Medieval constitutionalism

This chapter reviews developments in medieval Europe both secular and religious to establish the emergence of constitutionalism more widely. The process of moving political thought away from a sacred monarchy to more representative and republican forms only began after the onset of the Gregorian reform of the church in the late-eleventh century had begun to subvert the early-medieval theopolitical order. Medieval constitutionalism was the product of many mutually supportive factors, by no means all of them religious in nature, but whatever the strength of those factors, without the Christian insertion of the critical distinction between the religious and political spheres and without the instability engendered by the clash of rival authorities, it is extremely unlikely that the Middle Ages would have bequeathed to the modern world any legacy at all of limited, constitutional government.