At first glance, early Safavid Iran may not be the ideal place to search for forms of consensual rule in the early modern Persianate world, as there where neither estates nor institutionalised procedures for consensus-based decision-making. However, perhaps it is no less suitable for such considerations than any other non-European realm. As with most other contemporary or present-day rulers, the early Safavids’ claim for absolute power was rather convention than reality, a fact that is well reflected in present-day scientific literature. However, this is not the case for ‘rule by consensus’. Was consensus and consensus-based decision-making an issue in 16th-century Iran? If we look at the reports of the chronicles from the Safavids’ courtly sphere on their first ruler, Ismaʿil, we find passages that might well be read that way. Although it is somewhat difficult to imagine Ismaʿil thinking in terms of consensus or even mutual benefit, maybe he did just that. Obviously, ‘rule by consensus’ is a topic from Medieval Studies and is strongly based on the realms of medieval Europe, with no equivalents to many of the specific phenomena, procedures and theories elsewhere. While a ‘rule by consensus’ did not exist in early Safavid Iran, consensus-based decision-making did.
Modern Japanese political discourse was a syncretic fusion of new Western ideas with medieval and early modern East Asian notions of command and consent. The eleventh-century Chinese concept of ‘blocking roads of remonstrance’, for example, originally meant that elite imperial advisers should not stop their rivals from addressing the throne. That idea was reworked in nineteenth-centuary Japan as a complement to Western concepts such as ‘freedom of speech’ and ‘consent of the governed.’ Political discourse in the 1870s also invoked the medieval sense that a samurai’s duty was to his lord’s house, rather than to the lord’s person. The notion that a retainer could disobey his lord without dishonour was refashioned as a basis for dissent from state edicts in the national interest.
This article analyses structures and representations of power in late medieval Central Europe between 1350 and 1500. Using the examples of the medieval kingdoms of Poland, Bohemia, Hungary and Germany, the study describes and compares social structures and their political implementation, fora of political discourse, achievements in constitutional and theoretical writing as well as codification of laws and privileges.
The focus on "community" as a key term in the political discourse allows shedding light on modes of distributing political powers, the reciprocity and interconnections of political players and the development of notions of political representation. Against this background, the article presents the formation of structures and representations of power in late medieval Central Europe as a highly dynamic process, revealing both fictions and frictions of community.