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14 The of : Universal Hegemony, Imperial Power, and a New Comparative History of

PETER FIBIGER BANG

By the of God, and by His approval, the foundations of this auspicious castle were laid, and its parts were solidly joined to strengthen peace and tranquillity, by the command of the of the two Continents and the of the two Seas, the Shadow of God in this world and the next, the Favorite of God on the Two Horizons, the of the Terraqueous Orb, the Conqueror of the Castle of Constantinople, the Father of Conquest Sultan Mehmed , son of Sultan Murad Khan son of Sultan Mehmed Khan, may God make eternal his , and exalt his residence above the most lucid stars of the firmament, in the blessed month of Ramadan of the year 883. (Necipog˘ lu 1991: 34–6)

Such are the proud words which still greet the visitor, about to pass through the so-called Imperial Gate, the main entrance to the Topkapi Palace in Istanbul. The construction of the imperial residence, once the fabled seat of the mighty Ottoman , was initiated shortly after the capture of Constantinople in 1453 by Mehmed the Conqueror. By that time, the great city on the Bosphorus was a mere shadow of its former self. The , of which it was the dilapidated capital, had for a long time been reduced to almost complete political and territo- rial insignificance. The city, however, was still a valuable prize. Not only was it situated at a strategic crossroads; even more importantly, the place was redolent with symbolic meaning and memories of world rule. As the foundation and burial place of Constantine the Great, it had developed into a new Rome. It was from here that Roman power had been carried on in late antiquity and the writ of

The in Context: Historical and Comparative Perspectives Edited by J. P. Arnason and K. A. Raaflaub © 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. ISBN: 978-0-470-65557-3

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had continued to govern the Mediterranean ecumene. The possession of Constantinople enabled Mehmed to inscribe the Ottoman in the imperial succession from Rome. This was no mean bounty; it gave him the means to raise his monarchy to a new level of prestige and join the exclusive club of powers that could aspire to universal hegemony. Mehmed’s rule extended across two continents and straddled as many seas.1 Mehmed was soon to act and cash in on his gain. The capital of the was moved to Constantinople and the sultan embarked on a vigorous construction program to lend new luster to the imperial city and restore it to its former glory. The message was to be clear: a new Kayser-i Rum had arrived.2 During the next decades, the Ottomans were to prove that this was not an empty boast. Their armies blazed a trail of victories through , , and the . Under Süleyman the Magnificent, the Ottoman Empire had come to equal or even surpass the geographical reach of the Eastern Roman Empire at the height of its powers. Even so, modern has been much more impressed by the contemporary, but abortive efforts of Süleyman’s rival, the Habsburg Emperor Charles V, to create a new Roman Empire in Europe.3 Explanations for this relative neglect are not far to seek and reasons not all bad. The prominent position of the Latin language and its literary heritage did produce a semblance of continuity in the Western attempt which was much less overt in the Muslim-dominated Ottoman case. Roman and European history have become inextricably linked, while the Ottomans fell on the other side of the great civilizational rift between Occident and Orient. There they have traditionally been grouped together with other Asian such as those of the Mughals and the Chinese under the dubious label of Oriental .4 Conversely, the history of the Roman Empire has been written in the image of Europe.5 From a state formation perspective, this is not a little paradoxical. The Roman experience did undeniably exercise a profound influence on European history across a wide spectrum of areas: religion, law, politics, and the arts. But a key characteristic of European statehood is, nonetheless, generally identified to be precisely the absence of a vast Roman- empire. Instead, smaller, more compact states developed on the basis of regional .6 In many respects, this makes European state formation a poor guide to the challenges and problems of Roman imperial history. Indeed, from such a perspective, extensive empire-building has often been either denounced as a dia- bolical enterprise or ridiculed as an act of folly. Court slaves and eunuchs or notions of , institutions all commonly connected with the rule of vast agrarian , have seemed both exotic and abnormal: arro- gance in contradiction of the principles of sound government. Yet, these phe- nomena have a long and proven track record through much of Eurasian history; they are also features Rome shares with the so-called Oriental empires.7 This makes the latter attractive as comparisons for the historian and sociologist of the Roman Empire. Some fruitful attempts to pioneer this kind of cross-cultural comparison have appeared during the last generation of scholarship. Parallels to

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the Asian empires have offered alternative models better designed to grasp the imperial dimension of the Roman state.8 “Imperial,” however, does not simply refer to the possession of overwhelming power. This is a frequently voiced prejudice or misunderstanding that last surfaced in debates about the current position of America in the world. Contrary to the widespread, inflated image of the power enjoyed by hegemonic states, agrarian empires like the Roman, Ottoman, Mughal, or Chinese are often characterized as much by weaknesses and constraints. Hobbes (1996: 149 and ch. 21) was right when he noted that the subjects of the Ottoman sultan might be freer from intervention than citizens of small, but “free” republics. Mehmed’s act of moving his capital to Constantinople rested on a paradox. It was a proclamation of the universal hegemony and unequaled power of the Ottoman sultan, yet that statement had to be made by embracing a previous tradition of statecraft connected with his defeated foes. The universal power of the Ottoman kayser was composite, layered, and framed by historical compromise; it comprised both Muslim and Christian traditions, “Turko-Persian” kingship as well as “Roman.”9 This chapter aims to delineate an alternative comparative framework for Roman imperial history which will lodge it firmly in the context of preindustrial agrarian or tributary empires in Eurasia, particularly those of the early modern period. The following section identifies some broad similarities and shared histories to establish a common base-line for such an endeavor.10 The main section of the chapter under- takes a comparison of institutions of universal lordship as they developed in these empires. The focus, though not exclusively, is on Rome, the Ottomans, and the Mughals. These all represent forms of imperial statecraft that evolved on the basis of the interconnected cultural traditions of the Mediterranean and greater Middle East, a sphere which was first bound together by the World Empires of the Achaemenids and Alexander – “the kings of kings.” The final section seeks to sharpen our image of the composite and heterogeneous nature of universal empires by confronting them with prevailing Hobbesian notions of statehood and processes of state formation to explore parallels and differences to the middle-sized monarchies of .

A World of Broad Similarities

Launching a project focused on comparing the Roman with a number of early modern Asian empires runs up against several obstacles. Institutional boundaries and firmly held disciplinary convictions must be added to historiographical tradition; neither the principle of the unity of time and space is respected here nor the entrenched belief that truth resides in the culturally specific. Explanation, however, always involves both generalization – and simplification. Social anthro- pology, which more than any other discipline has advocated the importance of close observation and “thick description,” has for many years been the discipline that most forcefully supplied the arts with generalized concepts, models, and theories.

