From Hierarchy To Anarchy

From Hierarchy to Anarchy
Territory and Politics before

Westphalia
jeremy Larkins
pal grave
macmillan
2009
Contents
List ofIllustrations ix
Acknowledgments xi
1 Introduction: Territoriality, Westphalia, and

International Relations 1
2 International Relations, Political Theory, and
the Territorial State 17
3 Theorizing Territoriality: Discourse, Culture, History 35
4 Hierarchy, Order, and Space in the Medieval World 53
5 Christendom, Hierarchy, and Medieval Political Discourse 73
6 The Renaissance Critique of Hierarchy 101
7 Machiavelli, Territoriality, and Lo Stato 123
8 Picturing Renaissance Territoriality 145
9 The Renaissance Territorialization of International Society 169
10 Conclusion: Territoriality, the Renaissance, and
International Relations 195
Notes 201
Bibliography 245
Index 263
Illustrations
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. 75
5.2 The Emperor in Majesty, c. 975 (vellum) by German
school (tenth century). Aachen Cathedral, Aachen,
Germany. Bildarchiv Foto Marburg/The Bridgeman
Art Library. German. Out of copyright. 86
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. 151
8.2 Portraits of Duke Federico da Montefeltro (1422-82)
and Battista Sforza, c.1465 (tempera on panel)
by Francesca, Piero della (c.1415-92).
Galleria degli Uffizi, Florence, Italy/The Bridgeman
Art Library. Italian. Out of copyright. 156
8.3 The Triumphs of Duke Federico da Montefeltro
(1422-82) and Battista Sforza, c.1465 (tempera on
panel) by Francesca, Piero della (c.1415-92). Galleria degli
Uffizi, Florence, Italy/The Bridgeman Art Library.
Italian. Out of copyright. 157
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. 161
x Illustrations
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 {fifteenth century). British Library,
London, UK/ British Library Board. All Rights
Reserved/The Bridgeman Art Library. German.
Out of copyright. 164
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. 165
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. 179
9.2 Credit: Copy of Monumenta Cartographia, 1502
{color litho) by Royal Geographical Society,
London, UK/The Bridgeman Art Library. 191
Acknowledgments
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
At Palgrave Macmillan several people have played important roles in nur-

turing this project. I am particularly indebted to Peter Wilson the editor of the
"History oflnternational Thought Series" for expressing an interest in my work
and encouraging me to submit a manuscript for consideration. This series is an
important outlet for those of us who think that the history of ideas matters.
Farideh Koohi-Kamali, Toby Wahl, and Asa Johnson have all provided a pub-
lishing novice with invaluable support and advice. I would also like to thank
Victoria Hogarth at Bridgeman Art Library and Marek Suchy at the Archives of
the Prague Castle for their help with obtaining the images. The external review-
er's comments were extremely insightful and I am very grateful for their close
reading of my manuscript. I have incorporated many of the reviewer's valuable
suggestions and believe that the final text is considerably improved as a result.
Finally many thanks to Philip Davis for his diligent work compiling the index
and reading the proofs.
Emotional and psychological support on what has sometimes been a diffi-
cult journey has come from many people. Professor Valerie Cowie provided not
only valuable professional assistance but also hours of stimulating conversation.
I am grateful for the, often bemused, understanding and patience shown by
Zoe Rahman and Zaklina Manevska-Hamilton. One could not wish for better
friends than Spyros Economides and Katerina Dalacoura who have picked up
the pieces on more than one occasion. My parents Fay and Gordon, my sister
and brother, Frances and Matthew, and their families, have all been sources of
kindnesses beyond the call of family duty.
I have dedicated this book to Oominique Jacquin-Berdal. Dominique's tragic
death in early 2006 not only robbed the International Relations community in
Britain of one of its brightest prospects and Africa of one of its most passionate
advocates but also many of us of a dear friend. Dominique was an unfailing
source of wisdom, generosity, and kindness and I consider myself blessed to have
been able to count her among my dearest friends.
CHAPTER 1
Introduction: Territoriality, Westphalia,

and International Relations
International Relations and the Territorial State

The sine qua non of modern International Relations theory has been the idea
of an international system comprised of independent political communities or
states. Since this representation of the international system has no place for an
overarching Leviathan or hegemon it is generally assumed that the relations
between states are structured by anarchy. International theorists, perhaps mind-
ful of Kenneth Waltz's caution against reductionist explanations of interna-
tional processes and outcomes, have tended to leave the task of theorizing the
state to political theorists. 1 Nevertheless, even those theories of International
Relations that explicitly eschew the business of state theory implicitly endorse
certain assumptions about the nature and character of the states that make up
the international system.
Mainstream theories of international relations have been particularly well
served by Max Weber's famous account of the state as a human community
that "claims the monopoly of the legitimate use of physical force within a given
territory." 2 Violence, legitimacy, and territory define the Weberian state. In
International Relations the themes of violence and legitimacy have been sub-
ject to much debate and discussion. Most attention has focused on the idea
of legal domination, which for Weber distinguished modern from traditional
or charismatic forms of state domination. Legal domination in international
political theory is rewritten as the principle of sovereignty, which, it is claimed,
is the constitutive principle of the Westphalian international system. However,
the territorial aspect of the state, the fact of the state's physical presence in
space-which for Weber, writing in a culture dominated by geopolitics, seemed
2 From Hierarchy to Anarchy
self-evident-has not received equivalent critical consideration in International

Relations.
Indeed, it would be fair to say that, for most international political thought
the claim that the state has a territory or is in some sense territorial has assumed
the status of a common-sensical, self-evident truth. All states, regardless of his-
torical and geographical variables, are assumed to have some physical extension
in space, to occupy an identifiable place on the surface of the earth, to have
borders that clearly distinguish inside from outside and self from others. As
Stephen Krasner writes "[t]he assertion of final authority within a given terri-
tory is the core element in any definition of sovereignty," the only alternatives
being "either a world in which there are no clear boundaries or a world in which
there is no final authority within a given territory." 3 This final authority is not
just derived from the internal monopoly of violence but also comes from the
constitutive principle of the state system "that political life must be territorially
organized with one final authority within a given territory.'"~ Following Kant I
identify this essentialist account of the relationship between the state and ter-
ritory as the "territorial a priori." In Kant's Newtonian framework space and
time were universal a priori conditions for knowledge. However, the intellec-
tual revolution associated with the early twentieth century sciences of relativity
forced a paradigm shift in understandings of space and time and showed that
the Newtonian-Kantian categories were not universal but particular, the prod-
ucts of historically specific knowledge. This book will make a similar claim with
respect to the territorial a priori of International Relations. It will suggest that
the idea of the territorial state is neither universal nor immutable but contingent
and historical. It is a modern cultural representation, a discursive construct,
with a complex history whose origins lie in the Renaissance transformation of
man's understanding of his being-in-space.
Contemporary Neorealists are unlikely to be unduly disturbed by the asser-
tion that the territorial state has a history. After all they deny that differences in
the nature of the units that make up any international system have any causal
impact on the dynamics of war and the balance of power. However, their Classical
Realists predecessors, whose Realism was more imbued with history and polit-
ical theory, recognised that the modern state's territoriality was a fundamental
factor in the emergence of the modern international system. Hans Morgenthau
stated clearly that an international system composed of sovereign territorial states
only emerged in the period after the end of the Thirty Years War. Sovereignty
or supreme power over a particular territory became the determinant political
fact of early modern Europe only once it reflected the new social reality derived
from the double victory of the territorial princes: externally over the Holy Roman
Emperor and the Pope, and internally over local barons. For Morgenthau the
legal doctrine of territorial sovereignty formulated by the jurists and lawyers of
Introduction 3
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
The Westphalia Narrative

Morgenthau's claim that the sovereign territorial state emerged out of the tur-
moil of the religious wars of the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries
is one account of the Westphalia 'myth', according to which the agreements
reached at the Congresses of Munster (1644-48) and Osnabriick (1645-48)
and subsequently ratified by the Treaties of Westphalia (1648) gave birth to
the modern states-system. According to this narrative ever since Westphalia the
international system has been a territorial order whose actors, sovereign states,
have been coterminous with bounded, compartmentalized, spaces. 6 Although
the International Relations 'myth' ofWestphalia is often at odds with the histor-
ical events and social and political conditions of the time, the aura ofWestphalia
remains largely undiminished; not least because Westphalia has a significance
that goes beyond the immediate concerns oflnternational Relations.? For many
it connotes the moment when politics, having spent several centuries in the
darkened caves of medieval Christianity, emerged blinking into the daylight
of modern rationality and reason. Westphalia symbolized a transformation
from a system .of political rule based in the hierarchical structures of medieval
Christianity to one ordered in terms of independent sovereign territorial states:
a transition from hierarchy to anarchy.
For Leo Gross, the Homer of the Westphalia myth, this structural transfor-
mation is precisely what made Westphalia so significant: it "marks the end of
an epoch and the opening of another. It represents the majestic portal which
leads from the old into the new world." 8 Westphalia represented the victory of
centrifugal forces, empowered by the rising sense of individualism promoted
by the Renaissance and Reformation, over the Papacy and Empire upon which
the hierarchies of the Christian medieval world had been centered. It "marked
man's abandonment of the idea of a hierarchical structure of society and his
option for a new system characterized by the co-existence of a multiplicity of
states, each sovereign within its territory, equal to one another, and free from
any external earthly authority." 9 In the Westphalian international system, com-
posed of independent sovereign territorial states, the structure of authority is
horizontal: there is no Leviathan or transcendental authority figure dictating
how states should relate to each other.
This structural transformation in the nature of political authority from
medieval hierarchy to modern anarchy both enabled and required a profound
alteration in man's conception of his political being-in-space or his territoriality.

The transition from a vertical to a horizontal political cosmology is, suggests
Michael Shapiro, captured in Aldous Huxley's novel Grey Eminence in which
Cardinal Richelieu and his foreign emissary Father James embody, respectively,
aspects of the modern and medieval spatial imaginaries. In Father James's medi-
eval cosmology the world appears as a vertical set of spaces organized into a
mundane present and a transcendental eternity, whereas for Richelieu the hier-
archies of the Christian order have given way to the modern geopolitical hori-
zontal of sovereign states. The novel can thus be read as
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
be addressed as an object or an idea that is produced by discourse. This book's

insistence on the notion of the territorial imaginary seeks to posit an alterna-
tive to the territorial a priori in which territory is synonymous with extension
in physical space. The territorial imaginary reminds us that in any culture or
society assumptions about man's political being-in-space are "constituted by the
ensemble of representations which extend beyond the limit imposed by the facts
of experience and the deductive conclusions authorized by them." 14
As far as the historical purview of this work is concerned one can begin by
reiterating Donald J. Puchala's statement that "[t]here were, of course, interna-
tional relations before 1648." 15 Commenting on the various dates put forward
to signify the birth of the modern states-system, Martin Wight has observed
that they tend to derive less from balanced assessments of historical data than
from scholars' personal value systems and ideological biases. Thus, if one's pri-
ority is to emphasize the legal recognition of independent sovereign states then
Westphalia is an appropriate date. However, if one thinks that an operative
balance of power is a necessary requirement for an international system then
the 1713 Treaty ofUtrecht might be more attractive. 16 Yet, notes Wight, even if
we identify Utrecht a~> the coming-of-age of the modern states-system, we must
recognize that it was preceded by a long period of gestation, which began in the
fourteenth century.
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
Despite Wight's insistence that institutional developments in the fourteenth and

fifteenth centuries established the conditions of possibility for the emergence of a
distinctly modern form of international relations it is notable that this period of
European history, the Renaissance, has received remarkably little scholarly atten-
tion within the discipline oflnternational Relations. Of course, this is primarily
a consequence of the Westphalian narrative that has drawn a deep, if arbitrary,
line across the historical record. Ironically, the discipline's foundational histor-
ical myth requires that earlier events and ideas are themselves mythologized;
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 Relations and the Renaissance

The dichotomy between medieval and modern international systems is less
neat than the Westphalia narrative presumes. This has been acknowledged by
those few International Relations scholars who have incorporated aspects of
the Renaissance-a period of European history that bridged "the medieval"
and "the modern" while simultaneously bringing both into question-within
their histories of international relations. International Relations scholarship on
the Renaissance tends to focus on three issue areas: the political philosophy of
Machiavelli and other humanists; the Renaissance contribution to modern diplo-
macy; and the social relations leading to the institutional rise of the sovereign
state. The remainder of this introduction will briefly consider their work, both
to situate the present study and to indicate how its arguments extend beyond
existing discussions of the Renaissance irt international political thought.
Scholars of political philosophy often remark that the efflorescence of polit-
ical theory associated with Renaissance humanism is not matched by equiv-
alent advances in thinking about international politics. Torbj0rn L. Knutsen
argues that although Machiavelli's writings on self-interest and raison d'etat
anticipated some of the concerns of modern international political theory, The
Prince is primarily concerned with domestic politics and is not a modern treatise
since it continues to articulate power politics in terms of the classical categories
of virtu and fortuna. 21 Indeed, for Knutsen, the closest the Renaissance came
to developing a theory of international relations is Guicciardini's adaptation
of Thucydides' balance of power theory to describe Lorenzo de Medici's for-
eign policy. David Boucher, who unlike Knutsen does not limit himself to The
Prince, agrees that Machiavelli did not entertain the concept of a balance of
power, but maintains that the Florentine did have a distinctive view of interna-
tional relations: "Machiavelli's view of human nature and the subordination of
morality to politics postulates a dynamic view of the relations among nations,
each of which has its own common good which it is prepared to enhance at
the expense of others." 22 Since it is human nature to always desire more, in the
competitive environment of international relations, all states, even those that
seek only to maintain the status quo, will be threatened by others, a threat that
will spur their own desire and need for conquest. Both Knutsen and Boucher,
highlighting a theme that will be discussed extensively throughout this work,

acknowledge that even if Renaissance political thought articulated little by way
of explicit international relations theory, the humanist critique of medieval
scholasticism did pave the way for the subsequent development of modern sec-
ular political and international theory. Machiavelli and Guicciardini's descrip-
tive realism, which described and explained politics in terms of human nature,
the exercise of free will and rationality, isolated politics from the normative
prescriptions of Christian theological discourse. Renaissance political theorists
were no longer compelled to frame their discussions of the state in terms of its
relations to either celestial or temporal Christian authorities, but rather depicted
it as a human creation that needed constant vigilance in order to be sustained.
Boucher and Knutsen treat this theme, which Boucher neatly terms "the prior-
ity of the secular," largely through an explication of Machiavellian statecraft and
raison d'etat as adumbrated within the concepts of necessita, virtu, and fortuna.
Important as these concepts are to understanding Renaissance political theory,
neither study provides an extensive discussion of how the state was understood
during the Renaissance. Thus in chapter 4 a close textual reading of Machiavelli
will explore how humanist political thought conceived of lo stato and how that
conception played out in terms of a territorial imaginary.
If the Renaissance lacked a general theory of international relations, its con-
tribution to the theory and practice of diplomacy is well acknowledged. In his
classic Renaissance Diplomacy, Garrett Mattingly argues that modern diplomacy
began with the exchange of permanent resident embassies between the principal
courts of Renaissance Italy during the period of the Milanese wars (1444-54). 23
Drawing on Jacob Burckhardt's characterization of political life in Renaissance
Italy as illegitimate and requiring permanent vigilance, Mattingly claims that
the resident ambassadors were simultaneously "the agents and the symbols of
continuous system of diplomatic pressures." 24 During the remainder of the fif-
teenth century the machinery of Renaissance diplomacy was gradually refined
and the rights and duties of diplomats were clarified. The heyday of Renaissance
diplomacy was brought to a close by the French invasion of 1494 and the ensu-
ing struggles between the Valois and Hapsburg dynasties for hegemony over
the peninsula. However, because the northern powers adopted the Italian dip-
lomatic model it became the European standard, even surviving the Counter-
Reformation wars of religion. Renaissance Diplomacy remains a valuable work if
only for its insistence that the period between 1420 and 1530 was significant in
the history of international relations. Yet, Mattingly's claim that modern diplo-
matic practice emerged during the Renaissance has been challenged. For James
Der Derian Mattingly's text shares two of the characteristic flaws of the classi-
cal tradition of diplomatic studies. First, by narrowly conceiving of diplomacy
as "an exchange of accredited envoys by states, and as a valuable norm for the
Introduction 9
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
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
separation of politics and economics premised upon a form of material repro-

duction dominated by exchange relations, itself contingent upon a structural
location within feudal Europe which enabled the cornering of such flows suf-
ficient to support them." 38 The Communes' ability to isolate themselves from
private individual power so prevalent in feudal Europe and so reconstitute an
autonomous public sphere of political life-characterized by the institutions
of the poderteria and capitaneria-was derived from their unique role in the
feudal economy: their control of East-West trade, their production of manu-
factures such as textiles, and the presence of colonies of Italian merchants in
various European cities. Rosenberg's argument is persuasive if one accepts his
economic determinism, but from the perspective of discourse analysis it is too
restrictive. There are surely limitations to any discussion of the Renaissance,
which if it was anything was a cultural and intellectual movement that eschews
any consideration of ideas and art. This may be a consequence of Rosenberg's
idiosyncratic dating of the Renaissance to the emergence of the Communes in
the eleventh and twelfth centuries. However, few intellectual or cultural histo-
rians would accept that Renaissance culture in any meaningful sense existed
before the late thirteenth century when it erupted in Florence with the writ-
ings of Dante Alighieri and Francesco Petrarch and the painting of Giotto di
Bondone. Rosenberg's chronology merely serves to efface an important distinc-
tion between medieval and Renaissance cultures that in terms of their different
territorial imaginaries is profound.
The Westphalian narrative of the modern states-system is also contested in
Hendrik Spruyt's institutional historical sociology. 39 The processes of evolu-
tion and change underlying the transformation from a feudal system to one of
sovereign territorial states are not, he suggests, satisfactorily explained by N eo-
Marxist, Neo-Durkheimian or Neo-Weberian "unilinear explanations" that
highlight one explanatory variable-the economic contradiction in feudalism,
changes in dynamic density, or an instrumentally rational formal organization.
These functionalist and teleological explanations cannot account for the even-
tual triumph of the sovereign state as the dominant political institution of Early
Modern Europe for there was "nothing inevitable about the emergence of the
sovereign, territorial state.'>4 Spruyt's nonlinear view of institutional evolution,
derived from Fernand Braude! and Stephen Jay Gould, argues that the political
landscape of Late Medieval Europe was profoundly altered by the expansion of
trade and the growth of towns. Neither the conflict-ridden feudal institutions
of lordship nor the universal Church or Holy Roman Empire were unable to
take advantage of these developments. By contrast, the emergent institutions of
the sovereign territorial state, city-league, and city-state, embodied in Capetian
France, the Hanseatic League and Italian city-states, were able to bolster and
legitimize their political authority by means of effective alliance formations
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
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
an opposition to the barbarian other, expresses the modern desire to ground

national identity on the territory of the state.
Chapter 8, "Picturing Renaissance Territoriality," moves to the representa-
tion of sovereign territoriality in Renaissance art. A particular concern is the
effect that the technique of perspective had in transforming man's relationship
to space. The basic principles of perspective construction are introduced with
reference to the rules laid out by Alberti and their use in painting by Piero della
Francesca. Perspective is also addressed as a discourse of power/knowledge that
not only objectified space but also constituted man's subjectivity in space. The
chapter considers how Renaissance paintings of principalities (as represented by
Piero della Francesca's diptych of Federico da Montelfeltro and Battista Sforza)
and city states (as depicted in the ideal cityscapes of the Urbino, Baltimore, and
Berlin panels) endorsed the values of an emerging modern territorial order of
sovereignty, politics and space. Perspective was also instrumental in promot-
ing a cartographic sensibility that allowed the territorial boundaries between
Renaissance kingdoms to be drawn on topographical and regional maps.
Moving from the internal projections of Renaissance territoriality, chapter 9,
"The Renaissance Territorialization of International Society" looks outward
to the territorialization of the "new world." The "invention of America" and
the epistemological revolution derived from the voyages of discovery radically
altered man's perception of his being-in-the-world, not least in freeing him from
the confines of the medieval Christian geographical imaginary. The discovery
of the "new world" shattered the medieval view of the world as a cosmic jail
and freed man from the confines of the Orbis Terrarum. These transforma-
tions went hand in hand with more explicitly political territorializations of the
new spaces of international society. The famous papal demarcation line of the
Inter caetera bulls and the division of the new world agreed to at the Treaty
of Tordesillas reflected, at the level of high politics, strategies of territoriali-
zation on the ground. These processes, which reflected the complex interplay
between the drives to conquest and conversion, were legitimized through texts
and images. Accounts of the naming and possession of territories in the jour-
nals ofColumbus and Vespucci and the cartographic representation of the "new
world" on maps like the Miller Atlas and the Cantino Planisphere were instru-
mental in the production of territorialized spaces that constituted the new reach
of Renaissance International Society.
CHAPTER 2
International Relations, Political

Theory, and the Territorial State
M artin Wight established a famous dichotomy between, on the one

hand, the tradition of political theory that since Plato and Aristotle
has sought to establish the conditions by which mankind might pro-
gress to some ideal of the "good life" within the state and, on the other hand,
international theory, which focusing on relations between states, that amounts
to little more than a depressing account of the eternal recurrence of war and the
balance of power. 1 Whereas students of domestic politics assume the presence
of some sort of governmental system in which law and institutions override the
naked struggle for power, students of international politics presume that gov-
ernment in any meaningful sense is absent and those laws and institutions that
do exist are always vulnerable to the machinations of power politics. 2 Although
Wight was personally attuned to the tragic nature of international politics, this
dichotomy has served to legitimize International Relations as an academic dis-
cipline in so far as study of the anarchic relations between states has become
its sole preserve. Yet, as Justin Rosenberg observes, this disciplinary identity is
secure only as long as the idea of the sovereign state retains its legitimacy: "the
same absolute character of the sovereignty of the modern state that is the foun-
dation of order within national boundaries simultaneously dictates the persis-
tence of an external condition of anarchy among states."3 One important feature
of this dichotomy between sovereignty and anarchy is that it is inscribed in
space: "[t]he borders and landscape of this environment are set and policed by
the twin concepts of sovereignty and anarchy.'>4 This chapter will explore how
the modern ideal of political space, as embodied in the idea of the territorial
state, has served to maintain these dichotomies.
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.
The Territorial a Priori of International Theory

In the Critique of Pure Reason Kant asserts that space and time "are the pure
forms of sensible intuition, and are so what make a priori synthetic propositions
possible." 5 This statement refers back to some of the basic elements of Kant's
critical project. Thought is in immediate relation to objects through intuition.
Intuition requires that we receive representations of objects through the capac-
ity of sensibility: "Objects are given to us by means of sensibility, and it alone
yields us intuitions; they are thought through the understanding and from the
understanding arise concepts."6 The effect of an object upon the faculty of repre-
sentation Kant terms sensation. Sensation produces empirical intuitions whose
undetermined object is appearance. The appearance that corresponds to sen-
sation is matter, but Kant is interested in that which "so determines the man-
ifold of appearance that it allows of being ordered" or the form of appearance.
While matter is given to us a posteriori only (as empirical knowledge possible
only through experience) form must "lie ready for the sensations" a priori in the
mind-a priori knowledge being absolutely independent of all experience.
The critique's necessary first step is the constitution of the transcendental
aesthetic that identifies the pure forms of sensible intuition. These pure forms
are space and time and they serve as the principles of a priori knowledge. In
the eighteenth century there were two competing conceptions of space. The
dominant paradigm was Newton's in which space was conceived of as absolute
pure entity, the same throughout and immovable, and which existed in and of
itself without any relation to anything external to it. The secondary paradigm,
associated with Leibniz, conceived of space like time as a relative quality, as "an
order of co-existences as time is an order of successions." 7 Kant proposes four
postulates about space that reveals his affinity with the Newtonians. First, space
is not an empirical concept derived from outer experience, for any representa-
tion of an object as being outside of oneself, or as different from other objects,
presupposes the representation of space. Second,
IR, Political Theory, Territorial State 19
[s]pace is a necessary a priori representation, which underlies all outer intu-

itions. We can never represent to ourselves the absence of space, though we
can quite well think it as empty of objects. It must therefore be regarded
as the condition of the possibility of appearances, and not as a determina-
tion dependent upon them. It is an a priori representation, which necessarily
underlies outer appearances. 8
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
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
Wendt denies any fixed essential meaning to anarchy, he nevertheless privileges

the state as actor on the grounds that "states are ontologically prior to the states
system." 23 Despite its changing identities and interests "the essential state is an
organizational actor embedded in an institutional-legal order that constitutes
it with sovereignty and a monopoly on the legitimate use of organized violence
over a society in a territory." 24 Territory is one of the properties of the state and
quite possibly the most important: "No territory, no state." For Wendt the rela-
tionship between the state and its territory is evident from the Latin etymology
that combines "terra ('earth' or 'land') to torium ('belonging to' or 'surround-
ing,' presumably the state.)" 25 It is precisely its exercise of authority over territory
that distinguishes the state from other institutional actors such as the church
or firms. To be fair, Wendt does admit that the assumption of International
Relations states-system theory that territory is an exogenous given is problem-
atic. The historical record demonstrates, first, that territorial boundaries tend
to be flexible and shifting rather than rigid and fixed, and second, that national
interests and identities are rarely coterminous with the boundaries of the state.
Yet, if we are to successfully develop a social theory of the states system such
anomalies must be put aside. It is not the task ofinternational Relations scholars
to write a "'biology' of the state" that seeks to "problematise territory 'all the
way down'." 26 Ideas all the way down then; at least until one collides with the
hard material shell of territory.
Wendt makes an analytical distinction between sovereignty and territory,
which he discusses as two distinct and not necessarily related properties of
the state. By contrast, in Stephen Krasner's theory of sovereignty as an institu-
tional structure that conditions, to varying degrees, the interests, capabilities
and actions of states in foreign affairs, the relationship between sovereignty and
territory is rather more complex. Krasner identifies four possible meanings of
sovereignty. Two of these, "domestic sovereignty" that refers to the organization
and effectiveness of public authority within a state, and "interdependence sov-
ereignty" that denotes the ability of public authorities to control trans-border
movements, are only implicitly connected to territory. However, the other two
meanings of sovereignty are explicitly grounded in the principle of territoriality.
"International legal sovereignty" attests to states' mutual recognition of each
other as the only legitimate participants in international relations. Such recog-
nition is only extended to "entities, states, with territoriality and formal juridical
autonomy." 27 Finally, "Westphalian sovereignty" is an institutional arrange-
ment for organizing political life based on the principles of territoriality and
independence from external intervention in the exercise of domestic authority.
Westphalian sovereignty is symbolized by the norm of non-intervention formal-
ized by Wolff and Vattel at the end of the eighteenth century. However, endemic
violation of this norm by states means that the institution of sovereignty amounts
to little more than a form of organized hypocrisy. 28 Although Krasner posits

territory as an a priori reality underpinning the various permutations of sover-
eignty, he avoids crude materialism and recognizes that territorial-sovereignty
is constituted through a permanent exchange between knowledge and practice.
Territory in not simply synonymous with physical space but is embodied in the
principle of territoriality. It is an institution or idea that is not anterior to but
produced in practice.
The English School or International Society approach also acknowledges a
mutually constitutive relationship between territory and sovereignty. Rejecting
the structural determinism of neorealism, English School scholars maintain that
states accept, or at least pay lip service to, the rules and institutions of interna-
tional society because they promote their common interests and values. Mutual
recognition of each other's sovereignty is the ground rule of international society
and confirms membership of the society of states. However, in order to gain
access to this club, prospective members must possess a territory. Hedley Bull
defines states as "independent political communities" that "possess a govern-
ment and assert their sovereignty in relation to a particular portion of the earth's
surface and a particular segment of the human population." 29 Similarly Alan
James asserts that since each of the member states of international society exclu-
sively represents a distinct "physical sector of the land mass of the globe", so
the landscape of international society is "divided into states by frontiers rather
as a farm is into fields by fences and walls." 30 Now that international society
has expanded globally "almost every square kilometer of the earth's land sur-
face" has been allocated to "one sovereign state or another, with virtually all
frontiers being tidily delineated or clearly demarcated." 31 English School think-
ers also endorse the institutionalist assumption that the inside/outside spatial
distinction between domestic and international politics is primarily articulated
in terms of sovereignty. Bull, for example, distinguishes the exercise of internal
sovereignty (which gives a state supremacy over all other authorities within a
territory and over a population) from external sovereignty (which denotes inde-
pendence from outside authorities). 32 Again the underlying assumption here is
that territory exists a priori and is something onto which sovereignty is some-
how fixed. English School emphasis on the importance of international law has
lead many of its advocates to endorse the idea of the state as a Rechstaat, that is,
as the embodiment of the collective agency of social power through represen-
tative institutions, created by laws, customs, and practices. However, even the
Rechstaat resides upori the territorial a priori. As Cornelia Navari defines it, the
Rechstaat is "a particular kind of political community, one that is territorially
located, with a more or less delimited set of persons distinguished from the
citizenry by the name of government, and that is conceived as law maker." 33
English School theories of international relations that emphasize the state's
entrapment within webs of legal constraints thus fail to offer an alternative to

the territorial a priori of the Classical realists. 34 Certainly classical international
law offers a standard account of the state's relation to its territory. As defined by
Hans Kelson, territory is
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
The Territorial Legacy: Political Theory from Hobbes to Hegel

International theory is far from being the only body of thought to have stum-
bled into the territorial trap. Indeed International Relations theorists might,
with some justification, claim that the theory of the state they draw on has a
venerable ancestry reaching back to Hobbes, if not further. Navari points out
that Hobbes' political philosophy reflects the discursive strategy, ' implicit in
much political discourse of his time, to establish the identity of the modern state
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
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
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
Anticipating the English School requirement that the members of interna-

tional society must be territorial states, Kant declares that in order for the
republican states to combine successfully in a pacific federation they must first
have established control over their own territories. Once accepted as members
of the federation they will retain their territorial integrity. Kant does not desire
the borderless space of a universal state. Indeed, international justice requires
the "separate existence of many independent adjoining states." Although such a
divided territorial order can nevet fully eradicate the threat of war, reason shows
that it is to be preferred to "an amalgamation of the separate nations under a
single power which has overruled the rest and created a universal monarchy." 53
Kant also holds territorial differentiation to be a necessary condition for the cos-
mopolitan right to universal hospitality, which requires that the "stranger not
to be treated with hostility when he arrives on someone else's territory." 54 While
the stranger may be turned away, as long as he behaves in a peaceable manner he
must not be treated with enmity.55
In Hegel's philosophy of right the state is the arena in which subjectivity
and expressive unity, the necessary conditions of freedom in modernity, come
together. The state is the place where Spirit achieves its most elevated politi-
cal being. 56 It is an absolute rational being where the ethical idea achieves its
highest mode of expression. Thus attributes such as power, wealth and spatial
extension are contingent facts of external appearance, historical variables that
are not consequential for understanding its essential being. 57 However, asserts
Henri Lefebvre, Hegel was instrumental in inscribing modern politics within
space. With Hegel historical time gives birth to the space that the state occu-
pies and rules over; "[f]or Hegel space brought historical time to an end and
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
Max Weber and the Modern Territorial State

If the territorial a priori was implicit rather than explicit in political philosophy
from Hobbes to Hegel, Max Weber would bring it centre stage.
[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
Weber emphasizes the state's territoriality as a consequence of his realist politi-

cal ontology that stresses domination and coercion rather than cooperation and
negotiation.
A "ruling or dominating {Herrschaftverband) organization" will be called

"political" insofar as its existence and order is continuously safeguarded
within a given territorial area by the threat and application of physical force
on the part of the administrative staf A compulsory political organization
with continuous organizations (politischer Anstaltbetrieb) will be called a
"state" insofar as its administrative staff successfully upholds the claim to
the monopoly of the legitimate use of physical force in the enforcement of its
order. 62
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
command," to regulate the body's location in space and movement in time. 64

The modern state is able to coerce its subject population not only because it
has access to the means of physical violence but, equally importantly, because
it has a vast bureaucratic machinery at its disposal through which it disciplines
everyday activity. However, there is a price to pay, for the bureaucratic state is
in danger of becoming a "frozen spirit" or a "living machine" that "[t]ogether
with the dead machine (in the factories) ... is in the process of erecting the
scaffolding of that future subjection or enslavement."65 In developing Weber's
concepts of rationalization and discipline, Anthony Giddens argues that the
modern state's administrative capability is defined by a potent form of surveil-
lance, which combines the collection and organization of information stored
by agencies used to monitor the activities of an administered population with
the direct supervision of the activities of subordinates by superiors in a partic-
ular organization. 66 Together they form the basis of an administrative power
that controls the timing and spacing of human activity. All states utilize sur-
veillance to some degree but only the modern nation state has the necessary
technologies to effectively police the codes of criminal law and to control devi-
ance across its entire territory. 67
Another aspect of state territoriality explored by Weber is the mapping of
national identity onto territory. State legitimacy per se depends on the justifica-
tion of the claim to the monopoly of violence within a defined territory. While
other states looked to tradition or charismatic leadership to ground this claim,
the modern state appeals to legal rational authority or the de focto legality of
rules and the right of those who enact those rules to do so. 68 However, in a dis-
enchanted world modern states faced a "legitimacy deficit" for the procedural
criteria of legal and political legitimacy could not secure political commitment
to the state. What was required was an appeal to nationalism or those "irra-
tional political instincts in the masses towards the nation-state." 69 For Weber
nationalism was simultaneously subjective-a nation exists where a people
have a sense of belonging to a "community of sentiment"-and objective--' the
subjective sense of solidarity is based in objective factors such as common race,
language, religion, customs and political experience. To qualify as a nation
a group must meet three criteria: there must be an objective common factor
between the people that differentiates them from others; this common factor
must be considered as a source of value able to produce "a feeling of solidarity
against outsiders"; and this feeling of solidarity must be expressed in autono-
mous political institutions coextensive with the community.7 A nation's iden-
tity is secured through its Kulture or "those particular values which distinguish
a group or society from others ... and which are given self-conscious formation,
typically in the art or literature of the society." 71 Where national Kulture cor-
responds with the boundaries of the state a mutually reinforcing relationship
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
no different. Its rightful destiny was to achieve the value-prestige or glory of

power that accrued to great powers/ 7 To be fair, Weber was mindful of the
obligations that the great powers had to their smaller neighbors. In a world of
Machstaaten the balance among the Great Powers must not threaten the inde-
pendence of smaller nations and Germany had a duty to prevent the world
being carved up between the "regulations of Russian officialdom" and the
"convention of Anglo-Saxon society." 78
Weber's political writings are premised on a theory of the state conditioned
by the territorial a priori and so logically lend themselves to an interpretation
of international relations as geopolitics. As such we can concur with Michael
J. Smith that in many ways Weber was the intellectual forefather of much
Realist discourse/ 9 At the same time, it renders problematic Fred Halliday's
proposition that International Relations theory should incorporate the institu-
tional state theory of neo-Weberian historical sociologists such as Michael Mann

and Theda Skocpol. 8 For Halliday this school's sophisticated state theory is
a considerable advance on the vague notion of a "national-territorial totality"
commonplace in International Relations theory. By isolating the coercive and
administrative institutions of the state from broader social, political and eco-
nomic structures, institutional state theory enables the analyst to identify the
state's relative autonomy vis-a-vis not only other states but also its own domestic
constituency. However, because neo-Weberian historical institutionalists work
within the Weberian state paradigm a crude geopolitics tends to determine their
understanding of international relations. For example Michael Mann claims
that the state has several defining characteristics: the exclusive ability to make
rules and back them up with a monopoly of violence; differentiated institutions
and personnel; and "a central place and a unified territorial reach" in that the
resources and authority of state elites radiate out from a centre to territorial
boundaries. 81 Whether a state is despotic (able to carry out its activities without
routine institutionalized negotiation with civil society) or infrastructural (able
to control and infiltrate social life by means of an exchange with civil society),
its autonomous power is partially derived from its territoriality. Furthermore
Mann acknowledges that there is a necessary correspondence between the ter-
ritorial state and geopolitics. "The very definition of the state as a delimited
territory suggests a further set of political relations between this state and other
states-that is, geopolitics." 82 This logic deriving geopolitics from the ideal of the
territorial state is acknowledged by Theda Skocpol who admits that the modern
state as conceptualized by Weber and Hintze is necessarily "part of a system of
competing and mutually involved states." 83 The modern state is "Janus faced,
with an intrinsically dual anchorage in class divided socioeconomic structures
and an international system of states." 84 Weberian historical sociology offers no
way out of the territorial trap.
Postmodernism Confronts the Territorial a Priori

The inability ofWeberian state theory to offer an alternative to the territorial
a priori should come as no surprise. Weber's analysis of the state is, suggests
Walker, characteristic of a tradition ofWestern thought that privileges the "spa-
tial delineation of an inside and an outside" and seeks to limit political life to
the former. Weber's emphasis on the territorial foundations of the state was
an attempt to reinforce state autonomy in a world of "radical historicity" by
fixing "history on a spatial terrain." 85 Walker's emphasis on the role of this spa-
tial figure of inside[outside in the constitution of modernity's political order is
central to the so-c~lled postmodern critique of international political theory.
With particular reference to the work of Walker and Richard Ashley, the final
section will consider how postmodernism in International Relations highlights
the discursive production of territoriality and offers a useful starting point for
thinking about the relationship between politics and space in terms of the ter-
ritorial imaginary.
For Ashley and Walker international theory is conceived of under the "sign
of sovereignty." Neorealism and neoliberalism represent the state as an auton-
omous unit capable of making rational decisions about its interests and mobi-
lizing the necessary resources to carry them out. This implies that the state is
"an entity having absolute boundaries unambiguously demarcating a domes-
tic 'inside' and setting it off from an international 'outside'." 86 For Ashley this
demarcation privileges the state, imbuing it with sovereign presence and is typ-
ical of modern "heroic practice" which
turns on a simple hierarchical opposition: a dichotomy of sovereignty versus

anarchy, where the former term is privileged as a higher reality, a regulative
ideal, and the latter term is understood only in a derivative and negative
way, as a failure to live up to this ideal and as something that endangers this
ideal. On the one hand, the sign of "sovereignty" betokens a rational iden-
tity: a homogeneous and continuous presence that is hierarchically ordered,
that has a unique center of decision presiding over a coherent "self," and
that is demarcated from, and in opposition to, an external domain of differ-
ence and change that resists assimilation to its identical being. On the other
hand, the sign of "anarchy" betokens this residual external domain: an alea-
tory domain characterised by difference and discontinuity, contingency and
ambiguity that can only be known for its lack of coherent truth and meaning
expressed by a sovereign presence. 87
In political thought the principle of sovereign identity underpins a hierarchi-

cal opposition between "domestic community as presence" and an "international
absence ofcommunity." 88 The universal values of freedom, truth and obligation
are restricted to communities within the boundaries of a sovereign state. Outside

the state there is only the residual realm of the particular, the different and the
other.
Insides and outsides, selves and others are produced in state discourse and
practice. 89 The domestic domain of sovereign men, securely enclosed within
the boundaries of the territorial state, is constituted and differentiated from the
foreign, dangerous and external by means of the knowledge-practices of state-
craft.90 Statecraft produces and secures the identity of the domestic state-society
by marking off as dangerous and as requiring discipline and control, other
forms of knowledge and ways of being such as the insane and the criminal. By
inscribing specific problems and dangers as exterior to sovereign men statecraft
isolates the space of the domestic population over which the state is dominant
and able to secure its claims to legitimacy. 91 One realm of otherness marked
out by statecraft is "international politics" envisioned as the permanent threat
of war and anarchy. The representation of international relations as a constant
source of insecurity, danger and threat allows domestic society to cohere around
a sovereign centre offering security in exchange for subordination.
"international politics" is a practice of the inscription of the dangerous, the

externalization and totalisation of dangers, and the mobilization of popula-
tions to control these dangers-all in the name of a social totality that is
never really present, that always contains traces of the outside within, and
that is never more than an effect of the practices by which total dangers are
inscribed. The sign of international politics is invoked in opposition to a
"domestic society" conceived as an identical social whole. 92
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
put in their place'. 95 Likewise for Ashley, a "Cartesian practice of spatialization"

reinforces the distinction between domestic and international politics by draw-
ing an absolute boundary between inside and outside and privileging the former
over the later.
The inside is taken to be the space of identity and continuity-the privileged

space of the Sel Here, it is assumed, is a sharply bounded identity-an iden-
tity that is hierarchically ordered, that has a unique centre of decision presid-
ing over a coherent Self, and that is demarcated from and in opposition to an
external space of difference and change beyond its boundaries and eluding
its rational control. Here, too, according to Cartesian practice, resides the
very possibility of rational political subjectivity, be it that of an individual
or a political community. As for the outside, this is the space of difference
and discontinuity-the residual space of the Other that escapes the rational
truth residing within.96
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
Renaissance. Despite this particular historical oversight, International Relations

post-structuralism is instructive in that it questions the assumption of modern
political discourse that the territorial state is a universal political category. Post-
structuralism, which construes territoriality as discourse, denies to the territo-
rial state an ontological a priori status that transcends history. Only by adopting
the idea of territoriality as discourse can we account for the transition from a
hierarchical to an anarchical order of political space.
CHAPTER 3
Theorizing Territoriality: Discourse,

