Ioannes Chountis de Fabbri presents a global history of power:
Engelbert Kaempfer (1651-1716), a German physician in the service of the Dutch East India Company, spent two years at the trading outpost in Nagasaki at the close of the 17th century. His posthumous History of Japan, published in London in 1727, gave European readers one of the earliest sustained accounts of Japan’s political order and society. What struck Kaempfer was its structure. Power was divided – though far from equally – between an emperor who reigned in ceremonial seclusion and a military ruler who governed in his name. Japan, Kaempfer wrote, was a state in which ‘mutual checks, jealousies, and mistrusts of persons invested with power are thought the most effectual means to oblige them to discharge their respective duties’. He described a long and unbroken line of ‘ecclesiastical hereditary Emperors, all descended from one family… still keeping their title, rank, and grandeur’, yet ‘dispossessed of their sovereign power by the Secular Monarchs [whom he elsewhere styled ‘Crown-Generals’]’. Kaempfer’s English translator made the duality plain: ‘as affairs now stand in Japan, there are properly two Emperors, an Ecclesiastical and a Secular’. To readers familiar with the ceremonial supremacy of the Pope and the contested authority of the Holy Roman Emperor, the analogy spoke for itself.
Across history, sovereignty has rarely been a simple matter of one ruler holding unchallenged power. States and polities have found countless ways to divide, disguise, or distribute authority, sometimes to reconcile rival claims, sometimes to preserve the dignity of an office while transferring its powers elsewhere. In the modern age, these arrangements became ever more diverse. Constitutional monarchies, papal-imperial compacts, shogunal governments, and national churches each offered their own solutions, blending local traditions with pressures that were often global in scope. The variety is striking, but so too is the shared instinct: to root political change in forms that felt ancient, even when the reality they concealed was new.
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Patterns recur: ceremonial figureheads beside working rulers, religious authority coexisting with political command, and elaborate rituals designed to cloak change in the garments of continuity.
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Crucially, the Tokugawa shogunate did not seek to abolish the imperial court, the aristocracy, or the great religious foundations. Instead, it drew them into Edo’s orbit, binding court, temple, and nobility through ritual, law, and fiscal oversight. Like Hideyoshi before them, the Tokugawa ruled as ‘first subjects’, acting on behalf of the emperor while retaining the substance of powers in their own hands. They upheld the language of deference, preserved the rituals of subordination, and confirmed their appointments through court ceremony.
It is evident, then, that at the core of the Tokugawa settlement lay an unbroken allegiance to the emperor. As Kaempfer noted, even after the ‘Crown-Generals wrestled the Government of secular affairs entirely out of their hands’, the emperors retained ‘their rank and splendour, their ancient title and magnificent way of life, their authority in Church affairs, and one very considerable prerogative of the supreme power, the granting of titles and honours’. In constitutional terms, the shogun ruled not by independent right but as the emperor’s delegate; there had been no interregnum, no break in dynastic legitimacy. In 1615 the emperor’s movements were restricted, his household placed under surveillance, and senior courtly and ecclesiastical appointments required shogunal approval. The throne retained the dignity of appointing each new shogun and performing the rites that placed him, in Confucian language, as mediator between Heaven and Earth, or, in Shinto terms, between divine ancestors and the people of Japan. But it did so under supervision, confined to Kyoto much as a Pope might be enclosed within the Vatican after the unification of Italy – mutatis mutandis.
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Beyond preserving peace, the Tokugawa system cultivated a distinctive style of governance in which policy was cautious, aims were publicly stated, and means were governed by precedent. There were no grand reforms, yet the architecture of government was rational in form and moderate in ambition. If modernisation entails the growth of civil administration, the regularisation of authority, and the displacement of charismatic rule by procedure, then Tokugawa Japan belongs to the modern age, even if it arrived there by other paths.
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Kaempfer, who described the country’s dual order, was himself a subject of the Holy Roman Empire – a polity equally defined by negotiated authority, layered jurisdictions, and the careful accommodation of rival powers.
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The fiction of harmony began with Charlemagne (748-814). On Christmas Day 800, Pope Leo III (d.816) placed the imperial crown on the Frankish king’s head, reviving a western title dormant since the fall of Rome. The act was theatrical and ambiguous: Leo claimed the right to make emperors; Charlemagne, in practice, would act without papal leave. Over the centuries the office acquired its own institutional weight yet never shed its dependence on papal legitimacy. Until the 16th century, no emperor was truly crowned until anointed in Rome; no pope stood securely without the backing of secular arms.
Like in Japan, this uneasy compact shaped the fortunes of both offices. The Investiture Controversy of the 11th century (ostensibly a dispute over the right to appoint bishops) was in truth a clash of cosmologies. Pope Gregory VII (1020-85) insisted that spiritual authority must direct the temporal; Emperor Henry IV (1050-1106) claimed that his right to govern extended to the Church within his lands. Their struggle produced enduring symbols: the emperor’s excommunication, his barefoot penance at Canossa, and the long wars that followed. Beneath the doctrinal quarrel lay the more urgent question: who would command, and under whose sanction?
Maximilian I (1459-1519), elected King of the Romans in 1486, secured in 1508 the pope’s permission for kings of the Holy Roman Empire to call themselves ‘elected emperors’ and to use the imperial title without being crowned in Rome. From this point onwards, the title was used for the ‘emperor in waiting’, elected and crowned in his predecessor’s lifetime to ensure succession – a system not entirely unlike that followed by the early Tokugawa shoguns. Even at its height, imperial authority was partial and fragmented. By the time of Charles V (1500-58) the Empire was less a polity than a constellation of jurisdictions. Charles ruled vast territories (Spain, the Low Countries, parts of Italy and the Americas) but could not command the princes of the Reich without their consent. His coronation in Bologna in 1530 was the last performed by a pope.
The Reformation soon destroyed what unity remained between altar and throne. Sovereignty within the Empire became increasingly plural, claimed by electors, bishops, and cities alike. The emperor remained the fountain of honour and law, but enforcement passed to local hands. Emperors and princes effectively checked one another. Neither side wished for a strong government at the centre, lest it diminish their own standing. The emperor was indispensable for opening the imperial diet, advancing an agenda, and exercising a veto; yet for any measure to become law, it required his assent as well as the approval of the diet’s three separate colleges – electors, princes, and imperial cities. Above these temporal arrangements stood the pope, whose authority, spiritual in nature, was in theory supreme. As Martyn Rady has observed, ‘the Holy Roman Empire remained at best a policing institution that existed to curb excesses of violence. Day-to-day power was exercised by the great lords and princes in their territories [whilst] the Empire fulfilled only the most basic functions, operating as a security organisation of last resort’.
Here, the parallel with Tokugawa Japan becomes crystal-clear. The emperor in Kyoto resembled the pope in the Vatican: supreme in dignity, guardian of tradition, essential to the conferral of legitimacy, yet distant from the machinery of rule. The shogun, like the Holy Roman Emperor in relation to the pope, governed in the sovereign’s name, wielding temporal authority while invoking a higher, sacral source.
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Though the Enlightenment celebrated the ideal of separated powers, in practice most societies found it elusive. What endured instead was a dance of authority: sovereigns who held titles without command, ministers who ruled under borrowed names, and institutions whose strength lay precisely in their ambiguity. The common reflex in these systems was the art of clothing change in the familiar – weaving new settlements into the fabric of the old and drawing legitimacy from the very traditions they were reshaping. Such arrangements remind us that the making of modernity owed as much to artful accommodation and layered compromise as to any decisive rupture with the past.