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Concrete historical observation and analysis do not preclude comparison, they depend on it. In fact, few alternatives are readily available to the historian search- ing for parallels that are closer to the Roman process of state formation than the usual early modern European analogies. Large empires certainly existed other than those in the group singled out here, but few with a historical record as well known as the Roman, either because of a shortage of documentation or lacunae in scholarship.11 At any rate, on key parameters the similarities between the Roman and the later Asian empires are sufficiently close to justify comparison. Scale, as already suggested, is one of them. The size of populations and the extent of territories were of a different order of magnitude than was generally the case in Europe. All these empires were agrarian in the sense that they depended on their ability to tax vast multitudes of peasants. They also operated under comparable conditions and constraints in the areas of transport and communication. Technological progress in this field had been only marginal since antiquity. Gunpowder and firearms brought some change but did not prevent Mughal cavalry from still making exten- sive use of the bow in the seventeenth century. The size of the imperial armies remained comparable. The 200–300 thousand men whom Rome is believed to have fielded during the Principate stand up well against the numbers mustered by later empires.12 Weber, in one of the most nuanced theoretical discussions to date, treated these empires as a particular form of patrimonialism (1972: 580–624). More recently Michael Mann (1986) and John Hall (1985) have analyzed the fragmented and discontinuous nature of power in agrarian empires. But at the same time Mann uses the concepts of compulsory cooperation and legionary economy to direct attention to the enabling potential of imperial government. Though of limited capacity, where imperial power was applied, its effects were often profound and have spawned significant social developments.13 Hall’s analysis puts the emphasis differently (1985: 27–57, 103–10). The effects of imperial intervention were intense, but normally only served to block the emergence of strong societal forces. Agrarian imperial government worked as a capstone, putting a lid on provincial societies to keep them in subjection. To the historian of Rome, it is clear that both aspects must be given their due in any analysis. The emperors both presided benignly over a thriving Hellenic provincial and ruthlessly destroyed the temple of the rebellious Jews in Jerusalem. The case for comparison, however, does not rest exclusively on abstraction and the identification of structural similarities between separate social systems. We are not, after all, faced with a group of societies completely unrelated to each other. The world inhabited by the Ottomans, as the introductory example was meant to recall, was a very old one. Sediments of different traditions of statecraft and culture had accumulated over many centuries. From very ancient times, ideas and tech- nologies had traveled back and forth between the societies of the greater Middle East and the Mediterranean world. Few pockets had been left to develop in pristine isolation. Of course, this did not produce uniformity. There was no simple,

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unbroken genealogical continuity linking these various empires together. Traditions, as exemplified above, were constantly reinvented rather than merely passed on. The process of cultural transfer was both ruptured and uneven. Islam, for instance, was not a continuation of Christianity, but would be unthinkable without the preceding world of late antiquity (Fowden 1993). Competition, confrontation, and conquest were as important in creating a measure of convergence between individual societies as was peaceful transmission of knowledge and customs (Wilkinson 1995). Nevertheless, the process was strong enough to make many institutions broadly comparable. A good illustration is provided by the notion and practice of the hunt as an emblem of royalty across Eurasia during most of pre-industrial history (Allsen 2006).

Universal Lordship

The idea of universal empire to which Mehmed and his successors laid claim was another such instance of a widely shared, coveted, and contested currency of power. Under Süleyman the Magnificent, the of Charles V as Roman Emperor caused offense in Istanbul: how could he claim a position which rightly belonged to the sultan? A special “” was fabricated for the Ottoman ruler which combined references to Roman, Habsburg, and papal authority and added a fourth tier to stress his preeminence. The sumptuously embellished four-tier crown was designed as a symbolic refutation of the claims of the twin universal powers of Catholic Christianity, emperor and , and advertised to a European public the superior might of the Ottoman monarch (Necipog˘lu 1989: esp. 411–16; Ágoston 2007). This statement was made from a position of confidence. In the second decade of the sixteenth century, Ottoman armies had toppled the regime of the Mameluks and added Syria, Egypt, and much of the Arab peninsula to their . The Ottomans now held possession of Jerusalem, Mecca, and Medina, the three holiest places in Islam. Henceforth, the Sultan in Constantinople would present himself as the protector of the entire Muslim community and added khalifa to his many titles. It is true that the lustre of khilafat had worn somewhat thin since the succession of the first four rightful khalifs. By the sixteenth century many rulers had come to claim the prestigious dignity. However, with control of the holy cities the Ottomans could bring the relics of the prophet Muhammad to Constantinople, where they are still on display in the Topkapi, and thus support a special claim to preeminence.14 Around this time, however, a new power emerged along the eastern frontiers of Islam when Babur, an adventurer and central Asian warlord, descended from Afghanistan to the floodplains of Northern India and conquered the ailing remnants of the Delhi Sultanate. The previous career of Babur had been quite tumultuous and that of his son and successor Humayum was to be no different. Some years after the death of his father, Humayum was ousted from his possessions by a rebellion and had to seek refuge at the court of the Safavids in . Shortly before

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his accidental death, however, Humayum returned from his Persian exile at the head of an army and reconquered his domains. Under the rule of his son Akbar (r. 1556–1605), the hold of the Great Mughals on Northern India was consoli- dated and expanded (Richards 1993). A new, splendid had stepped on to the scene of Islam, unwilling to concede any notion of Ottoman supremacy. They styled themselves as Timurids, descendants of the world-conquering Timur Lenk, and subscribed to the Persian version of imperial high culture. The great Mughal lord was a ShahanShah, a king of kings, and entertained his own ambitions of world rule. After all, had not the Ottomans been forced to receive their lands in vassalage at the hands of Timur?15 Soon Akbar began to rival the patronage of the Ottomans in the holy cities of Mecca and Medina and their sponsorship of the pilgrimage. The Mughal claims to khilafat were further boosted by the daring assumption of the sacred title of Amir al-Muminin, leader of the faithful.16 This sort of symbolic rivalry continued under Akbar’s successors and left its trace in the tenuous diplomatic relations between the two great powers of Islam. The intermittent exchange of official letters between the rival courts was often marked by considerable posturing. The use of official titles and mutual courtesies was care- fully modulated to express or deny the claims of each ruling house to universal supremacy. Ottoman sultans and ministers might emphasize the supreme position they thought belonged to them within the world of Islam as the custodians of the faith. Mughal rulers, on the other hand, demonstratively avoided recognizing the Ottoman claim to khilafat. The lofty title of khalifa they reserved for themselves, while the Ottomans had to make do with less elevated phrases such as “pride of the Caesars” or “Servitor of the Holy Cities.”17 This was not the first time in history that a “” and a Persianizing lord were vying with each other for supremacy. During the third century CE tensions between the Roman and Persian empires reached a pitch. The crumbling rule of the Parthians was supplanted by a new dynasty, the Sasanids, who breathed new vigor and life into the Persian Empire. Twice in the middle decades of the century Roman armies suffered catastrophic defeats at the hands of Sasanian arms. In 244 the young emperor Gordian lost his life either from wounds suffered in the field or as victim of a conspiracy on his retreat from Persian soil. It was left to Philip, his successor, to ransom his way out of Mesopotamia, at least if we are to trust the Persian side of the story, and return to Roman territory. Humiliation was complete when the emperor Valerian, a few years later in 260, was taken captive, never to be released again.18 , the Persian emperor, knew how to celebrate and commemorate his spectacular triumphs in style. At Naqš-i Rustam, the site of the rock-cut tombs of the old Achaemenid rulers, not far from Persepolis, a new relief was carved into the rock depicting Shapur, seated on a horse, receiving a kneeling emperor Philip the Arab. On a tower opposite the tombs a trilingual inscription publicized for all the world in (Middle) Persian, Parthian, and Greek his great accomplish- ments: “I, the Mazda-honoring God, Shabuhr, the ShahanShah of Iran and non- Iran.” In the long list of exploits, these words stand out in particular: “And Philippus Caesar came to us as a suppliant, and gave us 500,000 denarii …, and became a