Culture, History
T he discourse of International Relations, or at least that part of it con-

cerned with the nature and evolution of the states-system, constructs
theory on the grounds of the territorial a priori. Territory is conceived
of as a material object, a portion of the earth's surface, a universal sine qua non
of political community. In this chapter I want to propose an alternative under-
standing of territory that counters the claims inherent in the territorial a priori.
First, against the assertion that territory is an objective material resource, I want
to recast it as an idea, a component of the social imaginary that is produced in
discourse. Second, rather than conceiving of territory exclusively from within
the paradigm of political theory, I shall propose that discourses of territoriality,
which produce and naturalize the politics of space, need to be related to the
ideas and practices that permeate a society's culture of space. Third, I question
the assumption that territory is a universal feature of human society shared by
all political communities. Rather, I shall suggest that since the territorial imagi-
nary is a cultural product it changes as societies develop new representations and
understandings of their being-in-space.
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
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
is at once a precondition and a result of social superstructures. The state and

each of its constituent institutions call for spaces-but spaces which they can
then organize according to their specific requirements; so there is no sense in
which space can be treated solely as an a priori condition ofthese institutions and
the state which presides over them. Is space a social relationship? Certainly-
but one which is inherent to property relationships (especially the ownership
of the earth, of land) and also closely bound up with the forces of production
{which impose a form on that earth or land); here we see the polyvalence of
social space, its "reality" at once formal and material. Though a product to be
used, to be consumed, it is also a means ofproduction; networks of exchange
and flows of raw materials and energy fashion space and are determined by
it. Thus this means of production, produced as such, cannot be separated
either from the productive forces, including technology and knowledge, or
from the social division of labour which shapes it, or from the state and the
superstructures of society. 10
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
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
"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.
The primary task of disciplinary power is to "delimit one's place in a world

bewitched by the invisible powers of the Other." 28 Its secondary concern is to
overcome and master the uncertainties of history and time by achieving own-
ership of and control over an autonomous place. Sight is the primary modality
enabling the exercise of disciplinary power. "The division of space makes pos-
sible a panoptic practice proceeding from a place whence the eye can transform
foreign forms into objects that can be observed and measured, and thus control
and 'include' them within its scope ofvision." 29 De Certeau's broader conceptual
framework implies that the state also has disciplinary powers at its disposal. It is
therefore at odds with Foucault's insistence that disciplinary power is of another
order to "juridico-discursive" or state power based in the discourse of right. The
juridico-discursive power of sovereignty and law operates by prohibition, neg-
ative interdiction, and repression. By contrast disciplinary power is productive,
and in order to understand how it works we must "cut off the King's head," that
is forget the person of the sovereign and his representation of power. 30
If a territory is a geographical area controlled by a juridico-political power
and Foucualt's distinction between disciplinary and sovereign power is to be
respected it may be methodologically problematic to analyze state territoriality
deploying genealogical concepts such as power/knowledgeY However, Gilles
Deleuze and Felix Guattari's depiction of the state as a body that striates space
offers a possible resolution. 32 Like Foucault, Deleuze and Guattari are inter-
ested in non-sovereign forms of power or "micropolitics." However, they situate
the relationship between micro politics and state power within a broad concep-
tual landscape characterised by a ubiquitous opposition between the forces of
nomadism and the dictates of State power. This all-pervasive struggle between
the rhizomatic nomad and the arboreal State manifests itself in certain regis-
ters as "territorialization." Deleuze and Guattari derive their notion of terri-
torialization from Lacan's contention that a mother's nourishment and care is
imprinted on her child's libido, producing charged erogenous zones and objects
out of organs. However, territorialization is not just limited to this primal psy-
chological relationship but pervades all aspects of man's social relationships.
Territorialization denotes the incessant and all-pervasive regulation and coding
of flows by social and political "machines." No human society is a milieu of
free-exchange and circulation, everyone is marked by "a socius of inscription"
whose primary function is to code flows. 33 The most effective agent of terri-
torialization is the state. This "apparatus of capture" draws into itself flows of
people, commodities, and capital. As a "milieu of interiority" the state resists
and opposes the nomads and the war-machine which inhabit the outside realm
of exteriority. 34
This realm of exteriority is the domain of smooth space, which the nomad
seeks to expand and which the State seeks to counter by deploying geometric
and mathematical theories of striation. 35 It segments space into homogeneous

units of equal and translatable values. As with Foucault's disciplinary spaces
and Lefebvre's representations of space, vision is at the heart of this process.
"The central eye has as its correlate a space through which it moves, but it itself
remains invariant in relation to its movements." 36 The state's primary function
then is to striate the space over which it reigns, or to utilize smooth spaces as a
means of communication in the service of striated space.
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
Territoriality in Cultures of Space

The second heuristic premise to be developed is that representations of politi-
cal space, and hence the production of territoriality, are informed by structural
codes that determine how a particular cultures represent and use space. Stephen
Kern's study of European culture between 1880 and 1914 shows how a culture's
dominant representations and conceptions of space impact on almost all dimen-
sions of life. Kern writes,
All people, everywhere, in all ages, have a distinctive experience of time

and space and, however unconscious, some conception of it. It is possible to
interpret how class structures, modes of production, patterns of diplomacy,
or means of waging war were manifested historically in terms of changing
experiences of time and space. 38
In Fin de siecle Europe analogous conceptions of space emerged simultaneously

in diverse realms of knowledge from philosophy to aesthetics, from architec-
ture to urban design, and from anthropology to studies of the natural world.
Developments in one sphere resonated in others and across the culture as a
whole there emerged an understanding of space which substituted universality
and homogeneity with relativity and heterogeneity. Elements of this new spatial
vocabulary can be identified in Einstein's theory of relativity, which replaced
absolute space with an infinite number of spaces perpetually changing position
vis-a-vis one another, in Cubism which "abandoned the homogeneous space of
linear perspective and painted objects in a multiplicity of spaces from multi-
ple perspectives," and in Durkheim's anthropology of religion which showed
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
common sense, of knowledge (savoir), of social practice, of political power, a

space hitherto enshrined in everyday discourse, just as in abstract thought, as
the environment of and channel for communications; the space, too, of clas-
sical perspective and geometry, developed from the Renaissance onwards on
the basis of the Greek tradition (Euclid, logic) and bodied forth in Western
art and philosophy, as in the form of the city and town. 41
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
relations of force; second, the "matrix of constraints and opportunities within

which social actors interacted" as defined by the structure of property rights,
coalitions between social actors and differences between private and social rates
of return; and, third, the mental equipment people use "in imagining and sym-
bolizing forms of political community or collective existence."43
This last dimension, which Ruggie terms the "social episteme," reveals that
the emergence of principles of differentiation in political doctrines like cujus
regia ejus religio and Rex in regno suo est lmperator regni sui mirrored equivalent
transformations in social epistemology such as the replacement of Latin by ver-
nacular vocabularies, the standardization of the 1-form of speech, the invention
of single-point perspective in visual art, and new notions of individual subjec-
tivity.44 A social episteme denotes "the process whereby a society first comes to
imagine itself, to conceive of appropriate orders of rule and exchange, to sym-
bolize identities and to propagate norms and doctrines.'>45 However, Ruggie does
not develop the idea of the social episteme other than to suggest that it combines
the thesis of German social theory that society comprises webs of meaning and
signification and the French idea of mentalites collectives. Ruggie passes over any
methodological difficulties that might arise from combining Durkheim's science
positive with Weber's verstehen or Foucault's critique of subject-centered reason
with Habermas's project for communicative rationality. Ruggie's social episteme,
while suggestive of the relays between territoriality and cultural representations
of space, lacks methodological rigor and cannot be deployed uncritically.
More useful is Foucault's concept of the episteme as worked out in the
archaeology of knowledge. Although the archaeology does not set out a spe-
cific program for investigating spatial discourses as such, its ethos has a dis-
tinctly spatial tincture. Foucault's language is full of spatial metaphors: he talks
of the "space of knowledge," "epistemological space" and "sites of dispersion."
However the utility of the episteme for analyzing the territorial a priori can
be derived from more substantive material. In The Order of Things Foucault
describes an episteme as
a sort of"historical a priori" which in a given period, delimits in the totality

of experienc~ a field of knowledge, defines the mode of being of the objects
that appear in the field, provides man's everyday perception with theoretical
powers, and defines the conditions in which he can sustain a discourse about
things that is recognised to be true. 46
The episteme denotes an unconscious set of rules, a system of regularities, that

determines how a culture orders things. This system, which establishes relations
of similarity and difference between things, provides objects with their identities.
In making reference to the Renaissance or Classical episteme Foucault does not
intend to invoke the sense of a Weltanschauung or spirit of an age. An episteme

does not underpin all forms of knowledge within a culture. 47 The archaeolo-
gist's task is to expose the "discursive regularities" that identify and order the
objects of knowledge in heterogeneous discourses. Thus, in the Classical age
(roughly 1650-1800), which is the main focus of The Order of Things, Foucault
finds a pattern of discursive regularities, a "polymorphous cluster of correla-
tions," in the relations within and between the empirical sciences of natural
history, general grammar and the analysis of wealth. 48 Each of these branches
of knowledge was subject to the epistemic order of representation in which the
identities of things were established by marking out their differences from oth-
ers. Its main structures were mathesis- 'a universal science of measurement'-
and taxonomia-the principle of classification or ordered tabulation. From an
archaeological perspective there is identity where we might expect difference:
natural history, general grammar, and the analysis of wealth share codes that
produce similarities between statements produced in each branch of knowledge.
In accordance with this archaeological principle, the conditions of possibility
for the articulation of the modern territorial a priori must be sought not only in
the realm of political discourse but also in other spatial discourses which share
its underlying ordering principles.
Foucault set his archaeology against progressive narratives of the evolution
of science in which the subject as historical consciousness achieves ever greater
objectivity and knowledge of the world. Rather, archaeology traces the ruptures,
breaks, and discontinuities between epistemes. The Classical episteme did not
evolve organically out of the Renaissance episteme, "the prose of the world,"
in which words and things were united in a web of resemblance or similitude.
This form of knowledge is incommensurable with the Classical episteme which
"replaced infinite resemblance with finite difference.'>4 9 Likewise, the ordered
regularities of the Classical episteme are incommensurable with the dynamic
historical categories of the modern episteme, which emerged at the end of the
eighteenth century. The modern episteme was the first to posit man in his fac-
tual, contingent existence as a legitimate object of inquiry. Hence Foucault's
controversial claim that "the archaeology of our thought easily shows, man is
an invention of recent date.'' 50 Thus the archaeology also demonstrates there is
difference where we might expect identity: in terms of their ordering principles
these Classical empirical sciences of natural history, general grammar, and the
analysis of wealth have little in common with the modern discourses of philol-
ogy, political economy, and biology that replaced them. It might be objected
that if our task is to prove that the modern territorial a priori was established
during the Renaissance then Foucault's archaeology is an inappropriate method
because it stresses discontinuity. According to its caesurallogic Renaissance ter-
ritoriality is most likely to be incommensurable with classical, let alone, modern
territoriality. However, Foucault made it clear that epistemes do not pervade

an entire culture, but unite specific discourses. "Archaeology disarticulates the
synchronicity of breaks .... [t]he period is neither its basic unity, not its hori-
zon .... if it speaks of these things it is always in terms of particular discursive
practices." 51 Both Lefebvre and Kern agree that the modern spatial episteme
extended from the Renaissance invention of perspective to Einstein's subversion
of the Euclidean paradigm, and it is within this epistemic timeframe that the
territorial a priori was articulated and legitimized.
Foucault's archaeology traverses established disciplinary boundaries in its
search for the epistemic "conditions of possibility" underlying the articulation
of statements in different discursive formations. This inter-disciplinary ethos is
taken a step further in Deleuze and Guattari's "schizoanalysis" which describes
the multiple rhizomatic networks that criss-cross multiple domains of being
and thought. Unlike Foucault, Deleuze and Guattari also prioritize the ques-
tion of space and its relationship to thought. In particular, they highlight the
relays and associations between, on the one hand, smooth space and nomadic or
rhizomatic thought, and on the other hand, striated space and state thought. 52
Deleuze and Guattari term the dominant tradition ofWestern thought, partic-
ularly as represented by linguistics and psychoanalysis, as arborescent or State
thought. It is organized by the principle of interiority that establishes a structure
or axis (the soul, consciousness, or production) in terms of which objects and
their relations to other objects are understood and explained. They contrast
arborescent thought with rhizomatic or nomadic thought which, driven by
desire, seeks to forge multiple, ever changing and mutating connections or lines
between heterogeneous realms such as semiotic chains, organizations of power,
the arts and sciences, and social struggles. 53 The antagonism between arbo-
rescent and nomadic thought extends into all realms of intellectual endeavor.
In the sciences, for example, nomadic thought is represented by Archimedean
and atomist sciences which fix on flux and flows and emphasize becoming and
heterogeneity. However, they are marginalized by the keepers of royal or State
sciences who promote Euclidean space and Newtonian gravity in order to pri-
oritize the stable, the eternal, and the identical. Similarly, modern philosophy,
as embodied in the Cartesian cogito and Kantian critique, takes the form of
State thought. In the modern rational state everything "revolves around the
legislator and the subject." 54 State thought orders mental space in terms of
two universals: "the Whole as the final ground of being" and "the Subject
as the principle that converts being into being-for-us." 55 Although dominant,
State thought has been challenged by thinkers like Kierkegaard, Nietzsche,
and Foucault whose nomadic ethos seeks to undermine the universal thinking
subject, resist any grounding in totality, and offers sites of resistance to State
thought. 56
In terms of space, the arborescent/nomadic confrontation is manifest in the

opposition between the smooth and the striated. Whereas in the abstract realm
striated and smooth spaces exist and are produced in opposition to one another,
in practice they combine in unstable configurations. Deleuze and Guattari dem-
onstrate the alterity between smooth and striated space across several registers or
modalities: a technological model contrasts the parallels and perpendiculars of
woof and weave in doth with the fibrous entanglement of felt; a musical model,
drawing on Boulez, distinguishes the organization of horizontal melodic lines
and vertical harmonies with the continuous variation of form that produces
properly rhythmic values; an environmental model opposes the open undefined
spaces of desert, sea or steppe with the dosed delineated spaces of the city; and
a mathematical model separates the fixing of points and line within coordi-
nates and axes in Euclidean physics from the open geometry of Archimedes or
the multiplicities of Riemann space. 57 There are profound differences between
smooth and striated spaces. First, the relations between points and lines differ:
in striated space a line is something that goes between two points, as in geom-
etry, while in smooth space priority is given to the line, with the points acting
merely as relays between successive lines. Second, lines have different character-
istics in the two spaces: in smooth space lines are locally directional with open
intervals, while in striated space lines are subordinate to global dimensionality
and have dosed intervals. Third, the surface of each space is different: "[i]n stri-
ated space, one doses off a surface and 'allocates' it according to determinate
intervals, assigned breaks; in the smooth, one 'distributes' oneself in open space,
according to frequencies and in the course of one's crossing (logos and nomos)." 58
In striated space, whose archetypes are Euclidean geometry and Renaissance
perspective, planes and surfaces are homogeneous; it has no qualitative values
but viewed from or concentrated on a central point is abstract and universally
replicable; in it points can be specified, counted, and mapped and trajectories
are determined by the points from which they leave and arrive. By contrast in
the heterogeneous "particularities" of smooth space, points are subordinate to
the trajectory; the inside spaces of tents, igloos or boats conform to and are
determined by the outside-steppe, ice or sea; smooth space is directional rather
than dimensional or metric; lines are vectors which organize the points and
stops; in smooth space affects rather than properties dominate and perception is
haptic rather than optic-one travels by being receptive to the tactile and sono-
rous qualities of the intensities, particularly winds, that occupy it.
At the political or social level, whereas the state is the institution of ter-
ritorialization or striation par excellence, the nomad occupies smooth space.
Nomadic territoriality is exercised across smooth space by constituting points,
such as water holes and assembly points, as mere relays on a trajectory, subordi-
nate to and not determining of paths. Nomadic trails or routes have a different
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
Histories of Space and Territory

So far we have established two heuristic propositions. First, the object of enquiry,
the territorial a priori, is not an objective material resource but an idea, a compo-
nent of the modern social imaginary produced in discourse. Second, we should
not examine territory exclusively from within the parameters of political theory.
Discourses of territoriality produce and naturalize the politics of space and need
to be related to the ideas and practices that permeate a society's culture of space.
The third proposition is that as cultures of space emerge, mutate, and disapp~tar
so do discourses of territoriality. This principle is opposed to the primordialist
contention that territory is a universal pre-condition o{all social life. Advocates
of primordialism trace it back to Aristotle's writings on the polis, and see its par-
adigmatic statement in Ferdinand Tennies' theory that by according symbolic
or sacred value to soil Gemeinschaft societies are able to ensure that residence
thereon is the basic qualification for membership of the community. 62 To be
sure, the primordialist theory of territory is more sophisticated than the territo-
rial a priori in so far as territory is not simply synonymous with empty physical
space but is understood as the repository of symbolic value. Because territory
is life sustaining the collective consciousness becomes symbolically attached to
it and its boundaries become defined by shared language, religion, or law. 63
Nevertheless, for primordialists, like Stephen Grosby, this symbolic attachment
is "a fundamental feature of all human societies," as basic to human existence
as nourishment or shelter. 64 It is universal and cannot be "segregated histori-
cally'' for in all historical situations "man has believed that his (sic) own life is
dependent upon the continued existence of the territorial sovereignty of 'his
country' for it gives and sustains life."65 Putting aside the questionable herme-
neutic which gives Grosby knowledge of the meaning that territory has had for
all men and the contestable humanist assumptions embodied in his notion of
man, can it really be the case that territoriality exists outside of history, unaf-
fected by changes in economic modes of production, cultural codes or political
institutions?
Even within International Relations primordialism has been challenged.

Ruggie maintains that the configuration of political space and territory that
characterises the modern international system is, in some instances, being
replaced by a postmodern order based in alternative principles of spatial dif-
ferentiation.66 Ruggie worries that International Relations, relying on Waltz's
neorealist understanding of change in the international system as being deter-
mined by variations in the distribution of capabilities among constituent units,
lacks the appropriate conceptual vocabulary with which to account for this
transformation. He hopes that by exploring how changes in the principles of
differentiation caused the previous structural transformation from the medie-
val to modern international system, we might derive an appropriate conceptual
vocabulary with which to theorize the emergence of a postmodern international
system. Again neorealism is found wanting here. Waltz is unable to explain
the transformation from a medieval to modern international system because he
understands differentiation as denoting the comparative differences between
units rather than the underlying principles that separate them. 67
Drawing on Meinecke's portrayal of medieval actors as being restricted by
"heteronomous shackles on their authority," Ruggie claims that in medieval
Europe the underlying principle of differentiation was that of heteronomy, mean-
ing that actors were subject to a variety of different laws or principles. Political
authority was exercised through personal relations that blurred the boundaries
between public and private. The medieval political landscape was a complex
mosaic of "overlapping and incomplete rights of government" in which "differ-
ent juridical instances were geographically interwoven and stratified; and plu-
ral allegiances, asymmetrical suzerainties and anomalous enclaves abounded."68
Inside and outside did not exist as clearly demarcated realms. The first territo-
rial markers established in the thirteenth century functioned more as permeable
frontier zones rather than as rigid boundaries. The conflation of public authority
with private estates and multiple chains of lord-vassal relations meant that the
medieval aristocracy claimed authority over non-contiguous spaces throughout
Europe. Further, the common bodies of law, religion, and custom that legiti-
mized the medieval system of rule by recourse to inclusive natural rights did not
threaten the integrity of the constituent units in the system because the units
"viewed themselves as municipal embodiments of a universal community."69
In sum, "the spatial extension of the medieval system of rule was structured by
a nonexclusive form of territoriality, in which authority was both personalized
and parcelized within and across territorial formations and for which inclusive
bases of legitimation prevailed." 70
The principle of differentiation which underpins the distribution of political
S\)ace i.n moderni.ty i.s the antonym of heteronomy: homonomy whi.ch denotes
'oe\:n~ s;u.'o\ect. t.o the same \a-ws. \\:\.e mo<:\.etn state \.s a \u.s\.on o\ a \)att\.c.u.\at
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
models of territorialization. The Greek city-states embodied a "homogeneous

isotopic space" and the Roman Empire imposed a "geometrical or linear reason
ofState on space", marking the boundaries of segmented spaces by means of the
lines of camps and fortifications.
The third moment of territorialization, characterized by decoded flows,
arises with the emergence of the capitalist social machine. Capitalism is a "gen-
eral axiomatic of decoded flows" that evolves from the conjugation of decoded
and de-territorialized flows of unqualified wealth and unqualified labor; it
replaces intrinsic codes with an "axiomatic of abstract quantities in the form
of money." 79 Capitalism substitutes the codes and over-codes of the primitive
and despotic machines for an axiomatic of abstract quantities determined by
exchange. However, this decoding carries substantial risk for the subjectivity
released as labor and desire resists reintegration into the capitalist axiomatic.
Hence the capitalist state must be the most effective apparatus of capture. It
must re-territorialize and recode these schizophrenic flows, which, if left, will
form vectors of nomadism traveling liberally within :the domains of smooth
space. 80 The modern state is not displaced by global capitalism but serves as
the locus where capitalism is realized: it groups together and combines the var-
ious flows required by capitalist production. Capitalist territorialization there-
fore combines "trans-national capital as locus of high-speed deterritorialization
and ... various forms of State as loci of reterritorialization." 81
Deleuze and Guattari 's emphasis on the relationship between the body and
space as an intrinsic element in the history of territorialization is mirrored in
Lefebvre's history of Western culture as decorporealization. He identifies a tran-
sition from the "space of the body," in which spaces were ordered and conceived
of in terms of the body's organization, to the "body-in-space," where the body
becomes fragmented and decomposed into localized functions. The earliest
modes of production both produce and are reproduced in absolute space, which
takes two forms. The space of primitive societies is analogical in that the phys-
ical form of dwellings and villages represents and reproduces a divine body-
itself a projection of the human body. The first ancient civilizations introduced
a cosmological space in which the built form of the political city, its elements
and configurations, expresses the architecture of the cosmos. The city-state,
establishes a fixed centre by coming to constitute a hub, a privileged focal

point, surrounded by peripheral areas which bear it stamp. From this moment
on, the vastness of pre-existing space appears to come under the thrall of a
divine order. At the same time the town seems to gather in everything which
surrounds it, including the natural and the divine, and the earth's evil and
good forces. As image of the universe (imago mundi), urban space is reflected
in the rural space that it possesses and indeed in a sense contains. 82
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
property markets on the earth, while comrnodificatioJ1. through space installs

economic grids of capital circulation through which abstract space inscribes
abstract labor and the commodity form. This commodification process is com-
plemented by bureaucratization. The bureaucratization of space occurs where
an administrative system stakes out and marks it territory. Meanwhile bureau-
cratization through space installs juridico-political grids which allow the state
to survey and regulate social life. 88 In the aesthetic register, abstract space was
created through the spatial language of modernists such as Picasso, Klee, and
Kandinsky who privileged the optical as the basis of aesthetic practice. Picasso's
art presents "an unreservedly visualized space, a dictatorship of the eye and of
the phallus." 89
Leaving aside the specific details of these histories of space, we can derive
some important conclusions from them for the purposes of the present study.
First, they all accept that spatial ideas and practices vary according to particu-
lar historical conditions, which they both reflect and help to constitute. Thus,
despite its self-proclaimed universal purchase, we must recognise that the terri-
torial a priori is embedded within the specific modern culture of space. Second,
while these histories of space offer different periodizations of spatial orders, they
all acknowledge the distinctiveness of the modern regime of space. They all,
explicitly or implicitly, highlight a fundamental rupture between medieval and
modern cultural representations of space. Ruggie identifies this as the shift from
heteronomy to homonomy; for Deleuze and Guattari it is the shift from despotic
de-territorialization to the capitalist axiomatic of flows; and Lefebvre character-
izes it as a transition from symbolic to abstract space. Our task is to delineate
the precise contours of this transformation as it relates to the re-imagination of
political territoriality, by comparing and contrasting the medieval spatial regime
of hierarchy with the modern territorial order of anarchy. Finally, each of these
histories emphasizes an intimate relationship between the visual and space and,
in particular, the role of linear perspective in the promotion of modern ratio-
nal and logical space. Linear perspective was, of course, a Renaissance inven-
tion and was one of the primary elements in the reimagining of the Western
spatial imaginary that led to the consolidation of the modern territorial a priori.
However, before addressing the Renaissance we must first describe Medieval
Europe's hierarchical imaginary of space and territoriality.
CHAPTER 4
Hierarchy, Order, and Space in

the Medieval World
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.
Dionysius and the Sacred Order of Hierarchy

Kenneth Waltz contends that domestic and international politics can be differ-
entiated in terms of the ordering principles of hierarchy and anarchy.
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
systems are centralized and hierarchic. The parts of international-political sys-

tems stand in relations of coordination. Formally, each is the equal of all the
others. None is entitled to command; none is required to obey. International
systems are decentralized and anarchic. 1
For many International Relations theorists the hierarchy-anarchy dichotomy

serves as a universal model for distinguishing the realms of international and
domestic politics. In the Westphalia narrative this synchronic structural model
is inserted into history and becomes employed diachronically to differentiate
the modern anarchical international system from the medieval hierarchical sys-
tem that preceded it.
However, in the medieval imaginary hierarchy had meanings and signi-
fications that extended far beyond simple "relations of super- and subordina-
tion." The term hierarchy, in medieval Latin (h)ierarchia, is derived from the
Greek hierarkhes composed of hieros sacred and -arkhes rule. The paradigm
of the medieval understanding of hierarchy was established in the writings of
Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite, an unknown Greek .author of the fifth or
sixth century. The De coelesti hierarchia (On the Celesti'al Hierarchy) and De
ecclesiastica hierarchia (On the Ecclesiastical Hierarchy) were repeatedly translated
and commented upon in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. According to
Ernst Cassirer, Dionysius' oeuvre constituted a unifying standard of medieval
thought, an assessment confirmed in Dante's Commedia, in which Dionysius
resides in Paradise, at a vantage point from where he can observe the hierarchy
of the angelic order. 2
Dionysius gave himself to contemplation

of these same orders with such holy zeal
that he named and ranked them just as I have done. 3
Dionysian hierarchy is underwritten by the Neo-Platonist principle of emana-

tion, associated with Plotinus, that all things proceed from, are derived from,
and are understood in terms of, the One, the Absolute, the first principle. Neo-
Platonists conceived of emanation as the diffusion of a light issuing from a pri-
mal source of infinite intensity. Dionysius regarded the source of this light to
be God so "each procession of the Light spreads itself generously toward us,
and, in its power to unify, it stirs us by lifting us up. It returns us back to the
oneness and deifying simplicity of the Father who gathers us in.'>4 As the light
ray descends so it creates things-angels, men, animals-until it reaches a place
where it can penetrate no further and there is only darkness and nothingness.
Lying about the feet of God is a golden chain binding all that exists between the
two infinities. Each rank in the chain strives to ascend the order and to transmit
Medieval Hierarchy, Order, and Space 55
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
is to enable beings to be as like as possible to God and to be at one with

him. A hierarchy has God as its leader of all understanding and action. It is
forever looking directly at the comeliness of God. A hierarchy bears in itself
the mark of God. Hierarchy causes it members to be images of God in all
respects, to be clear and spotless mirrors reflecting the glow of primordial
light and indeed of God himself. It ensures that when its members have
received this full and divine splendour they can then pass on this light gener-
ously and in accordance with God's will to beings further down the scale.9
There are, as Joseph Anthony Mazzeo observes, military connotations to this

representation of hierarchy as a sacred order or ranking (taxis). Hierarchy is a
"cosmological chain of command" which ensures that divine radiation is trans-
mitted according to the precise order that God, who is master of all hierarchies,
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
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
as the epistemic condition of possibility for the erection of a hierarchical spatial

architectonics that would support medieval theocracy for a millennium.
Feudalism and the Three Orders

Ernst Cassirer suggests that the distinction between the lower and higher worlds,
which is fundamental in Dionysius's account of the hierarchies, operated as
a structural principle that ordered the entire social and political imaginary of
medieval European culture.
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
Feudalism incorporated two primary institutions: first, the personal relations

of vassalage that bound a lord to his freeman or noble follower; and second,
the fief or the property relationship that vassalage impliedP In feudal society
"the characteristic human bond was the subordinate's link with a nearby chie
From one level to another the ties thus formed-like so many chains branching
out indefinitely-joined the smallest to the greatest." 18 Compared to serfdom,
which bound the peasant tenants to servile labor on lordly estates in perpetu-
ity, vassalage was more of a voluntary or reciprocal personal relationship which
had to be reaffirmed whenever one of the original parties to the arrangement

died. Vassalage was a relationship of protection distinctive to a warrior class.
Originating in the personal ties of the barbarian war-bands, it flourished in the
Frankish kingdoms of the eighth century where the state was weak and neither
family nor village could provide protection against external threats. Free men
entered into vassalage through the ritual of commendation and by taking an
oath of fidelity. The homage or commendation paid by a vassal to the lord was
symbolized by placing joined hands between those of the lord, a kneeling proc-
lamation of declaration and, finally, a kiss. These rituals signaled that the vassal
would enter into a relationship of dependence and protection with a king or
lord for the rest of his life. In return for providing the lord with military assis-
tance (auxilium) and counsel (consilium) he would receive protection and some
form of maintenance. He might become a member of the lord's household or
receive wages in money or land. The homage ritual was subsequently reinforced
by Christian rites of fealty, such as laying hands on gospels or relics. These
rites symbolized that the rights and duties of vassalage were based in mutual
fealty or fidelity. The Frankish Kings Pepin III (747-68) and Charlemagne
(768-814) promoted vassalage as a system of hierarchically arranged layers of
lords to extend their authority from their own vassi dominici to all their subjects.
Despite the king's position at the apex of the pyramid of vassal relations he
could not count on the support of all those at lower levels. The peliSonal nature
of the links between lords and vassals meant that in a situation where the king
came into conflict with a lord it was likely that lord's vassals wo1,1ld fight on the
lord's behalf against the royal forces. As the thirteenth century French jurist
John de Blanchot put it "the man of my man is not my man." 19 Indeed, as the
emergence of a plethora of private vassalages, following the break-down of the
Carolingian Empire in the middle of the ninth century, showed vassalage could
exist independently of a centralized state authority. The forces that bound soci-
ety together were personal bonds rather than abstract ideas of res publica.
In classical feudalism property relations of vassalage were embodied in
benefice or fiefs. Fiefs were units of property either created by a lord granting
property, usually in land, to someone to hold in fief to him, or through the
surrender of an alod or independent property to a lord which was then received
back as a fief. A fief was distinguished from the servile holdings of peasants
and privately held alods-although the distinction became blurred following
the collapse of the Carolingian Empire when many fiefs became effectively
alodized. With the revival of monarchical authority in the twelfth and thir-
teenth centuries the alods were converted back to fiefs. Subsequently, practically
all social groups above the peasantry were bound together by vassalage relations.
Each vassal owed duties both to his immediate lord above him and to his own
vassals below to whom he had granted a fief. As such "landholdings formed a
hierarchy-the 'hierarchy of tenure' or 'feudal pyramid'." 20 Whereas Roman

law concepts of dominion held that property rights were absolute, the system of
fiefs was based in the convention that property was divisible. As Bloch points
out, in the feudal world the word "ownership" (propriete') as applied to landed
property (un immeuble) would have been almost meaningless. 21 Harold Berman
argues that according to feudal notions of property land "was not 'owned' by
anyone; it was 'held' by superiors in a ladder of 'tenures' leading to the king or
other supreme lord. ('Tenure,' derived from the Latin word tenere, 'to hold,' itself
means 'a holding')." 22 Further, property as fief was not clearly distinguished
from government, reflecting the absence of rigorous distinction between public
and private realms. Fiefs carried jurisdictional rights and obligations that were
settled in local courts.
The hierarchical structures of feudal society were symbolized in the rituals of
chivalry. The rigid mores and codes of chivalry, in Johan Huizinga's view "the
crown of the whole social system," reinforced the conviction that the social order
was divinely ordained. 23 Value was determined by one's proximity in space to
God: "if the degrees of the social edifice are conceived of as the lower steps of the
throne of the Eternal, the value assigned to each order, will not depend on its util-
ity, but on its sanctity-that is to say, its proximity to the highest place." 24 The
social hierarchy of feudalism was also symbolized by depictions of God as a mag-
isterial figure in Carolingian art. Pictures showing God enthroned as an impe-
rial sovereign, the Pantocrator, his head encircled by the mandorla, affirmed that
"God had become a feudal lord or Dominus." 25 A similar message is found in texts
like the Libri Carolini which reiterated St. Augustine's assertion that the "Creator
is called creator with respect to his creatures just as the master is called master with
respect to his servants,'' and St Anselm's Cur Deus Homo which portrayed God as
a feudal lord owed vassal service by angels, monks, and peasants. 26
Georges Duby has argued that most significant collective "mental representa-
tion" or imaginaire of feudal society was that of the three orders, first articulated
by two eleventh century bishops in Northern France.27 In the poem Carmen ad
Rodbertum regem, Adalberon bishop of Laon declared that
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
Likewise, the Gesta episcoporum Cameracensium records a speech by Gerard

bishop of Cambrai in which "he demonstrated that from the beginning, the
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
patriarchs in order to reproduce "sur terre l'ordre celeste." 34 Although monarchy

was not an integral component of the three orders imaginary it could, however,
be readily absorbed into it. Thus with the resurgence of Capetian power at the
end of the twelfth century, Andreas Capellanus in De am ore and Guillaume Le
Breton in Philippidos libri XII remolded the three orders model to legitimise a
monarchical structure of authority. 35
Adalberon and Gerard constructed their theocratic edifice for the three
orders using building blocs provided by three of the Christian Fathers: from
St Augustine came the notion that order is both peace and the way to God;
Gregory the Great offered a prescription for ordering Christian society in rigid,
almost military, structures of subordination; and Dionysius provided the con-
ceptual framework, the structural analogies, which connected the visible to the
invisible, celestial to temporal society and enabled the bishops to "rattacher
l 'ordre politique a celui des etoiles." 36 Exegetes of the Fathers argued that when
God became incarnate as Christ the hierarchical order became immanent in the
terrestrial world; the two hierarchies were united in Christ's body. The Church,
instituted by Christ as his successor, therefore "constituted the entire terrestrial
order: from the Church and through the Church divine law spread out over
humanity." 37 The Dionysian model had particular appeal to the champions of
Episcopal authority for not only did it demote the monasteries as rival sources of
spiritual authority, it also made the bishops the direct recipients of celestial wis-
dom, including that pertaining to political action. It placed the bishops above
human law at the apex of the pyramid. The Dionysian framework allowed "the
ecclesiastical hierarchy to represent itself as an 'entre-deux' able to progressively
emancipate humanity from its spatiotemporal constraints, allowing it to emerge
in ways ever more total and pure into the strictly intelligible world, incorporeal
and in-temporal, that of the divine." 38 Once the three orders framework was
reimagined as a theocratic hierarchy, the bishops could abandon any pretence
that the three functions had equal status and mutual relations of exchange.
Their relative orders of merit could be divined from those Dionysius established
among the angels. Gilbert of Limerick's De statu ecclesiae 1110-39, for example,
described society as a pyramid with the clergy at the top.
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
according to the socio-professional status of different estates, rather than the

will of God or divine law. The humanistic tendencies of this social imaginary
prompted a counter response from the Church authorities who promoted the idea
of Christendom as divinely ordained hierarchy within one unified body, albeit
a bicephalous one, in which the two heads are the pope and emperor. 40 In the
next chapter we shall consider in some detail how this idea of Christendom as a
divinely ordained hierarchy, and the particular notions of territoriality it implied,
established the conditions of possibility for medieval political discourse.
Hierarchies of Space in Medieval Cosmology and Geography

