant difference for
"the members of the Church, the Christians ... are living beings in space and
time, [and so] form a temporal society and so a people." 17 As Ladner points out,
the important issue for those who differentiated Christendom from Ecclesia and
who were swayed by the idea of an Aristotelian natural political order was not
whether pope or emperor was supreme in the Church but "who was superior in
Christendom: the Church under the Pope or the kingdoms, including the Holy
Roman Empire." 18 Indeed, to the extent that the relati(;)ns between church and
state at this time amounted to a conflict between two different institutions,
Christendom had to exist as a Christian society of peoples distinct from the
church. Nevertheless, canonists like Stephen of Tournay could still argue that
the "duae vitae, spiritualis et carnalis" constituted two distinct bodies within the
common-weal without implying that the clerical and lay orders had equal sta-
tus.19 In the final reckoning, the jus divinum regulating spiritual life determined
and contained the jus humanum. As the Hungarian canonist Damasus stated
"Ordo clericorum dignior est coetu laicorum." 20 While the notion of Christianitas
gave more legitimacy to temporal politics it continued to guarantee the priority
of the spiritual in the hierarchical order of things.
Canonists seeking to justify the pope's right to intervene in temporal as
well as spiritual matters frequently cited the controversial doctrine of pleni-
tudo potestatis or papal fullness of power. Plenitudo potestatis is another elu-
sive concept with contested meaning. For Ullman the doctrine maintains that
"the supreme pontiff was to possess complete and exclusive jurisdiction over
the spiritual and temporal affairs of the whole world. Papal plenitude of power
Christendom, Hierarchy, Political Discourse 79
To me is said in the person of the prophet, "I have set thee over nations and
over kingdoms, to root up and to pull down, and to waste and to destroy, and
to build and to plant" (Jeremias 1:10). To me also is said in the person of the
apostle, "I will give to th~e the keys of the kingdom of heaven. And whatso-
ever thou shalt bind upon, earth it shall be bound in heaven, etc." (Matthew
16:19) ... thus the others were called to a part of the care but Peter alone
assumed the plenitude of power. You see then who is this servant set over
the household, truly the vicar ofJesus Christ, successor of Peter, anointed of
the lord, a God of Pharaoh, set between God and man, lower than God, but
higher than man, who judges all and is judged by no one. 23
all forms of secular authority, espeCially the Empire. Although God had willed
two distinct authorities on earth, the temporal was subordinate to the spiritual
in every way, for "just as the moon receives its light from the sun and not the sun
from the moon, so too the royal power receives authority from the priestly and not
vice versa." 33 From the theocratic principle that ecclesiastical authorities would be
demeaned if they physically carried out any punishments they handed down and
that accordingly such acts should be delegated to secular powers, Hostiensis con-
cluded that royal prerogative amounted to little more than the executive power
to inflict punishment. Clearly then "pontifical power ought to have precedence
as being greater and more honorable like one that enlightens in the manner of a
shining lamp, while the royal power ought to follow, as being lesser and cruder
like a club for striking and beating down infidels and rebels." 34
Regarding those lands located outside Europe, Innocent IV claH:ned that
as vicarius Christi papal plenitudo potestatis had global territorial ~xtension,
embracing peoples and places beyond the boundaries of Christendom. Since
Christ is lord of all men, including the infidels, they should all benefit from
his vicar's beneficent rule, at least de jure. 35 The pope's authority as iudex
ordinarius (highest competent judge) extended over all men: infidels as well
as Christians.36 "We do certainly believe that the pope, who is vicar of Jesus
Christ, has power not only over Christians but also over all infidels, for Christ
had power over all." 37 The pope's de jure right to intervene in the affairs of
non-Christian societies embraced several prerogatives: to alter parts of the
constitutions of countries which harmed Christians; to punish non-Christian
individuals in non-Christian countries who defied natural law; to guarantee
missionaries and other papal representatives free-entry into and unrestricted
movement within non-Christian lands; and, the right to re-conquer formerly
Christian lands which pagans had illegally expropriated-including, of course,
the Holy Lands. 38 However, Innocent acknowledged the pagans' right to prop-
erty ownership within and territorial rule over all lands that had never been
occupied by Christians on the basis that they numbered among the rational
beings to whom God had originally extended these rights: "lordship, possession
and jurisdiction can belong to infidels licitly" and therefore "it is not licit for the
pope or the faithful to take away from infidels their belongings or their lord-
ships or jurisdictions." 39 Hostiensis was less magnanimous and argued that with
Christ's coming every dominion, principality and jurisdictional power that had
previously been in possession of the infidels had been automatically surrendered
to the faithful. All men were therefore subjects of the vicarius Christi and any
who failed to acknowledge the Church's overriding dominion should be consid-
ered unworthy of their possessions and deprived of their sovereign rights. 40
From the images, metaphors, and analogies that suffused Christian culture
the canonists derived necessary truths about the divinely ordain~ hierarchical
82 From Hierarchy to Anarchy
Both swords are Peter's: one is unsheathed at his sign, the other by his own
hand ... Both swords, spiritual and mat.erial, then, belong to the church; the
one exercised on behalf of the church, the other by the church: the one by
the hand of the priest, the other by the hand of the so:~dier, but clearly at the
bidding of the priest (ad nutum sacerdotis) and the order of the emperor. 44
For the commentator Alanus ab Insulis (1128-1203) not only does the emperor
hold his sword by the grace of the pope but the pope is the ultimate arbitrator
of all princely power. Alluding to the hierarchical structure of feudal society,
he writes, "[w]hat has been said of the emperor may be held true of any prince
who has no superior lord. Each one has as much jurisdiction in his kingdom as
the emperor has in the empire, for the division of kingdoms that has been intro-
duced nowadays by the law of nations is approved by the pope .. .'>45 In Unam
Sanctam Boniface VIII combined the two swords imagery with Dionysian prin-
ciples to designate the proper places of spiritual and temporal powers in the
spatial hierarchy of the medieval territorial imaginary.
One sword ought to be under the other and the temporal authority subject to
the spiritual power. For, while the apostle says, "There is no power but from
i
Christendom, Hierarchy, Political Discourse 83
God and those that are ordained of God" (Romans 13:1), they would not be
ordained unless one sword was under the other and, being inferior, was led by
the other to the highest things. For, according to the blessed Dionysius, it is
the law of divinity for the lowest to be led to the highest through intermediar-
ies. In the order of the universe all things are not kept in order in the same
fashion and immediately but the lowest are ordered by the intermediate and
inferiors by superiors. But that the spiritual power excels any earthly one in
dignity and nobility we ought the more openly to confess in proportion as
spiritual things excel temporal ones. 46
Imperium
For the publicists the two swords allegory affirmed papal plenitudo potesta-
tis and a hierarchical order in which the spiritual was placed over and above
the temporal. However, it could also lend itself to a defense of imperial sover-
eignty. During the Investiture Contest Henry IV's ghost writer Gottschalk of
Aachen condemned Gregory VII's recent excommunication of the emperor as
Hildebrandica insania. Gottschalk argued that by undermining the emperbr,
the pope was guilty of holding in contempt the divine decree, clearly indicated
by the symbolism of the two swords, that there should be two powers of equal
status. 47 For imperialists the spiritual sword was not held over the temporal,
for both authorities occupied an equivalent place in the spatial hierarchy. The
temporal authority of the emperor was not exercised at the beck and call of the
papacy but in a cooperative relationship of equal sovereignty. "The emperor had
the power of the sword and the imperial dignity through election by the princes
and people" wrote Huguccio, and because Roman emperors existed long before
popes, the latter could depose an emperor only after the electors had convicted
him of wrong-doing. 48 Imperial dualists therefore insisted that the two swords,
symbolizing spiritual and temporal authority, were held directly from God by
pope and emperor respectively. 49 However, as long as imperialists accepted the
notion of Ecclesia as a universal corpus mysticum within which imperium and
sacerdotium denoted two distinct functions-in temporal affairs the lay ruler
is a real monarch ruling by divine right while the pope's authority is limited to
spiritual affairs in the sacrum romanum imperium-their argument was weak-
ened because it evoked the monstrous image of one body with two heads.
Indeed, imperialists were on stronger grounds when they accepted the pre-
mise that within Ecclesia the functions of rex and sacerdos should be combined in
one person, but then concluded from it that this person should be the emperor
rather than the pope. For Wilks the rhetoric of imperial dualism merely obfus-
cated the German emperor's real aspiration to reclaim the status of pontifex
maximus accorded to their Roman predecessors. "King and priest, the emperor
84 From Hierarchy to Anarchy
is now to be seen as the true ruler of the world." 50 However, for Francis Oakley
the idea of rex-sacerdos in European medieval political-theological discourse had
less absolutist connotations than it had had in imperial Rome.51 Because Greek
and Roman cultures retained the archaic notion that kings were also priests
and sometimes gods they also kept aspects of the monistic social imaginary of
primitive societies. In such societies the divine is immanent in nature and the
function of kingship is to ensure a harmonious bond with nature by oversee-
ing rites and policing taboos. However, Judaism and Christianity substituted
a transcendental and exclusive sense of the divine for "the archaic sense of the
divine, as a continuum running through the worlds of n~~ure and man, Judea-
Christian beliefs undercut also (and therefore) the very metaphysical underpin-
nings for the archaic pattern of sacral kingship." 52 Patri~tic Christianity denied
any sacred status to the political sphere. St. Augustine regarded the state as a
debased secular body, an aberration consequent on Adam's fall, and inferior to
the other-worldly civitas Dei where man's true telos lay. Naturally the deeply
rooted archaic archetype of sacral kingship could not be easily displaced and
vestiges survived in the Byzantine Empire, with the Carolingian and Ottonian
emperors, in extremist doctrines of papal plenitudo potestatis, and on into the
early modern discourse of the divine right of kings. Such sites of resistance aside,
the attack by Gregorian reformers on the pontifical kingship of the German
emperors set in motion three centuries of struggle between spiritual and tempo-
ral authorities that effectively denied that both powers could be held by either
institution. It was, writes Oakley, "between the hammer and the anvil of con-
flicting authorities, religious and secular that Western political freedoms were
forged." 53 This view is confirmed by Brian Tierney who points out that although
the most common form of government in recorded human history has been one
where a single ruler aspires to supreme spiritual and temporal power, the middle
ages was remarkable not because some emperors and popes were drawn to theo-
cratic rule but rather because such ambitions were never fully satisfied. 54
This is not to say that Carolingian and Ottonian emperors desisted from
promoting themselves as Christendom's legitimate rex-sacerdos. Charlemagne
was proclaimed rex et sacerdos by the Synod of Frankfurt (796-800), which also
approved a liturgy of kingship that promoted the emperor as christomimitis-the
imitator of Christ as both God and man. 55 Once anointed and crowned the
emperor took on the attributes of God and Christ by grace. As described by Ernst
Kantorowicz, the liturgical chants of these ceremonies placed the emperor at the
fulcrum of the terrestrial and celestial hierarchies. These liturgies evoked,
This harmonious spatial hierarchy in which the emperor is the conduit between
the world of heaven on high and the powers on earth was also nurtured in
Ottonian iconography which popularized Christ-centered kingship. The famous
miniature of Otto II as kosmokrator in the Gospel book of Aachen (c. 973) shows
"the emperor elevated unto heaven (usque ad celum erectus}, all earthly powers
inferior to his, and he himself nearest to God." 57
In figure 5.2 the young emperor is depicted seated on a throne receiving
homage from two archbishops and two warriors. While his feet ateiTesting on
the footstool carried by Tellus (earth) his head breaks through into the heav-
ens where it shares space with the four evangelists, and is touched physically
by God's hand. The evangelists are carrying a white banderole, the veil of
the tabernacle, which divides the emperor's gigantic body and symbolizes the
sky separating earth from heaven. In this image of spatial hierarchy it is the
emperor rather than the pope who occupies the place at the centre of the polit-
ical cosmos. His body unifies the celestial and temporal orders and it is the
emperor who mediates between heaven and earth. The emperor's unique corpo-
real being, simultaneously terrestrial and heavenly, underpins the claim of the
Norman Anonymous (c.llOO) that the emperor's power comes directly from
God in heaven.
Therefore the emperor, by the Lord Jesus Christ, is said to be elevated even
unto heaven. Even unto heaven, I say, not unto the corporeal sky which is
seen, but unto the incorporeal heaven which is unseen; that is, unto the
invisible God. Truly, unto God he has been elevated, since so much is he con-
joined to Him in power that no other power is more nigh unto God or more
sublime than that of the emperor; yea, all other power is inferior to his.58
Sicily, declared by "we, whom he elevated beyond hope of man to the pinnacle
of the Roman Empire," stated that the prince as an instrument of God has a
duty to establish laws, promote justice, and chastise wrongdoers. 61 Kantorowicz
refers to the Liber Augusta/is as "the birth certificate of the modern adminis-
trative state," arguing that it signaled a transition from liturgical to legal king-
ship. 62 In Policraticus (1159) John of Salisbury refers to the prince as rex imago
aequitatis, the image of justice or equity and argues that the prince's persona
publica is both above the law (legibus solutus) and subject to it (legibus alligatus). 63
In the Liber Augusta/is the prince's persona mixta is no longer that of Christ, God
and man, but pater etfilius Justitiae (the Father and Son of]ustice). 64 This blend
of theological and legal discourse in "Frederick's imperial theology of rulership"
reflected a culture in which the administration of justice by judges and lawyers
had the same mysterious aura as the administration of the sacraments by priests.
The emperor's dual function as both "lord and minister of justice" harked back
to two precepts of the Justinian Code: lex regia-specifically the law by which
the Quirites conferred the imperium together with a limited right of creating
law and law exemption on the Roman princes-and lex digna-which asserted
that the Emperor is morally obliged to serve certain laws even though he was
not legally subject to them. Frederick did acknowledge that "although our impe-
rial majesty is free from all laws, it is nevertheless not altogether exalted above
the judgement of Reason, herself the Mother of all Law." 65 The emperor's legal
standing, above Positive Law but subject to Reason, was strengthened by asso-
ciation with the classical hierarchy of the goddesses of law. The highest place in
the Templum Ju4itiae is occupied by Ratio (Reason), identified with the Law of
Nature and closest to Divine Law. Aequitas (Equity), who oversees the positive
laws made by man for the government of the state, resides in the lowest position.
Justitia (Justice), being less a form oflaw than an ideal or extra-legal premise of
legal thought, partakes of both divine and positive law. Her abode is thus a place
between Reason and Equity. Justitia mediates between divine and human laws,
therefore the emperor as her terrestrial representative also assumed, this role.
"If Justice was the power 'intermediate between God and the world,' then the
Prince as the Justitia animata necessarily obtained a similar position."66
The ideological war between sacerdotium, imperium, and regnum reached a
crescendo at the beginning of the fourteenth century. Whereas Boniface's Unam
Sanctam stood as a statement of papal plenitudo potestatis and John of Paris' De
potestate regia et papali (1302-3)-which shall be considered presently-flew
the flag for regnum, it was Dante's Monarchia (c. 1313) that epitomized impe-
rial discourse. 67 In Monarchia, Dante sought to prove the necessity of temporal
government, defined as "a single sovereign authority (unicus principatus) set over
all others in time (super omnes in tempore)" by refuting Thomas Aquinas' argu-
ment for papal sovereignty. 68 Aquinas had argued that because man's true end
88 From Hierarchy to Anarchy
is eternal beatitude and only the Church can assist man to reach this state, then
logically all princes, who are men, must be subject to the pope. 69 Dante accepted
Aquinas' logical principle that "the whole basis of the means for attaining an
end is derived from the end itself" but started from a different opening premise:
that man has two {not one) ends.
Ineffable providence has thus set before us two goals to aim at: i.e. happiness
in this life, which consists in the exercise of our own powers and is figured
in the earthly paradise; and happiness in the eternal life, which consists in
the enjoyment of the vision of God (to which our own powers cannot raise
us except with the help of God's light) and which is signified by the heavenly
paradise/0
;\:
By the "exercise of our own powers" Dante meant the universal and free exer-
cise of man's highest faculty; that is to "exist as a creature who apprehends by
means of the potential intellect; this mode of existence belongs to no creature
(whether higher or lower) other than human beings." 71 This cannot be achieved
by individuals or groups in isolation but only by the "whole of human society
(universalis civilitatis humani generis) in a universal condition of peace." 72 Only
the emperor, who, alone among terrestrial rulers, is imbued with profound phil-
osophica1 wisdom and has the means to ensure universal peace, can direct man
toward this end; he is, therefore, the only legitimate ruler of mankind.
Dante rejected the canonist's claim that the Church's authority was temporal
as well as spiritual. The Church, he argued, is not an effect of nature but a super-
natural entity created by God/3 Christ's renunciation of an earthly kingdom
before Pilate-"My kingdom is not of this world (Regnum meum non est de hoc
mundo)"-shows that God intended the Church's powers to be purely spirituaF4
The radical incommensurability of man's temporal and celestial destinies means
that he requires the service of not one but two independent guides: "the supreme
Pontiff, to lead mankind to eternal life in conformity with revealed truth, and
the Emperor, to guide mankind to temporal happiness in conformity with the
teachings of philosophy." 75 Both are the absolute sovereigns of their respective
realms and the papalists' contention that the emperor holds his sword by order of
the pope is whimsical speculation; "the authority of the temporal monarch flows
down into him directly without any intermediary from the Fountainhead of uni-
versal authority." 76 In the Commedia Dante draws on the metaphor of the two
suns to affirm the absolute separation of temporal and spiritual authority
Here Dante subverts the canonist metaphor in which the sun's radiance symbol-
izing papal power is identified as the source of the light of the moon i.e. impe-
rial authority. Rather, emperor and pope co-exist as two equal sovereigns, two
suns illuminating respectively the complementary ways of the world and God's
divine ordinance.78
Dante's dualism managed to avoid the pitfalls of previous imperialist
thought, which in positing the existence of two authorities within Christian
society as Ecclesia, had conceded superiority to the Church hierarchy. Dante
demoted Ecclesia. Rather than embracing both spiritual and temporal institu-
tions, it becomes a separate corporate body in a space alongside but not above
the terrestrial civitas. Dante, contends Gilson, initiated a radical break<with the
doctrinal premises of the dominant Christian ideology in which the Unity of a
medieval Christianity ruled by popes was sustained by the submission of phi-
losophy to theology. "The separation of Church and Empire necessarily presup-
posed the separation of theology and philosophy, and this is why at the same
time that he clove in two the unity of medieval Christianity, he also rent asunder
the unity of Christian wisdom, principle unifier and bond ofChristianity." 79 In
order to prove that the Emperor was independent of papal jurisdiction Dante
had to establish a new space for politics, a territorial imaginary independent of
the pope, the Church, and even the Christian religion. To this end Dante pro-
moted an ideal of humana universitas as "a world sector actualized in the symbol
of the 'terrestrial paradise'." 80
Dante's humana universitas implied a number of alterations to the territorial
imaginary of Ecclesia. First, as Kantorowitz suggests, Dante not only isolated
humanitas from Ecclesia but even from Christianitas: his humana universitas
embraced all men not just Catholics or Christians. "Whereas great portions of
men-Jews, Mohammedans, Pagans-did not belong to the mystical body of
Christ, or belonged to it only potentially, Dante's humana civilitas included all
men: the pagan (Greek and Roman) heroes and wise men, as well as the Muslim
Sultan Saladin and the Muslim philosophers Avicenna and Averroes." 81 Second,
although Dante felt that a Christian philosopher-emperor would be the ideal
guide to lead the humana universitas to its self-actualization as the terrestrial
paradise, his choice of the pagan Augustus, during whose rule Christ chose to
become man, as the best role model for emperor indicated that the emperor's
religious beliefs were not the primary concern. Third, the idea of humana uni-
versitas opposed the papalist claims that the pope as vicarius Christi had global
sovereignty. In the words of the author of the Somnium viridarii, "Papa non est
90 From Hierarchy to Anarchy
model for government on earth and just as God is the sole ruler of ~he celes-
tial kingdom so the emperor is the sole sovereign authority on earth. Only the
emperor is charged with government of the humana civilitas and his authority to
rule is not mediated by papal jurisdiction but comes directly through God.
Regnum
Alongside sacerdotium and imperium, regnum constituted the third corner of the
base of the medieval pyramid of sovereignty. Although, as the Westphalia narra-
tive records, regnum would ultimately triumph, this outcome was far from guar-
anteed, even at the end of the twelfth century when Philip the Fair decisively
outmaneuvered Boniface VIII. Regnum was, in terms of material resources and
ideological influence, the least powerful of the three institutions.
Nevertheless, in the ideological competition to dominate the medieval imag-
inary of territorial sovereignty, its proponents did have a particularly powerful
spectacular weapon to hand. If the Skziczick miniature captured the essence of
papal universalism and the image of Otto II best conveyed the aspirations of the
emperor, then the Gothic cathedral constituted the symbolic representation of
regnum. "The French cathedral," wrote Viollet-le-Duc, "was born with monar-
chical power." 87 For Henri Lefebvre the Gothic cathedral epitomized the sym-
bolic space of the feudal mode of production: the spatial aesthetics of vertical
projection reproduced and legitimized the hierarchical structures of a world in
which "the social edifice itself resembled a cathedral." 88 The Gothic aesthetic
that developed in the Ile-de-France reflected the social and cultural conditions
of French feudal relations during the revival of French royal authority under the
Capetians. 89 Capetian power was primarily based in the wealth of Paris. Yet, as
kings of France they had suzerainty over several great bishoprics on their borders.
Although these royal sees were officially subject to the crown, six of the bishops
were dukes and counts of the realm, great feudal lords whose combined pos-
sessions exceeded the royal domains. These six bishops had permanent, seats in
the royal college of twelve and exerted a considerable influence on royai policy.
Aware that their power could not be exercised independently of the ecclesiastical
hierarchy, the Capetian kings sought to represent themselves as rex and sacerdos:
"the pyramidal structure of the state now culminated in the king who knew he
was a priest and sat on his throne, surrounded by bishops."9
The most important architect of the Capetian vision of sacral kingship was
Abbot Sugar of Saint-Denis. Erwin Panofsky argues that Abbot Sugar was ani-
mated by a grand politico-theological vision comprising three truths: first, that
the king of France was a "Vicar of God," "bearing God's image in his person
and bringing it to life"; second, that because the king held the sword spiritual
"for defence of the Church and the poor" he had a sacred duty to subdue all
92 From Hierarchy to Anarchy
internal strife and any challenges to his own authority; and third, that the central
authority and the unity of the nation were symbolised, even vested in, the Abbey
of Saint-Denis, believed to have been founded by the Frankish king Dagobert
and to contain the relics of the Apostle of all Gaul, "the special and, after God
unique protector of the realm." 91 Between 1134 and 1144 Sugar oversaw the
rebuilding of the royal abbey in a style which would become the archetype of
the Gothic. Central to his vision was his belief that Saint Denis, the patron saint
of France, was also Dionysius the Areopagite. Thus, just as Dionysius wrote
that the hierarchical harmony of the universe was constituted by the emanation
of divine light, so Sugar pointed out that by virtue of the columns and central
arches of the nave and side-aisles, "the whole [church] would shine with the won-
derful and uninterrupted light of most sacred windows, pervading the interior
beauty." 92 The architecture of Saint-Denis, seemingly transparent, allowed light
to unify all matter and space within the building and to E;:Ommunicate the sense
of the unity of the divine cosmos. 93 The Gothic "theology of light" embodied
the splendor of Heavenly Jerusalem. 94 Furthermore, as the artistic incarnation
of Dionysian hierarchy, Saint-Denis also perpetuated an "idea of the French
monarchy [that] gradually became inseparable from the vision expounded in the
Corpus areopagiticum: (i.e. that the king as head of the ecclesiastical hierarchy
was through his coronation transformed into a Christus Domini, so mirroring,
according to Dionysian principles, Christ's position at the head of the celestial
hierarchy)." 95 The over-awed medieval spectator gazing up at the vaults would
have inferred that a space built as the manifestation of Dionysian principles
was also a symbol of the sacred nature of monarchy. "Precisely because it evoked
the mystical archetype of the political order of the French monarchy, the style
of St.-Denis was adopted for all the cathedrals of France and became the mon-
umental expression of the Capetian idea of kingship." 96
In the contest over who should exercise sovereignty within the territories of
Christendom, regnum came into its own during Philip IV's (1268-1313) strug-
gle with Boniface VIII. This conflict was the first dispute between church and
state "which can properly be described as a dispute over national sovereignty." 97
Hostilities erupted because the French and English crowns, who were at war,
sought to finance their campaigns by imposing taxes on their clergy. For
Boniface this amounted to a negation of the principle that the pope was the
head of all ecclesiastical hierarchies wherever they were located. His response
was the bull Clericis Laicos (February 1296), which asserted that as iudex ordi-
narius omnium, set over all kings, the pope had the right to settle international
disputes, and that by forbidding clergy to pay these taxes he could justly deprive
the kings of their war chests. However, the monarchs interpreted Clericis Laicos
as an attack on their sovereignty, for not only did it challenge their control
over members of the ecc\esia and their goods, but it a\so \egitimi'z.ed clerical
Christendom, Hierarchy, Political Discourse 93
place of Christ on earth, has dominion, cognizance, and jurisdiction over the
temporal goods of princes and barons." 109 John did not object to prelates hav-
ing "dominion and jurisdiction over temporal things" as such but insisted that
they recognize that such privileges were not derived from their status as vicars
of Christ or as successors to the apostles, but rather, that they "have such pow-
ers as a concession from or with the permission of princes." 11 Central to John's
argument was a distinction between the power of kings and the power of priests.
John drew on Aristotle's account of man as a naturally political or civil animal
and theories of natural law and the law of nations to define kingship as "rule over
a community perfectly ordered to the common good by one person." 111 Man has
two ends: to live virtuously on earth and to achieve eternal life in heaven. Kings
can only lead men to the former so another guide, namely Jesus Christ, whose
authority is currently manifest in the priesthood, is required t.o direct man to the
divine. As Dionysius the Areophagite had established, within the ecclesia hierar-
chy is the proper order and the pope is rightly supreme so,that he can settle mat-
ters of doctrinal controversy or institutional conflict. How~ver, John argued, in a
passage directed as much against imperium as sacerdotium, that
it is not the case that the faithful laity are by divine law subservient to
one supreme monarch in temporal matters. Rather, they live civilly and in
community according to the prompting of a natural inclination which is
from God. Accordingly, they choose different types of rulers to oversee the
well-being of their communities to correspond with the diversity of these
communities. 112
The implications of the autonomy John granted ctvttas from Ecclesia and
Christianitas were as radical as Dante's notion of humana civilitas. Although
one supreme head was required to guarantee the unity of the Catholic faith and
the common identity of the Christian peoples, "this purpose does not require
that the faithful be united in any common state (politia communi). There can be
different ways of living and different kinds of state (politic) conforming to dif-
ferences in climate, language and the condition of men, with what is suitable for
one nation (una gente) not so for another." 113 In his response to Hugh of Saint-
Victor's arguments in De sacramentis that the spiritual authority of the pope was
prior to kingship in both time and dignity, John further restricted the remit of
the pope's spiritual authority to intervene in the affairs of kings. Against Hugh's
argument that because priesthood was instituted by God it therefore antedated
any human temporal authority, John claimed that kings existed prior to Moses
and that the first true priest was Christ. Against Hugh's contention that the
spiritual is universally prior to and superior to the material, John accepted that
the dignity of the priesthood was greater than kingship in so far as it directs
Christendom, Hierarchy, Political Discourse 97
mankind toward the greater goal, but rejected the implication that princely tem-
poral authority was derived from spiritual power.
For the latter secular power does not relate to the higher spiritual power
in such a way that it arises or derives from it. This is how the power of the
proconsul relates to the power of the emperor; and the latter is greater in all
things because the proconsul's power is derived from the emperor. The rela-
tionship, rather, is like that between the power of the head of a family and
that of a master of soldiers; one is not derived from the other, but both are
derived from some superior power. Therefore, secular power is greater than
spiritual power in some things, namely, temporal things; and it is not subject
to the spiritual power with reference to them in any way, because secular
power does not arise from spiritual power. The two arise directly from one
supreme power: the divine power ... Hence, the priest is superior principally
in spiritual matters; and, conversely, the prince is superior in temporal mat-
ters, although the priest is superior absolutely insofar as the spiritual is supe-
rior to the temporal.ll 4
Ultimately John of Paris was still beholden to the Christian Weltanschauung and
its structures of hierarchy, yet there are intimations of a post-medieval territorial
imaginary in his work, especially where he exploited the contest between sacer-
dotium and imperium to further the interests of the Capetians. In their attacks
on the Emperor the canonists had unwittingly served as midwives to the monar-
chical discourse of territorial sovereignty. In the decretal Per Venerabilem (1202)
Innocent III proclaimed that the Emperor had no authority over other secular
rulers, "since the king himself [of the French] does not recognize a superior in
temporal matters (quum rex ipse [Francorum] superiorem in temporalibus minime
recognoscat)." This declaration was seized upon by advocates of monarchy, like
John, who generated from it the more extensive sovereignty claim of a "rex qui
superiorem non recognoscit." In the fourteenth century French and Neopolitan
lawyers combined it with the formula rex in regno suo est imperator regni sui to
propound a "thesis of royal territorial sovereignty." 115 Second, John voiced an
embryonic French nationalism in rejecting the papalist thesis that the Donation
of Constantine gave the pope de jure authority over the kingdom of France.
According to the Donation narrative, in return for baptism and a cure from
leprosy, Constantine had given Pope Sylvester I the Lateran palace, his imperial
crown (actually refused by Sylvester) and the right to wear imperial insignia
and garments.ll 6 Donatists claimed that since Constantine had handed over not
only the government of Rome and Italy but also that of some western imperial
territories, including contemporary France, the pope's patrimony and imperial
power still extended over these lands. John countered by arguing that that "royal
98 From Hierarchy to Anarchy
power both existed and was exercised before the papal,"' and there were kings
in France before there were Christians. Therefore neither the royal power nor
its exercise is from the pope but from God and from the people who elect a
king ... " 117 Although the Romans had conquered the Gauls they did not over-
come the noble Franks who, directly descended from the Trojans, had not only
never succumbed to imperial power but had themselves subjugated the whole
of Germany and Gaul: "they settled in Gaul, and named it France; and they
were subject neither to the Romans nor to anyone else." 118 From these elevated
peoples sprang the "saintly kings" who ever since St. Louis's canonization had
exercised authority over the kingdom of FranceY 9 Thus not only does France
have a venerable genealogy extending back to the Frankish empire, but her king
was also the personal embodiment of the country's sacred status.
