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The King of Kings: Universal Hegemony, Imperial Power, and a New Comparative History of Rome

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The King of Kings: Universal Hegemony, Imperial Power, and a New Comparative History of Rome 14 The King of Kings: Universal Hegemony, Imperial Power, and a New Comparative History of Rome PETER FIBIGER BANG By the grace 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 Sultan of the two Continents and the Emperor of the two Seas, the Shadow of God in this world and the next, the Favorite of God on the Two Horizons, the Monarch of the Terraqueous Orb, the Conqueror of the Castle of Constantinople, the Father of Conquest Sultan Mehmed Khan, son of Sultan Murad Khan son of Sultan Mehmed Khan, may God make eternal his empire, 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 sultans, 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 Byzantine Empire, 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 Roman Empire 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 99780470655573_4_014.indd780470655573_4_014.indd 332222 111/10/20101/10/2010 110:01:320:01:32 AAMM THE KING OF KINGS 323 emperors had continued to govern the Mediterranean ecumene. The possession of Constantinople enabled Mehmed to inscribe the Ottoman monarchy 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 Ottoman Empire 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 Europe, North Africa, and the Middle East. 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 historiography 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 empires such as those of the Mughals and the Chinese under the dubious label of Oriental despotism.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-style empire. Instead, smaller, more compact states developed on the basis of regional monarchies.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 universal monarchy, institutions all commonly connected with the rule of vast agrarian dominions, 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 99780470655573_4_014.indd780470655573_4_014.indd 332323 111/10/20101/10/2010 110:01:320:01:32 AAMM 324 PETER FIBIGER BANG 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 early modern Europe. 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. 99780470655573_4_014.indd780470655573_4_014.indd 332424 111/10/20101/10/2010 110:01:320:01:32 AAMM THE KING OF KINGS 325 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.
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