BMCR 2025.01.29

Imperial histories: Eurasian empires compared. Volume 1: empires and gods: the role of religions in imperial history

, , , Imperial histories: Eurasian empires compared. Volume 1: empires and gods: the role of religions in imperial history. Berlin: De Gruyter, 2024. Pp. viii, 368. ISBN 9783111341620.

[Authors and titles are listed at the end of the review]

 

This book contributes to the growing literature on comparative empire studies that seek to understand how empires functioned under different historical circumstances. It is the second volume of a series that compares imperial practices across a wide geographical space and a long period of time:[1] from the Mediterranean to Manchuria, and from the Macedonians to the Mughals. The volume is organized along three “waves of empire”, ancient (chapters 1 to 4), medieval (chapters 5 to 8), and Mongol to post-Mongol (chapters 9 to 11). A broad definition of empire is adopted, leaving aside core-periphery relationships or multi-ethnic composition, and concentrating instead on their universalistic pretensions, and ability to dominate a macro-region. Not all chapters relate imperial religion to the idea of universal empire, especially as the editors rightly note that religious space was not, and never became, coterminous with imperial space. Local elites and populations were in most cases not attuned to the idea of universal empire, though local religions adapted to the interpretational and organizational challenges that imperial expansion posed.

The stellar team of contributors succeeds well in cashing in their aim to show how imperial religious policies integrated a range of social, political and ideological factors. Especially helpful is the editorial introduction that draws out the benefits of the comparative exercise. For example, rulers can always be shown to have tapped into divine patterns of power distribution or into the agency attributed to divine support. Rulers also typically relied for their approval on religious intermediaries that validated their claims. Constantine, for example, co-opted bishops as his council, restored Church property, and conveyed privileges onto the organization. Similar conversations between rulers and local religious specialists or powerholders, of course, are found in other empires, and played a particular role under the Sassanians (see below). Total religious unity, by contrast, was never an imperial goal; and even when missionary religions came along, proselytism did not become a reason for imperial expansion. There were, however, different forms and degrees of interdependence between political and religious institutions. In contrast to its Roman predecessors which were important to its self-definition, the Byzantine empire was inseparably intertwined with its dominant religious institution, the Church. The great support which the Church offered to the idea of imperial authority was rather more similar to the Chinese idea of Heaven’s Mandate. Islam, furthermore, was far more tolerant of Jews and Christians than vice versa. The Mongols successfully integrated several belief systems, and unlike the Chinese, never demanded an imperial cult. No complete set of comparative conclusions can be drawn, but the editors emphasize that at least from the medieval period onwards, there was always a tension between the imperial co-optation of, and accommodation with religious powers.

In an innovative perspective on Ashoka’s inscriptions (that were no edicts), Olivelle shows that despite their explicit exhortation to follow dharma, they implicitly acknowledge religious diversity. Rather than advertising the conversion of all subjects to Buddhism, Ashoka created what Olivelle calls a “civil religion” for a complex society where many religions coexisted. It was a political theology of inclusion that honoured all sects and Brahmins, and asked them to live in harmony. The Ashokan inscriptions erected across the imperial realm and beyond should be read as a performance, a canon of authoritative texts, a scriptural authority for this civil religion.

In a grand survey from Shang to Han, Pines traces the changing relationship between the emperor and the divine in early imperial China. Marginal in educated writing and irrelevant for political dynamics, religion is often regarded as rather absent from the Chinese imperial court. This is a selective perspective, Pine argues. Shang China was a theocracy in which emperors held prime pontifical power, and ancestor cults played a vital role for the well-being of the state. Such ideas declined with the rise of the intellectual culture of the Warring state period. Yet they revived under Han, together with the comeback of the idea of Heaven’s Mandate of the emperor. Whether Han officials believed in the supranatural or not, Pines shows how many religious images formed under previous dynasties intimated the sacrosanctity of the Han emperor.

