After last weekend's "No Kings" rallies, it seems appropriate to blog about kings.
Kings have been the default for most societies, once a group of people gets above a certain size. Greece and Rome, seen by American founding fathers as inspiring democracy and a republican form of government, had kings before Athens decided on democracy (unlike the other Greek city-states) and Rome decided to become a republic (and remember Rome later became ruled by emperors). The ancient Mesopotamian city-states all had kings, and the pharaohs in Egypt were kings under a different name.
Medieval Europe took kings for granted. As new people settled in the old Roman Empire, whether Anglo-Saxons, Franks, Lombards, Visigoths, or whatever, they were under the rule of kings. A lot of these kingdoms were very small, but the idea of a single ruler being in charge of a territory seemed self-evident. Scandinavia had never been under Roman rule, but they too were ruled by kings.
Christianity also took kings for granted. After all, the Old Testament had been full of the doings of Hebrew kings, going back to Saul, David, and Solomon. Churches depicted these kings on their facades, as in the example of the royal head below, which was on the front of the cathedral of Notre Dame in Paris from the twelfth century until knocked off in the French Revolution (a new "improved" head replaced it in the nineteenth century).
God and Jesus were often referred to as kings. With the heavenly hierarchy organized with one central person in charge (or actually three persons united in one, let's not get distracted here), it made sense that earth too should have kings.
Kings have usually been hereditary, but there were always exceptions. We might think of a king's oldest son as automatically being the royal heir, but it didn't have to be that way. William the Conqueror of England's oldest son, Robert, became duke of Normandy, and his second son, William II, king of England. (Since the Conqueror had been duke of Normandy himself originally, that was the true family property, suitable for an oldest son.)
William the Conqueror himself, of course, as his nickname suggests, really became king by conquest, not by heredity, though he had a family connection to the last Anglo-Saxon kings. In the Merovingian era, kings had routinely tried to conquer their brothers' or cousins' kingdoms. All early medieval kings were wary of marrying off their daughters to men who might see this connection as a justification for going for the throne themselves. And Charlemagne's own father became king by announcing he was a better man for the position than the current (Merovingian) king,whom he unceremoniously dumped into a monastery.
Medieval kings were never absolute. They were supposed to act with the advice of a council, which became formalized in England around the end of the thirteenth century with the establishment of Parliament. Other countries set up similar bodies, representatives of the country as a whole (in practice the wealthy and powerful) to advise on important matters. Even before Parliament, King John of England was reined in by Magna Carta (1215) when he seemed to be acting too much like a tyrant.
Kings of course would have liked to be absolute. James I of England (James VI of Scotland) first spelled out the theoretical justification of divine-right monarchy. But this was post-medieval, and his son, Charles I (seventeenth century) was beheaded when Parliament decided he was acting too much like a tyrant. By the time his son was restored to the throne, England had decided it was going to continue to have kings, but that Parliament would have the final say on important matters (as they do now, when their kings have become essentially powerless).
In France the Estates General was much weaker during this time, and you get kings like Louis XIV declaring that he himself embodied France. ("L'état, c'est moi!") Kings and princes and dukes ruled small states in what is now Germany and Italy, their ambition to be absolute rulers checked primarily by the small size of their territory.
The American colonies were very unusual in deciding to become a country without a king. George Washington in fact was offered a chance to be king and turned it down. The colonies had had governors but, with a king over them in England, they'd never had kings on-site, so doing without kings was not too big a leap. Towns and villages had been run locally ("town hall meetings"), so citizen participation seemed obvious.
Today few kings are.still in power worldwide. Those called king (or queen) have symbolic and ceremonial power for the most part but cannot dictate policy. Presidents, elected men and women, may on occasion be seen eyeing the power that kings had in the post-medieval period and wishing some for themselves.
© C. Dale Brittain 2026
For more on medieval government, see my new ebook, Positively Medieval: Life and Society in the Middle Ages. Also available in paperback
