Empire and Imperialism - Overview - Roman Imperium, Christian Conceptions, Holy Roman Empire And Church Versus State, Evolution Of Europe
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The multiple meanings of empire have a long history. To the ancient Greeks, the concept, expressed by the term monarchy, referred to the Persian Empire, the vast power that fought the Greeks in a series of campaigns in the early fifth century B.C.E. To the Greeks, the empire was a gigantic war machine, one in which military officers employed whips to force their soldiers to fight, unlike the Greeks, who fought voluntarily as freemen. Empire thus signified conquest and slavery, as opposed to the city-state, which signified freedom.
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The ancient Roman conception of empire differed from the Greek. The term came from the Roman concept of imperium, meaning jurisdiction or lawful authority. A Roman official who ruled a subject population or who commanded troops possessed imperium, an authority symbolized by the fasces, which was borne as a sign of authority before the consuls who ruled Rome. The fasces, a band of rods bound around…
Empire had a mystical or spiritual meaning in the ancient world as well. In the ancient Near East, the course of human history was often symbolized in terms of empires. One of the most famous examples of this is in the biblical Book of Daniel, where there is an image of man composed of gold, silver, bronze, iron, and clay. Each element represents one of the stages of human history, a history of de…
The great medieval conflict between church and state from the eleventh to the thirteenth centuries focused, for the most part, on the relationship between emperors and popes. Each party possessed a vision of Christian society in which it played the leading role. In the decretal Venerabilem (1202), Pope Innocent III (r. 1198–1216) spelled out in detail the papal conception of the function an…
While the medieval use of the terms empire and imperial is usually seen as restricted to the Holy Roman Empire, in fact this was not the case. Several other medieval rulers referred to themselves as emperor and their possessions as an empire, or were said to have possessed imperium over a variety of peoples. The Ecclesiastical History of England, by the scholar and theologian Bede (672 or 673 …
Abulafia, David. Frederick II: A Medieval Emperor. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1992. Carlyle, R. W., and A. J. Carlyle. A History of Mediaeval Political Theory in the West. 6 vols. Edinburgh and London: W. Blackwood, 1903–1936. Fanning, Steven. "Bede, Imperium, and the Bretwaldas." Speculum 66 (1991): 1–26. Folz, Robert. The Concept of Empire in Wester…
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