King and King's Power in Iberia

Journal of Medieval History, 2002

This paper discusses the historiographical work of Sampiro, a member of the circle of the kings of Leon around the year 1000. His chronicle emerges from a cultural and political atmosphere of renovation of the old Visigothic kingdom, and deals with the Asturleonese history of the tenth century. Sampiro’s idea of kingship is compared with different perspectives on kingship during the late Visigothic and Astur era. Our study deals with kingship and defines changes to the concept that took place during the period. In doing so, we refer to Sampirus’ sources and audience.The paper considers royal titles and epithets, both in chronicles and in documents. One of the major difficulties as well as the raison d’être of Sampiro’s chronicle is the reign of Bermudo II (d. 999), a king who endured violent rebellions and the continuous attacks of the Andalusian Caliphate. Sampiro’s treatment of Bermudo is innovative: he is considered a saint, not only in general Davidical terms, but by stressing his life as a passio: he was tormented by those who revolted against him. In this comparison, King Bermudo emerges as a martyr and the rebellious aristocracy a new Judas.

Culture and Society in Medieval Galicia, 2000

This chapter surveys queenship in the Iberian Peninsula in the Middle Ages. Even though legal codes and didactic texts written by men mapped out gender norms and stereotypes regarding women, and tended to limit the role of queens as rulers, many queens took active roles in politics, whether they were queens in their own right, royal consorts, regents and lieutenants, queen-mothers or dowagers. In the Middle Ages, rulership and kingship were not synonymous, and monarchical power was a broad enterprise in which other members of the royal family participated, particularly the queen—especially given the fact that the government and the court were very much integrated, and that there was little distinction between the public and the private spheres in royal circles. This chapter analyzes how power was conceived and used by queens, and also surveys the pillars of medieval queenship: the role of the family, the networks of power and patronage (religious, political, artistic, etc.) created by queens to wield authority and influence, and how piety and ceremonial functioned and were entwined. Particular historical contexts, the evolution of the legal tradition and canon law, and the constitution of broader and more complex realms all affected the model of queenship and made it evolve. In sum, this contribution emphasizes the queen’s role in medieval monarchy.

2001

Albrecht Diem & Mayke de Jong (eds.), Connecting People: Saints, Relics and Communities in the Early Medieval World – In Memory of Janneke Raaijmakers. Series: Renovatio— Studies in the Carolingian World, 2024

This chapter explores seventh-century anxieties about royal manipulation of episcopal deliberation in Visigothic Hispania. It suggests that these fears where for a large part shaped by the legacy of the Homoian king Leovigild and his brief flirt with “Catholicism.” By analyzing the different seventh-century perspectives on Leovigild’s manipulation of episcopal deliberation and the theological innovation this sought to inspire, this paper will expose the generative and intertextual malleability of the figure of Leovigild, not only as a means to reflect on the past and present but also as a means to predict the risks of royal intrusion into religious affairs. Pre-print. To consult, please contact k.boers@uu.nl

This article explores the representation of royal power in the tenth-century county of Castile by contrasting the low degrees of effective royal agency within the county with a dominant charter-writing tradition that coupled king and count in the synchronisms of the dating clauses. The components of the Castilian charter corpus are broken down and compared to other areas in northern Iberia, in order to suggest that, rather than a mere regional charter-writing tradition, this practice reflects a widespread political culture that sought to legitimize the counts' unitary leadership of Castile by reference to a prestigious yet distant royal figure.

2021

In order to explore an instance from the Nachleben of Caucasian Albania (in the present-day Azerbaijan), the present paper focuses on the Armenian-Albanian marchlands stretching along the right bank of the middle Kur (Kura). Right tributaries of that river became the main axes of the new statelets. The distinct cultural and political identity that was in the process of crystallisation in these valleys during the tenth–beginning of the eleventh century would largely determine, in the period of the Turkic and Mongol invasions, the history of a much vaster area encompassing the eastern spurs of the Lesser Caucasus. Various features of the documents preserved betray a peculiar modus vivendi established between Christianity and Islam on the eastern slopes of the Lesser Caucasus. I take into examination a case of kingship shared between brothers, which has not yet been elucidated in scholarship. In that form of kingship we can discern some characteristic features of the dynastic principle which had been codified in the ancient Armenian society by the customary law. The study enables us to make important conclusions regarding the form of rulership exercised in former Caucasian Albania and regarding the idea of kingship that developed there at the end of the tenth century.