I suggested in the last chapter that representations of territorial sovereignty are
enclosed within a culture's spatial imaginary. This section discusses the extent
to which medieval understandings of space as represented in cosmology and
geography were configured by hierarchy. Today geography and cosmology are
considered to be different branches of knowledge but in medieval learning they
combined in a set of general reflections on man and his place in the world.
However, as Edmundo O'Gorman has pointed out, the vocabularies of medie-
val cosmology and geography did make significant distinctions between various
categories of being. The "universe" designated the totality of the celestial and
sub-lunar spheres. The "terraqueous globe" referred to the entirety of the earth's
sphere, both land and water. The Orb is Terrarum or Island ofthe Eartb denoted
the known interconnected continental landmass of Europe, Asia and Africa.
Finally "the world" signified man's cosmic dwelling place and was generally
thought to be contained within the Orbis Terrarum-few could envisage that
men could be living in the far away antipodal lands separated by vast seas. 41
Christian theologians rejected the ideal of the ancients that the cosmos was
complete and harmonious; a realm of beauty, order and dignity. Rather, man's
world was seen to be tainted by sin and only the celestial world remained as a
space of perfection. In this dualist vision "the concept of the 'cosmos' broke up
into two diametrically opposed concepts: civitas Dei and civitas terrena, with
the latter closely bordering on the concept of civitas diaboli.'>4 2 The opposition
between earth and heaven was not conceived of as one of terrestrial life in space
as opposed to heavenly life existing in some form of non-space, for life in heaven
also unfolded in space. 43 Opposed to heavenly life, earthly life became a value
category with moral and religious significance. Christianity's spatial dualism was
reinforced by the vertical structures of Dionysius' hierarchies. As A. J. Gurevich
notes, "[c]osmic space, social space and ideological space were all given hierar-
chic structure" and the beings within ,them were distributed on various planes
according to their relative degrees of perfection.44 The values of different spaces
Were determined according to the places that they were allocated on the vertical
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
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:
all things, whatever their mode,

observe an inner order. It is this form
that makes the universe resemble God .
. . . all Being within this order, by the laws
of its own nature is impelled to find
its proper station round its Primal Cause. 55
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
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
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
Medieval cosmologists generally accepted the idea of a spherical earth. However,

a minority of Christian theologians, citing the authority of the Christian
fathers, considered it to be heretical. In The Divine Institutions (Divinarum
Institutionum) c. 303-11 Lactantius had rejected it in favor of the flat earth
theory, arguing that "it is impossible that the sky is below the earth."62 Similarly
St. Augustine had argued that it was only scientific conjecture rather than "his-
torical knowledge" (i.e., biblical knowledge) that the "earth is suspended within
the concavity of the sky, and that it has as much room on the one side of it as
on the other."63
Macrobius mentions that torrid and frigid zones separate the four continents.
Here he is drawing on Parmenides' theory of the five climatic zones, which also
had considerable influence on the medieval geographical imaginary. The two
peripheral zones lying between the Arctic and Antarctic circles and their cor-
responding poles were considered to be uninhabitable because they were glacial.
Also considered uninhabitable and, for many, un-traversable was the equatorial
area or Torrid Zone lying between the Tropics of Cancer and Capricorn, whose
intense heat no man could hope to survive. This left two temperate zones where
life was theoretically possible: one located between the Arctic Circle and the
Tropic of Cancer and the other between the Antarctic Circle and the 'Tropic of
Capricorn. In Cicero's words,
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
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,
You are under the other hemisphere where you stand;

the sky above us is the half opposed
to that which canopies the great dry land.
On this side he plunged down from heaven's height,
and the land that spread here once hid in the sea
and fled North to our hemisphere for fright; 67
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
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
According to Pliny, Solin, Orose, Isidore and many other cosmographers or

describers of the World, in agreement with certain astrologers like Albategni,
the Earth is divided into three parts, that is Asia, Africa and Europe ... the
ancients did not divide these three parts of the Globe equally. Thus Asia
extends eastward from the Midi until the Septentrion; Europe goes from the
Septentrion to the west and Africa from the west to the Midi. From which it
appears that two of these divisions, Europe and Africa, occupy a half of the
World, while only Asia occupies the other half. 71
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
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
semi-fantastical travel narratives recalling the experiences of personal pilgrim-

ages following the route from Jerusalem to the Earthly Paradise. 77 Mandeville's
journal recalls the inscription near the St. Sepulchre "Hie Deus rex noster ante
saecula est salutem in medio terre." 78 Spaces are accorded distinctive moral values
in these narratives. As Yuri Lottman writes "[g]eography becomes a kind of
ethics." 79 A journey through space symbolizes a passage to salvation or dam-
nation. In the Commedia, Dante's journey unfolded in accordance with the
established tropes for representing the moral journey of a righteous person or
sinner in space: from the parental home to a monastery or house of sin; from
one's own country to holy or impure lands; and from earthly lands to paradise
or hell. John G. Demaray reads the Commedia as a figural pilgrimage: Dante's
fantastical ascent up Mount Purgatory in the southern hemisphere mirrors and
evokes the real journey of palm-bearing pilgrims up Mt Sinai in the northern
hemisphere. 80
Compared to Europe and Africa, Asia, occupying the entire upper semi-
circle, was represented as a vast landmass on the mappae-mundi. Europeans
imagined Asia as both the source of great wealth and marvels and the domain
of Prester John's theocratic utopia. The spaces of the oecumene, especially its
Asian parts, tended to be defined in terms of their relative alterity to the culture
of Christendom. Although Europe and Christendom were not coterminous-
the Moorish settlements in Spain were a constant source of embarrassment
to those who sought to locate the civitas terrarum within the boundaries of
the Roman Empire-"the geographical horizon was a spiritual one, that of
Christian Europe." 81 In both geographical and cultural terms the acY.:zantine
Empire was the closest. The Byzantines occupied a liminal place in theWestern
Christian geographical imaginary for as schismatic Christians they simulta-
neously belonged to and were independent of Christendom. The chronicles
of the first crusade record that the Western crusaders both respected and
were somewhat envious of the material riches and cultural sophistication of
Constantinople. Islam, however, occupied a more clearly defined space, that
of the infidel, the "enemy-elect" with whom, at least in Crusade propaganda,
there could be no reconciliation. Christian views of Muslims ranged from
polemical crusade narratives such as Jacques de Vitry's Historia Orienta/is in
which Muslims were depicted as subhuman and Mahomet as an and-Christ to
the more objective, if still patronizing, views of Aquinas. 82 In the chansons de
geste the representation of Muslims as beasts defiling the sanctity of the Holy
Land conveniently overlooked the prosperous mercantile contacts that trading
cities like Venice maintained with Muslim traders and the diffusion of Arab
science into European cultures during the Renaissance of the twelfth century.
The third zone of alterity was occupied by other pagans, who, although they
worshipped idols, were, unlike the Muslims, regarded as potential Christians.
Such peoples on the northern and eastern reaches of Christendom, in Seleucia,

Pomerania, and Prussia to the north of Poland, were subjected to proselytizing
campaigns of forceful conversion to ensure that they did not succumb to the
false promises of the Byzantine and Muslim missionaries. Finally, at the eastern
extremities of the Orbis Terrarum were the Mongols. For the Christians of cen-
tral Europe who were the victims of their regular raids these men were the fear-
some, bloodthirsty, monstrous Tartars. However others believed that they were
the Christian peoples who had been converted by the legendary Prester John.
Indeed, in the thirteenth century several missions were sent to the East with the
intention of creating an anti-Muslim Christian alliance. The project was, how-
ever, abandoned following Marco Polo's descriptions of the Tarter's social and
political life, which were deemed incompatible with basic Christian tenets.
Our review of the medieval culture of space has shown that the perception
and representation of man's-being-in-space was, in several different registers,
determined by the figure of hierarchy. The medieval culture of space was struc-
tured by the rigid hierarchies that Dionysius had identified as the divinely autho-
rized design of all celestial and terrestrial being. If the Kantian ideal of the space
of modernity is abstract, homogeneous, universal and empty, the heterogeneous
spaces of the medieval imaginary are differentiated, full of particular signifi-
cances, meanings and values. Such criteria were generally determined by their
relative positions in the hierarchy of things. Dionysius' hierarchies with their
value laden spaces and places provided the basic structural principles under-
pinning the social order of feudalism and its three orders, Dante's vision of the
cosmos, and the discourse of medieval geography. Medieval political discourse
was also interwoven within the knowledge structures and cultural practices of
Christianity. Thus we might expect that the conditions of possibility for the
articulation of the medieval territorial imaginary were also determined by hier-
archy. We shall pursue this hypothesis in the following chapter.
CHAPTER 5
Christendom, Hierarchy, and Medieval

Political Discourse
W e ha~e established that the principle ~f hi~rar~hy conditio~ed medi-

eval 1deas of place, space, and mans bemg m them. Th1s chapter
examines medieval political discourse in order to determine whether
a similar spatial logic of higher and lower, inferior and superior, also under-
scored medieval ideas of sovereign-territoriality. To be sure, the term medieval
political discourse is problematic. This is especially so if one maintains that
post-Westphalian political theory and practice is modern precisely because it
emancipated itself from Christian theology. Certainly, the Christianization of
classical political philosophy by medieval political theology produced an intri-
cate weave, an interlacing of temporal and spiritual concerns, that makes it diffi-
cult to identify a discrete realm of political discourse as such. Such issues cannot
be resolved here and I shall not attempt to do so. Nevertheless, historians of
medieval political discourse have argued that the templates for many of the
concepts characteristic of modern political thought were established between
the ninth and fourteenth centuries when institutional rivalry and ideological
upheaval combined in the "crisis of church and state."
At the heart of this crisis was a tripartite struggle for supremacy between the
institutions of Papacy, Empire, and Monarchy. This contest, which constituted
the essence of medieval international politics, was both a physical armed conflict
and a war of ideology. At stake in the ideological struggle between sacerdotium,
imperium, and regnum was the nature and legitimacy of political sovereignty
within Christian European society. These three bodies promoted alternative
visions of Christian political society as Ecclesia or Christianitas, humant;t civilitas,
or civitas, each of which entailed different settlements between tert'iitory and
sovereignty. 1 In this respect they articulated variations of the medieval territo-

rial imaginary. However, these differences of emphasis were subsumed within
a common understanding that space was structured hierarchically. In terms of
territoriality, this translated into the undisputed recognition that over and above
the civitas terrena lay the civitas Dei-the divine font of all sovereignty. Papal
universalists, imperial dualists, and monarchists each claimed that they and
they alone occupied the liminal space at the fulcrum of the political cosmos
between the celestial kingdom of the civitas Dei and the mundane world of
Christendom. From this privileged place they were able to gaze upon the civitas
Dei and know God's intentions for the best political arrangement of men on
earth. It is with these rival claims that this chapter is primarily occupied.
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.
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
As with other corporational metaphors, the constituent parts of Ecclesia have

different functions. For the whole to work effectively each must be allocated
to its proper place by the head. Only the Pope at the summit of the clerical
hierarchy can have direct access to divine wisdom in matters of faith but also
of law, government, and jurisdiction. He alone can understand the architec-
tonic structure of the whole as planned by the divine architect. The pope's role
,,,
is to maintain God's established order on earth, to ensure that the congregatio
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
embraced every conceivable aspect of human life." 21 Ladner is more cautious

arguing that it implies "spiritual sovereignty with temporal consequences, plus
temporal sovereignty in the Papal States and temporal suzerainty over certain
states (Sicily, Aragon, etc.)." 22 Contemporary scholarly differences reflect the
different emphases that the canonists themselves placed on plenitudo potestatis.
Innocent III (1198-1216), the pope who did most to promote the doctrine,
voiced both extreme and moderate positions. Sometimes he seemed to advocate
a universal extension of papal sovereignty:
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
This passage, incorporating a hierarchical spatial metaphor characteristic of the

medieval territorial imaginary, seems to imply that plenitudo potestatis could be
extended beyond ecclesiastical affairs in special circumstances. 24 Yet Innocent's
rhetoric failed to specify precisely how plenitudo potestatis could legitimize direct
intervention in the affairs of temporal rulers. Some historians claim that he was
wary of overstepping the limitations established by St. Bernard, for whom it only
designated the pope's responsibility for ecclesiastical government. 25 Innocent's
diplomatic practice does not help to clarify the conceptual ambiguiiy. During
the contested succession to the imperial crown between Otto of Brunswick
and Rudolf of Swabia he issued the bull Venerabilem (1202) that confirmed the
right of the electors to choose the emperor and only reserved for the papacy, as
the body that has to "anoint, consecrate and crown" the approved candidate, a
right of examination. Likewise in Novit (1204)-addressed to the French bish-
ops who had opposed Innocent's intervention in the disputes that arose when
the French king Philip Augustus occupied King John of England's fiefdom in
Normandy-Innocent denied that he sought to "diminish or disturb the juris-
diction and power of the king" yet, as the final authority on earth concerning
matters of sin (ratione peccati), he had the right to rebuke and coerce the king
on the grounds that breaking a peace treaty agreed to under oath amounts to a
sin. 26 Although Novit acknowledged limits to the pope's right of intervention in
feudal disputes, it should be remembered that the See of Rome had an extensive
fiefdom typical of the vertical layering of medieval territoriality. The kingdoms

of England and Ireland were theoretically added to this fiefdom when John
accepted Innocent's over-lordship in return for the pope's support. Innocent
celebrated this event by noting that "provinces which formerly had the holy
Roman church as their proper teacher in spiritual matters now have her as their
special lord in temporal matters." 27 England remained a de jure if not de facto
papal fief until Parliament abolished the relationship in 1366.
Another powerful weapon in the papal camp's discursive armory was the
pope's status as vicarius Christi. Innocent III had officially referred to the pope
as vicarius Christi in his Decretales. However, the first pope to use it as a weapon
of political rhetoric was Innocent IV (1243-54) in the'~ontext of his struggle
with Frederick II. 28 Relations between empire and papacy had been soured by
Frederick's ambitions to unite the kingdom of Sicily with the imperial lands
and cities of Lombardy. If successful this strategy would have cloaked the entire
Italian peninsula in Imperial colors and have relegated the pope to the status of
a dependent bishop. At the Council of Lyon (1245) Innocent issued a sentence
of deposition against Frederick in which, after listing Frederick's various sins-
which included abjuring God, breaking peace agreements, imprisoning church-
men and heresy-he proclaimed in his capacity as vicarius Christi that Frederick
had lost all honor and dignity in the eyes of God and sci forfeited his rights to the
Empire. Innocent absolved "for ever all who owe him allegiance in virtue of an
oath of fealty from any oath of this kind" and warned that anyone who contin-
ued to treat Frederick as their feudal overlord would themselves be excommuni-
cated.29 In Eger Cui Levia (1246) Innocent confirmed that the Roman pontiff,
as the ultimate judge of all members of the Christian commonweal in matters
of sin, has the authority to excommunicate anybody and once excommunicated
that person is rightfully "deprived of the power of any temporal rulership that
he had." 30 Michele Maccarrone suggests that Innocent was able to enhance the
political remit of vicarius Christi by building on the image of Christ the King,
which Innocent III had also promoted. In the Apparatus to the Decretales (1245)
Innocent IV argued that since Noah's time the leaders of the Jews had been
kings. This regal status was confirmed in the person of Jesus Christ "qui foit
naturalis dominus et rex noster," was later conferred on St. Peter, and was subse-
quently transmitted on to his successors. 31 Innocent's appeal to historical prece-
dent, argues Maccarone, was intended to demonstrate not only the necessity of
extraordinary recourse to papal authority but also "to affirm a general principle
of reliance on the pope in matters temporal of all the sovereigns ... this was not
derived from a particular right, as with the Emperor but came from the plenitudo
potestatis which the pope possessed in his capacity as vicar of Christ.'' 32 Innocent's
assertion of papal sovereignty as vicarius Christi was supported by the canonist
Hostiensis who insisted that the Pope's plenitudo potestatis::!;ould be exercised over
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
order of temporal and spiritual authorities in Christendom. One of the most

powerful images was the allegory of the two swords found in St. Luke's Gospel
(Book 22) where the evangelist describes the events of the Last Supper and the
Passion. Jesus has just told the apostles that Peter will deny knowing him and
that he will be arrested. The apostles' immediate instinct is to declare that they
will defend Jesus with physical force: "'But they said: Lord, behold here are two
swords' to which Jesus replied enigmatically 'it is enough.' >4! Pope Gelasius I
(492-96) had interpreted this passage as scriptural confirmation that "'the
two powers by which this world is chiefly ruled' are the sacred authority (auc-
toritas) of the Pope and the royal power (potestas)'.'>4 2 Gelasius, in seeking to
limit the Emperor's interference on matters of church doctrine, argued that
spiritual power was of a higher order since it was in charge of all men's souls,
including those of rulers. Morrall points out that this message was reinforced
by Gelasius's deployment of the legal distinction between auctoritas which in
Roman law denoted the ultimate sovereign source of government and potestas
which identified the power of a delegated executive agency to govern. 43 For
advocates of Ecclesia the Gelasian doctrine confirmed a hierarchical order in
which the pope held both swords directly from Christ and handed one of them
on down to the Emperor. In 1150 St. Bernard, responding to a renewed threat
to the Christians in the Holy Land, urged Pope Eugenius III in his capacity as
Peter's successor to draw both swords to protect the Holy Land.
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
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
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,
the cosmic harmony of Heaven, Church and State, an interweaving and

twining of the one world with the other and an alliance between the powers
on earth and the powers in heaven. Each terrestrial rank is associated with
a group of celestial intercessors. The king as the Christus Domini is linked

to the group of angels and superangelic intercessors, the pope to that of the
apostles, the army to the martyrs, the queen-if she is acclaimed-to the
choirs of virgins, and the bishops to the confessors. Human society thus
reflects, and is organised after, the model of the hierarchy above.56
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
As we saw, after the Investiture Contest canonists transferred the emperors'

titles of rex imago Christi and rex vicarius Christi to the pope. Imperial schol-
ars countered by denoting the emperor as rex imago Dei or rex vicarius Dei, and
"[h]enceforth a papal Christus in terris was sided by an imperial deus in terris." 59
The imperialist discourse of kingship claimed divine right as devolved through
the Father rather than the Son. It was complemented by a legal theory of monar-
chical authority which Frederick II (1215-50) promoted in the Constitutions
of Melfi, or the Liber Augusta/is of 1231. 60 This legal code for the kingdom of
Figure 5.2 The Emperor in Majesty, c. 975 (vellum) by German school (tenth
century). Aachen Cathedra l, Aachen, Germany. Bildarchiv Foro Marburg/
The
Bridgema n Arr Library. German. Our of copyright .
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
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
Rome use to shine in two suns when her rod

made the world good, and each showed her its way:
one to the ordered world, and one to God.
Now one declining sun puts out the other.

The sword and crook are one, and only evil
can follow from them when they are together; 77
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
super paganos secundum apostolicas sanctiones, sed solummodo super Christianos;

ergo non est dominus temporalis omnium." 82 Finally humana universitas drew on
a secular Aristotelian philosophy of politics: the aim of political life for Dante
is the fulfillment of human needs, that is the improvement of civilization by.
rational means, and the polis as the virtuous self sufficient community is the
best political order for achieving these ends. For Dante the limit of contem-
porary empire was Oceanus encircling the orbis terrarum. "[H]umana civili-
tas is potentially a 'world-city,' indeed the World-City for the entire world is
conceived of as a single political community ... Modelled largely after the his-
torical Roman imperium, Dante's ideal might he described as the Romanized
cosmopolis." 83
If humana civilitas extricated imperial authority from the overarching hier-
archy of Ecclesia where it was subordinate to the pope, Dante was still far from
imagining a political order outside of the episteme of hierarchy. The celestial
paradise is the model for governance on earth and the relations between celes-
tial and terrestrial polities remain those of superiority and inferiority, higher and
lower. In Paradiso XVIII Dante describes seeing an imperial eagle, created by
the lights issuing from the souls of the just and temperate rulers, evolving out of
final m of the phrase Diligite iustitiam qui iudicatis terram (Love righteousness,
you who are the judges of the earth) written across the sky of Jupiter. 84 The
message is that the emperor is the channel through which divine justice flows to
man on earth. The Emperor's position of eminence, high above other mortals,
provides him with a clear panorama of the Civitas Dei and allows him to guide
people to it.
Men, therefore, need restraint by law, and need

a monarch over them who sees at least
the towers ofThe True City. 85
Like the Ottonian christomimetes, Dante's emperor straddles both terrestrial

and celestial worlds; he occupies an interstitial place and mediates between the
transcendent realm of the civitatis Dei and the mundane world of the Empire;
he is the conduit between them, Justitia animata, the fulcrum of the hierarchy.
Beatrice alludes to the fact that through the person of the emperor the terres-
trial city is contained conceptually within the potential extension of the celestial
city, when, after welcoming Dante to "nostra citta" in the Rose of Paradise, she
points out a "great throne with the crown already set" to which shall come "the
soul, already anointed, of Henry the Great I who will come to Italy to bring law
and order.'' 86 The symbolism of Henry's celestial enthronement allows Dante
to juxtapose, and reveal the connections between, these two realms. The heav-
enly kingdom, God's perfect realm where the citizens enjoy eternal peace, is the
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
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
resistance to royal command. Philip's response was twofold: he banned the

export of precious goods from France thereby reducing the Holy See's reve-
nue; and he threatened to support the pope's enemies in Italy. Boniface stood
down and issued Etsi De Statu (July 1297) which exempted Philip from the
prohibition in Clericis Laicos. The second dispute started when Philip arrested
and tried Bernard Saisset, Bishop of Palmiers on charges of blasphemy, heresy,
and treason, thereby challenging the canon law principle that only the Pope
could try bishops. Boniface refused to accept the legitimacy of Philip's actions,
reasoning that if he endorsed Philip he would implicitly be approving of the
king's unlimited power over the French episcopate. He issued a series of bulls,
calling for Saisset's release, reversing Philip's previous exemption and calling the
French bishops to a crisis council in Rome. In Ausculta Pili (December 1301) he
accused Philip of undermining the French church by abusing clerical privileges
and warned him not to be deluded into thinking that "you have no superior or
that you are not subject to the head of the ecclesiastical hierarchy." 98 Although
Boniface's main concern was to reassert his control over the ecclesiastical hierar-
chy, Philip's minister Peter Flotte claimed at the Estates-General in Aptil 1302
that Boniface was claiming feudal lordship over France. Philip's pressure on
the French bishops ensured that only thirty six out of seventy eight attended
the Roman council Boniface called in October 1302. Boniface's response was
to issue Unam Sanctam (November 1302) directed toward any French bishops
whose patriotism might override their duty to the Church. The inflammatory
rhetoric of Unam Sanctam put paid to any hope of compromise between the two
camps. Philip's minister Guillaume de Nogaret condemned Boniface before a
council of French bishops in March 1303, and then, assisted by Boniface's sworn
enemy Sciarra Colonna, occupied the pope's home town of Anagni. Although
Boniface escaped he was deeply shocked and died a few weeks later in Rome.
Philip's victory was confirmed when he cajoled the French pope Clement V
(1305-14) to renounce Clericis Laicos and to issue Meruit (1306) which declared
that Unam Sanctam should not be interpreted as a papal claim for lordship over
France.
In this instance regnum's victory was down to skilful diplomacy and dis-
plays of physical force. However regnum's star was also burning brightly in the
ideological wars. Monarchical government was bolstered by the twelfth century
recovery of much of Aristotle's work, including the Nichomachean Ethics (full
Latin translation by Robert Grosseteste c. 1246/7) and the Politics (William
of Moerbeke 1265) as well as various commentaries by Moslem philosophers
such as Avicenna (980-1 037) and Averroes (1126-98). 99 Aristotle's metaphysics
challenged many tenets of established Christian doctrine. It depicted a ratio-
nally ordered cosmos in which matter and motion were eternally derived by
necessity from the potentiality of prime matter by a primum movens immobile,
the uncaused self-activity of reason. It portrayed man as a composite of bodily

matter and a rational soul. The Averroists in particular unsettled Christian
doxa by distinguishing between philosophical and theological truths. Drawing
on Aristotle they promoted the idea of a world-soul embracing all individual
souls, which challenged the Christian doctrines of personal immortality and
rewards in life after death. The Christian creation myth was undermined by the
Aristotelian argument that the world was both eternal and necessary. Further,
the Aristotelian view of politics as an autonomous sphere of human activity with
its own logic, values, and virtues challenged the premise of Christian political
theology that the temporal was inherently inferior to the spiritual. According to
Aristotelian logic the potential invested in human nature was not to be fulfilled
outside of quotidian time and space in the eternal realm of the celestial City of
God, but in the political community as it existed in the here and now. A good
life, independent of personal reconciliation with God in the hereafter, could be
achieved within the polis.
It would fall to Thomas Aquinas to reconcile the received doctrines of
Christianity with the rediscovered Aristotelian corpus. 100 Aristotle's work,
he maintained, could be brought to bear upon two current disputes among
Christian theologians: first, whether "the world" was part of the divine plan
of a beneficent God or the result of man's corruption and fall; and, second,
whether knowledge acquired by reason was compatible with revelations of
faith. 101 Aquinas argued that reason or knowing things through the senses
was compatible with faith. "Grace does not destroy nature but perfects it." 102
The purposes of man's temporal and spiritual lives could be reconciled within
an ethos, acceptable to both Aristotle and Christianity, of final causation, of
nature as being both rational and purposive: "nature does nothing in vain."
The world and man's place in it are determined by the telos to which all being
and becoming are directed. Sin, for example, should not be regarded as an
aberration but as an integral aspect of God's divine plan for man to achieve
happiness. It was on similar grounds that Aquinas challenged St. Augustine's
condemnation of civil government as a manifestation of the corruption of
human nature. Augustine had argued that "the citizens of the earthly city are
produced by a nature which is vitiated by sin" and that temporal rulers-whose
archetypes Cain and Romulus founded kingdoms by acts of fratricide-are
inherently debased and only fit to serve as the executioners of spiritual author-
ities. 103 In De Regimine Principum Aquinas challenged Augustine's view of
the corrupted nature of politics by reiterating Aristotle's premises that "man
is by nature a political and social animal" who in association with others can
achieve life's necessities by means of the free exercise of his reason and the
application of his natural talents. 104 Just government will ensure that individu-
als do not act purely according to their private interests, for it establishes the
conditions within which individuals can, by exercising their faculty of rational

judgment, establish the common good and identify the best ways to a<:;~ieve it.
Furthermore, as Ezekeil's proclamation that "[m]y servant David will be king
all over, and there will be one shepherd over all of them" makes clear, kingship
is the best form of government to achieve such aims. 105
Aquinas' argument that government should be exercised by rational man
seems to evacuate the divine from the political realm and to present an alter-
native to the papal and imperial versions of the territorial imaginary in which
sovereignty issues from a higher space, passes down rigidly structured spatial
hierarchies, and is exercised over terrestrial Christendom. While terrestrial
government may ultimately be sanctioned by the civitas Dei, those who com-
mand it do so free of the dictates of the ecclesiastical hierarchy. This message
is reinforced by Aquinas's assertion that since the civitas is the unique subject
of both types of human law-the law of nations, jus gentium and civil law-
rulers can adapt it to suit their community's best interests. Yet, the autonomy
Aquinas granted to the practical application of human law is circumscribed, for
he placed human law at the bottom of the hierarchy oflaws. In a scheme which
mirrors Frederick Il's plan for the Templum Justitiae, Aquinas differentiated the
different forms of law accordingly: the highest most perfect law is eternal law
or God's plan for the universe; beneath eternal law comes natural law or "the
rational creature's [man's] participation of the eternal law" by the use of reason,
and finally at the base is human law or the application of natural law to specific
societies. 106 So while Aquinas' state is somewhat autonomous, operating accord-
ing to its own laws and independent of ecclesiastical supervision, the Christian
Aquinas, for whom all lawful authority must be subject to God, ensures that
the civitas remains integrated into the Christian hierarchical order. Aquinas
did not, however, state his position on these matters clearly and his rare forays
into discussions of church and state relations were characterized by consider-
able ambiguity. For example, having asserted in one passage that the secular
and spiritual powers must accept each other's sphere of authority, he adds, in a
statement which would have done any canonist proud, "(u]nless, perhaps, the
secular power is joined to the spiritual, as in the pope, who holds the:~pex of
both authorities, the spiritual and the secular." 107
A more overtly partisan supporter of regnum, at least of the French Capetians,
was John of Paris. 108 In the Tractatus de potestate regia et papali John investigated
both the general relationship between spiritual and temporal powers and the
specific correspondences between rulers and subjects within Ecc!esia and civitas.
The truth about the "power of ecclesiastical pontiffs" lay between two extreme
positions: the ascetic Waldensian assertion that "the prelates of God's church, the
successors of the apostles, ought not to have dominion over temporal wealth,"
and the canonist contention that "the lord pope, in as much as he stands in the
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
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
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
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
The Renaissance Critique of Hierarchy
0 ne of this book's tasks is to unsettle the Westphalia narrative of

International Relations that identifies the Peace ofWestphalia as the
symbolic moment when medieval international relations gave way to
the modern international system of sovereign territorial states. This modern/
medieval dichotomy has heuristic value in that it isolates the modern states sys-
tem from the limitless text of history. Nevertheless, it is ideological for it rein-
forces the Western myth of progress: it legitimizes the international system by
aligning it with the progressive values of modernity that signified man's escape
from the Middle Age mire of religion and superstition. However, serious study of
the Renaissance, during which thought seems to be reaching to modernity while
being constrained by the grammars and vocabularies of medieval Christianity,
collapses this neat opposition between the Medieval and the Modern. In the
Renaissance modernity advances and retreats like the wash of an incoming tide
as reason and myth, science and superstition battle it out for supremacy. Study
of the Renaissance shows that modern thought, culture, and politics did not
emerge suddenly phoenix-like out of medieval darkness and so undermines the
Westphalian chronological rupture between medieval and modern international
politics. My concern in this chapter is with the Renaissance critique of hierar-
chy. However, before addressing this aspect of Renaissance thought consider-
ation must be given to the meaning of the Renaissance per se. Although invisible
in most IR scholarship, the Renaissance is one of the most contested concepts
of intellectual and cultural history. 1 Much debate has focused on the question
of originality. Did the Renaissance revolutionize the way that man conceived of
himself and his being-in-the-world or did it merely reformulate established ideas
and belief systems? Was the Renaissance the dawning of modernity or the wan-
ing of the Middle Ages, or both simultaneously?
The Idea of the Renaissance

At the end of a survey of five centuries of Renaissance historiography, Wallace
Ferguson concluded that as an object of historical enquiry the Renaissance
reveals more about the values and aspirations of those who have studied it than
some essential truth about its meaning or significance. 2 Although the various
connotations that the Renaissance has today emerged over many centuries, the
Italian humanists of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries were already con-
vinced that the return of the glories of classical culture they were witnessing
signified the dawning of a new era of civilization. Indeed, it was this histor-
ical self-consciousness that first gave voice to the medieval/modern dichot-
omy, which today underscores the Westphalia narrative. Petrarch (1304-74),
driven by nostalgia for Rome, rejected the teleological narrative of Christian
history-in which the divine oversaw mankind's progression from "heathen
darkness to the light that was Christ"-by identifying two distinct historical
eras: historiae antiquae and historiae novae. 3 Whereas the Christian narrative
implied progress from antiquity to the present-the latter being more proximate
to the moment of divine revelation-Petrach reversed it by portraying historiae
antiquae, the period of royal, republican, and imperial Rome, as the age of glory
and light and contrasting it with the following centuries of darkness and decay
caused by Rome's adoption of Christianity as the state religion. Inspired by
Petrarch, the Italian humanists saw themselves as the harbingers of new age of
history. The revival of classical antiquity would usher in a historical conscious-
ness as different from the medieval past as early Christian Europe had been
from Rome. For Erwin Panofsky the prevalence of"biblical antitheses between
darkness and light, slumber and awakening and blindness and seeing" indicates
that the Renaissance was not just an intellectual movement or new cultural sen-
sitivity but an almost religious experience. 4
Two centuries later, Vasari (1511-74) would declare that la rinascita, the
revival or rebirth of art inspired by the humanist recovery of ancient civili-
zation, amounted to a caesura! rupture with the past. Vasari identified con-
temporary, recent and antique artistic styles using terminology replete with
connotations of regression and progress. Thus by maniera vecchia (the old-
fashioned style) he denoted two unsophisticated artistic styles of the recent
past: greci vecchi e non antichi (Byzantine) and maniera tedesca (Gothic). By
contrast, maniera antica signified la buona maniera greca antica (the good,
antique-Greek style). Finally, moderno designated contemporary art, the
Renaissance style, which Vasari contrasted to the base art forms of the middle
ages. 5 His division of history into three distinct periods drew "the first major
dividing line in the annals of Western Europe between antiquity and the
Middle Ages, and the second between the Middle Ages and what Vasari and
The Renaissance Critique of Hierarchy 103
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
The apotheosis of the idea of the Renaissance as the historical emergence

of a new mode of civilization was Jacob Burckhardt's claim in Die Kultur der
Renaissance in ltalien that the Renaissance discovered man and the world.U In
Burckhardt's view, Renaissance culture flourished in the prosperous economic
and dynamic political condition of the Italian city-states. Economic indepen-
dence and the art of governance promoted individuality and self-expression. 12
In the Middle Ages both sides of human consciousness-that which was

turned within as that which was turned without-lay dreaming or half
awake beneath a common veil. The veil was woven of faith, illusion, and
childish prepossession, through which the world and history were seen clad
in strange hues. Man was conscious of himself only as a member of a race,
people, party, family, or corporation-only through some general category.
In Italy this veil first melted into air; an objective treatment and consideration
of the State and of all the things of this world became possible. The subjec-
tive side at the same time asserted itself with corresponding emphasis; man
became a spiritual individual, and recognized himself as such. 13
Burckhardt's vision of the Renaissance as a moment of salvation, a release from

the barbarism of the preceding ages, was challenged by medieval historians
who rejected its negative assessment of European culture between the sixth and
fourteenth centuries as a monotonous religious uniformity. They identified dis-
tinctive and innovative elements in medieval art-previously regarded as crude
and barbarous in the light ofVasari's classical schemes-and showed how post-
Roman medieval civilisation had absorbed much of Rome's legal, cultural, and
economic thought and practice. Scholars, like Walter Pater and Charles Haskins,
maintained that the culture of twelfth century France, combining Romanesque
and Gothic styles, the blossoming of lyric and epic vernacular poetry, and new
learning and literature in Latin, showed an intellectual and spiritual sensitivity
equal to, if not greater than, the Italian Renaissance of the quattrocento. "The
Middle Ages [is] less dark and static, the Renaissance less bright and less sudden,
than was once supposed." 14 For Pater if the Renaissance is understood as a move-
ment during which "the human mind wins for itself a new kingdom of feeling
and sensation and thought, not opposed to but only beyond and independent of
the spiritual system" then the legendary figure of Abelard was arguably the pro-
totype for Renaissance man. 15 Within the realm of science, Dana Durand argues
that if modernity emerged out of the scientific revolution then the quattrocento
did not achieve "a radical break with the Middle Ages and institute the era of
Modern Europe." 16 Compared to medieval scholastics, Renaissance humanists
made few breakthroughs in scientific methodology, cosmology, mathematics,
or physics. The Renaissance only produced three innovative scientific thinkers
in Leonardo, Cusa, and Toscanelli, and it made no significant contributions
to scientific knowledge, even within established paradigms. Lynn Thorndike's
judgment is harsher still. He argues, against Burkhardt, that the modern indi-
vidual, capable of appreciating nature and beauty, was the product of medieval
civilization rather than the Renaissance. 17 Furthermore, Middle Age art and
architecture displayed both a sensitivity to nature and signs of an innovative
mode of scientific inquiry that the humanists, with their retrospective obsession
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
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
constrained by an inescapable Malthusian dynamic. From the perspective of

the longue duree there is no meaningful distinction between medieval and early
modern Europe and the significance of the Renaissance as a period of transition
disappears. Nevertheless, claims Bouwsma, since Ladurie explains the ending of
longue duree in terms of "elitist forces of revolution" motivated by impulses such
as individualism and practical empirical rationality, he effectively reinstated the
Renaissance, which first promoted such values. 26
If there is one thing that emerges from these debates, it is that the Renaissance
is not simply one thing or another. It was neither medieval nor modern, but
embraced aspects of both. Renaissance thought, as Eusebio Colomer describes
it, constitutes a threshold between "the ancient and medieval past and the mod-
ern future ... in Leibniz's phrase imbued with the past and pregnant with the
future." 27 The subsequent inquiry into the Renaissance "origins" of the modern
territorial imaginary will, therefore, avoid depicting the Renaissance culture of
space as a coherent, unified, and organized body of spatial discourse that brought
about an absolute break with the hierarchical order of medieval Christianity.
Individual and Cosmos

Richard Ashley and Rob Walker assert that the Cartesian spatial practices of
modernity, which have differentiated the inside spaces of territorial sovereignty
from the outside spaces of anarchy, are symptomatic of a broader structural prin-
ciple of sovereign identity. Walker and Ashley imply that the principle of sover-
eign identity, and obviously Cartesian practice, are products of the Cosmopolitan
culture of seventeenth century Europe. However, as I shall demonstrate in this
section, the principle of sovereign identity was already present in Renaissance
philosophical reflections on the nature of man and his place in the cosmos.
Intimations of the principle of sovereign identity can be identified in Marsilio
Ficino's depiction of man as an image of God and in Pico della Mirandola's
promotion of the dignity of man. 28 Ficino and Pico gave man the means to
escape from the confines of the base position to which he had been allocated
in the medieval spatial episteme. In so doing they removed the pivotal founda-
tion upon which the cosmology of hierarchy was constructed. Self-fashioning
Renaissance man was able to mark out his being-in-space and took a significant
step toward the modern territorial imaginary.
However, it would be incorrect to assume that either Ficino or Pico rejected
the basic hierarchical premises of medieval cosmology. Their ontological horizon
was still determined by the vocabularies and categories of Neo-Platonism and
Christian scholasticism. It reflected the continued prevalence of the medieval
spatial episteme in Renaissance culture. 29 Peter Burke argues that few sixteenth
century Italians would have challenged Dante's division of the cosmos into a
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
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.
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.
For, as though a participant of providence on the model of divine governance

the soul rules itself, the home, the city, the arts, and the animals ... the power
of man, therefore, is very similar to that of the divine nature, seeing that man
by himself, that is through his own decision and art, rules himself without
being in the least limited by his physical nature, and imitates individual
works of the higher nature. 44
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
He therefore took man as a creature of indeterminate nature, and assigning

him a place in the middle of the world, addressed him thus: "Neither a fixed
abode nor a form that is thine alone nor any function peculiar to thyself have
we given thee, Adam, to the end that according to thy longing and according
to thy judgement thou mayest have and possess what abode, what form, and
what functions thou thyself shalt desire. The nature of all other beings is lim-
ited and constrained within the bounds of laws prescribed by Us. Thou, con-
strained by no limits, in accordance with thine own free will, in whose hand
We have placed thee, shalt ordain for thyself the limits of thy nature. We have
set thee at the world's centre that thou mayest from thence more easily observe
whatever is in the world. We have made thee neither of heaven nor of earth,
neither mortal nor immortal, so that with freedom of choice and with honour,
as though the maker and moulder of thyself, thou mayest fashion thyself in
whatever shape thou shalt prefer. Thou shalt have the power to degenerate into
the lower forms of life, which are brutish. Thou shalt have the power, out of thy
soul's judgment, to be reborn into the higher forms, which are divine.47
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
Cusa, Copernicus, and Infinity