The tone of John's history of the Franks has lead Jean Riviere to describes the
Tractatus as an example of"le nationalisme Franc;:ais." 120 It certainly evoked the
religious patriotism of the thirteenth century which, maintains Kantorowicz,
was embodied in a revival of the Greek and Roman ideal of the heroic warrior
who lost his life pro patria, that is for the greater cause of the polis or res publica
Romana. 121 During the feudal era civic death pro patria had been replaced by
either the crusader's martyrdom in the cause of Christianitas or the vassal giving
his life for the honor of his feudal lord. However, during the twelfth and thir-
teenth centuries the classical values of patria were recovered by the early state
builders and fatherland came "to refer to a national kingdom, or to the 'crown'
as the visible symbol of a national territorial community." 122 In the chansons de
geste France was depicted as a sacred land, the successor state of the Frankish
empire. Just as the crusaders had endured martyrdom on behalf of the patria
aeterna, the City of God, so Charlemagne's French crusaders who fought the
Saracens in Spain were seen as role models prepared to lay down their lives for
Francia Deo sacra. 123
Clearly it was regnum's version of the medieval territorial imaginary that
would eventually evolve into the modern secularized ideal of the sovereign
national territorial state. However, the other two mediev.al territorial imaginar-
ies and the spatial hierarchies within which they were embedded would con-
tinue to resonate for centuries. The spirit of papal plenitudo potestatis was kept
alive in hierocratic writing such as Augustinus Triumphus' Summa de potestate
ecclesiastica (1326) and Alvarus Pelagius' De planctu ecclesiae (1330-1332) well
into the fourteenth century. Likewise, although by 1300 imperium was a setting
star and Dante's Monarchia already rather anachronistic, the idea of humana
civilitas was an important contribution to modern secular politics. Indeed the
modern discourse of the divine right of kings, which prompted the religious or
sacred aura of regnum well into the era of Westphalia, contained within it ves-
tiges of the hierarchical arrangement of territoriality characteristic of medieval
Christendom, Hierarchy, Political Discourse 99
political discourse. However, we are concerned with rupture rather than con-
tinuity and the following chapters will discuss the challenges mounted to the
medieval territorial imaginary by the Renaissance revolution in thin.J\'fing about
space. With the Renaissance the episteme of hierarchy buckled and gave way to
a modern culture of space that established the conditions of possibility for the
modern representation of the territorial politics of anarchy.
CHAPTER 6
his contemporaries proposed to call the 'modern era'." 6 The impasse between
antiquity and the middle ages arose from the destruction of the pagan arti-
facts of Roman civilization by barbarian pillagers and Christian iconoclasts.
This cultural vandalism had erased the artistic sensibility through which
mankind's most honorable values had been expressed. The second rupture,
between the middle ages and the modern, came with the rediscovery of
painting and the rejection of the "ugly form of Byzantine style" by the artis-
tic geniuses Cimabue-"perhaps the first cause of the restoration of the art
of painting"-and Giotto who, infused with divine inspiration, "revived the
modern and excellent art of painting." 7
Enlightenment thinkers built on Vasari's basic scheme to present the
Renaissance as the rebirth of Europe's culture, values, and civilization. 8 For
Voltaire, men like Dante, Petrarch, Boccaccio, Cimabue, and Giotto pioneered
a perfect aesthetic which managed to combine the wisdom of the past with the
promise of the future. On reading Petrarch, Voltaire experienced "tpe beauty
of antiquity, together with the freshness of modern times." 9 Late eighteenth
century Europeans, infused with Enlightenment promises of progress, began
to see the Renaissance not just as the recovery of classical civilization but as
a pivotal moment in the history of mankind's emergence into maturity. In
Hegel's account of the Renaissance three new sensitivities come together-the
flourishing of Fine Arts, which turned man toward the sensual; the revival of
learning or study of antiquity, which directed his a'ttention away from heaven;
and the geographical discoveries, which turned the spirit outward toward the
earth-to establish the conditions within which the spirit or Godhead could
achieve its highest stage of reflective self-awareness. The Renaissance was
comparable
with that blush ofdawn, which after long storms first betokens the return of a
bright and glorious day. This day is the day of Universality, which breaks upon
the world after the long, eventful, and terrible night of the Middle Ages-a
day which is distinguished by science, art and inventive impulse-that is, by
the noblest and highest, and which Humanity, rendered free by Christianity
and emancipated through the instrumentality of the Church, exhibits as the
eternal and veritable substance of its being. 10
with ancient texts, did not develop. Thorndike favors ditching the i'cfea of the
Renaissance entirely because "[i]t has kept men in general from recognizing that
our life and thought is based more nearly and actually on the middle ages than
on distant Greece and Rome, from whom our heritage is more indirect, book-
ish and sentimental, less institutional, social, religious, even less economic and
experimental." 18
Renaissance historians did not let this attack on the uniqueness of the
Renaissance by the scientific "deperiodizers" go unchallenged. They sought to
reassert the distinctiveness of the Renaissance while acknowledging the vitality
of medieval civilization. Hans Baron challenged the view that the Renaissance
was irrelevant to the emergence of modern science. 19 Yes the humanists side-
lined natural science in favor of history, but their notions of man and the world
directly inspired subsequent scientific breakthroughs. Galileo's confirmation of
Copernican cosmology drew on Nicholas ofCusa's vision of a decentralized and
peripatetic cosmos. Similarly, the ethos of the artist-workshops of Renaissance
Italy-characterised by experimentation, observation and causal thinking-
influenced Galileo's decision to place observation and hypothetico-deductive
reasoning at the heart of scientific method. Leonardo also insisted that for an
enquiry to be scientific it should satisfy mathematical tests. For Baron the "sub-
de interrelations between the 'realism' of the Renaissance and the subsequent
rise of the scientific spirit" justify the claim that the Renaissance was the proto-
type of the modern world. 20
Another staunch defender of the idea ofthe Renaissance was Federico Chabod,
who denied that it was either radically incommensurate with a preceding "epoch
of barbarism and darkness" or a superficial intellectual or stylistic movement
of little consequence to the overall passage of history. Chabod identified the
Renaissance as a "period" in the sense of "a movement of ideas, an artistic, lit-
erary and cultural period which is first of all and above all a spiritual reality." 21
As such, its particular significance was derived from its reception of classical
culture and its promotion of conceptual realism. Although Classical antiquity
had permeated medieval life and was cherished and admired, it was aJ'an ideal
unrecoverable world. By contrast, the humanists felt it was possible to live the
spirit of the classical age through imitatio. Whereas for the scholastics Roman
history was merely a passage on the greater journey to Revelation, the humanists
viewed the pagan model of Rome as the Golden Age when man's highest aspira-
tions were realized. Furthermore, although both medieval and Renaissance cul-
tures produced rich and vivid descriptions of the world, the humanists replaced
providential causality with a "conceptual realism" that prioritized the actions of
great men as the motor of universal history. 22 Historical events were no longer
explained in terms of divine retribution or reward for good conduct but as the
consequences of human agency. Nevertheless, Chabod admits that in many
106 From Hierarchy to Anarchy
spheres of life attitudes remained far from modern. Economic life, in particu-
lar, was still constrained by a Christian ethic which regarded the instrumental
pursuit of money as sinful. There was no economic equivalent to Machiavelli's
"politics for politics' sake" or Alberti's "art for art's sake." Likewise, ethical dis-
course failed to escape the values of theological reasoning. The facts of the exis-
tence of man and the world could be explained rationally but their justification
required recourse to a universal moral law established by God or Providence.
Furthermore, the idealization of classical antiquity emulated the Christian
belief in the revelation of truth at a particular moment in history. Finally, the
humanist anticipation of a new humanitas mirrored the eschatological expec-
tation of the coming of the kingdom of God. Despite such caveats, Chabod's
Renaissance was not simply the final instance of another medieval culture, but
challenged its very essence. Similarly, for E. H. Gombrich, Renaissance intellec-
tual and artistic life, embodied in the recovery of an elegant Latin style and the
rebirth of art through perspective and nude drawing, was so distinctive that it
forced a rupture with pre-existing European culture. 23
In the post-war era the Renaissance debate shifted to an evaluation of its
importance within macro~historical processes. In narratives which staged
Western history as an unfolding drama of human progress and development,
reaching its final act in modernity, the Renaissance was cast as a principle actor.
Taking a broad chronological perspective (1300-1600), Wallace Ferguson
defined the Renaissance as a period of transition in Western civilization dur-
ing which medieval social structures and ideologies grounded in feudalism and
the Church were replaced with the institutions of modern civilization: com-
merce and industry supplanted agriculture; a money economy and capitalism
emerged; feudal particularism and Christian universalism were replaced by
national centralized states; the hegemony of the Catholic church was challenged
by Protestant sects; and urban elites emerged as political leaders, cultural arbi-
ters and sponsors of secular learning and knowledge. 24 Scholars promoted the
"age of the Renaissance" as a period of transition from the medieval to the mod-
ern world, one that anticipated modernity as much as it honored the legacies
of medieval culture. However, William Bouwsma points out that the validity
of the bridging thesis depends on the intelligibility of the two ages it connects.
"The Renaissance as 'transition' suggests something like an unsteady bridge
between two granitic headlands, clearly identifiable as the Middle Ages and the
modern {or, at least, early modern) world." 25 Accordingly it rests upon two weak
premises: that the modern world is an intelligible entity, and that modernity
emerged out of a single linear process. Subsequent Structuralist histories have
sought to overcome this by substituting progressive history with an emphasis
on discontinuity and rupture between durees. In LeRoy Ladurie's history of the
longue duree the centuries between 1000 and 1800 figure as a motionless unity
The Renaissance Critique of Hierarchy 107
higher and a lower world; their mental universe was "like that of their medieval
ancestors, animate rather than mechanical, moralized rather than neutral and
organized in terms of correspondences rather than causes." 30 The continued
appeal of the hierarchical universe was derived from its provision of an intelligi-
ble "ready-reference system for the allocation by category of every phenomenon
to its place in the scheme of things." 31 Its hegemony ensured that new cosmolog-
ical theories were resisted by much of the educated elite and remained unknown
to the mass of the population. By and large, "[t]he men of the fifteenth century
still lived in a walled universe as well as in walled towns." 32
Ficino's cosmos would certainly have been familiar to Dante. It was a closed
system of hierarchically ordered spheres in which each being has its place and
degree of perfection. God at the summit presided over a descending hierarchy
of orders: angels and souls, celestial and elementary spheres, then animal, plant
and mineral species and, at the bottom, shapeless prime matter. The realms
of the four elements moved according to Aristotelian criteria of substance and
quality. Seven heavens moved according to their disposition and the eighth,
which moved both east-west and west-east, had the qualities of brilliance and
splendor. The seven heavens were in turn enclosed within the crystalline sphere,
which only moved east to west and had a single quality of brilliance. Then
in accordance with the principles that position is superior to motion and the
source of light is superior to light itself, the summit of the universe is occupied
by the static and luminescent Empyrean, related to the stability and light of the
Trinity. In the Empyrean the nine orders of angels are disposed in a manner con-
sistent with Dionysius the Areopagite; three hierarchies of divine spirits, each of
which contains three orders. 33 In Ficino's cosmos all being is ordered in relations
of hierarchy. For P. 0. Kristeller, Ficino's "hierarchical order constitutes ... an
ontological space that embraces all corporeal and incorporeal elements alike and
in which all things have a definite relationship of proximity to each other." 34
All entities are ranked according to their relative di&nity or perfection and are
included in an ascending or descending sequence ofgrades: "divine sun" at the
summit over "angelic mind," "rational soul" in the middle, then "active quality"
giving form to matter and at the bottom, the "dull mass of bodies." 35
Although Pico's philosophy was more eclectic than Ficino's and complemented
the Neo-Platonist core with Aristotelian, Averroist, and Hebraic Cabbalist ele-
ments, the universe in the Heptaplus remains essentially hierarchical. The cos-
mos consists of three worlds: the elemental world of nature, the celestial world
ofthe planets, and the angelic world of the intelligences, arranged in ascending
order according to their relative values in the hierarchy.
In the first world, God, the primal unity, presides over the nine orders
of angels as if over many spheres and, without moving, moves all toward
The Renaissance Critique of Hierarchy 109
himself. In the middle world, that is, the celestial, the empyrean heaven
likewise presides like the commander of an army over nine heaveW.y spheres,
each of which revolves with an unceasing motion; yet in imitati~n of God,
it is itself unmoving. There are also in the elemental world, after the prime
matter which is its foundation, nine spheres of corruptible forms. 36
Man belongs to the fourth world and it contains all those things found in the
others. Pico's universe is an emanative sympatheia for "whatever is in any of the
worlds is at the same time contained in each." 37 The allegorical principle that
everything is in everything is the basis of all knowledge. For Pico, "[b]ound by
the chains of concord, all these worlds exchange nature as well as names with
mutualliberality." 38
Although none of this challenged the basic hierarchical structure of the
medieval cosmos, Ficino and Pico made one significant alteration by reas-
signing man's place within it. The order of things in the medieval cosmos had
been established by the Plotinian model of six hypostases: One, Mind, Soul,
Sensation, Nature, and Body. However, in the Theologia Platonica, Ficino only
recognized five grades of substances: God, Angel, Soul, Quality, and Body.
Although the upper part of this hierarchy reproduced the Plotinian scheme,
by placing Soul at the centre of the symmetrical hierarchy of ontological order,
Ficino guaranteed its indissolubility and immortality; for, if the soul perished
the whole hierarchy would dissolve. By giving "the privileged place in its centre
to the human soul ... [Ficino gives] ... a kind of metaphysical setting and sanc-
tion to the doctrine of the dignity of man." 39 As the absolute median connect-
ing the extremes of the world, Soul confirms the inner unity of Being. Situated
between and having attributes of both higher and lower beings it is the mean
of all God's creations. Soul is in all things simultaneously, possessing images of
the divine things on which it depends and concepts of the lower things which
it generates. "Therefore it may be rightly called the centre of nature, the middle
term of all things, the series of the world, the face of all, the bond and juncture
of the universe."4 For Charles Trinkaus, Ficino's conception of the soul was the
most radical statement of human autonomy made in the Renaissanc~~~ Man as
rational soul not only serves as the conduit between eternal and temporal and
between divine and nature, but is the only entity able to move between the cor-
poreal and divine realms. Man is unique because his soul "is not compelled by
the divine, from whose providence it is free from the start, nor is it coerced by
anything natural over which it widely rules.'>4 2 Unlike other animate creatures
whose actions are determined by nature, man, like God who created him in his
own likeness, is able to exercise free will through the application of his intellect.
Man acts freely and on nature rather than according to nature and by implica-
tion is capable of controlling rather than being imprisoned in time and space.
110 From Hierarchy to Anarchy
Furthermore, intellect provides man with relative autonomy from the influence
of the heavens. The soul's direct relationship to God elevates man above the
heavens for their form is "corporeal, singular, local and temporal" while the
form by which the "mind intellects is incorporeal, universal and absolute."43
This autonomy is the source of man's capacity to deploy the arts-industrial,
civil and liberal-and sciences for his own purposes.
In the Oration on the Dignity ofMan Pico wpuld further undermine the hier-
archical cosmological order. 45 He endorsed th~ humanist proposition that man
is the most wonderful and fortunate of creatures. However, he did not feel that
any of the reasons put forward thus far-man is an intermediary between crea-
tures, he is the intimate of the gods, the king of lower beings, or the being with
the most developed senses, intellect or use of reason-explained why man is so
worthy of admiration and occupies such an enviable rank in the universal chain
of being. For Pico, the dignity of man arose as a consequence of God's creation
of the world, for once the supreme Architect had finished his work he desired a
being that could appreciate and contemplate it. 46
There can be few more emphatic declarations of the principle of sovereign iden-
tity than Pico's Oration. Man's uniqueness derives from the fact that he is the
only being who has not been poured from a prefabricated mould and has the
power to enter into any form he wishes; only man can escape the rigid striations
of the medieval world. Man, notes Cassirer, has the "almost unlimited power of
self-transformation at his disposal" and "unlike any other creature, he owes his
moral character to himself. He is what he makes of himself ...48 Not only is Man
able to fashion his own self, but the entire universe, elements and beasts below
and angels and celestial souls above, is at his service.
It is a truly divine possession of all these natures at the same time flowing
into one, so that it pleases us to exclaim with Hermes, "A great miracle,
0 Asclepius, is man." The human condition can especially be glorified for
this reason, through which it happens that no created substance disdains to
serve him. To him the earth and the elements, to him the animals are ready
for service, for him the heavens fight, for him the angelic minds procure
safety and goodness.4 9
Man's capacity for self-fashioning raises him above all other animate beings
driven by instinct, and even above the angels and heavenly intelligences whose
nature and perfection is impressed upon them at creation.
In conclusion, we must acknowledge that Ficino and Pico played only a
modest part in undermining the hierarchies of the medieval cosmos. Ficino's
dynamic conception of the universe "transcends the limits of the traditional
notion of hierarchy" and with Pico
man is no longer a definite element in the hierarchical series, not even its
privileged centre: he is entirely detached from the hierarchy and can move
upward and downward according to his free will. Thus the hierarchy is no
longer all inclusive, while man, because of his possession of freedom, seems
to be set entirely apart from the order of objective reality. 5
However, their promotion of the doctrine of the dignity of man is important in so
far as it anticipates the principle of sovereign identity. Man is no longer directed by
the heavens and, as a sovereign subject detached from the hierarchical structures
of the world, he is able to observe it as an objective reality that he can manipulate
and control. He is no longer imprisoned within but able to know, order and con-
trol space and time. With dignity man also acquires the agency of territorializa-
tion and comes to embody the principle of sovereign identity driven by the desire
to "fix a point of identity-a universality in space and time against which all dif-
ferences in space and time can be measured, judged and put in their place." 51
112 From Hierarchy to Anarchy
the destruction of the Cosmos, that is, the disappearance, from philosoph-
ically and scientifically valid concepts, of the conception of the world as a
finite, closed, and hierarchically ordered whole ... and its replacement by
an indefinite and even infinite universe which is bound together by the
identity of its fundamental components and laws, and in which all those
components are placed on the same level of being. This, in turn, implies
the discarding by scientific thought of all considerations based on value-
concepts, such as perfection, harmony, meaning and aim, and finally the
utter devalorization of being, the divorce of the world of value and the world
offacts.52
for if it had a centre and a circumference there would be some space and
some thing beyond the world, suppositions which are wholly lacking in
truth. Since, therefore, it is impossible that the world should be enclosed
within a corporeal centre and a corporeal boundary, it is not within our
power to understand the world, whose centre and circumference are God.
And though this world cannot be infinite, nevertheless it cannot be con-
ceived as finite, since there are no limits within which it could be confined.
The earth, therefore, which cannot be the centre, cannot be wholly without
motion .... And just as the world has no centre, so neither the sphere of the
fixed stars nor any other is its circumference. 62
114 From Hierarchy to Anarchy
a planet revolving around the sun, the order of the other planets can be estab-
lished. Venus and Mercury, seen only at dawn and dusk, are within the earth's
orbit, while the rest, seen all night, lie outside. With the sun at the centre, their
positions could be established according to the relative duration of their orbits:
"the sphere of the fixed stars, which is immovable, then Saturn (with a circuit
of thirty years) followed by Jupiter (twelve), Mars (two), the Earth (an annual
orbit), Venus (nine months) and Mercury (eighty days)." 69 At the heart of this
universe is the sun at rest which illuminates everything: "called by some peo-
ple the lantern of the universe, its mind by others, and its ruler by still others.
The Thrice-Great Hermes labels it a 'visible god'; and Sophocles' Electra, 'that
which gazes upon all things.' Thus indeed, as if seated on a kingly throne, the
sun governs the family of planets revolving around it." 70
How did the cosmological visions sketched out by Cusa and Copernicus
contribute to the Renaissance reimagination of political cosmology and the pro-
motion of a modern territorial imaginary? Mindful of Michel Foucault's claim
that analogous epistemic shifts occur simultaneously in heterogeneous discur~
sive formations, we can cite Ernst Cassirer's observation that during the fif-
teenth and sixteenth centuries in both astronomy and politics "one breach after
another" was made in the hierarchical system/ 1 Cassirer prefaces a discussion
of the leveling of political hierarchies, caused by the decline of the feudal order
and the rise of territorializing monarchs and princes, with Giordano Bruno's
summary of Cusa's world as an infinite whole, lacking any privileged points
or any sense of above or below. 72 The erasure of hierarchy in Renaissance cos-
mology and political discourse mirror one another, for in both "the difference
between the 'lower' and the 'higher' world vanishes. The same principles and
natural laws hold for the 'world below' and the 'world above'. Things are on the
same level both in the physical and in the political order.'' 73 Just as Copernicus
and Cusa undermined the hierarchies of the cosmos, so Machiavelli and others
undermined the hierarchies of Papacy and Empire by. secularizing politics and
grounding it on the territories of republics and princedoms.
Machiavelli: Anti-Hierarch
The modern territorial imaginary presupposes that man's political spaces are
ordered along one horizontal plane, that there are no vestiges of the hierar-
chies of the Christian-Medieval theological-political cosmos obstructing the
landscape. The Renaissance thinker who did most to undermine the legitimacy
of the hierarchical political imaginary was Machiavelli, who dismantled the
spaces of political hierarchy as he undermined the temporal politics of eternity.
J. G. A. Pocock has placed Machiavelli in a current of Renaissance political
thought concerned to replace the Christian temporal paradigm of eternity and
116 From Hierarchy to Anarchy
being and to find his place in an eternal order." 79 At the turn of the sixteenth
century, another turbulent period in Florence's history, Francesco Guicciardini,.
Dino Giannotti, and Niccolo Machiavelli again insisted that the potential of
civic life in an environment of uncertainty and danger could only be achieved
if all citizens actively pursued the vivere civile. They aligned the vita activa with
the Aristotelian image of man as zoon politikon, a political animal whose telos
can only be realized in the polis, that is the republic. With an eye on Venice,
whose mixed constitution was widely regarded as the guarantor of her longevity
and relative stability, they endorsed Aristotle's maxim that the best form of gov-
ernment, that is the one most capable of instilling civic virtu in its citizens, was
a mixed government of the One, the Few, and the Many.
Guicciardini and Giannotti held that the goal of a mixed government found
in a republican constitution was to secure Florence's being as an Aristotelian
ideal of excellence and civic virtue able to overcome the contingencies of his-
tory. However, Machiavelli drives history right through the heart of the polity,
making it the essence of political being. The new prince who has occupied or
illegally acquired a state is an innovator, a man who, having overturned the
established order, now faces the task of holding onto his new possessions with-
out the legitimacy derived from established dynastic rule. Machiavelli's prince
has entered "the domain of contingency" where fortuna, the capricious god-
dess of chance, rules supreme. However, "the time-realm he now inhabits is not
wholly unpredictable or unmanageable" for bold action guided by virtU can
turn her "slings and arrows" to his advantage. 80 Likewise, Machiavelli proposed
that the republic should also enter the stream of history manifest in power pol-
itics and triumph over it by destroying her enemies. Hence his admiration of
bellicose Rome, the model republic, maintained by a well-disciplined and patri-
otic body of soldiers drawn from the citizenry. Yet Machiavelli remained true to
the spirit of Polybius' theory of anacyclosis which dictated that all constitutions
pass through stages of change and decay: from Kingship to Tyranny, then Rule
of the Best to Domination of the Few, and down to popular government and
anarchy. Thus even Rome's virtuous leaders were unable to guide that most glo-
rious republic away from an inevitable decline as dictated by the requirements
of natural law. 81 Further, while Polybius argued that the destiny of all political
bodies trapped within the unending cycle was a return to their natural state,
Machiavelli was less optimistic about the future, and doubted that any republic
would be able to endure such traumatic changes and still survive in a hostile
international environment. 82 For, while the republic is in a state of commotion,
lacking counsel and strength, it is likely to be overcome by a "neighbouring state
which is better ordered." 83
Machiavelli inserted politics into the stream of history in the context of
Charles VIII's 1494 invasion of Italy. This expedition had come to symbolise
118 From Hierarchy to Anarchy
the inability of Italy's rulers to determine their own destinies, when external
forces, deriving from power struggles taking place over the Alps, were seen to
be shaping the peninsula's political fortunes. In this context "it was natural
for Machiavelli to draw the conclusion that the dimension in which politics
worked was history and that every political action had to be fitted into the
context of historical change." 84 No longer moored to the secure shores of the
civitas Dei, Machiavelli cast politics adrift into the mundane world of change,
chance, and contingency ruled over by the capricious and unpredictable god-
dess Fortuna. If political leaders are to overcome this wily foe they must cul-
tivate a judicious combination of instinct, force, and virtu-the capacity to
anticipate and prepare for the unexpected and thereby turn it to one's own
advantage. In the principality, virtu was incarnate in the talents and character
of the prince, while in the republic it was generated by the active participation
of the citizens in the res publica. 85 Originally the Roman pagan goddess of
chance, medieval Christianity had recast Fortuna as an agency of divine will,
a "ministering angel entirely subservient to the Christian God.~' 86 Machiavelli,
however, reclaimed her pagan identity, making her the ruler of man's politi-
cal fortunes: "Fortune governs supreme. Instead of being a ministra of God,
she is the mistress of human destiny, and that destiny ... is subject to chance,
not to reason .... in the Machiavellian cosmos, there is no room for God's
Providence." 87 In chapter XV of If Principe Machiavelli makes it clear that
Fortuna is not a servant of the civitas Dei but a sovereign in her own right,
whose domain is the terrestrial world of politics. 88 Machiavelli opened this
chapter by voicing his concerns about the defeatism and resignation that had
arisen throughout Italy because of the failure of the Italian polities to defend
themselves against foreign interventions. Although these defeats suggested
that even the most carefully cultivated prudence is impotent in a world "gov-
erned by fortune and God," Machiavelli refused to give up on virtU "because
our free will is not extinct, I judge that it is likely that fortuna determines the
outcome of half of our actions, she allows us sovereignty over the other." 89
Machiavelli's rhetoric in this chapter, maintains Mikael Hornqvist, effected "a
descent from the exalted heights of Renaissance cosmology toward the polit-
ical here and now," for the world of politics is no longer "governed by fortune
and God" but Fortuna alone dictates the extent to which men are able to
exercise their free-will. 90 She alone is the ruler of the civitas Terra and God no
longer has a role to play.
Machiavelli's rejection of Christian political cosmology and its hierarchies
was not limited to his territorialization of Fortuna. His study of "the effective
reality of things" (verita effetuale della cosa) led him to conclude that Christianity
and politics were essentially incompatible. Machiavelli's writings on religion
are not always consistent and his personal religious beliefs remain the subject
The Renaissance Critique of Hierarchy 119
neither its power nor its virtue has been sufficiently great for it to be able to
subjugate Italian tyrants and to make itself their prince; nor yet, on the other
hand, has it been so weak that i~ could not, when afraid of losing its domin-
ion over things temporal (if dominio delle sue cose temporali), call upon one of
the powers (uno potente) to defend itself against an Italian state (quello) that
had become too powerful. 92
Machiavelli's contempt for the Church exudes from the sarcastic rhetoric he
used when refusing to discuss Ecclesiastical Princedoms in If Principe orl the
grounds that they are "governed by superior causes, unto which the human
mind cannot reach," and "because being exalted and maintained by God, to
discourse on them would be the task of a presumptuous and rash man." 93
Underlying Machiavelli's attack on the temporal power of the Pope and the
ecclesiastical hierarchy was his belief that Christianity's advocacy of the vita con-
templativa over vivere civile had, ever since the end of the Roman Empire, had
a universally detrimental effect on European political life. Christianity's high
valuation of humility, its contempt for worldly goods, and its recommendation
of withdrawn contemplation of the eternal, had had the effect of undermining
political life, for with their attention directed heavenward, men ignored.the_day
to day realities of terrestrial politics which required constant vigilance if virtU
was to overcome fortuna. Further, the devaluation of civic or political honour in
Christian culture meant that men were less inclined to identify with and hence
fight on behalf of their polities. Machiavelli assessed religions according to tbeir
political efficacy, that is their ability to promote political virtU. According to
120 From Hierarchy to Anarchy
such standards Christianity was inferior to those ancient religions which valued
worldly honour, assigned the highest values to "greatness of spirit, strength of
body," and which glorified great generals and princes who had achieved honour
pursuing the vita activa. Christianity's beatification of "humble and contem-
plative men" had allowed wicked and corrupt men to take control of the world.
