Queens

 We think of queens as wives of kings, as of course they were, but they also were rulers in their own right.  After all, Elizabeth II has been queen of England for going on for 70 years.  Let's not forget the sixteenth-century Elizabeth I.  There were ruling queens in the Middle Ages as well.  And even as wives of kings, queens exercised real power.

Here a good example is Eleanor of Aquitaine, who I've discussed earlier.  She was successively queen of France and of England, by being married successively to Louis VII of France and Henry II of England, and she was the mother of both King Richard the Lionheart of England and King John of England.  That's her tomb shown below.

Okay, Eleanor was unusual.  But for all medieval queens, they functioned as the power behind the throne.  They would have their own separate court, with their own faithful men.  Here they were entirely capable of advancing their own policies, which might or might not be the same as the king's.  Eleanor plotted against Henry II on behalf of her sons, who felt that Dad was not giving them what was Rightfully Theirs.  (Teenagers, they never change.)  Even when not working in opposition to the king, the queen could be a real power.  Someone who wanted a special favor from the crown might do well to start with the queen, figuring if she agreed, she could be a significant ally.

(First ladies, wives of presidents, have separate offices and staff, but people rarely go to them to get a special favor out of the president.  Maybe they're missing a bet.)

The above image is a twelfth-century depiction of a king and queen of the Old Testament, carved onto the facade of Chartres cathedral.  Not surprisingly, they have sort of a twelfth-century look to them.  That queen isn't going to stand for any nonsense.  I think she may be taller than the king, who looks worried.

Then there were ruling queens.  The mother of Henry II, Mathilda, thought of herself as ruling queen of England, though her cousin Stephen begged to differ, and the two carried out a long civil war.  (Stephen won by outliving her.)

The most famous ruling queen is probably Isabelle, of Ferdinand-and-Isabelle, who sent Columbus off on his crack-brained attempt to get to India by sailing west.  Isabelle was king (not queen) of Castile, the northern part of what is now Spain, as well as queen of Aragon (the eastern part of Spain), a position she gained by marrying King Ferdinand of Aragon.  (I don't think he was queen of Castile.)  They called themselves the "Catholic kings."

© C. Dale Brittain 2020

For more on medieval social and political history, see my ebook, Positively Medieval:  Life and Society in the Middle Ages.  Also available in paperback!

Kingdom and Empire

What's the difference between a kingdom and an empire?  A kingdom is headed by a king (or queen), an empire by an emperor (or empress).  There.  Wasn't that easy?

Okay, there's more to it.  A kingdom is a realm ruled by a king or queen (the terms are closer in medieval Latin than they are in English, rex and regina, and a realm is a regnum).  An empire is a collection of different countries/kingdoms/realms, all under one central imperial power, emperor or empress.

For the purposes of medieval Europe, the model for empire was the Roman Empire.  Interestingly, Rome had assembled an empire, conquering countries and territories all around the Mediterranean, while it was still officially a republic, run by the Senate and the "people," SPQR (Senatus populusque Romae, "the Senate and people of Rome").  By the first century BC, however, Rome acquired emperors, first Julius Caesar and then his nephew and successor Augustus Caesar.  Emperors soon became god-like absolute rulers (they also tended to be assassinated with some frequency, starting with Julius Caesar).

As I've discussed earlier, the Roman emperors moved permanently to Constantinople (now Istanbul) in the fourth century, though there were sometimes separate co-emperors in western Europe for another 150 years or so.  But when the pope crowned Charlemagne Roman emperor in 800, it was the beginning of a separate, western line of emperors that lasted throughout the Middle Ages.  This empire was called the Holy Roman Empire (at least by the emperors and their aids) from the twelfth century on.

This evolved in the post-medieval period into the great Spanish empire that took over most of Latin America (except Brazil and a few small territories) and eventually became the Austro-Hungarian empire, that lasted until World War I.  When Hitler announced that he was founding a "Third Reich" (third empire), he was looking at the Roman Empire and the Holy Roman Empire as the first two.

The medieval empire (Holy Roman Empire) included three countries, Germany, Burgundy, and Italy, so it meets the definition of an empire containing separate countries (it also had pieces of some other ones).  In practice, the emperors were also German kings, though they had to go to Rome to be crowned emperor.  Their control over Italy was tenuous at best; medieval Italy was made up of a number of small city-states and principalities, and they had no interest in being run by the German king.  Burgundy had stopped being an independent country in the early eleventh century, when the German king married the heiress.  This now-forgotten kingdom of Burgundy was centered in the Jura, between modern France and Switzerland, and headed south toward the Mediterranean along the valley of the Rhône.