If Pico and Ficino promoted the principle of sovereign identity, it is also true that
they left the essential structure of the medieval cosmos intact. As we saw ear-
lier, in the medieval world political and social hierarchies mirrored and so drew
their legitimacy from the divinely ordained structure of the cosmos. We might
therefore expect that any non-hierarchical representation of the cosmos might
serve to weaken the appeal of a hierarchical political cosmology. Direct causal
links bet~een the substitution of hierarchy for infinity within Renaissance cos-
mology and the replacement of hierarchy by anarchy in Renaissance political
discourse remain somewhat elusive. Nevertheless, at the level of metaphor and
analogy there is a strong correspondence between new conceptions of political
territoriality and the new cosmology.
Alexander Koyre contextualizes the demise of the Christian cosmos and
the rise of modern cosmology within a widespread spiritual revolution which,
at the beginning of the seventeenth century, embraced the "secularisation of
consciousness," the discovery of man's "essential subjectivity," and the replace-
ment of the vita contemplativa by the vita activita. In combination these new
modes of thought precipitated a philosophical and scientific revolution that
engineered
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 Koyre this revolution started with Copernicus's De revolutionibus orbium

coelestium (1543), was consolidated by Descartes' Principia philosophiae (1644),
and concluded with Newton's Philosophiae natura/is principia mathematica
(1687). However, Renaissance scholars like Kristeller have predated this revo-
lution by a century, arguing that Nicholas ofCusa's De docta ignorantia (1440)
was the first text to undermine the hierarchical conception of the cosmos and to
promote a new understanding of man's place in it. 53
Cusa's purpose in De docta ignorantia was not, however, to establish a new
cosmology but to develop a theory of knowledge. 54 From two starting premises:
first Aristotle's dictum that ''All men .by nature desire to know" and second
that everything created by God strives to achieve perfectibility, Cusa reasoned

that because Man is distinguished by his intellect his purpose is to seek per-
fect knowledge, that is knowledge of God. 55 Despite such aspirations, De docta
ignorantia sought to show that man is unable to know anything beyond the
Socratic doubt: "assuredly we desire to know that we do not know. If we can
fully attain unto this [knowledge of our ignorance], we will attain unto learned
ignorance." 56 The failure of the intellect to reach the truth is a consequence
of understanding's reliance on comparison: "all those who make an investiga-
tion judge the uncertain proportionally, by means of a comparison with what
is taken to be certain. Therefore, every inquiry is comparative and uses the
means of comparative relation (medio proportionis)." The common measure by
which comparative relation can be thought is number: "number encompasses
all things related comparatively (proportionabilia)." However, because under-
standing through number traces definite relations or comparisons of greater and
lesser, it can only comprehend the finite world while "the infinite, qua infinite,
is unknown, for it escapes all comparative relation."
This is especially significant when it comes to knowing God or the Absolute
Maximum which "is not of the nature of those things which can be compara
tively greater and lesser, it is beyond all that we can conceive." 57 Rather, in God
there are no such categories and all opposites, including maximum and mini-
mum, coincide. Cusa drew on a well established metaphor to describe God as "an
infinite sphere, whose centre is everywhere, whose circumference nowhere." 58
Further, he extended it to the cosmos to convey the sense that since God is in
all things, he must be equally close to every part of creation; the centre of the
universe, that is God, is present in all things everywhere. 59 Everything has its
origin or measure in God so "every created thing is, as it were, a finite infinity or
a created God." 60 The universe is also a finite infinity: infinite like God but not
a divine unity, rather a "multiplicity, a manifold spread out in space and time."61
Cusa's universe has no centre and no circumference and opposes the values of
the medieval hierarchical cosmos,
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
Several important consequences derive from Cusa's representation of the

universe as permanently in movement, acentric, and limitless. First, once the
earth is removed from the centre of the universe and placed among the stars,
Aristotle's upper/lower distinction between a celestial sphere of superior being
and a mundane world of debased substances effectively breaks down. Second,
once place and movement are no longer fixed and absolute, knowledge becomes
relative. Aristotle had argued that the universe could be known objectively by
taking measurements from fixed and immutable points prescribed by the nature
of things. For Cusa, however, these points were hypothetical and ideal, posited
by the free mind. Finally, and most disturbing, was the implication that if both
the universe and God's creative power were infinite then life in other places
was a distinct possibility. The modernity of Cusa's cosmology becomes appar-
ent when it is contrasted with Copernicus' model in De Revolutionibus Orbium
Coelestium (1543). 63 From the proposition that the earth moves around the sun,
Copernicus attempted to demonstrate that the planets make up a coherent inte-
grated system. He substantiated this claim by showing how adequate planetary
tables could be calculated from geometrical models that had the sun at their
centre. Despite Copernicus' popular reputation as a revolutionary thinker,
historians of science dispute his originality. For Bertrand Russell, Copernicus
was more Pythagorean than modern, and Lovejoy estimates that Copernicus
merely altered the details of the orthodox Christian theological cosmos: "[f1
or Copernicus the solar system and the universe remained identical; his world,
though not geocentric, was still centered, still spherical in shape, still securely
walled in by the outermost sphere."64 Cusa's infinite and acentric universe was
considerably more modern than Copernicus's heliocentric universe. 65
Certainly traditional premises underlay Copernicus' vision of a heliocentric
universe. 66 Copernicus accepted the established view of the earth as a sphere but
argued that it should have rotational motion appropriate to its form. Hence the
apparent rising and setting of sun, moon, stars, and planets could be accounted
for by the earth's daily rotation. Second, from the Aristotelian premise that the
movement of the eternal heavenly bodies in a symmetrical and harmonious uni-
verse must be circular and uniform, he surmised that because their movement,
as viewed from the earth, was non-uniform and irregular, the earth could not
be the centre of the universe. Because "the same planets are observed nearer
to the earth and farther away [this] necessarily proves that the centre of the
earth is not the centre of their circles."67 If the earth is not the centre of the
universe and itself moves around a centre then the yearly cycle can be "trans-
formed from a solar to a terrestrial movement." Finally, "it will be realised that
the sun occupies the middle of the universe. All these facts are disclosed to us
by the principle governing the order in which the planets follow one another,
and by the harmony of the entire universe." 68 Once the earth is recognized as
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
universality with one of change and contingency.74 In the medieval time-frame

the random flow of events on earth were considered meaningless in and of
themselves; they acquired meaning only when related to the eternal and uni-
versal. Events were interpreted within an eschatological framework as signs or
intimations of millennium and apocalypse; "though the signs are in the earthly
city they are not about it, not about secular history, but only signals of the corn-
ing ultimate event in sacred history, the Day of Judgement, that will mark the
destruction of the earthly city and with it the destruction of time and the end
of history." 75 Both Church and Empire promoted the temporal qualities of eter-
nity, stability, and universality and imbued them with positive values. Canonists
and Imperialists alike claimed that because the papacy and empire had been
established directly by divine will, they were, therefore, imbued with the divine
qualities of eternity and universality. Imperial political society was imagined
as "the existence among men of the hierarchical order existing in heaven and
in nature; its legitimation and its organising categories were alike timeless, and
change could exist in it only as degeneration of recovery. Affiliation with the
empire, then, like affiliation with monarchy generally, was affiliation with the
timeless." 76
The paradigm of the fixed and eternal was first challenged by the Florentine
humanists Coluccio Salutati and Leonardo Bruni during the "crisis" of the early
fourteenth century. Salutati and Bruni, worried that Florence was threatened by
the attempts by the Duke of Milan, Gian Galeazzo Visconti, to consolidate a
monarchical state in northern and central Italy, hoped that by appealing to the
city's special ethos they could rally the citizens to her defense. They promoted a
new foundational myth in which the patrimony of Julius Caesar was substituted
for that of republican Rome. From then on, writes Pocock, "the republic of
Florence, stated as a high ideal but existing in the present and in its own past,
was affiliated only with other republics and with those moments in past time
at which republics had existed." 77 It was not represented as a universal Platonic
ideal somehow outside of history, and the politics of citizenship and republi-
canism were explicitly divorced from the natural hierarchical order. Indeed, for
Pocock, because its organisation affirmed its "sovereignty and autonomy, and
therefore its individuality and particularity" it simultaneously asserted "that it
existed in time, not eternity, and was therefore transitory and doomed to imper-
manence, for this was the condition of particular being." 78
Salutati also reworked the traditional distinction between vita activa (engage-
ment in social activity) and vita contemplativa (the solitary pursuit of pure
knowledge) by aligning the former with the idea of vivere civile, the active pro-
motion of civic life and citizenship. This implicitly undermined the imperialist
chronology, for the active citizen, busy dealing with the practical contingencies
of everyday politics, had no time to "contemplate the unchanging hierarchies of
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
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
of scholarly debate, yet there is much in Giuseppe Prezzolini's claim that

Machiavelli was "the most anti-Christian thinker of his cime." 91 Machiavelli
mounted a critique of the political doctrines of Christianity and the historical
record of the Church as a political institution on several fronts. The most super-
ficial was his polemical attack, which drew on a vibrant tradition of Florentine
anti-clericalism extending back to Dante, on the current administratio:q. ofthe
Roman Church for its divisive and pernicious influence on Italian politics.
Machiavelli called into question the popular myth, as he saw it, that the Italian
city-states were blessed due to their close association with the Chiesa Romana.
On the contrary, because the religious establishment was the arbiter of a peo-
ple's sense of self worth and virtU, the venal and salacious conduct of the Roman
court had made the Italians irreligious, thereby causing them to loose any sense
of communal identity. In its role as a temporal power (imperio temporale) the
Church had been divisive, the root cause of the Italians' failure to unite either
around a virtuous prince or within a unified republic. The Church's influence
was pernicious because
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
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
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.
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
Machiavelli, Territoriality, and La Stato
Rval pohncal 1magmary. The promonon of the 1deal of sovere1gn man

enaissa~~e t~oug~t undermined the. spatial hi~rarchies of th: medie-
challenged the belief that man was a prisoner in space, trapped in a

mundane world, which existed only as a dull reflection of the divine world of
the heavens. Further, Machiavelli's realism removed republic and princedom
from the political theology of Christianity, in which territoriality was conceived
of as an attribute of Christendom rather than as an exclusively political space,
the locus of Aristotle's ziion politikon. However, no sooner had the state been
de-territorialized, extricated from the vertical spatial order of the medieval cos-
mos, than State-thought sought to re,territorialize it, to striate its space with the
markers and symbols of sovereign territory. Concentrating on Machiavelli, this
chapter explores how Renaissance political discourse territorialized lo stato by
fixing sovereignty, violence, and identity onto state space.
Lo Stato in Renaissance Political Discourse

In Machiavelli's writings lo stato has multiple meanings. One reason for this
is that although Machiavelli's prose is not particularly abstruse, he "uses the
same vocabulary for different concepts and expresses the same concepts with
different vocabularies." 1 Second, the lexicon of Renaissance political thought
was, like other contemporary vocabularies, "imbued with the past and pregnant
with the future." 2 Accordingly, lo stato had multiple connotations that varied
depending on the context in which it was used. 3 The first meaning, common in
the Northern kingdoms such as England and France, was derived from status,
which, in Roman law, denoted the standing a ruler enjoyed, that is the status
of majesty, or the status of the political community. This is the sense Giovanni
Campano deploys in De regendo magistratu where he argues that republics could

only achieve optimus status respublicae if their leaders strove for justice. According
to Quentin Skinner, Machiavelli implies this meaning of status when he advised
new princes on how to "tenere or mantenere lo stato" or how to maintain their
position as rulers over their new territories. 4 Lo stato was also used to classify dif-
ferent forms of government. This meaning derived from the humanists' use of
status to translate Aristotle's types of government constitutions. Thus, Leonardo
Bruni translates Aristotle's distinction between democracy and aristocracy
as status popularis and status optimatum, and in Filippo Beroaldo's Libel/us de
optima statu the typology of legitimate regimes are status populare, status pau-
corum, and status unius. 5 During the fourteenth century Florentines described
their own popular regime government as populare stato or popularis status. 6
However, notes Nicolai Rubinstein, the use of lo stato to denote differ-
ent forms of government gave way to stato as an indication of effective power;
"[s]tatus, defined by 'what has the supreme power in the state,' comes close to
the meaning with which stato was widely used in fifteenth-century Florence." 7
For Skinner, this use of lo stato "to refer to the institutions of government and
means of coercive control that serve to organize and preserve order within political
communities" was a major linguistic innovation of the Renaissance.' 8 Although
lo stato as the governmental and administrative apparatus was kept conceptually
distinct from citta or republica-the political community or state as a whole-it
was not always clearly distinguished from those who had effective control of
it. Sometimes the distinction is relatively clear, as when Vespasiano describes
how Alessandro Sforza conducted himself "in his government of lo stato," and
when Guicciardini in his Ricordi asks how the Medici "lost control of lo stato in
1527.'' 9 Again, in a letter to Lorenzo de Medici discussing the enhanced security
that Florence would gain from a treaty with Naples, the Florentine Chancellor
highlighted the benefits that will accrue to "you and the regime which is joined
to you and for the state which is joined to the regime.'' 10 However, by the time
Lorenzo had overcome the Pazzi plot in 1477, the stato of Florence was to all
effects and purposes designated by the Medici. Lo stato had come to refer not
to state's power structure but to the dominant regime in control of it: lo stato
di Medici.ll The final meaning of lo stato, and the one which will be addressed
in the rest of this chapter, was indicated when "writers contemporaneous with
Machiavelli used stato to designate a geographical area.'' 12 Here lo stato is "a way
of referring to the general area over which a ruler or chief magistrate needs to
exercise control." 13
Machiavelli's work reflects the general conceptual ambiguity surrounding
lo stato at the time. Sometimes he distinguishes the institutions and structure
of lo stato from those who control it. In such instances, lo stato not only has its
own foundations, laws, customs, and institutions, but is a subject capable of
Machiavelli, Territoriality, Lo Stato 125
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
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.
Machiavelli's Territorial Imaginary

Sovereignty
Machiavelli's famous declaratory statement opening II Principe: "Tutti gli stati,

tutti i domini che hanno avuto ed hanno imperio sopra gli uomini, sono stati e
sono o repubbliche o principati" translates as "[a]ll the states, all the dominions
that have had or now have authority over men have been and now are either
republics or princedoms." 21 Princedoms are either hereditary or new. If new, they
are either completely new, like Milan was when it was taken over by Francesco
Sforza, or they can be joined to the hereditary state like new members (come
membri aggiunti allo Stato), as Naples was when acquired by the Kingdom of
Spain. These dominions (questi domini) are either used to living under princely
rule or they are free (they are republics). They can be acquired either by using
one's own forces or troops under the command of another leader (mercenaries)
and either by fortuna or virtU. In chapter two Machiavelli points out that in
hereditary states (negli Stati ereditari) the new prince should have little diffi-
culty in holding onto his position (nel suo Stato-here in the sense of status) if
he continues to rule according to the traditions and customs established by his
predecessors. As long as he does not develop any particularly unpleasant vices,
his new subjects should be well disposed to him; innovation will be tolerated as
any consequential resentment will be subsumed "nell' antichita e continuazione

del dominio." 22
Machiavelli's slippery use of conceptual vocabulary is evident with respect to
dominio. Even in the brief passage above dominio seems to have several different
meanings: it is a body equivalent to but different from the state which has impe-
rium over men; it is an entity which can either live under princely rule or be free;
and, as in the last phrase, it seems to refer to an abstract notion of juristic legal-
ity, which Allan Gilbert translates as sovereignty. We have seen that the ali"gn-
ment of sovereignty and state territory is a mainstay of the modern territorial a
priori. Thus, if dominio is synonymous with territorial-sovereignty, then it can
be claimed that the modern territorial imaginary was present in Renaissance
discourses of politics and law.
According to Sebastian de Grazia, the opening sentence of Il Principe offers
the essential components of the Machiavellian state. Machiavelli
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
The Renaissance use of dominium to signify a domain or territory and imperium

to designate right or authority to command have their antecedents in the legal,
political and military vernacular of the Roman and Holy Roman Empires. In
Roman Law the Latin dominium denoted ownership or
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
However, in Renaissance legal discourse the sense of dominion to denote pri-

vate property or ownership had been supplemented by two public meanings.
First, was the "[t]he power or right of governing and cantrolling" where domin-
ion referred to the acts of exercising control, authority or sovereignty. Second,
dominion also referred to the space over which rule or sovereignty is exercised,
"[t]he lands or domains of a feudal lord .... The territory owned by or subject to
a king or ruler, or under a particular government or control." 25 In so far as the
public meaning of dominion denoted both a subject-the sovereign-and an

object-the territory over which sovereignty is exercised-it heralds the modern
concept of sovereign-territoriality.
However, most historians ofpolitical thought reject the claim that Renaissance
political discourse articulated a modern concept of sovereignty, understood as
the" idea that there is a final and absolute political authority in the political com-
munity ... and no final and absolute authority exists elsewhere." 26 For F. H. Hinsley
although Renaissance political theorists challenged the secular authority claimed
by the Papacy and Emperor, the first explicit justification and recognition of the
legitimate independence of political communities was Jean Bodin's Les six livres
de Ia Republique (1576). Likewise, for ]ens Bartleson, Renaissance political texts
express only a loosely developed notion of proto-sovereignty. The Renaissance
"general theory of the state" neither individuated the state as a sovereign entity
nor prioritized it as the object of study. 27 It also lacked a sense that something
existed outside of it, that is an international system-an integral component
of modern sovereignty. 28 Nevertheless, Hinsley and Bartleson do acknowledge
the presence in Renaissance political discourse of incipient features of modern
sovereignty. With respect to Machiavelli, Bartleson Writes that "[i]f II Principe
was focused around the problem of security and written from the vantage
point of the sovereign subjectivity of a ruler, this perspective is reversed in the
Discorsi. It is written from the vantage point of the sovereign subjectivity of a
people." 29 Similarly, Hinsley acknowledges that Renaissance political thinkers
were instrumental in de-legitimizing Christendom, an idea incompatible with
modern sovereignty. They hastened the erosion of the Christian political order
by rejecting the theocratically based claims of Papacy and Empire to univer-
sal authority, by questioning the idea that Christendom was a political society,
and by denying that regional rulers were beholden to laws superior to them.
Further, Hinsley accepts that Machiavelli made two important contributions to
the modern understanding of sovereignty. First, Machiavelli, like Guicciardini,
tried to resolve the competing interests of princes and subjects by conceiving
of lo stato as an instrument in the hands of the ruler that was to be used in the
interests of the ruled. Their shared interests would be served if the prince was
freed from custom and tradition and able to act on behalf of the body poli-
tic. Machiavelli, however, stopped short of "knitting ruler and society closer
together in a body politic which itself became endowed with sovereign power." 30
Second, Machiavelli limited politics to the terrestrial world by dismissing the
Augustinian notion that temporal rulers should aim to realize a superior law or
purpose.
While historians of political thought downplay the extent to which
Renaissance political discourse entertained a modern ideal of territorial sover-
eignty, for legal historians the principle was well-established. The principle of
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
[s]ubjectivized sovereignty must be supplemented by it objectivized compo-

nent part, and that means that sovereignty, or what is the same, jurisdiction
must be territorially anchored, must have a territorial connection ... territo-
rial boundaries had become boundaries of the law, jurisdiction and hence
of sovereignty. The territory had acquired juristic personality. Both govern-
mental practice and juristic doctrine had postulated that the personal kind of
sovereignty must be complemented by its territorial counterpart. 34
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
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
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
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
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
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
men's forces-his armies were heavily reinforced by mercenaries belonging to

the Orsini and by soldiers on loan from the French king, Louis XII-but also
with the assistance offortuna-he had been able to rely on the support of pope
Alexander VI, Roderigo Borgia, his father. Valentino recognized his position
was threatened by the dubious loyalties of the Orsini mercenaries, Louis' dis-
approval of his plans for further expansion into Tuscany, and the resentment
of those living in Romagna who were sick of being ruled by weak, exploitative
lords. Valentino eradicated the leaders of the Orsini and Colonna families and
broke his alliance with the French. 65 In order to pacify Romagna, he put in
charge "Messer Remirro de Orco, a man cruel and ready" who "in a short time
tendered the province peaceful and united." Then, in order to avoid
incurring resentment at the violent means used to restore order, Cesare

wanted to show that any cruelty which had gone on did not originate with
himself but with the harsh nature of his agent. So getting an opportunity
for it, one morning at Cesena he had Messer Remirro laid in two pieces in
the public square with a block of wood and a bloody sword near him. The
ferocity of this spectacle left those people at the same time gratified and
awestruck. 66
The Remirro case is an example of the use of spectacular violence in the

consolidation of the territoriality of a Renaissance state. This state shared many
characteristics with the states of Early Modern Europe, in which, as Foucault
pointed out, control was maintained by both spectacular and disciplinary vio-
lence. 67 However, the modern state rarely, if ever, engages in spectacular violence,
for it is able to ensure order by means of an extensive surveillance apparatus,
which permits it to coordinate individuals' time-space routines across the entire
territory under its jurisdiction. Nevertheless, Renaissance states did have some
mechanisms of disciplinary power at their disposal. Pierangelo Schiera argues
that if the modern state constitutes "a point of unity" in which the institu-
tional and legitimate organization of power is combined with the discipline that
determines the collective behavior its subjects, then while these three elements
came together in the seventeenth century, they all developed, albeit separately,
in Italian humanism. 68 The institutional dimension arose out of negotiations
between the signoria, the papal and imperial vicariati, and the principate, and
replaced an ancient civic legitimacy with a state based legitimacy. City-states
derived their legitimacy, as Marsiglio had noted, from their status as a commu-
nity that protects individuals so that "the men belonging to it may live and live
well." 69 Discipline arose from the codes of the guilds, corporations, universities,
and Church, which ensured the co-ordination of the citizens' behavior with the
needs of the communal civic order. Machiavelli, despite his contempt for the
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
Rousseau's argument a set of correspondences underwritten by violence: "to be

free you must belong to a people; to be a people you must have a common iden-
tity burned into you; to be a flourishing people you must exclusively inhabit
a contiguous territory; to flourish freely as a territorialized people you must
stringently limit contact with the foreign." Poland could only be endeared to
its citizens through violence: the violence "done to the internal other (those
inhabiting the territory who do not belong), the interior other (the other within
the self which resists such strong identification with the collectivity) and the
external other (those who are foreign)." 80
Machiavelli first touches upon issues of identity in II Principe in his discus-
sion of the problems faced by a prince who has recently acquired mixed prin-
cipalities. 81 If the new territory has the same customs, mores, and language as
those established in his antico stato and if the inhabitants of the new territory
are already accustomed to princely rule then assimilating the territory in tutto
un corpo will be relatively easy. The prince does not need to alter existing laws
and taxes, but merely has to ensure that all members of the previous ruling fam-
ily are wiped out. If he follows these rules "in a very short time they unite with
his old princedom in a single body." 82 If, however, the inhabitants of the newly
acquired territory speak a different language and have different laws and cus-
toms, the prince will require good fortuna and need to cultivate virtu. He will
either have to move his court to the new lands or to establish colonies in it. He
must forge alliances with the minor nobility of the region, while being careful
not to increase the power of any potential rivals. Some of the hardest territories
to retain are those where the previous ruler shared power with several minor
lords. These lands will contain several alternative foci of allegiance around
which those who oppose the new prince's rule could coalesce. However, the
hardest stati to retain are those republican cities with strong traditions of liberty
and procedures of civil life based in time-honored indigenous laws. The prince
cannot expect to eradicate memories of liberty and freedom and if he wants to
hold onto such a republic he must destroy the city, set up his court within its
walls, or establish a government that retains most of the old laws. 83
Like Rousseau, Machiavelli maintained that identity is constituted through
language. The language spoken by the inhabitants of the newly acquired provin-
cia would determine whether or not they shared the same identity as the subjects
of the prince's antico stato. 84 "[T]he territories [stati] a conqueror annexes and
joins to his own well-established state are either in the same country (provincia)
with the same language or they are not." 85 Although Machiavelli sometimes
uses provincia to designate Italy, here lingua does not refer to a national lan-
guage. Gramsci, four centuries later would still be ruing the fact that Italian
remained the exclusive vernacular of the cultural and social elites and that
the vast majority of the population still spoke various incompatible dialects,
which compromised any attempts to coalesce into an effective political force. 86

Nevertheless, many Renaissance humanists felt that it was important to define
the role and function of the language of Dante, Petrarch, and Boccaccio. Dante,
himself, had insisted in De vulgari eloquentia that his new vernacular or curiale,
the language of the courts spoken by courtiers, popes, dukes, and literary men
was not, as many Florentine humanists insisted, based in the Florentine dialect.
Machiavelli, as a good Florentine, wrote a counter tract refuting Dante's denial
of the Florentine patrimony of Italian and even accused the poet of defaming
their common patria. 87
Machiavelli's criticism of Dante has a tincture of campanilismo, the fierce
allegiance to and pride in one's city or region felt by many Renaissance Italians.
Florentines, argues de Grazia, felt that the Palazzo della Signoria and the Duomo
symbolized the city's grandeur and glory. "Brunelleschi's cupola high in the
heavens is the cosmos centred in Florence and covering an empire of the peoples
of Tuscany." 88 However campanilismo could easily slip into the type of small-
minded parochialism that Machiavelli mocked in Mandragola where one of the
characters is belittled by being told that "you're not used to losing the Cupola
from sight." 89 Indeed, although Machiavelli rose to Florence's defense when he
felt that she had been unfairly maligned and famously declared that "I love my
country more than my soul," he was not a Florentine chauvinist. 90 He rarely
trumpeted his city's prodigious cultural achievements, which, in his eyes, could
not compensate for the failure of this "[t]ruly ... great and miserable city" to
achieve its promise of political greatness. He would have gladly exchanged her
cultural riches for a political elite of equal military virtu and boldness of spirit to
the senatorial class of ancient Rome. Only then could the petty factionalisms,
internecine rivalries, and class conflicts that had bedeviled the city since the
eradication of the noble class be overcome. However, despite such disappoint-
ments, the spirit of Florence still burned in his soul.
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
It is true that the territorialization of political identity in Renaissance Italy

was primarily local or regional, determined by residency in or cultivation of the
lands that made up a prince's dominio or a republic's contado. However the piccola
patria was not the only locus of identity. Humanist writings regularly display a
tension between the immediate loyalty owed to the piccola patria, one's citta or
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
Then Virtue will seize arms

'Gainst madness, and the battle will be brief,
For ancient valour is
Not dead, as yet, within Italian hearts. 96
Machiavellian scholars continue to debate the intended meaning of this

chapter. Nineteenth century followers of Ranke, who viewed Machiavelli as
an Italian patriot and the prophet of the modern national state, claimed that
Machiavelli intended that all the advice he offered throughout Il Principe should
assist the potential liberator to free Italy. However, Meinecke argued that Il
Principe was not a unified composition and that the final chapter was a rhe-
torical addendum, designed to curry favor with the Medici. Machiavelli's loose
use of language means he could have been advocating a temporary military

alliance, a permanent federal constitution, or a unified national state. Against
this divisionist view, unifiers, like Chabod, claim that Il Principe has a natu-
ral narrative progression leading toward the telos of the final chapter. 97 Either
way .it would be rash to assume that Machiavelli envisaged a national territorial
based identity, equivalent to that aspired to by the state-builders of modernity.
Prezzolini argues that the romantic and mystical discourse of nineteenth cen-
tury nationalism, proclaiming the right of a population to form a separate state
when they have a common language and cultural traditions, would have been
alien to Machiavelli. His nationalism was utilitarian in that "conformity of lan-
guage, of customs [religion] and institutions [laws and military]" could provide
a realistic basis for a viable state, free of the religious allegiances of the medieval
territorial imaginary. 98 Chabod concurs that Machiavelli had no sense of the
sacredness attributed to the modern nation. He cut off religion from the polit-
ical but did not transfer the religious sentiments of sacrifice and martyrdom to
the nation. His only interest was the unity of the state: "the nation exists for him
to the extent that it is organised or can be organised into a political body, in a
unified state, with an established government." 99
To be sure, Machiavelli only rarely uses the term nazione and applies it to
both the large populations of foreign states and to the piccole patrie of Italy. 100
However, even if Machiavelli's idea of the nation was not fully modern, we
cannot deny that it does convey a sense of a communal identity grounded on
a space that exceeded the boundaries of the local patria. Even if Machiavelli
remained hopeful that the Italian polities could survive if they continued to
develop the traditions of civic humanism, upon which their liberties and great-
ness had depended upon in the past, his time as Florentine emissary to the
court of France and the lessons of 1494 would have made him acutely aware
that the power of the northern kingdoms surpassed that of any of the Italian
city-states. 101 Hence, Machiavelli's appeal for a national militia assembled under
a Medici leader, that could rival the armies of the French, Spanish, and Swiss.
Exactly which parts of the peninsula such troops should be recruited from is not
clear. If only Italian speakers were to be enlisted then by Machiavelli's own cri-
teria theywould.be restricted to men from five provinces: Lombardy, Romagna,
Tuscany, the territory of Rome, and the kingdom ofNaples. 102 As Vincent Ilardi
notes, "Venice, Piedmont, Liguria, and the islands (Sicily and Sardinia) were not
part of Italy for Machiavelli, linguistically speaking." 103
Nevertheless, ltalia did have meaning for Machiavelli. In citing Petrarch 's
"ltalia Mia" he purposely invoked the sentiment of italianita-a sense of shared
cultural identity characterized by common language, literature, customs, man-
ners and traditions-that had been nurtured by Italian humanists for genera-
tions. In "Italia Mia" Petrarch had grounded this identity in spatial images.
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.
Is this soil not the earth that I first touched?

This not the nest where I
Have been so sweetly nursed?
And is this not my homeland that I trust?
A mother, pious, kind,
Who shelters both my parents in her soil? 105
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
Nature made good provision for our state,

To set an Alpine shield
Between us and the Germans' ravening.U 0
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
Clearly, much of chapter XXVI of II Principe rehearses the standard themes

of italianita: "[!]aments over the oppressed state of Italy, and over the divisions
among the Italian leaders, contempt for the foreigners as 'barbarians,' yearn-
ings for the great Roman past, appeals for a leader, the wish to be free of the
invaders ... " 119 Machiavelli's depiction of a coherent Italian identity, differenti-
ated from the surrounding world and threatened by foreign forces, was not new.
However, Machiavelli's originality was to fuse these disparate elements into a

program of political action. He sought to revive Italian virtu by installing a spirit
of martial valour into the people, by forming an army of indigenous soldiers to
replace the mercenary troops, and by unifying the province under one prince.
Machiavelli's models for Italian unity were contemporary France and Spain:
"Italy was to become a "provincia unita" in order to withstand the assaults of
other 'provincie unite'." 120 Yet this political program would remain an aspiration
rather than a reality. For Italy's regional princes, italianita was merely a conve-
nient tool of realpolitik which they appealed to when their own interests were
threatened. 121 Florentine and Papal negotiators seeking to encourage Venice to
drop her stance of neutrality after Charles VIII's invasion argued that" 'a good
Italian' with concern for the 'universal danger' and 'universal needs of Italy' "
would abandon such a policy. 122 But Italian interests rarely took precedence
over the immediate interest of the piccola patria. The Venetian Doge replied to
the Pap allegate that Venice would not risk going to war with Milan and France
for the sake of a vague ideal. Furthermore, princes were prepared to put their
contempt for the barbarians aside, if the military services they offered could be
used to overcome local rivals. The weakness of Italian interest when set against
personal ambition became abundantly clear in 1494 when, motivated by his
desire for territorial gains at the expense ofVenice, the Duke of Milan, Ludovico
Sforza, encouraged Charles VIII's invasion on the pretext of the Angevin claim
to the Kingdom of Naples. Machiavelli was disgusted at Sforza and blamed his
deviousness for "the growth of those evil seeds that not long after, since no living
man could destroy them, devastated-and are still devastating-Italy." 123
Italy would not achieve anything like the status of a national territorial state
until well into the nineteenth century, and would experience many more "bar-
barian" incursions before then. Nevertheless Renaissance political discourse, by
aligning the state space with sovereignty, violence, and identity commenced a
process of striation that would eventually coalesce into the modern territorial
imaginary.
CHAPTER 8
Picturing Renaissance Territoriality
I n the dedicatory letter to Lorenzo de Medici prefacing II Principe, Machiavelli

expressed his worries that Lorenzo might take offence that a mere citizen
should presume to offer counsel on the conduct of princely affairs. He jus-
tified his unsolicited advice by means of an analogy.
I hope it will not be thought presumptuous if a man of low and humble

station dares to discuss and advise on the conduct of princes. For just as
those who draw up maps of countries place themselves in low lying valleys
to observe mountains and high places and to observe low lying areas situ-
ate themselves high up in the mountains so, likewise, to understand clearly
the nature of the people one must be a prince, and to discern clearly that of
princes, he must be one of the populace. 1
Machiavelli's analogy evokes a passage in Leonardo da Vinci's Treatise on

Painting in which Leonardo declared that the artist who mastered perspective
would become
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
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
political space came to be defined as it appeared from a single fixed view-

point. The concept of sovereignty ... was ... the doctrinal counterpart of the
application of single-point perspectival forms to the spatial organisation of
politics. 5
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
territorialized politics: the ideal cityscape, the portrait of a prince in a landscape

and local topographical maps.
Perspective Theory and Practice

In essence, perspective is a technique of pictorial representation that allows art-
ists to depict three-dimensional space and the positions of objects within it on a
two-dimensional canvas. Erwin Panofsky describes perspective as the capacity
to transform the material reality of a picture's surface into a transparent plane
or a window, and so create the illusion that "we are looking through this win-
dow into a space." 6 This "space comprises the entirety of the objects in apparent
recession into depth, and is not bounded by the edges of the picture, but rather
only cut off." 7 In Renaissance art history three foundational events constitute
the "invention" or "rediscovery" of perspective: Filippo Brunelleschi's peepshow
experiments carried out in Florence's Piazza del Duomo and Piazza dei Signori
(1425), which demonstrated the principles of perspective; Masaccio's application
of these principles in the Trinity fresco in Florence's Santa Maria Novella (1427);
and the systematization of these principles in Alberti's De pictura (1435)-"the
'Magna Carta' of the Renaissance." 8 De pictura set out the rules for perspective
construction with a geometrical rigor and established the parameters of the dis-
cipline of painting within the liberal arts. 9 Alberti started with the most funda-
mental humanist premise.
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
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
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
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
The Ideal City
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.
Perspective was an urban-based revolution which complemented the rise of the

town and the decline of the feudal landed order (figure 8.1). It was during the
Renaissance that the medieval conception of the town as a metaphysical presence,
as imago mundi, gradually dissipated. Now the town was able assume its own
identity as an urban space unified in terms of a political principle and represented
graphically according to plans in perspective. 38 According to Lewis Mumford,
the aspirations to grandiosity, uniformity, and regimentation characteristic of the
Baroque city, and, we might add, the Baroque absolutist territorial state, had their
origins in the Renaissance ideal of a city reflected in the purity and harmony of
its architectural forms. 39 Indeed, the archetype for the Baroque city is captured
in three Renaissance paintings of ideal cities, known as the Urbino, Baltimore,
and Berlin panels. All three show images of grand architectural or theatrical
scenes constructed with strict adherence to the principles of costruzione legittima.
Ordinary housing is barely evident and the countryside can only just be glimpsed
far outside of the city walls. There are no human figures present in either the
Berlin or Urbino panels and the few that populate the Baltimore panel appear
"lost in the vastness of the spatial composition.'>4 The layout of the squares and
the styles of the buildings comply with the principles of architectural humanism
set out in Alberti's De re aedificatoria (1443-52)_41 The buildings shown in the
paintings are examples of the standard types common to ideal urban layouts: a
templum or principal church, a basilica or law court, palaces for leaders serving
both administrative and domicile functions, squares for commercial and political
meetings, and symbolic antique monuments. 42 The details of the facades, porti-
cos, loggia windows, and columns all conform to Alberti's requirements.
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
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
The perfected forms of the imaginary ideal city-grand, symmetrical, pro-

portioned, in fixed optical recession-went forth from a wish for control
over the whole environment and from the implicit assumption that this was
possible. The quest for the control of space in architecture, painting and
bas-relief sculpture was not analogous to a policy for more hegemony over
the entire society; it belonged, rather, to the same movement of conscious-
ness. Behind the two different enterprises was the same drive to comprehend
the environment: to convert the surroundings, urban and even rural to a
"known" field. 52
The rigorously planned, tightly controlled representations of space in these pan-

els contrast with the organic lived-in spaces of medieval cityscapes. Cosgrove
draws our this contrast by comparing Ambrogio Lorenzetti's frescoes of Good
and Bad Government to Pietro Perugino's Christ Giving to St Peter the Keys to
the Kingdom ofHeaven. Lorenzetti's city is a vibrant, bustling world, the sights,
sounds, and smells of which are communicated to viewers as if they were pedes-
trians walking in the streets. How different to Perugino's formal monumental
space, in which the regimentations of the checkerboard piazza and the trees and
hills in the background attest to the rigid geometrical order striating the spaces
of the urban landscape. 53 Rather than random and spontaneous gatherings,
Perugino's human groups strike choreographed theatrical poses. Individuals do
not inhabit this impersonal space; they have no personal relationship to it, but
exist in it as objects situated by an external plan or scheme. In the ideal city
panels the logic of de-corporealization is taken yet further. These spaces are
almost entirely devoid of human figures, as if their impure physical presence
would contaminate the space's perfect proportions and refined lines. Although
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
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
De re aedificatoria was, argues Franc;:oise Choay, an "instaurational" text that

founded the discourse of urbanism. It was the first to conceive of the built
domain as a totality and the first to propose a rational method for conceptual-
izing and realizing buildings. Moreover, it expressed a new Foucauldian episte-
mological configuration, which, extending across the discourses of architecture,
painting and sculpture, "resulted in the imposition of a new ideal of control
over the world and a transformation of relations between European man and
his productions."61
Of course, few really existing Renaissance cities achieved the aspirations
of striated territoriality evoked by the ideal cityscapes. Class boundaries were
rarely as neatly demarcated in space as Alberti and his tyrant might have liked.
Further, when it came to actual control of urban space, the elites sought to
asset their territorial supremacy over each other. In Renaissance Florence, for
example, patrician families, seeking to extend their territorial power within
the city, contested the ownership of private and public spaces. 62 The patron-
age of churches and convents was particularly sought after and their walls were
inscribed with family coats of arms and other patrimonial symbols as signs of
territorial possession. K. J. P Lowe argues that in a Florence "obsessed with own-
ership, display and boundaries," the Medici were the most effective practitioners
of territorial patronage and used such means throughout the quattrocento to
extended their territorial control outside of their immediate neighborhood of
S. Lorenzo. 63 However, once they had fallen from power many of their symbols
of hereditary family rule were erased by Soderini and over-coded with symbols
of republican rule. In the convent of Le Murate a votive wax statue of Lorenzo
the Magnificent was replaced by one of the Virgin Mary; and at the convent of
San Gallo, founded by Lorenzo, Soderini dedicated a chapel to his own family.
Painting the Prince

Perspective not only contributed to the Renaissance territorial imaginaty
by enabling the representation of ideal cosmopolitan cityscapes, it also gave
princes an ideological tool with which to promote their claims to territorial
sovereignty. The most striking example of this is the diptych of Federico da
Montefeltro the Duke of Urbino and his wife Battista Sforza by Piero della
Francesca (figure 8.2 and 8.3). 64 On the diptych's inner panels we see Federico
and Battista in profile. Battista's portrait has two notable features: first, her
face is very white like a funeral mask, alluding to her recent death in childbirth;
Figure 8.2 Portraits of Duke Federico da Montefeltro (1422-82) and Battista

Sforza, c.1465 (tempera on panel) by Francesca, Piero della (c.l415-92). Galleria
degli Uffizi, Florence, Italy/The Bridgeman Art Library. Italian. Out of copyright.
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
Figure 8.3 The Triumphs of Duke Federico da Montefeltro (1422-82) and

Battista Sforza, c.I465 (tempera on panel) by Francesca, Piero della (c.I415-92).
Galleria degli Uffizi, Florence, Italy/The Bridgeman Art Library. Italian. Out of
copyright.
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
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,
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
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.
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.
Mapping Territorial Boundaries

Another form of image used by Renaissance state authorities to promote and
legitimise their territoriality was the map. Deleuze and Guattari point out that
the State-thought is constantly seeking to striate space. Now, in many ways, the
map is the instrument of striation par excellence. As Mark Monmonier points
out, maps are useful instruments for asserting claims to territorial sovereignty.
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
Renaissance mapping and cartography combined tradition with innovation.

