In The Mystery of the Grail, Julius Evola uses the phrase “the Ghibelline Middle Ages” to designate an idealized historical configuration rather than a neutral period label. He is referring to the high medieval imperial tradition associated with the Holy Roman Empire, especially as articulated by the Ghibelline faction in Italy, which supported the Emperor against the Papacy in the long struggle over authority in Christendom.
Historically, the Ghibellines were the party of the Empire, opposed to the Guelfs, who supported papal supremacy. For Evola, this political conflict expressed a deeper metaphysical opposition. The Guelf position represented a sacerdotal, ecclesiastical, and increasingly moralistic conception of authority centered on the Church as an external institution. The Ghibelline position, by contrast, embodied the idea of a sacred regality: a sovereign whose legitimacy derived directly from a transcendent principle and whose authority was both spiritual and temporal in nature.
When Evola speaks of the “Ghibelline Middle Ages,” he is isolating those moments in medieval Europe when the imperial idea still functioned as a living symbol of transcendent order. This was not merely a juridical empire or a balance of powers, but an attempt to restore, within a Christianized world, the primordial model of kingship in which sovereignty was an ontological state rather than a delegated function. The Emperor, in this view, was not subordinate to the priesthood but stood alongside it, or above it, as the bearer of a direct, solar, and initiatory authority.
Evola revered this epoch because he saw in it a rare historical approximation to what he regarded as the traditional norm: the unity of spiritual authority and temporal power in a single principle. In his framework, tradition is defined by vertical transcendence, hierarchy rooted in being, and the presence of a metaphysical center governing both inner realization and outer order. The Ghibelline ideal came closer to realizing this than most other medieval or modern forms, which either fragmented authority or reduced it to purely religious, moral, or administrative domains.
The Grail enters this picture as the inner, initiatory dimension of imperial sovereignty. For Evola, the Grail is not primarily a devotional Christian symbol, nor merely a chivalric romance motif. It is the emblem of a royal mystery: a transcendent source of legitimacy, regeneration, and power that confers kingship in the fullest sense. The “kingdom of the Grail” represents an order in which the ruler is inwardly transformed and outwardly effective, where spiritual realization and political authority are two expressions of the same center.
“For a certain period of time it seemed that the Ghibelline Middle Ages approximated this kingdom to a great degree. This epoch appeared to offer sufficient conditions for the "kingdom of the Grail" to turn from occult into manifest, affirming itself as a reality that is simultaneously inner and outer, in a unity of the spiritual authority and of the temporal power, just as it was in the beginning. In this way it can be said that the regality of the Grail constituted the apex of the medieval imperial myth and the highest profession of faith of the great Ghibelline movement.” - Julius Evola, Mystery of the Grail
Evola is making a precise claim. He argues that during the height of the Ghibelline movement, the conditions existed for this Grail-centered regality to pass from a hidden or “occult” reality into a manifest one. By “occult,” he means inward, initiatory, and accessible only to a qualified elite. By “manifest,” he means embodied in institutions, laws, symbols, and living authority. The imperial myth of the Middle Ages, at its highest point, aspired to make this inner sovereignty visible in the world through the figure of the Emperor and the chivalric orders aligned with him.
The reverence Evola expresses is therefore not nostalgia for medieval politics as such, nor admiration for feudal society in its empirical details. It is admiration for a metaphysical attempt: the last major Western effort to reestablish a sacred order in which transcendence governed both the soul and the state, and in which authority flowed from being rather than from contract, consensus, or clerical mediation.
In Evola’s broader thought, the failure of the Ghibelline project marks a decisive turning point. With the decline of the Empire, the triumph of the Guelf principle, and the later rise of modern secular power, the unity he admired collapsed. Spiritual authority retreated into purely religious forms, temporal power became profane and administrative, and the Grail withdrew again into myth, legend, and esoteric survivals.
Thus, when Evola calls the regality of the Grail “the apex of the medieval imperial myth and the highest profession of faith of the great Ghibelline movement,” he is identifying that movement as the last historical echo of a primordial royal tradition. In his view, it was not merely a political faction, but a metaphysical stance toward sovereignty, hierarchy, and the nature of legitimate power itself.