Between Sovereignty and Heteronomy

IR literature on medieval international relations in general, and on medieval political authority in particular, is divided between two loosely related camps, which I will call “statists” and “heteronomists.”Footnote ¹² Although they do not constitute cohesive schools of thought, the resulting outlook on the period within each bears some sort of family resemblance, even if different elements are emphasized.

The notion of heteronomy is perhaps the most common take on the period. Broadly understood, these scholars subscribe to the view that the organizing principles of political authority in the Middle Ages did not conform to the ideal of sovereignty, but were instead characterized by some form of heterogeneity in authority forms.Footnote ¹³ This definition in negative terms (i.e., as “nonsovereignty”) already points to some of the major conceptual difficulties in examining how medieval political authority was understood and distributed. Indeed, a definition by opposition has allowed authors in this tradition to highlight radically different—and sometimes contradictory—aspects. Thus, where some see a central role of large, universalist political organizations such as Church and Empire, others see a highly localized system of rule integrated by the symbolic role of higher offices such as kings.Footnote ¹⁴

Beyond these differences, however, heteronomists broadly agree on three features of medieval rule: first, that authority was not exclusive or territorialized but distributed through lord/vassal relations into a system of “loose enclaves” or “overlapping jurisdictions.”Footnote ¹⁵ Second, they see medieval authority as private in nature. Feudal contracts meant that authority was indistinguishable from property and vested in the individuals owning land, in opposition to the modern public/private division.Footnote ¹⁶ Finally, medieval authority was marked by oppositional struggles between Church and State and as such did not have the secular character of modern sovereignty.Footnote ¹⁷ This argument, notably, is not exclusive to the heteronomy thesis, but also shared by statists, and takes many different forms. Some authors draw a sharp division between secular and religious organizations: they consider that “authority” was exclusively secular, but was challenged by a parallel religious structure, the Church.Footnote ¹⁸ Others consider that the Church indeed wielded political authority, but with entirely separate legitimating bases.Footnote ¹⁹ Overall, the “heteronomist” take on medieval authority is nicely captured by Kratochwil and Hall: “to talk about the Middle Ages is to imply the existence of certain social institutions such as feudalism and personalistic rather than impersonal or state politics; it is to refer to traditional rather than legal rational legitimacy and to controversies between temporal and spiritual authority rather than sovereign supremacy.”Footnote ²⁰

This view contrasts sharply with a burgeoning historiographical literature that not only problematizes traditional notions such as “feudalism,” but argues that allegedly modern concepts such as sovereignty and the state can be meaningfully used in the medieval period.Footnote ²¹ In IR, this argument takes two forms. First, authors interested in a long-durée perspective have seen a pattern of centralization and stabilization of rule that allows them, on the basis of specified definitions, to speak of states.Footnote ²² The claim in this tradition is not that these are modern states, but rather that the presence of structures coexisting in an anarchical environment can be analytically treated as states or sovereigns. Second, from a constructivist approach, Andrew Latham has recently argued that while the traditional heteronomy view might be applicable to the early and central Middle Ages, the political organization of Western Europe experienced a fundamental change in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, with the emergence of a constitutive norm of sovereignty in the political thought and practice of the time.Footnote ²³ This norm of sovereignty was articulated through concepts such as potestas absoluta and had distinctly territorial and public connotations. These conceptual and practical changes ultimately crystalized in a script of corporate-sovereign statehood that was “enacted throughout Latin Christendom.”Footnote ²⁴ Thus, in this view, it would be an exercise in presentism to limit notions like sovereignty and the state to the modern era since the claim is that recognizable forms of them already emerged in the later Middle Ages.

We are therefore left with a variety of contradictory stories about medieval international relations, particularly from the twelfth century onward. According to some, the later Middle Ages were still characterized by an overlapping patchwork of authorities and loyalties, with chains of lord-vassal relations constituting the basic structure of political organization. According to others, the era of the state started in the twelfth century and so late-medieval Europe was populated by units that can be called sovereign states and co-existed in a situation of anarchy. How can we move beyond this division?

Political Authority

The core reason for this fundamental divergence of views does not lie in the exceptional nature of the period or in the difficulties of historical research, but rather on how IR has understood political authority. In what follows, I outline three existing approaches with radically different takes on both what constitutes political authority and how to study it. Against them, I propose an understanding based on contentious processes of authorization that captures both the historical embeddedness and thus variability of authority, and the contested dynamics by which it is constituted.

A large part of the neomedievalist literature is heir to a wide-spread descriptive approach to authority.Footnote ²⁵ Seeking to examine how authority is currently held by a variety of organizations and institutions beyond the state, this approach understands authority as an attribute or property that some actors have.Footnote ²⁶ What authority means is either taken for granted or specified by the researcher themselves in relation to their research agenda. Uncovering the variability of authority, therefore, becomes a matter of empirically noting who holds the predefined attribute. Thus, for example, a common claim among neomedievalists is the existence of a system of asymmetric “overlapping authority,” which is equated with various dimensions of contemporary governance, from private authority by companies to the EU.Footnote ²⁷ However, none of these authors unpack what is meant by authority, and take it instead as an unproblematic descriptor. Similarly, within some quantitative studies on the period, researchers restrict the notion of rule to secular rulers that stand high in the feudal chain, but whether this is a warranted assumption is left undiscussed.Footnote ²⁸ This approach leads to two fundamental problems: first, as mentioned, the notion itself is taken to be self-evident, thus preventing the examination of changing meanings and understandings of authority across time and space. Can we safely assume that rule was understood in the same way in the Middle Ages? Second, this leads to a static framework that is fundamentally unable to explain such variability or how authority patterns may change. Since the meaning and nature of authority are taken as given, this approach provides no way of explaining change, contestation, or differences between holders of authority.Footnote ²⁹

In contrast to this, a substantial part of the literature on the Middle Ages draws on a constructivist approach. Rather than understanding authority as a given and then seeking to recognize it in different actors, authors in this tradition accept that the meaning and nature of authority is historically variable and constituted by the norms prevalent in a society. Reus-Smit, for example, speaks of “constitutional structures, which define the social identity of the state and the basic parameters of rightful state action.”Footnote ³⁰ In the case of the Middle Ages, this is the prevalent approach among those who seek to study the period in its own terms, and stands at the core of the disagreement between heteronomists and statists. While Ruggie understands this historical constitution to be based on private and proprietary notions of lord and vassal, Latham sees a sovereign state imaginary in notions such as potestas absoluta.Footnote ³¹ As this illustrates, however, existing constructivist approaches to authority present a problem: while incorporating historical variability across periods, the way in which they have articulated the idea of prevalent or constitutional norms as singularFootnote ³² has prevented them from seeing diversity and variability within a period.Footnote ³³ Indeed, “constitutional” and “constitutive” are frequently understood to mean noncontested or taken for granted.Footnote ³⁴ As a result, even if the notion of rule is no longer analytically predefined and is endogenized to the ideational structures of the period, existing constructivist approaches have so far remained fundamentally static and to a large extent descriptive.