The reception of Jacopo d'Angelo's Latin translation of Ptolemy's Geographia
in 1406 nicely captures this Janus faced looking back and reaching forward. 88
Although the dissemination of the Geographia would have widespread repercus-
sions, reaching beyond the obvious constituencies of geography and cosmology
into many branches of Renaissance knowledge, its publication did not imme-
diately render obsolete the medieval cartographic imaginary, based in the coor-
dinates of divine symbolism. 89 The rediscovery of the Geographia was initially
filtered through a scholastic discourse which ensured that "the modernization

of Ptolemy was complex, tentative and obscure." 9 For a start, the Geographia
appealed to churchmen interested in the traditional discourse of perspectiva.
The optical theorem that only the aspect of an object on an axis with the eye's
centre could be clearly observed, resonated in Ptolemy's instruction to map-
makers to view the part of the world to be mapped as if it were connected at its
centre to the centre of the viewer's eye by an abstract visual axis or perpendicu-
lar line. 91 The Geographia, argues Edgerton, reinforced rather than overturned
the traditional belief of Euclidean-based perspectiva that the perfect harmonies
and symmetries of geometry revealed the plan of the universe as designed by
God. 92 Renaissance Europe retained the belief that geometric patterns found in
orthogonal relationships symbolized the ordered perfection of God's universe.
Ptolemaic scientific cartography did not dispel these notions, but reinforced
faith in the divine mission of Christianity. Indeed, the cartographic grid became
a talisman of Christian authority. 93 However, the Geographia did inspire new
cartographic techniques. Ptolemy showed how to map places in terms of lon-
gitude and latitude and gave cartographers the ability to preserve the correct
proportion of small areas to the whole earth. His method unified within one
geometrical space, two mapping techniques: chorography which mapped small
areas using pictorial elements and geography which produced maps of the world
showing features by lines and dots.
The striating longitude and latitude grid system of the Geographia (figure 8.5)
which "depended on imagining the globe not as amorphous topography but as a
homogeneous surface ruled by a uniform geometric grid" would, as we shall see
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
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.
cartographers sought inspiration from the more realistic ground-view images

of towns in paintings like Lorenzetti's Siena in Good Government or Benedetto
Bonfigli's Perugia in the chapel of the Palazzo dei Priori (1454). Cartographers
combined realism with perspective to construct bird's-eye views of cities of
striking accuracy. Such detailed realism characterized the engravings of Pisa,
Florence, Rome, and Constantinople made by Francesco Rosselli's workshop
in Florence. One of the most famous of Rosselli's maps is the Map with Chain
(1482), which depicts Florence as seen from the hills to the south-west. This
map is an intriguing example of the representation of Renaissance territoriality
within the regime of perspective, since Rosselli purposely included the person
of the artist-surveyor, the agent of territorialization, drawing up the plan in
the bottom right hand corner. Territoriality is being produced by knowledge.
This simple self-referential motif embodies the ideological claim of the modern
perspective regime that man is master and owner of all that he surveys. Yet, in
so far as the walls separating the city from the contado are the most prominent
territorial boundaries, the image also reflects the characteristic center-periphery
ordering of Renaissance territoriality. Another feted practitioner of topography
was Jacopo de' Barbari who, in 1500, produced a map of Venice that P. D. A.
Harvey calls "a masterpiece of the vision and skill of the Italian Renaissance." 96
To achieve the single perspective required by a bird's-eye view, Barbari
combined a mosaic of individual sketches within the framework of an existing

plan ofVenice, which had been adjusted to achieve the uniform foreshortening.
Through his mastery of painterly techniques, Barbari was also able to emphasize
the city's great size, its wealth and its power. Leonardo da Vinci also drew sev-
eral bird 's-eye maps of towns. During the 1503 war between Florence and Pisa,
Machiavelli, as Florence's Secretary of State for War, commissioned Leonardo
as a military architect to draw up an embanking scheme to divert the course of
the Arno to cut Pis a off from the sea. This map was not only drawn to scale,
but also depicted the surrounding countryside as a flattened projection as seen
from above. It is possible that Machiavelli commissioned Leonardo after seeing
the latter's bird's-eye plan of lmola, which the artist had presented to Cesare
Borgia in 1502. In this map the plans of the buildings are drawn in proportion
and the monuments remain to scale. Eight compass lines radiate out from the
centre of the city to the circumference of the map's frame to enable accurate
plotting of distances. Leonardo's maps showed how, by drawing to scale and
supplanting pictorial imagery for outline plans, cartography could be used to
promote landscape as both an economic resource and as an arena for military
strategy and tactics. 97
A second type of topographical map produced during the Renaissance was
the district or regional map of a small area. State authorities began commis-
sioning these as administrative tools in the quattrocento and they had become
widespread by the end of the sixteenth century. Perhaps aware of Machiavelli's
insistence that "[t]he prince who lacks expertise in topography lacks the first
quality needed by a general, because it teaches how to find the enemy, to choose
encampments, to lead armies, to plan battles, and to besiege towns with advan-
tage," many of these maps were used as aids to military strategic planning. 98
Several surviving fifteenth century maps provide "a graphic guide to the theatre
of war at the time of the first Venetian conquests of the terrrafirma." 99 During
the war between Milan and Venice (1437-41) two maps were made ofLombardy
showing several items of military significance, such as walled towns and bridges
and the Fosse Bergamasca boundary ditch between Milan and Bergamo. In the
fifteenth century, district maps of Verona, Padua, Parma, and Brescia were also
commissioned. A substantial Venetian mapping project was initiated in 1460
when the Council of Ten requested that the governors of territories, cites, and
castles under Venetian rule should commission maps and surveys and then send
them to Venice. Several of these maps survive including those made of Padua
(1465), Brescia (1469-70), and Verona (1479-80). 100 There is also a 1496-99
military map of the Venetian terrafirma that highlights its territorial fortifica-
tions. These maps were used to "define borders,. to aid in water and lagoon
management, to illustrate and clarify ambassadorial dispatches, for defense and
fortress designs, and to resolve disputes in court cases." 101 Although district
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.
I
I
I
I
I
I
I
I
I
I
I
I
I
I
.I
II
II
I
I
I
I
I
I
I
I
I
I
I
I
I
I
I
I
I
I
I
I
I
I
I
I
I
I
I
I
I
I
CHAPTER 9
The Renaissance Territorialization of

International Society
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
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.
The Invention of America and the European

Territorialization of the New World
The thesis that America was invented rather than discovered, associated with
the pioneering work of Edmundo O'Gorman, provides a useful heuristic model
with which to address the Renaissance territorialization of international society.
The political territorialization of the new world was deeply implicated in the
epistemological invention of America. This process profoundly changed man's
perception of his being-in-space, for it broke with the medieval conception of
the orbis terrarum as a cosmic jail and promoted a new ideal of sovereign man as
an agent capable of fashioning his world. For O'Gorman, discovery and inven-
tion are different acts. One discovers by finding something whose essence was
already known, such as a new planet. Invention by contrast, denotes the act of
bringing into existence a new category of being, that is the planets themselves.
The weight of documentary evidence indicates not only that Columbus set sail
fully intending to reach the western shores of Asia but also that throughout his
voyages he never wavered from the conviction that he had achieved this goal.
Nevertheless, Columbus scholarship from Oviedo to Morison has portrayed
Columbus as the discoverer of America by resorting to one of two hypotheses:
either Columbus was the instrument of a larger historical process of which he
Renaissance and International Society 171
was unaware, or he was an agent of chance. 3 However, argues O'Gorman, for

an act to have meaning it must have intention and it is logically nonsensical to
assert that Columbus could have discovered America without first showing that
he had the intention of doing so. In order to have discovered American he would
have had to have been aware of the specific being of the land which he found,
that is a continent named America. Thus "when we are told that Columbus
revealed the being of an object entirely different from the one with which he
endowed it, we are actually being asked to believe that the object itself revealed
its secret and hidden being at the moment when Columbus perceived it.'>4 This
argument not only discounts Columbus' own purposes and opinions, but also
makes man the agent of intentions supposedly present in some inanimate object.
For O'Gorman, the root of the problem lies in the assumption of Western meta-
physics that all things have an immutable Platonic essence, that the being of
things is fixed in nature and transcends time and space. This substantialist con-
ception of reality fails to recognize that the being (not existence) of a thing
is merely the meaning or significance it is given within an overall framework
of reality accepted as truth at any particular historical moment, "the being of
things is not something that they contain within themselves, but something
that is assigned or granted to them." 5 The error of the discovery thesis, then, is
to assume that the lump of cosmic matter that we now know as the American
continent has always been such, rather than only becoming America when this
meaning was given to it. America is not a thing in itself, an a priori essence, but
an idea, the product of a historical process of invention.
The invention of America was part of a widespread re-assessment of man's
place in the world, precipitated by the early voyages of discovery, which under-
mined many of the assumptions of the medieval Christian geographical imag-
inary. 6 W. G. L. Randles argues that the empirical evidence of the discoveries
undermined a clever synthesis of the medieval geographical imaginary. This had
managed to combine the Greek proposition of a spherical earth with the biblical
image of a flat earth, by positing a vast surface disproportion between the tiny
habitable oecumene and the infinitely vast surface of the sphere. This synthesis
began to come apart as the Portuguese voyaged along the African coast south of
the Equator. Sacrobosco's hypothesis of the existence of uninhabitable zones col-
lapsed and the distinct possibility emerged that humans ignorant of God's mes-
sage lived in antipodal lands. The adventurer Duarte Pacheco Pereira reported
that "under this equinoxialline there are many people, as we have seen in prac-
tice; and as experience is mother of everything, it is through it that we have come
to know the whole truth." 7 These travelers' accounts were integrated into official
cosmologies such as Enciso's Suma de geografia (1519). Between roughly 1480
and 1520 the surface of the oecumene almost quadrupled, all of its constituent
parts were proven to be accessible, and most appeared to be habitable. In 1515
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
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
the oecumene (as for Columbus) or whether it was independent anti-oecumene.

In Mundus Novus Vespucci favors the second option: "We recognised that this
land was a continent and not an island because its coast extended for a consid-
erable distance without enclosing it and because it was filled with an infinite
number of inhabitants." 19 Vespucci, argues O'Gorman, was correct to iden-
tify the discovered lands as new because they were previously unknown and
their presence refuted the traditional belief that the southern hemisphere was
entirely covered by sea. Not only did Vespucci conceive of the new lands as a
different geographical entity to the three parts (Europe, Asia and Africa) of the
orbis terrarium, but, having seen that they were inhabited, he identified them
as a new world in the heretical sense of an orbis alterius, distinct from the orbis
terrarum assigned to man by God. Vespucci's view that he had sailed to the
fourth part of the world was, claims Randles, derived from Isidore de Seville's
Etymologiarum, "Outside of these three parts of the world, there exists a fourth,
beyond in the Ocean in a southerly direction, a region which is unknown to
us due to the fieriness of the sun, at the interior limits of which it is reported
live the antipodes of the fable." 20 Because Vespucci reverted to the traditional
concept of the orbis alterius to identify the new lands, America had not yet
been invented. Nevertheless, his voyage was the "empirical determinant that
opened up the possibility of explaining the new-found lands in a way that
contradicted the accepted picture of the world." 21 Later in the Lettera, Vespucci
would affirm that the new lands neither belonged to Asia (and thus the orbis
terrarum) nor were they an orbis alterius. Rather they constituted a previously
unknown geographical unity, "a barrier running north and south through both
hemispheres and lying across the Ocean between Europe and Asia, separate
and distinct from the Island of the Earth." 22
It was left to Waldseemiiller in the Cosmographiae to assign the being of
America to this unforeseen land barrier. Summarizing the current state of cos-
mographical knowledge, Waldseemiiller began by noting that the sphere of
the earth is infinitesimally small compared to the size of the celestial globe.
However, whereas the ancients had knowledge of about one quarter of the
earth's sphere, the inhabited Island of the Earth, modern geographical knowl-
edge recognizes that
a fourth part has been discovered by Amerigo Vespucci (...). Inasmuch as

both Europe and Asia received their names from women, I see no reason
why anyone should justly object to calling this part Amerige, i.e., the land
of Amerigo, or America, after Amerigo, its discoverer, a man of great abil-
ity.... Thus the earth is now known to be divided into four parts. The first
three parts are continents, while the fourth part is an island, inasmuch as it
is found to be surrounded on all sides by the ocean. 23
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
Inter Caetera, Territoriality, and Sovereignty

The voyages of discovery underpinned a new geographical imaginary that, echo-
ing the conquest of cosmological space heralded by Ficino and Pico, declared the
sovereignty of man over the world's spaces. However, the voyages of discovery
were not primarily motivated by a desire to advance geographical knowledge but
by religious, economic, and political interests. These interests would determine
how the naked ontological presence of these newly encountered lands would be
integrated within the European territorial imaginary. The "discoveries" would
project the dynamics of territorialization onto spaces well beyond the boundar-
ies of those European states nestled within the traditional orbis terra rum.
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
Canary Islands ..." 29 At the request of Alfonso V of Portugal, Alcac;:ovas-Toledo

had been approved and confirmed by the "apostolic authority" of Pope Sixtus
IV in the bull Aeterni Regis (June 21 1481). 30 Worried that Joao intended to seek
another papal bull that would cede all Castilian claims derived from Columbus'
voyage to Portugal, Ferdinand and Isabel published Columbus' First Letter from
America as a declaration of their legal entitlement to the Indies. They argued
that the Portuguese claim to any territories discovered beyond Guinea was too
vague to be legally binding and denied that this undetermined beyond could
include the lands discovered by Columbus. However, to avoid open conflict
with Portugal they sought to have their position recognized in law and so turned
to the Holy See in its capacity as Christendom's international court of appeal.
The new incumbent, Alexander VI, Cardinal Rodrigo Borgia was a Spanish ally
and the Spanish sovereigns were confident that subsequent papal bulls would
rule in their favor. They were not to be disappointed.
The two bulls Inter Caetera and Eximiae Devotionis which Alexander issued
on May 3 1493 certainly favored Castile. Inter Caetera, while safeguarding pre-
vious Portuguese concessions, granted to Castile in perpetuity all "known and
unknown, discovered and to be discovered mainlands and islands" including
any "lordships, cities, castles, places, villages, rights, and jurisdictions" as long
as they were not already owned by other Christian princes. Eximiae Devotionis
reinforced these privileges by specifying that the Castilian remit extended over
the western part of the Ocean Sea and was of the same order as the rights the
Portuguese had over parts of Africa, Guinea, and the Gold Mine. 31 A second
Inter Caetera, issued on May 4, allocated these privileges to the Spanish over all
islands and lands one hundred leagues west of the Azores. 32
Inter Caetera reveals much about the nature of territorialization in this early
stage of the expansion of international society. First, it makes explicit the cor-
relation between internal and external territorialization. As Adam Watson has
noted, the initial impetus to expand outward from Europe arose from the fusion
of the turbulent culture of Latin Christendom-with its drives for crusading,
honor, and material gain-with the technologies and resources available to the
centralizing territorial states. The overseas expansion served as an outlet for, a
displacement of, drives to expand and acquire which, had they been allowed
to fester within the confines of European space, would have precipitated disas-
trous conflicts between the fledgling dynastic powers. The displacement of con-
flict to the new colonial territories allowed the European states to establish an
international society within Europe based on the principles of sovereignty and
juridical independence and then to extend them globally in the wake of their
imperial conquests. 33 Pope Alexander stated that the most important task of
current times is that "the Catholic faith and the Christian religion be exalted
and everywhere increased and spread, that the health of souls be cared for, and
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
Inter Caetera simultaneously unified and legitimized within the discourse of

Christian mission the reconquista and the conquista (figure 9.1).
Columbus reasserted this formal conjuncture ofinternally and externally pro-
jected territorialization on several occasions. On his arrival in what he assumed
was the Indies he declared, "there I found very many islands filled with people
innumerable, and of them I have taken possession for their Highnesses by proc-
lamation made and with the royal standard unfurled." 35 As Anthony Pagden
observes this ritual of possession alluded to the raising of the royal standard over
the Alhambra following the surrender of Granada. Columbus claimed that it
was the fact of this victory over their internal enemies, which he witnessed, that
enabled the sovereigns to authorize his voyage:
[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
The procedures enabling the internal territorialization of Castile, which required

Christianity to overcode the signs of the previous Islamic culture, were repli-
cated during the external territorialization of the new world. Lest there be ny
doubt as to the correspondence between internal and external territorializati n,
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
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.
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
Another hypothesis is that Alexander's division of the new-found lands between

the crowns of Portugal and Spain was an act of feudal investiture. This infeu-
dation thesis has, however, been rejected by Luis Weckmann-Muiioz because
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
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
Hope in 1488.54 Castile's response was to sponsor Columbus's expedition to the

west as a way to preempt its rival and negotiate a commercial monopoly with
the mainland Asians before the Portuguese arrived by the southern route. Henri
Vignaud famously rejected the thesis that the Spanish intended to reach the
Asia mainland, insisting that their aims were limited to reaching certain islands
in the Atlantic. 55 However, the presence of the term tierra firme in these docu-
ments does suggest that the objective was to reach the fabled cities of the Asian
mainland. Ferdinand and Isabel wrote that they were commissioning Columbus
to go "to the region of India, by way of the Ocean Sea." 56
This raises another intriguing question. If tierra firme refers to the Asian
mainland, how could Ferdinand and Isabella have expected to acquire and pos-
sess land that, presumably, already lay under the sovereignty of the Chinese rul-
ers? Helen Nader suggests that the Spanish intended to establish fortified trading
posts on the Asian coasts in accordance with the model already established by
the Portuguese, who financed their Atlantic ventures as royal monopolies and
claimed sovereignty over their trading posts. The most important Portuguese
trading post, Sao Jorge da Mina, was established in 1480 with the permission
of local West African rulers. 57 The Capitulations clearly stated that Columbus,
as "admiral, viceroy, and governor," was a royal agent, invested with the author-
ity to take possession of and to govern land and seas that he added to the royal
dominions on their behalf. Evidently the Castilian monarchs sought to extend
their sovereignty to the overseas islands and main-lands. However, in appoint-
ing Columbus, a foreigner, as a hereditary admiral, Ferdinand and Isabel came
up against a constitutional barrier. Castilian law prohibited monarchs from per-
manently giving away or selling any part of the crown's military or juridical
functions as hereditary offices. Any such actions would have violated a funda-
mental tenet of monarchical government that had "developed in Europe on the
premise that the royal domain belonged to the royal family as a function of the
monarch's judicial and military responsibilities, carried out for the welfare of
the entire realm." 58 In order to circumvent this obstacle, the Castilian royal sec-
retary Fernan Alvarez de Toledo drafted a preface to the agreements stating that
the monarchs were acting of their own free will and added a postscript confirm-
ing the royal intention to make these grants in perpetuity as hereditary private
possessions. He justified this permanent alienation of royal offices and income
with arguments from philosophy, Roman law, and scripture. 59
The question of how to take legitimate possession of the newly discovered
lands also exercised the discoverers themselves. The Crowns had issued highly
formalized general instructions for its representatives taking possession of lands:
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
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
In the following account, of Columbus taking possession of the Indian island

of Guanahani, it appears that while he did not enact any of the established sym-
bolic rituals that physically marked the land, such as placing stones, cutting
grass, raising mounds or pillars, or erecting crosses, he did perform the required
speech acts of proclamation and naming.
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
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
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
He steered east to a cape which he called Be/prado, a distance of four leagues,

and from there to the southeast is the mountain which he called Monte de
Plata, and he says it is eight leagues. From cape Be/prado east by south is the
cape he called del Angel. ... From Cabo del Angel four leagues in the same
direction is a point which he called the Punta Seca, then six leagues farther is
the cape which he called Redondo ... 68
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
Tordesillas and the Cartographic Representation

of International Society
The relative importance of fideistic and commercial motivations for the
Renaissance expansion of international society will probably never be resolved.
For Nader, because the papal decrees rested legal tide to islands and continents
on the imperative to convert the native people to Christianity, the Spanish appeal
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
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
terrain or represented symbolically on a map, between two or more political

or administrative bodies: signories, dioceses, juridical, or administrative zones,
state boundaries. Their immutability was often reinforced by being established
along divinely designated natural physical demarcations, such as mountain
ranges or coastal littorals, and as they changed so geographical representations
changed. A frontier, by contrast, separated two societies or groups whose stance
toward one another was generally hostile; it was often marked by a visible mate-
rial military presence, a garrison, or fortress, which, because it could be captured
or destroyed, meant that the frontier advanced and retreated in space. "While
the limit is immobile the frontier is movable." 80 The Tordesillas division of the
world, which was anterior to most of the discoveries, effectively transformed a
frontier zone between Spain and Portugal into an absolute limit, establishing
their respective areas of present and future domination.
This process, this territorialization of the world, known and unknown, phys-
ical and representational, entailed a significant shift in man's relationship to the
sea. Recall that in the medieval geopolitical imaginary the Ocean was an empty
void that could neither be possessed nor made subject to the exercise of sover-
eignty. To some extent this attitude still prevailed at the end of the fifteenth
century. Frank Lestringant points out that because the ocean was an abstract
place devoid of shape, relief, and color it was natural that the Tordesillas line
of demarcation "was in the beginning traced across the indefinite space of the
seas." 81 The sea, Deleuze and Guattari's "espace lisse par excellence," the arche-
type of all smooth space, was a blank canvas on which the fantasies of the impe-
rial imagination could run free. Immersed in this space the Renaissance mind
reacted with a mixture of wonder and respect. 82 The Spanish cosmographer
Pedro Medina considered the crossing of an ocean to be a wondrous achieve-
ment because it traced a course across "a thing so vague and spacious ... where
there is neither path nor trace." 83 However, as with all smooth spaces the sea was
soon to be exposed to the forces of striation. Medina taught seafarers the new art
of astronomical navigation and was a pioneer in the "politics of science" which
territorialized and striated the sea. Maritime space became enclosed within the
striations of the cartographic grid, as technicians of space combined bearings
obtained by astronomical calculations and the plotting of locations within
meridians and parallels. The Capitulations, writes O'Gorman, show a "desire
on the part of the Crown to exercise an act of sovereignty on the Ocean ... the~\
contain an express declaration in favor of Spanish seigniory and lordship over
the Ocean, which was ... something unusual if not unprecedented." 84 The forces
of striation were in the ascendant.
The striation of the sea was only one role that cartography would play in
the invention of the spaces of Renaissance international society (figure 9.2).
Renaissance cartography not only enabled the intellectual visualization of land
Figure 9.2 Credit: Copy of Monumenta Cartographia, 1502 (color litho) by

Royal Geographical Society, London, UK/The Bridgeman Art Library.
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
ownership, which reaffirm the physical acts of possession enacted by explorers

underneath the unfurled banners of their sovereigns. Just as these acts of territo-
rial possession were recorded and legitimized in legal documents, so maps were
covered in script confirming the symbolic messages of territorialization. Next to
the image of the land that today denotes Brazil the author of the Cantina map
affirms that this territory was "found by Pedro Alvares Cabral, a nobleman of
the King of Portugal," while the islands of the West Indies are marked as the
"Antilles of the King of Castille" (Has antilhas Rey de castella), "discovered by
Columbus, who is Admiral of them." 87 In the Cosmographiae, Waldseemiiller
explained that "[a]s farmers usually mark off and divide their farms by bound-
ary lines, so it has been our endeavour to mark the chief countries of the world
by the emblems of their rulers." Thus "the emblems of those sovereigns" were
placed over "the fourth division of the earth, discovered by the kings of Castile
and Portugal." 88 Symbols of political conquest were often accompanied by signs
symbolizing the religious mission. For example, on the Juan de la Cosa world
map (c.1500) the compass rose situated on the Tropic of Cancer embraces the
Holy Family, while thrust into the core of the dense, dark, heavy mass of the
terra incognita is an image of Columbus as Christoferrens, bearing the Christ
child into the unknown world.
These early maps of discovery did not just communicate the international
politics of modern territoriality through iconography. At a formal level they
expressed and contributed to the transformation of man's being-in-space enabled
by perspective and its rationalization of space. Edgerton states that Alexander's
gesture of demarcation was made on a mappa-mundi but it is probable that
maps derived from Ptolemy's Geographia were also used during the formula-
tion of Inter caetera and the negotiations leading to Tordesillas. The Geographia
presented a world ordered by geometrical coordinates; Ptolemy's organizing sys-
tem "depended on imagining the globe not as amorphous topography but as
a homogeneous surface ruled by a uniform geometric grid." 89 By calling on
Ptolemy's mapping techniques, which made possible the plotting of coordinates
on intersecting perpendicular axes, the cartographer was able to combine the
local surveys of the new lands made by the European sailors and the spaces of
the known world into a synthetic whole. The Geographia signaled the end of
the Christian symbolism of the T-0 map and the sanctified spatial hierarchies
which had structured the representation of the Christian oecumene. From the
late-fifteenth-century cartography would fix the spaces and boundaries of inter-
national society within a new conception of abstract, geometric, and homoge-
neous geographic space. 90
However, as we have seen, Renaissance discourses of space tended to retain
some imprints of the medieval spatial imaginary. Cartography was no different
and scholastic geographies were not entirely erased from maps until the early
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.
Nevertheless if, as Walter Mignolo claims, an important aspect of colonial-

ism is the struggle between competing semiotic systems and cultural modes of
representation, then the gridded map served as an effective instrument of ter-
ritorialization, since it effectively silenced Amerindian cartographic traditions,
reducing them to barely legible imprints on the European maps. 97 European
territorial representations filled out the spatial boundaries of the new world
with meaning, memory, and identity; they were discourses of power and truth
which silenced any alternative Amerindian representations of these spaces. In
the mapping of America "European territorial representations (maps, descrip-
tions), helped by the printing press, silenced Amerindian ones, which were never
printed during the colonial period, producing the effect that the former were
more appropriate or truthful descriptions of space than the latter." 98
However, these European maps did not only erase the spatial imaginary of
the Amerindian. They were also representations of space which reinforced the
notion that territoriality in the modern world should and could be ordered in
terms of clearly demarcated and isolated parcels of sovereign space. They were,
like all the representations of space discussed in this book, instruments for the
inscription of identity and difference in space that defined the cosmopolitan
or modern ideal of territoriality. They were part of a modern spatial imaginary
which, born out of the Renaissance challenge to the hierarchical Christian medi-
eval spatial episteme of above and below, made possible the territorial regime of
inside and outside upon which the international relations of anarchy have been
grounded ever since.
CHAPTER 10
Cone Iusion: Territoriality,

the Renaissance, and
International Relations
J orge Luis Borges' enchanting fragment "On Exactitude in Science" captures

succinctly the claim that our ideas about territoriality, and in particular
the territorial state, are subject to the requirements of representation and
imagination. 1 Purporting to be part of a travel record of one seventeenth century
Suarez Miranda, Borges' textual fragment exposes the hubris that accompanies
any attempt to provide a true, undistorted, and objective representation of space.
In a certain Empire, reports Miranda, the practice of cartography had achieved
such a degree of perfection that the map of a province occupied an entire city
and a map of the empire a whole province. Taking this process to its logical end
the "Cartographers Guilds struck a Map of the Empire whose size was that of
the Empire, and which coincided point for point with it." However, their suc-
cessors, who were less enamored with such ambitions and realized that "the vast
Map was Useless," abandoned the map to the vagaries of the seasons, and today
the only evidence of its existence are a few tattered remains scattered across the
desert region. Borges' parable denies the possibility that we can ever achieve
some true, objective, or disinterested representation of territory. And yet, most
International Relations theory is underpinned by the assumption, sometimes
explicit but more often implicit, that the territorial state is a-historical, primor-
dial, and universal. This conception of state territoriality, the territorial a priori,
assumes that all states are characterized by physical extension in space, that they
occupy a clearly defined place on the earth's surface, and that they have borders
that clearly differentiate inside from outside and self from others.
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
One of the implications of stressing the representational or imaginary nature

of territoriality has been to prioritize its cultural dimensions. In so far as terri-
toriality is produced in various discourses of space, territorial imaginaries are
made manifest in a plethora of written and pictorial cultural texts. If we con-
tinue to adhere to the positivist goal of constructing scientific theories that sat-
isfy Popper's criteria of verification or falsification, we will miss the constitutive
dimension of these cultural texts. Thus this work has looked to hermeneutic or
interpretative methodological tools prevalent in the humanities. For example,
the evolution of perspective in painting was identified as an integral component
of the Renaissance territorial imaginary; for not only did it promote a general
sense of man as the master of space but it also gave various political authori-
ties, notably princes and city-states, the means with which to express and legiti-
mize their aspirations to territorial sovereignty. The implication that Piero della
Francesca's portrait of Federico da Montelfeltro is as significant as Machiavelli's
Prince for understanding Renaissance international politics may not convince
many dyed-in-the-wool social scientists. Nevertheless, it is in keeping with the
tenet of the "aesthetic turn" within International Relations that "the political"
is constituted, legitimised and resisted in the spaces of representation. 2 At least it
is hoped that this research has justified taking an interdisciplinary approach to
the subject matter of international politics. Thinking about space requires that
we explore areas of knowledge outside of International Relations' traditional
constituency of politics, sociology, economics, and law. The political resolu-
tion of space in terms of sovereign-territoriality cannot be fully accounted for
unless one explores coeval representations of space produced in discourses such
as cosmology, art theory, urbanism, cartography, and geography and expressed
in cultural commodities such as maps, paintings, and buildings.
There are important political implications of conceiving of territoriality, and
specifically the territorial state, not as some primordial or universal material fact
but rather as a historically and culturally constituted form of representation or
imaginary. The first is to acknowledge that the territorial state and the geopolit-
ical distribution of space it authorizes-what Michael Shapiro calls the "inter-
national imaginary"-is not only historically contingent but is also achieved
through violence. 3 All cultures have different experiences of places and spaces
and code onto them alternative ways of being. However, since the Renaissance
the expansion of the European world system, and the universalization of its
projects of capitalism, modernity and Enlightenment, has resulted in the over-
coding and erasure of indigenous conceptions and experiences of space. As the
discussion of the Renaissance territorialization of international society demon-
strated, the European appropriation and conversion of the "new world" was
orchestrated as much through the discursive production of a novel territorial
consciousness, as through acts of physical violence against its inhabitants. The
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
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
1 Introduction: Territoriality, Westphalia, and

International Relations
1. Kenneth N. Waltz, Theory of International Politics (Reading: Addison-Wesley,
1979).
2. 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.
3. Stephen D. Krasner, "Sovereignty: An Institutional Perspective," in The Elusive
State: International and Comparative Perspectives, ed. James A. Caporoso
(Newbury Park: Sage, 1989), pp. 69-96, at p. 92.
4. Krasner, "Sovereignty: An Institutional Perspective," p. 92.
5. Hans J. Morgenthau, Politics among Nations: The Struggle for Power and Peace,
6th ed., rev. Kenneth W. Thompson (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1985), p. 327.
6. Of course, the surface of the globe has never been neatly divided into sharply
differentiated sovereign territorial units, but has included many fuzzy or
porous territories, such as UN Protectorates, Imperial spheres of interest, man-
dates, trusteeships, and neutral zones. See Friedrich Kratochwil, "Of Systems,
Boundaries, and Territoriality: An Inquiry into the Formation of the State
System," World Politics, 39:1, 1986, pp. 27-52; and Daniel H. Deudney, "The
Philadelphian System: Sovereignty, Arms Control, and Balance of Power in the
American States-Union, Circa 1787-1861," International Organization, 49:2,
1995, pp. 191-228.
7. See Benno Teschke, The Myth of 1648: Class, Geopolitics and the Making of
Modern International Relations (London: Verso, 2003); and Andreas Osiander,
"Sovereignty, International Relations, and the Westphalian Myth," International
Organization, 55:2, 2001, pp. 251-87.
8. Leo Gross, "The Peace of Westphalia, 1648-1948," The American journal of
International Law, 42:1, 1948, pp. 20-41, at p. 28.
9. Gross, "The Peace ofWestphalia," pp. 28-29.
10. Michael J. Shapiro, "Textualising Global Politics," in James Der Derian and
Michael J. Shapiro (eds.), International/Intertextual Relations: Postmodern
202 Notes
Readings of World Politics (Lexington: Lexington Books, 1989), pp. 11-22, at

pp. 12-13.
11. Shapiro, "Textualising Global Politics," pp. 12-13.
12. Michel Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge, tr. A. M. Sheridan Smith
(London: Routledge, 1972), p. 49.
13. David Campbell, Writing Security: United States Foreign Policy and the Politics of
Identity (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1992), p. 4.
14. Evelyne Patlagean, "L'histoire de l'imaginaire," in Jacques Le Goff, Roger
Chartier, and Jacques Revel (eds.), La nouvelle histoire (Paris: CEPL, 1978),
pp. 249-69, at p. 249. My translation.
15. Donald J. Puchala, Theory and History in International Relations (New York and
London: Routledge, 2003), p. 7.
16. Martin Wight, Systems ofStates, ed. Hedley Bull (Leicester: Leicester University
Press, 1977), p. 113.
17. Wight, Systems ofStates, p. 151.
18. Wight, Systems ofStates, p. 113.
19. Stephen D. Krasner, "Westphalia and All That," in Judith Goldstein and Robert
0. Keohane (eds.), Ideas and Foreign Policy: Beliefs, Institutions and Political
Change (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1993), pp. 235-64. Subsequently
Krasner appears to have retracted this position. He writes that "the Peace of
Westphalia was a break point with the past" and that it marked a "transition
from Christendom to reason of state and balance of power as the basic cognitive
conceptualization informing the actual behavior of European rulers." Stephen
D. Krasner, Sovereignty: Organized Hypocrisy (Princeton: Princeton University
Press, 1999), p. 82.
20. Stephen Toulmin, Cosmopolis: The Hidden Agenda of Modernity (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1990).
21. Torbj~rn L. Knutsen, A History of International Relations Theory, 2nd ed.
(Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1987), pp. 36-54.
22. David Boucher, Political Theories of International Relations (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 1998), p. 95.
23. Garrett Mattingly, Renaissance Diplomacy (New York: Dover, 1988).
24. Mattingly, Renaissance Diplomacy, p. 64.
25. James DerDerian, On Diplomacy: A Genealogy ofWestern Estrangement (Oxford:
Basil Blackwell, 1991), p. 2.
26. Friedrich Meinecke, quoted in Der Derian, On Diplomacy, p. 103.
27. Der Derian, On Diplomacy, p. 110.
28. DerDerian, On Diplomacy, p. 106.
29. Der Derian, On Diplomacy, p. 102.
30. Christian Reus-Smit, The Moral Purpose of the State: Culture, Social Identity,
and Institutional Rationality in International Relations (Princeton: Princeton
University Press, 1999).
31. Reus-Smit, Moral Purpose ofthe State, p. 30.
Notes 203

3S. Reus-Smit, Moral Purpose ofthe State, pp. 79-80.
36. Justin Rosenberg, The Empire of Civil Society: A Critique ofthe Realist Theory of
International Relations (London: Verso, I994).
37. Mattingly quoted in Rosenberg, The Empire of Civil Society, p. 7S.
38. Rosenberg, The Empire of Civil Society, p. 75.
39. Hendrik Spruyt, The Sovereign State and Its Competitors: An Analysis of Systems
Change (Princeton: Princeton University Press, I994).
40. Spruyt, The Sovereign State, p. I8.
41. Spruyt, The Sovereign State, p. ISO.
2 International Relations, Political Theory, and

the Territorial State
I. Martin Wight, "Why Is There No International Theory," in Herbert Butterfield
and Martin Wight (eds.), Diplomatic Investigations (London: Allen and Unwin,
1966), pp. 17-34.
2. Martin Wight, Power Politics, ed. Hedley Bull and Carsten Holbraad (Leicester:
Leicester University Press, 1978), pp. 101 and 102.
3. Justin Rosenberg, The Empire of Civil Society: A Critique ofThe Realist Theory of
International Relations (London: Verso, 1994), p. 142.
4. Rosenberg, The Empire of Civil Society, p. 30.
S. Immanuel Kant, Critique ofPure Reason, tr. Norman Kemp Smith (Basingstoke:
Macmillan Press, 1929), p. 80.
6. Kant, Critique ofPure Reason, p. 6S.
7. S. Korner, Kant (London: Penguin Books, I990), p. 33.
8. Kant, Critique ofPure Reason, p. 68.
9. Kant, Critique ofPure Reason, p. 69.
10. Kant, Critique ofPure Reason, pp. 70-71.
11. John H. Herz, "The Rise and Demise of the Territorial State," in Herz, The
Nation-State and the Crisis of World Politics (New York: David McKay, 1976),
pp. 99-123; and Raymond Aron, Peace and War: A Theory of International
Relations, tr. R. Howard and A. Baker Fox (London: Weidenfield and Nicholson,
1966).
I2. Herz, "The Rise and Demise," pp. 100-101.
I3. John Herz, "The Territorial State Revisited: Reflections on the Future of the
Nation-State," in Herz, The Nation-State, pp. 226-S2, at p. 238.
I4. See Herz, "The Rise and Demise," pp. 108-14.
IS. Aron, Peace and War, p. I81.
16. Aron, Peace and War, p. 181.
I979).
18. Waltz, Theory ofInternational Politics, p. 131.
I9. Robert Gilpin, War and Change in World Politics (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1981), p. 1S.
204 Notes
20. Gilpin, War and Change, p. 122.