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tributary of us.” The Persian king of kings now boasted the Roman Caesar as his tributary subject! Sasanid hegemony was universal: that was the message.19 On the Roman side, the capture of Valerian threw the government into complete disarray. Out of the ensuing chaos emerged. A Palmyrene notable who had risen to high rank in the imperial service, he managed to gather the Roman forces and stabilize the position of Rome in the Middle East. Never recognized as emperor, but with rank of “Corrector of the entire Orient,” Odaenathus also occasionally sported the title of “king of kings,” documented in Greek and Palmyrene inscriptions, presumably to emphasize his ability to match or surpass the Persians (Hartmann 2001: 176–86). These, however, were troubled times for Rome in more ways than one. External defeats were compounded by internal divi- sion and war (Ziolkowski, this volume). Only the advent of Diocletian in 284 began effectively to put an end to the crisis which had spanned half a century. The reconsolidation of the imperial monarchy under Diocletian was also accompanied by a claim to victory over the most prestigious rival, Persia. Of the facts we know little; but a panegyrist lauded the new “strong man” because he had forced the haughty foe to suffer unprecedented humiliation: “In the same manner the of Persia, who has never before deigned to confess that he is but a man, makes supplication … and throws open the whole of his Kingdom. … He offers … marvellous things of various kinds and sends … wild beasts of extraordinary beauty. Content to request the name of friend, he earns it by submission” (Panegyrici Latini 10.10.6–7, trans. Nixon and Rodgers 1994). From a Roman perspective, this reversal of roles marked a return to the proper order of things. It was firmly ingrained in state ideology that Rome would yield to no one. Arrian, the second-century CE biographer of , for instance, doubted a tradition that Rome had been among the many “nations” which had sent embassies to honor Alexander in in 323 BCE. Such an act would not have been suitable to the proud and independent-minded Romans (Anabasis of Alexander 7.15.5–6). Likewise, Livy felt compelled to insert in his narrative of Roman republican history a counterfactual digression contemplating whether Alexander, after having conquered the Persian Empire, would have been able to overcome the Romans had he lived long enough to turn his attention westwards. But not even Alexander, the bane of the Achaemenids and thus the closest to an equal that Livy was able to imagine, could outshine the Roman achievement. On an individual level, the scale of his conquests was hardly to be bettered. But Alexander’s career had been meteoric and came to a swift conclusion. A mere thirteen years separated beginning from end. Rome, on the other hand, Livy argued, had produced able and powerful leaders generation after generation. This was the badge of “” which had made her invincible and raised her head and shoulders above all other states (Livy 9.16–19; Spencer 2002: 41–53). The Roman Empire surpassed everyone and the emperor claimed world hegemony; people of all varieties were subject to his universal command, a feature which was often both emphasized and celebrated in iconographic and hyperbolic poetic representations of Roman power: “Neither they who drink of the deep Danube

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break the Julian commands, nor the Getae, nor the Chinese, nor the perfidious Persians,” as one of the poet laureates at the court of rejoiced. He continued, “the Scythians now seek your opinion and recently the haughty Indians too.”20 A universal emperor was the supreme form of patrimonial lord. His sovereignty encompassed a vast variety of relationships. At his court was to be found a medley of humble subjects, powerful aristocrats, tribal chieftains, and foreign client kings. Such a realm was not generally a clearly bounded territory. The term “ecumene,” a word coined by the Greeks to denote the civilized world usually thought of as coterminous with the Roman Empire, captures well the wide-ranging and open-ended nature of these dominions where government control typically declined by degrees rather than simply ended;21 it is also apposite in symbolical terms. The universal ruler claimed a position as the organizing principle of civilization for his subjects; he aspired to be perceived as the bulwark of ordered life against the forces of chaos and barbarism. His power was presented as a constant of human society and in that sense cosmic (Woolf 2001; Bayly 2004: 34); it was, ideally, the embodiment of justice – society organized according to nature and divine ordinance. Public ritual never tired of enacting imperial rule as the providential return of a virtuous Golden Age, a blessed and wondrous time where people would live in peace and prosperity (e.g., Zanker 1987: 171–96; Koch 2001). Even more than regular kingship, therefore, imperial kingship was “sacred.” Not only did the Roman Caesars bear the title of pontifex maximus, highest priest, they were also, before the adoption of Christianity, regularly the object of religious worship, dead or alive (Price 1984; Gradel 2002). Chinese emperors were often referred to as the “” or as possessing a “mandate from Heaven.” Monotheist and Muslim, the semi-divine nature of imperial authority was only a little less significant among the Ottomans and Mughals. Both ruling houses adhered to a doctrine which described the king as the “shadow of god on earth” and, as just seen, claimed the sacred dignity of khalifa.22 Badauni, an Indian Muslim of an austere kind, had no doubt that the elevated notion of kingship promoted under Akbar was tantamount to heresy and accused him of blurring the distinction between monarch and god.23 As the august embodiment of civilization and order, the emperor both sought, and was expected, to act as the final arbiter of power and privilege. His position combined the role of supreme patron with the notion of the king as sanctuary. Men of influence and ambition had to be benevolently admitted to share in the imperial bounty, while those with grievances could look to the emperor as the merciful seat of final appeal – a fountain from which justice would flow to right wrongs in society. Access to the emperor’s justice and grace, therefore, became an important issue for the various groups of ruling elites in imperial society. Strung out between the opposite conceptual poles of imperial as awe-inspiring and exalted as well as benign and accessible, court ceremonial sought to address this paradox of power in various carefully modulated forms of ritual. At one end of the spectrum was the Chinese notion of the imperial residence as a forbidden city. The emperor

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had withdrawn from the public gaze, admitting to audience only the select and most important few in order to stress the elevated nature of his power.24 At the other extreme, some Roman emperors declared their residence on the Palatine a public house. However, was like currency. Too liberally circulated it would become debased. Roman emperors who curried favor too eagerly with the multitudes of the capital, in return alienated the more powerful segments of society.25 Yet another variation of the paradox was produced by the Ottomans. With the growing ambitions of world rule, their concept of kingship became more exalted. Gradually, the sultans withdrew from the public to live in relative seclusion behind the third gate, the inner courtyard of the Topkapi where the fabled harem was located. Audiences became more exclusive and more formal, with the sultan residing in solemn and solitary majesty. Nevertheless, the ideal that the ruler would watch personally over government to prevent abuse retained its appeal. From the so-called Tower of Justice, the sultan could oversee the ceremonies of government taking place in the second courtyard of the palace while remaining hidden from view. Equally, a laced window in the tower allowed the sultan to watch over the proceedings of his leading ministers in the Council Hall without being visible. The symbolism was clear, as Necipog˘lu has established (1991: 84–6). The mystique of hidden seclusion contributed to the myth of imperial power; the omnipotent Sultan was omniscient. It is important, however, not to mistake these symbolic arrangements for a direct measure of the ability of subjects to access government. The ceremonial surround- ing late Roman emperors is generally thought to have become more formalized and rigid, while the rulers became less accessible and their majesty more elevated. Yet during the third and fourth centuries, emperors more often than not had one or several co-. Rome ceased to be the main center of rule as emperors set up residence in regional capitals (Garnsey and Humfress 2001: chs. 2–3). Government, in short, moved closer to provincial subjects, and many more local notables rose to positions in the widely expanded imperial service (Whittow 1990). Likewise, elevated seclusion did not necessarily guarantee the personal command of the monarch. The Ottoman sultans soon began to feel the price of dignified withdrawal. They became increasingly dependent on their grand viziers to handle the business of government. That should not, however, be taken as a sign of crisis and weakness. 26 All monarchs, whether they appeared accessible or not, depended on influential courtiers and ministers to mediate communications with the surrounding world. The logic of numbers dictated this. One person may be able to engage meaningfully with, say, a dozen different cases, perhaps a score or even two, during a day. But when the number of petitioners, letters, and court cases grows significantly beyond that, perhaps reaching into the hundreds, as would have been the case even with a minimally intrusive imperial government, then any ruler would need people to sift the queue for him and make sure that only the most important issues and persons were brought to his attention. Imperial monarchy depended on servants, high-ranking nobles, and family relations to serve as brokers. It was through their

