This assessment might throw some additional light on the merits and limits

of Brague’s idea of the ‘Roman road’. In many ways the Ottoman Empire saw

itself as both incorporating and overcoming the legacy of the Eastern Roman

Empire. The Romanian historian Nicolae Iorga liked to talk about an ‘Ottoman

Rome’, namely Istanbul as the last hypostasis of Rome: a reconstructed Muslim

Rome that especially in its final stages of existence engaged in a fierce competition

with the self-proclaimed ‘Third Rome’ of the Russian czars, more than with

the Western European powers (Iorga, 1935). The geo-political competition and

military rivalry between Istanbul and the czars concealed resemblances and

possibly patterns of mutual influence in the modes of construction of a monarchical

aura. It was no chance that the sultan moved to give juridical legitimacy

and ideological force to the old caliphal title in 1774 on the occasion of a peace

treaty with Russia. The reinvention of a tradition of caliphal continuity was expedient

in the efforts to balance out the religious authority that the czar claimed over the Christian Orthodox populations of the Ottoman Empire. The outcome came close to claiming an ‘Islamic sovereignty’ and a right to represent the ‘Islamic people’ (Schulze, [1994] 2000: 14–21). This development contrasts with the sharp discontinuity that characterized in the West of Europe, via the buildup of Roman Catholicism, the transformation of the Rome of the emperors into the Rome of the popes, a process during which Roman law was reinterpreted in order to fit into the ethnic, originally ‘barbarian’ and then feudal dimension of medieval Europe. The rediscovery of the ideological potential of the title of caliph by the Ottoman sultan occurred in the context of retreat vis-à-vis an expanding Russian empire, and cannot be equated with an attempt to legitimize a fullyfledged, though belated Muslim Leviathan.

If we agreed with Weber’s view of ancient conceptions of citizenship rooted in the

internal solidarity was warranted by a metaphor of horizontal consanguinity – as

the sociological matrix of the modern state, the West and Islamdom would seem

to be equally equipped to produce and maintain modern statehood. The divergence

lies then in the peculiarity of the Western power machine as highlighted

by Brague’s idea of an eccentric exceptionalism, which prevented a reconstruction

of tradition within a substantial continuity of the civilizing process and placed

instead a strong premium on innovations based on radical implosions, sharp

discontinuities and trenchant reconstructions. In contrast to this development,

the Ottoman counterpart to the second, abstract, political body of the king or

body-politic in Europe remained like a penumbra and was not able to materialize

a vivid aura. The representatives of core Muslim traditions and in particular the

was framed in terms of Persianate court culture) only managed to cast on