These usurpers had little to fear from those "who aspiring to reach Paradise are
prepared to bear, rather than avenge, their injuries." 94
Machiavelli cited the example of Classical Rome, specifically the policies of
Numa Pompilius, to demonstrate how important religion is to maintaining a
well-ordered state. Numa's genius was to realise that religion could be used in
"controlling the armies, in inspiring the people, in keeping men good, in mak-
ing the wicked ashamed." 95 By promoting a religion which drew on people's
instinctual fear of the Gods, Numa was able to reinforce the social contract
through the swearing of oaths, to promote civil obedience and, most impor-
tantly, to secure the loyalty of the military. The religion he introduced into
Roman society was "one of the chief causes (cagioni) of that city's prosperity"
for it "caused good laws (ordini), and good laws make good fortune, and from
good fortune comes happy success in all enterprise." 96 Therefore, the rulers of
republics and kingdoms have a duty to "preserve the foundations of the religion
they hold. If they do this, it will be an easy thing for them to keep their state
religious, and consequently good and united." 97
Machiavelli's instrumental dismissal of Christianity as an effective state reli-
gion directly undermined the legitimacy of the Christian political order. His dis-
cussion ofNuma was predicated on a functionalist methodological premise that
all religions, including Christianity, can be evaluated in terms of their political
efficacy. 98 It does not uphold Christianity as a truer or more profound religion
than that of pagan Rome, but simply concludes that for a political society to be
successful it must be founded not just in laws and military discipline but also in
a belief in divine sanction. "Those principalities or those republics which desire
to maintain themselves uncorrupted must, above all, maintain their religious
ceremonies uncorrupted and always ensure that they are held in veneration; for
there can be no greater indication of the ruin of a state (provincia) than to see its
divine cult being neglected." 99 Machiavelli's functionalism issued several chal-
lenges to the Christian body politic and its hierarchical order. First, it under-
mined the traditional Providential narrative in which Christianity transcended
the preceding pagan culture. For Machiavelli, Christianity and paganism were
simply two incompatible moral orders with irreconcilable ultimate values: the
redemption of the individual and the preservation of the polis. This moral rela-
tivism, which challenged the basic assumption ofWestern civilisation since Plato
that one overarching principle-Nature, God, The Chain of Being-regulates
life and sets the standard by which means and ends can be evaluated, is, suggests
The Renaissance Critique of Hierarchy 121
Isaiah Berlin, the root cause of the centuries of hostility that Machiavelli's work
has provoked. 100 Second, Machiavelli undermined the scholastic hegemony. He
rejected the premise of scholastic moral philosophy that all knowledge of man
could be interpreted within Christian theological categories and concepts. For
Machiavelli, politics is an autonomous realm of human action that warrants
its own self-contained branch of knowledge. Political realism brackets off the
traditional questions asked of religion concerning its truth, its meaning for the
individual, or the influence of divine providence on men's affairs. Its only con-
cern is to ascertain the importance of religious factors in determining individual
and social behaviour and in legitimising political power.
Machiavelli's realism not only distinguished political and theological
spheres, but, at times, seems to invert the established hierarchy between them.
Consider his discussion of the ordering principles of pagan and Christian reli-
gions. Machiavelli claimed that every religion is founded in institutions (ordini)
which "are particular to "a man's homeland" (dove l'uomo e nato). The implica-
tion being that all religions, including Christianity, are accidents of geography
and history, rather than universal truth-bearing belief systems. Likewise, the
title of the chapter in I Discoursi, "In order for a religious institution or com-
monwealth to endure for a long time it is necessary that it should be often
returned to its founding principle," challenges the medieval association of the
Church with immutability and permanence, attributes of the higher world of
the divine. Rather, the Church exists on the same plane, the mundane world of
change, as other secular authorities. 101
Machiavelli had no interest in whether or not religious institutions commu
nicated with a higher transcendental order, nor was he concerned with spiritual
salvation. His instrumentalist evaluation assessed religion purely in terms of its
role in providing a cultural identity that could facilitate the efficient conduct of
politics. Religion gives form to a society's culture and promotes its basic values;
it constituted "at the highest level the cement of society." 102 Bernard Guillemain
suggests that religion had similar status for Machiavelli as the conscience collective
did for Durkheim; both are collective and coercive facts expressed and reinforced
through ceremony and ritual. Religion is, as Campanella noted, subordinate to
politics and Machiavelli's maxim religio instrumentum regni issued a profound
challenge to the hierarchical Christian order based on the opposite belief. 103
Likewise, for Cassirer, The Prince can be considered the first text of modern
political philosophy precisely because it rejected scholasticism and refuted "the
cornerstone of this tradition-the hierarchic system." 104 Machiavelli's political
experience had taught him that power does not issue from God and that the
state is not of divine origin; there is nothing divine about the power wielded
by princes and the notion of the divine origin of kings was little more than an
ideological fantasy.
122 From Hierarchy to Anarchy
With Machiavelli we stand at the gateway of the modern world. The desired
end is attained; the state has won its full autonomy.... The sharp knife of
Machiavelli's thought has cut off all the threads by which in former genera-
tions the state was fastened to the organic whole of human existence. The
political world has lost its connection not only with religion or metaphysics
but also with all the other forms of man's ethical and cultural life. It stands
alone-in an empty space. 10 5
In the following chapter we shall investigate how Machiavelli filled that empty
space with attributes of sovereignty, violence, and identity, which would come
to define the modern territorial imaginary.
CHAPTER 7
choosing between different courses of action and of drawing on the citizen's loy-
alty. As such, maintains Skinner, Il Principe was not just a handbook of princely
conduct but a considered meditation on the abstract issues of "statecraft (dello
stato) and cose di stato or affairs of state." 14 Yet, at times, Machiavelli combined
the apparatus of government and its rulers into the one concept: "lo stato, as he
often puts it, remains equivalent toil suo stato, the prince's own state or condi-
tions of rulership." 15 J. H. Hexter has identified five different meanings of lo
stato in II Principe: "[t]ake (1) 'territory,' (2) 'the governed,' (3) 'ruling power,'
(4) 'status, position or rank,' (5) 'national-political territorial entity,' and try
substituting each of them wherever lo stato appears in II Principe. It is rare indeed
that two of the meanings will not fit. It is surprising how often three, four, or
occasionally even all five of the meanings will fit." 16 The one thing that unites.
them is that Machiavelli tends to deploy lo stato with verbs of an exploitative
tonality, such as acquistare, tenere, mantenere, togliere, and perdere: (to acquire,
hold, maintain, take away or lose). It is thus an "object of political exploitation,"
an instrument for the manipulation of the people by a prince and, therefore,
far removed from the modern ideal of the state as a sovereign subject. Hexter's
claim that Machiavelli's definition of the state lacks conceptual rigor is rejected
by Giuseppe Prezzolini, who argues that Machiavelli consistently uses lo stati:J
to denote an organization that unites individuals and institutions into a supe-
rior state of being that transcends their particularityP Unlike Dante's Empire,
which, provided for by the divine, is eternal, Machiavelli's state is an organic
living being, a "corpo misto" obeying the natural laws ofbirth, life, change, cor-
ruption, competition, and death that apply to every living being. As a political
adviser, the best Machiavelli can do is to suggest to rulers how they can prevent
the state dying before its time. Like all organic bodies its various parts have dif-
ferent degrees of importance and the minor ones can be sacrificed in the cause of
the greatest good: the survival of the state itself. The communal good embodied
in the state is the greatest known to man and whatever action is required to con-
stitute and save it can be excused.
In the light of these disputes, F. Chiapelli's bold judgment that Machiavelli's
stato "bears the meaning of 'State' in its full maturity,'' that is as a national-
political territorial entity may appear somewhat rash. 18 Of course, any evalu-
ation of the modernity of Machiavelli's state requires some a priori criteria for
understanding what precisely makes the modern state modern. For Federico
Chabod, the modern state is a sovereign unit, distinct from the ruler, limited to
a defined territory, incorporating the nation or patria, and represented institu-
tionally by a rationalized bureaucracy of appointed officials. As the Renaissance
state from Lorenzo di Medici to Richelieu was concentrated around two poles
"the power of the sovereign and the hierarchy of the 'officials','' it only ful-
filled the last of these criteria and failed to reach the standards of the modern
126 From Hierarchy to Anarchy
state. 19 Likewise, for Skinner, Machiavelli's account of the state was not mod-
ern for it failed to distinguish it as a form of public power separate from both
the ruler and ruled and constituting the supreme political authority within a
certain defined territory-an idea first formulated by sixteenth-century legal
humanists such as Bude, Du Haillan, and Bodin in France and Starkey, Ponet,
and Humphrey in England. 20 On the other hand, Skinner acknowledges that
by the end of the quattrocento works like Patrizi's treatise on The Kingdom and
Education ofthe King had begun to articulate an abstract idea of the state as an
independent political apparatus which the ruler has a duty to maintain. A sim-
ilar sense can be found in II Principe when Machiavelli declares that in times of
adversity the state has need of its citizens (lo stato ha bisogne de' cittadini) and
where he assures the prince that he can overawe his rivals by calling on "the
majesty of the state"(/a maesta della stato). It is unlikely that the issue of the
modernity of Machiavelli's state will ever be resolved. There are no universally
accepted criteria by which we might define the modern state and distinguish
it from other forms; hence no hard and fast standards exist in light of which
Machiavelli can be held to account. Nevertheless, Machiavelli's territorial imag-
inary does embrace three elements-sovereignty, violence and identity-that
are often cited in definitions of the modern state.
locates the constituents of a state in three nouns. A state has all three-a
dominion, an imperium, and men. It is a special case of dominion (the
definiens): one that is held by rightful (for which can be substituted just, law-
ful, or authoritative) command (which from its military antecedents contains
a strong sense of sanctions or force) over men (who are located in the territory
and obey the commands-laws, orders, rules, decrees-as rightful). 23
full legal power over a corporeal thing, the right of the owner to use it, to
take proceeds therefrom, and to dispose of it freely. The owner's plena potes-
tas in re (full power over a thing) is manifested by his faculty to do with it
what he pleases and to exclude anyone from the use thereof unless the latter
has acquired a specific right to it ... which he might obtain only with the
owner's consent. 24
legal territorial sovereignty can be traced back to the fourteenth century crisis of
church and state, discussed in chapter 4, when the regional monarchs first pro-
claimed their independence from the Holy Roman Empire. The test-case was
Robert of Naples' challenge to the authority of the Emperor Henry VII in 1312.
Robert had been charged with crimen laesae majestatis for inciting and allying
with imperial enemies in Lombardy and Tuscany and for occupying imperial
territory. He not only rejected the charge but responded by citing the arguments
of French and Neapolitan lawyers that the Holy Roman Emperor's claim to be
dominus mundi, or the lawful overlord and supreme monarch of Europe with
jurisdictional authority over all kings, was invalid. John of Paris and Andreas
de lsernia championed the principle of rex est monarcha in regno suo and denied
that the Holy Roman Empire had any superior juristic or political status over
the regional kings. 31 They maintained that the Emperor had the same status
and powers as the other kings of Europe. His jurisdiction, like theirs, extended
only over his own realm: "Whatever the Emperor can do in his lands, the king
can do in his kingdom ... kings have as much freedom in their kingdoms as the
Emperor has in the Empire." 32 Robert mobilized these arguments to declare that
as a sovereign himself he did not recognize any higher sovereign authority and
was not obliged to obey the demands of any other temporal rulers.
Robert's rejection of the Emperor's claim to wield jurisdictional power over
kings resident outside the bounds of the Empire was subsequently confirmed by
Pope Clement V in the decree Pastoralis Cura (1313). Clement, who regarded
Naples as a papal fief and had been upset by Henry's claim to Naples, declared
that the Emperor had no authority to summon any king extra districtum imperii
or to use force to bring a king to book extra imperium. For Walter Ullman, by
the time Marsiglia of Padua wrote Defensor pacis (1324), the principle that the
sovereignty of the humanist individual (legislator humanus) should be reflected
in the sovereignty of the universitas civium was a staple of legal discourse. 33
The citizen's place in space had become an element of his legal status as both an
individual and a citizen. A person's domicile united the res or territory with the
persona; it combined the animate person with inanimate soil. The implication
of this territorialization of the universitas civium was that no government could
130 From Hierarchy to Anarchy
claim jurisdiction over subjects resident in places outside its own territory and,
as 1312 proved, a citizen domiciled in one territory could not be summoned to
attend court in another. 35
While it may be the case that Renaissance political discourse did not have,
as Bartleson insists, a sense that the outside was constituted by an interna-
tional system, the legal principle of dominion did operate a distinction between
inside and outside in that the territories of republics and principalities were
distinguished from the myriad of other political spaces existing outside their
boundaries. The dominio of lo stato was a circumscribed space within which the
state authorities could wield coercive power and enforce internal jurisdiction.
Machiavelli experienced this coercive aspect of Renaissance territoriality first
hand in November 1512 when, following the fall of Soderini's government, he
was expelled from the Chancery and confined in territorio et dominio Florentino
per unum annum continuum. 36 Machiavelli's confinement within Florence's ter-
ritorio et dominio was a major hardship and after six months he wrote to his
friend Venturi in Rome declaring his intention to visit "ifl could get out of this
hole of dominion." 37 The legal principle of territorial sovereignty also came into
play during the negotiation of diplomatic treaties. The treaty which formed the
Italian League (1454) "was concluded 'ad tutelam et conservationem statuum et
dominiorum' of the signatories' and in it lo stato referred to a combination of
political power and territorial dominion. 38
Renaissance diplomatic documents often distinguished a ruler's stato from
his lands and subjects. This distinction implied that the sovereign subject and
the territorial object were not coterminous. According to the terms of the treaty
between Francesco Sforza and Federico Montefeltro (31 August 1450) Sforza
agreed to take into his protection "'el stato, citade, terre, castelle, homini,
subditi ... of Federigo.' " 39 Here stato and terre are distinct components of the
state. For Rubinstein, this distinction was especially pertinent with respect to
principalities and despotic states because the signore held both the internal
regime and the territory as components of his dominio. Chabod suggests that in
Machiavelli's stato the territory is, like the specific body of people who occupy it,
an object that is subjected to the juridical authority or political power of either
the prince or the dominant group in the republic. Stato, therefore, not only
designates a subject, that is the body exercising command, "clearly separated
from the object of command, which remains outside of and subservient to it.
But it also signifies territorial extension, 'dominio' in the objective sense (the
space-and population-within which and upon which a determined authority
is exercised) .'"' 0
There is a complex relationship in Machiavelli's stato between the prince as
sovereign subject and the territory as an objective component of his jurisdiction.
This has been commented on by Michel Foucault, who sees Machiavelli's stato as
Machiavelli, Territoriality, Lo Stato 131
a transitory stage in the development of the state, lying somewhere between "the
state of justice, born in the feudal type of territorial regime which corresponds
to a society of laws" and "the administrative state, born in the territoriality of
national boundaries in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries and corresponding
to a society of regulation and discipline.'>4 1 For Foucault, Machiavelli's account
of the relationship between territory and sovereignty in Il Principe reflected the
juridical principle, characteristic of contemporary theories and philosophies of
public law, that "sovereignty is not exercised on things, but above all on a ter-
ritory and consequently on the subjects who inhabit it." Variations in the attri-
butes of the territory-such as its fertility, the numbers of people occupying
it, and their wealth or labor-are insignificant "by comparison with territory
itself, which is the very foundation of principality and sovereignty.'>4 2 And yet,
the prince's relationship to his territory is fragile, synthetic, and permanently
threatened by external enemies and internal opponents. It needs constant atten-
tion if the prince is to achieve his raison d' etre, which is simply to hold onto what
he has got. In this sense, irrespective of how he has acquired his principality,
whether by conquest or inheritance, the prince remained alienated from it. 43
The objective of the prince's exercise of power is to strengthen and protect the
principality, understood not as "the objective ensemble of its subjects and the
territory, but rather the prince's relation with what he owns, with the territory he
has inherited or acquired, and with his subjects.'>4 4 Foucault draws our attention
to a paradox. Although territory is a fundamental component of Machiavellian
sovereignty, the sovereign prince is estranged from the territories which define
his sovereignty. In Renaissance sovereign-territoriality the hyphen between the
two terms separates rather than unites; it differentiates the subjectivity of the
sovereign prince from the object of his power, his territory.
Violence
In the first chapter we saw how the inside/outside spatial demarcation which
underpins the territorial a priori is reinforced by Max Weber's assertion that
the state exercises the legitimate monopoly of violence throughout its territory.
Machiavelli shared Weber's premise that violence is an integral element of polit-
ical life and his realism dispensed with the euphemisms which medieval writers
had used to disguise this aspect of political life. If, for St. Augustine, violehce
was debased, an instrument appropriate to terrestrial authority commanded to
execute the coercive sanctions of the ecclesiastical hierarchy, for Machiavelli,
violence replaced divine sanction as the warrant of secular power politics.
Sheldon Wolin claims that Machiavelli saw the state as an "aggregate of
power" whose "profile was that of violence.'>4 5 Machiavelli stressed that a suc-
cessful state had to have good institutions or laws (buone istituzione) and strong
132 From Hierarchy to Anarchy
armies (eserciti efficienti), but, when push comes to shove, armies are the most
important. "The main foundations of all states, whether new, old or mixed are
good laws and good armies .... It is not possible to have good laws without good
armies and where there are good armies good laws follow .... "46 Machiavelli was
adamant that if the prince were to achieve his political ends, he must not shirk
from employing violence where appropriate, even at the risk of being considered
cruel. For a prince to acquire and maintain a principality he must cultivate mil-
itary virtU. All the most accomplished rulers in history have devoted themselves
to the study of war, the greatest of the princely arts. Francesco Sforza's acqui-
sition of the Duchy of Milan was a recent illustration of how a man who has
mastered the art of war can rise from the mass of private citizens to become a
successful prince. Conversely, rulers who neglect the study of war while pursu-
ing the finer rewards of power will loose their states. 47
Machiavelli was convinced that a state should exercise its monopoly of vio-
lence through a standing army made up of soldiers drawn from the subject popu-
lation. The question of armies was very important to Machiavelli, who had been
responsible for recruiting a militia force for Florence, and discussions on how
to raise, maintain, and deploy armed forces appear in all his major works. 48 He
repeatedly insisted that the Italian rulers should establish their own forces rather
than deploy unreliable and dangerous mercenaries or auxiliaries. 49 Mercenaries
are "disunited, ambitious, undisciplined and treacherous"; they have no fear of
God, no loyalty to the prince who hires them, and will not risk their lives for
their paltry wages. 5 Consequently, any prince who tries to hold "his state on
the basis of mercenary forces will never be stable or secure." 51 Living memory
could furnish an acute example of the limitations of using mercenary forces.
During the 1494 invasion of Italy by the French King Charles VIII, the mer-
cenary forces employed by Italian rulers had dispersed in the face of superior
foreign troops, thus allowing Charles to "conquer Italy with a piece of chalk." 52
Equally dangerous was the policy of hiring another's man's troops as auxiliaries.
These troops are loyal only to their own commander who, if the prince is in a
dire situation, can easily switch allegiance and turn his men against the prince,
thereby destroying him. A strong prince will be able to defend himself against
any attacker without calling for any external assistance.
Machiavelli advised both princes and the ruling elites of city-states to replace
mercenaries with militia forces made up of loyal local men. The state's security
cannot be guaranteed if the armies, the means of violence, come from out-
side the boundaries of the dominio. Fortuna in the guise of internal rebellion
or foreign incursion can only be overcome by virtu as embodied in an indig-
enous militia force. Armies must be autochthonous, made up of men whose
livelihoods come from the lands which make up the state's dominio, and who
recognize that by enlisting in the militia and making the state more secure
Machiavelli, Territoriality, Lo Stato 133
their own interests would be better protected. The militia has both an internal
coercive function and an external defensive function. If the militia is conducted
properly, "it naturally suppresses all disturbances-rather than fomenting
them-among its constituents" as well as being able "to protect them against
the fear of foreign enemies." 53 The inherent resentment and hostility a popolo
exhibited toward their rulers could be contained if they were drafted to serv~ as
soldiers in a military structure in which the mechanisms of discipline and con-
trol were well developed. Further, in the "tightly-packed condition of political
space" where the new prince had to carve out a new state while "hemmed in by
vested interests and expectations, privileges and rights, ambitions and hopes"
the prince could not expect to hold onto power without creating enemies.54 In
a political environment where faction and intrigue are rife it is the militia that
must be relied upon to quell any rebellious factions or internal challenges to
the prince's authority. A loyal and well-disciplined army is especially important
for a regime which has just taken power, for it must liquidate anybody hostile
to the new order. "He who establishes a tyranny and does not kill Brutus, and
he who establishes a democratic regime and does not kill the sons of Brutus
will not last long." 55 A militia was also required for external warfare. At a time
when the marauding armies of the oltramontani were rampaging through Italy,
Machiavelli admonished those princes and republican leaders who lacked suffi-
cient of their own soldiers to defend their own states or to join in a united effort
to rid Italy of the foreigners.56
Machiavelli's hopes that Florence would acquire a militia force capable of
both internal peace-keeping and external war-fighting is symptomatic of the
modern sovereign territorial imaginary in so far as the modern territorial state
is defined by its ability to exercise violence, internally and externally, at will.
However, in Renaissance Italy, few princes or republican leaders had sufficient
coercive resources at their disposal to exercise their sovereignty equally effec-
tively over all the spaces that made up their dominions. Machiavelli, therefore,
advised a weak prince under attack from superior forces to "fortify and provi-
sion his city, and to make no account of the territory lying outside it." 57 The
prince should "take refuge behind walls and defend them" for he will be able
to withstand a siege and hold onto his state if he makes sure that the city is
well fortified and that the people within it remain loyat.5 8 As long as the city
holds fast, the countryside or contado is expendable; a space that the enemy can
occupy without threatening the existence of the state as a whole. However, this
image of state territoriality, structured around central and peripheral spaces,
fails to meet the standards ofWeber's ideal type in which the state's monopoly
of violence is exercised evenly across the entire territory. Florentine republican
writers, who used lo stato in a geographical sense to denote the extent of the
city's dominion, automatically made a distinction between a center based on
134 From Hierarchy to Anarchy
the city and a periphery of outlying areas. "Giovanni Villani divides the stato of
Florence into city, contado and distretto" and Guicciardini "speaks circa 1508 of
Pisa as belonging to 'lo stato nostro.' " 59 Elana Guarani claims that this center-
periphery territorial order reflected the reality of Italian political communities
in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. Renaissance states which had territo-
ries further out than the castles and villages located in the immediate contado
did not exercise "a form of immediate sovereignty over a territory." 60 Rather,
the jurisdiction they exercised over the people living in these outlying spaces
was indirect and diffused, being filtered through local institutions and commu-
nal structures. The center-periphery structure of Renaissance state territoriality,
therefore, still maintained the vestiges of a "hierarchical and polarized organi-
sation of. .. space." 61
While serving in the Florentine Chancery, Machiavelli travelled exten-
sively, visiting potentially rebellious cities and recruiting soldiers for the mili-
tia. During these trips he became sensitive to the potential weaknesses of these
center-periphery systems and shared the general view that the inability of the
communes to unify and discipline the feudal aristocracies domiciled in their dis-
tretti had led to the crises of the fourteenth century. In this context, Pisa, which
Florence had brought from Gabriele Maria Visconti in 1405 and lost in 1494
following Charles VIII's invasion, had a special role in II Principe for it demon-
strated the difficulties facing a prince trying to hold onto a recently acquired
city-state that has a long established tradition of liberty. Earlier, in the Discorso
dell'ordinare lo stato di Firenze aile armi (1506), Machiavelli had contrasted the
restlessness in the Florentine distretto populated by rebellious cities to the peace-
ful contado of the city's immediate vicinity. 62 He worried that Florence's survival
was threatened by "the fragility of its territorial system, badly guarded, exposed
to external pressures, undermined internally by the presence of cities 'which
desire your death even more than their life'." 63 For Florence to ensure peace and
security within her dominio she must develop both a military force capable of
defending the city and controlling the rebellious cities, and a coercive justice
system capable of punishing seditious subjects.
One might surmise that Machiavelli might have encouraged the Florentine
authorities concerned to quell dissension in the dominio to sanction more of the
spectacular violence that some Renaissance rulers were partial to. In the tract
"On the Method of Dealing With the Rebellious Peoples of the Valdichiana,"
Machiavelli warned the Florentine leaders that the Duke of Valentino, Cesare
Borgia, who was seeking to establish his authority in Romagna and to build a
powerful territorial state in central Italy, was trying to incite rebellion among the
discontented peoples of the Florentine state. 64 However, in Il Principe, Valentino
is praised for his attempts to hold onto his new principality in the most difficult
of circumstances. Valentino had conquered Romagna not only by using other
Machiavelli, Territoriality, La Stato 135
institutions of the Roman church, recognized, as we have seen, that religion had
a vital role in reinforcing social cohesion and identity. It is the duty of "the rulers
of a republic or of a kingdom to preserve the foundations of the religion they
hold. If they do this, it will be an easy thing for them to keep their state reli-
gious, and consequently good and united." 70 Religion can also assist in securing
the discipline of armies. Machiavelli praised rulers who "with very great cere-
monies ... had their soldiers swear to observe military discipline, in order that if
they acted against it, they would have to fear not merely the laws and men but
God; and they used every device to give them strong religious feeling." 71
Nevertheless, the territoriality of center and periphery remained the norm.
It characterized not just relations between citta and distretto, but also those
between citta and contado. Although city and countryside in Renaissance Italy
were closer knit than they had been in feudal society, mutual distrust and
resentment was still endemic. The replacement of serfdom by more flexible ten-
ancies, based in commercial leases and contractual sharecropping or mezzadria,
drew the cities and countryside together in relations of dependency: city dwell-
ers relied on food, fuel, and labor drawn from rural areas, while investment and
speculation by the mercantile and noble classes of the cities brought prosperity
to the countryside. Like Machiavelli, who owned a farm at Sant' Andrea in
Percussina outside Florence, many city dwellers had farms near the city or were
absentee landlords in estates further out. Yet, economic ties of necessity between
the urban upper classes and the agrarian workers did not necessarily engender
mutual feelings of trust or affection. Franco Sacchetti's declaration that "[t]he
city should produce good men, the villa good beasts" is indicative of the type
of prejudice that many of urban landowners felt toward the peasantry. 72 The
animosity of urban dwellers toward rural society was a legacy of the medieval
conviction that law and order were restricted to the city, while the countryside
was a lawless space full of dangers and threats. This theme is evident, for exam-
ple, in Giotto's frescoes for the Arena Chapel which depict Injustice as a tyrant,
sitting outside the city-gates, ruling over a wilderness in which brigands are
robbing and murdering the unfortunate inhabitants. 73 Many later Renaissance
paintings, notably those by Mantegna and Leonardo, continued to promote the
ideal of urban life as the embodiment of civic virtue and economic wealth by
contrasting it to the lawlessness and anarchy shown outside in the countryside.
Indeed, for Lauro Martines, artists were so "[i]nfected by the arrogance of the
domineering city" that many picture of walled cities depicted the surrounding
rural space as "a sort of no man's land fit for armies and desolation, not for civi-
lized living (vivere civilmente)," thereby producing "fantasticated pictures of the
established relationships of power." 74
Indeed, territoriality in Italy, would remain structured along a center-periphery
axis long into the sixteenth century. The Medici rulers of that century were well
Machiavelli, Territoriality, La Stato 137
aware that the degree of power they exercised over the immediate environs of
Florence and her contado was attenuated in the outer Tuscan territories. Tuscany
was a pluralistic society in which cities, towns and rural communities main-
tained their own councils and government bodies. They were responsible for
tax collection and public expenditure as well as the maintenance of public order
and defense.7 5 One city-state where relations between the city and its peripheral
spaces were especially strained was Venice which, notes Machiavelli, had taken
"possession of a large part ofltaly, for the most part not with war but with money
and craft." 76 The Venetian state was a heterogeneous mix of the city, "a strange
centre placed at the borders of its state, a seafaring and mercantile city, foreign
to the world of common law," and the Terrafirma, "a multiform and polycentric
periphery, organized around big urban poles and dotted with feudal lordships
and 'little princes'." 77 Venice's policy of territorial acquisition was admired by
Machiavelli in so far as it showed that her leaders had absorbed the lesson of
imperial Rome that territorial expansion could diffuse internal tensions and
struggles. Expansion could refocus the destructive energy generated by inter-
nal conflict and, by projecting it outward in a constructive manner, so increase
the state's power resources against rivals and bolster the citizens' sense of civic
virtit. 78 Of course, expansionist policies risk increasing the sense of threat felt by
other states and setting the logic of the security dilemma into motion. Indeed,
Venice's expansion did not just alarm other Italian powers but was seen as a
threat by the Spanish, French, and German rulers. Under Pope Julius II's lead-
ership these disparate interests were brought together in the League of Cambrai
which defeated the Venetians at the battle of Agnadello (May 14, 1509). For
Machiavelli, the Venetians had
attained such a reputation for power that not merely to the Italian princes
but to the kings beyond the Alps they gave cause for dread. Hence when
these foreign rulers made a league against them, in one day the Venetians
were deprived of the territory which in the course of many years they had
gained with boundless expense.7 9
Identity
Together with sovereignty and violence, the third interlocking component of
the modern territorial a priori is identity. In a reading of Rousseau's tract The
Government ofPoland, William Connolly demonstrates how identity, violence,
and territory combine in the modern political imaginary. Rousseau argued that
if the Poles were to become a free people they needed to inscribe their iden-
tity into a defined territory. The people who inhabit the land must all use a
common language, and have shared values and mores. Connolly identifies in
138 From Hierarchy to Anarchy
Every time that I have been able to honour my patria, even at my own
expense and risk of danger, I have done so voluntarily; because a man has no
greater obligation in his life. On it depends his whole being and moreover
from it comes every good thing which fortuna and nature have conceded to
us; these are notably so much greater in those who come from the most noble
patria. 91
stato, and La grande patria or some notion ofltaly-embodying the cultural her-
itage derived from the Roman Empire-that extended over all the lands in the
peninsula beneath the Alps. 92 Appeals to Italian identity were most often made
in periods when the political situation in the peninsula was particularly dire-a
condition usually marked by the presence of foreign armies. Machiavelli's most
farnous evocation of an Italic spirit in the final chapter of Il Principe was itself
prompted by the conflict and disorder precipitated by the expedition of the
French king Charles VIII in 1494. 93 In "Exhortation to Liberate Italy from the
Barbarians" Machiavelli suggests that the time is ripe for a new ruler to emerge
in Italy, who will lead its people toward a better future. For just as the qualities
of great leaders like Moses, Cyrus, and Theseus were born out of adversity, so
the true valor of the Italian spirit will rise out of the dire circumstances in which
Italy currently finds itself: "more enslaved than the Hebrews, more oppressed
than the Persians, more dispersed than the Athenians; lacking either leadership
or order; beaten, despoiled, lacerated, devastated, and having been subject to
every sort of ruination." 94 Italy's hopes rest with the illustrious Medici family,
whom Machiavelli urges to take up the righteous cause of Italy's salvation. The
Medici should deploy their "great military skill and valour" to lead an army of
Italian soldiers-who as individuals have unrivalled military skill and virtU,
but because of a lack of leadership have not yet been combined into an effective
army-against the foreign armies. No one will resist the liberator, who will be
received warmly by all those who are oppressed by foreign domination and are
thirsty for revenge.