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recommendations that royal favor, privilege, and grace were distributed to wider, mostly elite, groups in the empire.27 More than anything else, the political discourse on accessibility was about who would control access to the emperor, which groups would get to serve as brokers of imperial power. In broad terms, emperors had to appeal to powerful aristocratic landowners in order to attach them to the imperial government or, lacking those, fashion a service elite as substitutes. Usually the solution combined elements of both. The imperial monarch required a governmental elite that transcended local communities.28 A key advantage of hegemonic imperial power was precisely that government could defeat and contain local pockets of resistance by bringing resources drawn from a wider geographical sphere to bear on such challenges. It was, so to speak, able in organizational terms to outflank local opposition. Emperors achieved this goal by promoting cosmopolitan elites that acquired a significant stake in the continuation of imperial unity (Crone 1980; Gellner 1983: ch. 2; Mann 1986: 7). These elites came to depend on their ability to access the wider resources of imperial government to maintain their wealth and rank in society. Positions in the army and administration might, for instance, be linked with the right to collect taxes from a designated part of the imperial territories. Such prebends were normally periodically redistributed to preserve ultimate imperial control over these revenues. The Mughals created a vast service nobility, the so-called mansabdars, whose ranks and prebendal lands were assigned by the Timurid rulers. A significant minority contingent within this group, the Hindu Rajputs, were often even allowed to retain their ancestral lands as long as they continued to recognize the Mughal emperor as their superior lord. The loyalty of this group was fortified by topping up their “homelands” with the income from domains drawn from the wider pool of imperial prebends. This gave them a significant stake in the imperial order.29 The Roman elite controlled its estates as private property rather than imperially assigned and revocable prebends. Nevertheless, a fall from political favor was often accompanied by confiscation. Furthermore, the emperor controlled access to senatorial rank and high political office. Participation in Roman imperial politics afforded nobles crucial contacts and opportunities that enabled them to build up their portfolios of landed estates. By tapping the wealth and resources commanded by the empire, the Roman political elite saw a steady expansion of its wealth. Often combining property in several provinces, the landholdings of leading aristocratic families significantly outgrew the capacity of individual local communities and came to depend on the preservation of a more wide-ranging political order.30 These imperial elites were held together by universalizing models of courtly and literary high culture. Artistic refinement and ceremonial splendor, combined with command of a canon of classical works, served to distinguish the language, behavior, and appearance of the gentleman and true connoisseur from the customs of the common folk, hoi polloi, as the Eastern Hellenic aristocracy of the Roman Empire liked to call the broader population. Elite languages that treasured the use of ornate sentences, arcane vocabulary, and complex intertextual references put a premium

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on schooling over vernacular speech. Lengthy study and access to book collections were more important to achieve this kind of proficiency than being born to the language. This enabled “imperial” languages such as the “high” forms of Latin, Greek, Persian, Turkish, and Han Chinese to travel outside their immediate cultural contexts and function as media of communication between elites from very diverse backgrounds.31 Cosmopolitan integration of ruling elites, however, did not require cultural and religious uniformity; integration was always accompanied by the profession of respect for local and regional diversity.32 The Qing dynasty, presiding over an order dominated by literati graduates from its famed examination system, based on the Confucian classics (Elman 2002), nevertheless conspicuously cultivated its Manchu origins to set it apart from (and above) Han Chinese culture. The lords of Ch’in, to borrow the words of Elisabeth Rawski, “did not present themselves simply as Chinese or Manchu monarchs. Governing diverse peoples, they ‘took on’ different cultural guises and portrayed themselves within different cultural frames. Only thus could they act as the integrating center of the empire” (1998: 55). The Ottoman sultans, though posing as rulers in the service of Islam, still allowed Christians and Jews to be officially recognized and represented within the state structure through the so-called system of millets. The head of the Greek Orthodox Church continued to preside over his flock from Constantinople after its conquest by Mehmed. The Muslim Mughal rulers were confronted with a vast majority of subjects practicing one form or other of Hinduism. This did not deter them from posing as waging war against the infidels. But at the same time, they took great care to appeal to the Hindu majority and demonstrate tolerance. The Mughal order was based on suhl-ı- ku-l (“peace for all”; Richards 1978: 305). The ruling house celebrated some of the Hindu festivals, sponsored the erection of temples and admitted powerful Hindu aristocrats to the highest positions in the imperial service. Likewise, the Mughal lords attempted to bring the Sikhs into their fold and sought, though not altogether successfully, to appoint their leadership. Timurid syncretism, thus, was not without communal tensions. Aurangzeb famously cut a strikingly more austere Islamic figure than his predecessors. On winning the throne he had his defeated elder brother, Dara Shuko, who had demonstrated a keen interest in Hindu lore, executed as an apostate. Aurangzeb’s name is also connected with the destruction of some Hindu temples and an ultimately abortive attempt to introduce the jiziya, a capitation tax on non-Muslim subjects. While such acts bred frustration and resentment, they still fell somewhat short of a general policy directed against Hindus; they represented a mixture of symbolic professions of orthodoxy and punitive measures administered in retaliation for specific acts of rebellion. Rajput nobles continued to serve in high positions at court and in the army.33 As Chris Bayly has remarked, religious and ethnic conflicts never rose to the level of a totalizing discourse. Ethnicity and religion remained only one set of cultural markers. Other signifiers “included rank, pedigree [and] personal appearance” (1996: 28–9). Communal boundaries were permeable and cultural identity malleable.

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The ambiguous and tortured relationship between Roman imperial government and the Jewish religious establishment may be read in parallel terms (Goodman 1983, 1987, 2007). The emperors sponsored the cult at the temple in Jerusalem, where sacrifices were performed in their name. But when in the 60s CE the city became the center of a Jewish revolt, Titus, son of the emperor Vespasian, who had emerged victorious from the scramble for the imperial purple that followed the fall of Nero, led an army against the defiant city, stormed it, and destroyed the temple, never to be rebuilt. The temple treasures were brought to Rome and paraded through the streets in a magnificent triumph, commemorated in splendid reliefs on the still extant Arch of Titus, to make manifest the claims of the new Flavian dynasty to legitimate power. Even so, we are only unusually well informed about these events because the new ruling house chose to patronize the scholarship of a high-ranking Jew, Josephus. In the Jewish War and in the Jewish Antiquities he strove to make his people appear acceptable in the eyes of imperial society.34 Still later, when Hadrian had banned all Jews from Jerusalem as punishment for the Bar Kochba rebellion, Roman authorities nevertheless eventually came to recognize and collaborate with the rabbis that functioned as community leaders in the villages of the Jewish peasantry.35 Roman superiority was periodically reasserted, not only by force, but also through symbolism. The emperors did occasionally order the capital purged of disruptive foreign elements such as subversive philosophers or exotic cults.36 At most, such bans had only temporary effect; in practice they were ineffectual. Roman identity was not exclusive and sealed off from the outer world. Quite the reverse, it treasured access to the great diversity of peoples, cultures, and resources brought by the empire. The emperors attempted to embrace and include influential and powerful elites in the business of rule across the far-flung territories that constituted the realm. Citizenship was extended, particularly in the Western provinces, to such groups. The plans of Claudius to introduce Gallic notables into the Roman Senate were not only announced in a speech at a Senate meeting; they were also publicized on a bronze tablet erected next to the altar to Rome and Augustus outside Lugdunum (Lyon) for all the leading members of Gallic society to see when they assembled to debate the affairs of the provinces and celebrate the imperial cult.37 In similar fashion, the Caesars appealed to, honored, and promoted the culture of the Hellenic elites of the eastern Mediterranean. Under Hadrian, Athens, the center of classical Greek culture, was showered with imperial gifts: a new public library, the completion of the grandiose temple of the Olympian Zeus, and the institution of a Panhellenic league (Woolf 1994; Boatwright 2000). To the historian of Rome, the second century almost wears the imprint of Hellas more than of Latium. The original Latinate elite did look with some suspicion on such attempts at collaboration. During the final phase of the civil wars, Augustus had been able to play quite effectively on Italian fears that his rival, Antony, was about to betray the Romans, hand the empire to the Hellenistic client queen of Egypt, , and move the capital to Alexandria. We owe the immortal nunc est bibendum of Horace to these sentiments – a poem celebrating the defeat of the Egyptian queen, the

