Pacific Empire Dbq
The emperors, Henry VII and Ludwig IV, had both dreamed of bringing about a renewal of imperial authority and the empire, in the mould of the Carolingians, or perhaps even, Rome itself, and it seemed at the beginning of the fourteenth-century that this might be plausible. Yet, this had not been the only envisioned ‘empire’ at the start of the fourteenth-century; there was the imagined papal monarchy, reigning supreme over all of Italy, or perhaps even all Christendom, the Plantagenet Empire dreamed of by King Edward I of England, or the Capetian Empire of King Philip IV of France, or even King Alfonso XI of Castile’s united Iberian Peninsula. These “fantasy kingdoms”, to borrow a phrase from John Watts, would prove to be unachievable, but as
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In the case of the emperors, their authority had been transformed into something more ephemeral. “Emperors”, states John Larner, “when they intervened in Italy, appear as ghosts feared at first through their re-evocation of the past, yet soon mocked with the swift realisation of their impotent insubstantiality”. The empire, it seemed, was to be progressively confined only to the German lands; the emperors’ powers being checked from within by the great princes and city-states of empire, and from abroad, by the defiant will of regional kings. The authority of the other universal power, the papacy, by all appearances, was in decline also. The papacy’s sphere of influence apparently shrinking, with its attention primarily focused on France and the states of Italy. This appeared to be exacerbated by the Avignon Captivity which supposedly subjected the papacy to the will of the French monarchy. Seemingly, in the words of Joseph Strayer, the idea of the universal empires “had never been anything but a dream”. Yet, this commonly held conclusion; that fourteenth-century witnessed the final breaking of the authority of the universal powers, is questionable. As Watts explains, although few emperors invaded Italy after the 1320s, “the ideal of a universal secular prince certainly persisted”, as its jurisdictional claims “could not easily be
In the case of the emperors, their authority had been transformed into something more ephemeral. “Emperors”, states John Larner, “when they intervened in Italy, appear as ghosts feared at first through their re-evocation of the past, yet soon mocked with the swift realisation of their impotent insubstantiality”. The empire, it seemed, was to be progressively confined only to the German lands; the emperors’ powers being checked from within by the great princes and city-states of empire, and from abroad, by the defiant will of regional kings. The authority of the other universal power, the papacy, by all appearances, was in decline also. The papacy’s sphere of influence apparently shrinking, with its attention primarily focused on France and the states of Italy. This appeared to be exacerbated by the Avignon Captivity which supposedly subjected the papacy to the will of the French monarchy. Seemingly, in the words of Joseph Strayer, the idea of the universal empires “had never been anything but a dream”. Yet, this commonly held conclusion; that fourteenth-century witnessed the final breaking of the authority of the universal powers, is questionable. As Watts explains, although few emperors invaded Italy after the 1320s, “the ideal of a universal secular prince certainly persisted”, as its jurisdictional claims “could not easily be