21. Gilpin, War and Change, p. 37.
22. Alexander Wendt, "Anarchy Is What States Make of It: The Social
Construction of Power Politics," reprinted in James Der Derian (ed.),
International Theory: Critical Investigations (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1995),
pp. 129-77, at p. 138.
23. Alexander Wendt, Social Theory ofinternational Politics (Cambridge: Cambridge
24. Wendt, Social Theory ofInternational Politics, p. 213.
27. Stephen D. Krasner, Sovereignty: Organized Hypocrisy (Princeton: Princeton
28. Krasner, Sovereignty: Organized Hypocrisy, p. 20.
29. Hedley Bull, The Anarchical Society: A Study ofOrder in World Politics (London:
Macmillan, 1977), pp. 8-9. Italics added.
30. Alan James, Sovereign Statehood: The Basis of International Society (London:
Allen and Unwin, 1986), p. 13.
31. James, Sovereign Statehood, p. 31.
32. Bull, The Anarchical Society, pp. 8-9.
33. See Cornelia Navari, "Introduction: The State as Contested Concept in
International Relations," in Navari (ed.), The Condition of States (Milton
Keynes: Open University Press, 1991), pp. 1-18.
34. Navari, "Introduction: The State as Contested Concept," all quotes from
pp. 12-15.
35. Hans Kelsen, General Theory ofLaw and State, tr. Anders Wedberg (New York:
Russell and Russell, 1945), pp. 210-21.
36. John Agnew and Stuart Corbridge, Mastering Space: Hegemony, Territory and
International Political Economy (London: Routledge, 1995), p. 89.
37. Agnew and Corbridge, Mastering Space, p. 100.
38. Cornelia Navari, "Knowledge, the State and the State of Nature," in Michael
Donelan (ed.), The Reason of States: A Study in International Political Theory
(London: Allen and Unwin, 1978), pp. 102-21, at p. 108.
39. Navari, "Knowledge, the State and the State of Nature," p. 119.
40. Zygmunt Bauman, Intimations ofPostmodernity (London: Routledge, 1992).
41. Bauman, Intimations ofPostmodernity, pp. 178-79.
42. On the inappropriate appropriations of Hobbes in International Relations, see
R. John Vincent, "The Hobbesian Tradition in Twentieth Century International
Thought," Millennium, 10:2, 1981, pp. 91-101.
43. Rob Walker, "Realism, Change and 'International Political Theory',"
International Studies Quarterly, 31:1, 1987, pp. 65-86.
44. Sheldon Wolin, "Hobbes: Political Society as a System of Rules," in Wolin,
Politics and Vtsion: Continuity and Innovation in Western Political Thought
(London: Allen and Unwin, 1961), pp. 239-85, at p. 243.
Notes 205
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.
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
the Twilight of Enlightenment (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1994),

pp. 49-67, at p. 59.
66. Anthony Giddens, The Nation-State and Violence: Volume Two ofa Contemporary
Critique ofHistorical Materialism (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1985), p. 47.
67. Giddens, The Nation-State and Violence, p. 49.
68. The typology of legal orders is in Weber, Economy and Society, Vol. I,
pp. 212-301.
69. BryanS. Turner, Max Weber: From History to Modernity (London: Routledge,
1992), p. 197.
70. On Weber's theory of the nation-state, see David Beetham, Max Weber and the
Theory ofModern Politics, 2nd ed. (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1985), pp. 119-47.
Quote at p. 122.
71. Max Weber, Gesammelte Politische Schriften, quoted in Beetham, Max
Weber and the Theory ofModern Politics, p. 125.
72. Max Weber, Gesammelte Politische Schriften, referred to in Beetham, Max Weber
and the Theory ofModern Politics, p. 129.
73. David Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity (Cambridge: Blackwell, 1989),
pp. 258-83.
74. Stephen Kern, The Culture of Time and Space (Cambridge, MA: Harvard
75. Ratzel, quoted in Kern, The Culture ofTime and Space I880-I9I8, p. 224.
76. Ratzel, quoted in Kern, The Culture of Time and Space I880-I9I8, p. 226.
77. For Weber's views on great powers, see Economy and Society, Vol. I,
pp. 910-911.
78. See Weber's article "Zwischen zwei Gesetzen," referenced in Beetham, Max
Weber and the Theory ofModern Politics, p. 137.
79. Michael Joseph Smith, Realist Thought from Weber to Kissinger (Baton
Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1986), p. 53.
80. Fred Halliday, "State and Society in International Relations: A Second
Agenda," Millennium, 16:2, 1987, pp. 215-29, esp. pp. 218-19.
81. Michael Mann, "The Autonomous Power of the State: Its Origins,
Mechanisms and Results," in John A. Hall (ed.) States in History (Oxford: Basil
Blackwell, 1986), pp. 109-36, at pp. 112 and 123.
82. Michael Mann, The Sources of Social Power, Volume Two: The Rise of
Classes and Nation-States, I760-I9I4 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1993), p. 56.
83. Theda Skocpol, "Bringing the State Back In: Strategies of Analysis in
Current Research," in Peter B. Evans, Dietrich Rueschemeyer, and Theda
Skocpol (eds.), Bringing the State Back In (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1985), pp. 3-37, at p. 8.
84. Theda Skocpol, States and Social Revolutions: A Comparative Analysis ofFrance,
Russia and China (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979), p. 32.
85. R. B. J. Walker, "Violence, Modernity, Silence: From Max Weber to International
Relations," in David Campbell and Mick Dillon (eds.), The Political Subject of
Violence (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1993), pp. 137-58.
Notes 207
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.
3 Theorizing Territoriality: Discourse, Culture, History

1. Robert David Sack, Human Territoriality: Its Theory and History (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1986), P 5.
2. Sack, Human Territoriality, p. 19.
3. Robert David Sack, Conceptions of Space in Social Thought: A Geographic
Perspective (London: Macmillan, 1980), pp. 40-41.
4. Sack, Human Territoriality, pp. 28-29.
5. David Campbell, Writing Security: United States Foreign Policy and the Politics of
Identity (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1992), p. 4.
6. Richard K. Ashley, "Untying the Sovereign State: A Double Reading of the
Anarchy Problematique," Millennium, 17:2, 1988, pp. 227-62.
7. David Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity (Cambridge: Blackwell, 1989),
p. 204.
8. David Harvey, "The Geopolitics of Capitalism," in Derek Gregory and John
Urry (eds.), Social Relations and Spatial Structures (Basingstoke: Macmillan,
1986), 128-63.
9. Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space, tr. D. Nicholson-Smith (Oxford:
Blackwell, 1991), at pp. 46 and 77.
208 Notes
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
theory of the social realm as a contrivance to preserve the differentiation of the

units and facilitate orderly relations between them; and are legitimized in terms
of the minimal social needs of the component units." (p. 146).
74. For example, the English Enclosure Acts served the capitalist machine by
deterritorialising dispossessed peasants, thereby establishing the conditions for
their reterritorialisation in the textile looms. See Deleuze and Guattari, Anti-
Oedipus, pp. 139-271, for the "universal history" of the three "social machines."
Universal history is an abstraction and the social machines, rather than describ-
ing particular societies, suggest a set of abstract figures in terms of which par-
ticular societies may be understood. Universal history is also anti-historicist;
the abstract machines are not stages of evolution with one machine resulting
from the effects of another. See Paul Patton, "Conceptual Politics and the War-
Machine in Mille Plateaux," SubStance, 13:3/4, 1984, pp. 62-80.
75. The social machines are literally machines, which have "an immobile
motor and undertakes a variety of interventions: flows are set apart, elements
are detached from a chain, and portions of the tasks to be performed are dis-
tributed. Coding the flows implies all these operations." Deleuze and Guattari,
Anti-Oedipus, p. 141.
78. Deleuze and Guattari, Anti-Oedipus, pp. 145-46.
79. Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, p. 453; and Anti-Oedipus, p. 139.
This resume of Deleuze and Guattari's discussion of capitalism is greatly sim-
plified. See Anti-Oedipus, pp. 222-71, for a fuller discussion.
80. Deleuze and Guattari, Anti-Oedipus, p. 252. They view schizophrenia as other to
capitalism, "its difference, its divergence and its death.," Anti-Oedipus, p. 246.
81. Eugene W. Holland, "Deterritorializing 'Deterritorialization': From the Anti-
Oedipus to A Thousand Plateaus," SubStance, 20:3, 1991, pp. 55-65, at p. 63.
82. Lefebvre, Production ofSpace, p. 235.
88. This summary of the colonization of lived by abstract space is taken from
Gregory, Geographical Imaginations, p. 401.
89. Lefebvre, Production ofSpace, pp. 302 and 286.
4 Hierarchy, Order, and Space in the Medieval World

1979), p. 88.
2. Cassirer, The Myth ofthe State, p. 131.
212 Notes
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.
5 Christendom, Hierarchy, and Medieval

Political Discourse
1. The best introduction to these debates is Jean Riviere, Le probleme deL' eglise et
deL' etat au temps de Philippe LeBel (Louvain: Spicilegium Sacrum Louvaniense,
1926), esp. pp. 2-60. See also Brian Tierney, The Crisis of Church and State
1050-1300 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press [in association with the
Medieval Academy of America], 1988), pp. 33-95. Tierney provides an excel-
lent selection of abridged primary source material.
2. The classic study is Walter Ullman, Medieval Papa/ism: The Political Theories of
the Medieval Canonists (London: Methuen, 1949).
3. Gratian, Distinctiones, 22:i (c. 1140), in Tierney, The Crisis of Church and State,
p. 119.
216 Notes
4. See on this image, and other mmratures illustrating editions of Gratian's

Decretum, Anthony Melnikas, The Corpus of the Miniatures in the Manuscripts
of Decretum Gratiani: Vol. I (Rome: Studia Gratiana XVI, 1975), pp. 24-62.
My discussion of the Skrziczick miniature draws heavily on Melnikas.
5. Boniface VII, Unam Sanctam (November 1302). Latin version in Corpus
Juris Canonici, II, ed. Aemilius Friedberg (Graz: Academische Druck-U.
Verlagsanstalt, 1959), col. 1245-46. English translation in Tierney, The Crisis
of Church and State 1050-1300, pp. 188-89.
6. Boniface VII, Unam Sanctam, p. 188.
7. Gerhart B. Ladner, ''Aspects of Mediaeval Thought on Church and State,"
reprinted in Ladner, Images and Ideas in the Middle Ages: Selected Studies in
History and Art, Vol. II (Roma: Edizioni di Storia e Letteratura, 1983),
pp. 435-55, at p. 447. Ladner observes that the Augustinian tradition between
the fifth and late eleventh century entertained a functional concept of the state:
"states are not communities or territories, but forms and functions of just gov-
ernment in the mixed condition in which the City of God finds itself on this
earth." p. 437.
8. Quoted in Ladner, ''Aspects of Mediaeval Thought on Church and State,"
p. 439.
9. Ladner, "Aspects of Mediaeval Thought on Church and State," p. 446.
10. Gerhart B. Ladner, "The Concepts of 'Ecclesia' and 'Christianitas' and their
relation to the idea of Papal 'Plenitudo Potestatis' from Gregory VII to Boniface
VIII," reprinted in Ladner, Images and Ideas, pp. 487-515.
11. The term Ecclesia is central to medieval theocratic thought, but the meaning
is somewhat slippery. Ladner explains that with the increased emphasis on the
doctrine of papal primacy from Gregory VII onwards, the universal church
(ecclesia universalis) became increasingly identified with the Roman church
(Romana ecclesia). "The terms Ecclesia and Ecclesia Romana thus appear to coa-
lesce into one concept comprising the Church both as an institution, that is as
an essentially clerical 'corporation', and as the community of all the faithful,
the Body of Christ. It was, perhaps, the formation of a 'corporational'-institu-
tional aspect of the concept of the Church which gave increasing importance to
the concept of Christian 'temporal' society (Christianitas, populus Christianus,
politia or respublica Christiana), not simply identical with the Church." Ladner,
"Aspects of Mediaeval Thought on Church and State," pp. 444-45.
12. Michael Wilks, The Problem of Sovereignty in the Later Middle Ages: The Papal
Monarchy with Augustin us Triumphus and the Publicists (Cambridge: Cambridge
13. Wilks, The Problem ofSovereignty, p. 28.
14. Quoted in Wilks, The Problem ofSovereignty, p. 58.
15. Ullman, Medieval Papa/ism, p. 8.
16. "Ullman's contention that the mediaeval belief in the superiority of anima over
corpus (the primacy of the spiritual) must lead to the doctrine of direct temporal
power of the Pope, is not borne out by the sources." Ladner, "The Concepts of
'Ecclesia' and 'Christianitas'," fn. 32 on p. 495.
Notes 217
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
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:
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.
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
108. Original Latin version of Tractatus de Potestate Regia et Papali (1302-3) in

Dom Jean Leclercq, jean de Paris et l'ecclesiologie du XIIIe siecle (Paris: Librairie
Philsophique, J. Vrin, 1942), pp. 171-260. English translation is John of Paris,
On Royal and Papal Power, tr. Arthur P. Monahan (New York: Columbia
University Press, 1974). The best overview of the Tractatus is Riviere, Le
probleme de l'eglise et de l'etat, pp. 281-300.
109. John of Paris, On Royal and Papal Power, pp. 1-2.
110. John of Paris, On Royal and Papal Power, p. 4.
111. John of Paris, On Royal and Papal Power, pp. 7-8. John, like Aquinas, consid-
ered kingship, if possible mixed with aristocracy and democracy, to be the best
form of government.
112. John of Paris, On Royal and Papal Power, pp. 13-14.
113. John of Paris, On Royal and Papal Power, p. 15 (Tractatus de Po testate, p. 181).
115. See J. P. Canning, "Introduction: Politics, Institutions and Ideas, c. 1150-
c.1450," to Cambridge History of Medieval Political Thought, pp. 341-66, at
p. 363.
116. The Donation was a Carolingian forgery based on the Legenda sancti Silvestri
(Legend of St Sylvester 480-90). See J. P. Kirsch, "Donation of Constantine,"
The Catholic Encyclopedia, Volume V (New York: Robert Appleton Company,
1909).
120. Riviere, Le probleme del'eglise et del' etat, pp. 272-307.
121. Ernst H. Kantorowicz, "Pro Patria Mori in Medieval Political Thought," in
Kantorowicz, Selected Studies, pp. 308-24.
122. Kantorowicz, "Pro Patria Mori, p. 312.
123. Kantorowicz, "Pro Patria Mori, pp. 314-15.
6 The Renaissance Critique of Hierarchy

1. The exception is Garrett Mattingly, Renaissance Diplomacy (New York: Dover,
1955).
2. Wallace K Ferguson, The Renaissance in Historical Thought: Five Centuries of
Interpretation (Cambridge, MA: The Riverside Press, 1948); also Ferguson,
"The Reinterpretation of the Renaissance," (1956), reprinted in Wallace
K. Ferguson, Renaissance Studies (London, Ontario: University of Western
Ontario, 1963), pp. 17-30. See also Johan Huizinga, "The Problem of the
Renaissance" (1920) in Huizinga, Men and Ideas: History, the Middle Ages, the
Renaissance, tr. J. S. Holmes and H. van Marie (New York: Meridian Books,
1959), pp. 243-87.
3. Erwin Panofsky, Renaissance and Renascences in Western Art (Stockholm:
Almquist and Wiksell, 1960), p. 10.
4. Panofsky, Renaissance and Renascences, p. 36.
222 Notes

7. "quasi prima cagione della rinovazione dell'arte," quoted in Huizinga, "Problem
of the Renaissance," p. 247; and "quella greca goffa maniera; et risuscito Ia
moderna, et buona arte della pittura," Vasari, Vita di Giotto, quoted in Federico
Chabod, "11 Rinascimento," (1942) in Chabod, Scritti sul Rinascimento (Torino:
Giulio Einaudi, 1967), pp. 73-109, at p. 77.
8. On Enlightenment attitudes to the Renaissance, see Huizinga, "Problem of the
Renaissance," pp. 248-54.
9. Voltaire, quoted in Huizinga, "Problem of the Renaissance," p. 250.
10. Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, The Philosophy of History, tr. ]. Sibree (New
York: Dover, 1956), pp. 410-411.
11. Jacob Burckhardt, The Civilization ofthe Renaissance in Italy (London: Phaidon
Press, 1995).
12. Burckhardt, The Civilization ofthe Renaissance in Italy, p. 61.
13. Burckhardt, The Civilization ofthe Renaissance in Italy, p. 87.
14. Charles Homer Haskins, The Renaissance of the Twelfth Century (Cambridge,
MA: Harvard University Press, 1927), p. vii.
15. Walter Pater, The Renaissance: Studies in Art and Poetry, ed. Donald L. Hill
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1980), p. 5.
16. Dana B. Durand, "Tradition and Innovation in Fifteenth Century Italy:
'11 Primato dell' ltalia' in the Field of Science," journal ofthe History ofIdeas, 4,
1943, pp. 1-20.
17. Ly~n Thorndike, "Renaissance or Prenaissance," journal ofthe History ofIdeas,
4, 1943, pp. 63-74.
18. Thorndike, "Renaissance or Prenaissance," p. 74.
19. Hans Baron, "Towards a More Positive Evaluation of the Fifteenth-Century
Renaissance," journal ofthe History ofIdeas, 4, 1943, pp. 21-49.
20. Baron, "Towards a More Positive Evaluation," at pp. 32 and 45.
21. Federico Chabod, "II Rinascimento," (1942) in Chabod, Scritti sul Rinascimento,
22. Chabod, "II Rinascimento," p. 92.
23. E. H. Gombrich, "The Renaissance-Period or Movement?" in Background to the
English Renaissance: Introductory Lectures, ed. J. B. Trapp (London: Gray-Mills
Publishing, 1974), pp. 9-30.
24. Wallace K. Ferguson, "The Interpretation of the Renaissance: Suggestions for a
Synthesis," (1948) in Ferguson, Renaissance Studies, pp. 125-35.
25. William ]. Bouwsma, "The Renaissance and the Drama of Western History,"
The American Historical Review, 84:1, 1979, pp. 1-15 at p. 5.
26. Bouwsma, "Drama ofWestern History," p. 8.
27. Eusebio Colomer, "Individuo e Cosmo in Nicolo Cusano e Giovanni Pico," in
L'opera e il pensiero di Giovanni Pico della Mirando/a nella storia dell' umanesimo
(Florence: Istituto Nazionale di Studi sui Rinascimento, 1965), pp. 53-102, at
p. 102. My translation.
Notes 223
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
44. Trinkaus, "Human Autonomy," pp. 206 and 207.

45. Giovanni Pico della Mirandola, "Oration on the Dignity of Man," in The
Renaissance Philosophy ofMan: Selections in Translation, ed. Ernst Cassirer, Paul
Oskar Kristeller, and J. H. Randall Jr. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
1948), pp. 223-54.
46. Pico della Mirandola, "Oration on the Dignity of Man," p. 224.
47. Pico della Mirandola, "Oration on the Dignity of Man," pp. 224-25.
48. Ernst Cassirer, "Giovanni Pico della Mirandola: A Study in the History of
Renaissance Ideas," in Paul Oskar Kristeller and Philip P. Wiener (eds.),
Renaissance Essays From the journal of the History of Ideas (New York: Harper
and Row, 1968), pp. 11-60, at pp. 45 and 34.
49. Pico, Heptaplus, quoted in Trinkaus, In Our Image and Likeness, p. 519.
50. Paul Oskar Kristeller, "Ficino and Pomponazzi on the Place of Man in the
Universe," in Kristeller, Renaissance Thought and the Arts (Princeton: Princeton
University Press, 1964), pp. 102-10, at pp. 109-10.
51. R. B. ]. Walker, "Sovereignty, Identity, Community: Reflections on the
Horizons of Contemporary Political Practice," in R. B. J. Walker and Saul H.
Mendlovitz (eds.), Contending Sovereignties: Redefining Political Community
(Boulder: Lynne Reinner, 1990), pp. 159-85, at p. 175.
52. Alexandre Koyre, From the Closed World to the Infinite Universe (Baltimore: The
Johns Hopkins University Press, 1968), p. 2.
53. Kristeller, "Ficino and Pomponazzi," p. 109. More recently, Karsten Harries,
Infinity and Perspective (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2001).
54. Nicholas of Cusa, On Learned Ignorance, tr. Jasper Hopkins (Minneapolis:
Banning, 1981). Good introductions to Cusa's cosmology are Lovejoy, Great
Chain of Being, pp. 108-16; Koyre, From the Closed World, pp. 5-2.3; and
Harries, Infinity and Perspective, pp. 22-63.
55. Quoted in Harries, Infinity and Perspective, p. 50.
56. Cusa, On Learned Ignorance, 1:1, p. SO. All quotations in this paragraph are
from this passage.
57. Cusa, On Learned Ignorance, 1:2, p. 51.
58. Harries points out that Cusa took the metaphor from Meister Eckhardt who, in
turn, refers to the twelfth-century pseudo-Hermetic Liber XXIVphilosophorum,
Infinity and Perspective, p. 59.
59. Harries, Infinity and Perspective, p. 60.
60. Cusa, On Learned Ignorance, II:2, p. 93.
61. See Harris, Infinity and Perspective, p. 60.
62. Cusa quoted in Lovejoy, Great Chain ofBeing, pp. 112-13.
63. Nicholas Copernicus, De revolutionibus orbium coelestium, reprinted in Michael
J. Crowe, Theories ofthe Worldfrom Antiquity to the Copernican Revolution (New
York: Dover, 1990), pp. 102-34.
64. Bertrand Russell, A History of Western Philosophy (London: Unwin Paperbacks,
1979), p. 513; and Lovejoy, Great Chain ofBeing, pp. 103-4.
65. Harries, Infinity and Perspective, pp. 33-34.
Notes 225
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.
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.
79. Pocock, Machiavellian Moment, pp. 56-57.
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.
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.
7 Machiavelli, Territoriality and Lo Stato

1. Giuseppe Prezzolini, Machiavelli: Anticristo (Rome: Gherardo Casini, 1954), p. 3.
2. Eusebio Colomer, "Individuo e Cosmo in Nicolo Cusano e Giovanni Pico," in
L'opera e il pensiero di Giovanni Pico della Mirando/a nella storia dell'umanesimo
Notes 227
(Florence: Istiruto Nazionale di Srudi sui Rinascimento, MCMLXV),

2. The secondary literature on the meaning of lo stato in Renaissance politi-
cal theory is extensive. I have found particularly useful, Nicolai Rubinstein,
"Notes on the Word Stato in Florence before Machiavelli," in J. G. Rowe and
W. H. Stockdale (eds.), Florilegium Historiale: Essays Presented to Wallace K
Ferguson (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1971), pp. 313-26; Quentin
Skinner, "The State," in Terence Ball, James Farr and Russell L. Hanson
(eds.), Political Innovation and Conceptual Change (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1989), pp. 90-131; Federico Chabod, "Esiste uno Stato del
Rinascimento?" in Chabod, Scritti sui Rinascimento (Torino: Giulio Einaudi,
1967), pp. 593-623; and Chabod, "Alcune questioni di terminologia: Stato,
nazione, patria nel linguaggio del Cinquecemo," in Scritti sul Rinascimento,
pp. 625-61.
3. Skinner, "The State," p. 98.
4. These examples are from Rubinstein and Skinner respectively.
5. Rubinstein, "Notes on the Word Stato," p. 315.
6. Rubinstein, "Notes on the Word Stato," p. 317.
8. Vespasiano and Guicciardini are both quoted in Skinner, "The State," p. 101.
9. Rubinstein, "Notes on the Word Stato," p. 319. My translation.
10. Rubinstein, "Notes on the Word Stato," p. 318. Rubinstein claims that by the
time Piero de Medici was ousted in 1494 "the theoretical concept of stato as
constitution had lost most of its original meaning by the transformation of the
power structure of Florence into the Medici regime." p. 319.
11. Felix Gilbert, Machiavelli and Guicciardini: Politics and History in Sixteenth
Century Florence (New York: W. W. Norton, 1965), p. 177.
15. J. H. Hexter, The Vision ofPolitics on the Eve ofthe Reformation: More, Machiavelli
and Seyssel (New York: Basic Books, 1973), p. 175.
16. Prezzolini, Machiavelli, pp. 14-17.
17. F. Chiappelli, Studi sullinguaggio del Machiavelli, quoted in Skinner, "The
State," p. 102.
18. Chabod, "Esiste uno Stato," p. 604. My translation.
19. Although this concept of the modern state was a product of the seventeenth-
century tradition of natural law absolutism, represented by Bodin, Suarez,
Grotius, and Hobbes, the Renaissance republican idea that the res publica, the
community, was the ultimate source of authority, and that the rulers and mag-
istrates were merely elected officials was also influential. Skinner, "The State,"
p. 107.
20. Niccolo Machiavelli, II Principe, ed. L. Arthur Burd (Oxford: Clarendon Press,
1891), I, pp. 173-74. All subsequent citations are from this text and are my
translations, unless stated otherwise.
228 Notes
21. Machiavelli, Il Principe, p. 183. Allan Gilbert translates this as "[t]he

remote origin and long continuance of such sovereignty," Niccolo Machiavelli,
The Prince in Machiavelli, The ChiefWorks and Others: Volume One, tr. Gilbert
(Durham: Duke University Press, 1989), p. 12.
22. Sebastian de Grazia, Machiavelli in Hell (New York: Harvester Wheatsheaf,
1989), pp. 158-59.
23. Adolf Berger, Encyclopaedic Dictionary of Roman Law (Philadelphia: American
Philosophical Society, 1953), p. 441.
24. Oxford English Dictionary, Vol. IV, 2nd ed. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989),
p. 949.
25. F. H. Hinsley, Sovereignty, 2nd ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1986), p. 26.
26. ]ens Bartleson, A Genealogy of Sovereignty (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1995), pp. 88-136.
27. Bartleson, A Genealogy of Sovereignty, p. 136. Bartleson rejects the
"Renaissance hypothesis" that the 1494 French expedition into Italy symbolized
the moment when the state began to be imagined as distinct from an interna-
tional system existing outside of its borders. Because there was no rigid dif-
ferentiation between the inside and outside of particular states in Renaissance
discourse, the notion of the international as a realm of the relations between
autonomous states "dependent on yet ontologically distinguishable from indi-
vidual states" was not possible.
28. Bartleson, A Genealogy ofSovereignty, p. 118.
29. Hinsley, Sovereignty, p. 113.
30. See Walter Ullman, "The Development of the Medieval Idea of
Sovereignty," English Historical Review, 64, 1949, pp. 1-33.
31. "Rex poterit in regno suo, quod imperator in terra imperii . .. Liberi reges tantum
habent in regnis suis quantum imperator in imperio," quoted in Ullman, "The
Development of the Medieval Idea of Sovereignty," p. 24.
32. Walter Ullman, "Personality and Territoriality in the 'Defensor Pads': The
Problem ofPolitical Humanism," in Ullman, Law and jurisdiction in the Middle
Ages (London: Variorum Reprints, 1986), pp. 397-410. For Ullman the devel-
opment of the principle of territorial sovereignty could be seen in the chang-
ing intitulations of kings from Rex Francorum to Rex Franciae and from Rex
Anglorum to Rex Angliae.
33. Ullman, "Personality and Territoriality in the 'Defensor Pacis'," p. 401.
34. Robert could not "potest trahi extra territorium," see Ullman, "Personality and
Territoriality in the 'Defensor Pacis'," p. 402.
35. De Grazia, Machiavelli in Hell, p. 159.
36. "se io potessi sbucare del dominio," Machiavelli, quoted in de Grazia, Machiavelli
in Hell, p. 159.
37. Rubinstein, "Notes on the Word Stato," p. 320. In diplomatic documents des-
potic states had the same status as republics.
38. Rubinstein, "Notes on the Word Stato," fn. 79, p. 326.
39. Chabod, "Alcune questioni," p. 631. My translation.
Notes 229
40. Michel Foucault, "Governmentality," in Graham Burchill, Colin Gordon

and Peter Miller (eds.), The Foucault Effect (Heme! Hempstead: Harvester
Wheatsheaf, 1991), pp. 87-104, at p. 104. Foucault argues that the sixteenth-
century territorial administrative state, analogous to the territorial a priori, of
International Relations was supplanted in the classical age by the "governmen-
tal state," no longer defined by its surface area or territory but by a population
which it controls through economic savoir.
41. Foucault, "Governmentality," p. 93.
44. Sheldon S. Wolin, "Machiavelli and the Economy ofViolence," in Wolin, Politics
and Vision: Continuity and Innovation in Western Political Thought (London:
George Allen and Unwin, 1961), pp. 195-238, at p. 221.
45. Machiavelli, Il Principe, XII, pp. 253-55.
46. Machiavelli, Il Principe, XII, p. 277.
47. See, especially, Niccolo Machiavelli, The Art ofWar, tr. and ed. N. Wood (New
York: Da Capo, 1965).
48. As first secretary of the Ten of Liberty and Peace and later as secretary to the
Nine of the Florentine Ordinance and Militia, Machiavelli had been personally
involved in the recruitment and training of troops, conducting operations and
negotiating treaties, and in proposing statutes governing the recruiting, equip-
ping, paying, and disciplining of native infantry. See de Grazia, Machiavelli
in Hell, pp. 93-97; and Machiavelli, "La Cagione dell'Ordinanza," in Niccolo
Machiavelli, I:Arte della Guerra, Scritti Politici Minori (Rome: Salerno Editrice,
2001), pp. 470-476.
49. Machiavelli, Il Principe, XII, p. 255.
50. Machiavelli, II Principe, XII, p. 255.
51. Machiavelli, II Principe, XII, p. 256.
52. Machiavelli, The Art of War, I, p. 40.
53. Wolin, "Machiavelli and the Economy of Violence," p. 221.
54. Niccolo Machiavelli, Discorsi sopra La prima deca di Tito Levio, ed. Gennaro
Sasso and Giorgio Inglese (Milano: Biblioteca Universale Rizzoli, 1984), III:iii,
p. 467. My translation. Machiavelli's reference is to Brutus who, according to
Livy, not only ordered the death but attended the execution of his sons, the
rebellious Tarquins.
55. Machiavelli, Discorsi, l:xxi, p. 114.
56. Machiavelli, Il Principe, X, p. 244.
57. Machiavelli, Il Principe, X, p. 244.
58. Rubinstein, "Notes on the Word Stato," pp. 320-321.
59. Elana Fasano Guarani, "Centre and Periphery," The journal ofModern History,
67, 1995, S74-96, at S74.
60. Guarani, "Centre and Periphery," S74-75.
61. Elena Fasano Guarani, "Machiavelli and the Crisis of the Italian Republics,"
in Gisela Bock, Quentin Skinner, and Maurizio Viroli (eds.), Machiavelli and
Republicanism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), pp. 17-40.
230 Notes
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
97. Prezzolini, Machiavelli: Anticristo, p. 73.

98. Federico Chabod, L'idea di nazione (Bari: Editori Laterza, 1962), p. 7. My
translation.
99. See, for example, Machiavelli, Discorsi, III:xliii, p. 565.
100. Niccolo Machiavelli, "Ritratto di cose di Francia," Machiavelli, Tutte Le Opere,
pp. 731-39.
101. Machiavelli, "Discorso o dialogo intorno alia nostra lingua," p. 771.
102. Vincent Ilardi, "'Italianita' among Some Italian Intellectuals in the Early
Sixteenth Century," Traditio: Studies in Ancient and Medieval History, Thought
and Religion, 12, 1956, pp. 339-67, at p. 362.
103. Petrarch, "Italia Mia," lines 21, 30, and 56.
104. Petrarch, "Italia Mia," lines 80-86.
105. Fazio degli Uberti, Rime, XVII "Ai Signori e Popoli d'Italia, Serventese," at
http://www.classicitaliani.it/trecento/fazio _uberti04.htm.
106. Salutati, quoted in Gilbert, "The Concept of Nationalism," p. 41.
107. On Flavio Biondo see The Catholic Encyclopedia Vol. 11 (Online 2003), http://
www.newadvent.org/cathen/02575a.htm.
108. Gilbert, Machiavelli and Guicciardini, p. 255.
109. Petrarch, "Italia Mia," lines 33-35.
110. Petrarch, "Italia Mia," lines 74 and 21.
111. Denys Hay, "Italy and Barbarian Europe," in Italian Renaissance Studies, ed.
E. F. Jacobs (London: Faber and Faber, 1960), pp. 48-68.
112. Hay, "Italy and Barbarian Europe," pp. 57-58.
113. Machiavelli, History ofFlorence, V:i, p. 1233.
114. Marcel Gagneux, "Italianite, Patrie Florentine et service de L'Eglise dans
I'oeuvre et dans la vie de Frans;ois Guichardin," in Quetes d'une identite collec-
tive chez les Italiens de la Renaissance (Paris: Universite de !a Sorbonne Nouvelle,
1990), pp. 67-119, at p. 80.
115. Francesco Guicciardini, Storia d'Italia, ed. Silvana Seidel Menchi (Torino:
Giulio Einaudi, 1971), IV:vi, pp. 376 and 377.
116. Guicciardini, quoted in Gagneux, "Italianite," fn. 44, p. 80.
117. Guicciardini, Storia d'Italia, I:ix, p. 78. My translation.
118. Ilardi, "Italianita," p. 359.
119. Ilardi, "Italianita," p. 359.
120. Gilbert, "The Concept of Nationalism," p. 44.
121. Quoted in Gilbert, "The Concept of Nationalism," p. 43.
122. Machiavelli, History ofFlorence, VI:xxxvi, p. 1435.
8 Picturing Renaissance Territoriality

1. Niccolo Machiavelli, It Principe, ed. L. Arthur Burd (Oxford: Clarendon Press
1891), pp. 173-74.
2. Leonardo, quoted in Roger D. Masters, Machiavelli, Leonardo, and the Science
ofPower (Notre Dame: University ofNotre Dame Press, 1996), p. 52.
Notes 233
3. Carlo Ginzburg, "Distanza e prospettiva: Due metafore," in Ginzburg, Occhiacci

di legno: Nove riflessioni sulfa distanza (Milan: Feltrinelli, 1998), pp. 171-93.
4. John Gerard Ruggie, "Territoriality and Beyond: Problematizing Modernity in
International Relations," International Organization, 47:1, 1993, pp. 139-74,
at p. 159.
6. Erwin Panofsky, Perspective as Symbolic Form, tr. C. S. Wood (New York: Zone
Books, 1991), p. 27.
7. Panofsky, Perspective as Symbolic Form, fn. 5, p. 77.
8. "[L]a 'Grande Charte' de Ia Renaissance', Henri Focillon, Piero della Francesca
(Paris: Armand Colin, 1952), p. 100. Leon Battista Alberti, On Painting,
tr. Cecil Grayson (London: Penguin Books, 1991). The best introduction
to Alberti and perspective is Alison Cole, Perspective (London: Dorling
Kindersley, 1992).
9. Martin Kemp, Behind the Picture: Art and Evidence in the Italian Renaissance
(New Haven: Yale University Press, 1997), pp. 95-96.
10. Alberti, quoted in Kemp, Behind the Picture, p. 90.
11. Martin Kemp, "Introduction" to Alberti, On Painting, p. 2.
12. Giulio Carlo Argan, "The Architecture of Brunelleschi and the Origins
of Perspective Theory in the Fifteenth Century," Journal of the Warburg and
Courtauld Institutes, 9, 1946, pp. 96-121.
13. Alberti, On Painting, p. 37.
14. Kemp, Behind the Picture, p. 93.
15. Alberti, On Painting, p. 53.
16. Alberti, On Painting, pp. 64-65.
17. On Alberti's notion of the virtuous painter, see Kemp, Behind the Picture,
pp. 96-97.
18. Kemp, Behind the Picture, p. 96.
19. Focillon, Piero della Francesca, p. 104. My translation.
20. Alessandro Angelini, Piero della Francesca (Florence: Scala, 1985), p. 17.
21. Focillon, Piero della Francesca, p. 112. My translation.
22. On De prospectiva pingendi see Kemp, Behind the Picture, pp. 97-101; Marco
Bussagli, Piero della Francesca (Firenze: Giunti, 1992), pp. 5-13; and James
Elkins, "Piero della Francesca and the Renaissance Proof of Linear Perspective,"
The Art Bulletin, 69:2, 1987, pp. 220-30.
23. Cole, Perspective, p. 18. The squares of the terra cotta pavement are eight wide
and deep, there are eight-pointed stars behind and in front of Christ, and an
octagonal arrangement of patterned floor tiles around the stars. The piazza, in
which the foreground figures are standing, is eight units deep into the shade of
the middle distance, and then another eight units deep into light-flooded areas
in front of the far wall.
24. Bussagli, Piero della Francesca, p. 15. My translation.
25. Henri Lefebvre, The Production ofSpace, tr. Donald Nicholson-Smith (Oxford:
234 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.
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.
51. Lauro Martines, Power and Imagination: City-States in Renaissance Italy
(New York: Alfred A Knopf, 1979), p. 272.
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.
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
62. K. J. P. Lowe, "Patronage and Territoriality in Early Sixteenth Century

Florence," Renaissance Studies, 7:3, 1993, pp. 258-71.
63. Lowe, "Patronage and Territoriality," p. 260.
64. The best discussion of the Urbina Portraits is Eugenio Battisti, Piero della
Francesca (Milano: Institute Editoriale Italiano, 1971), pp. 355-71. See also
Angelini, Piero della Francesca, pp. 60-7; and Bussagli, Piero della Francesca,
pp. 43-47. Originally the two portraits were separated by a hinge that allowed
them to be opened and shut like a book. When closed, the cover showed the
two allegorical triumphs. The precise dates of the portraits remains unknown.
Battista's portraits were probably commissioned by Federico after her death in
July 1472. Bussagli claims Federico's portraits were painted before 1467. For
Battisti, Federico's allegorical triumph is a reference to his crowning in Rome
which means it must be dated after the summer of 1474. Focillon dates both
portraits to Piero's residency in Urbino in 1456. Bussagli notes that it was not
until 1834 that claims that they were portraits of either Francesco Petrarca and
Laura or of Sigismondo Pandolfo Malatesta and his consort Isotta degli Atti
were abandoned.
65. Bussagli, Piero della Francesca, p. 45. My translation of Bussagli's Italian
translation from the Latin.
66. The Montefeltro had been mercenaries since the Middle Ages. The pro-
fession had given them the resources to control their terre caste/late in the moun-
tainous frontier region between the Papal domains and Imperial territories.
67. According to Vespasiano da Bisticci, Federico's military virtU was partially
derived from his mastery of Latin, which allowed him to absorb the lessons
of the ancients. See the excerpts from Vespasiano da Bisticci, Vite, in Eugenio
Garin, Il Rinascimento Italiano (Bologna: Capelli, 1980), pp. 236-38.
68. Niccolo Machiavelli, The History of Florence, Chief Works and Others, Vol. Ill,
tr. Allan Gilbert (Durham: Duke University Press, 1989), VII:xxxi, p. 1376.
Machiavelli notes several subsequent shifts of allegiance by Federico. From 1447-8
Federico served Florence as a general against King Alfonso of Naples. However in
1452 he commanded 12,000 of Alfonso's troops against Florence. Between 1467
and 1474 Federico was once again in the pay of Florence, campaigning against
Venice and quelling disturbances in Volterra. Then as a papal soldier, Federico
again fought against Florence, leading an attack on the city ofRadda in 1478.
71. Pierantonio Paltroni, Commentari della vita et gesti dell'illustrissimo Federico
Duca d'Urbino, quoted in C. W. Westfall, "Chivalric Declaration: The Palazzo
Ducale in Urbino as a Political Statement," in Henry A. Millon and Linda
Nochlin (eds.), Art and Architecture in the Service of Politics (Cambridge, MA:
MIT Press, 1978), pp. 20-45.
72. Baldassarre Castiglione, II libro del Cortegiano, ed. Ettore Sonora (Milano:
Mursia, 1972), I:ii, p. 33. My translation.
73. Castiglione, lllibro del Cortegiano, p. 33
Notes 237
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.
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
89. Samuel Y. Edgerton, Jr, "From Mental Matrix to Mappamundi to Christian

Empire: The Heritage of Ptolemaic Cartography in the Renaissance," in
David Woodward (ed.), Art and Cartography: Six Historical Essays (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1987), pp. 10-50.
90. Dana B. Durand, "Tradition and Innovation in Fifteenth Century Italy: '11
Primato dell'ltalia' in the Field of Science," journal ofthe History ofIdeas, IV,
1943, pp. 1-20, at p. 5.
91. Edgerton, "Mental Matrix to Mappamundi," p. 14.
92. Edgerton, "Mental Matrix to Mappamundi," pp. 12-15.
95. P. D. A. Harvey, The History of Topographical Maps: Symbols, Pictures and
Surveys (London: Thames and Hudson, 1980), p. 58. The following dis-
cussion draws heavily on Harvey. John Marino accepts that in Europe only
Italy had a "map consciousness" but warns that it was premised in "an inte-
grated cosmography of spiritual and geographical knowledge," John Marino,
"Administrative Mapping in the Italian States," in David Buisseret (ed.),
Monarchs, Ministers and Maps: The Emergence of Cartography as a Tool of
Government in Early Modern Europe (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
1992), pp. 5-25, at p. 5.
96. Harvey, History of Topographical Maps, p. 76.
98. Machiavelli, Il Principe, XIV, pp. 279-80.
100. These fifteenth-century maps were not sophisticated. They had no consistent
scale, tended to overemphasize the main city, and rarely illustrated more than
the fortifications of outlying towns.
101. Marino, ''Administrative Mapping," p. 6.
102. Denis Cosgrove, "The Geometry of Landscape: Practical and Speculative
Arts in Sixteenth-Century Venetian Land Territories," in Denis Cosgrove and
Stephen Daniels (eds.), The Iconography ofLandscape (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1988), pp. 254-76.
103. Marino, ''Administrative Mapping," p. 7.
9 The Renaissance Territorialization of International Society