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fatale monstrum, by the forces of Augustus (Odes 1.37.21; Kleiner 2005). Later, Hadrian allegedly earned the pejorative nickname “Greekling” (Graeculus) for his great fondness of Hellenizing culture (Historia Augusta, Hadrian 1.5). Essentially, the issue was one that in Roman times was often debated in the context of the virtues and vices of Alexander the Great. After the conquest of Persia, the Macedonian king decided to adopt certain aspects of Persian court ceremony. This was a matter of some controversy among his commentators. Quintus Curtius was unbending in his condemnation (Hist. Alex. Magn. 8.8): Persian-style dress was a sign that Alexander, drunk on success, had forgotten his roots and begun to betray the interests of the Macedonian companions who had been instrumental in his victories. A different view is represented by Strabo and Plutarch. They saw Alexander’s actions as a valuable attempt to appeal to leading members of the conquered society and fashion a cosmopolitan governing class composed of the best men in the realm, the aristocracy.38 Emperors had to navigate between the two positions. They had to confirm their commitment to the conquest elite and culture but, at the same time, needed to appeal to the sundry provincial of the realm. Rule depended on the active support of these latter groups. Roman emperors, like their later Manchu, Mughal, and Ottoman peers, had to play different roles to cater to different constituencies. The Caesar was the head of the Roman res publica, but also posed as a Hellenizing king or a patron of foreign cults. To the example of the Jews could be added the continued imperial sponsorship of the old Egyptian religion at whose temples the emperor was portrayed as the to ensure the continuation of the rites which since time immemorial had guaranteed the prosperity of life in the Nile valley (Herklotz 2007). Universal power was, to sum up, a heterogeneous composite, and imperial culture a laminated and hierarchical amalgam.

Conceptualizing Heterogeneous Power

The notion of imperial heterogeneity, however, has had a troubled existence in the modern world. Statesmen and thinkers interested in national liberation and modernization had little veneration for agrarian empires. To the extent that “ universal imperial power” attracted attention, it was habitually referred to in pejorative terms and written off as a sign of an ailing and decadent political order, barely to be taken seriously and better left behind. During the nineteenth century, the description of the Ottoman Sultan as the “sick man of Europe” became a well-worn cliché.39 The experience of universal empires, therefore, seemed of only marginal relevance as the predominant modern theoretical concepts of political power and processes of state formation were consolidated in the age of mass mobi- lization, industrialized warfare, and nation-states. Three centuries earlier, when European state-building was in its early phases, universal empire had seemed much more of a real possibility. Whether it was seen as an opportunity or an abhorrent threat or dangerous dream, the challenge or prospect of a universal empire in

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Europe elicited reflections that remain instructive to historians and sociologists engaged in conceptualizing the character of such imperial formations. Among those who in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries debated state- craft – the ancestors of the modern disciplines of constitutional law and political science – Tommaso Campanella most enthusiastically embraced the question of the heterogeneous character of universal monarchy. The Dominican friar, visionary thinker, and mystic remained wedded to the idea of the resurrection of a universal Christian Roman Empire. Spain was the monarchy to which he thought the charge of effectuating this scheme had fallen. In a political-theoretical tract he offered advice on how best to govern such an entity and overcome the rivals of the Spanish throne (among whom he considered the Ottomans the strongest alternative con- tender for universal hegemony).40 Accommodation of local customs was identified as a key principle in the formation of empire. We meet Campanella here in Edmund Chilmead’s (1654) English translation of the Latin De Monarchia Hispanica: “It is moreover necessary that a Law be conformable to the Custome of the place for which it is made: for all Northern People love Easie Lawes; and would rather obey out of their own Good Nature, then by Compulsion. And the not observing of this, was the reason of the D’Alva’s losing the Low-Countries. The Southern People, as thoese of Andaluzia, require strict Lawes; the Italians, Portuguez, and Calabrians, desire a Mediocrity, and Moderation in their Lawes.”41 Moderation or prudence (prudentia) in the exercise of government was a key tenet of Campanella’s statecraft; the acts of the ruler were to be governed and perfected by Christian notions of justice and morality to serve the interests of the subjects. Campanella’s program was an ecumenical dream, but in a post-Reformation world. Any illusions that the Italian monk might still have entertained in the early seventeenth century about an impending Spanish world monarchy were soon shat- tered, ultimately on the field of battle. This era was not to be written in the sign of Campanella’s universalist or Catholic prudentia. The new fashion was reason of state.42 But, Campanella and many others objected, that was an amoral doctrine; it privileged the self-serving interests of the monarch and his government over the legitimate claims and concerns of subjects – it was simply another word for tyranny.43 The proponents of the new theory thought differently. Bodin and Hobbes devised it as a necessary strategy to overcome the patchwork of local privilege and particularism which hampered the efforts of monarchs to strengthen their hold on their dominions and build up their military capacity. Centralization of power and authority was the all-important concern, the aim more cohesive and unitary states. The key concept was sovereignty; this defining quality of the state was to be absolute and indivisible. A king was emperor in his own realm and should bow to no one.44 The new political science had neither patience nor sym- pathy for aspirations of universal empire. As Hugo Grotius declared in his frame- work for international law (De Iure Belli ac Pacis II, cap. XXII, xiii), it was “a silly notion” (stultus titulus ). The doctrine of sovereignty developed a new analytical language of state power, but was in essence prescriptive and even utopian; few states at the time could live

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up to its stringent requirements. The problem was felt most acutely in the greater German area. Still organized within the remnants of the medieval , the complex and jumbled structure of rights and authority of which the Reich was composed could not easily be handled with the conceptual toolbox of sovereignty. While it demanded unequivocal clarity, it could see only confusion. No less a figure than Leibniz took to the field against the doctrine of Hobbes and Bodin. Clinging to the receding ideal of universal Christian, Catholic unity, the great polymath declared: “I know that these thoughts of mine on the nature of the state cannot be reconciled with the opinions of the sharp-witted Englishman . But I also know that no people in civilised Europe is ruled by the laws that he has proposed.”45 State power, Leibniz objected, was not unitary. In practice sovereignty was both composite and divisible; government authority was layered and built on a set of only partly overlapping forms of power, to characterize the thoughts of the old German thinker in terms inspired by Michael Mann (1986: ch. 1). This state of affairs was not limited to . Even the powerful kingdoms of and Spain had to accept and accommodate any number of irregular, power-sharing, arrangements. “Therefore Hobbesian empires,” Leibniz insisted (in Riley 1988: 120), “exist neither among civilised peoples nor among barbarians, and I consider them neither possible nor desirable.” It would, in other words, be mistaken simply to write off Leibniz’s concerns as irrelevant; they reflected not only his lived experience of the weak, extremely decentralized body of the Holy Roman Empire – a realm which notoriously had never succeeded in overcoming the fragmentation of medieval . His critique reflected a much more fundamental problem in the new theory of the state: it was unfit to understand the issue of imperial heterogeneity and allow for Campanella’s adaptive prudentia. It was not by chance that the Roman imperial monarchy caused Bodin considerable embarrassment when he first designed his concept of absolute sovereignty. In his Six Livres de la République he had to devote several passages to a (more or less unresolved) discussion of just where sovereignty resided in the Roman state of the Caesars.46 This debate was later to be repeated as the modern discipline of ancient history took shape by the turn of the nineteenth century. Standing head and shoulders above the rest, Theodor Mommsen intended his authoritative Römisches Staatsrecht to be the crowning achievement of his generation. Here Roman history was organized according to the principles of modern constitutional law. A landmark, the study nevertheless sparked considerable controversy. Mommsen’s attempt to solve the riddle of the emperor’s sovereignty was far from satisfactory: he had to describe it almost as a sort of constitutional anomaly.47 Historians have contin- ued to debate this issue ever since, however inconclusively. The reason is, as Egon Flaig (1992) has argued in his study of the imperial succession, that constitutional theory is inadequate to the task. The emperor’s position was not defined by a coherent system of constitutional law; it was rather a bundle of powers held on the basis of the support or acceptance gained from a number of distinct constituencies. Flaig focuses his attention on the standing army, the Roman senate, and the popu-

