10 - Widening the Lens

Summary

This chapter serves as a counterpoint to the previous chapter and frames the book’s arguments up to this point in very broad terms, looking back to corruption in the ancient Roman Empire and forward to the Sicilian mafia and other modern, nonstate actors. It argues that advocates’ corrupt practices of protection and justice ought to be understood as encompassing two main strategies: either extracting as much income as possible from regions that were peripheral to their own territorial interests or – in contrast – attempting to win the hearts and minds of churches’ dependents in order to convince them to abandon their allegiance to their landlords. Both of these strategies are commonplace ones across human history and highlight more general challenges tied to protection and justice. This chapter also contends that, precisely because these corrupt practices were so common, scholars’ arguments about the decline of advocatial abuses from the thirteenth century onward are misleading.