So-called relational approaches are a third take on political authority which has not been applied to Middle Ages but nevertheless provides useful insights on the matter. While encompassing a variety of different perspectives—from rationalist to Bourdieusian—this approach understands authority not as an attribute but as inherent in the relation between a ruler and a subordinate.Footnote ³⁵ Authority denotes a relation of super/subordination between two actors whereby the subordinate one accepts the right of the superordinate to issue mandatory commands. Understanding authority as relational gets us a step closer to understanding the production and reproduction of authority: as an accepted relation between actors rather than an individual property or attribute, it is the constant re-enacting of this relation that perpetuates it in time.Footnote ³⁶ As David Lake puts it, “authority is a dynamic and constantly evolving relationship of domination and subordination” that “does not follow from the office of the ruler but from a bargain between ruler and ruled.”Footnote ³⁷ It is precisely this need for re-enactment and bargaining that opens up space for change and variations over time.Footnote ³⁸

At the same time, however, they present some fundamental limitations. While understanding authority as a relation brings in dynamism, restricting the focus exclusively to ruler and ruled—those who command and those who obey or defer—leaves us unable to account for a large part of the authority problématique because it overlooks the fact that the relational nature of authority involves more than the subordinate and superordinate actors—it also relies on the constitutive relation between these and third parties. Indeed, even the basic premise that states are at the core of the international system cannot be explained merely as a product of simultaneous contract-like (re)negotiations between populations and their rulers. On the contrary, we need to be able to account for both the importance of the concept, categories, and practices of a state, insofar as they create the framework within which authority can be negotiated, and for the relational centrality of third parties who are not themselves the ruler or the ruled.Footnote ³⁹

This specific problem is something that Bourdieusian-inspired relational approaches explicitly attempt to address by pointing to the notion of recognition.Footnote ⁴⁰ The argument is that authority always operates within an already-made hierarchical social and institutional context that makes it recognizable and stabilizes it. With this, Sending, for example, is able to understand broader patterns of reproduction and parallelism as something more than happenstance or coincidence. Furthermore, change becomes possible when actors mobilize different forms of capital to create a new symbolic and institutional context.Footnote ⁴¹ While this opens up the possibility for both stability and change, it has an important shortcoming: the notion of change here is one of punctuated equilibrium by which symbolic stabilization is periodically successfully challenged by mobilization of different forms of capital that are then stabilized as a new symbolic and institutional order. In doing so, symbolic capital becomes merely a stabilizing by-product of other forms of capital, and one which can itself only stabilize. In this sense, therefore, ideas and institutions can be as static in this model as in existing constructivist accounts and their own importance in processes of contestation is left unexplored.

To overcome some of these issues and be able to understand the nature of medieval political authority I take two steps. The first involves recognizing, with constructivist approaches, that not only who has political authority but also what political authority is, is historically contingent. While we might generally define political authority as “rightful rule,”Footnote ⁴² the particular meaning of both “rightful” and “rule” have been understood in radically different ways. Uncovering these different meanings, and how they change, necessarily needs to take a central stage in any inquiry into historical political authority.

The second step is recognizing, with relational approaches, that not only are these meanings historically contingent, but also the site of vivid contestation. This contestation goes beyond challenging an established norm for the attribution of authority or disputing specific ruling rights.Footnote ⁴³ Rather, it calls attention to the fact that authority is not a stable property but emerges as a result of constant (re)authorization. In turn, authorization is neither a mechanical process on the basis of an existing “constitutive” norm nor merely a by-product of other forms of capital: it involves the constant negotiation, definition, delimitation, and categorization of both authority and connected concepts and institutions that make authority possible. This of course takes a variety of forms, from contestation over the object of governance to struggles over the material representation of authority.Footnote ⁴⁴

Here, however, I draw attention to the notion of categories and categorization: concepts of authority linked to specific semantic fields that get constantly deployed to reauthorize authority. The insight is simple: authorization starts with the naming of authorities as such, through specific words, and these categories and their variability are central to understand the production and evolution of authority itself.Footnote ⁴⁵ Two aspects are worth bearing in mind. First, categories are the linguistic and normative resources with which authority is constituted and they must be understood not as singular but plural. At any point, there are a variety of categories available that can be meaningfully and intelligibly deployed in order to categorize—and thus authorize—authority. Mapping the existing categories, their meanings, and their interplay is essential to understand the constitution of authority in any period. Second, the meaning of these categories is not fixed. As words within a language, each instantiation of their use can also slightly reformulate their meaning and relation to concepts within their semantic field.Footnote ⁴⁶ It is this multiplicity of categories and nonfixity of meaning that open up the potential for change and strategic contestation. Therefore, to understand the production of authority in IR we should not focus on fixed norms or bilateral bargaining but on the emergence of rule from a constant struggle for categorization.Footnote ⁴⁷

Medieval Political Authority

In what follows, I show how this perspective can help us make sense of medieval political authority. I discuss how medieval lawyers—specifically Roman and Canon lawyers—understood and categorized authority from the twelfth to the fourteenth centuries, which is the period IR scholars disagree the most about. The choice of lawyers responds to their central role in medieval politics. Although IR scholars have focused overwhelmingly on theology through figures such as Augustine and Aquinas when approaching the Middle Ages,Footnote ⁴⁸ historiography tells us that from the late twelfth century onward, university-trained canon and Roman lawyers started to occupy a variety of positions within both Church and secular administrations:Footnote ⁴⁹ they worked in several levels of law courts and managed the affairs of and advised secular and ecclesiastical rulers alike. The centrality of lawyers in medieval politics is hard to overstate. For example, within the Church, after the mid-twelfth century lawyers dominated the College of Cardinals, and between the thirteenth and fifteenth centuries popes were more frequently lawyers than theologians.Footnote ⁵⁰ As such, their categories and concepts became a fundamental part of the language of politics at the time and provide a crucial understanding of the nature of political relations and disputes.Footnote ⁵¹

I examine a variety of legal books, court decisions, and political documents written by these medieval lawyers in both teaching and the daily practice of politics, and show that political authority in the later Middle Ages is best understood as emerging from the contestation between four ordering categories. As semantically related groups of concepts, each of these categories put forward a distinct view of what rule was and a different understanding of how rulers stood in relation to one another—that is, a different order. More broadly, in these four categories we can not only find reflected some of the arguments of statists and heteronomists but also alternative understandings that have been missed in IR because of how the medieval period was approached. After examining the four categories, a final section illustrates how contestation played out in a thirteenth-century high-profile dispute. Table 1 summarizes the core categories and arguments.