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lation of the capital. These groups were best placed to play a role in the succession of rulers. But one should probably also allow for the influence of other powerful groups, particularly the Hellenic aristocracy.48 And if we change our perspective from monarchical succession to the empire as a system of government, the importance of provincial elites takes on greater prominence, as argued above. In spite of such conceptual difficulties, however, our basic idea of “the state” has been dominated by the notion of sovereignty and unitary power. But during the last generation of scholarship this has begun to change. Historians have become much more interested in the limitations of Hobbesian statecraft and in exploring the alternatives. For most of history, people have not been organized in neat sovereign and national units. Within early modern history, the notion of the composite or conglomerate state has gained currency; monarchs usually presided over a bundle of individual polities and territories rather than a homogeneous realm (Elliott 1992; Gustafsson 1998). This represents an interesting historio- graphical development for the student of classical or tributary empires and provides a point of contact with “mainstream” historiography. From one perspective, for example, the Roman Empire may be presented as showing a strong family resemblance to later loosely structured feudal regimes. A very small administrative apparatus of central rule and the preservation of city-states to govern local society combine to produce an impression of considerable fragmentation. Jon Lendon has pictured Roman imperial government as based on an exchange of honor between emperor and elites.49 Yet, as Lendon and Cohen argue in this volume, the Roman imperial state was much stronger than the average feudal kingdom and was subject to far fewer constraints in its command of resources, military as well as economic. To borrow a concept from Shmuel Eisenstadt (1963: 26–8), Roman imperial gov- ernment was in command of many more free-floating resources than a feudal mon- arch, in particular a large standing army and regular taxation. A universal and tributary empire like the Roman, in other words, seems more comparable to the conglomerate, patrimonial, and bureaucratic states of sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century Europe, as recently argued by Peter Eich (2005), than to either the feudal monarchies of the preceding period or the later much more cohesive (post-Hobbesian) European states of the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. But, importantly, the processes of state formation were very different. Comparison with the failed Habsburg ambitions to create a universal empire in Europe (Kennedy 1988: 39–93), mentioned several times in the preced- ing discussion, will elucidate the contrast. At the height of their powers in the sixteenth century, the early modern gunpowder military revolution, intense competition, and an emerging balance of power between the rival monarchies of Europe forced the Habsburgs into an expensive arms race. To finance the ever bigger armies required to participate in high politics, Habsburg rulers strove constantly to widen their tax base. Conquests in the New World brought a much needed infusion of silver and gold. But this incredibly rich tribute was far from enough to meet the insatiable and rising demands of warfare. Existing territories had to contribute more taxes and more men, which was easier said than done. As

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the Roman Empire had unraveled in the West, state taxation had slowly wasted away in many parts (Wickham 2005). Reversing that trend was a tough challenge; and it was an aim which could not be achieved without negotiating with the many local and regional bodies that controlled European societies. Such regional “ parliaments” regularly looked with suspicion on the military ambitions of their rulers, if they were accompanied by a request for higher taxes. Conflicts and clashes were frequent. Often enough, however, rulers managed to overcome opposition by making other concessions which suited the interests of local elites. Either way, the process favored the build-up of structures and produced a trend toward fragmentation of the holdings of very extensive monarchies. In organizing his succession, Charles V, the Habsburg emperor who came closest to uniting most of Europe under his hegemony, had to accept the division of his territories into an Austrian and a Spanish branch. The former would go to his brother Ferdinand, the latter to his son Philip who, in turn, would later have to face the rebellion and secession of the prosperous . But as the Habsburg was gradually split up, the mobilization of resources from the parts was stepped up. The Spanish king was able to field about twice the number of soldiers in the 1620s than the maximum ever achieved by Charles in the middle of the sixteenth century when he had command of the unbroken Habsburg inheritance (Kennedy 1988: 71). State formation in early modern Europe intensified and capacities increased in tandem with the consolidation of rival, more compact, middle-sized monarchical states.50 Tributary empires depended almost on the opposite logic; they had come to control extensive domains by absorbing their rivals. Taxation was the fruit of conquest, and successful expansion often drove the development of imperial armies. Both the Ottoman and Mughal cavalry, for instance, were financed by the distribution of prebendal incomes from conquered territories to the horsemen in the service of the ruler. An Ottoman, Mughal, Chinese, or Roman emperor there- fore already had at his command quite substantial armies and felt competitive pressures to expand the number of troops less acutely. But if such emerged, the imperial states began to show signs of some of the same strains as could be found in the Habsburg Empire of the sixteenth century. Successful conquests and plenti- ful tributes gave the Ottoman sultans the edge during the first phases of the military revolution and enabled their armies to strike fear into the hearts of Christian Europe.51 However, as the military revolution wore on into the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and Ottoman expansion ran out of steam, the empire began to find it increasingly difficult to keep up with its European rivals. Attempts by the government to increase its revenues regularly came at the price of strengthening provincial elites and created a long-term trend toward the decentralization of state power. Voices demanding reform along European lines grew stronger toward the nineteenth century. But in the end, modernization spelt the end of Ottoman rule and completed the break-up of its domains.52 The Roman Empire was never subject to similarly vigorous competition. Nevertheless, when during the third century rival claims to the imperial purple

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pitted contenders against each other in civil war, intensified military mobilization was accompanied by a tendency toward the regionalization of imperial power (Shaw 1999). According to Herodian (4.3.5–7), plans had already existed to divide the realm between the two sons of the emperor Septimius Severus (r. 193–211), who had become the focus of rival factions at court. Geta, the younger, was to relocate to the Oriental parts of the empire together with the eastern sections of the Roman senate and form a new regional government seated in either Syrian or Alexandria. Eventually Caracalla, the older brother, solved the problem by killing Geta. But during the next decades regionally based emperors became a fact of life in the empire. This trend was never decisively reversed. With the death of Theodosius the Great in 395, the division of the empire into an eastern and a western half became permanent. A similar development dominates late Mughal history. The Timurids ran into trouble while expanding along their southwestern frontier in the late seventeenth century. Attempts to compensate by securing a firmer hold on the agricultural revenues of existing provinces saw the transforma- tion of governors into regional rulers, , who eventually paid little but lip service to their overlord in Delhi. While Mughal statecraft continued to penetrate provincial societies more deeply, the powers of central government were sapped.53 By contrast, the Chinese imperial government for long periods successfully exploited the advantages of size. With incomes drawn from extensive territories and a vast population, the emperors were able to field very considerable armies without the need for steadily increasing taxes (Bin Wong 1997: ch. 6; Rawski 2005: 141). The combination of a vast army and (relatively) low taxes probably provides a signifi- cant part of the explanation as to why universal empires over long spans of time have been able successfully to govern very diverse territories. Imperial government was spread thinly but could be concentrated and applied with great intensity.

