WRITING AUTHORITY IN LATE MEDIEVAL ... - Cornell University

such, the Pope who, lacking the power of the sword, could not properly exercise sovereignty was
destined not to have it.
Further, a John Rocha, in expressing the overall mood of the Council of Constance, made
painfully clear, the use of Christian representations as the sole grounds for taking lands
guaranteed a state of constant war in which an enemy could merely called un-Christian to justify
a right of crusade over their lands. To put it in Paulus Vladimiri’s formula, if Christian dominium
only occurs through Christian practice, then there is no place in which a Christian could act un-
Christianly and so “multas prohibitiones” ‘many prohibitions’ would not bind Christians. The
attempt to protect infidel lands was thus not a concern for the well-being of their individual lives
and bodies. Rather, it was a way of ensuring that new ways of articulating sovereignty would not
undermine the legal foundations of the Christian community as a whole.
The regicides in Castile and England; the rise of Wycliffite heresies and regional
factionalism within the Roman Empire; and the Great Schism all seemed to confirm the danger
of continuing to think sovereignty as a form of representation. If, by playing around with
metaphors, a sovereign like Clement or Alfonse could advance a legal argument over lands
which cognized no legal precedent, what would prevent anyone from deploying metaphoric
interpretation to be the sole requirement for legal authority? How could a universal body, like the
Church, govern a community of nations which saw law as deriving from their own social
interpretations—from their “virtus sermonis” ‘force of speech’? What would be the power of the
Pope when sovereigns refused to turn to traditional modes of discourse to understand legal
authority? These questions, which had haunted the Church from the unseating of traditional
forms of power in the previous century, were resurrected and reified every time a secular
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