Kings

 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

 

Barbarians and Romans

 As I discussed back when I started this blog, the idea of Rome falling to hordes of barbarians, like a tsunami sweeping up the beach and inland, used to be a standard part of history.  In recent decades it has been rejected, because it is unsupported by the evidence.  Yes, there were major changes between the fourth and seventh centuries, but a process that takes three centuries is hard to characterize as a "fall."

The only place where Germanic peoples and their culture essentially overran the Romanized Celtic peoples of the Roman Empire was England, where Roman cities disappeared and Christianity moved to the margins.  But even there a great deal of melding between Roman and Anglo-Saxon culture occurred, and British scholars named the following centuries the Dark Ages not because they were evil but because we know so little about them.

And England of course is not the model for all of Europe and the Mediterranean basin, as much as the English would like you to believe it.  In fact on the European Continent in the fourth and fifth centuries a lot of Germanic people were welcomed into the Empire, serving in the Roman armies, settling in various territories.  There was friction of course and the occasional sacking of a city, like Rome itself in 410, but the Empire continued on.

The biggest changes to the Empire were the disasters of the sixth century, several "years without a summer" which broke down trade routes and nearly emptied the cities, as lack of harvests meant no food for the cities to buy, coupled with the first outbreak of the Black Death.  Then in the seventh century the rise of Islam meant that Mediterranean basin, the Middle East, and North Africa became Arabic-speaking and predominantly Muslim, rather than Greek and Latin speaking and predominantly Christian, and no longer answered to the Emperor.

But how did Romanized populations react to the Germanic people settling among them in western Europe?  The Romans were not impressed with those they called barbarians, a term they coined because they said those who didn't speak Latin just said "Ba bar ba barg" or the equivalent.  But the Germanic peoples were impressed by Roman culture and, on the Continent, jettisoned their religion and language like a hot potato.  That's why Spanish, Italian, and French are all descended from Latin, in spite of the Visigoths, the Ostrogoths, and the Franks.  Even Romanian is a Latin-derived language.  East of the Rhine and in Scandinavia, however, where the Empire had never extended, and in Anglo-Saxon England, Germanic languages persisted (as they still do).

In practice, Romans and Germanic peoples quickly started to intermarry, meaning their descendants had a shared ethnic identity.  Archaeologists who have tried to determine whether a burial represents a Gallo-Roman or a Frank, for example, have been confused by both Roman and Germanic artifacts in the same grave.  Names still had cultural overtones, but parents might name a son Siegfried who they hoped would rise to power as a warleader, while naming a different son Peter who they hoped would end up as a bishop.

The so-called barbarian kings, who established kingdoms within the old Empire with the favor of the Emperor (now in Constantinople), kept much of the old imperial governance structure.  The Empire had been divided into administrative units, each called a pagus, centered on a city.  The pagi became first Christian dioceses (by the fourth or fifth century) and then (by the sixth or seventh century) the counties into which the kingdoms were divided.  Even some of the old Roman taxation system remained, although the collected money went not to Rome or Constantinople but rather to the king.

Interestingly, the Germanic people settled in the old Empire all wanted to assert their own thnic identity.  The Franks were the first to start writing down their old, traditional laws, writing them in Latin, in imitation of Roman law.  These so-called Salic Laws inspired similar written lawcodes from other Germanic peoples, including laws written for the Goths, the Bavarians, the Burgundians, and so on.  This is an indication that even as "German" and "Roman" were in the process of being fused into what would become a (sort of) general medieval culture, the "barbarians" were proud of their heritage and didn't want to forget it.

© C. Dale Brittain 2024

For more on medieval social and political history, see my book, Positively Medieval:  Life and Society in the Middle Ages, available on Amazon and other e-tailers, either as an ebook or in print.

Brother is the Enemy

 We tend to think of families as all getting along and supporting and protecting each other.  For most families in the Middle Ages, that was probably the norm as well.  But just as today siblings can become very competitive over such things as "who gets Grandma's gold coin collection," so among the medieval aristocracy there was often fierce competition between brothers.

This is to be anticipated, because even though there were no strict rules of primogeniture (that is, of the oldest son getting everything), oldest sons did tend to inherit more, and the younger sons thought this was Totally Unfair.  Throughout the medieval and early modern period there were plenty of tales about three brothers, where the oldest gets the big inheritance, the middle one gets some small thing, and the third is told, "Good luck, kid."  Of course in these stories the youngest heads off and finds something worth far more than the original inheritance, and even a princess to marry.  Take that, older brother!

The Merovingian kings of what is now France (fifth to eighth centuries) were described by contemporaries as ready to slay their brothers and cousins.  The various small kingdoms, into which what is now France and the Low Countries were divided, were parceled out between heirs, who then decided the best way to add to their holdings was to kill their rivals.  Gregory of Tours, chief historian of the Merovingian era, said that Clovis, first of the kings, complained loudly that he was alone in the world without any relatives, in the hopes of luring some relatives out of hiding so he could kill them.

The Carolingian kings were not much better (eighth to tenth centuries).  Charlemagne had a younger brother, named Carloman, whom Charlemagne's biographer Einhard said died of "some disease."  Einhard went on to say that he couldn't imagine why Carloman's widow then fled with her children.  (One can imagine just fine.)

Charlemagne's grandsons were each given a kingdom of their own, Germany for Louis, France for Charles, and the "Middle Kingdom" (including Italy) for Lothair.  Louis and Charles immediately ganged up on their brother, as perhaps should be expected.  In the confusion and disagreements over the next two generations, a kingdom of Burgundy was established within what Lothair had thought was his kingdom, and Boso declared himself king, only to be opposed by his brother Richard, who told the Carolingian kings that he was their little friend.

In England after the 1066 Norman Conquest, William the Conqueror designated Normandy, the family inheritance, for his oldest son, Robert Curthose, designated newly conquered England for his second son, William Rufus, and told Henry, the third son, "Sorry, kid."  When William Rufus died without heirs in 1100, Henry immediately took his brother's throne.  Robert Curthose was off on Crusade and was understandably shocked when he got home.  Extensive fighting then took place, and Henry eventually won, taking Normandy as well as England and locking up his brother for the rest of his life.

In France, it was often remarked in the thirteenth century, with some wonderment, that the younger brothers of the king didn't try to kill him, not even a little.  In part this was due to the kings parceling out large chunks of territory (appanages) to their younger brothers.

These examples are all of the most powerful (and there are plenty more examples of fraternal warfare).  Peasant families in contrast tended to act in solidarity.  After all, they could not call up armies or faithful followers (like Boso's brother Richard) to fight against their relatives.  Landlords were more likely than brothers to be seen as the enemy.

© C. Dale Brittain 2023

For more on medieval political and social history, see my ebook Positively Medieval, available on Amazon and other ebook platforms.  Also available in paperback.