Table 1. Four ordering categories

Iurisdictio

The first and most central category through which late-medieval jurists—but also political practice—discussed and conceived of political authority is iurisdictio (jurisdiction). In 1456, for example, Pope Calixtus III, wanting to recruit further support in his fight against Muslim polities, decided to grant to the Order of Jesus Christ (a military order headed by then King Alfonso V of Portugal) authority over all the African lands beyond Guinea that he could conquer. He phrased this as granting “in perpetuity … all kinds of ordinary jurisdiction [omnimodam iurisdictionem ordinariam], both in the acquired possessions … and in the other islands, lands, and places which may hereafter be acquired by said king.”Footnote ⁵²

That the idea of iurisdictio was central in conceiving of medieval political authority should not surprise IR scholars. Mentions of jurisdiction are scattered throughout both heteronomist and statist writings, from Latham's claims that jurisdiction was one of the “quintessentially political ‘goods’” over which medieval states competed to the very characterization of the system as one of “interwoven and overlapping jurisdictions.”Footnote ⁵³ Unpacking how this eminently legal notion was articulated, however, reveals a category that challenges some of the fundamental characterizations behind either thesis. Against the heteronomists, jurisdiction reveals a notion of authority that is explicitly articulated as public, and allows for the comparison of rulers beyond atomistic notions of lord/vassal. Against the statists, the conceptual structure of iurisdictio offers an understanding of rule that encompasses all rulers and questions the bases upon which we can claim fundamental distinctiveness for those at the top.Footnote ⁵⁴

The classical definition of the term stated that “jurisdiction is a power publicly introduced with responsibility for pronouncing the law and establishing equity.”Footnote ⁵⁵ This already points to several crucial dimensions in the meaning of authority: first, central to the conception of iurisdictio is the ability to “pronounce the law,” that is, to judge—to the point that the ruler was in many cases referred to as iudex (judge).Footnote ⁵⁶Iurisdictio, however, was also associated with the power to establish law. Jurisprudentially, the expression ius dicere was quite ambiguous: if at its origins it was tied to interpreting the law for a specific case—hence the judicial function—this was intimately connected to the ability to generally pronounce what is right [ius], that is, establish law. Thus, successive commentary started expanding the idea of “pronouncing the law” and differentiating it from mere judicial functions, to the point that “saying the law” became “establishing the law,” that is, legislating. Odofredus de Denariis, for example, already spoke of the power to “judge, say the law and establish equity,”Footnote ⁵⁷ separating both aspects. Thus iurisdictio included legislative functions as well, constituting political authority in a way that encompassed all governance functions.

Contrary to what proponents of the heteronomy thesis claim, iurisdictio was not necessarily tied to an understanding of political authority as private: jurisdiction was not based on private or patrimonial ideas, but instead had an explicit public dimension. In relation to its origins, and also to its nature, the standard definition that we saw earlier said that it was a power “publicly introduced.” This pointed to two fundamental aspects. First, jurisdiction could not be granted or created by private persons [singuli] but was established by some public institution instead: either another holder of jurisdiction, a corporation—understood in the late-medieval sense of a transpersonal entity composed of multiple individualsFootnote ⁵⁸—or eminently public sources such as the law or custom.Footnote ⁵⁹ Second, and as a consequence of this, the holder of jurisdiction had a public character. Although this public nature could be expressed in many ways, this was essentially connected to a sense of purpose insofar as it was meant to foster what Albericus de Rosate called “the public good.”Footnote ⁶⁰

Taking seriously political authority as jurisdiction is essential, for it both challenges the private and proprietary notion of authority advanced by heteronomists, and it also poses significant challenges for the idea of sovereignty, particularly since its unitary and public character means that we cannot exclude certain political forms from the medieval distribution of political authority. If rule was conceived as jurisdiction, that means that the category was much broader than what we now understand as political authority. The authority wielded by artisan guilds, for example, or merchant corporations, was also understood through the lens of jurisdiction in the same sense as papal and royal authority were. When asking about the various sites and origins of jurisdiction, Azo mentioned that “the consensus of those who are of the same profession or business can create an ordinary [judge].”Footnote ⁶¹ Similarly, Baldus asked “whether guilds, for example, the wool merchants, can make amongst themselves special statutes”Footnote ⁶² and concluded that they indeed could. Since the governance of guilds and professions was articulated through the same vocabulary and thus constituted in essentially the same way as the more conventional authorities, creating any artificial labels that exclude these authorities from the realm of “political authority” on the basis that they currently belong to the realm of “private governance” or to a functionally differentiated sphereFootnote ⁶³ misrepresents the medieval understanding of rule and constitutes a presentist exercise.Footnote ⁶⁴

However, this unitary notion of rule did not mean that lawyers were unable to differentiate between rulers, for the political reality around them clearly showed that there were substantial differences. Thus, jurists developed several typologies within iurisdictio that allowed them not only to grasp different manifestations of authority, but also to contest them.Footnote ⁶⁵ The most central of these typologies was based on the association between iurisdictio and imperium. Although in its evolution it took a variety of forms—highlighting the crucial role of contestation—the stabilized version of the typology had three main subcategories: merum imperium, mixtum imperium, and iurisdictio simplex. These categories of jurisdiction were clearly hierarchically ordered: merum imperium was superior to mixtum imperium, which in turn was superior to iurisdictio simplex. Commentators also created several subdivisions or degrees of jurisdiction within each of the categories, using clearly ordinal language such as magnum/modicum imperium or maior/minima iurisdictio. Bartolus's final classification, which was extensively reproduced, included six subdivisions within each category, ranging from maximum to minimum.

This had crucial implications regarding the constitution of authority. The genus of iurisdictio, as well as all the subspecies within it, did not each refer to a specific office or specific rulers. Instead, they provided a language to refer to bundles of competencies that could be accumulated in several ways. The notion of a “bundle” becomes clear if we briefly examine some of the eighteen categories created in Bartolus's typology. Within merum imperium, for example, we find that maximum is exclusive to the prince, and includes the ability to enact general laws, whereas maius refers to the ability “to punish the wicked,” which in this case means to impose capital punishment, incarceration, or loss of citizenship. Vis-à-vis this, magnum includes among other things the ability to deport, and parvuum the ability to relegate, as well as the ability to impose certain physical punishments. The last two degrees refer to abilities possessed by most rulers, such as minimum and verbal coercion.Footnote ⁶⁶

The categories of jurisdiction thus referred to both issue-specific prerogatives that different rulers could exercise, as well as the ability to enact laws and statutes on those matters. They did not, however, immediately refer to specific rulers. Some of them were reserved for special categories of rulers, such as the maximum types of both merum and mixtum imperium, which were reserved for the emperor, but most were just set up as abstract bundles of specific rights. Crucially, however, their bundled nature means that the same ruler could exercise more than one bundle at the same time—as exemplified by the emperor holding both merum and mixtum imperium maximum. In this sense, their bundled nature seems to conform to the expectation of heteronomists, with the strong caveat that we are talking about a public language with no explicit relation to property rights.