[T]his barbarian rule stinks to everyone. Your illustrious house must there-
fore take on this challenge with the spirit and that hope that comes from tak-
ing up any just cause, so that under its standard this patria will be ennobled
and under its auspices will be verified Petrarch's saying: 95
He praised the fecundity of Italy's soil-"this verdant earth"; the beauty of her
landscape-"our lovely countryside"; and her territorial uniqueness-"that
part of the world which is most fair." 104 Furthermore, by combining imagery
of maternal nurturing with the nourishing capacity of the homeland, the poem
also alludes to the modern territorial theme of blood and belonging.
Although italianita was not a mass sentiment, being largely limited to the intel-
lectual elite, it nevertheless expressed themes that would echo in later nationalist
rhetoric. First, it was a discourse whose appeal was strongest when the political
fortunes of the peninsula were lowest. Fazio degli Uberti's ''Ai Signori e Popoli
d' Italia" (c.1350) had described the parlous state of fourteenth century Italy
during the "age of despots", when princes fought wars using marauding bands
of foreign mercenaries. 106 For Uberti, only an Italy united under a Ghibelline
monarch could restore the fortunes of the peninsula and evict the foreign sol-
diers. During the fifteenth century, when foreign interference was minimal and
Italian politics were relatively autonomous, humanists could praise the virtues
of their own piccola patria, while retaining a sense of belonging to and having a
responsibility to a greater community. Thus Coluccio Salutati praised Florence
for" defending her own freedom" on the grounds that in doing do "she had 'saved
liberty in Italy.' " 107 After the devastation of the French expedition of 1494, itali-
anita flourished once again. Second, just as the German Romanticists would
seek the origins of German culture in a mythical golden age of the Holy Roman
Empire, so the Italian humanists drew on the legacy of Rome. Projects such as
Flavio Biondo's archaeological descriptions of the ruins of Roman civilization
in Romae instauratae libri tres (1482) reinforced a sense of an inherited cultural
superiority. 108 Third, the sheer physical presence of the Alps provided a natural
territorial marker or boundary for italianita. The coherence of Italian culture
seemed to be divinely ordained, in that "God-or Nature-had placed the Alps
as a protecting wall around Italy. People living beyond the Alps were foreigners
and it was unnatural for oltramontani to interfere in Italian affairs.'' 109
These proto-nationalist themes: the forging of identity in adversity, the evo-
cation of cultural genealogies, and the delineation of natural territorial markers,
were often expressed in rhetoric which differentiated ltalia from the barbarian
other. In "ltalia Mia" Petrarch acknowledged that
Machiavelli, Territoriality, Lo Stato 143
He contrasted the "noble Latin blood" that runs in Italian veins with the "blood
of the barbarians." 111 By the fourteenth century, the word barbarian in Italian
discourse had acquired several connotations: a non-Christian, a writer of bad
Latin, and the ancient sense of someone outside of the cultural ambit ofRome. 112
From the fourteenth century on, humanists developed the latter meaning to
distinguish Italy from the rabies barbarica north of the Alps. Salutati's offi-
cial correspondence of 1376 "identified Florence with Italy, Italy with Latinitas
and barbarism with the French and English mercenaries." 113 With the sixteenth
century revival of italianita the barbarian theme came to the fore again. In the
History ofFlorence, Machiavelli uses barbarian to describe and to draw analogies
between the Germanic tribes who attacked the Roman Empire between 377 and
439 and contemporary foreign invaders. Recent wars had opened a new road "to
the barbarians, and Italy put herself back into slavery to them." 114 However, notes
Marcel Gagneux, it was Guicciardini rather than Machiavelli who did most to
privilege "the couple 'Barbarians-Italians' as the fundamental element of identi-
fication through opposition."llS In Storia d1talia, Guicciardini records a speech
by Marchionne Trivisano warning his fellow senators of the Venetian Consigli
de' Pregato not to enter an alliance with the French against Lodovico Sforza, on
the basis that all barbarians are "eternal enemies of the Italian" and there is an
essential "difference between barbarian and Italian spirits." 116 Guicciardini also
praised Pope Giulio II, the incarnation of the national struggle, as "Iiberatore di
ltalia da' barbari." 117 Guicciardini's discursive construction of italianita through
opposition to the figure of the barbarian is aptly demonstrated in an analogy he
drew between Hannibal and Charles VIII.
[P]assing into Italy through the mountain pass of Monginevra ... through
which Hannibal of Carthage passed with great difficulty in antiquity, the
king entered Italy on the ninth of September 1494 bringing with him the
seeds of innumerable calamities, ghastly events, and changes in almost all
things. 118
lord of all types of peoples and of all things. If he wants valleys, if he wants
from high mountain tops to unfold a great plain extending down to the sea's
horizon, he is lord to do so; and likewise if from low plains he wishes to see
high mountains. 2
Carlo Ginzberg argues that Machiavelli was attracted to this image of the "sov-
ereign painter" with the world at his command because it posited an analytical
distance between the painter and the world he represented. 3 A similar principle
underpinned Machiavelli's desire to describe political life in terms of "la verita
146 From Hierarchy to Anarchy
effectual delle cosa." Politics is a relationship between the prince and his people.
So, Machiavelli, occupying the low plain, can provide the prince with an objec-
tive view on the conduct of politics which the prince, who occupies the heights,
is unable to experience.
Machiavelli combined perspective and politics through metaphor. However,
according to the International Relations theorist John Ruggie, there is, in
terms of the production of modern territoriality, a more immediate relation-
ship between perspective and politics. In chapter three we discussed Ruggie's
contention that the transformation from the heteronomous territoriality of the
medieval international order to the homonomous territoriality of modernity
was partially produced by a reimagination of subjectivity within the European
social episteme. Ruggie contends that the essence of modern subjectivity and its
being-in-space is embodied by single-point perspective, which prioritized the
sovereignty of "a single point of view, the point of view of a single subjectivity,
from which all other subjectivities were differentiated," in relation to the vanish-
ing point. 4 As in art, so in politics
Unfortunately, Ruggie does not develop this tantalizing observation much fur-
ther, leaving us to wonder how exactly single-point perspectival forms were
applied to the spatial organisation of politics. This chapter, building on Ruggie's
suggestive insight, addresses the question of how perspective, in essence a code
or technique of pictorial representation, could have assisted in the promotion of
the modern territorial imaginary. In particular, it explores how following the col-
lapse of the vertical structures of medieval territoriality, perspective enabled the
territorialization of politics along a horizontal axis. Perspective will be addressed
from two, as it were, perspectives. First as an epistemic structure whose assump-
tions about the subject and its being-in-space are reproduced across various spa-
tial discourses. Second, as a representational technique which lent itself to the
legitimization of the modern idea of territorial sovereignty. The first section
introduces the basic principles of perspective with reference to Leon Battista
Alberti's paradigmatic text On Painting and some of Piero della Francesca's
paintings. This is followed by a discussion of recent work on perspective by
cultural theorists and critical geographers who have theorized it as a representa-
tion of space or a matrix of power/knowledge. With the conceptual framework
in place, we can analyze how the Renaissance regime of perspective served to
striate the territorial imaginary, with reference to three pictorial expressions of
Picturing Renaissance Territoriality 147
The Stoics taught that man was by nature constituted the observer and man-
ager of things. Chrysippus thought that everything on earth was born only
to serve man .... Protagoras ... seems to some interpreters to have said essen-
tially the same thing, when he declared that man is the mean and measure
of all things. 10
Man has a duty to study "the natural order of things in God's creation" and the
painter's particular task is to reveal Nature's concinnatus or harmony, which the
divine has inscribed in the perfect proportional correspondences of number,
shape, and location in the world. 11 Since perspective could show things in pro-
portion, it enabled the artist to represent the classically defined ideal of beauty
as a harmony of parts. 12
Alberti began De pictura with a general description of geometrical con-
cepts such as point, line, and surface and discussed their material existence. He
explained that the world is made manifest through rays of light, which issue
from the surface of an object and converge on the eye in the configuration of a
cone or pyramid. 13 The visual pyramid is constituted by three points or surfaces:
the seen surface, which forms the base; extrinsic light rays, which constitute the
148 From Hierarchy to Anarchy
sides of the pyramid and "hold on like teeth to the whole of the outline, form
an enclosure around the entire surface like a cage"; and the vertex in the eye,
where the angles of the quantities meet. Two other types of rays complement the
extrinsic rays: median rays, which convey surface characteristics such as light
and color; and the centric, perpendicular or axial ray-"the leader and prince
of rays" -which passes along our visual axis and whose position determines
what appears on the surface. The concept of the visual pyramid in itself was not
new-it had been a standard device of medieval optics or Perspectiva-however,
Alberti was the first to describe a painting as the intersection of the visual pyr-
amid by a plane perpendicular to the centric ray and to imply that because the
painting forms a proportional triangle within the broader triangle, the objects
recorded on it retain their relative sizes and positions. 14 Book Two set out the
rules of costruzione legittirna or vanishing point construction. Alberti believed
that if the artist adhered to these rules he would be able to represent the vertical
and horizontal dimensions in and across the space of a picture in correct propor-
tion. The fundamental principle underlying costruzione legittirna is that man is
"the scale and measure of all things," in relation to whom the sizes and distances
of objects can be represented in proportion. 15 Once the artist has learnt the rules
he will be ready to produce a painting in the three stages which mirror our
perception of things in Nature: circumscription-outlining the position of the
object in space; composition-reproducing various combinations of an object's
surfaces; and, finally, the depiction of surface colors through sensitivity to "the
reception of light." 16 Finally, Alberti discussed artistic virtu. In order to choose
the most suitable istoria or subjects selected from scripture, history, or myth, the
painter must be learned in the liberal arts. He must also be a student of nature,
able to discern all of its qualities, especially that of beautyP Only then can
he paint appropriate istoria with "a systematic and communicative naturalism
within a framework of order and restrained delectation." 18
Piero della Francesca was one of many Renaissance artists influenced by
Alberti's rules of costruzione legittirna. For Henri Focillon, Alberti's principles
are particularly well demonstrated in Piero's use of space in the Flagellation of
Christ (1455-60). The composition of the image is severe and simple. The con-
vergence of the floor and ceiling lines to an imaginary point reveal the presence
of a structuring scheme that orders and divides the space, in which "[t]he figures,
similar to pawns in a game of chess, are placed with implacable and rigorous
precision in their halves." 19 Piero uses the architecture of the elegant classical
temple to organize the space of the Flagellation so that it complies with Alberti's
rules for measuring volume and space. The Flagellation is composed around
a single vanishing point that not only assigns a place to all the objects within
the pictorial space, but also determines the place of the observing viewer-in
order to make sense of the composition as a unified whole, the observer must
Picturing Renaissance Territoriality 149
stand directly in front of the painting's centre. 20 The sense that the protagonists
"appear to be inscribed in eternity" comes from Piero's adherence to Alberti's
recommendation that the spaces of paintings should not be crowded out by
highly animated figures, but should include empty spaces in which the principal
figures can move with grace and dignity. 21
Neither Piero nor Alberti treated perspective as merely a set of rules for achiev-
ing a realistic aesthetic representation of the world. Perspective was a symbolic
system capable of reproducing the harmony of God's created universe. Piero
was not only a master technician of perspective on canvas but also a theorist
of perspective, interested in its wider symbolism. In the treatise De prospectiva
pingendi (c. 1474) he insisted that if the artist wished to reproduce the harmony
of Nature he had to be attentive to the correct geometrical representation of
objects and figures. 22 In The Flagellation both the proportions and dimensions
of the architecture and the numerical harmonies of the angular stones have sym-
bolic overtones which, in combination with the light, were intended to reflect
the divine order. There is, for example, the regular occurrence of the number
eight, a numeral heavy with Christian symbolism (coming after the seven days
of creation, the eighth day signified rebirth or Christ's resurrection). 23 In Piero's
work, geometry and perspective are "symbolic elements for the representation
of the dimensions of the Absolute, which are themselves mirrored in perceivable
reality." 24
In terms of perspective's broader cultural impact, Henri Lefebvre identi-
fies it as the dominant Renaissance representation of space. Perspective gradu-
ally overlaid the traditional representational space "of religious origin, which
was now reduced to symbolic figures, to images of Heaven and Hell, of the
Devil and the angels." 25 Drawing on Lefebvre, Stuart Cosgrove has identified
the Renaissance as the birthplace of "landscape" or modernity's characteris-
tic "way of seeing." Landscape, made possible by a fusion of linear perspec-
tive and Euclidean geometry, enabled the appropriation of the external world
"by a detached, individual spectator to whom an illusion of order and control
is offered through the composition of space according to the certainties of
geometry." 26 Landscape pervaded many levels of man's interaction with his
environment: from landscape painting and garden design to the surveying of
estates and mapping of the new world. Whereas in the medieval imaginary
man came to terms with the alterity of spaces, the threats and dangers they
contained, by crowding them with signs and symbols of the divine, the cosmo-
politan spirit of modernity required spaces to be brought under man's control,
to be made subject to his sovereignty. Thus through technologies of landscape
man imposed order on space, stripping it of symbolic meaning and rendering
it an abstract object to be appropriated and used at will. Renaissance perspec-
tive or landscape introduced into European culture three modern aspects of
150 From Hierarchy to Anarchy
space. First, the eye became the sovereign ruler of modernity's ocular-centric
cultureP In Alberti's costruzione legittima the rays of the visual pyramid cen-
tre on the eye, it is the sovereign centre of the visual world. The eye, writes
Norman Bryson, has "absolute mastery over space. Visually space is rendered
the property of the individual detached observer, from whose divine location
it is a dependent, appropriated object." 28 Second, the rise of the sovereignty of
the eye augmented the process of de-corporealization. Lefebvre describes how
the abstract ideal of the humanist subject came to replace the living body as the
standard by which space was measured and conceived and in terms of which
man understood his being-in-space. 29 Alberti's Man now occupied "a central
position as observer of a pictorial world of which he himself is the measure." 30
Giulio Argan claims that once man was no longer conceived of as a particu-
lar inscribed within a universal transcendent Nature, perspective became the
vehicle by which the newly constituted Ego, by means of the senses and rea-
son, was able to apprehend "nature as a reality conceived by man and as dis-
tinct from him as the object from the subject." 31 Third, the sovereignty of the
eye and de-corporealization complemented a new understanding of space as
"geometrically isotropic, rectilinear, abstract and uniform." 32 Panofsky argues
that the emergence of perspective accompanied the transformation of psycho-
physiological space into modern rational, systematic, and mathematical space.
Perspective served the modern Weltanschauung which "demands and realizes
a systematic space"-in modernity perception is "governed by a conception of
space expressed by strict linear perspective" which, in turn, is "comprehensible"
only for a "specifically modern, sense of space, or ... sense of the world." 33 Note
that for Panofsky modern systematic space is a prerequisite for rather than a
product of perspective. He identifies in early Renaissance paintings such as
Ambrogio Lorenzetti's Annunciation (1344) an underlying coordinate system
ordering the space long before it was postulated by the abstract mathematical
thought of costruzione legittima. 34 Samuel Edgerton agrees that "a 'systematic'
space, infinite, homogeneous, and isotropic" precipitated the rediscovery of
linear perspective in the quattrocento. 35 The practice of linear perspective was
based on the assumption that "visual space is ordered a priori by an abstract
uniform system of linear coordinates" which allows painters to conceive of a
subject in the realm of spatial homogeneity. 36 However, James Elkins warns
that this argument falsely projects back onto the Renaissance a Kantian con-
ception of space in which an a priori intuition of pure space makes possible the
appearance of the a posteriori world of objects. Perspective, for Elkins, did not
arise from a general sense of rationalized space. While some painters did have
"an inchoate idea of rationalized space" it is going too far to "attribute an inter-
est in the rationalization of all space to painters who looked at specific objects
with geometrical eyes." 37
Picturing Renaissance Territoriality 151
Figure 8.1 View of an Ideal City, 1490-1500 (oil on panel) by Italian School
(fifteenth century). Walters Art Museum, Baltimore, USA/The Bridgeman Art
Library.
Art historians continue to debate the provenance and purpose of the panels.
One view is that the panels depict architectural or urban models. Fiske Kimball
suggests that the paintings were made by Luciano Laurana, the architect who
built Federico da Montelfeltro's palace at Urbino between 1470 and 1480.43
Laurana was a member of Federico's court at the same time as Bramante and
Raphael and their influence seems to be evident in the architectural style rep-
resented in the paintings. Likewise, for Andre Chaste! the panels are "urban
views in perspective" similar to the images found on many marquetry panels
and cassone frontals. The paintings are representations of the city designed to
valorize its spaces. Perspective was used "to define solemn places, ennobled by
forceful architectural references, Colissea, triumphal arches, temples ... so as to
suggest singular crystalline spaces set apart in the interior of the city, ideal for
processions ... One should think of them in the context of ritual entries, of cer-
emonial decotations."44 Another school of thought claims that the panels are
theatrical scenography. Alessandro Parronchi identifies them as sets designed by
the Ghirlandaio brothers for the comedies, including Machiavelli's Mandragola,
that were staged as part of the festivities celebrating the marriage of Lorenzo di
Medici and Madeleine di II Tour d'Auvergne in September 1518. The panels
later found their way to Urbino when Pope Leo X made Lorenzo de Medici
duke of the province in 1519. 45 Richard Krautheimer argued (before retracting
his statement) that the panels were not specific stage sets but generic models
of theatre architecture; figural representations of what Sebastiana Serlio would
later term, drawing on Vitruvius, the tragic (Baltimore) and comic (Urbino)
scenes. 46
All these readings, argues Hubert Damisch, are limited by their adherence to
a "descriptive allusion," which seeks to establish the real world referents of the
buildings. This allusion is premised on the false assumption that both language
and art are primarily concerned with representation: the notion that pictures
or linguistic statement have meaning to the extent that they describe or present
some external objective reality of facts, whether real or imaginaryY Damish
brackets such concerns and asks a different question: how do the paintings
function as a series demonstrating the function of perspective as an "expressive
apparatus." Just as the sentence assigns "the subject a place within a previously
established network that gives it meaning" so perspective determines the posi-
tion of objects on the pictorial plane. 48 As conduits of the modern principle of
sovereign identity the sentence and perspective have similar spatial functions
of allocation, distribution, and differentiation. Perspective functions like a lan-
guage, for it "institutes and constitutes itself under the auspices of a point, a fac-
tor analogous to the 'subject' or 'person' in language, always posited in relation
to a 'here' or 'there'.'>49 In the Urbino panel the orthogonals come together at a
vanishing point within the opening of the tempio door "at the height of an eye
Picturing Renaissance Territoriality 153
of an imagined observer standing there, half hidden by the closed panel door
and directing a Cyclopean gaze towards us." 50 This is the place occupied by the
sovereign subject, toward which our sight is inexorably drawn and from which
the panoptic gaze, which for de Certeau and Foucault is the primary instrument
of discipline in modernity, observes us.
In modernity, as Lefebvre indicates, the symbolic places of the medieval imag-
inary are colonized by the abstract and rational spaces of capital and sovereign
territoriality. Archetypes of modern abstract spaces, the representations of space
of urban planers and architects, are reproduced and legitimized in these paint-
ings. For Lauro Martines these panels with their "vast organised spaces ... neatly
boxed and absolutely controlled" are representative of Renaissance projects for
ideal cities in which "power and imagination united and the ensuing vision of
space was domineering, moved by faith in men's ability to control the spatial
continuum." 5 1
a few isolated figures populate the Baltimore panel, these bodies, most notice-
ably the burdened figure leaning on a stick in the foreground, seem to be visibly
oppressed by the totalitarian monumental spaces that enclose them. These ideal
cityscapes capture the spirit of the territorial imaginary of the cosmopolitan
absolutist state: the broad avenues and monumental order, symbolizing ecclesi-
astical and secular power, are striated, coded, and free from all traces of nomadic
existence; here there are no "vagabonds, vagrants or nomads." 54
In so far as these spaces evoked the moral values of purity and cleanliness,
they can be aligned with the dispositifthat, as documented by Richard Sennett,
legitimized the construction ofJewish ghettoes in Venice. In the early sixteenth
century Venice's fortunes were in decline and the city was beset by cultural and
moral unease. 55 It was also home to a number of Jewish immigrants who had
been expelled from Spain in 1494. These newcomers were easy scapegoats for
the authorities who, seeking to apportion blame for an outbreak of syphilis,
encouraged a general "fear of touching" The Jewish body became associated
with corrupting bodily vices, which had to be isolated to avoid infecting or
contaminating the Christian community. However, the Venetian rulers were
aware that the Jewish community had made a significant contribution to the
city's economic fortunes, and "sought a spatial solution to deal with its impure
but necessary Jewish bodies." 56 In 1515 Zacaria Dolfin drew up plans to use the
foundry site of Ghetto Nuovo to segregate the Jews and advised the Venetians
to "[s]end all of them to live in the Ghetto Nuovo which is like a castle, and
to make drawbridges and close it with a wall; they should have only one gate,
which would enclose them there and they would stay there." 57 In 1516 seven
hundred Ashkenazi Jews were sent to the Ghetto Nuovo, and in 1541 the nearby
Ghetto Vecchio was also designated as a part of the city exclusively reserved for
Jewish habitation.
The sanitized de-corporeal spaces of the panels were also examples of what
Martines terms "signorial space"-they revealed the elites' aspirations to con-
struct environments that would evoke the grandeur of classical antiquity. 58
Renaissance urban planners, commissioned by the wealthy and powerful, con-
structed real and imaginary cities comprising vast squares, wide streets and large
buildings in which "more space was allotted to the powerful and less to the
powerless." 59 Alberti's De re aedificatoria, for example, striated space according
to class distinctions. Alberti advised the tyrant to build his city according to a
circular plan of two walled cities.
This wall, I believe, should not run diametrically across the city but should
form a kind of circle. For the wealthy citizens are happier in more spacious
surroundings and would readily accept being excluded by an inner wall, and
would not unwillingly leave the stalls and the town-centre workshops to the
Picturing Renaissance Territoriality 155
market traders; and that rabble, as Terence's Gnatho calls them, of poulter-
ers, butchers, cooks, and so on, will be less of risk and less of a nuisance if
they do not mix with the important citizens. 60
second, her elaborate hairstyle and exquisite jewelry are rendered in consider-
able detail revealing Piero's mastery of miniature portraiture. Federico's por-
trait is also very detailed, showing the various moles and blemishes on his olive
skin. Federico presents his left profile to the viewer and thereby hides from view
his blind right eye which, like his broken nose, was acquired in battle. Behind
both Federico and Battista, receding into the far distance until it reaches the
horizon where it merges with the sky is an extensive countryside landscape,
comprising cone-shaped hills, fields, and a lake. On the reverse panels, Battista
and Federico are represented in triumphal procession. Federico's carriage is
being pulled by two white cavalry horses driven by Eros. Federico is sitting in a
gilded chair, dressed in a full suit of amour and holding a scepter and is in the
process of being crowned by the angel of la Vittoria. Toward the front of the
carriage sit the four Virtues: Prudenza, T emperanza, Fortezza, and Giustizia.
Battista's carriage, also driven by Eros, is drawn by two unicorns the symbols of
chastity and purity. She has taken on a pious reading pose and is accompanied
by Fede and Carita, at the front, and Speranza and Modestia, at the back, of the
Picturing Renaissance Territoriality 157
carriage. Once again the backgrounds of both pictures are provided by exten-
sive landscapes of the Urbino territories: behind Federico is Lake Trasimeno
and behind Battista is the fertile countryside ofValdichiana.
The message Federico sought to convey through these paintings is clearly
one of territorialized sovereignty. The Latin inscription underneath his tri-
umph declares: "His eminence is carried in great triumph for his famed eternal
virtue proclaims him worthy of bearing the sceptre as the equal of the most
distinguished condottieri."65 Federico, following in the Montefeltro family's tra-
ditional "profession of arms," had made his fortune as a successful condottiero
and became the ruler of Urbino in 1444 (subsequently raised to a duchy by
Sixtus IV in 1474). 66 Although Federico seems to have embodied many of traits
of princely virtU admired by Machiavelli and could even be regarded as an equal
to Cesare Borgia in terms of ambition and ruthlessness, Machiavelli despised
him not only because he was a condottiero or mercenary but also because of a
personal history of treachery toward Florence. 67 Machiavelli noted that during
158 From Hierarchy to Anarchy
the formation of two rival alliances between 1473 and 1474 which had pitted
Florence, Milan, and Venice against the Papacy and Naples,
Frederick, the ruler of Urbino, then considered the ablest general in Italy,
had for a long time carried on wars for the Florentine people. The Pope
[Sixtus IV] and the King [Ferdinand of Naples], therefore, in order that
the hostile league might be without this leader, determined to get hold of
Frederick, so the Pope advised him to visit the King of Naples and Ferdinand
invited him. Frederick consented, to the wonder and displeasure of the
Florentines ... and Frederick returned from Naples and Rome with high hon-
our and as general of Sixtus and Ferdinand's league. 68
Federico's shift of allegiance to Rome broke with the Montefeltro family's tra-
ditional allegiance with the Empire. Damisch suggests that this move prompted
Federico to revoke "the Ghibelline mode of tyranny" and while "motivated
by power politics as much as by reason" to endorse the idea that his authority
should be founded on virtu and prudence. 69
The iconography of the portraits indicates that Federico sought to project
an image of himself not as "the leader of a band of mercenaries" but as someone
who strove to "comport himself like prince." 70 Although in the triumphal pro-
cession he is wearing amour, the standard iconography of the warrior-prince is
largely absent. His military virtU is presented alongside and complementary to
other princely qualities of good governance and cultural patronage. As his biog-
rapher Paltroni surmised,
the life of this excellent prince is to be compared and equated with the life of
any of the more worthy and notable ancients in any of the great generations.
For the things he did so outstandingly in handling arms he merits the great-
est fame and eternal memory, as he does for his singular sapienza (wisdom)
in ruling and governing ... and for being learned in scienza (knowledge), elo-
quence, liberality, benevolence, and clemency, and for the splendid court and
for magnificent and splendid buildings.7 1
Castiglione also felt that Federico's military virtU was equal to that of the
great generals of antiquity and insisted that it was just one of his many qual-
ities alongside "prudence, humanity, justice, generosity and an indomitable
spirit." 72 His contemporary biographers were particularly impressed by the pal-
ace at Urbino designed by Laurana-Castiglione considered it the "most beau-
tiful to be found anywhere in ltaly." 73 It was not only furnished and decorated
with luxurious trappings of wealth and prestige, but also displayed a wealth of
objects-antique statues, pictures, musical instruments, and rare Latin, Greek,
Picturing Renaissance Territoriality 159
and Jewish texts-which testified to its patron's high culture and learning.Y4
The architecture of the palace was designed to symbolize Federico's benevolent
and compassionate rulership. The public spaces of the cortile and garden were
accessible to all of his subjects, whom, we are told, he treated with such kind-
ness and humility that they considered themselves to be the favored children of
a kindly parent?5
Just as the palace architecture embodied Federico's good governance, so did
the images that decorated its walls. It seems likely that the diptych would have
hung in one of the palace's public rooms, thereby informing any visitors that the
fruits of the prince's good government were evident throughout his domains. As
such these paintings belong to the tradition of pictorial representations of good
and bad government established by Ambrogio Lorenzetti's frescoes of Allegories
of Good and Bad Government in Siena's Palazzo Pubblico (1338-40). Lorenzetti
symbolized the abstract idea of good government by making its consequences
manifest in the realistic visual landscape and the human activity taking place
therein. Elegantly attired city folk ride out to enjoy the reinvigorating effects of
the country, while peasants walk to town to sell their animals and crops. The
landscape is the scene of various pastoral practices-reaping in the fields, tilling
the soil, hunting in the country-all of which testify to the fecundity of Sienna's
contado. Even the hillsides in the far distance have been extensively cultivated
according to the rules of sound agricultural practice. This detail communicates
the essential meaning of the fresco: the presentation of a well-governed land
where human needs and pleasures are satisfied?6
For Kenneth Clark, Renaissance landscape painting evolved out of a tra-
dition in medieval art which had developed an increased realism and natu-
ralism to critique Christian symbolism and didactic imagery. The medieval
"landscape of symbols," in which material objects were presented as symbols of
spiritual truth and arranged in an unified flat surface in a decorative yet har-
monious pattern, was replaced by a "landscape of fact" in which istoria could
be presented in realistic settings that embodied "a new nexus of unity, enclosed
space." 77 Chronologically, the Lorenzetti frescoes predate both the rediscovery
of perspective and the maturity of the genre of landscape art, yet intimations
of landscape emerged in art from the early fourteenth century. 78 The realistic
landscape of Duccio di Buoninsegna's Entry into jerusalem (1308-11), argues
Richard Turner, removed this event from its traditional representation within
the symbolic narrative of the unfolding of divine will. Rather, Duccio commu-
nicates a sense of how the participants in and witnesses to the event might have
experienced it. Further, the landscape itself was a source of meaning, rather than
just a nugatory backdrop for the istoria? 9
By the dawn of the quattrocento, Renaissance landscape was increasingly
represented as a domesticated and humanized space, a place that served man's
160 From Hierarchy to Anarchy
physical needs and spiritual yearnings. "Its fields and groves are carefully
groomed and only rarely give way to wild ravines, spectacular vistas, or deserted
places." 80 Renaissance landscape had come to symbolize man's capacity to exer-
cise sovereignty over his environment and was a forerunner of the cosmopolitan
desire to organize, manage and cultivate space, which as William Connolly's
reading of Tocqueville's justification for the foundation of the American state
shows, is integral to the modern territorial imaginary. 81 Tocqueville, while
aware that th~ foundation of this new state imposed an alien social fortn on
the preexisting Indian communities, nevertheless argued that since the Indians
were nomadic wandering tribes, lacking the knowledge of agricultural prac-
tice, they occupied but did not posses the land they lived on. Thus the conti-
nent of North America was effectively empty, waiting for the introduction of
"civilization" by newcomers who would territorialize the land through agricul-
ture, possession, and the exploitation of natural wealth. Similarly, the landscape
extending behind Federico and Batista has been coded by agriculture. It is a
space which, by means of agricultural processes, directed and overseen by the
sovereign authority that possesses it, has been civilized. For Eugenio Batisti,
the landscape has clearly been "modified by man" and there is a modernity to
the general system of agriculture. The countryside has been shaped by mod-
ern farming practices: irrigation schemes, artificially created pastures, farms
enclosed within rectangular hedgerows, and modern ploughing and tillage
systems. Further, the buildings have been constructed according to the latest
techniques, the little farmsteads are fecund, and a network of roads brings the
component parts together. 82
In this representation of territorial sovereignty Piero painted a relatively
unembellished landscape. By contrast, Andrea Mantegna's lncontro fresco
(1474), in the Camera degli Sposi of the palace at Mantua, represented the same
theme against an invented landscape. The Incontro shows an outdoor meeting
between the Marquis of Mantua, Ludovico Gonzaga, and his son Francesco,
who had recently been elevated to the status of a cardinal. Both men are accom-
panied by their entourages. The image symbolized a union of tem8oral and
spiritual power within the persons of the Gonzaga family. Like Piero, Mantegna
expressed the transcendental sovereignty of his signori by according their
figures a rigid formality and monumentality. However, while Piero's sovereigns
are shown against a landscape that was recognizably that of Urbina's contado,
Mantegna's sovereigns are placed in an entirely fictitious landscape, com rising
a vast walled medieval city set on top of a hill, the slopes of which are strew with
antique temples, pyramids, and statues. By placing the Gonzaga arms o two
of the entrance gates, whose approaches are presided over by Hercules, th god
of political and civic wisdom, Mantegna makes it clear that the family con rols
and effectively owns this city, the seat of their political power. However, Ma tua
is actually situated in a flat countryside and lacks any significant Roman r ins.
