Imperialists, Separatists, and Crusaders

Abstract

This chapter describes the decline of Christendom, which involved the weakening of two competing forms of medieval universal power: the Papal monarchy and the empire. It also discusses the work of three late medieval writers who defended the empire as the legitimate world monarchy, necessary for the establishment and maintenance of universal peace and the spread of Christianity. The chapter furthermore presents the idea of three of the contemporary writers who advocated territorial powers. The crusade idea survived the decline of Christendom, which the crusade had helped to create. The works of two authors presented in the concluding section say that the idea of crusade was rejuvenated in the second half of the fourteenth century. Dante Alighieri penned the most famous argument for universal rule. He developed his conceptions of secular government, and especially of the empire, independently of the church–state pamphlet war of the late thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries.