Respublica christiana and peace of westphalia

João Marques de Almeida

The Peace of Westphalia and the Idea of Respublica ChristianaTeoria das Relações Internacionais

The English School (ES) presents us with a puzzle regarding the origins of modern international

society: on the one hand, the medieval political order is defined as respublica Christiana; on the

other hand, the Thirty Years War and the Peace of Westphalia are identified as marking the

collapse of that political order. Yet, the participants in the negotiations that led to the Peace often

referred to the respublica Christiana, demonstrating that they saw themselves as belonging to

such a political republic. Moreover, other political figures and thinkers continued to use such an

expression well beyond 1648.

The ES solves this puzzle in a odd and, in my view, ultimately unsatisfactory manner. Basically,

the solution suggests that the term respublica Christiana persisted due to the absence of a better

alternative term. Political participants and thinkers were not able to articulate a notion that could

define the new political system and, consequently, only the passage of time could provide a

satisfactory conceptual clarification. This solution to the puzzle is rather odd since it posits that

the persistence of the term respublica Christiana implies that its survival was due to the inability

of XVII Century political thinkers to develop the concept of anarchical state system.

Let me give an example to show the oddity of this argument. Imagine that fifty years from now

the European Union is a unitary federal state. That is to say, European sovereign states have

disappeared. Then imagine that two hundred years later, political historians and thinkers argue

that the end of the Second World War (which in fact terminated also a kind of Thirty Years War)

constituted a profound revolution in European political history. Specifically, the beginning of the

European federation and the end of the sovereign state in Europe. Continuing with this use of

historical analogy, the Rome Treaty would be a kind of Peace of Westphalia. Of course, someone

with a keener interest in History would note that European political figures and thinkers of the

period still relied on the notion of the sovereign state. Indeed, well until the twenty first century,

the European Union was defined as an association of sovereign states.

If these future political thinkers reason along the lines of the members of the ES, they will argue

that the use of the term sovereign state simply reflects a deep inability to define the European

federation rather than the persistence of the sovereign state itself. However, I do not think that it

is excessive to say that the sovereign state is still quite important in Europe. This is a relevant

point for the process of European integration and will have far-reaching consequences in the

shaping of the kind of political confederation that is emerging in Europe.

If we take this example seriously, the solution to the puzzle offered by the ES is clearly

unsatisfactory. The persistence of the notion of respublica Christiana well after the Peace of

Westphalia demonstrates that we cannot really understand the nature of modern international

society without simultaneously taking into account many ideas inherent to that notion. Just as

any sort of European confederation will inevitably be influenced by ideas inherent to the concept

of sovereign statehood, modern international society has been influenced by ideas inherent with

the notion of respublica Christiana.

In light of what I have so far said, perhaps another solution to the Westphalian puzzled may be

offered. Part of my solution is simply not to see it as a puzzle. The fact that political figures and

thinkers in the XVII Century often referred to the idea of respublica Christiana only

demonstrates that the idea was both politically relevant and significant. In short, we should take

these political actors and thinkers in a rather serious way. The concept of respublica Christiana,

a creation of Renaissance humanism and republicanism, served as an alternative to the medieval

notion of universal monarchy, which was associated in early modern Europe with Catholic

imperialism. It was precisely this humanist conception of respublica Christiana that participants

in the Peace of Westphalia invoked. Looking at the problem in this faction, the fact that the

participants in the negotiations of a settlement that defeated the Catholic project of universal

monarchy remained loyal to the idea of respublica Christiana ceases to a puzzle.

This paper offers a solution to the Westphalian puzzle. In the first section, I discuss the humanist

conception of empire, which emerged in the high middle ages, in opposition to Christian

conception of universal empire. In the second section, I trace the transformation, during the

Renaissance, of the humanist conception of empire into the idea of respublica Christiana.

Finally, in the third section, I explain the significance of the idea of respublica Christiana in the

process that led to the Peace of Westphalia. In the conclusion, in a brief way, I say something on

why the ES could not solve the puzzle in this way and I justify why it is important to solve such

a puzzle.

The English School, the Notion of Respublica Christiana, and the Significance of the Peace

of Westphalia

The ES’s analysis of the medieval respublica Christiana emphasises four points. First, its

imperial nature. In Systems of States, Martin Wight emphasises the institutional unity of

medieval politics. Despite the recognition of the existence of ‘an innumerable multitude of

governmental units’, for instance Wight refers to the distribution of power among many political

units, with some of them developing ‘the internal organisation and external claims which in due

course gave birth to the conceptions of ‘sovereignty’ and the ‘state’’, he clearly emphasises the

‘unity rather than separateness’, ‘hierarchy rather than equality’, the Empire’s claim to universal

jurisdiction in temporal matters, and ‘[t]he universal government of the papacy’.[1] Wight even

calls the Church ‘the real state of the Middle Ages’.[2] Likewise, drawing on Otto Gierke, Bull

defines respublica Christiana in imperial terms.[3] More recently, Robert Jackson has recovered

this conventional view. For him, ‘respublica Christiana was a unified authority’, defined by a

‘dual arrangement’: a religious authority...headed by the pope and a political authority...headed

by a secular ruler designated as emperor’.[4]

The second point refers to cultural unity. Again, Wight recognises a strong cultural unity in the

medieval political society, which was associated with the Christian religion. The term societas

christiana characterises precisely such a religious unity. This sense of spiritual unity was the

basis of the Holy See political power, which was confirmed by the doctrine of the Pope as

dominus mundi, or ‘lord of all mankind’.[5] The crucial episode in the emergence of this

Christian conception of imperial order was the coronation of Charlemagne, by the Pope, as

Emperor in the Christmas Day of the eighth century. From this moment, the papacy claimed

universal jurisdiction in both spiritual and temporal matters.[6] In the same vein, for Bull, in

medieval politics, ‘the values which they held to underly the society were Christian’.[7] Jackson

affirms that respublica Christiana defined and guaranteed the ‘belief system of Europeans in the

western half of the continent’.[8]

Thirdly, for the ES, ‘theorists of this period provided no clear guidance as to who the members

of international society were; no fundamental constitutive principle or criterion of membership

was clearly enunciated’.[9] In particular, the sovereign state had not emerged. Given ‘the

assumptions of a universal society…what is lacking is a conception that makes independence of

outside authority in the control of territory and population the inherent right of all states’.[10] In

Jackson’s words, the imperial institutional architecture of the medieval international society ‘did

not imply sovereignty’: No ruler was fully independent or sovereign, all were ‘semi-

autonomous’.[11]

Finally, according to the ES, the institutions of the Christian international society did not derive

‘from the co-operation of states’. ‘On the one hand, the existing ‘international’ or ‘supranational’

institutions were those of the decadent Empire and Papacy, and did not derive from the co-

operation or the consent of states; and on the other hand the tradition of co-operation which

states were developing was not yet perceived as taking the place of these institutions’.[12] For

instance, institutions that later came to have a central role in the system of states, such as

diplomacy or international law, were under the papal authority.[13] The emergence of the

modern society of states had to wait for the collapse of respublica Christiana. In Jackson’s

words, ‘Before a plural system of sovereign states could fully emerge, the supreme authority of

respublica Christiana had to be extinguished or at least rendered superfluous’.[14] For the ES,

the Peace of Westphalia is the historical symbol of such a collapse.

The association between the emergence of the modern system of states and the defeat of the

imperial project is an idea that often appears in the work of the ES. For instance, Wight stresses

the break between the medieval and the modern political systems. In his own words, modern

‘international anarchy’ arose from the ruins of the medieval international monarchy.[15]

Moreover, the modern society of states not only replaced the medieval imperial order, but it also

emerged after ‘the interval of realism’[16] that lasted for thirty years. Between the medieval

Christian political society and the modern European international society, there was a period

characterised by power politics, which was marked by the religious and dynastic wars of the

sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. For Bull, there was already a states-system, ‘which must be

dated from the appearance of sovereign states whose behaviour impinged on one another’, and

which ‘began at least as early as the late fifteenth century’.[17] Yet, there was not an

international society in the sense of states following legal rules in their mutual relations. The

modern society of states only emerged in 1648 with the Peace of Westphalia.

Such a view demonstrates that, in Bull’s historical account, the Peace of Westphalia occupies a

privileged place. On the one hand, the Peace recognises a modern and anarchical society of

states, in opposition to the medieval imperial political society; and, on the other hand, the Peace

establishes a society of states after the ‘interval of realism’ of the early modern states system.

The modernity of the Peace lies in its crucial role in the development of a statist international

society, in the recognition of the emergence of secular principles and institutions to manage

international politics, and lastly in the establishment of a body of rules to be applied to the states

system as a whole.[18] In this sense, the Treaties of Munster and Osnabruck also marked the

historical transition from an international system of power politics to an international society of

common norms and institutions. In other words, the historical significance of the Peace of

Westphalia derives from its recognition of the emergence of the modern international society.

[19] Therefore, the Peace of Westphalia represents, in historical terms, the alternative to both

political anarchy and to hegemonic empire. In theoretical terms, this view translates in the

transformation of the Peace of Westphalia as the historical symbol of rationalism and in its

opposition to both realism and revolutionism.[20]

As a result of this structural transformation, ‘State sovereignty displaced the sovereignty of

God’, and ‘Europe was defined as a plurality of regna’. After the Peace of Westphalia, the

entities of the Empire, ‘formerly subordinated’, ‘became independent authorities within their

own territories’. Thus, in Westphalia, ‘A modern society of sovereign states had been created out

of the political debris of a ruined medieval Christian empire’.[21] Jackson strongly emphasises

the significance of this historical change

The great political transformation symbolized by Westphalia can be captured conceptually as a

reconstitution of European politics from that of a universitas, based on the solidarist norms of

Latin Christendom, to that of a societas, based on the pluralist norms of state sovereignty and

political independence.[22]

In the ES’s definition of the ‘societas of sovereign states’, the emphasis on the unitary and

absolutist nature of the sovereign state is quite clear. As Jackson puts it, the modern sovereign

state can be defined ‘as a single governing authority which is acknowledged to be supreme over

all other authorities within a certain territorial jurisdiction and is independent of all foreign

authorities’.[23] Form this follows the absolute defence of the principle of non-intervention, the

opposition between pluralism and solidarism, and the association between solidarism and

imperial order. It is quite common to find these assertions in the work of the central members of

the ES.

It is now the moment to return to the Westphalian puzzle, identified in the beginning of the

paper. Jackson’s recent work can serve to illustrate the ES problematic answer to the puzzle. At a

certain point in his account of the Peace of Westphalia, Jackson makes an interesting and

relevant point: ‘The conceptual and linguistic categories available to the statespeople at

Westpahlia were those of the late medieval era’. Accordingly, those statespeople saw themselves

as ‘Christian rulers’, as belonging to the ‘universal community’ of ‘Christendom’, and

understood the Peace as representing the ‘senate of the Christian world’. These observations lead

Jackson to admit that ‘The peace treaties do not specifically include much evidence for the claim

that Westphalia is the crucial turning-point in the emergence of sovereignty’.[24] However, and

despite the views and the language used by the participants in the negotiations that led to the

Peace, Jackson ‘knows’ what those participants ‘did not know’ at the time. Although the

transition did not become ‘clearly evident’ then, it is ‘clearly evident’ now for Jackson that it

occurred then. This interpretation is, in my view, extraordinary and demonstrates that, contrary

to Jackson’s intentions, he does not ‘understand the Westphalian moment from the perspective of

that time’, but rather ‘from the present time’. If we really attempt to understand what happened

in Westphalia ‘from the perspective of the time’, then we need to take their language and views

seriously. In particular, we need to grasp that their use of the term, and attachment to, respublica

Christiana was not a legacy of the medieval period, condemned to disappear. The problem is that

Jackson, like Wight and Bull before him, confuse the notion of respublica Christiana with the

Christian idea of universal monarchy and fails to perceive that the emergence of the secular and

humanist conception of respublica Christiana was the response to the failure of universal

monarchy. It is important to understand how such a conception emerged.

Medieval Political Thought  and the Notion of Empire

As I said in the Introduction, we need to grasp that the idea of respublica Christiana emerged

only in early modern Europe and as a reaction against universal monarchy. To understand this

point, it is helpful to, briefly, return to the medieval period. One of the central political notions

during that period was the notion of empire. Both historical memory and political experience

contributed to keep the idea alive throughout the medieval period. On the one hand, the memory

of the ancient Roman empire was very powerful and was readily invoked by political agents. In

the medieval political imagination, the empire of Rome was associated with progress, with

justice and with political order. In a nutshell, Rome was the symbol of civilisation. It was this

image that gave legitimacy to the aspiration of restoring the empire. A contemporary medieval

historian calls this ‘the ideology of Roman imperial restoration’.[25] On the other hand, the idea

of empire also arose form more recent political experience, namely the political experience of the

empire of Charlemagne, which was created in the eighth century. Like the old Roman empire,

this early medieval imperial experience became quickly associated with political order and

progress. We should not forget that the creation of the Carolingian empire ended a period of

barbarism, characterised by centuries of permanent anarchy and warfare.[26] Yet, despite the

aspiration for an imperial order, ‘the movements towards the unity of a universal empire was

more than balanced by movements towards the separation and division of independent states or

kingdoms’.[27] Therefore, it is not entirely correct to characterise medieval political order in

terms of imperial unity; and this crucial point is not entirely captured by the ES. Yet, on the other

hand, the imperial idea was very powerful in the minds of both scholars and politicians.

From these observations, we can draw three conclusions. First, the idea of empire meant order,

progress, security and civilisation, and as such became a legitimate political aspiration. Secondly,

the notion of empire was associated with rulership over many different territories and peoples. It

was seen as an extended political system where the centre, through expansion, ruled over the

peripheries, or the provinces of the empire. However, emperorship was by no means always

necessarily viewed in absolutist, unitary and universal terms. In other words, empire did not

necessarily mean ‘universal monarchy’. This point leads to the third conclusion, which is the

most significant in the context of this paper. It is important to bear in mind that there were two

competing conceptions of empire during the high Middle Ages, particularly after the Carolingian

period.

Janet Nelson makes a distinction between the ‘Rome-free imperial idea’, and the ‘Rome-centred

imperial idea’.[28] It is important to note that the term ‘Rome’ here refers to the papacy and not

the Roman empire. Let me call these two versions of empire the decentralised or the humanist

conception and the hegemonic or the Christian conception. I want to briefly elaborate on this

distinction, starting with a discussion of the origins of the Christian conception of empire. The

emergence of such a conception knows two crucial historical moments. First, the conversion of

Constantine and the progressive christianisation of the Roman Empire. For Christian thinkers,

‘the conversion of Constantine’ was a ‘watershed between the age of a persecuted church and the

age of a triumphant established Christianity’. This gave origin to an increasingly popular ‘vision

of a christianised Roman Empire’.[29] Thus, the ideas of ‘Roman’ and ‘Christian’ tended to

merge. The identification between the Roman Empire with the Christian society raised a crucial

issue: ‘who exercised ultimate authority in such a society?’.[30] As we will see below, this

question is central for the critics of the Christian conception of empire. The second crucial

moment occurred on Christmas Day 800, when the two ideas, the Roman and the Christian,

‘intersected in the coronation of Charlemagne by Leo III in Rome’.[31] After almost four

centuries of political anarchy, the Christian Roman Empire was rebuilt, and, in the words of a

historian, ‘Charlemagne’s imperial seal was inscribed Renovatio romani imperii’.[32] Since the

Carolingian period, the notion of empire in the middle ages acquired a Roman-Christian

universality. The political implications were far-reaching.

From the mid-twelfth century the papacy was characterised above all by its development as a

legal and governmental institution. In following this path...the papacy pursued a policy of

centralisation by means of the extension of its jurisdiction. This was the context in which

theories of papal power were developed and reactions against them emerged.[33]

We can draw three conclusions from the views of those who defended the project of the

Christian universal empire. First, the imperial powers were bound to fulfil two central functions:

to preserve peace within Christendom, and to expand and defend the Christian faith against non-

Christians. Secondly, they embraced the papal hierocratic thesis, which identified a legitimate

political order with the establishment of political unity under a imperial single ruler. Thirdly,

Christianity was recognised as the official religion of the empire. This Christian conception of

empire is quite similar to the ES’s definition of the respublica Christiana. As we saw above,

Wight, Bull and Jackson stress the imperial unity and the Christian nature of the medieval

respublica Christiana. However, there were alternatives to the Christian conception of empire. In

the words of a medieval historian,

The Christian idea of empire...was a powerful force in the middle ages, influential in the minds

and actions of many kings and emperors...But we shall simply pile up confusion if we attempt to

identify it with the historical empire in the west.[34]

One of this alternative conceptions corresponds to what I call the decentralised or the humanist

vision of empire. I shall use the thought of the Florentine writer, Dante, as the example of such a

conception. Two crucial issues marked the political context of the early Renaissance, Dante’s

lifetime. On the one hand, the conflicts between city-states in the north of Italy. On the other

hand, the attempt by the papacy to impose imperial authority on northern Italy, which resulted

into the return of the papal hierocratic imperial argument. For Dante, the authority of the Holy

Roman Emperor was the answer to both problems. Only imperial authority could bring peace to

the north of Italy and at the same time defeat the papacy’s ambitions.[35] In his book, De

Monarchia, published in the beginning of the fourteenth century, Dante discusses the legitimacy

and the origins of empire. In particular, he answers three questions: first, is the empire ‘necessary

to the well-being of the world?’ Secondly, ‘did the Roman people take on the office of the

monarch by right?’ Thirdly, ‘does the monarch’s authority derive directly from God or from

someone else?’.[36] It is the answers to the first and the third questions, treated by the author,

respectively, in Book One and Book Three, that directly concern us here. To justify the imperial

authority, Dante develops three arguments. First, for Dante, the monarch’s double function ‘is

that of peace-keeper and lawgiver’.[37]  Dante firmly believed that only a single sovereign

authority could provide peace to humankind. Indeed, it was the capacity to maintain peace

among Christians that justified the legitimacy of the imperial political order. Secondly, without

imperial authority it would be impossible to resolve the conflicts that arise between lesser kings

and princes, who compete for territory and power, and thereby Christendom would not be at

peace. In other words, without a universal empire, Christendom is ‘condemned to endemic

conflict’.[38] Thirdly, in this sense, the progress of Christendom called for the authority of the

Emperor. Universal authority can ensure that ‘human beings can achieve self-fulfilment

individually and collectively’.[39]

In the final chapter of Book One, Dante links his philosophical claims to history. He recalls a

brief period when humanity enjoyed universal peace due to the existence of a universal empire:

‘under the immortal Augustus, when a perfect monarchy existed...mankind was then happy in the

calm of universal peace’.[40] For Dante, this episode shows that ‘the role of the Roman empire

in human history was crucial’, which legitimises the exercise of imperial authority. It also

demonstrates that the universal empire described in Monarchy is not an idealized philosophical

abstraction, but a historical reality. In other words, Dante recovered the idea of a secular Pax

Romana. This last point leads us to consider Dante’s answer to the question of the sources of

imperial authority, which is the subject of Book Three. As I mentioned above, one of the central

political issues of Dante’s age was the relationship between religious and secular power. Dante

argued that ‘the authority of the monarch [emperor] comes from God directly’,[41] and it is

completely independent of the Pope. In the context of this paper, it is important to emphasise two

conclusions regarding Dante’s contribution. First, he starts to develop a secular conception of

imperial authority, which is opposed to the Christian vision of empire. Secondly, although he

clearly develops a theory of universal monarchy, he does not ignore the gradual emergence of

territorial sovereignty. This leads Anthony Black to observe that Dante’s conception of imperial

authority ‘does not mean empire in the conventional...sense but something a bit closer to

confederation’. Black goes on saying that

 Separate states and nations keep their own laws; the emperor acts not as a court of first instance

but when municipal laws are defective, and on matters common to the whole human race...On

the other hand, it is clearly part of the emperor’s function to discipline and depose bad rulers and

install better ones.[42]

That is, Dante attempts to articulate the ideas of universal unity and state autonomy in his vision

of empire, and this moves him considerably away of the Christian conception of empire.

Therefore, the points I wish to stress at this point are, first, Dante’s move towards secularism

and, secondly, his move towards confederalism; that is, his attempt to articulate political and

institutional unity, or empire, with political and institutional diversity, or state autonomy. These

two themes would be developed in early modern Europe. 

The Renaissance and the Idea of Respublica Christiana

Now, it is fundamental to see how these two conceptions of empire dominated again European

politics during the late Renaissance and the early modern period, up to the Peace of Westphalia.

In particular, the processes that led, on the one hand, from the Christian conception of empire to

the idea of universal monarchy and, on the other hand, to the emergence of the notion of

respublica Christiana. In early modern Europe, it was the Habsburgs, both the Spanish and the

Austrians, with the support of the papacy, who sought to recover the Christian version of

universal empire. Since the reign of Charles V, which started in 1519, the Habsburgs sought to

implement an hegemonic imperial order in Europe.[43] Simultaneously Holy Roman Emperor

and Spanish monarch, Charles V became, in the sixteenth century, the political symbol of the

universal monarchy.[44] Whereas the former title gave him a connection with the classical

Roman Empire, the latter made him the ruler of an expansionist European empire. He could thus

link the old to the new world and as such to integrate the Americas into a European universal

monarchy. As it was observed, ‘the sheer extent of his inheritance made possible a monarchy on

a scale not seen since the Roman Empire’.[45] In this regard, Charles V could claim to be the

‘universal and sole monarch of the world’.[46]

During the reign of Charles V, international politics in Europe were dominated by political and

religious conflicts in the Empire, which questioned religious unity in Europe, and by the threat of

an expansionist Ottoman Empire. As we saw above, imperial powers were bound to fulfil two

central functions: to preserve peace and religious unity within Christendom, and to expand and

defend the Christian faith against non-Christians. The idea of universal empire, for many

Europeans, became the symbol for political unity of the Western civilisation. In early modern

Europe, the accomplishment of these functions meant the preservation of the Christian faith,

which demanded from the Emperor the capacity to defend Christendom from the external

menace of the Turk and to impose religious unity challenged from within by the Protestant

Reformation.[47] This clearly demonstrates the religious nature of the Christian conception of

empire.

Moreover, Charles V’s imperial project sought to create an hierarchical political order, well in

accordance with hegemonic conception of empire. In this vein Charles V’s imperial power

should encompass all other political rulers, which would question the principle of political

autonomy. To attain these ends, Charles V’s empire engaged in a process of territorial expansion,

captured by the term ‘incorporating empire’,[48] or in Machiavellian terms, ‘commonwealth for

expansion’. Such an expansion required the attempt ‘to concentrate power in the hands of a

single man’.[49] The Emperor, and the Pope, were thus seen as dominus mundi, that is as the

rulers that could claim to monarchia universalis, or to world domination.[50] For the Christian

conception of empire, the term ‘universal’ had a double meaning. On the one hand, ‘it referred to

the superiority of the emperor over all other rulers’; and, on the other hand, ‘it designated the

area of imperial authority, which was regarded as universal and not circumscribed by any

political borders’.[51] This usage of the term universal had also a double implication. First, no

territorial limits could be imposed on the Emperor’s authority and as such the world as a whole

could be subject to his rule. Secondly, all other rulers of both the ‘old’ and the ‘new’ world were

bound to the Emperor’s law. Such a conception of universality could thus be used to justify any

policy of expansionism. Those who favoured the project of universal empire in early modern

Europe used these arguments quite consistently. To a great extent, these arguments were

recovered from the medieval Christian and hegemonic conception of empire. 

The idea of universal empire was elaborated, during the first half of the seventeenth century, by

scholars in order to legitimise the imperial claims of the Habsburgs. In 1640, an influential

treaty, De Monarquia Hispanica, which defended the idea of universal monarchy, was published

by a Napolitan thinker, Tommasio de Campanella. Despite the title, Campanella considered the

Habsburgs, and not only the Spanish monarch, as the new Roman emperors. Campanella argued

that the establishment of the empire was fundamental in order to maintain peace in Europe, to

defeat the Protestant revolt, and to defend Christendom from the Ottoman threat.[52]

Campanella’s work also demonstrates that for many in Europe the issue that was really at stake

in the Thirty Years’ War was whether the future of the international political order would follow

the imperial model of the universal monarchy. To a large extent, the central issues of the War,

both religious and political, were the outcome of unsolved conflicts and struggles that had

emerged during the sixteenth century. The background against which we should understand all

those questions was the opposition between those who fought for universal monarchy and those

who resisted in name of the liberty of Europe. At this point, it is worth noting that the ES’s

notion of respublica Christiana corresponds, in broad terms, to this Christian and hegemonic

conception of universal monarchy.

As I observed in the Introduction, the confusion between the ideas of respublica Christiana and

universal monarchy is precisely the crucial problem with the ES’s historical account. Some of

the central points of the idea of respublica Christiana build on the medieval humanist and

decentralised conception of empire, particularly secularism and the confederal nature of political

order. Moreover, such a conception of respublica Christiana was also inspired in the classical

Roman model. As Anthony Pagden notes, ‘Tacitus spoke of the Roman world as an ‘immense

body of empire’…the kind of political…unity created out of a diversity of different states widely

separated in space’.[53] The idea of a diversity of territories united under the rule of law

underpins the early modern republican conception of empire. Republican thinkers recovered such

a view of imperium when they tried to show that ‘size…was no impediment to true republican

government, so long as the various parts of the state constituted an association of states or a

confederacy’.[54] Thus, the Roman republic and the early republican phase of the empire were

used as historical examples of a confederal empire. 

We first find a strong attempt to develop the idea of a confederal empire in early Italian

Renaissance with the school of legal humanism.[55] Those legal humanists lived in a political

context marked by the struggle for political self-determination against the Emperor. The central

political concern of early modern Italian humanists was the justification of the Northern Italian

city-states’ fight for political liberty against the Emperor. Legally, these cities were vassals of the

Holy Roman Empire, and this condition extended as far back as the ninth century. Yet, despite

this legal subjection, Northern Italian cities were able to acquire a great measure of de facto

autonomy during the eleventh and twelfth centuries. Such a political self-determination was

threatened y the Emperor Barbarossa’s expeditions to Northern Italy during the second half of

the twelfth century. From that moment, the Holy Roman Emperors tried ‘to impose their rule’ in

Italy, ‘while the leading cities…fought with no less determination to assert their independence’.

[56] The Emperors had a very strong ally in the scholastic legal school, which interpreted Roman

Law in the terms of the Justinian’s Code. For scholastics, Roman law was interpreted in a way

that permitted the Emperor to be ’regarded as the dominus mundi, the sole ruler of the world’.

[57] The implication of this conventional view was that the legitimisation of the cities’ resistance

to the imperial dominion required a legal revolution. Pure political arguments and the fight for

self-defence were not enough.

The decisive move was to abandon the interpretation of Roman Law as civil law and to see it as

the common law of the Empire. The Corpus Juris began to be presented ‘as a kind of European

common law, which [was] not necessarily associated with political subordination to the

emperor’. For legal humanists, Europe was regarded less as a system of political subordination

than as a set of communities, which recognised a single common law.[58] Such a theoretical

break, however, accepted the existence of two levels of legal authority. First, the domestic

legislative sovereignty, which justified the cities’ claims to political self-determination. For

instance, Bartolus, in one of his works, explicitly asked ‘whether the Italian cities may be said to

have the rights to make their own laws’. His answer was that ‘every king within his own

kingdom is equivalent in authority to the Emperor’, and in this sense Italian cities ‘ought to be

recognised as fully independent sovereign bodies’.[59] At a second level, legal humanists

admitted that the Emperor kept some sovereign authority over the Empire, and it is in this sense

that it was referred that the reaction of the legal humanists was not radical. In particular, it was

recognised that the Emperor had the authority to mediate conflicts between the civitas, and to

impose his views, and to organise external defence against the common enemies of the Empire.

[60] 

Therefore, the humanist arguments justifying political autonomy did not involve a radical attack

on the imperial structures, but only a defence of the modification of those structures in a way that

could respect political freedom. This means that Renaissance legal humanists, although

defending the freedom of political communities in Northern Italy, ultimately accepted the

existence of imperial structures. In the language of contemporary international theory, which was

not the language of the Renaissance, but helps to understand the points I am trying to make, the

coexistence between state sovereignty political and imperial structures was not, for the

Renaissance humanists, a constitutional anomaly. Otto Gierke defined this view as the

‘federalistic construction of the Social Whole’.[61] In the words of one of his early modern

supporters, Bartolus,

The Emperor is truly lord of the entire world. And this does not prevent that others should be

lords in a more particular sense, because the world is a kind of  universitas, and hence there may

be a person who possesses the said universitas and yet the individual things do not belong to

them.[62]

Thus, for the Renaissance humanists, the European Empire was simultaneously united and

plural. On the one hand, the newly independent civitas expressed the political pluralism of the

Renaissance Europe, while, on the other hand, the Emperor symbolised the unity of the Empire.

The thought of these humanists constitutes the transition from the humanist conception of empire

to the early modern idea of respublica Christiana. 

Justus Lipsius made a central contribution to the humanist conception of respublica Christiana.

In this sense, his main political work, Six Books of Politics,[63] will serve to illustrate the

importance of such a model of international order in early modern Europe. Gerhard Oestreich

sees Lipsius as ‘the chief figure’ of European political thought during the sixteenth and

seventeenth centuries, whose ‘mirror of princes appealed to the prudentia of the leading

personalities in the state...and called for vis to be restrained by virtus’.[64]  Indeed, in the preface

to the book, Lipsius is clear concerning his intentions to offer advises to the rulers. He starts by

addressing the ‘Emperor, Kings, and Princes’.

The change you sustain is great and glorious. What is more magnificient among men, then for

one to have authority over many; to give laws and commands; to govern the sea, the land, peace

and war?[65]

Lipsius continues by making, at once, the distinction between two forms of exercising princely

authority. ‘Your end’ is to exercise such tasks for ‘the profit and good of the Commonwealth’,

and ‘for the benefit of men’. However, there are ‘idle and wicked Princes, who in a kingdom

think upon nothing else but the commandement they have…and who do imagine they are not

given to their subjects, but their subjects to them’.[66] This distinction indicates that one of the

greatest contributions of Lipsius was the idea that the good of the commonwealth and the benefit

of citizens, the central duties to be pursued by the ruler, require a peaceful international order. To

contribute to the maintenance of international peace is a duty of the ruler that follows from

her/his duty to guarantee domestic security. This new kind of secular prince, in Lipsius’s view,

embraces the classical Roman values and is, ‘in the Stoic sense’, a ruler of the world, and not just

of her/his own country.[67] The implication is that European rulers are politically responsible to

a political society that exists above their states, the respublica Christiana.

In accordance with his political morality, Lipsius affirms that peace is the ultimate political goal,

and he ‘warns against the principal causes of war: ambition, power-hunger and acquisitiveness’.

[68] In this regard, in book five, addressing the question of ‘military prudence’, he treats the

problem of just and unjust wars. In very conventional terms, according to the humanist tradition,

the issue of the justice in war is further divided into three questions: just origins, just causes and

just objectives.[69] Here, Lipsius’s discussion, in particular on the causes and origins of war, is

dominated exclusively by defensive, and not offensive, concerns.[70] As for the objectives of

war, ‘a good end is required, which is peace’.[71] Lipsius made the connection in rather different

terms: virtuous and prudent statecraft leads to the quest for international peace. We have here

again the vital distinction between ‘commonwealths for expansion’ and ‘commonwealths for

preservation’. What is quite interesting is Lipsius’s ability to reconcile a conception of the

sovereign state based on power with a Neostoicist political morality, which in the end permits to

discipline and to limit the use of state power itself. It is crucially important to see why Lipsius

focuses on the doctrine of just war. The Six Books of Politics was published in the end of the

sixteenth century, a period marked by political and military conflicts throughout Europe. For

Lipsius, the majority of these conflicts could not be considered as falling into the category of just

war. They were, on the contrary, part of a general civil war within the respublica Chrisitana.

Lipsius sought to tell his European audience that if all European rulers respected the doctrine of

just war, civil wars within the European respublica Christiana could be avoided.

In this regard, Lipsius praised moderate republics.[72] For instance, Lipsius admired the fact that

Venice had always been peace-loving and not expansionist. This shows the contrast between

Lipsius and Machiavelli, for the second criticised Venice for its moderation and its inability to

expand, as in opposition to the imperial Rome.[73] In other words, whereas Machiavelli

defended the ‘commonwealths for expansion’, Lipsius was strongly in favour of

‘commonwealths for preservation’. As the thought of early modern defenders of the Habsburg

empire, such as Botero and Campanela, demonstrated, the notion of commonwealth for

expansion was associated with the project of universal monarchy. Thus, contrary to Botero and

Campanela, Lipsius showed a clear concern for peace over expansion, a quality associated with

the republic of Venice, a commonwealth for preservation,[74] and a fundamental condition for

political order in the respublica Christiana.

We should now note the significance of another crucial contribution offered by Lipsius. Contrary

to the case of the Italian Renaissance humanists, the term empire does not appear in Lipsius’s

writings. He replaces the notion of Christian, or universal empire, found in thinkers such as

Dante, Padua and Bartolus, by the term respublica Christiana. Now, Christian Europe is not an

empire, but a republic. This indicates that the notion of respublica Christiana was a creation of

the early modern Europe and not of the medieval Christendom, it was tied to a secular and

humanist view of the world, and it served as an alternative to the Christian and imperial notion of

universal monarchy. As Richard Tuck recently observed, ‘the respublica had to have an

institutional character separate from that of the old imperial Europe’.[75]

This third part of the paper argues that we find in Renaissance humanist thought the emergence

of a secular and confederal notion of respublica Christiana as the model for international

political order. These two themes, secularism and confederalism, ought to be emphasised. The

emphasis on these two points shows, first, that the idea of respublica Christiana was developed

as an alternative to the Christian conception of universal empire. Secondly, it shows the link

between the humanist conception of empire and the Renaissance’s humanist conception of

respublica Christiana. However, the creation of the notion of respublica Christiana is also the

result of a break with the medieval notion of empire. As we saw with the thought of Lipsius,

respublica replaces empire. We shall see now how the participants in the conferences that led to

the Peace of Westphalia recovered such a conception to rebuild international order in Europe.

The Peace of Westphalia and the Idea of Respublica Christiana

As I argued, two central ideas define the humanist conception of respublica Christiana. On the

one hand, secularism, which demonstrates the humanist opposition against a  Catholic political

order. As we also saw, for the ES respublica Christiana is associated with Catholicism. On the

other hand, I emphasised the idea of confederalism. In this paper, confederalism only means that

there is no contradiction between respublica Christiana and sovereign statehood. In other words,

an international respublica can be composed of sovereign states. Again, in this case, the ES

offers a different interpretation. For its members, the triumph of the modern sovereign state

resulted from the collapse of the medieval respublica Christiana. In this section, I want to make

two arguments. First, the ideas of universal monarchy and respublica Christiana went through

important transformations during the Thirty Years War and the negotiations that led to the Peace

of Westphalia. Secondly, despite these transformations, the international order built in

Westphalia was founded on the idea of respublica Christiana. In other words, there is a

remarkable continuity between the idea of respublica Christiana articulated by Lipsius and other

Renaissance humanists and the vision of international order that eventually was accepted in the

Peace of Westphalia.

Let me start by discussing the transformation of the meaning of universal monarchy in the

seventeenth century, particularly during the Thirty Years War. It ceased to be identified with the

imperial order and started to be identified with hegemonic attempts by great powers to dominate

Europe. In this sense, every action to achieve universal monarchy constitutes an aggression

against all other states. As a result, all states are justified to combine their forces to wage a

defensive and just war against the potential universal monarch.[76] This view is clear in the

manner the French monarchy presented the Thirty Years War. In a memorandum of 1629,

Richelieu wrote that ‘[o]utside our realm...it must be our constant purpose to arrest the course of

Spain's progress’.[77] To achieve that, he adopted the strategy of identifying the idea of universal

monarchy empire with Spanish and Austrain hegemonic ambitions. Of course, he was aware of

the supranational character of the idea of universal monarchy, as the existence of a radical

Catholic party in France demonstrated. Yet, the ‘Spanization’ of Habsburg imperialism was a

necessary step to justify both a policy of external alliances with Protestant states, and the French

intervention in the war as a defensive and just act.

One of the central implications of the widespread use of the term respublica Christiana was the

view that ‘warfare between Christian princes was condemned as civil war, the worst fate that

could befall a republic in Roman eyes’.[78] This became a common view towards the end of the

Thirty Years War, which led to the signature of a peace of compromise in Westphalia. It was

through Lipsius’s thought that these ideas influenced both French and Spanish views. The

influence of Lipsius’s thought on Richelieu’s approach to politics was recently emphasised. In

his study of Lipsius’s political thought, Oestreich observes that

Richelieu...seems to have been influenced by Lipsius. In his youth he had been close to the party

of the Politiques, at whom the Civilis doctrina seems to have been aimed, and he lived in the

Neostoic climate of his age. Anyone who studies the cardinal’s practice and reads his political

testament can discern the voice of the Netherlander.[79]

As we saw above, Lipsius’s conception of reason of state defends a prudent and not an

expansionist self-interest. Moreover, Lipsius associated the commonwealts for preservation with

European peace and order. Likewise, since France’s involvement in the war, Richelieu always

claimed that his ultimate goal was the public good of respublica Christiana. According to the

editor of Richelieu’s instructions for the French negotiators at the Conference of Munster, the

German historian Fritz Dickmann, ‘for Richelieu the great political decisions were also decisions

of conscience; much more than we might expect he evaluates questions of power politics by way

of legal concepts’.[80] Therefore, as William Church put it, Richelieu ‘consistently defended

legality, built upon it, and believed it essential to the peace of Europe’.[81]

This concern for the European public good anticipates the recognition that the idea of respublica

Christiana, as a particular conception of international order, gained in the Peace of Westphalia of

1648. For instance, Andreas Osiander argues that European states felt a sort of collective social

obligation towards Christendom, or Europe. In this regard, the political and diplomatic

community referred to the Conferences in Munster and Osnabruck as the ‘senate of the Christian

world’.[82] Although the term Christiana was often used, this should not lead us to overlook the

secular conception of the seventeenth century international order.[83] In fact, secularism was the

only possible solution for a political order that had to recognise confessional pluralism and

sought to end with the religious conflicts that so deeply affected European politics since the first

quarter of the sixteenth century. More than on a common Christian religion, European public

peace rested on ‘a common secular heritage’.[84] Ideas such as the opposition to universal

monarchy, the rule of law, just war, a defensive conception of reason of state, division of power

and political equilibrium were the central elements of that legacy.

 We should also, and crucially, grasp the confederal nature of the European respublica

Christiana. As I observed above the term confederal is used to capture the coexistence between

the unity of an international respublica and the diversity of sovereign states. For the participants

in the conferences of Munster and Osnabruck there was no puzzle about such a coexistence.

Again, Richelieu’s plans provide a good example. His vision of European peace was based on

Sully’s Grand Design. At the end of the sixteenth century, Sully was a minister of the French

king Henry IV. In his memories, he referred to a project for the European political order, which

he attributed to Henry IV. Such a political project has been interpreted by some as proposing the

establishment of a European confederation. For instance, as a solution to European conflicts,

Sully refers to a ‘federal council to settle disputes and maintain the peace’, resulting from ‘a

reunion of all the different states’.[85] Remarks such as this one even led F. H. Hinsley to refer

to Sully as a forerunner ‘of the League of Nations or United Europe or the United Nations

experiment’.[86] Sully’s plan of a European confederation was recovered by Richelieu under the

term of ‘the peace of Christendom’.[87] From these observations, it is important to stress two

points. The establishment of a European confederation would signify the defeat of universal

monarchy in Europe. As we saw in this paper, the resistance to universal monarchy is one of the

constitutive principles of the idea of respublica Christiana. Secondly, there is no contradiction

between the formation of a confederation and the existence of ‘different states’, to use Sully’s

words.  

This humanist conception of respublica Christiana still influenced European politics and

thinking well into the eighteenth century. In the introduction to the paper, I observed it is

important to understand that the term respublica Christiana was used in opposition to the project

of universal monarchy. Subsequently, European political thinkers used the term universal

monarchy to define the goals of Louis XIV during the wars of the Spanish Succession and

Napoleon during the wars that followed the French Revolution. This clearly suggests that one of

the consequences of those wars was the destruction of the European international respublica. The

examples of Leibniz, Fletcher, Montesquieu, Burke and Constant. The Peace of Utrecht; the

thought of Leibniz and Fletcher, Montesquieu, and Hume (Thesis, 198-206). Quite significantly,

Pufendorf and Leibniz associated the Peace of Westphalia with the seventeenth century

European republican peace.[88] Moreover, they both strongly opposed Louis XIV’s attempts to

impose a universal monarchy in Europe. Leibniz devoted a great deal of his political writings to

combat the French monarch’s expansionist policies.[89] As for Pufendorf, he warned that ‘if the

French nation should aim at universal Monarchy the attempt would be vain’, for ‘the other

powers of Europe would join against France’.[90] However, none of these writers explicitly

developed a republican conception of international society. For instance, in Leibniz’s idea of

Respublica Christiana, we can still notice a strong medieval outlook, where the papacy and the

Emperor play a vital role.[91] As we shall see now, a truly secular notion of international

respublica was only formulated during the eighteenth century.

Conclusion

In the conclusion, I want to briefly address two points. First, I will try to explain why the ES was

not able to capture the humanist conception of respublica Christiana. We only understand this if

we place the Renaissance at the starting-point of the modern international society, and forget the

Reformation for a moment. The problem with the ES is that it attributes to the Reformation the

central role in the emergence of the modern international society. According to Jackson,

Reformation ‘disengaged the authority of the state from the overarching religious sanction of

respublica Christiana’.[92] Therefore, ‘the formation of the modern European society of states

is, in a very significant way, a religious transformation: the Protestant Reformation’.[93] There

are two consequences from attributing a central role to the Reformation. First, the political

propaganda of the Reformation during the XVI and XVII Centuries identified any kind of

political and institutional unity in Europe, which of course includes the idea of respublica

Christiana, with Catholic imperialism. As Andreas Osiander argued in a recent article, it was the

political propaganda of the Reformation during the Thirty Years’ War builds the imperial

conception of respublica Christiana. To a large extent, for radical Reformation, the absolute

defeat of Catholicism and papism would necessarily result, in international terms, in the state of

nature. Then the new sovereign states could create a new international society through a

collective contract. The identification between Reformation and the modern national narrative is

reinforced during the nineteenth century. This is clear in the thought of the Prussian historian

Leopold Ranke when he identifies the beginning of the struggle of German nationalism against

medieval imperialism with the Lutheran Reformation against Catholicism. We all know the

influence of Ranke’s historiography in the work of the ES, through the influence of Herbert

Butterfield. In an important sense, the political propaganda of the Reformation and its

subsequent historiography are the creators of the understanding of modern international society

in statist terms and in accordance with the idea of state of nature. The ES was never able to

escape this ideological trap.

The second consequence is the relative neglect of the role of the Renaissance in the emergence of

modern international society. Jackson admits that the Renaissance played an important role in the

emergence of ‘a separate political ethics liberated from the Christian Church’ and in the

articulation of the modern ideas of diplomacy and the state.[94] Yet, like Wight, Bull before him,

Jackson associates the Renaissance political thought with realism. Renaissance contributed to the

emergence of the international system, but the creation of the society of states involved a

reaction against the realism of the Renaissance thinkers. Jackson entirely ignores that the idea of

respublica Christiana was a creation of the Renaissance, and not of Catholicism, and that it was

used precisely to combat the Catholic idea of universal monarchy. Moreover, by neglecting the

role of Renaissance, the ES does not fully capture the secular dimension of modern international

society. It is secularism, and not the Reformation, even in its liberal wing, that allows us to fully

grasp that there is more to the history of modern international society than the nationalist

interpretation tells us. It is this emphasis on the Reformation and the related neglect of the

Renaissance that explains the title of my paper. I must admit that it is not entirely correct. After

all, some key continental figures contributed to the Reformation historiography, and some,

although not many, English thinkers have recognised the fundamental role of the Renaissance in

modern political thought. Yet, despite an element of overstatement, I believe that the title

captures the crucial point of my view. In this sense, well in accordance with the humanist

tradition of the Renaissance, we should probably take it as a piece of rhetoric.  

Now, why is the interpretation that I offer relevant? First, there is the obvious point that any

argument that contributes to a more correct understanding of the history of modern international

society, and I believe that this is the case, is always well come. Secondly, and more important,

my understanding of the significance of the Peace of Westphalia allows us to develop a different

interpretation of the nature of modern international society, in a manner that may solve other

puzzles that often appear in IR  discussions. Here, I want to emphasise the confederal nature of

the idea of respublica Christiana. The ES’s conception of society of states is based on an

absolutist and unitary understanding of sovereignty. The recovery of the humanist and republican

conception of respublica Christiana allows us to treat sovereignty in a radical different way. In

particular, we find two themes in work of the writers who define international society as a

political respublica. First, rather than in unitary terms, sovereignty can also be understood as

divided sovereignty. This view has obvious implications for the notion of international

confederations or confederated empires. Secondly, rather than in absolutist terms, sovereignty

can also be seen as limited and conditional sovereignty. This understanding is linked with the

existence of international political and normative standards imposed on states and, ultimately,

with the idea of legitimate sovereignty and legitimate forms of international coercion such as

intervention.

I am not making a radical claim if I say that the ideas of divided sovereignty and limited

sovereignty are quite important in contemporary world politics. We cannot properly understand

the constitutional nature of the European Union, the growth of interventions, and of

international protectorates, without grasping the nature of the notions of divided sovereignty and

limited sovereignty. This paper is the result of the belief that perhaps we can have a better

understanding of these practices if we study again the history of modern international society. In

turn, this belief results from another belief: the way we define international society is the

consequence of the way we understand its historical evolution. Thus, in moments of conceptual

discussions we need to examine our historical interpretations.

[1] Martin Wight, Systems of States, (edited by Hedley Bull, Leicester: Leicester University

Press, 1977), pp.27-8.

[2] Systems of States, p.28.

[3] Hedley Bull, The Anarchical Society: A Study of Order in World Politics (London:

Macmillan, 1977), p.28.

[4] Robert Jackson, The Global Covenant: Human Conduct in a World of States (Oxford: Oxford

University Press, 2000), pp.157-8.

[5] Wight, Systems of States, pp.26-9.

[6] Wight, Systems of States, p.27.

[7] The Anarchical Society, p.28.

[8] The Global Covenant, p.158.

[9] Bull, The Anarchical Society, p.29.

[10] Bull, The Anarchical Society, pp.30-1.

[11] The Global Covenant, pp.157-8.

[12] Bull, The Anarchical Society, p.31.

[13] Jackson, The Global Covenant, p.159.

[14] Jackson, The Global Covenant, p.159.

[15] Systems of States, pp.131-3.

[16] Systems of States, p.148.

[17] Hedley Bull, ‘The Importance of Grotius’, in Hedley Bull, Benedict Kingsbury and Adam

Roberts (eds.), Hugo Grotius and International Relations (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992), p.75.

[18] Bull, ‘The Importance of Grotius’, pp.75-8.

[19] According to Bull, ‘the idea of international society…was given concrete expression in the

Peace of Westphalia’, ‘The Importance of Grotius’, p.75.

[20] See Martin Wight, International Theory: The Three Traditions (edited by Gabriele Wight

and Brian Porter, Leicester: Leicester University Press, 1991), chapter one.

[21] Jackson, The Global Covenant, pp.157-64.

[22] The Global Covenant, p.165.

[23] The Global Covenant, pp.156-7.

[24] The Global Covenant, pp.163-4.

[25] D.E. Luscombe, ‘The Formation of Political Thought in the West’, in J.H. Burns (ed.), The

Cambridge History of Medieval Political Thought (Cambridge University Press, 1988), pp.157-

73.

[26] See Janet Nelson, ‘Kingship and Empire’, in Burns (ed.), The Cambridge History, pp.211-

51.

[27] Luscombe, ‘The Formation’, p.166.

[28] Nelson, ‘Kingship and Empire’, pp.230-1.

[29] R.A Markus, ‘The Latin Fathers’, in Burns (ed.), The Cambridge History, p.92-3.

[30] Markus, ‘The Latin Fathers’, p.93.

[31] Nelson, ‘Kingship and Empire’, p.231.

[32] Nelson, ‘Kingship and Empire’, p.231.

[33] J.P. Canning, ‘Introduction: Politics, Institutions and Ideas’, in Burns (ed.), The Cambridge

History, p.347.

[34] Quoted in Nelson, ‘Kingship and Empire’, p.234.

[35] For the historical context, see Joseph Canning, A History of Medieval Political Thought

300-1450 (London: Routledge, 1996), pp.150-3.

[36] Dante, Monarchy (edited by Prue Shaw, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996),

p.4. See also the discussion in the ‘Introduction’ by Prue Shaw.

[37] Shaw, ‘Introduction’, p.xiii.

[38] Shaw, ‘Introduction’, p.xiii.

[39] Shaw, ‘Introduction’, p.xiv.

[40] Dante, Monarchy, p.28.

[41] Dante, Monarchy, p.94.

[42] Antony Black, Political Thought in Europe 1250-1450 (Cambridge: Cambridge University

Press), p.99.

[43] For the Habsburg expansionism, see J. H. Elliott, Europe Divided 1559-1598 (London:

Fontana Press, 1968); and Geoffrey Parker, Europe in Crisis 1598-1648 (London: Fontana Press,

1979).

[44] For a discussion of the arguments used to defend Charles V’s universal monarchy, see John

M. Headley, ‘The Habsburg World Empire and the Revival of Ghibellinism’, in David Armitage

(ed.), Theories of Empire 1450-1800 (Aldershot: Ashgate, 1998), pp.45-79.

[45] John Robertson, ‘Empire and Union: Two Concepts of the Early Modern European Political

Order’, in John Robertson, A Union for Empire: Political Thought and the British Union of 1707

(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), p.6.

[46] Anthony Pagden, Lords of All the World: Ideologies of Empire in Spain, Britain and France

c.1500-c.1800 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995), p.40.

[47] See Bosbach, ‘The European Debate’, pp.87-8.

[48] See Robertson, ‘Empire and Union’, in Robertson (ed.), A Union for Empire, pp.5-6, and

19-20.

[49] Anthony Pagden, Spanish Imperialism and the Political Imagination (New Haven: Yale

University Press, 1990), p.3.

[50] For a discussion of the way the Roman legacy was used to justify universal monarchy, see

Pagden, Lords of All the World, pp.11-28.

[51] See Franz Bosbach, ‘The European Debate on Universal Monarchy’, in Armitage (ed.),

Theories of Empire, p.85.

[52] See Anthony Pagden, ‘Instruments of Empire: Tommaso Campanella and the Universal

Monarchy of Spain’, in Spanish Imperialism and the Political Imagination (New Haven: Yale

University Press, 1990), pp.37-63; and Richard Tuck, Philosophy and Government 1572-1651

(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), pp.69-72.

[53] Lords of All the World, pp.13-4.

[54] Pagden, Lords of All the World, p.16.

[55] See Julian H. Franklin, Jean Bodin and the Sixteenth-Century Revolution in the

Methodology of Law and History (New York: Columbia University Press, 1963); and Donald R.

Kelley, The Human Measure: Social Thought in the Western Legal Tradition (Cambridge,

Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1990).

[56] Quentin Skinner, The Foundations of Modern Political Thought, Volume One: The

Renaissance (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1978), p.5.

[57] Skinner, The Renaissance, p.8. For a discussion of the political and legal arguments in

defence of the Emperor’s authority, see Black, Political Thought in Europe, pp.92-108.

[58] Franklin, Jean Bodin and the Sixteenth-Century Revolution, p.16.

[59] Skinner, The Renaissance, pp.10-1.

[60] Black, Political Thought in Europe, pp.88-9.

[61] Political Theories, p.21.

[62] Quoted in Franklin, Jean Bodin and the Sixteenth-Century Revolution, p.15. Onuf also

argues that Bartolus’s view of international political order is founded on the idea of ‘associations

in ascending order of size’, see The Republican Legacy, pp.70-1.

[63] Justus Lipsius, Six Books of Politics or Civil Doctrine, Written in Latin by Justus Lipsius:

Which Does Especially Concern Principalities (Translated by William Jones, London: Richard

Field, 1594).

[64] Gerhard Oestreich, Neostoicism and the Early Modern State (Edited by Brigitta Oestreich

and H.G. Koenigsberger, translated by David McLintock, Cambridge : Cambridge University

Press, 1982), pp.1-9 and 33-8.

[65] Six Books of Politics, preface.

[66] Six Books of Politics, preface.

[67] See Oestreich, Neostoicism, p.28.

[68] Oestreich, Neostoicism, p.51.

[69] See the discussion in Oestreich, Neostoicism, p.51.

[70] Six Books of Politics, pp.127-32.

[71] Six Books of Politics, pp.132-3.

[72] Mulier, ‘Dutch or European?’, p.184.

[73] Machiavelli’s comparison between Rome and Venice is discussed in Pocock, The

Machiavellian Moment, pp.183-218.

[74] This should not be understood as a denial of Machiavelli’s influence on Lipsius. According

to Mulier, ‘[i]n his work on government and the state [Lipsius] referred by name to Machiavelli

as a sharp intellect, but immediately added a warning that his prince had taken the wrong road’,

Eco Haitsma Mulier, ‘A Controversial Republican: Dutch Views of Machiavelli in the

Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries’, in Bock et al (eds.), Machiavelli and Republicanism,

p.252. Moreover, Lipsius was in general influenced by the republican idea of secular political

virtues, as it will be argued below.

[75] The Rights of War and Peace: Political Thought and the International Order from Grotius

to Kant (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), p.28.

[76] See Bosbach, ‘The European Debate’.

[77] Quoted in G. Pagès, The Thirty Years War (London: Routledge, 1971), p.117.

[78] Tuck, The Rights of War and Peace, p.29.

[79] Oestreich, Neostoicism, p.198. Similarly, in his short political biography of Richelieu,

Elliott has noted that ‘Richelieu had the complete works of Lipsius in his library of the Palais

Cardinal, and a copy of the Civil Doctrine in his more private library’. Richelieu and Olivares,

p.26.

[80] Cited in Dietrich Gerhard, ‘Richelieu’, in Leonard Krieger and Fritz Stern (eds.), The

Responsibility of Power (New York: Doubleday and Company, 1967), p.98.

[81] Church, Richelieu and Reason of State, p.372.

[82] Andreas Osiander, The States System of Europe, 1640-1990: Peacemaking and the

Conditions of International Stability (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994), p.27.

[83] It is appropriate to remember that the Pope did not recognize any legitimacy to the Peace of

Westphalia.

[84] Osiander, The States System of Europe, p.74.

[85] See F.H. Hinsley, Power and the Pursuit of Peace: Theory and Practice in the History of

Relations between States (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1963), pp.24-6.

[86] Hinsley, Power and the Pursuit of Peace, p.13.

[87] In Richelieu’s words: ‘une bonne Paix en toute la Chréstienté’; cited in Weber, ‘Une Bonne

Paix’, p.46.

[88] See Pufendorf, An Introduction to the History; and Leibniz, ‘Mars Christianissimus (Most

Christian War-God’, in Leibniz, Political Writings (Second Edition, edited by Patrick Riley,

Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), p.123.

[89] See in particular, ‘Mars Christianissimus’, pp.121-45; ‘Manifesto for the Defense of the

Rights of Charles III’, pp.146-63; and ‘Letters to Thomas Burnett’, pp.194-5, all in Leibniz,

Political Writings.

[90] An Introduction to the History, pp.309 and 392.

[91] See ‘Codex Iuris Gentium’, pp.165-76; and ‘Observations on the Abbé’s Project for

Perpetual Peace’, pp.178-83, both in Leibniz, Political Writings.

[92] The Global Covenant, p.161.

[93] The Global Covenant, p.156.

[94] The Global Covenant, p.160.