Conclusion and Perspectives

Comparative history was once described by Paul Veyne as a venture to avoid being trapped in conventional categories (Veyne 1970: 155). As an exercise in imaginative thinking, it allows us to question the things we tend to take for granted and enables critical reflection on the presuppositions and premises which underlie our argu- ments. Historians of Rome have traditionally addressed the imperial experience with notions shaped by later European statehood. This was no doubt felt as natural since Europeans continued to understand themselves in the light of the Roman cultural achievement. Yet a paradox lies hidden here. Europe is characterized pre- cisely by the absence of a unifying hegemonic empire, Roman-style. This experience is reflected in current political theory, which has been predicated on the prevalence of middle-sized compact states joined together in a competitive system. When this condition first began to register in political doctrine during the , think- ers such as Machiavelli emphasized the republican aspect of Roman history. In the works, for instance of a Sallust, one could read how conquests had undermined and

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corrupted the free republic (Pocock 1975, 2003). It was this narrative that fed into the new political theories of the early modern era, whose principles were coined in express opposition to aspirations of resurrecting a new Rome: universal empire became anathema to the evolving political mainstream. Instead, it empha- sized the consolidation of compact, independent, and sovereign states. As a result, modern historiography has found it difficult to accommodate some of the imperial aspects of Roman state formation within its image of classical civilization. This chapter, therefore, has attempted to reexcavate universal empire, both as a historical phenomenon and as a theoretical concept to recontextualize the Roman imperial experience. Far from being an awkward anomaly, something to be relegated to the margins of our understanding of the Roman Empire, the notion of universal hegemony turns out to be a central currency of power that Rome had in common with a number of other large, agrarian, or tributary empires, such as the early modern empires of the Mughals, Ottomans, and the Qing dynasty. They present us with the prospect of a form of statecraft both stronger and weaker than the early modern composite monarchies of Europe. Stronger, in the sense that in absolute terms universal emperors often commanded more resources than early modern European kings, particularly in the earlier phases of the period. Weaker, because this apparent strength was the outcome primarily of size, the greater extent of subject territories. On the ground, imperial government was often less densely represented and its demands on the subject populations less intensive than gradually became the rule in the small and middle-sized states of early modern Europe. In terms of state formation, then, the Roman Empire confronts us with an experience that does not conform to the patterns presented by later European history. It was not subject to the same pressures that inexorably drove European states to intensify government, nor was it simply locked in feudal fragmentation. If we want to develop and deepen our understanding of the Roman condition further, we need, as suggested here, to explore closer comparisons with other universal empires. They challenge us to think more carefully about the mixture within the same body politic of far-flung, loosely governed territories and the creation of vast concentrations of power in the hands of the emperors and central government. Such comparisons will teach us more about the pressures and constraints which shaped the Roman Empire, and they will allow us to test our analytical explanations and sharpen our recognition of causal relationships in the processes which governed the formation of empire in the ancient Mediterranean.54 In short, they will help us to appreciate aspects of the ancient experience that we have hitherto underestimated. Mughal, Ottoman, or Chinese, these imperial comparisons will enable us to look at the world of Rome in new ways.

Acknowledgments

I should like to thank Peter Garnsey and John Hall, who both generously read a first draft of this chapter and helped me improve it in numerous ways. Dariusz Kolodziejczyk, Metin Kunt, and Muzaffar Alam kindly explained points of detail

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and supplied me with a few pieces of bibliography unavailable to me in Copenhagen. Thanks are also due to Johann Arnason and Peter Wagner for having organized the stimulating meeting in Florence for which this contribution was first conceived, and to the editors of this volume for helpful comments. The responsibility for the final result, alas, rests solely with me.

Notes

1 See Necipog˘lu 1991: chs. 1–2 on the erection of the Topkapi; the inscription is placed above the imperial gate. 2 On the Roman credentials and universal claims made by the Ottoman sultan, see Inalcik 1973: 56–8; Kunt 1995: 19–21; Goffman 2002: 51–4, 105–9. 3 See, e.g., Kennedy 1988: ch. 2. There is an extensive historiography on the Roman aspirations and ideology of Charles V; see Pagden 1995: 31–46 for a broad discussion. Further, e.g., Yates 1975: 1–28; Headley 1983; Tanner 1993. For a recent attempt to compare the Mughals, the Ottomans, and the Habsburgs, see Subrahmanyam 2006. 4 Anderson 1974: 462–549 still represents a valuable historiographical survey and devastating critique of the concept and its Marxist offshoot, “the Asiatic mode of production.” 5 Oriental despotism was something which scholars in previous generations might even present as a sort of cancer, taking over and suffocating the Roman Empire during late antiquity, from the third century onwards – in other words, a foreign element undermining the foundations of Western civilization and leading to the Dark Ages; cf. Rostovtzeff 1957: ch. 12. 6 McNeill 1982; Tilly 1992; Creveld 1999. 7 In general, see Gellner 1983: 14–18. For specific analyses, Hopkins 1978: ch. 4; Crone 1980; Hathaway 2006; Dettenhofer 2009. 8 Whittaker 1994; Bang and Bayly 2003; Bang 2008; Scheidel 2009; cf. Saller 1982; Gommans 2002. 9 A small contemporary Greek history of Mehmed the Conqueror illustrates well how its author Kritovoulos mobilizes the Christian-Roman heritage to claim a position for the Christian Orthodox elites within the Muslim empire (for a translation, see Kritovoulos 1954). On the complex mixture of elements going into the Ottoman monarchy, see the discussion of Kunt forthcoming; Kafadar 1995. 10 From 2005 to 2009 I chaired a European research network, funded by COST (European Cooperation in Science and Technology), to promote a comparative dialogue among historians and sociologists on tributary empires, with special emphasis on the Romans, the Ottomans, and Mughals. See http://tec.saxo.ku.dk. 11 See, however, Alcock et al. 2001; Scheidel 2009; Morris and Scheidel 2009. 12 For the many similarities of such agrarian empires, see, e.g., Wickham 1985; Lieven 2002; Bayly 2004: ch. 1. 13 Mann 1986: chs. 5, 8, 9. See Hintze 1997 for an attempt to apply Mann’s theoretical apparatus to early modern Indian history. 14 Inalcik 1973: 57–8. The Ottomans, therefore, did not claim to be khalifs in the strict classical sense or to have succeeded the last of the Abbasid khalifs, who was deported to Constantinople after the conquest of Mamluk Egypt in 1517; see Farooqi 1989:

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174–86 for a detailed discussion. For the importance to Ottoman kingship of being a “warrior of the faith” (gaza “lord”), see Imber 1995. 15 See Beach and Koch 1997: 25–7 for a Mughal Timurid genealogy and illustration showing Timur handing the imperial crown to Shahjahan, and The Jahangirnama (Thackston 1999), p. 95, with Timur reducing the Ottomans to the status of vassals. In general, see Richards 1978; Koch 1994. 16 On the Mughal khilafat and ambitions of universal lordship, see Farooqi 1989: 190–4; further, 1989: chs. 3–4 and Pearson 1996 on the sponsorship of the Hadj and patron- age of Mecca and Medina. 17 Quotations from Farooqi 1989: 195. For these rivalries, see further Alam and Subrahmanyam 2007: ch. 7. Hammer 1830 translates parts of the diplomatic correspondence. 18 Millar 1993: 152–67 (many of the details behind these events remain uncertain, contested, and covered in historical cloud); Sommer 2005: 72–7. 19 The inscription should now be consulted in the critical edition, with German translation and commentary, of Huyse 1999; quotations (in my English translation) from §§1 and 8. See Zeev 1998; Huyse 2006for further analysis of Sasanian titulature and claims of preeminence. The precise meaning of the Achaemenids for the location of Shapur’s relief and inscription is uncertain, even contested. But the site can hardly have been chosen at random. The symbolic presence of the former dynasty is too striking to be missed, even if its precise historical meaning had faded from memory. See now also Canepa 2009, for a general discussion of the cultural effects of Roman– Sasanian rivalry. 20 Horace Odes 4.15.21–3; Carmen Saeculare 55–6 (my trans.). See, e.g., Nicolet 1991: chs. 1–2, 4–5; Mattern 1999: chs. 2 and 5. 21 Whittaker 1994; Gommans 2002 (drawing explicitly on Whittaker); Brummett 2007. The notion of supremacy and the prevalence of frontiers rather than firmly established borders, however, should not be understood to preclude pragmatic recognition that some areas were outside the control of the emperor and that his power stopped there. As Ottoman historians point out, defeats suffered against the Russians and Austrian Habsburgs forced the Porte to concede such limits as part of the peace treaties, but only grudgingly. By diplomatic conceit, the sultan himself was normally kept aloof from these concessions and would thus not symbolically have to recognize the equality of his enemies; see Aksan 2006. Lattimore 1951 is the classic theoretical discussion of the frontiers of agrarian empires. 22 Cf. Imber 1995 (on the Ottomans); Hardy 1986 (for the numinous aspects of Mughal kingship). On the notion of a “mandate from heaven” stretching back to the Han Empire, see Loewe 1986. 23 Al-Badaoni 1884: e.g., 262–89, 310–19. See Ikram 1964: ch. 12 for a clear introduction to the problem of Akbar’s controversial religious practices and innovations; they need to be set in the context of Muslim Sufi saints rather than traditional orthodoxy. 24 See Lewis 2007: 79–80 on the manipulation of secrecy to bolster the majesty of the Han emperor. 25 The Roman imperial palace as an open house: Pliny, Panegyric 47.3–5; see 54 for praise that the emperor attempts to restrain popular adulation. Veyne 1976: ch. 9 discusses the delicate balance Roman emperors had to find between popular appeal and aristocratic respect.

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26 As is now increasingly clear, the Ottoman Empire of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries was not the entity in terminal decline described in the older historiography, but in many ways thriving and measuring up to the challenges which it confronted; see Faroqhi 2006. 27 Elias 1969: ch. 6, on the social configuration of the court, describes well the dependence of the monarch on intermediaries and the need to organize and modulate access. See also Saller 1982 for a study of the importance of brokers at the Roman court. 28 Weber’s (1972) discussion of patrimonial power remains a useful starting point for the various elite arrangements characterizing these imperial polities. 29 Richards 1993: 19–25, 63–71, 138–48. The classic studies of the Mughal nobility and revenue assignment system are Athar Ali 1997; Habib 1999. 30 In general, Bang 2008: ch. 2. Further, Hopkins 1983: ch. 3 (on the relative weakness of the senatorial aristocracy); Saller 1982: chs. 4–5 (on the network of connections that supported the accumulation of power and wealth in the aristocracy). When the imperial system began to unravel in late antiquity, the higher echelons of the aristocracy also suffered. The conquest of Africa by the Vandals caused significant losses not only to the imperial treasury but also to those members of the aristocracy who lived in Rome but had acquired large estates in these provinces; see Wickham 2005: 88. 31 Blake 1991; Swain 1996; Alam 2004; Stroh 2007. See also Goffman 2002: 51. 32 See Bayly 2004: 29–36 on the composite nature of agrarian imperial government. 33 Asher 1992: 253–55; Richards 1993: 158–64, 171–84. On the religious complexities and tensions of Mughal culture, Alam 2004 is now fundamental. Hodgson 1974: 59–98 remains valuable. 34 See, recently, Edmondson et al. 2005, discussing the Romano-Judean historian, though the contribution of Rajak and Eck exaggerates his marginality and obscurity in Rome. Given the shortage of information, it seems futile to speculate on the precise standing of Josephus in the circles of literary society in the imperial capital. The fact that he did find a measure of sustained and repeated imperial patronage does bespeak a position of some comfort. It was not commonplace to receive living quarters in a house belonging to the emperor. On the other hand, that did not necessarily make Josephus a close and intimate confidant of Vespasian and Titus. 35 As Origen observed disapprovingly during the second quarter of the third century, Epistula ad Africanum 20 (14). Millar 1993: 374–86 surveys the thin and riddled evidence for the rise of rabbinic . 36 E.g., Suetonius, Tiberius 36; Isaac 2004: 235–339 (though reading the evidence too heavily in the light of twentieth-century racism). 37 Corpus Inscriptionum Latinarum XIII 1668; trans. in Sherk 1988: no. 55. The classic study of Roman citizenship is Sherwin-White 1973. 38 Plutarch, On the Fortune of Alexander 329a–d; Strabo, Geography 1.4.9. The point is not Strabo’s inconsistency, as Isaac 2004: 300 claims, but rather that Strabo attempts to formulate a position which transcends the dichotomy in an aristocracy of virtue. 39 On the nineteenth- and early twentieth-century of classical agrarian empires, see the contributions of Bayly, Tezcan, and De Dono in Bang and Bayly forthcoming. 40 Campanella 1653: chs. 1–2, 30. The best discussion remains Pagden 1990: ch. 2. 41 Campanella 1654: 51. Chilmead’s name does not appear on this first edition but on the 1660 reprint with a prefatory epistle by William Prynne.

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42 See Creveld 1999: 170–88 for a convenient overview. Meinecke 1924 is a classic. 43 See Campanella 1653: ch. 5, and Leibniz’s “Mars Christianissimus,” a satire lampoon- ing the power politics pursued by the absolutist French monarchy under the banner of raison d’état. 44 Hobbes 1996: ch. 17–18; Bodin, Six Livres: Book I, chs. 8 and 10: “Mais en l’estat d’une Republique bien ordonnee, ceste puissance ne doit ester baillee, ny par commis- sion, ny en tiltre d’office” (1986, vol. 1: 327–28), the rights of sovereignty ought not to be delegated or distributed to others. 45 Leibniz, De suprematu principum Germaniae, ch. xi; trans. cited from Riley 1988: 118. 46 Bodin Six Livres: book I, ch. 8, and II, ch. 1 (1986, in particular vol. 1, pp. 206–8 and vol. 2, 27–30). A convenient selection of the key chapters and translation into English based on the French Paris edition of 1583, complemented by that in Latin of 1586, has been made by J. H. Franklin as Bodin 1992; see 24–7, 107–9 for the discussion of the Roman Principate. 47 Mommsen 1887: 748: “Die Bezeichnung als Dyarchie … würde das Wesen dieser merkwürdigen Institution [i.e. des Principats] zutreffender ausdrücken.” 48 Flaig 1992: ch. 4, esp. 177, 182–4; Flaig 2003 pursues this theme further by exploring ritual and cultural semantics (rather than the customary constitutional analysis) as keys to unlock the secret of Roman republican politics. 49 Lendon 1997. Garnsey and Saller 1987 is fundamental on the ephemeral nature of Roman provincial government. 50 Thus when Goldstone and Haldon 2009 argue that all traditional monarchies were imperial, in the sense that they were all composite, this does not mean that we cannot identify different logics and distinguish between varying processes of state formation within this broader category. 51 Murphey 1999: ch. 3 and 191–2 emphasizes the Ottomans’ ability to benefit from the vast size of their dominions to sustain military efforts without too much strain. 52 See several contributions in Barkey and von Hagen 1997. The Ottoman attempts to reform their military base and revenue system from the seventeenth to the nineteenth century are treated by Aksan 2006: 107–14. Gradually the weight of the timariot cavalry, based on the allocation of prebendal lands, so-called timars, in lieu of military service, was reduced and a standing army, with a much stronger infantry component, gained importance. 53 Bayly 1983; Alam 1986; Hintze 1997. 54 A huge stride forward in this direction has now been made by a parallel project, initiated and directed by Walter Scheidel at Stanford, to compare the worlds of Rome and Han China. The first volume of this enterprise has just appeared, cf. Scheidel 2009.

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