However, in the context of iurisdictio’s general applicability to all holders of political authority, these categories enabled these rulers’ positions to be mutually intelligible and comparable to each other. As I mentioned, proponents of heteronomy focused on chains of lord-vassal relations, which effectively made the positions of rulers not connected by vassalage mutually unintelligible. Consider a hypothetical situation: what was, for example, the standing of the King of Castile's vassal vis-à-vis the vassal of the King of Hungary? If our understanding of political authority is based on lord-vassal relations this comparison is impossible. Redescribing them in terms of jurisdiction, however, first of all tells us that we are talking about the same type of social position—they are both rulers-qua-holders of iurisdictio. But most importantly, they are comparable through the specific powers that each one holds in terms of the species and subdivisions of iurisdictio.

This has a further consequence for how to understand the ordering of rulers that resulted from this category. Although the language and classifications had obvious hierarchical connotations, the fact that the different types referred to bundles of competencies that could be accumulated, along with the multiple subdivisions within each category, led to a situation in which it is impossible to outline a clear hierarchy of competencies or positions. Since different bundles of jurisdictional rights could be accumulated at once by the same person, creating a complete rank of rulers or positions was not possible. Thus, against some of the historiography and IR treatments of the period, we cannot speak of a unitary rank of positions in a Weberian sense, a “hierarchy of sovereignty” or a “pyramid of jurisdictions” that some historians talk about,Footnote ⁶⁷ but we can instead speak of a “loosely stratified” order.Footnote ⁶⁸

Potestas

While the language of iurisdictio emphasized the distribution of a variety of bundles of rights, in potestas we find a language of binaries that emphasized a ruler's distinctiveness and superiority compared to the ordinary nature of others. For this reason, it is the language that has most frequently been used by statists to justify their claims of a medieval ordering principle of sovereignty.Footnote ⁶⁹Iurisdictio and potestas were closely linked: they appeared side by side at various points in the law books, and crucially in political practice. We saw earlier the use of iurisdictio in a 1456 papal grant to King Alfonso V of Portugal. A few years later, the 1493 bull Inter Caetera, one of the famous Bulls of Donation by Pope Alexander VI dealing with the division of American lands, phrased the grant to Isabel of Castile as follows: “we make, appoint, and depute you and your heirs and successors, lord of them with full, free and every kind of power, authority, and jurisdiction [plena, libera et omnimoda potestate, auctoritate, et jurisdictione].”Footnote ⁷⁰ And yet, despite its connection to iurisdictio, the language of potestas reveals a different articulation of rule and its types through a series of discussions of potestas-with-adjectives.Footnote ⁷¹

The most important, and far-reaching, variation on potestas was that of plenitudo potestatis (fullness of power).Footnote ⁷² The expression was originally used in canon law in a variety of contexts, mostly equivalent to that of plena potestas, to refer to the full administrative and jurisdictional authority of a variety of elected officials within the Church. The category, however, became progressively associated with the papal office. Johannes Teutonicus had already stated in the ordinary gloss that “papal authority is full, and that of other bishops is less full [semiplena], because they are called to a part of the responsibility not fullness of power,”Footnote ⁷³ thus linking the full/less full gradation and the plenitudo potestatis / in partem sollicitudinis formula, and applying it to the relation between the pope and the other bishops. This formula was subsequently repeatedly used by Pope Innocent III in his letters, a few of which were compiled in the Liber Extra, and became current in commentary toward the middle of the thirteenth century.Footnote ⁷⁴ By the end of the thirteenth century plenitudo potestatis was an almost mystical expression associated with the supreme power of the pope over all Christians, closely connected to other formulas such as Vicarius Dei (Vicar of God) or iudex ordinarius omnium (ordinary judge of all).Footnote ⁷⁵

However, this category did not remain restricted to the papal office, but was later deployed by a variety of other rulers in their struggles to claim supreme authority, illustrating the centrality of processes of contestation and semantic change. At the turn of the thirteenth century, canonist Huguccio could note in passing that both pope and emperor had plenitudo potestatis in their respective spheres of action.Footnote ⁷⁶ Toward the end of that century, Hostiensis was noting that although plenitude of power was a prerogative of only the pope and the emperor, “not only kings but even inferiors”Footnote ⁷⁷ were wrongly using it. Eventually, by the end of the fourteenth century, the claim to plenitudo potestatis was instrumental in the Visconti family's maintenance of claims to the government of Milan.Footnote ⁷⁸ Thus, Baldus, at the time himself having a close relation to Giangaleazzo Visconti, not only used plenitudo potestatis to refer to the power of the emperor, saying that “nothing resists plenitude of power, for it overcomes all positive law” in his commentaries, but he also easily applied it to other rulers, such as the Italian signori, in his court opinions.Footnote ⁷⁹

In terms of its ordering function, plenitudo potestastis therefore had strong hierarchical connotations. However, instead of being associated with bundles of prerogatives, it denoted the hierarchical relation between the whole and the parts, or between the geographically unlimited authority of the pope and the geographically circumspect one of the bishops. With its extension to rulers other than the pope, plenitudo potestatis carried with it the idea of a strong, central authority and thus it is no surprise that it constitutes the basis for claims to the medieval idea of sovereignty.Footnote ⁸⁰

Other concepts around potestas further this idea. Closely linked to the notion of plenitudo potestatis was the distinction between potestas absoluta and potestas ordinata. This distinction, coined by canonist Hostiensis, is a refinement of the concept of plenitudo potestatis, and had crucial implications well into the Early Modern period. As Pennington notes, despite the use by Innocent III in his letters, and increasing canonistic commentary, the term plenitudo potestatis remained undefined and connected to a series of statements concerning the divine origin and superiority of the pope's power. For example, a commentary on Innocent III's decretal Quanto persona stated that the pope “changes the nature of things by applying the essences of one thing to another … he can make iniquity from justice by correcting any canon or law,”Footnote ⁸¹ to which Johannes Teutonicus had added “he makes something out of nothing.”Footnote ⁸²

Hostiensis, writing in the second half of the thirteenth century, gave the concept a central place in his analysis of papal power and primacy. He wrote that when he was acting according to what has been established in canon law and Church statutes the pope is exercising the fullness of his office [plenitudo oficii], but when he “transcends the law, then he uses his fullness of power.”Footnote ⁸³ In this treatment, fullness of power was the power of the exception, to act above the law and right what is wrong, capturing Laurentius's and Johannes Teutonicus's statements about the power of the pope to change the nature of things. Thus, potestas ordinata and potestas absoluta effectively created a standard of normality for the exercise of power, opposing it to an idea of exceptionality and in doing so it highlighted the hierarchically superior—some might say sovereign—position of the exception.