Figure 8.4 Arrival of Cardinal Francesco Gonzaga, greeted by his father Marchese
Ludovico Gonzaga III (reigned 1444-78) and his brothers, from the Camera degli
Sposi or Camera Picta, 1465-74 (fresco) by Mantegna, Andrea (1431-1506). Palazzo
Ducale, Mantua, Italy/The Bridgeman Art Library. Italian. Out of copyright.
162 From Hierarchy to Anarchy
The city is, therefore, "a fantasy Mantova, a city of Lodovico's dreams," which
with its allusions to imperial grandeur sought to present the Gonzaga as the
inheritors of the majesty of imperial Rome. 83
Perspective serves to unite figures with the spaces that enclose them. In the
Urbina Portraits this unifying quality of perspective lent itself to the visual rep-
resentation of sovereign-territoriality by facilitating the inscription of the human
figures of the sovereigns into the landscape of their territories (figure 8.4). One
notable compositional feature of the painting is Fiero's successful unification of
two distant perspective planes, the foreground figures and the landscape back-
ground, without resorting to the traditional ploy of placing an architectural
balustrade between the figures and the landscape. Piero achieved "a remarkable
synthesis ... between the accurate description according to the rules of linear
perspective, as elaborated by Italian art, and "miniaturistic" painting obtained
thanks to the techniques of oil paints, developed ... by Netherlandish artists." 84
Federico and Battista are inscribed into the landscape of their territorial domin-
ion by means of pictorial juxtapositions: the wealth and authority revealed by
the minutia of portrait detail in their faces and clothes are mirrored in the pre-
cise execution of the symbols of fertility and productivity in the landscape. The
space of the painting is dominated by the imposing hieratic profiles of the sover-
eigns in the same way that "the power of the rulers portrayed dominates over the
expanse of their territories." 85 The geometric lines of their profiles replicate and
unite with the horizontal and receding lines which carve out the extended ter-
ritory behind them. Although both sovereigns are placed against a background
landscape of hills and mountains, there is an important difference conveying
a political message. In the duchess's portraits the landscape encloses the scene,
while behind the duke it opens onto a navigable body of water. Damisch reads
this "almost as if these were the two complementary wings of a single political
agenda, one of them affirming the dynasty's geographic roots, the other sig-
naling the opening to the exterior reflected in the duke's enterprises." 86 These
images are visual representations of the modern territorial imaginary, which not
only express the fact of the extension of the prince's authority over a territory but
also serve to legitimate it by showing the order and prosperity that have arisen
as a consequence.
The map is the perfect symbol of the state. If your grand duchy or tribal area
seems tired, run down, and frayed at the edges, simply take a sheet of paper,
plot some cities, roads and physical features, draw a heavy, distinct bound-
ary around as much territory as you dare claim, colour it in, add a name-
perhaps reinforced with the impressive prefix of "Republic of"-and presto:
you are now the leader of a new, sovereign, autonomous country. Should any-
one doubt it, merely point to the map. Not only is your new state on paper,
its on a map, so it must be real. 87
Figure 8.5 Map of the world, based on descriptions and coordinates given in
"Geographia," by Ptolemy (Claudius Ptolemaeus of Alexandria) (c.90-168 AD),
published in Ulm, Germany, 1486 (color engraving) by German School (fif-
teenth century). British Library, London, UK/ British Library Board. All Rights
Reserved/The Bridgeman Art Library. German. Out of copyright.
in the next chapter, eventually presage the end the T-0 map. 94 However, in Italy,
which even during the middle ages had been "by far the most map-conscious
part of Europe," Renaissance cartographers inspired by the Geographia, pio-
neered topographical mapping as a technique for territorializing the local land-
scape and marking-out territorial boundaries. 95 Unlike small-scale maps, which
show a whole province or nation, the topographical map is a large-scale map of
a small area or district, which shows the shapes and patterns of the landscape in
terms of standardized formats and within a uniform scale. Representations of
territoriality were promoted in two types of Italian Renaissance topographical
map: bird's-eye views of towns and district or regional maps.
Until the fifteenth century the picture maps of Italian towns tended to' be
rather basic, showing little more than the outlines of walls and the most no~a
ble buildings (figure 8.5). Some were made of Milan and Florence but the v~st
majority, such as the maps in Paolino Veneto's Magna chronologia (1320-30) r
in Flavia Biondo's Roma instaurata (1444-46), were of Rome. By the end oft e
quattrocento the basic plan no longer satisfied the realism required of art, a
Picturing Renaissance Territoriality 165
Figure 8.6 Carta della Catena, 1490 (Detail) by Italian School (fifteenth century).
Museo de Firenze Com' era, Florence, Italy/The Bridgeman Art Library. Italian. Out
of copyright.
maps in the quattrocento were almost exclusively restricted to north Italy, there
were some notable exceptions: a manuscript of the Geographia printed in 1448
reproduced a map of Tuscany by Pietro de Massaio; and Giovanni Pontano in
the first decade of the sixteenth century produced a scale map based on a mea-
sured survey of the northern boundary ofN aples for King Ferdinand. There was
a massive increase in the Venetian mapping projects in the sixteenth century.
Venetian land surveyors or periti mapped and charted 150,000 hectares of land
in the terrafirma between 1560 and 1600. The periti, armed with compasses,
cross-staff quadrants, and astrolabes mapped the land using methods which
combined perspective and Euclidean geometry with naturalistic landscape
imagery. 102 One map commissioned by the Office of the Border Commissions
(1538) showed the land between Strasoldo, Cervignano, Aquileia, and the Aussa
River, has a "dear demarcation of proprietorship between Venice and Germany
(de Tedeschi)" 103
Renaissance cartography, where it clearly demarcated the borders between
political communities, manifested the principles of the modern discourse of
territorial sovereignty. However, Renaissance cartography, underscored by the
regime of perspective, would also play a significant role in the political territori-
alization of spaces beyond European Christendom. The Renaissance expansion
of European international society would lead Europeans into spaces of danger
and alterity. Cartography would be one of several discursive strategies called
upon to territorialize these spaces and discipline their inhabitants. These pro-
cesses, which are considered in the next chapter, would not only enfold them
within the framework of a European territorial imaginary, but also require and
enable Europe's own transition from a medieval to modern political spatial
cosmos.
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CHAPTER 9
M artin Wight has written "[w]hether or not we agree with Adam Smith
that 'the discovery of the Americas and that of a passage to the East
Indies by the Cape of Good Hope are the two greatest and most
important events recorded in the history of mankind,' those events largely gov-
erned the development of international society." 1 If the previous two chapters
discussed the internal dimension of Renaissance territorialization, this chapter
looks outward, to its external projection through the discovery and conquest of
the New World and the beginning of the expansion of European International
Society. This process was, as William Connolly has observed, one in which the
inscriptions of identity and difference were paramount. 2 Columbus did not dis-
cover America but a "world of otherness." The encounter between Europeans and
Amerindian natives was not simply a meeting between two already-constituted
subjects and the subsequent mastery of one by the other. America was not a pre-
existing world which the Europeans happened upon but a text to be discovered
in the sense of an unfamiliar, unrecognizable set of empirical date which, in
order to be made intelligible and therefore conquerable, was created and imag-
ined in terms of the cultural predispositions and expectations of the Europeans,
which were themselves altered by the experience of the encounter. In terms of
space, the new was rendered intelligible and conquerable by processes of terri-
torialization, which drew on representational media, notably cartography and
traveler's narratives, to invent America as a space that could be understood,
assimilated, and possessed by Europeans.
Our concern, then, is with how the expansion of international society was
achieved by strategies of territorialization. Such strategies demarcated and
170 From Hierarchy to Anarchy
possessed space on behalf of political sovereignty, not only through direct phys-
ical occupation but also by means of representational media deploying spatial
figures and vocabularies that determined how contemporaries understood and
represented their individual and collective being-in-space. Clearly these histor-
ical events have generated a wealth of literature and the focus of this chapter is
restricted to the initial period of discovery, broadly speaking from Christopher
Columbus' first voyage in 1492 to the publication of Martin Waldseemiiller's
Cosmographiae introductio in 1507. The "new" spaces of international society
were territorialized by representational discourse operating at two interrelated
levels of analysis. First, the machinations of various sovereign powers at the level
of high politics, that is through the diplomatic negotiations which lead to the
Treaty ofTordesillas (1494) and the division of the world into Portuguese and
Spanish spheres. However, the Renaissance territorialization of international
society was not simply the result of popes and sovereigns arbitrarily dividing the
world into spheres of influence. Equally significant, and providing the condi-
tions for such grand gestures, was the discursive construction of the "discov-
ered" territories by cartographic practices, which sought to make familiar the
nature and limits of these unfamiliar spaces, and the rituals of naming and pos-
session, recorded in explorers logs and official correspondence, which accorded
these lands and their inhabitants their identity within international society.
Vadianus wrote that "today there is no region of the earth which is not inhabited
by men and other animals." 8 Second, the empirical experience of the naviga-
tors in the southern hemisphere refuted the Aristotelian-Biblical consensus that
a sphere of water encircled that of the earth, and led to the modern idea of the
terraqueous globe. 9 Encisco could declare that water and earth together form one
body at the centre of the universe. Third, the discoveries led to a revival of Crates'
four island theory as an epistemological model to locate the new lands. In his
Physices compendium (1520) Pedro Margalho asserted that the Spanish, traveling
to the west beyond the Fortune Isles (Canaries), had encountered the lands of the
periokoi, while the Portuguese, having sailed beyond the Tropic of Capricorn,
had reached the lands of the antoikoi. 10 In sum, as biblical authority gave way
to empirical observation of the austral hemisphere, so the medieval image of the
flat earth gave way to the new notion of the terraqueous globe: "experience had
established in an incontestable fashion that the oecumene was spherical." 11
O'Gorman has laid out in painstaking detail the gradual process by which
American was invented. The crux of his thesis is that, despite plenty of evidence
to the contrary, Columbus throughout his four voyages refused to abandon his
a priori belief that the lands he had come across were the outer regions of the
eastern coast of the orbis terrarum, wherein lay the dominion of the Grand Khan
as described by Marco Polo. During the first voyage (1492-93) he informed his
patrons Ferdinand of Aragon and Isabel of Castile that "I shall set out for another
large island which, according to the indications given me by the Indians whom I
have aboard, must be Chipangu. They however call it Coiba (Cuba) and say that
there are many large ships and sailors there .... I am still determined to go to the
city of Quinsay (Hangchow-the capital of Great Khan as described by Marco
Polo) to deliver your Highnesses' letters to the Grand Khan ..." 12 Much of the
second voyage (1493-96) was spent navigating what is today's southern coast of
Cuba. However, despite being told by the indigenous people that they lived on
an island, "[t]he Indian ... told the Admiral that Cuba was definitely an island,"
Columbus maintained that he was navigating the southern coastline of the
Chinese province of Mangi. 13 He even had a public instrument drawn up to this
effect and had his crew declare on oath, under threat of fines and flogging, that
because the coastline was so long it could not be insular and that the civilizations
of the Golden Chersonese could be found a few leagues to the south. 14 The third
voyage (1498-1500) was undertaken with the intention of locating the sea pas-
sage to the Indian Ocean, which Columbus believed lay south of the Golden
Chersonese. Columbus, however, carne across a substantiallandmass-today's
north-eastern coast of South America. To salvage his belief in the presence of
a sea passage to the Indian Ocean he was forced to admit that the land was an
inhabited southern orb or new world comparable to the orbis terrarum. The her-
esy implicit in this position was somewhat mitigated by identifying these lands
Renaissance and International Society 173
as the site of the Garden of Eden, which was spiritually, if not geographically,
regarded as being located within the world, that is the cosmic place assigned to
man. 15 The fourth voyage (1502-4), also undertaken with the aim of locating
the elusive sea-passage, navigated shores in the vicinity of the Panamanian-Costa
Rican border. On the basis of native reports that a wealthy province replete with
gold, jewels, and spices lay only nine days away by overland travel, Columbus
identified these coasts as part of an isthmus, an additional Asian peninsula, lying
between him and the province ofCiguare in the Indian Ocean. 16
It was, however, Amerigo Vespucci's voyage (1501-2) that for O'Gorman
opened up the possibility of the invention of America. Vespucci set sail expect-
ing to reach Cattegara, the southernmost point of Asia, where, it was generally
believed, the coastline turned to the west. From there he intended to cross the
Sinus Magnus to India and then return to Portugal having circumnavigated the
globe. 17 However, after reaching the eastern coast of Brazil and following the
coast south, the expected turn to the west did not materialize and the caravel
sailed as far as the Antarctic Circle before returning to Lisbon by way of the
Atlantic. At first Vespucci did not conclude that the southern land mass was
separate from Asia and the orbis terrarum, although he did surmise that as it
extended at least fifty degrees south latitude it must be part of a continental
landmass. In the subsequent Mundus Novus, however, he identified the land
mass as a new world.
During these last few days I have written to you at length on the subject of
my return from these new regions which we have explored and discovered,
thanks to the armed fleet paid for and commissioned by his serene high-
ness the King of Portugal. ... it truly seems that they are another world, and
is not without justification that we have called them a new world [mondo
nuovo] because the ancients had no knowledge of them and the things that
have recently been rediscovered [ritrovate] by us overrides their opinions.
They maintained that beyond the equator towards the south there is noth-
ing apart from an extensive sea and a few barren islands; this sea they called
the Atlantic, and if some among them have affirmed that there is a continent
there they have understood it to be barren and uninhabited. But my last
voyage has clearly demonstrated that this last opinion is false and totally con-
trary to the truth, since beyond the Equator I found lands [paesi] more fertile
and more densely populated by men and animals than our own Europe, or
even Asia or Africa, and furthermore a more temperate and agreeable climate
than is found in whatsoever region known to us. 18
Once it was accepted that the new land was a continent, the next task was
to establish whether it was contiguous with Asia and therefore formed part of
174 From Hierarchy to Anarchy
All these ideas were illustrated in the accompanying map. For O'Gorman
Waldseemiiller's naming of America is less important than his conception of the
new lands as an identifiable geographical being: "[t]he independence of the new
lands is finally recognized; they are conceived of as a distinct entity, separate
from the Island of the Earth. Moreover, a specific being has been attributed to
that entity and a proper name has been given to it to distinguish it from other
similar entities." 24 The meaning of the new found land is "the meaning of being
the "fourth part" of the world." 25 Yet, for O'Gorman, there is an apparent con-
tradiction in the Cosmographiae for the new lands are at once geographically dis-
tinct from the orbis terrarum and comprise its fourth part. Now orbis terrarum
not only signified the traditional tripartite landmass, but also denoted the tra-
ditional landmass and the new lands which, although insular (being separated
from the other three parts by the Ocean), also belong to it. This new representa-
tion of the orbis terrarum implied that the traditional conception of the Ocean
as an absolute boundary was no longer valid. The archaic notion of the world
as a bounded place within the universe collapsed as the Ocean is transversed
and the world extends beyond its ancient insular boundaries to embrace the
entire terraqueous globe. Further, this world is no longer providentially given
or assigned to man. Rather, from now on man can, potentially, make his world
anywhere; it is a place which he makes, owns, and is responsible for.
When the author of the Cosmographiae lntroductio asserted that the new
lands, notwithstanding their isolation by the Ocean, were one of the parts
that for the moment made up the world, he was really claiming for the first
time in history his sovereignty over the whole universe .... the world hav-
ing ceased to be considered as a sort of cosmic jail, man was able to picture
himself as a free agent in the deep and radical sense of possessing unlimited
possibilities in his own being, and as living in a world made by him in his
own image and to his own measure. 26
From the beginning the race between Castile and Portugal to acquire col-
onies was adjudicated and legitimized by the Holy See. The legality of Rome's
claim to adjudicate on such matters was established in Nicholas V's bull
Romanus Pontifex (1455), which granted the Portuguese crown sovereignty over
the recently discovered islands of Madeira, Cape Verde and the Azores, and
over any further discoveries in the Atlantic. Nicholas claimed he was the right-
ful arbiter of disputes in the Christian world, including those concerning rival
claims to lands inhabited by unbelievers, on the basis that he was "the succes-
sor of the key-bearer of the heavenly kingdom and vicar of Christ." Romanus
Pontifex also confirmed that the right of the Christian princes to possess the
new lands was derived from their role in the ongoing crusade of Christianity
against Islam. The Portuguese deserve "suitable favours and special graces" for
their role as "intrepid champions of the Christian faith," whose primary inten-
tion was to "restrain the savage excesses of the Saracens and of other infidels"
by "vanquish[ing] them and their kingdoms and habitations ... and subject [ing]
them to their own temporal domain." Portuguese colonial policies-such as the
campaign against the Saracens in Africa, the founding of Christian settlements
on the Atlantic islands, and the conversion of pagan peoples along the African
coast-were commended for their contribution to the divine mission of spread-
ing the Christian imperium wherever possible. In order to make this mission
more secure in future, Nicholas gave his approval to Alonso and his successors
"to invade, search out, capture, vanquish, and subdue all Saracens and pagans,
whatsoever, and other enemies of Christ wheresoever placed" and "to reduce
their persons to perpetual slavery" and to appropriate and use for their own ends
any "kingdoms, dukedoms, counties, principalities, dominions, possessions,
and goods" from the "capes of Bojador and ofNao as far as through all Guinea
and beyond." 27 Clearly, a correspondence between the territorialization of inter-
national society and the Christian mission was established at the very outset.
On his return journey to Castile at the end of the first voyage in March 1993
a storm forced Columbus to land in Lisbon where he was received by Joao II.
Having heard Columbus' descriptions of the lands he had happened upon, Joao
remarked "that it seemed to him, according to what had been agreed between
them, that the newly conquered lands should belong to him." 28 The agreement
Joao was alluding to was the Treaty of Ald.<;:ovas-Toledo (Sept 4 1479), under
the terms of which the Spanish sovereigns, Isabel and Ferdinand, had agreed
that for the sake of peace neither they nor their heirs would contest Portuguese
sovereignty over any of the "islands, coasts, or lands, discovered or to be discov-
ered ... from the Canary Islands down toward Guinea. For whatever has been
found or shall be found, acquired by conquest, or discovered within the said
limits, beyond what has already been found, occupied, or discovered, belongs to
the said King and Prince of Portugal and to their kingdoms, excepting only the
Renaissance and International Society 177
that barbarous nations be overthrown and brought to the true faith." Various
"illustrious deeds" of the Spanish monarchs demonstrate that they both desire
and are working diligently toward this goal. Of all their endeavors the one which
most clearly expresses their commitment to the "glory to the Divine Name" is
their recovery of the Kingdom of Granada from Saracen tyranny. Alexander
then acknowledges their intention to
seek out and discover certain islands and continents, remote, unknown, and
not hitherto discovered by others, so that you might bring their residents
and inhabitants to the worship of our Redeemer and the profession of the
Catholic faith. Having been up to the present time engaged in the siege and
recovery of the Kingdom of Granada, you were unable to accomplish this
holy and praiseworthy purpose. But finally, as was pleasing to the Lord, the
kingdom having at least been regained, you wish to fulfil your desire. 34
[l]n this present year of 1492, after Your Highnesses had brought to an end
the war with the Moors who reigned in Europe and had concluded the war
in the great city of Granada where ... on the second day of January I saw
Your Highnesses' royal banners placed by force of arms on the towers of the
Alhambra ... and I saw the Moorish King come out to the city gates and kiss
Your Highnesses' royal hands ... Your Highnesses, as Catholic Christians
and princes devoted to the Holy Christian faith and the furtherance of its
cause, and enemies of the sect of Mohammed and of all idolatry and heresy,
resolved to send me, Christopher Columbus, to the said regions of lndia; 36
Figure 9.1 Columbus at Hispaniola, from "The Narrative and Critical History
of America," edited by Justin Winsor, London, 1886 (engraving) by Bry, Theodore
de (1528-98) (after). Private Collection/The Bridgeman Art Library. Flemish. Out
of copyright.
Columbus also brings into the terms of reference the ongoing campaign against
that other great Other of European culture: the Jews. In the same vein he, some-
what arbitrarily, continues "[s]o, then after having expelled all the Jews from all
your kingdoms and dominions, in this same month of January, Your Highnesses
commanded me to take sufficient ships and sail to the said regions of India." 37
180 From Hierarchy to Anarchy
Ferdinand and Isabel had formally institutionalized the Inquisition, the arche-
type of internal territorialization, on Spanish soil when they solicited Sixtus IV
to bestow on Fray Tomas de Torquemada the office of Grand Inquisitor, a decree
eventually approved by Innocent VIII in 1487. 38 The Indian, the Jew, and the
Moor must all be converted to the true faith and any who resist assimilation can
rightfully be shown the error of their ways by coercive means. "I hope in Our Lord
that Your Highnesses will determine with all speed to bring such great peoples to
the Church and convert them, just as you have destroyed those who refused to
confess the Father, the Son and the Holy Ghost." 39 As Tzvetan Todorov charac-
terizes it, 1492 symbolizes a double movement in the history of Spain, for, in the
same year "the country repudiates its interior Other by triumphing over the Moors
in the final battle of Granada and by forcing the Jews to leave its territory; and it
discovers the exterior Other, that whole America which will become Latin.'>4
Second, Inter Caetera reaffirmed the tenet of Romanus Pontifex that it
was proper that those who were committed to spreading the faith should
receive appropriate economic rewards for doing so. Alexander thought that
hardships incurred pursuing the task of spiritual conversion could be com-
pensated by material rewards, especially in the form of gold. In return for
their efforts in bringing "the residents and inhabitants" of "certain islands
and continents, remote and unknown, and not hitherto discovered by others"
to "the worship of our redeemer and the profession of the Catholic faith" it
is right that the Catholic sovereigns should have exclusive access to the "[g]
old, spices and a great many other precious things" found in these lands.
Columbus also elides gold and conversion. "Your Highnesses must resolve to
make them Christians, for I believe that once you begin you will in a short
space succeed in converting to our faith a multitude of peoples while gaining
great kingdoms and riches and all of their peoples for Spain. Because with-
out doubt there is in these lands a huge amount of gold ... "41 For Todorov
this association derives from Columbus' hopes that gold finds in the new
lands would finance a new crusade to liberate Jerusalem. The language used
by Columbus and Alexander was characteristic of what Stephen Greenblatt
calls the "discursive economy of Christian imperialism," which assumed that
all desires are convertible and amenable to exchange. 42 For Columbus "[g]
old constitutes treasure, and he who possesses it may do what he will in the
world, and may so attain as to bring souls to Paradise."43 Commodities are
converted into gold, which is used to finance the project of conversion and
thus to save souls. Further, the discourse of Christian imperialism is able to
conflate earthly gain and divine purpose by reasoning that by depriving the
Indians of their temporal possessions and enslaving them, the Spanish are
thereby freeing them from their own bestiality and providing the conditions
for the salvation of their souls.
Renaissance and International Society 181
Inter Caetera can also be read as a document which symbolizes the transition
from hierarchy to anarchy. It embodied an important juncture in the state of
relations between the waning authority of the papacy and the waxing author-
ity of the incipient nation-states. The language which Alexander deployed to
authorize his conferring of apostolic favor on Castile's overseas enterprise harked
back to the hierarchical discourse of papal plenitudo potestatis.
[F]rom the plenitude of our apostolic power, the authority of Almighty God
conferred on us in blessed Peter and the vicarship ofJesus Christ, which we
hold on earth, by these decrees we give, grant, and assign forever to you,
your heirs and successors, the monarchs of Castile and Leon, all islands and
continents [insulas et terras firmas] found and to be found, discovered and
to be discovered towards the west and south of a line to be drawn from
the Arctic pole, namely the north, to the Antarctic pole, namely the south,
whether these continents and islands to be found are in the direction oflndia
or toward anywhere else, found by your envoys and captains, together with
all their dominions, cities, forts, towns, and villages, and all rights, jurisdic-
tions, and appurtenances. 44
By what right could Alexander make these concessions? Michael Donelan, for
whom the proselytizing aspect of the conquests indicates a fideistic impulse
underpinning the initial expansion of international society, notes that the bulls
did not seek to legitimize the Spanish enterprise in terms of just war: there was
no mention of the recovery of wrongly annexed lands, the right to defense from
attack in support of preaching, or the correction of a breach of naturallaw. 45
This is perhaps surprising since the European monarchs were well aware that
territorial aggrandizement could be veiled by the discourse of just war. A letter
from Ferdinand to his ambassador in Rome, Jerome Vich, written while prepar-
ing for an expedition against Algiers in 1510, had acknowledged that
for a better justification of the said war [against Algiers] it would be appro-
priate for His Holiness to declare war ... against all infidels, to give us the
right of conquest over all lands we would acquire from them, because it is
said that it is not lawfully permissible for Christian princes to make war in
any of the lands of the infidels, except in the Kingdom of Jerusalem, unless
these infidels start a war against Christians, or unless war is declared against
them by the Supreme Pontiff. 46
Alexander did not request vassalage from the kings of Castile in return for ced-
ing to them dominions in the New World. 47 Further, in 1493 no one had any
notion that a new continent had been discovered. Neither Inter Caetera nor the
drawing of the so-called Alexandrine line entailed the enfoeffement of a conti-
nent for "how can Alexander VI have "divided" a continent whose existence was
not even suspected?'>4 8 Rather, suggests Weckmann-Muiioz, the pope's author-
ity as fons iuris with the prerogative to grant new-found lands to Spain on condi-
tion that the Spanish converted the natives to Christianity, was derived from the
omni-insular doctrine established in Urban II's Cum Universae Insulae (1091).
Citing the spurious Donation of Constantine (750-800)-which asserted that
Pope Sylvester had been bequeathed "all provinces, palaces and districts of
the city of Rome and Italy and the regions of the West" by the first Christian
Emperor on his withdrawal to his Eastern capital of Constantinople-this bull
had claimed that all islands in Western Europe, particularly those recovered
from the Muslims, were automatically assigned to the dominion of the Holy
See, which had the right to cede them to whomsoever it wished. Initially the
reach of the omni-insular doctrine was limited to the Mediterranean basin, but
following the Portuguese discoveries in the Atlantic its range was extended in
bulls such as Romanus Pontifex. Yet, points out Miguel Battlori, the remit of an
omni-insular doctrine would not have covered lands identified as terra firma. 49
Rather, Alexander relied on the medieval theocratic doctrine of papa vicarius
Christi, which had asserted the pope's sovereignty over both spiritual and tem-
poral spheres. As vicarius Christi the pope could arbitrate in disputes where
the princes directly petitioned the Holy See. Similarly, Donelan maintains that
the only way the temporal powers of the papacy could have been legitimately
stretched to give lordship over the Indies to the Castilian monarchs in return
for spreading the Faith was by conflating Innocent III's principle of plenitudo
potestatis, which allowed the pope to exercise temporal power for the well-being
of Christendom, with Innocent IV's claim that as vicarius Christi the pope exer-
cised God's lordship over the world. 50
Of course, Ferdinand and Isabel would have rejected the implications of
these outdated and barely credible remnants of medieval theocratic discourse
as being antithetical to attempts by princes and kings, like themselves, to carve
out enclaves of territorial sovereignty free from papal interference. However,
Renaissance Europe was a society whose norms, values, and laws were still fil-
tered through the skein of Catholicism and the Spanish monarchs were aware of
the requirement to at least seem to be operating within the discursive framework
of Christian doctrines and institutions. Inter Caetera was evidence that, at least
in terms of ideology, the Renaissance expansion of European international soci-
ety was not exclusively a secular project, but was imbued with the still pervasive,
if essentially empty, temporal claims of the papacy. If we cannot fully endorse
Renaissance and International Society 183
Wight's assertion that Inter Caetera was "the most far-reaching exercise of papal
world-sovereignty," there is truth to Donelan's argument that as an attempt to
keep peace between Spain and Portugal "it was well-grounded use of the papal
"plenitude of power" in the society of states." 51 Either way, it is evident that the
territorialization of European international society did not begin with a caesura!
rupture with the hierarchies of the Christian-Medieval cosmos.
