An important fact has emerged from this: the idea of monarchical rule as the ‘natural’ form of government. This did not mean that royal authority was equally strong in all parts of Latin Christendom. In fact, powerful comital or ducal dynasties, like those of Barcelona, Normandy, Provence, or Austria, were formidable players on the international stage, many of them exercising quasi-regal powers within their territories. Nonetheless, they still derived their political legitimacy from their relationship to a dynasty or realm to which they were subservient in name, though not always in deed. Similarly, the peasant community of Frisia and the Italian city republics still accepted that they were subject to royal or imperial authority. Finally, even the Icelandic experiment, which for several centuries had existed without royal authority, came to an end in 1262 when the king of Norway was invited to take control of the island by its inhabitants. By 1320, in short, virtually all inhabitants of western Europe were—in one way or another—ruled by kings. What, however, did this monarchical rule entail in practice, and how did its form and function change between the tenth and the fourteenth centuries?
Let us begin by addressing the question of how one became king. First of all, it helped being related to a previous monarch. In the tenth century, succession within kingdoms was at best loosely defined: most commonly, one member of the royal dynasty followed another, but there was no guarantee that it would be a ruler’s eldest son or closest male relative. Both Emperor Otto I (936-73) and his grandson
Otto III (983-1002), for instance, faced rival claimants in their brothers, cousins, and uncles. The history of twelfth-century Norway was one long list of murdered and expelled kings, of rival siblings, distant cousins, legitimate or illegitimate progeny seeking to claim the throne. In fact, with the exception of Capetian France, which had the unusual fortune of an unbroken male dynastic line from 987 to 1328, most European kingdoms experienced some political turmoil over how exactly rules of succession were to work in practice. Although there was an increasing tendency to postulate primogeniture as a guiding principle, where an eldest son (or the closest surviving male relative) would succeed to all of a lord’s or king’s possessions, what this meant in practice was still open to debate. We should also keep in mind the role of dynastic accidents: kings died without male heirs or heirs in general, and then the question arose as to how a new ruler was to be chosen. In 1135, for instance, the English barons had to choose between Matilda, daughter of Henry I (1100-35), and his nephew Stephen of Blois, with Henry’s illegitimate son Robert of Gloucester, Stephen’s elder brother Theobald, and King David I of Scotland also mooted as potential successors. Similarly, in 1199, the succession to Richard the Lionheart in England brought up the question of who held the better claim to the throne: his younger, surviving brother, John, or Arthur, the son of John’s deceased older brother Geoffrey? In both cases, the rules of succession were elaborated in a prolonged process of dynastic wars and civil unrest. Still it is worth remembering that normally claimants were members of the deceased ruler’s family, ideally by descent, but sometimes also by marriage. Occasionally claimants went to great lengths to claim dynastic legitimacy: when Sverrir claimed the Norwegian throne in 1177, for instance, his supporters spread word of a vision in which both the prophet Samuel and Saint Olaf, the patron saint of Norway, appeared to him and revealed that Sverrir was not, as he himself had believed, of plebeian stock, but rather the illegitimate son of a king. Rules were debated and open to interpretation.
The two exceptions to this rule, on the surface at least, were the Holy Roman Empire and the papacy. Both had, by definition, an elective form of rulership. Popes were chosen in a complex process, which, in combination with the principle of celibacy, ruled out a dynastic succession. Nonetheless, in reality the succession to the see of Saint Peter reflected the changing predominance of one group or another among the leading aristocratic families of Rome as much as the composition of the College of Cardinals (see Chapter 4). In the tenth and eleventh centuries, for instance, the dynasties of the Crescentii and the Tusculani provided the majority of popes, while even in the thirteenth century clans like the Conti, Frangipani, or Orsini dominated the College of Cardinals. Similarly, emperors were usually elected by the German princes, but in practice between 919 and 1254 a ruler normally ensured the election of his eldest son during his lifetime. Election to the imperial throne mattered only when no heir was available, as in 1002, 1024, or 1125, or when, as in 1197, the chosen heir was himself under age. It was only after Richard of Cornwall (king of the Romans 1257-72) failed to secure the succession of his son Henry that electoral imperial lordship developed its full potential. Not once between 1273 and 1376 did son follow father.
Secondly, it helped to be a man. Outside Byzantium, where empresses such as Zoe (d. 1050) and Theodora (d. 1056) occasionally ruled in their own right, queens normally assumed a prominent position only once they lacked a husband, and when they either acted as regents for their sons, or when marriage to them conferred dynastic legitimacy upon whoever seized the throne. This is not to deny the fact that some queens were powerful and historically significant political players, as, for instance, Theophano, the Byzantine princess married to Otto II, who for ten years (983-93) exercised the regency for the young Otto III; Queen Urraca (1109-26), the heiress of Castile and Leon, who resisted the wars of a spurned husband (the king of Aragon) and the misgivings of an aristocracy who refused to submit to the authority of a woman; or Blanche of Castile, the mother of Louis IX of France, who not only steered the realm through the troubled times of her son’s minority (1226-30), but continued to exercise such a dominant influence on Louis’s governance that it may not be unfair to say that his personal rule started only with her death in 1252. At the same time, for every Theophano or Blanche there was a queen like Margaret of Provence (d. 1295), Saint Louis’s wife, who was deliberately ignored by her husband, or Isabella of Angouleme (d. 1246), the wife of King John of England (1199-1216), who was mistreated by her husband and ignored by those who organized the regency of her son Henry. Even Theophano had come to act as regent because serious doubts existed as to the seriousness with which young Otto’s male relatives would resist the temptation of claiming the throne for themselves, while Urraca’s power originated in the dynastic legitimacy she could convey onto her successive spouses. In fact, men were generally unwilling to accept the succession of women, which was one of the key difficulties facing Matilda when she wanted to succeed her father to the English throne in 1135. Women, in short, were believed to be able to exercise power through and on behalf of their male relatives only.
Needless to say, the reality of medieval queenship was more complex, and we must draw a distinction between queens regnant, including some queen mothers (like Theophano, Urraca, or Blanche), who actually exercised political authority in the absence of a monarch, and queen consorts (such as Isabella of Angouleme or Margaret of Provence), who were much more immediately dependent on the degree of authority their husband was willing to grant them. As in so many other areas of medieval life, it was the personality of the individual king or queen that decided the real extent of female power. We know, for instance, that Ottonian queens other than Theophano exercised considerable influence over their spouses and sons, while Emperor Conrad II (1024-38) even insisted on describing his queen as sharing in his exercise of royal power, while, in the twelfth century, Constance (d. 1198), the heiress of the Norman kingdom of Sicily, governed her inheritance with a considerable degree of independence from her husband, Emperor Henry VI (1190-7). Most commonly, queens and queen mothers appear as intercessors, as those who were approached to soften the king’s rigour; they took a prominent role in exerting religious patronage; and they frequently oversaw the education and training of the ruler’s heirs. Although important, these functions were also much less clearly defined and much less frequently commented upon than those of kings and princes, and we all too often hear of the political role of royal women only when they surpassed or when they violated the limits of their authority. The reality of medieval queenship, we may assume, lay somewhere between Conrad II’s wife being described as equal partner in kingship, and the miserable marriage of Isabella of Angouleme.
World History