In the category of potestas we therefore find articulations of political authority that, while tied to jurisdiction, had significantly different connotations. While jurisdiction and its species portrayed a myriad of extremely specific bundles of rights that allowed for the careful consideration of all rulers, in the case of potestas the gradation was much vaguer. Instead, the language of potestas revolved around a series of concepts that emphasized the distinction between a strong authority, and smaller, more limited ones, or between the regular exercise of power, and the exceptional one afforded to only certain rulers. It was a language that emphasized the differences and exceptionality of supreme power vis-à-vis others, and it is thus no surprise that it constitutes the basis for many historiographical approaches to the existence of medieval sovereignty.Footnote ⁸⁴

Lord/Vassal

We have so far seen two different ways of articulating political authority: jurisdiction, which portrayed an all-encompassing set of rulers with different bundles of rights, and potestas which tended to highlight the superior and in some cases exceptional power of some rulers. We may note one commonality between them: they both refer to political authority in itself rather than to the people who hold it. In opposition to this, the last two ordering categories—lord/vassal and magistrates—refer to rulers. A look at feudal categories reveals the existence of a third notion of rule, in this case much more based on direct notions of authority and subordination between two rulers. Against statists, we see that the presence, distinctiveness, and extent of “feudal” language means that we cannot readily dismiss it by claiming that “by 1300, however, feudalism had both declined in importance as a mode of social and political organization and, in any case, effectively been subordinated to the logic of state-building.”Footnote ⁸⁵ Conversely, against heteronomists, we see that beside the fact that it coexisted with other important categories and thus its existence as the main ordering category is questionable, it became associated with core elements of these other categories in a way that challenges its merely private and proprietary nature.

Before we proceed with an examination of feudal language, however, it is necessary to consider where this language was found, as this bears great importance for the nature and characteristics of these terms. The central locus of juristic analysis of feudal relations was neither a Roman nor a canon law text per se. The so-called Libri Feudorum was a compilation of a variety of unrelated texts—including letters, treatises, consilia, and imperial constitutions written at different times, some of which had already been included in the Decretum—that mostly contained Lombard custom and that in many instances contradicted each other.Footnote ⁸⁶ Although initially a separate collection, the Libri Feudorum were from the thirteenth century onwards included in Roman law texts at the end of the Volumen parvum, and from the mid-thirteenth century, they were regularly cited in academic commentary.

This introduction to the textual sources of what is here called “feudal language” serves two crucial purposes that necessarily need to precede any examination of the language. First, although we speak of “feudal law,” the lawyers commenting on the Libri and practicing in court were trained civilians and canonists. Consequently, the cross-fertilization of ideas, vocabulary, principles, and approach to jurisprudence between the three laws is not only substantial, but also central to how “feudal language” was to be interpreted. Second, the Libri as a source of law stood halfway between local custom and imperial constitution, that is, between local restrictions and general applicability.Footnote ⁸⁷ Lawyers never forgot that what they were commenting on was local custom, and that customs varied greatly throughout Europe. Thus, their commentary work can be seen as developing a set of categories of legal analysis of feudal relations that, while in some sense constituted a unified “feudal law,” never existed as a unified practice in reality. As we will see in the illustrative example, this meant that the possible space for contestation within feudal language itself was even broader than in the other categories.

The basic scheme of a feudal relation is well known: a vassal gets a fief from a lord in exchange for an oath of fealty/homage, which creates an obligation toward that lord. The relation is thus that of a contract between two unequal parties. According to Roffredus Beneventanus, “vassals are those who receive something from somebody else in fief [feudum] … All these who are called vassals on account of their fiefs swear an oath of fealty to their lords.”Footnote ⁸⁸ A first thing that should be noted is that, unlike the Romano-canonical terms we saw in the previous sections, the language of dominus and vassallus had, first, a purely relational, and second, an extremely concrete nature: neither category referred to a generalizable and substantive notion of rule,Footnote ⁸⁹ but rather identified the condition of a person in relation to another. Thus, the vassal exists only in relation to the lord, and vice versa. While vassal and lord themselves are categories, and therefore applicable to a variety of people making them fundamentally comparable to each other, what we find here is not sustained reflection on the nature of authority, its origins, or meanings. The language itself does not imply in any sense that all rule is feudal—it is arguably a language about property and interpersonal relations rather than political authority.

However, the specific hierarchical connotations of this language meant that it was increasingly used in political practice to denote political supremacy.Footnote ⁹⁰ While iurisdictio and potestas represented a broad array of rights capable of encompassing a wide variety of rulers, lord/vassal takes us to an explicit acknowledgement of direct subordination. Thus, from the thirteenth century onward, a series of political relations between rulers which had not been described in feudal terms became progressively feudalized. Through the centrality of the idea of the coronation oath, for example, lawyers began to advocate for a feudalized understanding of the relationship between all kings and the pope, not only those who actually held their kingdoms as a papal fief.Footnote ⁹¹ Similarly, canon lawyers increasingly portrayed the relation between pope and emperor as feudalized, and, more generally, it became established that all offices held from the emperor were held as fiefs. As a result, although partly a proprietary language referring to local customs, lord/vassal acquired great importance in the ordering of political authority. In this sense, then, a first examination would at least seem to confirm the intuitions of heteronomists.

A closer unpacking of the articulation of feudal categories and connected concepts, however, reveals some problems in the heteronomy thesis. IR scholars have frequently emphasized that feudalism constitutes an interpersonal, private mode of power.Footnote ⁹² The contractual nature of feudal relations is key in these claims. However, these were not the necessary connotations of feudal language, but instead constituted just one jurisprudential option. When talking about the oath of fealty, canonist Rufinus stated that “oaths of fealty are done either to a person or in respect to a person's office (dignitatum).”Footnote ⁹³ Oaths of fidelity, therefore, need not be conceived as relations between two private persons, but in some cases, increasingly common, they had a public dimension insofar as they were associated with a specific office.

