3. But was there a State, and if so, where was it
in the Middle Ages? J. N. Figgis's famous dicta are
still repeated after more than half a century: the State
in the Middle Ages might have been “a dream, or even
a prophecy, it was nowhere a fact.... The real State
of the Middle Ages in the modern sense—if the word
is not a paradox—is the Church.... The State or
rather the civil authority was merely the police de-
partment of the Church.” Such sweeping judgments
are alluring and stimulating; but they rest on a gross
oversimplification of facts. If we do not let ourselves
be hampered by the confusing terminology, we can
find in medieval sources, at any rate since the turn of
the millennium, a clear awareness of the distinctive
features of political experience and a growing effort
to find appropriate names for the particular associa-
tions in which these features appear. Thus, in medieval
political language civitas usually referred to the city-
state which flourished in various parts of Europe, and
more particularly in Italy. Regnum was used to de-
scribe the territorial monarchies in process of formation
from the close of the high Middle Ages onwards.
Respublica was reserved in most cases for describing
a wider community, the respublica christiana, which
united all believers in one sheepfold. The angle of
vision determined whether that community was the
Empire or the Church.
There is no denying that, among these different types
of social organization, the medieval Church was the
one which preserved and presented most clearly two
of the features which we have listed as distinctive of
the State. With its claim to supreme jurisdiction—a
jurisdiction universally accepted throughout Christen-
dom—the Church could undoubtedly appear as the
highest earthly power, the moderator and source of
all law; while authority, almost by definition, was the
essential attribute of its spiritual rule. But the medieval
Church avoided in most cases the direct use of might—
effective enforcement and sanctions in temporal
matters—and would in fact have been unable to exer-
cise it except in its own small territorial domains.
When, at a certain comparatively late date in history,
the ambitious Pope Boniface VIII (1294-1303) pro-
claimed and even tried, as other popes before him, to
establish the universal lordship of the Church over the
whole world, the attempt ended in lamentable failure.
Had the attempt succeeded, then, and only then, would
the Church have become a State.
Medieval political writers were much nearer the
mark in tracing elsewhere the substance of the “State,”
even though they did not yet dispose of the proper
name for indicating it. Nothing is more interesting than
to watch the efforts they made to grasp the essence
of the new political reality which was beginning to
take shape during the last centuries of the Middle Ages.
They were helped in doing so both by the inheritance
of Roman legal concepts and by the rediscovery of
Aristotelian political thought which took place towards
the middle of the thirteenth century; indeed, it is
difficult to say which of these two influences was more
decisive. From their study of Roman law, medieval
writers derived the idea that what distinguished the
State from all other associations was the existence of
a supreme, “sovereign” power, of a “will that legally
commands and is not commanded by others.” They
further derived the distinction between public and
private law, which enabled them to overcome the
personal concept of power that was inherent in
feudalism, and to understand adequately the legal
structure of the State. To Aristotle, on the other hand,
medieval political theory was indebted for an entirely
new vision of the value and dignity of political life.
No longer would the State be conceived merely as
poena et remedium peccati (“the penalty and remedy
for sin”). Henceforward its authority would rest on
rational, positive grounds. Such views worked havoc
with the old idea of the unity of the respublica
christiana. A plurality of separate communities—of
civitates et regna—had already in fact taken its place.
The character of perfection, self-sufficiency, and sov-
ereignty could be ascribed to each of them individually.
But for the name, the modern idea of the State was
at hand.
