60 How politics works
Arabs (Al-Andaluz or the Emirate of Granada, as it was later called). The Roman
Empire was re-founded in the year AD 800 under the Christian aegis, as the Holy
Roman Empire, by the king of Franks Charlemagne, who was crowned by Pope
Leo III the new ‘emperor of the Romans’. Through continuous wars of submission,
Charles the Great’s empire came to comprise approximately France, Germany and
Italy, plus the strips of Catalonyan/Spanish territory that were taken away from
Arab rule. Its claim to being universal, as well as its source of legitimacy, relied on
the alleged continuation of the Roman past: it was recognised by the pope as the
polity of the (western-European) Christians and gave institutional shape to the
res
publica christiana, as it was later called by emperor Friedrich II (1194–1250). This
claim ended substantially with the Treaties of Westphalia (1648) and was formally
cancelled as late as in 1806 by Napoleon.
In medieval Europe, the other power with universal claims was the Roman
Church, although it was weakened by the separation (1054) from the Eastern
Orthodox Church of Constantinople and later the Reformation, which Martin
Luther started in 1517. Rome was regarded as the source of the true Christian doc-
trine and the supreme authority in sacramental issues,
4
as well as in the legitimation
of temporal authorities, first and foremost with those of the emperor. Charlemagne
also transferred territories in the Italian peninsula under direct political rule of
the pope, thus creating the
temporal power of the Church, which lasted until 1870,
when Rome was taken to the pope and became the capital of the newly founded
Kingdom of Italy. In spite of bitter strife between popes and emperors, disunion and
wars in the empire, as well as corruption of various types and degrees in the Roman
Church, on the front of legal (top-down) legitimacy, the claims of the two univer-
sal powers lasted until the dawn of modern politics in the sixteenth–seventeenth
centuries. This edifice of power and recognition was reinforced, but also ossified,
by the hereditary personal dependence of power holders on the next upper level
of patrician bondage, up to the king and/or the emperor. This was the
feudal system,
whose structure is well-known also in very different countries and cultures as in
ancient China, and elements of which survive still now in not yet fully modernised
societies, in organised crime networks, but also in niches inside the democratic
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