Although they were happy to utilize the rhetoric of Christian mission for
their own expansionist ends, the Iberian monarchs considered themselves to be
independent sovereigns and would have extended their territorial reach to the
newly discovered lands with or without the approval of the pope. The terms of
agreement drawn up between Columbus and the Castilian crown indicate that
commercial motives far outweighed any religious concerns. In the memorandum
of intent to form a business partnership, known as the Santa Fe Capitulations
(April 17, 1492), Ferdinand and Isabel granted Columbus five concessions. 52
First, he was given a commission as admiral "on all those islands and mainland
discovered or acquired by his command or expertise in the Ocean Seas." Second,
he was appointed viceroy and governor general in the same territories. Third,
he was given the right to "one-tenth of all and any merchandise, whether pearls,
precious stones, gold, silver, spices," obtained or exchanged within the limits of
his admiralty. Fourth, he was given jurisdiction over lawsuits arising from any
matters pertaining to commerce within his admiralty. Fifth, he was given the
right to invest one eighth of the cost of fitting out any vessels for trade or busi-
ness and take one eighth of any resulting profits. These terms were confirmed in
the Granada Capitulations (30 April 1492) in which the sovereigns re-affirmed
that because Columbus was prepared to put his life in danger while seeking
out new lands and islands on their behalf he should be rewarded appropriately.
"You will be empowered from that time forward to call yourself Sir Christopher
Columbus, and thus your sons and successors in this office and post may entitle
themselves sir, admiral, viceroy, and governor of them." 53
In contrast to the papal bulls, these agreements make no mention of any
duty to convert pagans and barbarians or to advance the universitas fidelium.
The rationale for the discovery and possession of these lands was exclusively
commercial, and these documents are to be interpreted in light of the struggle
between Spain and Portugal for control of anticipated Atlantic trade routes to
Asia. The stakes of this rivalry had increased dramatically since the annexation
of Genoese trading stations by the Ottomans at the end of the fifteenth cen-
tury, which had severed an important access route to the Asian markets for
European traders. The Portuguese were seeking a sea route to Asia by circum-
venting Africa. In light of the progress they were making down the Western
coast of Africa, Castile feared that it would be permanently eclipsed by its rival.
This fear grew considerably when Bartolomeu Dias rounded the Cape of Good
184 From Hierarchy to Anarchy
The manner that you must have in the taking of possession of the lands
and parts which you shall have discovered is to be that, being in the land or
Renaissance and International Society 185
part that you shall have discovered, you shall make before a notary public
and the greatest number of possible witnesses, and the best known ones, an
act of possession in our name, cutting trees and boughs, and digging and
making, if there be an opportunity, some small building [ediftcio], which
should be in a part where there is some marked hill or a large tree, and you
shall say how many leagues it is from the sea, a little more or less, and in
which part, and what signs it has, and you shall make a gallows there, and
have somebody bring a complaint before you, and as our captain and judge
you shall pronounce upon and determine it, so that, in all, you shall take the
said possession; which is to be for that part where you shall take it, and for
all its district [partido] and province or island, and you shall bring testimony
thereof signed by the said notary in a manner to make faith. 60
Immediately some naked people appeared and the Admiral went ashore in
the armed boat, as did Martin Alonzo Pinzon and Vincent Yanez his brother,
captain of the Nina. The Admiral raised the royal standard and the captains
carried two banners with the green cross which were flown by the Admiral
on all his ships. On each side of the cross was a crown surmounting the let-
ters F and Y (for Ferdinand and Isabella). On landing they saw very green
trees and much water and fruits of various kinds. The Admiral called the two
captains and the others who had landed and Rodrigo de Escobedo, recorder
of the whole fleet, and Rodrigo Sanchez de Segovia, and demanded that they
should bear faithful witness that he had taken possession of the island-
which he did-for his sovereigns and masters the King and Queen. He fur-
ther made the required declarations, which are recorded at greater length in
the evidence there set down in writing. 61
The display of the royal standard established the context within which these
formal speech acts had meaning: they were performed on the sovereigns' behalf
and were made official by being enacted in the presence of witnesses and
recorded in writing. Stephen Greenblatt claims that there were two (absent)
audiences for these linguistic acts, whose efficacy lay in the phrase "y no me fue
contradichio," "and I was not contradicted." The real intended audiences were
the other European powers who had the language and discursive conventions
to dispute the claims but were not in situ. The Indians constituted a second
186 From Hierarchy to Anarchy
intended audience despite that fact that the proclamations were issued in a lan-
guage they could not be expected to understand. Columbus, argues Greenblatt,
was not concerned with the subjective consciousness of the Indians bur with
the correct enactment of the legal process by which, according to Roman law,
land could be transferred from one patrimony to another as long as the original
owner consented. Columbus staged a legal ritual that depended upon the formal
possibility of a contradiction without actually permitting such a contradiction;
"it enables him to empty out the existence of the natives, while as the same time
officially acknowledging that they exist." 62
However, if the Indians, as Columbus himself admitted, had identifiable, if
primitive, social, and economic conventions, then the legality of the possession
remained dubious. 63 Francisco de Vitoria would later insist that although the
Indians might be pagan and living in mortal sin, in so far as they were rational
beings with political, cultural, and social institutions and systems of exchange
requiring the use of reason, there was no legal basis for appropriating their ter-
ritory. 64 In natural law, lands had to be either uninhabited, in which case they
became the property of the first occupant, or they had to belong to a recognized
enemy who had been defeated. Thus during the third voyage, by which time
Inter Caetera and Tordesillas had formally designated the new lands as spaces
under Portuguese or Spanish sovereignty, Columbus adopted a more deroga-
tory representation of the Indians as lawless, warlike nomads living beyond the
bounds of civilisation. The previous markers of civility, the "infinity of small
hamlets," disappeared to be replaced by "a large and warlike people, with cus-
toms and beliefs very different from ours. These people live in mountains and
forests without settled townships." 65 Once the Indians were depicted, in Deleuze
and Guattari's terms, as the nomadic war-machine, the other against which
European civilization has defined itself since Aristotle, they could legitimately
be territorialized by whatever means necessary.
The second discursive ritual by which the new-found lands were possessed
was that of naming.
I passed from the Canary Islands to the Indies with the fleet which our most
illustrious king and queen, our sovereigns, gave to me. And there I found
very many islands filled with people innumerable, and of them I have taken
possession for their Highnesses, by proclamation made and with the royal
standard unfurled, and no opposition was offered to me. To the first island
which I found, I gave the name San Salvador, in remembrance of the Divine
Majesty, who marvellously bestowed all this; the Indians call it "Guanahanf."
To the second, I gave the name Isla de Santa Maria de ConcepciOn; to the
third, Fernandina; to the fourth, Isabella; to the fifth, Isla Juana, and so to
each one I gave a new name. 66
Renaissance and International Society 187
Tzvetan Todorov has remarked that, rather like Adam in Eden, in order to make
sense of and possess the virgin world that confronted him Columbus set abo~t
naming it. Occasionally this precipitated "a veritable naming frenzy." 67
Columbus' first gesture on contact with new lands was "an act of extended nom-
ination, the declaration that the lands will henceforth be part of the Kingdom
of Spain. 69 This naming was intrinsic to the "principle of attachment" which,
suggests Anthony Pagden, informed the Europeans' initial responses to the
encounter with the Indians. Strange Indian customs, habits, and rituals were
interpreted through European categories of reference. This allowed common-
alities and equivalences to be identified between Indian and Christian rituals,
even if they were really incommensurable. Although the "principle of attach-
ment" reduced the distance between self and other by rendering that marked
by alterity as partially knowable, in making Indian otherness accountable, it
also ran the risk of, if not eliminating the difference, assimilating the unknown
to the known. For Pagden the discoverer entered into his discoveries through
a sequence of epistemological strategies: attachment, recognition, and naming,
which set up the conditions for the final act of possession. The first person to see
a new land could claim a right ofpossession, which was recorded and secured
by naming and the appropriation of tides. "The Europeans as they crossed and
re-crossed the oceans, became inveterate namers and possessors." 70 Names, of
course, are transferable; they are symbolic units that could be transported across
the globe. "Just as maps could transform the un-possessable world into a series
of lines and figures which could then be carried home to Barcelona or Lisbon,
names had the power to reduce what still remained to be explored, possessed
and settled into a single transportable set of phonemes." 71
to the papacy changed the nature of the Indies enterprise from its purely com-
mercial origins to a mission infused with religious objectives. 72 Yet, Battlori is
surely right that despite the personal religious beliefs of the sovereigns and their
interests in evangelizing and maintaining the true faith, "the Alexandrine bulls
had only subsidiary value in claims to dominion over the new lands." 73 Perhaps
it is best to assume that economic gain and spiritual salvation were complemen-
tary objectives as the economy of exchange between gold and souls suggests.
Whatever the underlying motivations and the respective interests of papacy and
kings, they coalesced in Alexander VI's infamous drawing of a demarcation line
on a world map to mark out the respective spaces of Portuguese and Spanish
sovereignty. This was not the only time that cartography would have a pivotal
role in the territorialization of Renaissance international society.
In Inter Caetera Alexander had affirmed that the line should be "distant by
one hundred leagues west and south from whatever of the islands that are called
in Spanish 'the Azores and Cape Verde' or any territory that was in the effective
possession of any Christian king or prince before the Christmas just past, from
which the present year one thousand four hundred and ninety-three begins." 74
Samuel Edgerton has drawn our attention to the distinctly cursory nature of
this division:
Pope Alexander VI ... sat down before his mappamundi and arbitrarily, in
the blank space to the left of the oikoumene, drew in a new meridian that he
proclaimed to be "one hundred leagues west of the Azores." All the vast terra
incognita to the west of this purely abstract "demarcation line" he awarded to
the Spanish. Everything east must go to PortugaF5
However, this was not to be the end of the matter. Later in the year Alexander,
responding to further pressure from Castile, issued Dudum Siquidem
(September 26, 1493) which stated that if any Spanish agents, when sailing west
or south, landed in eastern regions and "there discover islands and main-lands
that belong to India" they did not have to cede them to the Portuguese. The
Spanish were granted the freedom and authority to "take corporal possession of
the said islands and countries and hold them forever, and to defend them against
whosoever may oppose." 76 This blatant declaration of Spanish interest, which
effectively nullified Portuguese rights over any further discoveries, displeased
Joao who insisted that the line be extended further to the west. After a period
of intense diplomatic maneuvering an agreement was reached between the two
crowns and confirmed by the 1494 Treaty of Tordesillas. Under its terms the
signatories agreed that "a boundary or straight line be determined and drawn
north and south, from pole to pole, on the said ocean sea, from the Arctic to the
Antarctic pole. This boundary or line shall be drawn straight ... at a distance of
Renaissance and International Society 189
three hundred and seventy leagues west of the Cape Verde Islands." All islands
and main-lands, known or to be discovered, to the east of the line "shall belong
to, and remain in the possession of, and pertain forever to" the King of Portugal
and his heirs while those to the west shall belong to Spain. 77 Both sides agreed
not to send ships into each other's sphere of influence with the specific purpose
of discovering land and accepted that any accidental discoveries must be passed
to the rightful owner. Although lip service was paid to the traditions of religious
oaths-the parties swore not to violate it "before God and the Blessed Mary and
upon the sign of the Cross, on which they placed their right hands and upon the
world of the Holy Gospels," and it was agreed that pope would be asked to con-
firm and approve it by issuing a bull-Tordesillas dispensed with the rhetoric
of proselytization and conversion that is so marked in Inter Caetera. The sole
stated purpose of the agreement was the "sake of peace and concord" between
the two kingdoms.
Tordesillas is an intriguing document of territorialization not least because
it describes in some detail the process by which this line could be inscribed
onto the physical surface of the globe. In order that the line should be both
straight and at a distance of three hundred and seventy leagues west of the Cape
Verde Islands both crowns agreed to commission a joint expedition comprising
pilots, astrologers, and sailors who, having studied the sea, courses, winds, and
the degrees of latitude would be able to identify a mutually acceptable point
through which the line should be drawn north to the Arctic pole and south
to the Antarctic pole. Once they had agreed on where this point should lie,
delegates of both sides, conferred with their respective sovereign's authority and
power, should "draw up a writing concerning it and affix thereto their signa-
tures," thereby confirming that it was a permanent mark or boundary that could
not be denied, erased or removed. If the line should cross any island or main-
land, at
the first point of such intersection ... some kind of mark or tower shall be
erected, and a succession of similar marks shall be erected in a straight
line from such mark or tower, in a line identical with the above-mentioned
bound. These marks shall separate those portions of such land belonging to
each one of the said parties; and the subjects of the said parties shall not dare,
on either side, to enter the territory of the other, by crossing the said mark or
bound in such island or mainland. 78
Clearly it was intended that this line should designate an absolute limit in space
rather than just a frontier, there being, as Daniel Nordman has noted, a signifi-
cant difference in the meaning of these two terms at the time/ 9 A limit denoted
a theoretically fixed or immutable barrier, whether marked physically into the
190 From Hierarchy to Anarchy
but also provided practical tools for its "conquest, appropriation, subdivision,
commodification, and surveillance." 85 Visible emblems of political and religious
ideology decorated the Renaissance maps of European expansion. Particularly
striking was the sweeping line of royal blue running from pole to pole on
maps like the Cantino planisphere (1502). This cerulean swathe symbolized
the Tordesillas demarcation and converted maps into "stridently geopolitical
documents," recording and symbolizing "the division of the world into differ-
ent national spheres of influence." 86 Yet, territorial claims were not just asserted
through the drawing of boundary lines. Decoration, inscriptions recording dis-
covery, commemorative portraits, and coats of arms all communicated owner-
ship and possession. Embedded in the new world lands of the Cantino map are
images of the. national flags of Portugal and Spain that act as declarations of
192 From Hierarchy to Anarchy
seventeenth century. Even Mercator's world map of 1569, for many an emblem
of modern cartography constructed according to strict mathematical principles,
still drew on non-scientific geographical sources. Mercator's representation of
the Arctic, based on the legend of the four rivers recounted by the fourteenth
century English monk Nicholas of Lynn, and his depiction of the Antarctic,
based on the contestable authority of Ptolemy and Marco Polo, are, suggests
Peter Whitfield, examples of "pure medievalism." 91 As William Boelhower has
demonstrated with respect to the mapping of America during the Renaissance, a
modern cartography based on the Ptolemaic system existed simultaneously with
two medieval cartographic models: the pictorial map and the portolan chart. 92
Thus icons, which on medieval pictorial maps conveyed the characteristics of
local place, were used by Renaissance mapmakers to convey the sense of won-
der and strangeness that explorers felt on first contact with the new continent. 93
Images of mythical Indians and bounteous virgin lands served as representa-
tional substitutes that could be brought back to the Iberian courts in lieu of
the objects themselves. Further, the rhumb lines criss-crossing the seas of many
Renaissance world maps and the "dense toponymic chains along the outer edge
of the new land" which deployed a "mnemotechnic device of naming to indicate
possession and imminent settlement" harked back to the portolan maps used
to chart sailing routes in the Mediterranean and the distances between and
along coastline places. 94 The modern system of cartographic line and scale map,
"uncontaminated by the imperfect body of the earth," freed of "the local per-
spectivism of the image" and thus able to project a global universalism within
the orthogonal grid, would only come into its own with the rational and juridi-
cal organization of new Northwest territories when the cartographic line would
mark out the boundaries of national spaces. Although cartography was an
important instrument in the Iberian expansion and territorialization of the new
world, the gridded map and the abstract spatiality it embodied were not uni-
versal. In Spain it was largely restricted to an elite group of cosmographers and
geographers working for the Crown at the Casa de la Contrataci6n.95 Modern
derivatives of the Latin mappa did not enter general circulation until the mid-
dle of the sixteenth century and only within specialized technical discourses
did derivatives of spatium denote a "geometric, abstract, isotropic expanse." 96
The geographical descriptions sent back to Spain by colonial administrators
still tended to rely on a medieval epistemology, which situated places in respect
to the traveler's body passing through them rather than in terms of an objec-
tive optical abstraction. A text like Martin Fernandez' Suma de geografia (1519),
which combined the new spaces of geometrical abstraction with the traditional
linear space of narrative itinerary, conveys the hybrid spatiality characteristic of
Renaissance Hispanic culture. The gridded map, suggests Ricardo Padron, was
more a cartographic ideal rather than an achievable reality.
194 From Hierarchy to Anarchy
This book has advanced two interwoven critiques of the territorial a priori
that, taken together, expose some of the deep-rooted epistemological and onto-
logical assumptions about space and politics that inform much political and
international political theory. The first critique is conceptual. Seeking to develop
a methodology appropriate for a cultural or intellectual history of space and ter-
ritoriality, it has two parts. First, it has challenged the assumptions, integral to
the territorial a priori, that present sovereign-territoriality as universal, fixed, and
objective. Second, it has advocated replacing the territorial a priori with the more
fluid concept of the territorial imaginary, which emphasizes the historically con-
tingent, transformative, and subjective nature of sovereign-territory. The territo-
rial imaginary does not situate ideas of sovereign-territoriality exclusively within
the domain of political discourse. Rather, it frames the imagination and repre-
sentation of the politics of space within the more extensive landscape of a soci-
ety's culture of space. It alerts us to how how the particular configurations of
spatial discourses prevalent in any society construct ideas about space that limit
the possibilities for conceiving of political existence within it.
The book's historical claim is that in dismantling the medieval culture of
space, ordered in terms of the hierarchical logic of above/below, the Renaissance
erected the scaffolding upon which the modern territorial imaginary could be
built. In the medieval culture of space, embodied by the soaring edifices of
gothic cathedrals, all being was constituted in perpendicular chains of hier-
archy, reaching from the debased spaces of the terrestrial world to the lofty
elevated heights of the celestial world. Constricted by this framework, the medi-
eval mind conceived of sovereign-territoriality in terms of multiple, overlapping
jurisdictions and allegiances structured vertically through hierarchies of polit-
ical authority, which extended far above the temporal authorities of Emperor
and Papacy to culminate in the ethereal realm of the civitas Dei. During the
Renaissance, the hierarchical architectonics of this medieval culture of space
were discarded and the territorial imaginary it had generated was replaced. The
novel spatial vocabularies and categories of the Renaissance culture of space
established the conditions of possibility for the modern territorial imaginary.
Man's being-in-space was redefined during the Renaissance; no longer impris-
oned within space, man became the master of space, which could henceforth
be known rationally, ordered systematically, and rendered the object of man's
desires. In terms of political territoriality, this resulted in the gradual delegiti-
mation of any claims to sovereignty above the state. The Renaissance established
the modern territorial imaginary in which territorial sovereignty is parceled out
between clearly differentiated political authorities co-existing on a horizontal
plane of equivalence. The Renaissance made possible the modern conception of
a territorial imaginary, no longer governed by the spatial motif of above/below,
but authorized by the oppositional figure of inside/outside.
Conclusion 197
mapping of the new world, the cartographic division of the world, and journal
records of rites of possession all served to territorialize the "new world," domesti-
cating unknown and foreign places and extending European power and control
over the new spaces of international society. Putting the Americas on the map
was less about determining the shape and extent of the earth than about "con-
trolling territories, diminishing non-European conceptualization of space, and
spreading European cartographic literacy; thus colonizing the imagination of
people on both sides of the Atlantic: Amerindians and Europeans.'>4
The second implication of territorialization it that, as Deleuze and Guattari
remind us, state strategies of territorialization and striation are always and every-
where challenged and opposed by the nomadic forces of de-territorialization.
Again with reference to the European territorialization of the Americas, Walter
D. Mignolo suggests that residual expressions oflncan cosmology in contempo-
rary Peru can be read as a form of resistance to the dominant territorial imagi-
nary ofWestern modernity. 5 For Shapiro this international territorial imaginary
needs to be challenged by alternative visions of identities and spaces that privilege
the flows of people rather than the static boundaries of sovereign territorialities,
constructed according to the logics of inclusion and exclusion. 6 Of particular
interest here is the critique of the dominant territorial model mounted by dias-
pora or border theory, with its celebration of cultural hybridity. "The nation-
state," argues James Clifford, "as common territory and time, is traversed and,
to varying degrees subverted by diasporic attachments." 7 The hegemony of the
international territorial imaginary recedes in the face of Homi Bhabha's obser-
vation that nations, nation-spaces are performative or narrative constructs that
are always seeking to erase the memories of their hybridity. Imaginary nations,
like territorial imaginaries, are produced in in-between spaces within which
novel notions of selfhood and identity arise: "[i]t is in the emergence of the
interstices-the overlap and displacement of domains of difference-that the
intersubjective and collective experience of nationness, community interest, or
cultural value are negotiated.'' 8 Mirroring our critique of the territorial a priori,
Bhabha's exposes the essentialist myth of the nation as an "originary and ini-
tial subjectivity", an "imagined community" secure within homogeneous empty
time. 9 Rather, insists Bhabha, we must listen to to "counter narratives of the
nation" that accentuate and highlight the "irredeemably plural modern space"
of the nation.
The phenomenon of de-territorialization has become a staple of of the con-
temporary discourse of globalization. Jan Aart Scholte has argued that if glob-
alization means anything at all, it denotes a process of"respatialization with the
spread of transplanetory social connections" or "the advent and spread of what
are alternately called 'global,' 'trans planetary,' 'transworld' and in certain respects
also 'supraterritorial' social spaces.'' 10 However, contrary to the enthusiasm of
Conclusion 199
the hyperglobalizers, Scholte stands back from claiming that globalization has
completely erased the map of territorial geography and the economic, political,
and identity formations that it engenders. Today's global landscape, he suggests,
is one in which global and territorial spaces coexist and interrelate in complex
fashions. "We do not live in a 'borderless world' where territory is obsolescent." 11
The research undertaken in this work supports such caution. The discourse of
globalization has a tendency to hyperbole, portraying the transformation from
the modern Westphalian to the globalized postmodern world system in terms of
a caesura! rupture of extremely short duration. For example, Saskia Sassen iden-
tifies the 1980s as a "tipping point," when the internationalism of the Bretton
Woods system gave way to today's global era. This transition so radically trans-
formed the organizing logics of territory, authority, and rights that it moved
"us from an era marked by the ascendance of the nation-state and its capture
of all major components of social, economic, political and subjective life to one
marked by a proliferation of orders." 12 This is quite some claim. Especially in
view of the fact that the cultural and intellectual revolution of the Renaissance
lasted for most of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, and that even at the end
of this period few, if any, contemporaries had completely divested their think-
ing of some of the legacies of the hierarchical territorial imaginary. Of course,
one of the claims made by globalisation is that we live in a world of acceleration
and speed. Nevertheless, is it likely that if the transformation from medieval to
modern territoriality took at least two centuries, that the transformation from
the modern to the postmodern order is likely to have occurred in two decades?
A second contribution that the research undertaken in the present book can
make to the current debates about globalisation is to suggest a broader meth-
odological remit than scholars in International Relations have tended to allow
for. Both Scholte and Sassen are intellectually predisposed to see the territorial
transformation of globalization as an objective process, one that the methods
and epistemologies of the social sciences can adequately analyze and explain.
However, as we have seen, transformations in ideas about political territoriality
are intimately related to prevailing cultures of space. Thus, we need to exam-
ine how the transformations in the territorial imaginary of globalization are
represented, and, indeed, produced in contemporary art, literature, and film. If
my argument that the shift from the medieval territorial imaginary of hierar-
chy to the modern imaginary of anarchy was primarily represented and imag-
ined within the cultural sphere has validity, we should perhaps, as International
Relations scholars pay attention to the aesthetic postmodern re-imagination of
space and place, so carefully documented by Frederic Jameson. 13
Yet, one need not justify historical research purely on the grounds that it
allows us to better understand or explain today's world. International Relations
as a discipline is not noted for its historical rigor, and the discipline as a whole
200 From Hierarchy to Anarchy
can only be enriched by meticulous and patient research into the historical con-
ditions of its existence. Thus, this work has tried to fill some of the gaps in
a major lacuna in the discipline's historiography. The Renaissance can justly
claim to have been as important a cultural and intellectual movement as the
Enlightenment, which, due to the contributions that Rousseau, Locke, and
Kant made to our understanding of the Westphalian international system, has
been the subject of much research in international political theory. However,
with the exception of Garrett Mattingly's magisterial Renaissance Diplomacy, the
Renaissance is either absent or little more than a footnote in most International
Relations texts. Indeed, the characteristic attitude to the Renaissance of the
discipline is encompassed by Sassen's history of territoriality "from medieval to
global assemblages" that makes no mention of the Renaissance at all. In com-
mon with much International Relations history, by erasing the Renaissance,
Sassen is able to present the medieval and the modern international systems
as two neat coherent historical formations. This neat binary implicitly holds
out the promise of progress and modernity as the medieval is swept away by
the modern. Of course, the historical narrative is rarely so neat, and by pay-
ing attention to the Renaissance we become sensitive to the complex and often
non-linear nature of historical transformations. It is hoped that work has made
a small contribution to restoring the Renaissance to its rightful place in the cul-
tural and intellectual history of international political theory.
Notes
45. Hobbes limits his discussion of territory to chap. XXXIV of Leviathan. Thomas
Hobbes, Leviathan, ed. Richard Tuck (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1991), pp. 170-176, at p. 171.
46. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, On The Social Contract, or Principles of Political Right,
in Rousseau, Collected Writings Vol. 4, ed. Roger D. Masters and Christopher
Kelly, tr. Judith Bush, Masters and Kelly (Hanover: University Press of New
England, 1994), pp. 127-224, at p. 160.
47. Rousseau, On The Social Contract, p. 168.
48. Rousseau, On The Social Contract, p. 139. Italics in original.
49. Rousseau, On The Social Contract, p. 143.
50. Rousseau, On The Social Contract, p. 143.
51. Immanuel Kant, "Perpetual Peace: A Philosophical Sketch," in Kant, Political
Writings, 2nd ed., ed. Hans Reiss, tr. H. B. Nisbet (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1991), 93-130.
52. Kant, "Perpetual Peace," p. 94. Kant accepted the contemporary distribution
of political territories, even though many were acquired by these illegitimate
means, on the grounds that "the prohibition relates only to the mode ofacquisi-
tion, which is to be forbidden henceforth, bur not to the present state ofpolitical
possessions."
53. Kant, "Perpetual Peace," p. 115.
54. Kant, "Perpetual Peace," p. 105.
55. The stranger may claim a "right of resort" as all men are entitled to present
themselves in the society of others "by virtue of their right to communal posses-
sion of the earth's surface." See Kant, "Perpetual Peace," pp. 105-8.
56. William E. Connolly, Political Theory and Modernity (Oxford: Blackwell, 1988),
p. 121.
57. G. W. F. Hegel, Philosophy ofRight, tr. T. M. Knox (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 1952), p. 157.
58. Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space, tr. D. Nicholson-Smith (Oxford:
Blackwell, 1991), p. 279.
59. Hegel, Philosophy ofRight, p. 213.
60. Hegel, Philosophy ofRight, p. 208.
61. Max Weber, "Politics as a Vocation," in From Max Weber: Essays in
Sociology, ed. H. H. Gerth and C. Wright Mills (London: Routledge, 1970),
pp. 77-128, at p. 78.
62. Max Weber, Economy and Society: An Outline of Interpretative Sociology,
Vol. 1, ed. Guenther Roth and Claus Wittich (New York: Bedminster Press,
1968), p. 54.
63. Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, tr. Talcott
Parsons (London: Routledge, 1992).
64. Max Weber, "The Meaning of Discipline," in From Max Weber, pp. 53-64,
at p. 253.
65. Weber, quoted in Fred Dallmayr, "Max Weber and the Modern State," in Asher
Horowitz and Terry Maley (eds.), The Barbarism of Reason: Max Weber and
206 Notes
86. Richard K. Ashley, "Untying the Sovereign State: A Double Reading of the
Anarchy Problematique," Millennium, 17:2, 1988, pp. 227-62, at p. 248.
87. Ashley, "Untying the Sovereign State," p. 230.
88. Richard K. Ashley, "The Geopolitics of Geopolitical Space: Towards a Critical
Social Theory oflnternational Politics," Alternatives, 17:4, 1987, pp. 403-34.
89. R. B. J. Walker, "International Relations and the Concept of the Political,"
in Ken Booth and Steve Smith (eds.), International Relations Theory Today
(Cambridge: Polity, 1991), pp. 306-327, at p. 321.
90. Richard K. Ashley, "Living on Borderlines: Man, Poststructuralism, and War,"
in James Der Derian and Michael J. Shapiro (eds.), International/Intertextual
Relations: Postmodern Readings of World Politics (Lexington: Lexington Books,
1989), pp. 259-321, at p. 301.
91. Ashley, "Living on Borderlines," p. 302.
92. Ashley, "Living on Borderlines," pp. 303-4.
93. R. B.J. Walker, "Sovereignty, Identity, Community: Reflections on the Horizons
of Contemporary Political Practice," in Walker and Saul H. Mendlovitz (eds.),
Contending Sovereignties: Redefining Political Community (Boulder: Lynne
Reinner, 1990), pp. 159-85.
94. R. B. J. Walker, Inside/Outside: International Relations as Political Theory
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), p. 128.
95. Walker, "Sovereignty, Identity, Community," p. 175.
96. Ashley, "Living on Borderlines," p. 290.
97. Walker, Inside/Outside, p. 129.
98. Walker, "Sovereignty, Identity, Community," p. 172.
10. Lefebvre, The Production of Space, p. 85. My emphasis. Two points are worth
noting. First, although Lefebvre contends that social spaces mirror the dom-
inant relations of production, he does not suggest that space is reducible to
them. Each mode of production has a space, but the characteristics of space are
not equivalent to the mode of production. Indeed, he regarded the tendency
to reduce the aesthetic, social, and mental realms to the economic as a "disas-
trous error." Lefebvre, quoted in Derek Gregory, Geographical Imaginations
(Cambridge: Blackwell, 1994), p. 38. Second, Lefebvre regarded social spaces
not as distinct and bounded, but as overlapping, interpenetrating, and superim-
posed on one another. They cannot be explained in terms of isolated discourses
(urban, geographic, architectural, or anthropological) which focus on particular
aspects rather than the whole of social space.
11. Henri Lefebvre, "Reflections on the Politics of Space," Antipode, 8:2,
1976, pp. 30-37, at p. 31.
12. Lefebvre, The Production ofSpace, pp. 413-14.
13. Lefebvre, The Production ofSpace, p. 39.
14. Lefebvre, The Production ofSpace, p. 42.
15. Lefebvre, The Production ofSpace, p. 42.
16. Lefebvre, The Production ofSpace, pp. 3-4.
17. For a discussion of Foucault's epistemology, see Richard Rorty, "Foucault
and Epistemology," in David Couzens Hoy (ed.), Foucault: A Critical Reader
(Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1986), pp. 41-49.