Bonnet looks at the politics of difference under the Ptolemies, with special focus on the Ptolemaic possessions Syria-Phoenicia and Cyprus. Local gods were never fully absorbed into either the Greek or Egyptian pantheon, but double dedications to the royal couple and their divine counterparts outside Egypt showed the extent to which the Ptolemies spread a Pharaonic formula into their imperial realm. Cult practices were disseminated through royal governors in the provinces, but local elites were invested in this process, promoting local cults in an imperial framework. Skilful mediation of the two enabled local powerholders to successfully combine Hellenism and local micro-identities.

In his wide-ranging and multifaceted chapter, Rüpke argues that the Roman empire was more important for religious development than religion for imperial development. There was never an imperial religious koine, but there gradually developed empire-wide media of expression, and the sacralised emperor became a focal point. Common ideas about the purposes of religion emerged, guiding group identities and political legitimacy. Instead of confronting competing ‘religions’ or ‘cults’, many political and religious actors appropriated and modified signs deemed religious for their purposes, while religious professionals worked towards establishing and securing group boundaries. In the end, it was the empire that produced religions, not vice versa.

Quite in contrast to the religious diversity of the empires of the first wave, those of the second were built on more holistic cosmologies. Canepa shows how the Sassanian kings created a coherent cosmology in which Zoroastrian dualism and apocalyptic eschatology were suborned to create a framework for key concepts of the Sassanian imperial aim. Empire could no longer be understood without religion, and the court collaborated with religious specialists that served them to align the Iranian aristocracies and military to the goals of the king of kings. Through a fascinating range of visual materials, Canepa shows how the Sassanians inserted themselves into a long Iranian history, and aligned it with their new conceptions of past, present and future. Similarly, in the Byzantine empire “Roman-ness” became aligned with Christianity, an alignment that was crucial for social and imperial cohesion in times of severe instability. In a packed chapter covering five centuries, and a perspective on further five, Preiser-Kapeller shows how doctrinal controversies complicated the integration of new Christian communities, increased conflict, but in the end led to “multiple Christianities” anchored together in a common Roman past.

Benn lays out the problems the state faced, as well as the benefits to be gained by patronizing the rapidly growing Buddhist population in Tang China. Buddhist dharma posed a threat to the Legalist state ideology and the total social control of the people it envisioned. At the same time, Buddhist institutions offered sites and ready access to large numbers of people, so that patronizing them could be fruitfully combined with the imperial project. New movements like “action Buddhism”, seeking active courses towards social justice, or the increasing practice of self-immolation, created new problems. However, as Benn suggests, the Tang chose to recognise them in order to tame and harness their popular appeal.

Religious diversity returned in the third wave of empires, but in a different form. The Mongols venerated Tengri, the sky god of the steppe, but they accepted other religious beliefs as alternative routes to the same end. Religious pluralism, Biran argues, combined with the mobilization policies of the Mongols resulted in religious exchange on an unprecedented scale, which not only broadened the spiritual horizons of the Mongols, but also of their subjects and neighbours. When Mongol power regionalised after 1260, each khanate gradually embraced one world religion. The consequences of this process were the expansion of Islam and a lasting role of Tibetan Buddhism in China, but also the impregnation of religious beliefs in the steppe with the ideas of the world religions, which prevented later nomadic rulers from uniting the steppe expanse under the standard of Tengri.

Looking at Christianity in the Western medieval empire, Scales observes less cohesion than in the East. Politically more polycentric, the Western Empire could not draw on the Roman past as a similarly uniting imperial resource. The papacy in Rome formed yet another centre, often at odds with the politics of the emperor. The exceptionally conflicted relationship between Church and emperor in medieval Europe was the result of structural factors. Yet eschatology thrived as never before within this fragile environment. Lending meaning to decline, it mapped the fate of empire on a scheme that required things to get worse to get better.