One often sees reference to a "Norman empire."  The dukes of Normandy became kings of England as well in 1066.  Other Normans (not the dukes) established their rule in Sicily and southern Italy in the early eleventh century, becoming first dukes and then kings of the region.  This was not however a real empire, because Normandy, which remained under the kings of England from 1066 to 1214, was part of France, and France was not under the English king, as the French king would have explained if you had any doubts.

Great Britain today is in some ways an empire, in that the three kingdoms on the island (England, Wales, and Scotland) are all under one monarch, now Elizabeth II.  But they are officially not an empire, but rather a "united kingdom."  They have been so since the king of Scotland became king of England as well in the seventeenth century.  The Irish are probably the most "imperial" part now.  Officially it's the "United Kingdom of Great Britain [GB being the island with the three kingdoms] and northern Ireland."

In the nineteenth century, however, when "the sun never set on the British Empire," the British king or queen was also emperor/empress of areas from Australia and Hong Kong and India to Canada.  No medieval king or emperor ever had anything as broad as either the British Empire or the early-modern Spanish Empire.

© C. Dale Brittain 2020

For more on emperors and other aspects of medieval history, see my ebook Positively Medieval, available on Amazon and other ebook platforms.

Medieval Monarchs

Medieval kings and queens are often assumed to have been absolute, "divine right" monarchs.  But this is not true--such monarchs instead are found only in the early modern period, the Ancient Régime (sixteenth through eighteenth centuries).  Medieval monarchs were elected.

Elected? you say.  You don't mean peasants had access to the ballot box?  No, of course not.  When the US was founded, only propertied men could vote, and women got the vote only after World War I, after many decades of effort by people like Susan B. Anthony, who didn't live to see it.  The ability of southern blacks to vote was tenuous at best until the 1960s.  So we shouldn't expect medieval voting rights to match the twenty-first century.

If one wanted to be a king in medieval Europe, one needed both to be part of a family considered royal and to be elected by a council of the powerful.  In the Merovingian dynasty in early medieval France (fifth-eighth centuries), any male descended in the male line from Clovis, the first king, seemed to imagine he had the right to be king, regardless of details like illegitimacy or a plethora of brothers and cousins.  This led to some extremely nasty family feuds.  A would-be king needed at least some of the powerful to support, follow, and elect him.

The Carolingian dynasty, Charlemagne's family, started with his father Pippin, who deposed the last Merovingian king, had himself formally elected by his followers, and persuaded a bishop to anoint him.  To add to this, he got the pope to bless him and his children as indubitably royal.

In the next centuries, a number of people challenged Carolingian rule, in all cases assembling nobles and bishops who were supposed to "represent" the will of the people, in order to be elected by them.  (Our form of representative democracy derives from medieval forms.)  Once kings, of course, they wanted to make the position hereditary, but it was hard to do so.  And it was not automatic that the oldest son inherit.

In England, the duly elected Anglo-Saxon king was defeated in 1066 by William, duke of Normandy, now known as "the Conqueror."  William was succeeded as king by his second, not first son, William II; the oldest son got Normandy.  William II was succeeded by his younger brother Henry I.  Henry, whose only legitimate son died by drowning (legitimacy had become more important than it had been during the early Middle Ages), was succeeded by his nephew Stephen (son of a daughter of William the Conqueror).  Stephen in turn was succeeded by Henry II, whose mother was a daughter of Henry I.  Henry II had five sons, but three of them died before he did, and the fourth, Richard "the Lionheart," died childless and was succeeded by his younger brother John.

(Interestingly, one of the sons of Henry II who predeceased him, Geoffrey, had had a son named Arthur.  Young Arthur went to visit his Uncle Richard one day and was never seen again.)

For all of these successions, none of which match our vision of inheritance by oldest son, the great lords of England had to give their consent.  We are now up to the early thirteenth century, and, for the first time, both French and English kings started asserting that their oldest son would inherit, even if not formally elected.  But it took a long time to get there.

The castle in the image is Château Gailliard in Normandy, built by Richard the Lionheart.

© C. Dale Brittain 2014