18. Michel Foucault, "The Order of Discourse," in Robert Young (ed.), Untying the
Text: A Poststructuralist Reader (Boston: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1981), pp.
48-78, at p. 67.
19. Michel Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge, tr. A. M. Sheridan Smith
(London: Routledge, 1972), p. 49.
20. Michel Foucault, "Confessions of the Flesh," in Foucault Power/Knowledge:
Selected Interviews and Other Writings, 1972-1977, ed. Colin Gordon (Brighton:
The Harvester Press, 1980), pp. 194-228, at p. 194.
21. Foucault, "Confessions of the Flesh," p. 197.
22. Foucault, "Confessions of the Flesh," p. 196.
23. Michel Foucault, "Truth and Power," in Power/Knowledge, pp. 109-33,
at p. 131.
24. Miel Foucault, "Afterward: The Subject and Power," in Herbert L. Dreyfus
and Paul Rabinow, Michel Foucault: Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics
(London: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1982), pp. 208-26, at p. 212.
25. Michel Foucault, "Questions on Geography," in Power/Knowledge, pp. 63-77,
at p. 69.
26. Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth ofthe Prison, tr. Alan Sheridan
(Harmondsworth, Penguin Books, 1979), pp. 136-38.
27. Foucault, Discipline and Punish, pp. 143-46.
28. Michel de Certeau, The Practice ofEveryday Life, tr. Steven Rendall (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 1984), pp. 35-36.
29. de Certeau, The Practice ofEveryday Life, p. 36.
Notes 209
30. Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality: Vol 1, tr. Robert Hurley (London:
Penguin, 1984), p. 85; and Foucault, "Truth and Power," p. 121.
31. Michel Foucault, "Questions on Geography," p. 68.
32. Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia,
tr. Robert Hurley (London: Athlone Press, 1984); and Gilles Deleuze and Felix
Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, tr. Brian Massumi
(London: Athlone Press, 1988).
33. Deleuze and Guattari, Anti-Oedipus, p. 142.
34. Delel).ze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, p. 360.
35. Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, p. 452.
36. Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, p. 211.
37. Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, pp. 385-86.
38. Stephen Kern, The Culture of Time and Space 1880-1918 (Cambridge, MA:
Harvard University Press, 1983), p. 4.
39. Kern, The Culture of Time and Space 1880-1918, p. 143.
40. Lefebvre, The Production ofSpace, p. 17.
41. Lefebvre, The Production of Space, p. 25. Lefebvre suggests that modern
space was fundamentally altered around 1910, when its codes and practices
began to dissolve. However, this common-sense space of Euclid and perspective
did not disappear completely but left traces in consciousness, where it continues
to inform words, images, and metaphors.
42. John Gerard Ruggie, "Territoriality and Beyond: Problematizing Modernity in
International Relations," International Organization, 47:1, 1993, pp. 139-74.
43. Ruggie, "Territoriality and Beyond," p. 158.
44. Ruggie, "Territoriality and Beyond," p. 158.
45. Ruggie, "Territoriality and Beyond," p. 157.
46. Foucault, quoted in J. G. Merquior, Foucault (London: Fontana, 1981), p. 36.
47. Michel Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human
Sciences, tr. Alan Sheridan (London: Routledge, 1970), pp. 54 and x.
48. Foucault, The Archaeology ofKnowledge, p. 191.
49. Foucault, The Order of Things, pp. 55-56.
50. Foucault, The Order of Things, p. 387.
51. Foucault, The Archaeology ofKnowledge, p. 176.
52. Deleuze presents Foucault's archaeology as an engagement with statements that
situates them in terms of three orders or realms of space: collateral, correla-
tive, and complementary. See Gilles Deleuze, Foucault, tr. Sean Hand (London:
Athlone Press, 1988), pp. 1-22.
53. Deleuze and Guattari, Thousand Plateaus, esp. pp. 3-25.
54. D.eleuze and Guattari, Thousand Plateaus, p. 376.
55. Deleuze and Guattari, Thousand Plateaus, p. 379. In a similar manner, Gaston
Bachelard diagnoses modern philosophy as having contracted a "geometrical
cancerization of its linguistic tissue" in which, "[o]utside and inside form a dia-
lectic of division, the obvious geometry of which blinds us as soon as we bring
it into play in metaphorical domains. It has the sharpness of the dialectics of yes
and no, which decides everything. Philosophers, when confronted with outside
210 Notes
and inside, think in terms of being and non-being. Thus profound metaphysics
is rooted in an implicit geometry.... The dialectics of here and there has been
promoted to the rank of an absolutism according to which these unfortunate
adverbs of place are endowed with unsupervised powers of ontological determi-
nation." Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space, tr. M. Jolas (Boston: Beacon
Press, 1994), pp. 211-12.
56. Deleuze and Guattari, Thousand Plateaus, p. 379. Nietzsche's aphoristic
method is typical of nomadic thought, a "force that destroys both the image and
its copies, the model and its reproductions, every possibility of subordinating
thought to a model of the True, the Just, or the Right (Cartesian truth, Kantian
just, Hegelian right, etc.)." p. 377.
57. Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, esp. "1440: The Smooth and
the Striated," pp. 474-500.
58. Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, p. 481.
59. Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, p. 380.
60. Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, p. 381.
61. Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, p. 382.
62. For a discussion of the Aristotelian territorial legacy, see Edward Shils,
Center and Periphery: Essays in Macrosociology (Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 1975).
63. Stephen Grosby, "Territoriality: The Transcendental, Primordial Feature of
Modern Societies," Nations and Nationalism, 1:2, 1995, pp. 143-62, at p. 150.
64. Grosby, "Territoriality," p. 155.
65. Grosby, "Territoriality," p. 150.
66. Ruggie, "Territoriality and Beyond," pp. 138-48.
67. All social organisations have some mode of differentiating human collec-
tivities from each other in space. Ruggie identifies three ideal types other than
territorial states: non-territorial collectivities based on kinship; the fluid terri-
torial constituencies of nomadic property rights; and systems of territorial rule
in which rights are not necessarily mutually exclusive as in medieval Europe.
Ruggie, "Terriroriality and Beyond," p. 149.
68. Ruggie's citations are from Joseph H. Strayer and Dana C. Munro, The Middle
Ages (New York: Appleton Century Crofts, 1959), p. 115; and Perry Anderson,
Lineages ofthe Absolutist State (London: New Left Review, 1974), pp. 37-38. See
Ruggie, "Territoriality and Beyond," pp. 149-50.
69. John Gerard Ruggie, "Continuity and Transformation in the World Polity:
Towards a Neorealist Synthesis," in Neorealism and Its Critics, ed. Robert
0. Keohane (New York: Columbia University Press), 131-57, at 143.
70. Ruggie, "Territoriality and Beyond," p. 150.
71. Ruggie, "Continuity," p. 143. There are correlations between bourgeois the-
ories of private property, which represent civil society as a framework for the
protection of natural individual property rights, and international theory that
managed to achieve a balance between the political rights of sovereign states
and the idea of a community of states. Both "differentiate among units in terms
of possession of self and exclusion of others; advance a possessive individualist
Notes 211
3. Dante Alighieri, The Divine Comedy, tr. John Ciardi (New York: W. W. Norton,
1970), Paradiso, XXVIII, 130-132, p. 569. Beatrice places the angels in Paradiso
according to the Dionysian order.
4. Pseudo-Dionysius, "The Celestial Hierarchy," in The Complete Works, tr. Calm
Luibheid (London: SPCK, 1987), 143-91, at I:120B, p. 145.
5. This discussion of Dionysius the Areophagite draws heavily on Joseph Anthony
Mazzeo, Medieval Cultural Tradition in Dante's Comedy (New York: Greenwood
Press, 1968), pp. 14-55.
6. Pseudo-Dionysius, "Celestial Hierarchy," II: 144C, pp. 151-52.
7. Mazzeo, Medieval Cultural Tradition, p. 19
8. Pseudo-Dionysius, "Celestial Hierarchy," III: 164D, p. 153.
9. Pseudo-Dionysius, "Celestial Hierarchy," III: 165A, p. 154.
10. Mazzeo, Medieval Cultural Tradition, p. 22.
11. Dionysius's account of the heavenly powers is in "Celestial Hierarchy," VI-IX,
pp. 160-73.
12. Pseudo-Dionysius, "The Ecclesiastical Hierarchy," in The Complete Works,
pp. 193-259.
13. For the description of the Hierarchy of Law, see "The Ecclesiastical Hierarchy,"
V: 301C, p. 234.
14. All quotes are from "The Ecclesiastical Hierarchy," V, 500c-509a, pp. 233-39.
15. Ernst Cassirer, The Myth ofthe State (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1946),
p. 132.
16. Marc Bloch, Feudal Society, 2nd ed., tr. L. A. Manyon (London: Routledge and
Kegan Paul, 1962), p. 446. For Bloch, the feudal system ensured the systematic
economic subjection of the peasantry by the ecclesiastical and warrior oligar-
chies. Feudal society was "an unequal society, rather than an hierarchical one-
with chiefs rather than nobles; and with serfs, not slaves." p. 443.
17. A useful summary of the literature on vassalage and fiefs is Susan Reynolds, Fiefs
and Vassels: The Medieval Evidence Reinterpreted (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 1994), pp. 17-74.
18. Bloch, Feudal Society, p. 444.
19. Quoted in Reynolds, Fiefs and Vassels, p. 22.
20. Reynolds, Fiefs and Vassels, pp. 50-51.
21. Bloch, Feudal Society, p. 115.
22. Harold J. Berman, Law and Revolution: The Formation of the Western Legal
Tradition (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1983), p. 312.
23. Johan Huizinga, The Waning of the Middle Ages, tr. F. Hopman (London:
Penguin Books, 1955), p. 55. Huizinga claims that despite the substitution of
nobility and feudalism by monarchs and states, chivalry survived as a meaning-
ful form of social expression well into the fifteenth century.
24. Huizinga, The Waning ofthe Middle Ages, p. 55-56.
25. Jacques Le Goff, Medieval Civilization 400-1500, tr. Julia Barrow (Oxford:
Basil Blackwell, 1988), p. 156.
26. Quoted in Le Goff, Medieval Civilization 400-1500, p. 156.
Notes 213
27. Georges Duby, Les trois ordres ou l'imaginaire du ftodalisme (Paris: Editions
Gallimard, 1978).
28. My translation of an Italian translation ofDuby's French translation of this pas-
sage from the Latin, in Ottavia Niccoli, I sacerdoti, i guerrieri, i contadini: storia
di un' immagine della societd (Turin: Giulio Einaudi editore, 1979), p. 18.
29. My translation of Duby's French translation from the Latin in Les trois orders,
p. 15.
30. Le Goff, Medieva! Civilization, p. 256.
31. My translation from Niccoli's translation into Italian, I sacerdoti, p. 13.
32. Georges Duby, "Les societes medievales: Une approche d'ensemble," in Duby,
Hommes et structures du moyen age (Paris: Mouton Editeur, 1973), pp. 361-79,
at p. 369. My translation.
33. Duby, "Les socieres medievales," p. 368. My translation.
34. Duby, Les trois ordres, p. 150.
35. On this point and for a good general discussion of Duby and the three orders,
see Elizabeth A. R. Brown, "Georges Duby and the Three Orders," Viator:
Medieval and Renaissance Studies, 17, 1986, pp. 51-64.
36. Ouby, Les trois ordres, p. 141.
37. Duby, Les trois ordres, p. 146. My translation.
38. R. Roques, L'univers dionysien: Structure hierchique du monde selon le pseudo-
Denys (Paris: Aubier Editions Montaigne 1954), p. 174. My translation.
39. Quoted in Niccoli, I sacerdoti, p. 25. My translation. In medieval culture the
left had multiple negative connotations. Therefore, by placing the agricul-
tural workers on the left side of the pyramid the superiority of the knights was
confirmed.
40. Le Goff, Medieval Civilization, p. 264.
41. For these distinctions, see Edmundo O'Gorman, The Invention of America
(Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1961), pp. 51-69.
42. A.]. Gurevich, Categories of Medieval Culture, tr. G. L. Campbell (London:
Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1985), p. 58.
43. Yuri M. Lorman, Universe of the Mind: A Semiotic Theory of Culture, tr. Ann
Shukman (London: I. B. Tauris, 2001), pp. 177-85.
44. Gurevich, Categories ofMedieval Culture, p. 70. See pp. 42-91 for an overview of
medieval perceptions and representations of space. See also Harald Kleinschmidt,
Understanding the Middle Ages (Woodbridge: The Boydall Press, 2000), pp.
33-61. Kleinschmidt traces a shift from early medieval notions of space as the
sum of qualitatively different places occupied by objects to the high/late middle
age notion that space encloses objects and has presence between them.
45. Gurevich, Categories ofMedieval Culture, p. 72.
46. Erich Auerbach, Dante: Poet of the Secular World, ed. T. Silverstein, tr.
R. Mannheim (University of Chicago Press, 1961), p. 106. Auerbach discusses
how Dante built his ethical system around the Nicomachean Ethics as elaborated
by St. Thomas and interpreted by Brunetto Latini, pp. 105-21.
214 Notes
47. Ernst Cassirer, The Individual and the Cosmos in Renaissance Philosophy, tr. Mario
Domandi (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1963), p. 178. Aristotle replaced Plato's idea
of chora or space as a vast sphere in which objects are not confined to specific
places or regions, by place as a distinct topos. Aristotelian space contained all
particular places. Space encloses bodies; it is the geometrical line between bod-
ies constituted by the boundaries of other adjacent bodies. There are no gaps
between bodies and so all individual places are connected to space as a whole. In
this universe there is no empty space. Aristotelian place is like a vessel that sur-
rounds and contains the body located within it. Place is unchanging, "the inner
surface of the innermost unmoved container of a body," Aristotle from Physics,
quoted in EdwardS. Casey, The Fate ofPlace: A Philosophical History (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 1997), p. 55. See on Aristotelian concepts of
space, Casey, op. cit., pp. 50-71, Cassirer, op. cit., pp. 174-85; and M.A. Orr,
Dante and the Early Astronomers (London: Allan Wingate, 1956), pp. 75-83.
48. Johannes de Sacrobosco, De Sphaera, tr. Lynn Thorndike, in Thorndike, The
Sphere of Sacrobosco and Its Commentators (Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 1949), pp. 118-42, at p. 119.
49. Dante, Paradiso, XXIX, 51, p. 573. Arthur 0. Lovejoy, The Great Chain of
Being (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1964), p. 102.
50. Dante, Purgatorio, III, 15, p. 196.
51. Dante, Purgatorio, XXXI, 145, p. 375.
52. Orr, Dante and the Early Astronomers, p. 82.
53. Dante, Paradiso, XXII, 132, p. 531.
54. See Dante, Paradiso, VII, 124-41, p. 434.
55. Dante, Paradiso, I, 102-5 and 109-111, pp. 379-80.
56. Orr, Dante and the Early Astronomers, pp. 296-97.
57. Dante, Paradiso, XXVII, 70, p. 567.
58. Dante, Convivio, 2:4, quoted in Karl Federn, Dante and his Time (New York:
Haskell House Publishers, 1970), p. 81.
59. Dante, Paradiso, XXIV, 130-132, p. 544.
60. W. G. L. Randles, De Ia terre plate au globe terrestre: une mutation epistemologique
rapide (1480-1520) (Paris: Librairie Armand Colin, 1980). Much of the fol-
lowing discussion is drawn from Randles. See also 0' Gorman, Invention of
America, pp. 51-69.
61. Macrobius, Ambrosius Theodisius, Commentary on the Dream of Scipio, tr.
William Harris Stahl (New York: Columbia University Press [Records of
Civilization, Sources and Studies, 48], 1952), II: 5, 32-33, p. 206.
62. Quoted in Randles, De Ia terre plate, p. 13.
63. Saint Augustine, Concerning the City of God against the Pagans, tr. H. Bettenson
(London: Penguin Books, 1972), XVI: 9, pp. 664-65.
64. Macrobius, Commentary, II: 5, 1-3, p. 200.
65. Augustine, City of God, XVI: 9, pp. 664-65.
66. Augustine, City of God, XVI: 9, pp. 664-65.
67. Dante, Inferno, XXXIV, 112-4 and 124-26, p. 180.
Notes 215
68. Pierre d'Ailly, Imago Mundi, tr. into French by Edmond Buron, in Texte Latin
et traduction franraise de quatre traites cosmographiques de d'Ailly et des notes
marginales de Christophe Colomb, ed. Buron (Paris: Maisonneuve Freres, 1930),
p. 187. My translations refer to the French edition.
69. Randles, De La terre plate, p. 11.
70. Sacrobosco, De Sphaera, p. 129.
71. Pierre d'Ailly, Imago Mundi, pp. 254-55.
72. Paolo Revelli, L1talia nella Divina Commedia (Milano: Fratelli Treves, Editori,
1922), p. 33. My translation.
73. On mappae-mundi, see Jerry Brotton, Trading Territories: Mapping the Early
Modern World (London: Reaktion Books, 1997), pp. 26-33; David Woodward,
"Maps and the Rationalization of Geographic Space," in Jay A. Levenson (ed.),
Circa 1492: Art in the Age of Exploration (New Haven: Yale University Press
[National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC], 1991), pp. 83-7; and Brenda Deen
Schildgen, Dante and the Orient (Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2002),
pp. 66-91.
74. Dante Paradiso, IX, 83, p. 446; and Dante, Monarchia, tr. and ed. Prue Shaw
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), I:XI, 12-14, p. 27.
75. O'Gorman, Invention ofAmerica, p. 67.
76. Dante, Purgatorio II, 1-4, p. 191. Jerusalem at the centre of the northern hemi-
sphere is directly opposite the Earthly Paradise, "the luxuriant holy forest ever-
green," in the southern hemisphere, Purgatorio, XXVIII, 2, p. 354.
77. On Mandeville, see Randles, De la terre plate, pp. 17-20.
78. Quoted in Randles, De La terre plate, p. 17.
79. Lorman, Universe ofthe Mind, p. 172.
80. John G. Demaray, "Dante and the Book of the Cosmos," Transactions of the
American Philosophical Society, 77:5, 1987, pp. 14-15.
81. Le Goff, Medieval Civilization, p. 138. The following scheme is derived from
Le Goff.
82. See Schildgen, Dante and the Orient, pp. 66-91.
17. Etienne Gilson, La philosophie au moyen age: des origines patristiques a la fin du
XIVe siecle (Paris: Payor, 1944), p. 257.
18. Ladner, "The Concepts of'Ecclesia' and 'Christianitas'," 492.
19. Quoted in Ullman, Medieval Papalism, p. 97.
20. Quoted in Ullman, Medieval Papalism, p. 97.
21. Ullman, Medieval Papalism, p.107.
22. Ladner," 'Ecclesia' and 'Christianitas'," p. 508.
23. Innocent Ill, "Sermon on the Consecration of a Pope," in Tierney, The
Crisis of Church and State, pp. 131-32.
24. Colin Morris, The Papal Monarchy: The Western Church from 1050-1250
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989), p. 431.
25. In the official documents oflnnocent's predecessor, Alexander III (1159-1181),
plenitudo potestatis designated the delegation of power to a papal legate equiv-
alent to the principle of plena potestas in civil and canon law. John B. Morrall,
Political Thought in Medieval Times (Toronto: University of Toronto Press [In
association with the Medieval Academy of America], 1980), p. 66.
26. On the other hand, Tierney notes that neither of these decretals con-
tained any passages that were incompatible with claims to universal jurisdic-
tion. Tierney, The Crisis of Church and State, pp. 127-28.
27. Innocent III, letter to King John, accepting his feudal homage (April 1214), in
Tierney, The Crisis of Church and State, pp. 135-36.
28. See on the genesis of vicarius Christi and Innocent III's deployment of it in
respect to potestas vicaria, that is the pope's authority within the ecclesiastical
hierarchy, Michele Maccarrone, Vicarius Christi: Storia del titolo papale (Rome:
Lateranum, N.S., xviii, 1953).
29. See the "Sentence of deposition promulgated by Innocent IV in the General
Council of Lyon" (June 1245), in Tierney, The Crisis of Church and State,
p. 144.
30. Innocent IV, encyclical letter Eger Cui Levia (c.1246), in Tierney, The Crisis of
Church and State, pp. 147-49. Eger Cui Levia also rejects the imperialist inter-
pretation of Constantine's donation of the empire to Pope Sylvester. For impe-
rialists all papal claims to temporal authority rested on this act, which could be
rescinded by the present emperor. Against this, Innocent argued that popes had
inherited both royal and priestly powers from Christ. Thus, in surrendering the
empire to Sylvester, Constantine did not bestow temporal power for the first
time on the papacy, but merely acknowledged the de facto possession of what it
already held de jure.
31. Maccarrone, Vicarius Christi, p. 125.
32. Maccarrone, Vicarius Christi, p. 126. My translation.
33. Hostiensis, On Decretales, 4.17.13, in Tierney, The Crisis of Church and State,
pp. 156-57, at p. 156.
34. Hostiensis, On Decretales, 1.33.6, in Tierney, The Crisis of Church and State,
p. 157.
35. See Ullman, Medieval Papalism, pp. 114-37.
36. See Morrall, Political Thought in Medieval Times, pp. 84-85.
218 Notes
37. Innocent IV, Comments on the decretale Quod Super, quoted in Maccarrone,
Vicarius Christi, p. 126. My translation from the Latin.
38. See Ullman; Medieval Papa/ism.
39. Innocent IV, Comments on Quod Super, in Maccarrone, Vicarius Christi,
p. 126.
40. Ullman, Medieval Papa/ism, pp. 130-131.
41. On the two swords, see J. A. Watt, "Spiritual and Temporal Powers," in
J. H. Burns (ed.), Cambridge History ofMedieval Political Thought c. 350-c. 1450
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), pp. 367-423. Luke quote at
p. 370.
42. Morrall, Political Thought in Medieval Times, p. 22.
43. Morrall, Political Thought in Medieval Times, p. 22.
44. Bernard, De consideratione iv, iii, 7, quoted in Watt, "Spiritual and Temporal
Powers," p. 373.
45. Alanus, Commentary on Dist. 96 c. 6 (c.1202), in Tierney, Crisis of
Church and State, pp. 123-24.
46. Boniface VIII, Unam Sanctam, p. 189.
47. On the Investiture Contest, see Joseph Canning, A History ofMedieval Political
Thought 300-1450 (London: Routledge, 1996), pp. 82-110; and I. S. Robinson,
"Church and Papacy," in Cambridge History ofMedieval Political Thought, pp.
252-305, esp. pp. 246-48 and pp. 301-4.
48. Huguccio, quoted in Watt, "Spiritual and Temporal Powers," p. 376. See also
Huguccio, Commentary on Dist. 96 c. 6 (1189-91), in Tierney, Crisis of Church
and State, pp. 122-23.
49. Watt, "Spiritual and Temporal Powers," p. 372.
50. Wilks, Problem ofSovereignty, p. 79.
51. Francis Oakely, The Medieval Experience (Toronto: University of Toronto
Press [in association with the Medieval Academy of America], 1988), esp.
pp. 105-35.
52. Oakely, The Medieval Experience, p. 111.
53. Oakely, The Medieval Experience, p. 114.
54. Brian Tierney, "Medieval Canon Law and Western Constitutionalism," The
Catholic Historical Review, 62:1, 1966, pp. 1-20 at pp. 7-8.
55. Ernst H. Kantorowicz, Laudes Regiae: A Study in Liturgical Acclamations and
Medieval Ruler Worship (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1946).
56. Kantorowicz, Laudes Regiae, p. 62.
57. Ernst H. Kantorowicz, The King's Two Bodies: A Study in Mediaeval Political
Theology (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1957), pp. 63-64. See
pp. 61-78 for Kantorowicz's reading of this image.
58. Quoted in Kantorowicz, The King's Two Bodies, p. 63.
59. Kantorowicz, The King's Two Bodies, p. 92.
60. Liber Augusta/is, or Constitutions ofMelfi Promulgated by the Emperor Frederick
Two for the Kingdom ofSicily in 1231, tr. James M. Powell (New York, Syracuse
University Press, 1971).
61. Liber Augusta/is, p. 4.
Notes 219
62. Liber Augustalis, p. 92. The following discussion draws heavily on Kantorowicz's
consideration of the theological-juristic discourse of the emperor, The King's
Two Bodies, pp. 87-143.
63. Kantorowicz, The King's Two Bodies, pp. 94-97.
64. Kantorowicz, The King's Two Bodies, p. 99.
65. Quoted in Kantorowicz, The Kings Two Bodies, p. 106. See pp. 102-7 for
Kantorowicz's discussion of lex regia and lex digna.
66. Kamorowicz, The Kings Two Bodies, p. 137.
67. Dante Alighieri, Monarchia, tr. and ed. Prue Shaw (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1995).
68. Dante, Monarchia, l:ii, p. 5.
69. See on Aquinas' reasoning, Etienne Gilson, Dante et La philosophie (Paris:
Librairie PhilosophiqueJ. Vrin, 1939), pp. 191-92.
70. Dante, Monarchia, l:ii, p. 7, and III: xvi, p. 145.
71. Dante, Monarchia, l:iii, p. 9.
72. Dame, Monarchia, l:ii, p. 7 and I:iv, p. 11.
73. Dame, Monarchia, III:xiv, p. 141.
74. Dante, Monarchia, III:xv, p. 143.
75. Charles Till Davis, "Dame and the Empire," in Rachel Jacoff (ed.), The
Cambridge Companion to Dante (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1993), pp. 67-79, at p. 68.
76. Dante, Monarchia, III:xvi, p. 149.
77. Dante Alighieri, The Divine Comedy, tr. John Ciardi (New York: W. W. Norton,
1970), Purgatorio, XVI, 106-11, p. 280.
78. Ernst H. Kantorowicz, "Dante's 'Two Suns'," in Kantorowicz, Selected Studies
(New York:]. J. Augustin, 1965), pp. 325-38.
79. Gilson, Dante et Ia philosophie, p. 210. My translation.
80. Kantorowicz, King's Two Bodies, p. 457.
81. Kantorowicz, King's Two Bodies, p. 465.
82. Kamorowicz, King's Two Bodies, p. 465, fn. 41.
83. Donna Mancusi-Ungaro, Dante and the Empire (New York: Peter Lang, 1987),
p. 26.
84. Dante, Paradiso, XVIII, 92-117, pp. 504-5. See Piero Boitani, "From Darkness
to Light: Governance and Government in Purgatorio XVI," in John Woodhouse
(ed.), Dante and Governance (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997), pp. 12-26.
85. Dante, Purgatorio, XVI, 94-96, pp. 280.
86. Dante, Paradiso, XXX, 128-38, p. 581.
87. Quoted in Otto von Simson, The Gothic Cathedral: Origins ofGothic Architecture
and the Medieval Concept of Order, 3rd ed. (Princeton: Princeton University
Press, 1988), p. 62.
88. Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space, tr. D Nicholson-Smith (Oxford:
Blackwell, 1991), p. 266.
89. Georges Duby, The Age ofthe Cathedrals: Art and Society 980-1420, tr. E. Levieux
and B. Thompson (London: Croom Helm, 1981), p. 93.
90. Duby, Age ofthe Cathedrals, p. 95.
220 Notes
91. Quotes from Sugar in Erwin Panofsky, "Introduction" to Abbot Sugar, On the
Abbey Church ofSt.-Denis and Its Art Treasures ed. and tr. Panofsky (Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 1946), p. 2.
92. Abbot Sugar, On the Abbey Church ofSt.-Denis, p. 101.
93. The form of "the High Gothic cathedral sought to embody the whole of
Christian knowledge, theological, moral, natural and historical, with every-
thing in its place and that which no longer found its place suppressed." Erwin
Panofsky, Gothic Architecture and Scholasticism (Latrobe, PA: Archabbey Press,
1951), pp. 44-45.
94. Duby, Age ofthe Cathedrals, p. 104.
95. Duby, Age ofthe Cathedrals, p. 104.
96. von Simson, The Gothic Cathedral, p. 141. Against the view that Suger under-
stood kingship in sacral terms, some historians argue that his Life ofLouis VI
offers a more traditional theory of kingship as royal suzerainty at the summit of
a pyramid of feudal ties. See Andrew W. Lewis, "Suger's Views on Kingship,"
in Paula Lieber Gerson (ed.), Abbot Suger and Saint-Denis: A Symposium (New
York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1986), pp. 9-54.
97. Tierney, Crisis of Church and State, p. 172. The following account of the dis-
pute is drawn from pp. 172-92.
98. Boniface VIII, Ausculta Pili (December 1301), in Tierney, Crisis ofChurch and
States, pp. 185-86.
99. For Aristotle's impact on medieval Christian thought, see Canning, History of
Medieval Political Thought, pp. 125-7; and Paul E. Sigmund "Introduction,"
to St. Thomas Aquinas, On Politics and Ethics, tr. and ed. Sigmund (New
York: W. W. Norton, 1988), pp. xvi-ix.
100. For Canning, Aquinas was not the main conduit of Aristotle's political ideas to
the Middle Ages. More influential was Giles of Rome's (Aegidius Roman us) De
regimine principum (1286), History ofMedieval Political Thought, pp. 133-34.
101. See Sigmund, "Introduction," pp. xix-xx.
102. "Gratia non tollit sed perficit naturam," Aquinas, Summa theologiae (Ia, 8, 2),
quoted in Canning, History ofMedieval Political Thought, p. 145.
103. St. Augustine, Concerning the City of God against the Pagans, tr. Hep.ry
Bettenson (London: Penguin Books, 1972), XV:2, p. 598.
104. St. Thomas Aquinas, De Regimine Principum [The Governance of Rulers or
On Kingship] (1265-67), tr. P. Sigmund, in Aquinas, On Politics and Ethics,
Chapter 1, p. 14.
105. Aquinas, De Regimine Principum, p. 15 and pp. 16-17.
106. See "The Treatise on Law (Qu. 90-97)", Aquinas, Summa Theologiae, Part I,
in St. Thomas Aquinas, On Politics and Ethics, pp. 44-60. Divine law, the
fourth law of the quadrate, is outside this order, for it pertains to God's com-
mands for guidance to supernatural destiny, as revealed to Christians through
the Scriptures.