In a fascinatingly broad account, Teszan attempts no less than to chart the impact of socio-economic change in the 16th– and 17th-century Ottoman empire on the transformation of Islam, considering also the difference of Muslim and Christian responses to such change, and the consequences of the Ottoman responses for modern Islam. Turning away from a supposed duplicity of Muslim elites leaning towards the mystical and philosophical dimension of Islam in private and propagating its legalistic version in public, Teszan shows how these approaches changed in popularity under changing socio-economic circumstances. The legalistic approach became more attractive in the course of a growing egalitarian ideology pushed forward by the reformer Mehmed Kadizade, while the Sufi-inspired mystical and philosophical approach lost at least some of its appeal when the Ottoman elite became more exclusively Muslim during the Second Empire. Some parallels could be drawn between Muslim and Christian paths to secularization, yet Islam went through this process less successfully due to the weakness of Muslim institutions of faith vis-à-vis the institutions of political authority.

Openness to multiple religious influences and religious pluralism are usually regarded as the mark of the Mughal empire. Nevertheless, Wink argues in this final chapter, there was a slow transformation away from religious pluralism towards monotheistic Islam, a process that parallels once again that in Europe and the Mediterranean, though it happened much later, and was far less complete. Wink shows the ambivalences of the Mughal move towards greater religious cohesion, accompanied by iconoclasm and destruction of Hindu rituals, on the one hand, and the enduring role of customary law and entrenched family rights that militated against anything like an imperial system, be this at the level of politics, law, or religion, on the other. Despite the unifying dynamics of Sunni Islam, of market economics and innovations the Mughals promoted in their empire, the spread of Islam in India remained patchy, never becoming anything like an imperial religion.

The focus of the volume on religious policies may not cover the interaction between religion and imperial history in all its facets, and the chapters on the third wave of empires look more at religions in these empires than their interaction; it also remains unclear in what ways religious policies related to the defining characteristics of empires laid out in the Introduction: size and universal rule. More influential for the direction of religious politics and their varying success seem to have been the endurance of local differences, the engagement of religious politics with imperial pasts, as well as that of the rulers with their own origins. Yet the long chronological perspective adopted in all chapters and the longue durée covered by the volume offer a truly global history of religious transformation under different and changing imperial conditions. The contributors take their readers through a fascinating range of historical materials and succeed well in introducing them to the political histories relevant for their chapters. Together with the helpful Introduction and frequent cross-references between the chapters, this volume is a splendid example of the benefits of comparison in imperial history.

 

Authors and Titles

Jörg Rüpke, with Michal Biran and Yuri Pines, “Empires and Religions: An Introduction”

Patrick Olivelle, “Imperial Ideology and Religious Pluralism in the Aśokan Inscriptional Corpus”

Yuri Pines, “Secular Theocracy? State and Religion in Early China Revisited”

Corinne Bonnet, “On Imperial Intermediaries: Elites and the Promotion of the Hellenistic Ruler Cult in Ptolemaic Phoenicia and Cyprus”

Jörg Rüpke, “Religion in, for, and against the Roman Empire”

Matthew P. Canepa, “Envisioning Dualism and Emplacing the Eschaton: Apocalyptic Eschatology and Empire in Sasanian Iran“

Johannes Preiser-Kapeller, “A Christian Roman Empire? Byzantium between Imperial Monotheism and Religious Multiplicity, Fourth to Ninth Century CE (and Beyond)”

James A. Benn, “‘Action Buddhism’” in the Medieval Chinese Empire”

Michal Biran, “Religions in the Mongol Empire Revisited: Exchanges, Conversion, Consequences”

Len Scales, “Religion and the Medieval Western Empire (CE 919–1519)”

Baki Tezcan, “A Populist Reformation: The Early Modern Transformation of Islam in the Ottoman Empire”

André Wink, “Religion and Politics in the Mughal Empire of India”

 

Notes

[1] Y. Pines, M. Biran, and J. Rüpke (eds.) The Limits of Universal Rule: Eurasian Empires Compared. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 2015.