The medieval political order did not consist of relatively autonomous political units that were bound together by shared understandings about standards of restraint that can be found in the international states-systems of antiquity, or the Italian Renaissance city-states system, or the modern global figuration of sovereign political communities. As a result of identification with the societas christiana, ‘unity rather than separateness’ – ‘hierarchy rather than equality’ – characterized relations between the constituent units (Wight 1977: 25–7). So powerful were we-feelings organized around the idea of ‘the normative unity of the Christian world’ that the physical ‘separation … into kingdoms and duchies was considered illegitimate by most and epiphenomenal even by the temporal rulers who benefited from it’ (Fischer 1992:435–6). If there was a medieval states-system, it consisted of the ‘triangular relationship between Eastern Christendom, Western Christendom and the Islamic world’, but one that was complicated by the reality that none of those political entities formed a ‘singular power-bloc’ (Wight 1977: 25). Latin Christendom is perhaps best regarded as a ‘uniquely complicated dualistic or double-headed suzerain state-system’ in which the empire and papacy asserted rival claims for authority over the subordinate parts (Wight 1977: 29). Many of those actors would go onto assert and acquire rights of sovereignty that altered the we–I balance between Latin Christendom and particular ‘survival units’. During the wars of religion, the restraining effect of earlier shared universal convictions declined sharply (Phillips 2011: chs. 4–5). Prior to that era, the papacy came closest to displaying the basic hallmarks of a state (Wight 1977: 28; also Davies 2003; Reynolds 1997, 2003 and Larkins 2010).