1. Martin Wight, Systems ofStates, ed. Hedley Bull (Leicester: Leicester University
Press, 1977), pp. 114-15.
2. William E. Connolly, "Identity and Difference in World Politics," in James
DerDerian and Michael J. Shapiro (eds.), International/Intertextual Relations:
Postmodern Readings of World Politics (Lexington: Lexington Books, 1989),
pp. 323-42. See also David Campbell, Writing Security: United States Foreign
Policy and the Politics of Identity (Manchester: Manchester University Press,
1992).
Notes 239
3. Edmundo O'Gorman, The Invention of America (Bloomington: Indiana

University Press, 1961). For a strident critique of O'Gorman see Wilcomb
E. Washburn, "The Meaning of 'Discovery' in the Fifteenth and Sixteenth
Centuries," The American Historical Review, 68:1, 1962, pp. 1-21.
4. O'Gorman, The Invention ofAmerica, p. 39.
6. W. G. L. Randles, De Ia terre plate au globe terrestre: une mutation epistemologique
rapide (1480-1520) (Paris: Librairie Armand Colin, 1980).
7. Duarte Pacheco Pereira, Esmeralda de Situ Orbis (Lisbon: 1508), quoted in
Randles, De Ia terre plate, p. 38. My translation.
8. Quoted in Randles, De Ia terre plate, p. 39. My translation.
9. Although the term terraqueous globe was first used in the seventeenth century,
Randles believes all the essential elements were in place by the middle of the
sixteenth.
10. Pedro Margalho, Physices Compendium (Salamanca: 1520), quoted in Randles,
De Ia terre plate, p. 65. My translation.
11. Randles, De Ia terre plate, p. 90. My translation.
12. "Digest of Columbus's Log Book on his First Voyage made by Bartolome de las
Casas," in Christopher Columbus, The Four Voyages, ed. and tr. J. M. Cohen
(London: Penguin Books, 1969), pp. 37-76, at pp. 71-72.
13. Fernando Colon, The History of the Life and Deeds of the Admiral Don
Christopher Columbus, [Repertorium Columbianum Vol XII], tr. Geoffrey Symcox
and Blair Sullivan (Turnhout, Belgium: Brepols, 2004), LVI, p. 124.
14. See Felipe Fernandez-Armesto, Columbus (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 1991), p. 109.
16. Columbus, "Lettera Rarissima," 7/7/1503, in Columbus, The Four Voyages,
pp. 283-304, esp. pp. 287-89.
17. Vespucci, "Letter to Lorenzo de Medici," 4/6/1501, cited in O'Gorman,
Invention ofAmerica.
18. Amerigo Vespucci, Mundus Novus or "Sommario di Amerigo Vespucci fioren-
tino, di due sue navigazioni, a! magnifico M. Pietro Soderni ... ," in Giovanni
Battista Ramusio, Navigazione e Viaggi; Vol. 1, ed. Marcia Milanesi (Torino:
Giulio Einaudi, 1978), pp. 670-81, at p. 670. My translation. The Ramusio
version is a translation from the Latin Mundus Novus, itself a translation from
the original (lost) Italian letter, which Vespucci originally addressed to Lorenzo
di Pier Francesco de Medici. Not all scholars accept that this document is
genuine.
19. Vespucci, Mundus Novus, p. 672.
20. Quoted in Randles, De Ia terre plate, p. 72.
22. O'Gorman, The Invention ofAmerica, p. 122. See "The Four Voyages ofAmerigo
Vespucci," [translation of the Latin "Quatuor Americi Vespuccici Navigationes,"
itself a translation of Vespucci's Italian letter to Pier Soderini (Sept 1504)] in
240 Notes
Martin Waldseemiiller, The Cosmographiae lntroductio, [1507 Academy St Die],

tr. Mario E. Cosenza, ed. Charles George Herbermann (Freeport: Books for
Libraries Press, 1969), pp. 84-151, esp. pp. 133-44.
23. Waldseemiiller, Cosmographiae lntroductio, IX, p. 70.
25. O'Gorman, The Invention of America, p. 124. Washburn disagrees with
O'Gorman that when Waldseemiiller uses inventa est to describe Vespucci's rela-
tionship to America it can be translated as conceived of rather than discovered.
Accordingly, the argument that Vespucci was the real discoverer in the sense
of conceiver of America as the fourth part of the world is doubtful. Washburn,
"The Meaning of 'Discovery'," pp. 12-15. Conversely, Anthony Pagden,
European Encounters with the New World: From Renaissance to Romanticism
(New Haven: Yale University Press, 1993), quotes Waldseemiiller's "alia quarta
pars per Americum Vesputium ... inventa est" in support of O'Gorman's claim
that invenio can be translated as conceive rather than invent. Fn. 11, p. 189.
26. O'Gorman, The Invention ofAmerica, pp. 129-30.
27. The Bull Romanus Pontifex (Nicholas V, January 8 1455), tr. Frances
Gardiner Davenport, in Davenport (ed.), European Treaties Bearing on the
History of the United States and its Dependencies to 1648 (Washington, DC:
Carnegie Institution ofWashington, 1917), pp. 20-26.
28. Colon, History ofthe Life, p. 98.
29. "Treaty between Spain and Portugal, concluded at Alca<;:ovas, September
4 1479," tr. J. A. Robertson, in Davenport (ed.), European Treaties, pp. 43-48,
at p. 44.
30. The Bull Aeterni Regis (Sixtus IV, June 21 1481), tr. Davenport, in
Davenport (ed.), European Treaties, pp. 53-55.
31. The Bull Eximiae Devotionis (Alexander VI, May 3 1493), tr. Davenport, in
Davenport, European Treaties, pp. 67-70.
32. Inter Caetera or "Papal Decree Granting Castile Sovereignty over the Indies,"
Rome, June 1493, in The Book of Privileges issued to Christopher Columbus
by King Ferdinand and Queen Isabel, 1492-1503, ed. and tr. Helen Nader
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996), pp. 93-98, at p. 96. The sec-
ond Inter Caetera has been interpreted as a concession to the Portuguese, who
were seemingly guaranteed exclusive rights to all navigational routes through-
out Africa, the eastern Atlantic and all territories to the East. Davenport argues
that because the Portuguese are not mentioned directly this interpretation is
too strong.
33. Adam Watson, "European International Society and its Expansion," in Hedley
Bull and Adam Watson (eds.), The Expansion of International Society (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 1984), pp. 13-32.
34. Inter Caetera, pp. 93-95.
35. Christopher Columbus, "The Spanish Letter of Columbus to Luis de
Sant'Angel," 4/3/1492, in Columbus, The Four Voyages of Columbus: A History
in Eight Documents, ed. Cecil Jane (New York: Dover Publications, 1988), pp.
2-19, at p. 2.
Notes 241
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.
64. Franciscus de Victoria, "The First Relectio on the Indians Lately Discovered,"
tr. John Pawley Bates, in de Victoria, De lndis e de lure Belli Relectiones, ed.
Ernest Nys (Washington, DC: Carnegie Institution of Washington, 1917),
pp. 115-62.
65. Columbus, "Letter to Dona Juana de Torres," 10/1500, in The Four
Voyages, pp. 265-76, at p. 274.
66. Columbus, "Spanish Letter," p. 2.
67. Todorov, Conquest ofAmerica, p. 27.
68. Columbus, journal ofthe First Voyage, 11/111492, p. 189.
69. Todorov, Conquest ofAmerica, p. 28.
70. Pagden, European Encounters, p. 34.
71. Pagden, European Encounters, p. 27.
72. See Nader, "Notes," Book ofPrivileges, p. 37.
73. Batllori, "Papal Division," p. 216.
74. Inter Caetera, p. 96.
75. Samuel Y. Edgerton, Jr, "From Mental Matrix to Mappamundi to Christian
Empire: The Heritage of Ptolemaic Cartography in the Renaissance," in David
Woodward (ed.), Art and Cartography: Six Historical Essays (Chicago: University
of Chicago Press, 1987), pp. 10-50, at p. 46.
76. The Bull Dudum siquidem (Alexander VI, September 26 1493), tr. Davenport,
in Davenport, European Treaties, pp. 82-83.
77. Treaty between Spain and Portugal, concluded at Tordesillas, June 7, 1494, tr.
E. H. Blair and J. A. Robertson, in Davenport, European Treaties, pp. 93-100.
78. Treaty of Tordesillas, pp. 96-97, Ferdinand and Isabel initially thought
Columbus might oversee the establishment of the line: "It seems to us that the
line, or border, that is to be made is an extremely difficult matter requiring
great wisdom and trust. If possible, therefore, we would like you to locate it
yourself and establish it with those who are to be involved on behalf of the king
of Portugal." See "Letter from Fernando and Isabella to Columbus, enclosing
a copy of Treaty of Tordesillas," Segovia, 16 August 1494, Book of Privileges,
pp. 99-100, at p. 100.
79. Daniel Nordman, "Frontiere et Decouverte (XV-XVI siecles)," in Renzo Zorzi
(ed.), L' Epopea delle Scoperte (Venezia: Olschki, 1994), pp. 17-35.
Notes 243
80. Nordman, "Frontiere et Decouverte," p. 26. My translation.

81. Frank Lestringant, Mapping the Renaissance World: The Geographical Imagination
in the Age ofDiscovery, tr. D. Fausett (Oxford: Polity Press, 1994), p. 15.
82. Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, Mille Plateaux (Paris: Les Editions de Minuit,
1980), p. 598.
83. Medina, cited in Lestringant, Mapping the Renaissance World, p. 15.
84. O'Gorman, Invention ofAmerica, p. 76.
85. J. Brian Harley, "Rereading the Maps of the Columbian Encounter,"
Annals of the Association ofAmerican Geographers, 82:3, 1992, pp. 522-42, at
p. 524. Good reproductions of many important early maps of discovery are in
David Buisseret, The Mapmaker's Quest: Depicting New Worlds in Renaissance
Europe (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003).
86. Harley, "Rereading the Maps," pp. 528-29.
87. Harley, "Rereading the Maps," p. 528.
88. Waldseemiiller, quoted in Harley, "Rereading the Maps," p. 529.
89. Edgerton, "From Mental Matrix," p. 13.
90. Brotton, Trading Territories, p. 32.
91. See Peter Whitfield, The Image of the World: Twenty Centuries of World
Maps (London: The British Library, 1994), esp. p. 38.
92. William Boelhower, "Inventing America: A Model of Cartographic Semiosis,"
Word and Image, 4:2, 1988, pp. 475-97, at p. 477.
93. Boelhower, "Inventing America," p. 488.
94. Boelhower, "Inventing America," pp. 481-82.
95. Ricardo Padron, The Spacious World (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
2004).
96. Padron, The Spacious World, p. 12.
97. Walter D. Mignolo, "Colonial Situations, Geographical Discourses and
Territorial Representations: Towards a Diatopical Understanding of Colonial
Semiosis," Dispositio: American journal of Cultural Histories and Theories, XIV,
1994, pp. 93-140. On Amerindian maps and the impact of the Spanish need
for administrative maps of the colonies on the Indian tradition of pinturas, see
Walter D. Mignolo, The Darker Side of the Renaissance: Literacy, Territoriality
and Colonization, 2nd ed. (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2003),
pp. 296-309.
98. Mignolo, "Colonial Situations," p. 94.
10 Conclusion: Territoriality, the Renaissance,

and International Relations
1. Jorge Luis Borges, "On Exactitude in Science," Collected Fictions, tr. A. Hurley
(Middlesex: Penguin, 1998), p. 325.
2. See Roland Bleiker, "The Aesthetic Turn in International Political Theory,"
Millennium, 30:3, 2001, pp. 509-33.
244 Notes
3. Michael J. Shapiro, "Introduction," in Shapiro and Hayward J. Alker (eds.),

Challenging Boundaries: Global Flows, Territorial Identities (Minnesota:
University of Minnesota Press, 1996), pp. xv-xxiii.
4. Walter D. Mignolo, The Darker Side of the Renaissance: Literacy, Territoriality
and Colonization, 2nd ed. (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2003),
pp. 296-309.
5. Mignolo, The Darker Side ofthe Renaissance, p. 311.
6. Shapiro, "Introduction."
7. James Clifford, "Diasporas," Cultural Anthology, 9:3, 1994, pp. 302-38.
8. Homi K. Bhaba, The Location of Culture (Abingdon: Routledge, 2004), p. 2.
9. Bhaba, The Location of Culture, p. 2.
10. Jan Aart Scholte, Globalization: A Critical Introduction, 2nd ed. (Basingstoke:
Palgrave Macmillan 2005), p. 3.
11. Scholte, Globalization, p. 76.
12. Saskia Sassen, Territory, Authority, Rights: From Medieval to Global Assemblages
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006), p. 9.
13. Frederic Jameson, Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logics of Late Capitalism
(London: Verso, 1991).
Bibliography
Agnew, John, and Corbridge, Stuart, Mastering Space: Hegemony, Territory and
International Political Economy, London: Routledge, 1995.
Alberti, Leon Battista, On Painting, tr. C. Greyson, London: Penguin Books,
1991.
- - - , On the Art ofBuilding in Ten Books, tr. J. Rykwert, Cambridge, MA: MIT
Press, 1988.
Ailly, Pierre d', Imago Mundi, in Texte latin et traduction franraise de quatre traitis
cosmographiques de d'Ailly et des notes marginates de Christophe Colomb, tr. and ed.
E. Buron, Paris: Maisonneuve Freres, 1930.
Angelini, Alessandro, Piero della Francesca, Florence: Scala, 1985.
Aquinas, St. Thomas, On Politics and Ethics, tr. and ed. P. E. Sigmund, New York:
W. W. Norton, 1988.
Argan, Giulio Carlo, "The Architecture ofBrunelleschi and the Origins ofPerspective
Theory in the Fifteenth Century," journal ofthe Warburg and Courtauld Institutes,
9, 1946, pp. 96-121.
Aron, Raymond, Peace and War: A Theory ofInternational Relations, tr. R. Howard
and A. Baker Fox, London: Weidenfield and Nicholson, 1966.
Ashley, Richard K., "The Geopolitics of Geopolitical Space: Towards a Critical
Social Theory oflnternational Politics," Alternatives, 17:4, 1987, pp. 403-34.
- - - , "Untying the Sovereign State: A Double Reading of the Anarchy
Problematique," Millennium, 17:2, 1988, pp. 227-62.
- - - , "Living on Borderlines: Man, Poststructuralism, and War," in James Der
Derian and Michael]. Shapiro (eds.), lnternationalllntertextual Relations: Postmodern
Readings ofWorld Politics, Lexington: Lexington Books, 1989, pp. 259-321.
Auerbach, Eric, Dante: PoetoftheSecular World, tr. R. Mannheim, ed. T. Silverstein,
Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1961.
Augustine, St., Concerning the City of God Against the Pagans, tr. H. Bettenson,
London: Penguin Books, 1972.
Bachelard, Gaston, The Poetics ofSpace, tr. M. Jolas, Boston: Beacon Press, 1994.
Baron, Hans, "Towards a More Positive Evaluation of the Fifteenth-Century
Renaissance," Journal ofthe History ofIdeas, 4, 1943, pp. 21-49.
246 Bibliography
- - - , "The Principe and the Puzzle of the Date of Chapter 26," journal of
Medieval and Renaissance Studies, 21:1, 1991, pp. 83-102.
Bartleson, Jens, A Genealogy of Sovereignty, Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1995.
Batllori, Miguel, S.J. "The Papal Division of the World and Its Consequences," in
Fred Chiappelli (ed.), First Images ofAmerica: The Impact ofthe New World on the
Old, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1976, pp. 211-21.
Battisti, Eugenio, Piero della Francesca, Milan: lnstituto Editoriale Italiano, 1971.
Bauman, Zygmunt, Intimations ofPostmodernity, London: Routledge, 1992.
Beetham, David, Max Weber and the Theory ofModern Politics, 2nd ed., Cambridge:
Polity Press, 1985.
Berger, Adolf, Encyclopedic Dictionary of Roman Law, Philadelphia: American
Philosophical Society, 1953.
Berlin, Isaiah, "The Originality of Machiavelli," in Isaiah Berlin, Against the Current:
Essays in the History ofIdeas, ed. Henry Hardy, London: The Hogarth Press, 1979,
pp. 25-79.Berman, Harold J ., Law and Revolution: The Formation ofthe Western
Legal Tradition, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1983.
Bhaba, Homi K., The Location of Culture, Abingdon: Routledge, 2004.
Bisticci, Vespasiano da., Vite, in Eugenio Garin (ed.), If Rinascimento Italiano,
Bologna: Capelli, 1980, pp. 236-38.
Bleiker, Roland, "The Aesthetic Turn in International Political Theory," Millennium,
30:3, 2001, pp. 509-33.
Bloch, Marc. Feudal Society, 2nd ed., tr. L. A. Manyon, London: Routledge and
Kegan Paul, 1962.
Boelhower, William, "Inventing America: A Model of Cartographic Semiosis,"
Word and Image, 4:2, 1988, pp. 475-97.
Boitani, Piero, "From Darkness to Light: Governance and Government in Purgatorio
XVI," in John Woodhouse (ed.), Dante and Governance, Oxford: Clarendon
Press, 1997, pp.12-26.
Borges, Jorge Luis, "On Exactitude in Science," in Jorge Luis Borges, Collected
Fictions, tr. A. Hurley, Middlesex: Penguin, 1998.
Boucher, David, Political Theories of International Relations, Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 1998.
Bouwsma, William J., "The Renaissance and the Drama of Western History," The
American Historical Review, 84:1, 1979, pp. 1-15.
Brotton, Jerry, Trading Territories: Mapping the Early Modern World, London:
Reaktion Books, 1997.
Brown, Elizabeth A. R., "Georges Duby and the Three Orders," Viator: Medieval
and Renaissance Studies, 17, 1986, pp. 51-64.
Bryson, Norman, Vision and Painting: The Logic ofthe Gaze, Basingstoke: Macmillan
Press, 1983.
Buisseret, David, The Mapmaker's Quest: Depicting New Worlds in Renaissance
Europe, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003.
Bull, Hedley, The Anarchical Society: A Study of Order in World Politics, London:
Macmillan, 1977.
Bibliography 247
Burckhardt, Jacob, The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy, London: Phaidon

Press, 1995.
Burke, Peter, The Italian Renaissance: Culture and Society in Italy, Cambridge: Polity
Press, 1986.
Bussagli, Marco, Piero della Francesca, Florence: Giunti, 1992.
Campbell, David, Writing Security: United States Foreign Policy and the Politics of
Identity, Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1992.
Canning, Joseph, A History of Medieval Political Thought 300-1450, London:
Routledge, 1996.
- - - , "Introduction: Politics, Institutions and Ideas, c. 1150-c.1450,"
in J. H. Burns (ed.), The Cambridge History of Medieval Political Thought
c. 350-c.1450, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988, pp. 341-66.
Casey, EdwardS., The Fate ofPlace: A Philosophical History, Berkeley: University of
California Press, 1997.
Cassirer, Ernst, The Myth ofthe State, New Haven: Yale University Press, 1946.
- - - , The Individual and the Cosmos in Renaissance Philosophy, tr. M. Domandi,
Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1963.
- - - , "Giovanni Pice della Mirandola: A Study in the History of Renaissance
Ideas," in Paul Oskar Kristeller and Philip P. Wiener (eds.), Renaissance Essays
from the journal of the History of Ideas, New York: Harper and Row, 1968,
pp. 11-60.
Castiglione, Baldassare, Illibro del Cortegiano, ed. Ettore Sonora, Milano: Mursia,
1972.
Certeau, Michel de, The Practice ofEveryday Life, tr. S. Rendall, Berkeley: University
of California Press, 1984.
Chabod, Federico, L'idea di nazione, Bari: Editori Laterza, 1962.
- - - , "II Rinascimento," in Federico Chabod, Scritti sul Rinascimento, Turin:
Giulio Einaudi, 1967, pp. 73-109.
- - - , "Esiste uno State del Rinascimento?" in Chabod, Scritti sul Rinascimento,
pp. 593-623.
- - - , '~lcune questioni di terminologia: State, nazione, patria nellinguaggio del
Cinquecento," in Chabod, Scritti sul Rinascimento, pp. 625-61.
Choay, Frans;oise, The Rule and Method: On the Theory ofArchitecture and Urbanism,
Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1997.
Clark, Kenneth, Landscape Into Art, London: John Murray, 1949.
Clifford, James, "Diasporas," Cultural Anthology, 9:3, 1994, pp. 302-38.
Cole, Alison, Perspective, London: Dorling Kindersley, 1992.
Colomer, Eusebio, "lndividuo e Cosmo in Nicolo Cusano e Giovanni Pice," in
L'opera e il pensiero di Giovanni Pico della Mirando/a nella storia dell' umanesimo,
Florence: lstituto Nazionale di Studi sui Rinascimento, 1965, pp. 53-102.
Colon, Fernando, The History of the Life and Deeds of the Admiral Don Christopher
Columbus (Repertorium Columbianum Vol. XII), tr. G. Symcox and B. Sullivan,
Turnhout, Belgium: Brepols, 2004.
Columbus, Christopher, The Four Voyages, tr. and ed. J. M. Cohen, London:
Penguin Books, 1969.
248 Bibliography
- - - The Four Voyages of Columbus: A History in Eight Documents, tr. and ed.
Cecil Jane, New York: Dover, 1988.
- - - , Journal of the First Voyage, tr. and ed. B. W. Ife, Warminster: Aris and
Phillips, 1990.
- - - , The Book of Privileges issued to Christopher Columbus by King Ferdinand
and Queen Isabel, 1492-1503, tr. and ed. Helen Nader, Berkeley: University of
California Press, 1996.
Connolly, William E., Political Theory and Modernity, Oxford: Blackwell, 1988.
- - - , "Identity and Difference in World Politics," in James Der Derian and
Michael J. Shapiro (eds.), Internationalllntertextual Relations: Postmodern Readings
ofWorld Politics, Lexington: Lexington Books, 1989, pp. 323-42.
- - - , "Tocqueville, Territory and Violence," Theory, Culture and Society, 11:1,
1994, pp. 19-40.
Copenhaver, Brian P., and Schmitt, Charles B., Renaissance Philosophy, Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 1992.
Copernicus, Nicholas, De revolutionibus orbium coelestium, in Michael J. Crowe
(ed.), Theories ofthe Worldfrom Antiquity to the Copernican Revolution, New York:
Dover, 1990, pp. 102-34.
Cosgrove, Denis, "Prospect, Perspective and the Evolution of the Landscape
Idea," Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers: New Series, 10, 1985,
pp. 45-62.
- - - , "The Geometry of Landscape: Practical and Speculative Arts in Sixteenth-
Century Venetian Land Territories," in Denis Cosgrove and Stephen Daniels
(eds.), The Iconography of Landscape, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1988, pp. 254-76.
Cusa, Nicholas of, On Learned Ignorance, tr. J. Hopkins, Minneapolis: Banning,
1981.
da Vinci, Leonardo, On Painting, ed. Martin Kemp, New Haven: Yale University
Press, 1989.
Dallmayr, Fred, "Max Weber and the Modern State," in Asher Horowitz and
Terry Maley (eds.), The Barbarism of Reason: Max Weber and the Twilight of
Enlightenment, Toronto: University ofToronto Press, 1994, pp. 49-67.
Damisch, Hubert, The Origin ofPerspective, tr.]. Goodman, Cambridge, MA: MIT
Press, 1994.
Dante Alighieri, Monarchia, tr. and ed. Prue Shaw, Cambridge: Cambridge
- - - , The Divine Comedy, tr. John Ciardi, New York: W. W. Norton, 1970.
Davenport, Frances Gardiner, European Treaties Bearing on the History ofthe United
States and Its Dependencies to 1648, Washington, DC: Carnegie Institution of
Washington, 1917.
Davis, Charles Till, "Dante and the Empire," in Rachel Jacoff (ed.), The Cambridge
Companion to Dante, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993, pp. 67-79.
Deleuze, Gilles, Foucault, tr. Sean Hand, London: Athlone Press, 1988.
Deleuze, Gilles, and Guattari, Felix, Mille Plateaux, Paris: Les Editions de Minuit,
1980.
Bibliography 249
---,Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, tr. Robert Hurley, London:

Athlone Press, 1984.
- - - , A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, tr. Brian Massumi,
London: Athlone Press, 1988.
Demaray, John G., "Dante and the Book of the Cosmos," Transactions of the
American Philosophical Society, 77:5, 1987, pp. 14-15.
DerDerian, James, On Diplomacy: A Genealogy of Western Estrangement, Oxford:
Basil Blackwell, 1991.
Deudney, Daniel H., "The Philadelphian System: Sovereignty, Arms Control, and
Balance of Power in the American States-Union, Circa 1787-1861," International
Organization, 49:2, 1995, pp. 191-228.
Donelan, Michael, "Spain and the Indies," in Hedley Bull and Adam Watson (eds.),
The Expansion of International Society, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984,
pp. 75-85.
Dosse, Frans;ois, History of Structuralism, Vol. 2: The Sign Sets, 1967-Present, tr.
Deborah Glassman, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997.
Duby, Georges, "Les societes medievales: Une approche d'ensemble," in Duby,
Hommes et structures du moyen age, Paris: Mouton Editeur, 1973, pp. 61-79.
- - - , Les trois ordres ou l'imaginaire du ftodalisme, Paris: Editions Gallimard,
1978.
- - - , The Age of the Cathedrals: Art and Society 980-1420, tr. E. Levieux and
B. Thompson, London: Croom Helm, 1981.
Durand, Dana B., "Tradition and Innovation in Fifteenth Century Italy: 'II Prima to
dell' ltalia' in the Field of Science," Journal of the History of Ideas, 4, 1943,
pp. 1-20.
Edgerton, Samuel Y., Jr., The Renaissance Rediscovery of Linear Perspective, New
York: Basic Books, 1975.
- - - , "From Mental Matrix to Mappamundi to Christian Empire: The Heritage
of Ptolemaic Cartography in the Renaissance," in David Woodward (ed.), Art and
Cartography: Six Historical Essays, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987,
pp. 10-50.
Edwards, John, Inquisition, Gloucester: Tempus, 1999.
Elkins, James, "Piero della Francesca and the Renaissance Proof of Linear
Perspective," The Art Bulletin, 69:2, 1987, pp. 220-30.
---,The Poetics ofPerspective, Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1994.
Federn, Karl, Dante and His nme, New York: Haskell House, 1970.
Ferguson, Wallace K., The Renaissance in Historical Thought: Five Centuries of
Interpretation, Cambridge, MA: Riverside Press, 1948.
- - - , "The Reinterpretation of the Renaissance," in Wallace K. Ferguson,
Renaissance Studies, London and Ontario: University of Western Ontario, 1963,
pp. 17-30.
- - - , "The Interpretation of the Renaissance: Suggestions for a Synthesis," in
Ferguson, Renaissance Studies, pp. 125-35.
Fernandez-Armesto, Felipe, Columbus, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991.
Focillon, Henri, Piero della Francesca, Paris: Armand Colin, 1952.
250 Bibliography
Foucault, Michel, The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences, tr.
Alan Sheridan, London: Routledge, 1970.
- - - , The Archaeology of Knowledge, tr. A. M. Sheridan Smith, London:
Routledge, 1972.
- - - , Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, tr. Alan Sheridan,
Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1979.
- - - , "Questions on Geography," in Michel Foucault, Power/Knowledge: Selected
Interviews and Other Writings, 1972-1977, ed. Colin Gordon, Brighton: Harvester
Press, 1980, pp. 63-77.
- - - , "Truth and Power," in Foucault, Power/Knowledge, pp. 109-33.
- - - , "Confessions of the Flesh," in Foucault, Power/Knowledge, pp. 194-228.
- - - , "The Order of Discourse/' in Robert Young (ed.), Untying the Text:
A Poststructuralist Reader, Boston: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1981, pp. 48-78.
- - - , "Afterward: The Subject and Power," in Herbert L. Dreyfus and Paul
Rabinow, Michel Foucault: Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics, London:
Harvester Whearsheaf, 1982, pp. 208-26.
- - - , The History of Sexuality: Vol. 1, tr. Robert Hurley, London: Penguin,
1984.
- - - , "Governmenraliry," in Graham Burchill, Colin Gordon, and Peter Miller
(eds.), The Foucault Effect, Heme! Hempstead: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1991,
pp. 87-104.
Friedberg, Aemilius, Corpus Juris Canonici, II, Graz: Academische Druck-U.
Verlagsansta!t, 1959.
Gagneux, Marcel, "ltalianire, Patrie Florentine et service de L'Eglise dans !'oeuvre er
dans Ia vie de F ran<;ois Guichardin," in Quetes d 'une identite collective chez les !taliens
de Ia Renaissance, Paris: Universite de Ia Sorbonne Nouvelle, 1990, pp. 67-119.
Giddens, Anthony, The Nation-State and Violence: Volume Two of a Contemporary
Critique ofHistorical Materialism, Cambridge: Polity Press, 1985.
Gilbert, Felix, "The Concept of Nationalism in Machiavelli's Prince," Studies in the
Renaissance, 1, 1954, pp. 38-48.
- - - , Machiavelli and Guicciardini: Politics and History in Sixteenth Century
Florence, New York: W. W. Norton, 1965.
Gilpin, Robert, War and Change in World Politics, Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1981.
Gilson, Etienne, Dante et Ia philosophie, Paris: Librairie Philosophique J. Vrin, 1939.
- - - , La philosophie au moyen age: des origines patristiques a La fin du X!Ve siecle,
Paris: Payor, 1944.
Ginsburg, Carlo, "Disranza e prospettiva: Due metafore," in Carlo Ginsburg, Occhiacci
di legno: Nove riflessioni sulfa distanza, Milano: Feltrinelli, 1998, pp. 171-93.
Gombrich, E. H., "The Renaissance Theory of Art and the Rise of Landscape," in
E. H. Gombrich, Norm and Form: Studies in the Art of the Renaissance, London:
Phaidon Press, 1966, 107-21.
---,"The Renaissance-Period or Movement?" in E. H. Gombrich, Background
to the English Renaissance: Introductory Lectures, ed. J. B. Trapp, London:
Gray-Mills, 1974, pp. 9-30.
Bibliography 251
Gramsci, Antonio, Quaderno 29: Note per una introduzione allo studio della gram-
matical," in Antonio Gramsci, Quaderni del Carcere, Vol. III, Turin: Giulio
Einaudi, 1975, pp. 2339-53.
Grazia, Sebastian de, Machiavelli in Hell, New York: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1989.
Greenblatt, Stephen, Marvelous Possessions: The Wonder ofthe New World, Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1991.
Gregory, Derek, Geographical Imaginations, Cambridge: Blackwell, 1994.
Grosby, Stephen, "Territoriality: The Transcendental, Primordial Feature of Modern
Societies," Nations and Nationalism, 1:2, 1995, pp. 143-62.
Gross, Leo, "The Peace of Westphalia, 1648-1948," The American journal of
International Law, 42:1, 1948, pp. 20-41.
Guarani, Elena Fasano, "Machiavelli and the Crisis of the Italian Republics," in
Gisela Bock, Quentin Skinner and Maurizio Viroli (eds.), Machiavelli and
Republicanism, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990, pp. 17-40.
- - - , "Centre and Periphery," The journal of Modern History, 67, Supplement,
1995, pp. 74-96.
Guicciardini, Francesco, Storia d1talia, ed. Silvana Seidel Menchi, Turin: Giulio
Einaudi, 1971.
- - - , Ricordi, Diari, Memorie, ed. Mario Spinella, Rome: Editori Riuniti, 1981.
Guillemain, Bernard, Machiavel: L'anthropologie politique, Geneva: Librairie Droz
S.A., 1977.
Gurevich, A. J., Categories of Medieval Culture, tr. G. L. Campbell, London:
Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1985.
Hale, John, The Civilization ofEurope in the Renaissance, London: Harper Collins,
1993.
Halliday, Fred, "State and Society in International Relations: A Second Agenda,"
Millennium, 16:2, 1987, pp. 215-29.
Harley, J. Brian, "Rereading the Maps of the Columbian Encounter," Annals of the
Association ofAmerican Geographers, 82:3, 1992, pp. 522-42.
Harries, Karsten, Infinity and Perspective, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2001.
Harvey, David, "The Geopolitics of Capitalism," in Derek Gregory and John Urry (eds.),
Social Relations and Spatial Structures, Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1986, pp. 128-63.
- - - , The Condition ofPostmodernity, Cambridge: Blackwell, 1989.
Harvey, P. D. A., The History of Topographical Maps: Symbols, Pictures and Surveys,
London: Thames and Hudson, 1980.
Haskins, Charles Homer, The Renaissance of the Twelfth Century, Cambridge, MA:
Harvard University Press, 1927.
Hay, Denys, "Italy and Barbarian Europe," in E. F. Jacob, Italian Renaissance Studies,
London: Faber and Faber, 1960, pp. 48-68.
Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich, Philosophy of Right, tr. T. M. Knox, Oxford:
- - - , The Philosophy ofHistory, tr. J. Sibree, New York: Dover, 1956.
Herz, John H., "The Rise and Demise of the Territorial State," in John H. Herz,
The Nation-State and the Crisis of World Politics, New York: David McKay, 1976,
pp. 99-123.
252 Bibliography
- - - , "The Territorial State Revisited: Reflections on the Future of the Nation-