The medieval idea of an office (sometimes expressed through the word dignitas) is complex. At a basic level, it involved a distinction between the physical person who was mortal and held authority, and the titles and offices they operated, which were immortal.Footnote ⁹⁴ The broader implications of the association between fidelity and office for the nature of political authority are crucial. A text by Baldus highlights the relevance:

We have noted that the feudal bond had a contractual nature. In jurisprudence from the thirteenth century onward, contracts had generally been understood as belonging to natural law or the ius gentium, and as such, to be an effective limit to rulers’ power.Footnote ⁹⁶ As Baldus says, even when jurisprudence claimed that the prince was not bound by the laws [legibus solutus], he still had to abide by his contractual obligations. Insofar as private obligations between two parties, however, they died with the person and were thus not inheritable by his successor. And yet, Baldus makes an exception: feudal bonds are not contracted between two private persons but are made by the office which we have seen is immortal, and so they bind both the prince—as contracts—and his successors who take up the office. In the development of feudal language in the context of a broader Romano-canonical system, we therefore find the key to the fact that feudal bonds transcended the idea of a private realm and were associated with public rule and thus inheritable.

Feudal language therefore takes us to a third way of understanding rulers that refers to direct relations of authority and subordination rather than broad, all-encompassing schemes. In this sense, we seem to be closer to the heteronomist world of a variety of bilaterally (inter)linked rulers who can hardly be compared to each other. Two caveats we have seen, however, nuance this view. First, lord/vassal were categories that could be and were deployed, and as such, although comparison between rulers may not be possible, the relation in itself was intelligible beyond the two parties. Second, the link between feudal language and the notion of a (public) office means that feudal relations did not necessarily conform to the IR image. As a result, the relation between feudal and private/public authority, and with it many presuppositions about this matter in the IR heteronomy proponents, needs to be qualified.

Magistrates

The fourth category of rulers is that of magistrates. The use of magistrates to categorize authority starts from a surprising asynchronous situation: the legal compilations that constituted the basis for late-medieval juristic commentary had been issued as a governance tool for the late-Roman Empire in the sixth century, and thus included a multiplicity of titles and books devoted to the discussion of its political organization. For example, the role of senators, consuls, praetorian prefects, and a variety of other long-dead imperial magistracies was extensively covered. Despite some of these roles’ quite obvious obsolescence, medieval lawyers were not at liberty to ignore these long-lost institutions, and as a result, they produced extensive commentary on them. In doing so, they developed a jurisprudential language that, far from being obsolete or a pure academic exercise in pointless abstraction, provided a framework for the general understanding and categorization of rulers. Much like in the case of iurisdictio, this was an all-encompassing framework with clear hierarchical connotations. However, in this case it was based on a clear ranking of positions through the idea of orders of magistrates and their dignity, instead of loose notions of bundled rights. They therefore provide important points of connection to claims of hierarchy within both heteronomy and state theses.

Rather than providing an integrated typology for the consideration of all magistracies, the law books tended to approach each magistracy separately. Thus, for example, Title 9 of the first book of the Digest dealt with senators, while the following titles dealt with consuls and praetorian prefects. Despite this approach, late-medieval jurists promptly built on the separate treatments to construct a categorization in which all magistrates were included and that thus allowed for comparison between them. By the mid-thirteenth century, the structure of these classifications became more stable around five degrees or ordines—superillustres, illustres, spectabiles, clarissimi, and infimi—corresponding to five degrees of greatness—maximi, magni, medii, minors, and infimi. All the Roman magistrates described in the law books were then placed within each category. For example, the emperor and the pope occupied the highest rank (superillustres), followed by senators, consuls, quaestors, and some praetorian prefects as illustres, and this continued for over twenty different magistracies down to the last two offices, the defender of the city and other municipal magistrates, which were infimi.

Surprisingly, these classifications progressively included continuous references to rulers that did not find a basis in the law books—rulers contemporary to the lawyers themselves. For example, we read that “the praetorian prefect is equivalent to kings,”Footnote ⁹⁷ that “cardinals are illustres like consuls,”Footnote ⁹⁸ or that “counts are spectabiles.”Footnote ⁹⁹Table 2 summarizes these discussions and equivalences, taking as the basis the composition in Guillelmus Durantis's Speculum iudiciale but it also includes the writings of several other authors.

Table 2. Orders of magistrates and their equivalence in thirteenth- and fourteenth-century jurists

Notes: This is my own elaboration from Vallejo Reference Vallejo1992b, 248 complemented with various thirteenth- and fourteenth-century authors; * denotes that this position is disputed in jurisprudence.

What function did these equivalences fulfill within the broader thought about political authority? Or, in other words, what is the significance of these parallelisms? If we look at the specific instances they were used in, we can see that the tension between a clear categorization of magistrates and a reality where those offices did not exist enabled the redescription and legitimation of the latter through its associations with legally existing—and thus legitimate—magistracies.Footnote ¹⁰⁰ We thus see a process of semantic change within an ordering category by which something that was initially not used for contemporary authorization became progressively more central.

Particular details of some offices were used to think through the specifics of some contemporary rulers. We have already seen that kings were considered equivalent to the praetorian prefect. In the late Roman Empire, this was a high-ranking magistrate who was in charge of a large territorial unit called a praetorian prefecture. A particularity of this office was that when they served as judges, their decisions could not be appealed. In this context, Baldus commented that “finally, note that you cannot appeal [the decisions of] the king, even if they are subjects of the Roman Empire, because Kings are either equal or greater than the praetorian prefect.”Footnote ¹⁰¹ In doing this, Baldus saw both offices as parallel but he also used the specific governmental prerogatives of one to think through the other, effectively recategorizing the office of the king.

Additionally, lawyers also used this classification to think through their contemporary political challenges. As I noted earlier, the division of the various kinds of jurisdiction into bundles of rights prevented the consideration of a holistic hierarchy because the same holder could have different rights for different territories. Problems within the classifications of magistrates, however, allowed for the discussion of this situation within the Roman law scheme. This was the case, for example, with the proconsul— the equivalent of the governor of a province for a year. Legally, only men who had formerly been consul could be elected for it, which created a problem identifying the status of the proconsul, since both offices had different dignities. Noticing this, Baldus asked: “The gloss says that the proconsul is spectabile, but is he not chosen from among the consuls, and aren't all consuls illustris?” In his answer, rather than merely resolving the issue, Baldus draws an analogy with his contemporary situation: “I answer that by reason of his mission he is spectabilis, but by reason of his consulate he is illustre, just as the King of Sicily is king with respect to Sicily and provincial count with respect to the Provence, and Duke of Apulia with respect to several cities.”Footnote ¹⁰²

