ABSTRACT
As explained in Chapter 2, the European divine-right monarchy began with the appropriation by civil rulers of the pastoral role acquired by Roman Catholic bishops during the transition from Late Antiquity to the Middle Ages. The unification of civil and religious authority in temporal hands was, in fact, an inversion of the source of supreme authority in the Hebrew Republic, in which the Torah embodied that authority as a constitution. The inception of the divine-right monarchy forged the political foundation of a type of European polity, or ‘micro-Christendom,’ a term coined by Peter Brown, that would endure in Spain from the dawn of the Middle Ages through early modern times in part through the popularization of typological symbols. Typology involved biblical figures, events and institutions. In the realm of politics, typology provided the components of a new order that nullified the Hebrew Republic and that created an inverted polity, or anti-Hebrew Republic. This anti-Hebrew Republic was grounded in the hierarchy established by typology through relationships between types and antitypes. The types and antitypes that enlisted the Virgin Mary as the new Eve, and as such as a mediator between God and man, were widely embraced in Spain. This pastoral, mediatory role became a component of the divine-right to authority possessed by monarchs in Spain.