State," in Herz, The Nation-State, pp. 226-52.
Hexter, J. H., The Vision ofPolitics on the Eve ofthe Reformation: More, Machiavelli
and Seyssel, New York: Basic Books, 1973.
- - - , "The Machiavellian Moment," History and Theory, 16:3, 1977, pp. 306-37
Hinsley, F. H., Sovereignty, 2nd ed., Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986.
Hobbes, Thomas, Leviathan, ed. Richard Tuck, Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1991.
Holland, Eugene W., "Deterritorializing 'Deterritorialization': From the Anti-
Oedipus to A Thousand Plateaus," SubStance, 20:3, 1991, pp. 55-65.
Hornqvist, Mikael, Machiavelli and Empire, Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 2004.
Huizinga, Johan, The Waning ofthe Middle Ages, tr. F. Hopman, London: Penguin
Books, 1955.
- - - , "The Problem of the Renaissance," in Johan Huizinga, Men and Ideas:
History, the Middle Ages, the Renaissance, tr. J. S. Holmes and H. van Marle, New
York: Meridian Books, 1959, pp. 243-87.
Ilardi, Vincent, " 'ltalianita' among Some Italian Intellectuals in the Early Sixteenth
Century," Traditio: Studies in Ancient and Medieval History, Thought and Religion,
12, 1956, pp. 339-67.
James, Alan, Sovereign Statehood: The Basis of International Society, London: Allen
and Unwin, 1986.
Jameson, Frederic, Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logics ofLate Capitalism, London:
Verso, 1991.
Jay, Martin, "Scopic Regimes of Modernity," in Hal Foster (ed.), Vision and Visuality,
Seattle: Bay Press, 1988, pp. 3-23.
Kant, Immanuel, Critique of Pure Reason, tr. Norman Kemp Smith, Basingstoke:
Macmillan Press, 1929.
- - - , "Perpetual Peace: A Philosophical Sketch," in Immanuel Kant, Political
Writings, 2nd ed., tr. H. B. Nisbet, ed. Hans Reiss, Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1991, pp. 93-130.
Kantorowicz, Ernst H., Laudes Regiae: A Study in Liturgical Acclamations and
Medieval Ruler Worship, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1946.
- - - , The King's Two Bodies: A Study In Mediaeval Political Theology, Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 1957.
- - - , "Pro Patria Mori in Medieval Political Thought," in Ernst H. Kantorowicz,
Selected Studies, New York: J. J. Augustin, 1965, pp. 308-24.
- - - , "Dante's 'Two Suns'," in Kantorowicz, Selected Studies, pp. 325-38.
Kelsen, Hans, General Theory of Law and State, tr. Anders Wedberg, New York:
Russell and Russell, 1945.
Kemp, Martin, Behind the Picture: Art and Evidence in the Italian Renaissance, New
Haven: Yale University Press, 1997.
Kern, Stephen, The Culture of Time and Space 1880-1918, Cambridge, MA:
Bibliography 253
Kimball, Fiske, "Luciano Laurana and the 'High Renaissance'," Art Bulletin, 10,
1927-28,pp. 124-51.
Kleinschmidt, Harald, Understanding the Middle Ages, Woodbridge: Boydall Press,
2000.
Knutsen, Torbj0rn L., A History of International Relations Theory, 2nd ed.,
Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1987.
Korner, S., Kant, London: Penguin Books, 1955.
Koyre, Alexander, From the Closed World to the Infinite Universe, Baltimore: Johns
Hopkins University Press, 1968.
Krasner, Stephen D., "Sovereignty: An Institutional Perspective," in James
A. Caporoso (ed.), The Elusive State: International and Comparative Perspectives,
Newbury Park: Sage, 1989.
- - - . "Westphalia and All That," in Judith Goldstein and Robert 0. Keohane
(eds.), Ideas and Foreign Policy: Beliefs, Institutions and Political Change, Ithaca:
Cornell University Press, 1993, pp. 235-64.
- - - , Sovereignty: Organized Hypocrisy, Princeton: Princeton University Press,
1999.
Kratochwil, Friedrich, "Of Systems, Boundaries, and Territoriality: An Inquiry into
the Formation of the State System," World Politics, 39:1, 1986, pp. 27-52.
Krautheimer, Richard, "The Tragic and Comic Scenes of the Renaissance: The
Baltimore and Urbino Panels," Gazette des Beaux-Arts, 33, 1948, pp. 327-48.
- - - , "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.
Kristeller, Paul Oskar, The Philosophy ofMarsilio Ficino, tr. V. Conant, New York:
Columbia University Press, 1943.
- - - , Eight Philosophers of the Italian Renaissance, Stanford: Stanford University
Press, 1964.
- - - , "Ficino and Pomponazzi on the Place of Man in the Universe," in Paul
Oskar Kristeller, Renaissance Thought and the Arts, Princeton: Princeton University
Press, 1964, pp. 102-10.
Ladner, Gerhart B., "Aspects of Mediaeval Thought on Church and State," in
Gerhart B. Ladner, Images and Ideas in the Middle Ages: Selected Studies in History
and Art, Vol. II, Rome: Edizioni di Storia e Letteratura, 1983, pp. 435-55.
- - - , "The Concepts of 'Ecclesia' and 'Christianitas' and their Relation to
the Idea of Papal 'Plenitudo Potestatis' from Gregory VII to Boniface VIII," in
Ladner, Images and Ideas, pp. 487-515.
Laven, David, "Machiavelli, italianita and the French Invasion of 1494," in David
Abulafia (ed.), The French Descent into Renaissance Italy: Antecedents and Effects,
Aldershot: Variorum, 1995, pp. 355-69.
Le Goff, Jacques, Medieval Civilization 400-1500, tr. Julia Barrow, Oxford: Basil
Blackwell, 1988.
Leclercq, Dom Jean, jean de Paris et l'ecclesiologie du XIIIe siecle, Paris: Librairie
Philosophique, J. Vrin, 1942.
254 Bibliography
Lefebvre, Henri, "Reflections on the Politics of Space," Antipode, 8:2, 197, pp. 30-37.
- - - , The Production of Space, tr. D. Nicholson-Smith, Oxford: Blackwell
Publishers, 1991.
Lestringant, Frank, Mapping the Renaissance World: The Geographical Imagination in
the Age ofDiscovery, tr. D. Fausett, Oxford: Polity Press, 1994.
Lewis, Andrew W., "Sugar's Views on Kingship," in Paula Lieber Gerson (ed.),
Abbot Sugar and Saint-Denis: A Symposium, New York: Metropolitan Museum
of Art, 1986, pp. 9-54.
Lorman, Yuri M., Universe of the Mind: A Semiotic Theory of Culture, tr. Ann
Shukman, London: I. B. Tauris, 2001.
Lovejoy, Arthur, The Great Chain of Being: A Study of the History of the Idea,
Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1936.
Lowe, K. J. P., "Patronage and Territoriality in Early Sixteenth Century Florence,"
Renaissance Studies, 7:3, 1993, pp. 258-71.
Maccarrone, Michele, Vicarius Christi: Storia del titolo papale, Rome: Lateranum,
N.S., xviii, 1953.
Machiavelli, Niccolo, Il Principe, ed. Arthur L. Burd, Oxford: Clarendon Press,
1891.
- - - , "Ritratto di cose di Francia," in Niccolo Machiavelli, Tutte Le Opere,
ed. Guido Mazzoni and Mario Casella, Florence: G. Barbera Editore, 1929,
pp. 731-39.
- - - , "Discorso o dialogo intorno alia nostra lingua," in Tutte Le Opere,
770-78.
- - - , The Discourses ofNiccolo Machiavelli, ed. Leslie Walker, London: Routledge
and Kegan Paul, 1950.
- - - , The Art of War, tr. and ed. N. Wood, New York: Da Capo, 1965.
- - - , Discorsi sopra La prima deca di Tito Levio, ed. Gennaro Sasso and Giorgio
Inglese, Milan: Biblioteca Universale Rizzoli, 1984.
- - - , The Prince, in Niccolo Machiavelli, ChiefWorks and Others, Vol. I, tr. Allan
Gilbert, Durham: Duke University Press, 1989.
- - - , The History of Florence, in Niccolo Machiavelli, Chief Works and Others,
Vol. Ill, tr. Allan Gilbert, Durham: Duke University Press, 1989.
- - - , "La Cagione dell'Ordinanza," in Niccolo Machiavelli, L:Arte della Guerra,
Scritti Politici Minori, Rome: Salerno Editrice, 2001, pp. 470-76.
Macrobius, Ambrosius Theodisius, Commentary on the Dream ofScipio, tr. William
Harris Stahl, New York: Columbia University Press, 1952.
Mancusi-Ungaro, Donna, Dante and the Empire, New York: Peter Lang, 1987.
Mann, Michael, "The Autonomous Power of the State: Its Origins, Mechanisms
and Results," in John A. Hall (ed.), States in History, Oxford: Basil Blackwell,
1986, pp. 109-36.
- - - , The Sources of Social Power, Volume Two: The Rise of Classes and Nation-
States, 1760-1914, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993.
Marino, John, "Administrative Mapping in the Italian States," in David Buisseret (ed.),
Monarchs, Ministers and Maps: The Emergence ofCartography as a Tool ofGovernment
in Early Modern Europe, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992, pp. 5-25.
Bibliography 255
Martindale, Andrew, "The Middle Ages of Andrea Mantegna," journal ofthe Royal
Society ofArts, 127, 1979, pp. 627-42.
Martines, Lauro, Power and Imagination: City-States in Renaissance Italy, New York:
Alfred A. Knopf, 1979.
Masters, Roger D., Machiavelli, Leonardo, and the Science of Power, Notre Dame:
University of Notre Dame Press, 1996.
Mattingly, Garrett, Renaissance Diplomacy, New York: Dover, 1955.
Mazzeo, Joseph Anthony, Medieval Cultural Tradition in Dante's Comedy, New
York: Greenwood Press, 1968.
Melnikas, Anthony, The Corpus of the Miniatures in the Manuscripts of Decretum
Gratiani: Vol. I, Rome: Studia Gratiana, XVI, 1975.
Merquior, J. G., Foucault, London: Fontana, 1981.
Mignolo, Walter D. "Colonial Situations, Geographical Discourses and Territorial
Representations: Towards a Diatopical Understanding of Colonial Semiosis,"
Dispositio: American journal of Cultural Histories and Theories, 14, 1994,
pp. 93-140.
- - - , The Darker Side ofthe Renaissance: Literacy, Territoriality and Colonization,
2nd ed., Ann Arbour: University of Michigan Press, 2003.
Monmonier, Mark, How to Lie With Maps, Chicago: University Of Chicago Press,
1991.
Morgenthau, Hans J., Politics among Nations: The Struggle for Power and Peace,
6th ed., rev. Kenneth W. Thompson, New York: McGraw-Hill, 1985.
Morrall, John B., Political Thought in Medieval Times, Toronto: University of
Toronto Press, in association with the Medieval Academy of America, 1980.
Morris, Colin, The Papal Monarchy: The Western Church from 1050-1250, Oxford:
Mumford, Lewis, The City In History: Its Origins, Its Transformations, and Its
Prospects, London: Penguin Books, 1961.
Navari, Cornelia, "Knowledge, the State and the State of Nature," in Michael
Donelan (ed.), The Reason of States: A Study in International Political Theory,
London: George Allen and Unwin, 1978, pp. 102-21.
- - - , "Introduction: The State as Contested Concept in International Relations,"
in Navari (ed.), The Condition of States, Milton Keynes: Open University Press,
1991, pp.1-18.
Nederman, Cary J., "Amazing Grace: Fortune, God, and Free Will in Machiavelli's
Thought," journal ofthe History ofIdeas, 60:4, 1999, pp. 617-38.
Niccoli, Octavia, I sacerdoti, i guerrieri, i contadini: storia di un'immagine della
societd, Turin: Giulio Einaudi, 1979.
Nordman, Daniel, "Frontiere et Decouverte XV-XVI siecles," in Renzo Zorzi (ed.),
L'Epopea delle Scoperte, Venezia: Olschki, 1994, pp. 17-35.
Oakely, Francis, The Medieval Experience, Toronto: University of Toronto Press,
1988.
O'Gorman, Edmundo, The Invention ofAmerica, Bloomington: Indiana University
Press, 1961.
Orr, M.A., Dante and the Early Astronomers, London: Allan Wingate, 1956.
256 Bibliography
Osiander, Andreas, "Sovereignty, International Relations, and the Westphalian

Myth," International Organization, 55:2, 2001, pp. 251-87.
Oxford English Dictionary, Vol. IV, 2nd ed., Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989.
Padron, Ricardo, The Spacious World, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004.
Pagden, Anthony, European Encounters with the New World: From Renaissance to
Romanticism, New Haven: Yale University Press, 1993.
Panofsky, Erwin, "Introduction," in Abbot Sugar, On the Abbey Church ofSt.-Denis
and its Art Treasures, tr. and ed. Panofsky, Princeton: Princeton University Press,
1946.
- - - , Gothic Architecture and Scholasticism, Latrobe: Archabbey Press, 1951.
- - - , Renaissance and Renascences in Western Art, Stockholm: Almquist and
Wiksell, 1960.
---,Perspective as Symbolic Form, tr. C. S. Wood, New York: Zone Books,
1991.
Pare!, Anthony J ., "The Question of Machiavelli's Modernity," The Review ofPolitics,
53:2, 1991, pp. 320-29.
- - - , The Machiavellian Cosmos, New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992.
Paris, John of, On Royal and Papal Power, tr. Arthur P. Monahan, New York:
Columbia University Press, 1974.
Parronchi, Alessandro, "Due note, 2. Urbino-Baltimora-Berlino," Rinascimento, 29,
1968, pp. 355-61.
Patch, Howard R, The Goddess Fortuna in Mediaeval Literature, Cambridge, MA:
Pater, Walter, The Renaissance: Studies in Art and Poetry, ed. Donald L. Hill,
Berkeley: University of California Press, 1980.
Padagean, Evelyne, "L' histoire de I' imaginaire," in Jacques Le Goff, Roger Chartier,
and Jacques Revel (eds.), La nouvelle histoire, Paris: CEPL, 1978, pp. 249-69.
Patton, Paul, "Conceptual Politics and the War-Machine in Mille Plateaux,"
SubStance, 13:3/4, 1984, pp. 62-80.
Petrarch, Petrarch's Songbook: Rerum Vulgarium Fragmenta, tr. James Wyatt Cook,
Binghampton: Medieval and Renaissance Texts and Studies, 1995.
Pico della Mirando! a, Giovanni, "Oration on the Dignity of Man," in Ernst Cassirer,
Paul Oskar Kristeller, and J. H. Randall Jr. (eds.), The Renaissance Philosophy
of Man: Selections in Translation, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1948,
pp. 223-54.
Pocock, J. G. A., The Machiavellian Moment: Florentine Political Thought and the
Atlantic Republican Tradition, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1975.
Poggi, Gianfranco, The State: Its Nature, Development and Prospects, Cambridge:
Polity Press, 1990.
Preus, J. Samuel, "Machiavelli's Functional Analysis of Religion: Context and
Object," journal ofthe History ofIdeas, XL:2, 1979, pp. 171-90.
Prezzolini, Giuseppe, Machiavelli: Anticristo, Rome: Gherardo Casini Editore, 1954.
Pseudo-Dionyius, "The Celestial Hierarchy," in Pseudo-Dionyius, The Complete
Works, tr. Colm Luibheid, London: SPCK, 1987, pp. 143-91.
Bibliography 257
Puchala, Donald J., Theory and History in International Relations, New York and
London: Routledge, 2003.
Randles, W. G. L., De la terre plate au globe terrestre: une mutation epistemologique
rapide (1480-1520), Paris: Librairie Armand Colin, 1980.
Reus-Smit, Christian, The Moral Purpose of the State: Culture, Social Identity, and
Institutional Rationality in International Relations, Princeton: Princeton University
Press, 1999.
Revelli, Paolo, L'Italia nella Divina Commedia, Milano: Fratelli Treves, 1922.
Reynolds, Susan, Fiefs and Vassals: The Medieval Evidence Reinterpreted, Oxford:
Robinson, I. S., "Church and Papacy," in J. H. Burns (ed.), The Cambridge History
of Medieval Political Thought c.350-c.l450, Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1988, pp. 252-305.
Riviere, Jean, Le probleme de l'eglise et de l'etat au temps de Philippe LeBel, Louvain:
Spicilegium Sacrum Louvaniense, 1926.
Roques, R., L'univers dionysien: Structure hierchique du monde selon le pseudo-Denys,
Paris: Aubier Editions Montaigne, 1954.
Rorty, Richard, "Foucault and Epistemology," in David Couzens Hoy (ed.), Foucault:
A Critical Reader, Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1986, pp. 41-49.
Rosenau, Helen, The Ideal City: Its Architectural Evolution in Europe, 3rd ed.,
London: Methuen, 1983.
Rosenberg, Justin, The Empire of Civil Society: A Critique of the Realist Theory of
International Relations, London: Verso, 1994.
Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, On The Social Contract, or Principles of Political Right, in
Rousseau, Collected Writings Vol. 4, ed. Roger D. Masters and Christopher Kelly,
tr. Judith R. Bush, Masters and Kelly, Hanover: University Press ofNew England,
1994, pp. 127-224.
Rubinstein, Nicolai, "Notes on the Word Stato in Florence before Machiavelli," in
J. G. Rowe and W. H. Stockdale (eds.), Florilegium Historiale: Essays Presented to
Wallace K Ferguson, Toronto: University ofToronto Press, 1971, pp. 313-26.
Ruggie, John Gerard, "Continuity and Transformation in the World Polity: Towards
a Neorealist Synthesis," in Robert 0. Keohane (ed.), Neorealism and Its Critics,
New York: Columbia University Press, pp. 131-57.
- - - , "Territoriality and Beyond: Problematizing Modernity in International
Relations," International Organization, 47:1, 1993, pp. 139-74.
Russell, Bertrand, A History of Western Philosophy, London: Unwin Paperbacks,
1979.
Sack, Robert David, Conceptions ofSpace in Social Thought: A Geographic Perspective,
London: Macmillan, 1980.
- - - , Human Territoriality: Its Theory and History, Cambridge: Cambridge
Sacrobosco, Iohannes de, De Sphaera, tr. Lynn Thorndike, in Thorndike, The
Sphere of Sacrobosco and Its Commentators, Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
1949, pp. 118~42.
258 Bibliography
Sassen, Saskia, Territory, Authority, Rights: From Medieval to Global Assemblages,

Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006.
Sasso, Gennaro, "Machiavelli e la teoria deWAnacyclosis," Rivista Storica Italiana,
70:1, 1958, pp. 333-73.
Schildgen, Brenda Deen, Dante and the Orient, Chicago: University of Illinois Press,
2002.
Scholte, Jan Aart, Globalization: A Critical Introduction, 2nd ed., Basingstoke:
Palgrave Macmillan, 2005.
Sennett, Richard, Flesh and Stone: The Body and the City in Western Civilization,
London: Faber and Faber, 1994.
Shapiro, Michael J., "Textualising Global Politics," in James Der Derian and
Michael J. Shapiro (eds.), International/Intertextual Relations: Postmodern Readings
of World Politics, Lexington: Lexington Books, 1989, pp. 11-22.
- - - , "Introduction," in Shapiro and Hayward J. Alker (eds.), Challenging
Boundaries: Global Flows, Territorial Identities, Minnesota: University of
Minnesota Press, 1996, pp. xv-xxiii.
Shils, Edward, Center and Periphery: Essays In Macrosociology, Chicago: University
of Chicago Press, 1975.
Skinner, Quentin, "The State," in Terence Ball, James Farr, and Russell L. Hanson
(eds.), Political Innovation and Conceptual Change, Cambridge: Cambridge
Skocpol, Theda, States and Social Revolutions: A Comparative Analysis of France,
Russia and China, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979.
-~-, "Bringing the State Back In: Strategies of Analysis in Current Research,"
in Peter B. Evans, Dietrich Rueschemeyer, and Theda Skocpol (eds.), Bringing the
State Back In, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985, pp. 3-37.
Smith, Michael Joseph, Realist Thought from Weber to Kissinger, Baton Rouge:
Louisiana State University Press, 1986.
Spruyt, Hendrik, The Sovereign State and Its Competitors: An Analysis of Systems
Change, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994.
Strauss, Leo, Thoughts on Machiavelli, Seattle: University of Washington Press,
1969.
Teschke, Benno, The Myth of 1648: Class, Geopolitics and the Making of Modern
International Relations, London: Verso, 2003.
Thorndike, Lynn, "Renaissance or Prenaissance," journal of the History of Ideas, 4,
1943, pp. 63-74.
Tierney, Brian, "Medieval Canon Law and Western Constitutionalism," The
Catholic Historical Review, 52:1, 1966, pp. 1-20.
- - - , The Crisis ofChurch and State 1050-1300, Toronto: University of Toronto
Press, 1988.
Todorov, Tzvetan, The Conquest ofAmerica: The Question of the Other, tr. Richard
Howard, London: Harper Collins, 1985.
Toulmin, Stephen, Cosmopolis: The Hidden Agenda ofModernity, Chicago: University
of Chicago Press, 1990.
Bibliography 259
Trinkaus, Charles, In Our Image and Likeness: Humanity and Divinity in Italian
Humanist Thought, Vol II, Notre Dame: Notre Dame Press, 1970.
- - - , "Marsilio Ficino and the Idea of Human Autonomy," in G. Garfagnini
(ed.), Marsilio Ficino e il ritorno di Platone: Studi e documenti, Firenze: Leo
S. Olschki, 1986, pp. 197-210.
Turner, A. Richard, The Vision ofLandscape in Renaissance Italy, Princeton: Princeton
Turner, Bryan S., Max Weber: From History to Modernity, London: Routledge, 1992.
Uberti, Fazio degli, "Ai Signori e Popoli d'Italia," Serventese, Rime, XVII, at http://
www.classicitaliani.it/trecento/fazio_uberti04.htm.
Ullman, Walter, Medieval Papalism: The Political Theories ofthe Medieval Canonists,
London: Methuen, 1949.
- - - , "The Development of the Medieval Idea of Sovereignty," English Historical
Review, 64, 1949, pp. 1-33.
- - - , "Personality and Territoriality in the Defensor Pacis: The Problem of
Political Humanism," in Walter Ullman, Law and jurisdiction in the Middle Ages,
London: Variorum Reprints, 1986, pp. 397-410.
Vespucci, Amerigo, "The Four Voyages of Amerigo Vespucci," in Martin
Waldseemiiller, The Cosmographiae lntroductio, tr. Mario E. Cosenza, ed. Charles
G. Herbermann, Freeport: Books for Libraries Press, 1969, pp. 84-151.
- - - , Mundus Novus or "Sommario di Amerigo Vespucci fiorentino, di due sue navi-
gazioni, al magnifico M. Pietro Soderni," in Giovanni Battista Ramusio, Navigazione
e vtaggi, Vol. ], ed. Marcia Milanesi, Turin: Giulio Einaudi, 1978, pp. 70-81.
Victoria, Franciscus de, "The First Relectio on the Indians Lately Discovered,"
tr. John Pawley Bates, in Victoria, De /ndis e de lure Belli Relectiones, ed. Ernest
Nys, Washington, DC: Carnegie Institution of Washington, 1917, pp. 115-62.
Vignaud, Henry, Toscanelli and Columbus, London: Sands, 1903.
Vincent, R. John, "The Hobbesian Tradition in Twentieth Century International
Thought," Millennium, 10:2, 1981, pp. 91-101.
von Simson, Otto, The Gothic Cathedral: Origins of Gothic Architecture and the
Medieval Concept of Order, 3rd ed., Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1988.
Waddington, R., "The Sun at the Centre: Structure as Meaning in Pico della Mirandola's
Heptaplus," journal ofMedieval and Renaissance Studies, 3, 1973, pp. 69-86.
Waldseemiiller, Martin, The Cosmographiae lntroductio, tr. Mario E. Cosenza, ed.
Charles G. Herbermann, Freeport: Books for Libraries Press, 1969.
Walker, R. B. J ., "Realism, Change and 'International Political Theory'," International
Studies Quarterly, 31:1, 1987, pp. 65-86.
- - - , "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
Publishers, 1990, pp. 159-85.
- - - , "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.
260 Bibliography
- - - Inside/Outside: International Relations as Political Theory, Cambridge:

Cambridge University Press, 1993.
- - - , "Violence, Modernity, Silence: From Max Weber to International
Relations," in David Campbell and Mick Dillon (eds.), The Political Subject of
Violence, Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1993, pp. 137-58.
Waltz, Kenneth N., Theory of International Politics, Reading: Addison-Wesley,
1979.
Warnke, Martin, Political Landscape: The Art History ofNature, London: Reaktion
Books, 1994.
Washburn, Wilcomb E., "The Meaning of'Discovery' in the Fifteenth and Sixteenth
Centuries," The American Historical Review, 68:1, 1962, pp. 1-21.
Watson, Adam, "European International Society and its Expansion," in Hedley Bull
and Adam Watson (eds.), The Expansion ofInternational Society, Oxford: Oxford
Watt, J. A., "Spiritual and Temporal Powers," in J. H. Burns. (ed.), Cambridge
History of Medieval Political Thought c.350-c.J450, Cambridge: Cambridge
Watts, Pauline Moffit, "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, Supplementum Festivum:
Studies in Honor ofPaul Oskar Kristeller, Binghampton: Centre for Medieval and
Early Renaissance Studies, 1987, pp. 279-98.
Weber, Max, Economy and Society: An Outline ofInterpretative Sociology, Vol. ], ed.
Guenther Roth and Claus Wittich, New York: Bedminster Press, 1968.
- - - , "Politics as a Vocation," in Max Weber, From Max Weber: Essays in
Sociology, tr. and ed., H. H. Gerth and C. Wright Mills, London: Routledge,
1970, pp.77-128.
---,"The Meaning of Discipline," in Weber, From Max Weber, pp. 253-64.
- - - , The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, tr. Talcott Parsons,
London: Routledge, 1992.
Weckmann-Mufwz, Luis, "The Alexandrine Bulls of 1493: Pseudo-Asiatic
Documents," in Fred Chiappelli (ed.), First Images of America: The Impact
of the New World on the Old, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1976,
pp. 201-10.
Wendt, Alexander, ''Anarchy Is What States Make of It: The Social Construction
of Power Politics," in James Der Derian (ed.), International Theory: Critical
Investigations, Basingsroke, UK: Macmillan, 1995, pp. 129-77.
- - - , Social Theory of International Politics, Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1999.
Westfall, C. W., "Chivalric Declaration: The Palazzo Ducale in Urbina as a Political
Statement," in Henry A. Millon and Linda Nochlin (eds.), Art and Architecture in
the Service ofPolitics, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1978, pp. 20-45.
Whitfield, Peter, The Image ofthe World: Twenty Centuries of World Maps, London:
British Library, 1994.
Bibliography 261
White, John, The Birth and Rebirth of Pictorial Space, London: Faber and Faber,
1957.
Wight, Martin, "Why is There No International Theory," in Herbert Butterfield
and Martin Wight (eds.), Diplomatic Investigations, London: George Allen and
Unwin, 1966, pp. 17-34.
- - - , Systems of States, ed. Hedley Bull, Leicester: Leicester University Press,
1977.
- - - , Power Politics, ed. Hedley Bull and Carsten Holbraad, Leicester: Leicester
Wilks, Michael, The Problem of Sovereignty in the Later Middle Ages: The Papal
Monarchy with Augustinus Triumphus and the Publicists, Cambridge: Cambridge
Wolin, Sheldon S., "Machiavelli and the Economy of Violence," in Wolin, Politics
and Vision: Continuity and Innovation in Western Political Thought, London:
George Allen and Unwin, 1961, pp. 195-238.
- - - , "Hobbes: Political Society as a System of Rules," in Sheldon S. Wolin,
Politics and Vision, pp. 239-85.
Woodward, David, "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 in assoc. with National Gallery of Art, Washington, 1991,
pp. 83-87.
Young, Robert, "Introduction to 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.
Index
Note: page numbers in italic denote references to illustrations.

Agnew, John 23 Jonas of Orleans 76-77
Alberti, Leon Battista 147-50, 151, Saisset, Bernard, Bishop of
154-55 Palmiers 93
De pictura 147-48 Bloch, Marc 58, 60
Americas, the 169./f., 182 Boucher, David 7, 8
anarchy 3, 9, 10, 17, 20-21, 31, 117 Bouwsma, William 106, 107
hierarchy-anarchy dichotomy 54 Bull, Hedley 22
hierarchy-anarchy transition 181 bureaucracy 27-28
Aquinas, Thomas 71, 87-88, 94-95
Aristotle 64, 66, 69, 78, 93-94, 114 Campbell, David 4
Aron, Raymond 19-20 canonisrs, the 78, 79, 80-81, 88,
art and artists 102-103, 104, 106, 95-96,97
136, 152, 153, 159 capitalism 37, 50, 51-52
Giotto di Bondone 103, 136 Cassirer, Ernst 54, 58,111, ll5, 121
landscape 149, 156, 157, 159-60, Castile, Kingdom of, see Spain and the
166 Spanish
Urbino, Baltimore and Berlin panels, Chabod, Federico 105-106, 125,
the 151-55 130, 141
Vasari, Giorgio 102-103 Christ, as symbol or
see also Leonardo da Vinci; representation 70, 74-76, 77,
Mantegna, Andrea; Piero della 80,81,92
Francesca civitas rex Christus 76
Ashley, Richard 31, 32, 33 Church, the 61, 62, 63, 77, 78, 88
Augustine, St 60, 62, 67, 68, Christian mission, the 177, 178,
84, 94, 131 179, 180, 188
role of gold and "precious things"
balance of power 2, 5, 7 in 180
Bauman, Zygmunt 24 "crisis of church and state," the 73,
Berman, Harold 60 77./f., 129
bishops 57, 61, 62, 93 Ecclesia 77-78, 82, 83, 89, 90
264 Index
Church, the-Continued Europe and Europeans 10, 167, 169,

Christianitas 77, 78, 89 176, 178, 182, 185
Machiavelli's contempt for 119, see also Italy; Portugal; Spain
121
Christianity, see under medieval period, Federico de Montefeltro, Duke of
the; Renaissance, the Urbino 155-59
citizen, the 129-30 Ferguson, Wallace 102, 106
Columbus, Christopher 69, 169, feudalism 58.ff., 72
170-71, 172-73, 175, 177-78, three orders, the 60-63, 72
179-80, 185, 186, 192 Ficino, Marsilio 107-108,
his agreements with Ferdinand and 109, 111
Isabel 183, 184, 190 fortuna/Fortuna 7, 8, 117, 118, 119
and "naming," 186-87 see also virtU
Copernicus, Nicolaus 114-15 Foucault, Michel 4, 38-41, 43-45,
Corbridge, Stuart 23 115, 130-31, 153
Cosgrove, Stuart 149, 153 Discipline and Punish 39
Cosmopolis and the Cosmopolitan 6, Order of Things, The 43
24,90 frontiers 22, 189-90
Cusa, Nicholas of 104, 112-14
Giddens, Anthony 28
Damisch, Hubert 152, 158, 162 Gilpin, Robert 20
Dante Alighieri 54, 64-66, 68, 70, Gilson, Etienne 78, 89
71, 72,88-89,90,139 globalization 23, 198-99
Monarchia 87-91 God 54.ff., 60, 61, 62, 64, 65, 66, 69,
da Vinci, Leonardo 104, 105, 145, 70, 110, 113
166 civitas Dei 6, 61, 63, 74, 78, 84,
de Certeau, Michel 39-40, 153 90, 118
Deleuze, Gilles 40, 45, 49, 186, 190 incarnate as Christ 62
Der Derian, James 8-9 "good life," the 17, 94
Dionysius the Areopagite 54-58, 62, Gothic architecture and
63,66, 72,74,92 aesthetic 91-92
De coelesti hierarchia 54-57 government 77, 95, 124, 159
De ecclesiastica hierarchia 57-58 Greenblatt, Stephen 180, 185-86
diplomacy 8-10 Grosby, Stephen 47
proto-diplomacy 9 Gross, Leo 3
discipline 27-28 Guattari, Felix 40, 45, 49,
Divine Comedy; The, see Dante 186, 190
Alighieri Guicciardini, Francesco 7, 8, 117,
Donelan, Michael 181, 182, 183 128, 143
Durkheim, David Emile 41-42,
121 Halliday, Fred 30
Harvey, David 29, 37
emperors, role of, see Holy Roman Hegel, Georg Wilhelm
Empire, the Friedrich 26-27, 103
Index 265
hegemony 1, 9 Francesco; Machiavelli,

Christian hegemony 74 Niccolo; Mantegna, Andrea;
Herz, John 19 Pico della Mirandola, Giovanni,
hierarchy and hierarchies 3, 24, 54.ff., Count; Piero della Francesca
72, 74ff, 79, 90,
92, 95, 108, 109, 112, James, Alan 22
183, 196 John of Paris 95-98, 129
ecclesiastical hierarchy 57-58
heavenly hierarchy 56-57 Kant, Immanuel 2, 18-19, 26, 72
hierarchy-anarchy dichotomy 54 Critique ofPure Reason 18-19
hierarchy-anarchy transition 181 Perpetual Peace 26
spatial hierarchy 74, 75, 85, 86, Kantorowicz, Ernst 84, 87, 89, 98
95, 134 Kelson, Hans 23
see also Holy Roman Empire, the; Kern, Stephen 41-42, 45
Monarchy; Papacy, the kings, role of, see Monarchy
Hobbes, Thomas 23, 24 Knutsen, Torbj0rn L. 7, 8
Leviathan and territoriality 24 Krasner, Stephen 2, 6, 21-22
Holy Roman Empire, the 2, 3, 6, 58,
61,63,73, 78, 79,83.ff., 129 Lacan, Jacques 40
Charlemagne 59, 84 Ladner, Gerhardt 78, 79
Emperor, role and position of 74, law and legality 1, 2-3, 28, 62, 87,
76,82,129 95, 127, 129, 131-32, 186
Frederick II 80, 85, 87 Dionysius's legal hierarchy 57
Otto II 85, 86 international justice 26
two swords allegory, the 82-83, 88 internationallaw 23
humanists 7, 104-105, 106, 110, medieval canon law 74, 93
116-17, 126, 139, 142, 143 naturallaw 186
see also Guicciardini, Francesco; Roman law 184, 186
Machiavelli, Niccolo Lefebvre, Henri 26, 37-38, 45,
50-52,91. 14~ 150
identity 137.ff. legitimacy 1, 184-85
language, role of 138-39 linear perspective, see perspective
imperium, see Holy Roman Lovejoy, Arthur 64, 114
Empire, the
international society 22, 26, 169, 170, Machiavelli, Niccolo 7-8, 9, 12,
178, 182, 187-88 115.ff., 123.ff., 145-46, 157-58,
international theory 17.ff. 23, 31 166
Italy and the Italians 10, 103, 117-18, and Florence 139, 166
119, 133, 140, 141-44, 164 his contempt for the Church 119,
see also Alberti, Leon Battista; 121
Columbus, Christopher; lo stato 123-26, 130-31
Dante Alighieri; Federico de on armed forces 132-34
Montefeltro, Duke ofUrbino; Prince, The 7, 118, 121, 125, 126,
Ficino, Marsilio; Guicciardini, 128, 131, 134, 140-41, 143
266 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
medieval politics 73.ff. its culture of space 107

power politics 17, 131, 158 its representation of space 149
Renaissance politics 117.ff. politics in 112, 123-26, 128
popes, role of, see Papacy, the Renaissance cosmology 112
Portugal and the Portuguese 172, Renaissance humanism, see
176-77, 183-84, 188-89 humanists
Joao II 177, 188 republic, concept of 117, 120
see also, Tordesillas, Treaty of Reus-Smit, Christian 9-10
power 3, 20, 28, 36, 39-40, Rosenberg, Justin 10, 11, 17
77,97 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques 24-26,
two powers, the 82 137-38
see also Machiavelli, Niccolo Social Contract, The 24-26
Prezzolini, Giuseppe 119, 125, 141 Ruggie, John 42-43, 48, 146
primitive communities or
societies 49, 50, 186 sacerdotium, see Papacy, the
princes and princedoms 126-27, 128, Sack, Robert 35-37
130, 131, 132, 138, 144, 146, Sacrobosco, Johannes de 64, 69, 171
159, 177, 182 sea, the 70, 190
territorial princes 2, 115 Sforza, Battista 155-56
see also Federico de Montefeltro, Shapiro, Michael 4
Duke ofUrbino Skinner, Quentin 124, 125, 126
Prince, The, see under Machiavelli, Smith, Michael J. 30
Niccolo social space, see space and society
Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite, see soul, the 109-10
Dionysius the Areopagite sovereign identity 107, 109-11,
Ptolemy (Claudius Ptolemaeus of 152, 153
Alexandria) 65, 69, 163, 192 sovereignty 1, 2, 3, 9, 10, 17, 19,
Geographia 163-64, 167, 192 21-22,31-32,73,92-93,95,
Puchala, Donald J. 5 126-31, 146, 160
national sovereignty 92
Randles, W. G. L. 66, 68, 171 sovereign state, the 7, 17, 32
rationalism 24 territorial sovereignty 2-3, 6, 22,
Ratzel, Friedrich 29 63, 128-29, 130, 157, 160,
Realism and Realists 2,10,20 162-63, 196
Classical Realists 19,23 Westphalian sovereignty 21
regnum, see Monarchy see also Holy Roman Empire, the;
Renaissance, the 2, 3, 5, 6ff., 44, 53, Monarchy; Papacy, the
101.ff., 199, 200 space 2, 3, 4, 6, 18-19, 20, 24, 26-27,
Christianity in, see under Church, 29, 31, 33-34, 37.ff., 47.ff.,
the; God; Papacy, the 149-50, 169,
economic life in 106 176, 192
human autonomy, concept of 109 absolute space so, 51
ideal city, the 151, 153 abstract space 51-52
ghettos in 154 conceived space 38
268 Index
space-Continued Rechstaat, the 22

cosmological space 63.ff., 107.ff., Renaissance state, the 125, 128, 135
171-72, 173, 174, 176 state domination 1
inside/outside 31, 32, 33, 49, 130, state theory 18-23, 30
195 Weberian state, the 1, 27-30
landscape, see under art and artists see also sovereignty; space; territory
lived space 38 surveillance 28, 135
man's being-in-space 2, 4, 5,
6, 35, 72, 107, 146, 170, territory 1, 2, 3, 19, 20, 21, 22, 35.ff.,
192, 196 ll5, 131, 133
medieval understanding of 63ff., center-periphery systems 134,
196 136-37, 165
perceived space 37-38 colonial territories 25-26, 194
public/private 49 lo stato, see under Machivelli, Niccolo
smooth space 40-41,45,46-47, 190 territorial a priori 2, 4, 5, 18-23,
and society 36, 37-38 30, 35, 36, 43, 44, 47, 131, 137,
striated space 40-41,45, 46-47, 195-96
123, 144, 153, 154, 155, 163, 190 territorial boundaries 21, 162-67
symbolic space 51 territoriality 4, 20, 35ff., 40,
systematic space 150 4l.ff.,4Z 146,160,165,194,
"timeless" space 23 195-200
upper/lower 74-76, 114, 115, 196 territorialization 40, 49-50, 169,
see also perspective 178, 179, 190-92, 198
Spain and the Spanish 172, 178, 179, territorial sovereignty 2-3, 6, 22,
183-84, 188-89, 193 63, 128-29, 130, 157, 160,
see also Columbus, Christopher; 162-63, 196
Isabel and Ferdinand under territorial state 2, 3, ll, 17, 26,
Monarchy; Tordesillas, 27-30,34,195,197
Treaty of territorial trap, the 23, 30
Spruyt, Hendrik 11, 12 see also Tordesillas, Treaty of
state, the l.ff., 8, 9, 11-12, 17, time 2, 18, 26, 37
19, 20-21, 22, 26-27, 30, 31, Todorov, Tzvetan 180, 187
32, 36, 40, 45, 77. 95, 98, Tonnies, Ferdinand 47
122, 125-26 Tordesillas, Treaty of 188-90, 191
absolutist state 24 Toulmin, Steven 6
city-state, the 10, 11, 12, 25, 50,
119, 135, 137 Ullman, Walter 78, 129
"crisis of church and state," the 73,
77ff., 129 Vespucci, Amerigo 173-74
despotic state, the 49-50 violence I, 2, 21, 28, 131-37
importance of religion in 120 virtU 7, 8, 117, 118, 119
lo stato, see under Machivelli, artistic virtu 148
Niccolo military virtU 132, 140,
modern state, the 48-49, 125, 126, 144, 158
133, 135 see also fortuna
Index 269
Waldseemiiller, Martin 174-76, 192 Milanese wars 8

Walker, Rob 24, 31, 32 Weber, Max 1, 27-30, 131
Waltz, Kenneth 1, 20, 48, 53-54 Wendt, Alexander 20-21
war 2, 3, 20, 132 Westphalia see Peace of
armies 132-33, 136 Westphalia, the
just war 181 Wight, Martin 5, 6, 17
Scanned by NT (12/21/2011)

From Hierarchy To Anarchy - Larkins PDF

Hochgeladen von

Dokumentinformationen

Originaltitel

Copyright

Verfügbare Formate

Dieses Dokument teilen

Dokument teilen oder einbetten

Freigabeoptionen

Stufen Sie dieses Dokument als nützlich ein?

Sind diese Inhalte unangemessen?

Copyright:

Verfügbare Formate

From Hierarchy To Anarchy - Larkins PDF

Hochgeladen von

Copyright:

Verfügbare Formate

Territory and Politics before

1 Introduction: Territoriality, Westphalia, and

5.1 The Skrzicziek Miniature, in Gratian of Bologna,

8.5 Map of the world, based on descriptions and

At Palgrave Macmillan several people have played important roles in nur-

Introduction: Territoriality, Westphalia,

International Relations and the Territorial State

self-evident-has not received equivalent critical consideration in International

The Westphalia Narrative

alteration in man's conception of his political being-in-space or his territoriality.

be addressed as an object or an idea that is produced by discourse. This book's

Despite Wight's insistence that institutional developments in the fourteenth and

International Relations and the Renaissance

highlighting a theme that will be discussed extensively throughout this work,

separation of politics and economics premised upon a form of material repro-

an opposition to the barbarian other, expresses the modern desire to ground

International Relations, Political

M artin Wight established a famous dichotomy between, on the one

The Territorial a Priori of International Theory

[s]pace is a necessary a priori representation, which underlies all outer intu-

Wendt denies any fixed essential meaning to anarchy, he nevertheless privileges

to little more than a form of organized hypocrisy. 28 Although Krasner posits

entrapment within webs of legal constraints thus fail to offer an alternative to

The Territorial Legacy: Political Theory from Hobbes to Hegel

Anticipating the English School requirement that the members of interna-

Max Weber and the Modern Territorial State

Weber emphasizes the state's territoriality as a consequence of his realist politi-

A "ruling or dominating {Herrschaftverband) organization" will be called

command," to regulate the body's location in space and movement in time. 64

no different. Its rightful destiny was to achieve the value-prestige or glory of

Postmodernism Confronts the Territorial a Priori

turns on a simple hierarchical opposition: a dichotomy of sovereignty versus

In political thought the principle of sovereign identity underpins a hierarchi-

are restricted to communities within the boundaries of a sovereign state. Outside

"international politics" is a practice of the inscription of the dangerous, the

put in their place'. 95 Likewise for Ashley, a "Cartesian practice of spatialization"

The inside is taken to be the space of identity and continuity-the privileged

Renaissance. Despite this particular historical oversight, International Relations

Theorizing Territoriality: Discourse,

T he discourse of International Relations, or at least that part of it con-

is at once a precondition and a result of social superstructures. The state and

The primary task of disciplinary power is to "delimit one's place in a world

and mathematical theories of striation. 35 It segments space into homogeneous

Territoriality in Cultures of Space

All people, everywhere, in all ages, have a distinctive experience of time

In Fin de siecle Europe analogous conceptions of space emerged simultaneously

common sense, of knowledge (savoir), of social practice, of political power, a

relations of force; second, the "matrix of constraints and opportunities within

a sort of"historical a priori" which in a given period, delimits in the totality

The episteme denotes an unconscious set of rules, a system of regularities, that

intend to invoke the sense of a Weltanschauung or spirit of an age. An episteme

territoriality. However, Foucault made it clear that epistemes do not pervade

In terms of space, the arborescent/nomadic confrontation is manifest in the

Histories of Space and Territory

Even within International Relations primordialism has been challenged.

models of territorialization. The Greek city-states embodied a "homogeneous

establishes a fixed centre by coming to constitute a hub, a privileged focal

property markets on the earth, while comrnodificatioJ1. through space installs

Hierarchy, Order, and Space in

Dionysius and the Sacred Order of Hierarchy

systems are centralized and hierarchic. The parts of international-political sys-

For many International Relations theorists the hierarchy-anarchy dichotomy