Baldus hence resolved the issue by applying a variation of the distinction between dignity and administration.Footnote ¹⁰³ But at the same time, through the analogy between his contemporary situation and the books, he used the books to rethink, categorize, and ultimately validate the contemporary situtation. Moreover, it is worth noting that these parallels applied to secular powers and served the same function regarding ecclesiastical rulers. Thus, Albericus de Rosate, commenting on the same problem and the same passage, said that: “the proconsul is superillustre in terms of its dignity, but spectabile in terms of administration. In the same way, as well, the King of England is duke of Aquitaine and nevertheless King of England … and in this way some cardinals are called bishops, others presbyters, and others deacon cardinals.”Footnote ¹⁰⁴

Crucially, this categorization of their contemporary political situation through the magistracies of Roman law not only served to validate existing rulers but was also a vivid site of contestation, both in terms of the equivalences themselves and also through the deployment of some of the other ordering categories we have seen. This is evident in the case of the discussion about cities’ power. The last degree of magistrates—infimi—were holders of only iurisdictio simplex. Through the association of defenders of the city and municipal magistrates with this degree, therefore, it seems that elected officials within late-medieval Italian cities—usually called podestà—would therefore be included in this category. This was certainly the opinion of Bartolus, who claimed that “the potestates which are nowadays elected are municipal magistrates or defenders of the cities, who do not have merum imperium.”Footnote ¹⁰⁵ The problem here was that many of the Italian cities were effectively exercising those powers—recall the earlier discussion about plenitudo potestatis and the Visconti family in late-Medieval Milan.Footnote ¹⁰⁶ Guilelmus Durantis, for example, noted that “the potestates of the cities of our time, mutilating limbs and amputating heads usurp merum imperium for themselves.”Footnote ¹⁰⁷

In this context, recategorization became key to understand and even legitimize the situation. Some, such as Albericus de Rosate, noted that “the potestates of the Lombard cities are in the place of praeses [provincia] and proconsuls on account of the Peace of Constance,”Footnote ¹⁰⁸ thus trying to give a legitimate legal basis for such an exceptional circumstance, but still constructing this fact as exceptional and the normal situation being their equivalence to one of the infimi magistrates. Conversely, Baldus simply bypassed the problem by changing the equivalence and arguing that they were in the category of clarissimi as praesides provinciae all along: “Take the examples of Florence, Perugia and the city of Siena: they are considered to occupy the position of a province. Therefore those who exercise authority in them have the position of a praeses provinciae.”Footnote ¹⁰⁹ Recategorization of cities through the language of magistrates could thus effectively be used to authorize and legitimize their rule beyond the scope afforded by other categories, and change their standing vis-à-vis other rulers. In other words, in the category of magistrates we find a language through which all rulers, both secular and ecclesiastical, could be subsumed under the broad scheme and ranked in one unitary hierarchy with five possible ranks.

Contestation in Practice: Edward I and Philip IV

My core claim is that political authority can be understood as emerging from a process of contested categorization. In the previous sections, I have analyzed the four ordering categories that authorized medieval rule, showing how, although related, they constituted authority in fundamentally different ways. However, how did this process of contestation take place in medieval political practice? In this section, I provide an illustration of how the theoretical and historical insights of this article can help us understand political dynamics through a brief overview of a specific high-profile episode: the conflict between Edward I of England and Philip IV of France over the Duchy of Aquitaine in the 1290s.Footnote ¹¹⁰

Because of family inheritance Edward I, King of England, was also Duke of Aquitaine, a large territory in the southwest corner of present-day France. The duchy had originally not been legally tied to the French crown,Footnote ¹¹¹ but after a war defeat Edward I's father Henry III gave up many of his continental possessions and retained the duchy as a fief from the French crown in the 1259 Treaty of Paris.Footnote ¹¹² In exchange, Louis IX of France agreed to cede to Henry the bishoprics of Limoges, Cahors, and Périgueux. Over the next few decades, and particularly from the end of the 1280s, tensions mounted between the two rulers over both the role that Philip had as an overlord and the continental activities of Edward I, which affected some of Philip's territories. Eventually, Philip summoned Edward to appear in his court to answer for alleged breaches of the feudal relation. When Edward did not appear, Philip proceeded to confiscate the duchy. After some failed negotiations, this led to a war between both monarchs which mobilized a large system of alliances throughout Europe, included the occupation of the duchy by Capetian armies until 1302, and spread to other territories such as Flanders.

Providing a full account of the conflict is beyond the scope of this article. However, we can briefly see how contestation over authority on the basis of the four categories I described was key to the breakout, development, and resolution of this conflict. With regards to its causes, this was ultimately a conflict about authority over the duchy specifically and of both monarchs more generally. In the thirteenth century the French crown attempted to reassert and expand its role within its dominions. Doing so in the duchy of Aquitaine compromised the power and rule of the king-duke, and caused increasing frictions which, coupled with some naval incidents, resulted in the war.

As mentioned earlier, the core understanding of political authority in the period was articulated by the concept of iurisdictio, which had a fundamentally judicial connotation. How the French crown reasserted its supremacy in this case was nothing but the establishment of what some have called a “theory of the appeal”Footnote ¹¹³ or the idea that anyone in the kingdom dissatisfied with their lord-qua-judge could appeal to the king. As Malcolm Vale remarked, “this was what sovereignty [sic] really meant—the king of France's right to hold a supreme court of appeal.”Footnote ¹¹⁴ In the case of the duchy of Aquitaine, the number of appeals increased dramatically in the second half of the thirteenth century, with some historians counting up to 260 appeals between 1259 and 1324.Footnote ¹¹⁵ This undermined the authority of the king-duke insofar as it gave his subjects the opportunity of bypassing his authority by appealing to the authority of the king-qua-judge.

The status of both rulers also caused increased friction. This status element is not easily understandable if we understand political authority to be constituted only through the lord/vassal relation. While other vassals of the Capetian kings were also of course resisting the monarchy's appellate role, this was all the more problematic for Edward I. Given that he was the king of England, being put in a subordinate position to a fellow king and treated as a vassal was particularly thorny. As we saw with the category of the magistrate, there was an ordinal rank between different types of rulers, and in this case the double status as king-duke under another king not only meant an affront to his status, but it also limited his ability to act as a king in other circumstances. For example, a core element of liege-homage was that the vassal could not be mobilized against the lord. In 1275 Alfonso X of Castile had requested the participation of Edward I in his capacity as king in a war against Philip III. Married to Alfonso's sister, Edward had a standing alliance treaty with Castile. However, in this case he had to (embarrassingly, says Chaplais)Footnote ¹¹⁶ decline providing assistance on account of his vassal status in Aquitaine. When coupled with the expanding role of the French crown, this mismatch between different orderings of authority contributed to escalating the situation.

