Chapter 5 offers a probing survey of late reflections on nationhood in the context of the German Empire, focusing on Engelbert of Admont, Dante Alighieri, and Marsiglio of Padua. By 1300, radical changes to the political landscape – especially the curtailing of imperial power and the rise of independent territorial kingdoms – prompted medieval thinkers to rethink and refine the principles of political order, resulting in two broad currents of thought: renewed imperialism and defenses of territorial monarchy. Medieval proponents of empire, despite their different argumentative approaches and strategies, treat a number of similar problems: the source of imperial authority, the end and purpose of world government, and the legitimacy of the empire’s claim to universal rule, that is, over all nations of the world. While Engelbert and Dante aim to reconcile national pluralism and political unity through some variant of legal pluralism, Marsiglio suggests that the various national communities that are part of the empire have to consent to imperial rule, offering explicit normative criteria for multinational politics.

Chapter 4 examines one of the most politically influential books to appear in Britain during the years of the Napoleonic Wars, Charles Pasley’s Essay on the Military Policy and Institutions of the British Empire (1810). This was a book that many commentators at the time felt had an impact on the political life of the nation second only to Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790). Pasley calls upon Britain to wage an aggressive war of conquest to resist Napoleonic France. The nation must, he contends, build a universal empire as the only bulwark against French conquest of Europe. Although he insists that British conquests will form an empire of liberty, his calls for aggressive military action also seek to remodel Britain itself in relation to far-reaching demands of military security. Considering, in turn, why he was so widely praised as a writer, more a poet than a statesman in Wordsworth’s view, this chapter proposes that Pasley displaced the traditional patriotic functions of the national bard to establish a new kind of national wartime narrative, a sublime liberal epic founded on the nation’s traumatic confrontation with war.

This chapter shows that the sixteenth century was not dominated by European actors but rather by three post-Timurid empires in west Asia, that expanded the reach of the Chinggisid sovereign norm and world ordering into new territories. These empires were the Ottoman, the Mughals and the Safavid, and together they ruled over a third of the world's population and controlled much of the world's resources. They also developed their own version of the Chinggisid sovereignty model, inflected by Timurid influences and varying according to local cultural repertoires. This was the notion of 'millennial sovereignty' as captured by the concept of sahibkıran, essential a ruler marked by conjunction astrology for great distinction. Ottoman, Safavid and Mughal rulers competed with each other (and Charles V) for the title of sahibkıran. Their world order was connected through intellectual network of astrologers and other occult scientists who legitimised universal empire projects. This chapters develops a comparative narrative of these three empires and their rulers' universal empire dreams in the sixteenth century.