107. Thomas Aquinas, Commentum in IV Libros Sententiarum (1253-55), in
Tierney, Crisis of Church and State, p. 171.
Notes 221
28. My discussion of Ficino and Pico is limited to their writings on space. Useful
general introductions can be found in Brian P. Copenhaver and Charles
B. Schmitt, Renaissance Philosophy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992);
and Charles Trinkaus, In Our Image and Likeness: Humanity and Divinity in
Italian Humanist Thought, Vol. II (Notre Dame: Notre Dame Press, 1970).
29. For Copenhaver and Schmitt, Ficino's Platonic Theology is "as much patristic
and scholastic as classical, depending not only on Plato, Plotinus and Proclus
but also on Augustine and Aquinas," Renaissance Philosophy, p. 149.
30. Peter Burke, The Italian Renaissance: Culture and Society in Italy (Cambridge:
Polity Press, 1986), p. 201. In Botticelli's Primavera the space between the earth
and moon is filled with nymphs, wood spirits, and demons.
31. John Hale, The Civilization of Europe in the Renaissance (London: Harper
Collins, 1993), p. 562.
32. Arthur Lovejoy, The Great Chain of Being: A Study of the History of the Idea
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1936), p. 101.
33. Marsilio Ficino, Opera omnia 1:19, quoted in Pauline Moffitt Watts, "Pseudo-
Dionysius the Areopagite and Three Renaissance Neoplatonists: Cusanus,
Ficino and Pico on Mind and Cosmos" in James Hankins, John Monfasani and
Frederick Purnell Jr. (eds.), Supplementum Festivum: Studies in Honor of Paul
Oskar Kristeller (Binghampton: Centre for Medieval and Early Renaissance
Studies, 1987), pp. 279-98, at p. 294.
34. Paul Oskar Kristeller, The Philosophy of Marsilio Ficino, tr. V. Conant (New
York: Columbia University Press, 1943), pp. 74-75.
35. On Ficino's hierarchy of being, see Kristeller, The Philosophy ofMarsilio Ficino,
pp. 104-9.
36. G. Pico della Mirandola, Heptaplus, quoted in Watts, "Pseudo-Dionysius the
Areopagite," p. 290.
37. Pico, Heptaplus, quoted in Watts, "Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite,"
290-291.
38. Pico, Heptaplus, 78-79, quoted in R. Waddington, "The Sun at the Centre:
Structure as Meaning in Pico della Mirandola's Heptaplus," journal ofMedieval
and Renaissance Studies, 3, 1973, pp. 69-86, at p. 83.
39. Paul Oskar Kristeller, Eight Philosophers of the Italian Renaissance (Stanford:
Stanford University Press, 1964), p. 43.
40. Ficino, quoted in Kristeller, Philosophy ofMarsilio Ficino, p. 120. Kristeller pro-
vides a comprehensive discussion of the soul, love, and the principle of affinity
in Ficino.
41. Charles Trinkaus, "Marsilio Ficino and the Idea of Human Autonomy," in
G. Garfagnini (ed.) Marsilio Ficino e if ritorno di Platone: Studi e documenti
(Firenze: Leo S. Olschki, 1986), pp. 197-210.
42. Ficino, Disputatio contra iudicium astrologorum, quoted in Trinkaus, "Human
Autonomy," p. 201.
43. Ficino, Theologica Platonica II, quoted in Trinkaus, "Human Autonomy,"
p. 204.
224 Notes
66. Copernicus assumed that the structure of the universe was based on the sym-
metry of its parts. He placed the sun, the symbol of good in the Platonic tra-
dition, in the middle of the universe. He assumed that the universe must be a
sphere because "of all forms, the sphere is the most perfect." Furthermore, the
"earth too is evidently enclosed between poles and is therefore spherical" and
"is perfectly round, as the philosophers taught." Copernicus, De revolutionibus,
at pp. 114 and 116.
67. Copernicus, De revolutionibus, p. 119.
68. Copernicus, De revolutionibus, pp. 127-28.
69. Copernicus, De revolutionibus, p. 132.
70. Copernicus, De revolutionibus, p. 133.
71. Ernst Cassirer, Myth of the State (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1946),
p. 132.
72. Cassirer, Myth ofthe State, p. 133.
73. Cassirer, Myth ofthe State, p. 136.
74. ]. G. A. Pocock, The Machiavellian Moment: Florentine Political Thought and
the Atlantic Republican Tradition (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1975).
For Pocock, paradigms are language structures whose function is to define and
determine the commonly held view of politics in a society, thereby licensing
some forms of political belief and action and restricting others.
75. ]. H. Hexter, "The Machiavellian Moment," History and Theory, 16:3, 1977,
pp. 306-37, at p. 316.
76. Pocock, Machiavellian Moment, p. 53.
77. Pocock, Machiavellian Moment, p. 53.
78. Pocock, Machiavellian Moment, p. 53.
79. Pocock, Machiavellian Moment, pp. 56-57.
80. Pocock, Machiavellian Moment, p. 165.
81. Gennaro Sasso, "Machiavelli e la teoria deWAnacyclosis," Rivista Storica ltaliana,
70:1, 1958, pp. 333-73. See Niccolo Machiavelli, Discorsi sopra Ia prima deca di
Tito Levio, ed. Gennaro Sasso and Giorgio Inglese (Milano: Biblioteca Universale
Rizzoli, 1984), l:ii. For a useful comparison of Polybius and Machiavelli, see
Leslie J. Walker, "Notes on Book 1," in The Discourses ofNiccolo Machiavelli, ed.
Walker (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1950), pp. 6-13.
82. Sasso, "Machiavelli e Anacyclosis," p. 340
83. Machiavelli, Discorsi, l:ii, p. 67. This and all subsequent quotes are my
translations.
84. Felix Gilbert, Machiavelli and Guicciardini: Politics and History in Sixteenth
Century Florence (New York: W. W. Norton, 1965), p. 199.
85. Pocock, Machiavellian Moment, p. 184.
86. Howard R. Patch, The Goddess Fortuna in Mediaeval Literature (Cambridge,
MA: Harvard University Press, 1927), p. 19.
87. Anthony ]. Parel, The Machiavellian Cosmos (New Haven: Yale University
Press, 1992), p. 65. Cary]. Nederman, "Amazing Grace: Fortune, God, and
Free Will in Machiavelli's Thought," journal ofthe History ofIdeas, 60:4, 1999,
226 Notes
pp. 617-38 argues against Parel that Christian providentialism still under-
scores Machiavelli's concept offortuna.
87. Pare! argues that Machiavelli's references to fortuna in his political writings shows
that he is still beholden to the beliefs of a premodern mindset, such as a belief that
the heavens determine man's destiny. A.]. Parel, "The Question of Machiavelli's
Modernity," The Review ofPolitics, 53:2, 1991, pp. 320-29, at p. 321.
88. Niccolo Machiavelli, II Principe, ed. Arthur L. Burd (Oxford: Clarendon
Press, 1891), XVI, pp. 365-67 and p. 358. These and subsequent quotations
are my translations.
89. Mikael Hi:irnqvist, Machiavelli and Empire (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 2004), p. 236.
90. Giuseppe Prezzolini, Machiavelli: Anticristo (Rome: Gherardo Casini, 1954),
p. 30. My translation. Compare Strauss's view of II Principe as "irnmoral and
irreligious" and Machiavelli as a "teacher of evil with Sebastian De Graz.ia's
claim that the many references to God "[s]cattered about his writings ... like
poppies in a field of chick peas" indicates that scholastic categories of knowl-
edge and Christian cultural norms pervade Machiavelli's writing to the extent
that he "discourses about God always in the conventional reverent attitude."
Leo Strauss, Thoughts on Machiavelli (Seattle: University of Washington Press,
1969), pp. 9-10 and p. 12; and Sebastian de Grazia, Machiavelli in Hell (New
York: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1989), pp. 58-59.
91. Machiavelli, Discorsi, I:xii, p. 96.
92. Machiavelli, II Principe, XI, p. 248.
93. Machiavelli, Discorsi, Il:ii, p. 299.
94. Machiavelli, Discorsi, I:xi, p. 92.
95. Machiavelli, Discorsi, I:xi, p. 93.
96. Machiavelli, Discorsi, I:xii, p. 95.
97. J. Samuel Preus, "Machiavelli's Functional Analysis of Religion: Context and
Object," journal ofthe History ofIdeas, XL:2, 1979, pp. 171-90.
98. Machiavelli, Discorsi, l:xii, p. 94.
99. Isaiah Berlin, "The Originality of Machiavelli," in Berlin, Against the Current:
Essays in the History ofIdeas, ed. Henry Hardy (London: The Hogarth Press,
1979), pp. 25-79.
100. Machiavelli, Discorsi, III:i, p. 461.
101. Bernard Guillemain, Machiavel: L'anthropologie politique (Geneva: Librairie
Droz S.A., 1977), p. 328. My translation.
102. Guillemain, Machiavel: L'anthropologie politique, p. 328.
103. Cassirer, The Myth ofthe State, p. 135.
104. Cassirer, The Myth ofthe State, p. 140.
62. Machiavelli, quoted in Guarani, "Machiavelli and the Crisis of the Italian
Republics," p. 23.
63. See the extracts in Machiavelli, The ChiefWorks, Vol. I, pp. 161-2.
64. In 1502 and 1503 Machiavelli was sent on official missions to Valentino's courts
at Imola and Cesana, and then to the Papal court in Rome. From these courts
he sent detailed dispatches to the Ten of Liberty reporting on the status of the
ongoing alliance negotiations between Florence and Borgia. In these legations
Machiavelli describes Cesare's rise and fall. See the extracts from Legation 11,
"An Official Mission to Duke Valentino in Romagna" in Machiavelli, The Chief
Works, Vol. 1, pp. 121-42; and Legation 13, '~n Official Mission to the Court
of Rome" in Machiavelli, The Chief Works, Vol. I, pp. 142-60. In the Roman
legation Machiavelli reports on the death of Pope Alexander in 1503 and the
succession of Julius II; these events reappear in The Prince as the blow offortuna
which ultimately cost Cesare his princedom. On Cesare's elimination of the
Vitelli and Orsini factions in January 1503, see Machiavelli, 'A Description of
the Method Used by Duke Valentino in Killing Vitellozzo Vitelli, Oliverotto da
Fermo, and Others' in Machiavelli, The ChiefWorks, Vol. I, pp. 163-9.
65. Machiavelli, The Prince, p. 31.
66. Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth ofthe Prison, tr. Alan Sheridan
(Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1979), pp.l36-138.
67. Pierangelo Schiera, "Legitimacy, Discipline and Institutions: Three Necessary
Conditions for the Birth of the Modern State," The journal ofModern History,
67: Supplement (December 1995), pp. Sll-33, at pp. S30 and S32
68. Marsiglia of Padua, quoted in Schiera, "Legitimacy, Discipline and
Institutions," p. S19.
69. Machiavelli, Discourses, 1:12, in The ChieJWorks, Vol. I, p. 227.
70. Machiavelli, Art of War, 6, in The Chief Works, Vol. ], p. 69.
71. Sacchetti quoted in Lauro Martines, Power and Imagination: City-States in
Renaissance Italy (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1979), p. 165.
72. Martin Warnke, Political Landscape: The Art History of Nature (London:
Reaktion Books, 1994), p. 40.
73. Martines, Power and Imagination, p. 166.
74. Guarani, "Center and Periphery," S81-82.
75. Machiavelli, Discorsi, I:vi, p. 78.
76. S. Zamperetti, I piccoli principi: Signorie locali, feudi e comunita soggette nello
Stato regionale veneto dall' espansione territoriale ai primi decenni del' 600,
quoted in Guarani, "Centre and Periphery," S86.
77. Wolin, "Machiavelli and the Economy of Violence," p. 219.
78. Niccolo Machiavelli, The History of Florence, in Machiavelli, The Chief Works,
Vol. 3, I: xxix, p. 1069.
79. William E. Connolly, "Tocqueville, Territory and Violence," Theory, Culture
and Society, 11:1, 1994, pp. 19-40, at p. 22.
80. Machiavelli, Il Principe, III, pp. 183-200.
81. Machiavelli, Il Principe, III, p. 187.
Notes 231
82. The problems that Florence faced in keeping hold of cities with traditions of
liberty also exercised Guicciardini, "it has been harder for the Florentines to
acquire their small dominion than for the Venetians to gain their large one. For
the Florentines are in a province that used to be full of free republics, which
are very difficult to extinguish. It requires the greatest effort to conquer them
and, once conquered, it is no less difficult to keep them .... The cities captured
by the Venetians have been used to being subjected and lack the determination
to defend themselves or to rebel.' Ricordo 29, Francesco Guicciardini, Ricordi,
Diari, Memorie, ed. Mario Spinella (Roma: Editori Riuniti, 1981), p. 150. My
translation.
83. ]. G. A. Pocock, The Machiavellian Moment: Florentine Political Thought and
the Atlantic Republican Tradition (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1975),
p. 163.
84. Machiavelli, Il Principe, III, p. 186.
85. Antonio Gramsci, Quaderno 29 "Note per una introduzione allo studio
della grammatica," in Gramsci, Quaderni del Carcere, Vol III (Giulio Einaudi,
1975), pp. 2339-53.
86. Machiavelli, "Discorso o dialogo intorno alia nostra lingua," in Niccol.o
Machiavelli, Tutte Le Opere, ed. Guido Mazzoni and Mario Casella (Firenze:
G. Barbera, 1929), pp. 770-78.
87. de Grazia, Machiavelli in Hell, p. 146.
88. Quoted in de Grazia, Machiavelli in Hell, p. 148.
89. Machiavelli, "Letter to Francesco Vettori," April 16, 1527, quoted in de Grazia,
Machiavelli in Hell, p. 420.
90. Machiavelli, "Discorso o dialogo intorno alia nostra lingua," pp. 770-71.
My translation.
91. The terms piccola patria and La grande patria are from Chabod, ''Alcune
Questione." In most Italian quattrocento texts patria refered to the city, although
it occasionally denoted the wider collectivity.
92. Machiavelli, II Principe, XXIV, "Esortazione a Liberare L'ltalia da' Barbari,"
pp. 365-71.
93. Machiavelli, II Principe, XXIV, p. 367.
94. Machiavelli, II Principe, XVI, p. 371. Patria here denotes Florence, which will
be ennobled if the Medici take on the role of liberating Italy.
95. Translation from Petrarch, Petrarch's Songbook: Rerum Vulgarium Fragmenta,
tr. James Wyatt Cook (Binghampton: Medieval and Renaissance Texts and
Studies, 1995, p. 185. "Italia Mia" is on pages pp. 182-87.
96. See on these debates: Felix Gilbert, "The Concept of Nationalism in
Machiavelli's Prince," Studies in the Renaissance, 1, 1954, pp. 38-48; David
Laven, "Machiavelli, italianita and the French invasion of 1494," in David
Abulafia (ed.), The French Descent into Renaissance Itaf:y: Antecedents and Effects
(Aldershot: Variorum, 1995), pp. 355-69; and Hans Baron, "The Principe and
the Puzzle of the Date of Chapter 26," journal of Medieval and Renaissance
Studies, 21:1, 1991, pp. 83-102.
232 Notes
26. Denis Cosgrove, "Prospect, Perspective and the Evolution of the Landscape
Idea," Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers: New Series, 10, 1985,
pp. 45-62, at p. 55.
27. Martin Jay, "Scopic Regimes of Modernity," in Hal Foster (ed.), Vision and
Visuality (Seattle: Bay Press, 1988), pp. 3-23. For Jay, Cartesian perspectival-
ism, which combined philosophical ideas of subjective rationality with the artis-
tic principles of perspective, was the dominant visual model or "scopic regime"
of modernity. Although Cartesian-Perspectivalism was preeminent because it
seemed to best express "the 'natural' experience of sight valorised by a scientific
world-view," it was challenged by two counter regimes: (1) an "art of describing,"
as in seventeenth-century Dutch painting, based in cartographic principles; and
(2) a "madness of vision," as in Baroque art, which flaunted the opacity of the
sublime subject and underscored the rhetorical conventionality of sight.
28. Norman Bryson, Vision and Painting: The Logic of the Gaze (Basingstoke:
Macmillan Press, 1983), p. 94.
29. Perspective erased "the living body itself: this is a space dominated by
the eye and the gaze." Derek Gregory, Geographical Imaginations (Cambridge:
Blackwell Publishers, 1994), p. 392.
30. John White, The Birth and Rebirth of Pictorial Space (London: Faber and
Faber, 1957), p. 121.
31. Argan, "Architecture ofBrunelleschi," p. 96.
32. Jay, "Scopic Regimes," at pp. 4 and 6.
33. Panofsky, Perspective as Symbolic Form, pp. 42 and 34.
34. Panofsky, Perspective as Symbolic Form, p. 58.
35. Samuel Y. Edgerton, Jr, The Renaissance Rediscovery of Linear Perspective (New
York: Basic Books, 1975), p. 161.
36. Edgerton, The Renaissance Rediscovery ofLinear Perspective, p. 7.
37. James Elkins, The Poetics ofPerspective (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1994),
pp. 28-29.
38. Lefebvre, Production ofSpace, p. 78.
39. Lewis Mumford, The City in History: Its Origins, Its Transformations, and Its
Prospects (London: Penguin Books, 1961).
40. Richard Krautheimer, "The Panels in Urbino, Baltimore and Berlin
Reconsidered," in Henry A. Millon (ed.), Italian Renaissance Architecture: From
Brunelleschi to Michelangelo (London: Thames and Hudson, 1994), pp. 233-56,
at p. 238.
41. Leon Battista Alberti, On the Art ofBuilding in Ten Books, tr. Joseph Rykwert,
Neil Leach, and Robert Tavernor (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1988).
42. For an overview of the theme of the ideal city in the Renaissance, with particu-
lar emphasis on Alberti's De re aedificatoria and Filarete's Trattato d'architettura,
see Helen Rosenau, The Ideal City: Its Architectural Evolution in Europe, 3rd ed.
(London: Methuen, 1983), pp. 42-67.
43. Fiske Kimball, "Luciano Laurana and the 'High Renaissance'," Art Bulletin, 10,
1927-8, pp. 124-51. The only other grand visionary urban settings produced
Notes 235
until the second decade of the Cinquecento were the doors of the ducal apartment
in the palace ofUrbino (1474-82).
44. Andre Chastel, "Vues urbaines, peintres et theatre," quoted in Hubert Damisch,
The Origin of Perspective, tt. John Goodman (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press,
1994), p. 225.
45. Alessandro Parronchi, "Due note, 2. Urbino-Baltimora-Berlino," Rinascimento,
29, 1968, pp. 355-61.
46. Richard Krautheimer, "The Tragic and Comic scenes of the Renaissance: The
Baltimore and Urbino Panels," Gazette des Beaux-Arts, 33, 1948, pp. 327-48.
He retracted this reading in "The Panels in Urbino, Baltimore and Berlin
Reconsidered."
47. Damisch, The Origin ofPerspective, pp. 238-39.
48. Damisch, The Origin of Perspective, p. 446. Damisch views the panels
as "representations of representation," a demonstration of perspective. He is
interested in how costruzione legittima functions as a dispositif or model "what
linguists call an 'expressive apparatus' (dispositifd'enonciation, sometimes trans-
lated as 'sentence structure')." Costruzione legittima is "characterised by the
conjunction, the bringing together at a given point designated the 'origin', of
lines that measure the declension of figures, by establishing their relationship
to a shared horizon line, while simultaneously determining their conjugation
on a plane.," p. xxi.
49. Damisch, The Origin ofPerspective, p. 53.
50. Damisch, The Origin ofPerspective, p. 341.
51. Lauro Martines, Power and Imagination: City-States in Renaissance Italy
(New York: Alfred A Knopf, 1979), p. 272.
52. Martines, Power and Imagination, p. 275.
53. Denis Cosgrove, "Prospect, Perspective," p. 49.
54. Zygmunt Bauman, Intimations of Postmodernity (London: Routledge, 1992),
P XV.
55. Richard Sennett, Flesh and Stone: The Body and the City in Western Civilization
(London: Faber and Faber, 1994), esp. pp. 212-51.
56. Sennett, Flesh and Stone, p. 227.
57. Dolfin, quoted in Sennett, Flesh and Stone, pp. 234-35. Ghetto means foundry
in Italian from the verb gettare, to pour.
58. Martines, Power and Imagination, pp. 271-76.
59. Martines, Power and Imagination, p. 274.
60. Alberti, On the Art of Building, p. 118. Alberti's utopia was a product of its
time, "adapted to the realities of fifteenth-century Italy and thus envisioned
under different forms of government-a republic; a prince ruling in accord with
his subjects; or one imposing his will, a tyrannus." Krautheimer, "The Panels
Reconsidered," p. 255.
61. Fram;:oise Choay, The Rule and Method: On the Theory of Architecture and
Urbanism (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1997), p. 5. De re aediftcatoria was
presented to Pope Nicholas V in 1452 and printed by Poliziano in 1485.
236 Notes
74. da Bisticci notes that these objects were not just for show, but reflected the fact
that Federico was himself a man of high culture: well-read in history, conver-
sant with philosophy, knowledgeable of architecture, and appreciative of music,
sculpture and painting. Vite, pp. 236-37.
75. Westfall, "Chivalric Declaration," pp. 28-31.
76. A. Richard Turner, The Vision of Landscape in Renaissance Italy (Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 1966), pp. 11-12.
77. Kenneth Clark, Landscape into Art (London: John Murray, 1949), p. 14.
78. Scholars disagree when landscape painting emerged as a distinctive genre.
E. H. Gombrich, "The Renaissance Theory of Art and the Rise of Landscape,"
in Gombrich, Norm and Form: Studies in the Art of the Renaissance (London:
Phaidon Press, 1966), pp. 107-21, argues that Giorgione's Tempesta (c.1512)
was the first landscape painting. Clark dates the origins of the landscape of fact
earlier to Gentile da Fabriano's Flight into Egypt 1423, which, although still
replete with symbolism, is the first painting where the details of a landscape are
united by light rather than by decorative arrangements. Clark, Landscape into
Art, p. 15.
79. Turner, Vision ofLandscape, pp. 9-10.
80. Turner, Vision ofLandscape, p. 3.
81. William E. Connolly, "Tocqueville, Territory and Violence," Theory, Culture
and Society, 11:1, 1994, pp. 19-40.
82. Battisti, Piero, pp. 357-58. Federico's biographers attributed these innovations
directly to the prince. Castiglione reasoned that Federico's subjects enjoyed the
fruits of fertile and abundant lands because of the wise and just rule of their
ottimi Signori. Castiglione, Illibro del Cortegiano, 1:" pp. 33. For da Bisticci,
Federico took a personal interest in the cultivation of the land: he provided
housing and security for the agricultural laborers, and personally visited their
workshops and farms to enquire into their well-being., da Bisticci, Vite, p. 238.
83. Andrew Martindale, "The Middle Ages of Andrea Mantegna," Journal of the
Royal Society ofArts, 127, 1979, pp. 627-42, at p. 631.
84. Angelini, Piero della Francesca, p. 66.
85. Angelini, Piero della Francesca, p. 62.
86. Damisch, The Origin ofPerspective, p. 188.
87. Mark Monmonier, How to Lie with Maps (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
1991), p. 88.
88. The Geographia was introduced into the Western tradition by Manuel
Chrysoloras and Jacopo d'Angelo. The first edition, without maps, was pub-
lished in Venice in 1475, the first with maps in Bologna 1477. Six editions were
published before 1500. The general ideas rather than the work as a whole are
derived from Ptolemy himself. The Geographia was compiled by Byzantium
scholars in the tenth and eleventh centuries and the maps were drawn by a
Greek monk Maximos Planudes around 1300. See, W. G. L. Randles, De fa
terre plate au globe terrestre: une mutation epistemologique rapide (1480-1520)
(Paris: Librairie Armand Colin, 1980).
238 Notes
36. Christopher Columbus, journal of the First Voyage, ed. and tr. B. W. Ife
(Warminster: Aris & Phillips, 1990), p. 3.
37. Columbus,journal ofthe First Voyage, p. 3
38. A good general history is John Edwards, Inquisition (Gloucester: Tempus, 1999).
39. Columbus,journalofthe First Voyage, 6/11/1492, p. 75.
40. Tzvetan Todorov, The Conquest of America: The Question of the Other, tr.
Richard Howard (London: Harper Collins, 1985), p. 50.
41. Columbus,journal ofthe First Voyage, 12/11/1492, p. 77.
42. Steph,en Greenblatt, Marvelous Possessions: The Wonder of the New World
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991).
43. Columbus, quoted in Greenblatt, Marvelous Possessions, p. 71.
44. Inter Caetera, p. 96.
45. Michael Donelan, "Spain and the Indies," in Bull and Watson (eds.), The
Expansion ofInternational Society, pp. 75-85.
46. Quoted in Miguel Batllori. S. J., "The Papal Division of the World and Its
Consequences," in Fred Chiappelli (ed.), First Images of America: The Impact
of the New World on the Old (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1976),
pp. 211-21, at p. 213.
47. Luis Weckmann-Mufioz, "The Alexandrine Bulls of 1493: Pseudo-Asiatic
Documents," in Chiappelli, First Images ofAmerica, pp. 201-10, at p. 201.
48. Weckmann-Mufioz, "The Alexandrine Bulls of 1493," p. 203.
49. Batllori, "The Papal Division of the World," p. 215.
50. Donelan, "Spain and the Indies," p. 80. See my discussion of these ideas
in chapter five.
51. Wight, Systems ofStates, p. 119; and Donelan, "Spain and the Indies," p. 80.
52. "Santa Fe Capitulations," Santa Fe, 17 April 1492, The Book of Privileges,
pp. 63-66.
53. "Granada Capitulations," Granada, 30 April 1492, The Book of Privileges,
pp. 66-69, at p. 67.
54. On the Portuguese navigation of the Western coast of Africa and its conse-
quences for the rivalry between Portugal and Spain, see Jerry Brotton, Trading
Territories: Mapping the Early Modern World (London: Reaktion Books, 1997),
esp. pp. 46-88.
55. Henry Vignaud, Toscanelli and Columbus (London: Sands, 1903).
56. Ferdinand and Isabella Letter, quoted in Nader, "Introduction," Book of
Privileges, p. 21.
57. Nader, "Notes on the Translation," Book ofPrivileges, p. 197.
58. Nader, "Introduction," Book ofPrivileges, p. 29.
59. The lawyers in the Royal Chancellery phrased the capitulations as contin-
gent grants. The concessions became operative only if Columbus discovered
and took possession of any islands or mainland in the name of the monarchs.
During the negotiations and preparations the purpose and destination of
the voyage was kept secret. Documents described the voyage in the vaguest
terms to "certain parts of the Ocean Sea" so as to avoid spies reporting back to
Portugal. On Columbus' return to the court he asked the monarchs to elevate
242 Notes
the Granada Capitulations from simple informal writ of grant cartas de merced
to a permanently binding charter of privilege cartas de privilegio emplomadas.
Both documents were rewritten and upgraded in March 1493. This did not
satisfy Columbus who asked that they be confirmed before the start of each of
his voyages.
60. Crown instructions to Juan Diaz de Solis, quoted in Greenblatt, Marvelous
Possessions, p. 56.
61. "Digest of Columbus's Log Book," 11/10/1492, p. 53.
62. Greenblatt, Marvelous Possessions, p. 65.
63. Columbus describes the Indian communities not as savage confusion"
but "admirable orderliness," quoted in Greenblatt, Marvelous Possessions, p. 65.
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Index
man 104, 109-11, 112, 123, 147, 148, Panofsky, Erwin 102, 147, 150
149, 150, 176 Papacy, the 2, 3, 6, 57, 63,
Mantegna, Andrea 160-62 73, 74.ff., 83, 88, 89,
maps and mapping 69-71, 162-67, 181, 182-83
170, 188, 190-94, 195, 198 Alexander VI 178-79, 180,
mappae-mundi, the 70-71 181, 188
Martines, Lauro 153, 154 Inter Caetera 178ff., 186, 188, 189,
Mattingly, Garrett 8, 10 192
medieval period, the 3, 48, 51, 52.ff., Boniface VIII 76, 82-83, 87, 91,
104-105, 107, 111, 92-93
112, 116 Clement V 93, 129
canon law 74, 93 Gelasius I 82
Christianity in 3, 51 see also GregoryVII 74
Augustine, St; bishops; Innocent III 79-80, 97
canonists; Church, the; God; Innocent IV 80, 81
Papacy, the Nicholas V 176-77
Europe in 48, 71, 72 Romanus Pontifex 176-77, 180
politics in 73.ff., 84 papal fullness of power 78-79,
understanding of space in 63.ff., 80-81,83,84,98,182,183
196 papal universalism 74, 75
modernity 104, 105, 106, 122, 149, pope as vicarius Christi 80-81, 89,
150, 153 182
monarchs, role of, see Monarchy two swords allegory, the 82-83, 88
Monarchy 73, 79-80, 84, 91ff see also Church, the
Capetians, the 91, 92 Peace ofWestphalia, the 3, 5, 101
Isabel and Ferdinand 177-80, 181, medieval/modern dichotomy,
182, 183, 184 the 101, 102
Joao II 177, 188 Westphalia myth 3
Philip the Fair 91, 92-93 Westphalia narrative, the 53, 54,
morality 7, 9 91, 101
Morgenthau, Hans 2-3 Westphalian international system,
the 1, 3
nationalism 28-29, 141 Westphalian sovereignty 21
nation-states, the 181, 198 perspective 51, 52, 106, 145, 146,
nature 94, 109, 150 147.ff., 162, 165, 192, 197
Navari, Cornelia 22, 23 as a symbolic system 149
Neorealism 2, 31, 48 Pico della Mirandola, Giovanni,
"new world," concept of 173, 174 Count 107, 108-109, 110-11
New World, the, see Americas, the Piero della Francesca 148-49,
155-59, 160, 162, 197
Ocean Sea, the, see sea Pocock, J. G. A. 115, 116
O'Gorman, Edmundo 63, 70, politics 3-4, 7, 8, 17, 24, 31,
170, 171, 172, 174, 53-54, 90, 94,
175-76, 190 116-17, 146
Index 267
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