If contestation through different notions of authority played a role in the increasing tensions, it was also key in how the kings themselves disputed the conflict. As noted earlier, the tensions really escalated when Phillip—in a legal procedure—summoned Edward to appear before his court, arguing breach of the feudal agreement. Edward of course countered the charges, asking his jurists to produce a set of arguments that supported his position. A brief examination of two of these arguments shows how contestation for authorization occurred both within each ordering category and between ordering categories.

A first argument stayed within the feudal ordering scheme: lawyers argued that the 1259 treaty was indeed a contract between the two kings that established a reciprocal feudal relation. Much like Edward was bound by it, so was Philip. Given that Philip had not fulfilled the territorial commitments stated in the treaty—specifically the transfer of the three bishoprics—Edward could not therefore be accused of failing to fulfill his part. The forfeiture of the fief and confiscation by Capetian troops in the war was thus illegal, and Edward was the legitimate ruler of Aquitaine.

A second argument, however, sought to completely bypass the feudal logic and redescribe Edward's authority. Edward's lawyers claimed that before 1259 Aquitaine was actually an allod rather than a fief.Footnote ¹¹⁷ (An allod was a figure of medieval law used for free lands where the owner had complete rights.) But if ownership was complete and free, rather than inscribed within a feudal order, how was authority in this land to be described? The lawyers did so with recourse to the concepts within the ordering category of iurisdictio: Edward I “had in it merum and mixtum imperium, and all jurisdiction, mediate and non-mediate.”Footnote ¹¹⁸ As we saw earlier, these were core subcategories within the language of iurisdictio. And merum et mixtum imperium, as an expression, had increasingly come to signify the holding of full rights within a territory. In using it Edward's lawyers were challenging Capetian action in the war but they were also recategorizing Edwards’ authority in a way that completely erased the possibility for Philip to legitimately rule over the territory. If Edward already held both merum and mixtum imperium over it, the way the language of iurisdictio was structured meant that there was no legitimate authority left for Philip.

Finally, the setting in which these arguments were put forward adds some further light to the contested process by which rule was authorized. When the truce was declared toward the end of 1297, the negotiation of peace terms became a difficult affair between both monarchs. As a result, the case was referred for legal arbitration by Pope Boniface VIII. Papal arbitrations were a relatively common occurrence in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries.Footnote ¹¹⁹ Indeed, we have already seen that through notions like plenitudo potestatis or potestas absoluta the papacy had sought to expand its role over Christian secular affairs, and central within this was his judicial capacity.Footnote ¹²⁰ However, in a context of the French crown's expanding claims—and also of almost overt conflict with the papacy—referring the dispute for papal arbitration largely reinforced papal claims to supremacy and undermined the king's standing. For this reason, both monarchs made use of one of the legal figures that we have seen: the distinction between an office and a private person. Indeed, rather than referring the case to Pope Boniface VIII, they called on his private person, Benedetto Caetani.Footnote ¹²¹ Doing this, the monarchs both conformed to established practices and reinforced their status as kings. At the same time, however, they also undermined the role of the pope—as evidenced by the fact that five years later, when the pope attempted once again to mediate in the conflict between both kings, he insisted that he could do so as his public rather than his private person.

In conclusion, merely seeing this as either a feudal dispute in the image of a simplified heteronomy thesis or as a sovereignty one does not allow us to understand most of its proceedings: without the hierarchical and ordinal ideas of prestige between kings and dukes that we saw through the category of magistrates, one cannot grasp the problems of appellate jurisdiction. Similarly, without recourse to the concepts of merum and mixtum imperium, it would have been difficult to articulate an alternative ordering to that of lord/vassal between both kings. Finally, the referral to Boniface for arbitration both authorized the papacy and undermined some of its claims, thanks to recourse to the distinction between office and person. Ultimately, this case illustrates how political authority in the middle ages emerged from the fierce contestation not only of specific ruling rights and contractual relations but also of the terms themselves that authorized—that is, as an interplay between different sets of ordering categories.

Contesting Political Authority in IR

We started this article noting a wide variety of accounts of medieval authority. Against this, approaching authority through categorization allowed us to examine four separate semantically related groups of authority categories that structured the contestation over the authorization of medieval rule. In terms of existing accounts of the period, this provided mixed evidence for existing positions. The unified framework of iurisdictio, which as we saw encompassed all rulers, coupled with the importance of feudal language, seems to indicate a world closer to that described by heteronomists. Conversely, the presence of a language of potestas that highlighted the exceptional nature of supreme power or the progressive use of appellate jurisdiction supports the statist narrative of progressive centralization of rule and could be seen to indicate an emergent notion of sovereignty. Overall, the fundamental role of iurisdictio and the dynamics we have seen in the case between Edward I and Philip IV would seem to tilt the scales toward a more nuanced heteronomy side.

And yet, what the approach to authority I have outlined indicates is that more than merely advocating for more historical nuance in both views or trying to decide on a “winner,” it is thinking in the binary terms of either sovereignty or heteronomy that was problematic and ultimately prevented a historicized understanding of medieval political authority. For this separation is based on the possibility of the existence of the single ordering principle of sovereignty, which is then mirrored to create a notion of heteronomy as its complex—but conceptually dependent—other. And as a result, rather than serving as useful analytical tools to capture the ethos of a time, thinking of rule in those terms actually prevents us from understanding the production of political authority—heteronomous or sovereign alike. To understand political authority we need a conceptual apparatus that puts authorization as a contested process at the center and allows us to see the emergence of rule from political struggles for categorization.

This has important implications beyond the IR debate about the Middle Ages. As the literature on neomedievalism exemplifies, even a cursory look at contemporary world politics reveals that a sovereignty heuristic does not begin to capture the authority dynamics we are interested in. And still with the neomedievalism literature, the Middle Ages have an important role in transcending the limitations of our current vocabulary. However, how the Middle Ages can help is not as much by analogy to the current system as it is by showing us what taken-for-granted elements of our present are actually historically contingent rather than immutable facts of authority. For example, the question is not whether the existence of private authority means a return to premodern timesFootnote ¹²²—the discussion here showed that even that is problematic. It is rather what dynamics and changing configurations of public/private as categories are at play and how these are authorizing new forms of authority. For the analysis of iurisdictio showed an effectively different meaning of public and private—one where kings and guilds stood firmly together on one side of that divide. Looking at the medieval thus reveals that the public and the private are not fixed transtemporal categories but are subject to constant reconfiguration. And it is that insight, and not a quick historical analogy that can help us understand the current evolution of authority. In what way are notions of public/private and authority being redeployed to enable corporations to exercise rule? What other categories are at play in this process of authorization? And, even, to what extent does speaking of “private authority” itself authorize? These are the type of questions that a reimagined Middle Ages can help us formulate, and with them we can get better insights about the changing authority dynamics of our contemporary world.