BLOOD

ROYAL
DYNASTIC POLITICS
IN MEDIEVAL EUROPE

ROBERT
BARTLET T
 BLOOD ROYAL

Throughout medieval Europe, for hundreds of years, monarchy was the

way that politics worked in most countries. This meant that power was in
the hands of a family – a dynasty; that politics was family politics; and that
political life was shaped by the births, marriages and deaths of the ruling
family. How did the dynastic system cope with female rule, or pretenders to
the throne? How did dynasties use names, the numbering of rulers and the
visual display of heraldry to express their identity? And why did some royal
families survive and thrive, while others did not?
Drawing on a rich and memorable body of sources, this engaging and
original history of dynastic power in Latin Christendom and Byzantium
explores the role played by family dynamics and family consciousness in the
politics of the royal and imperial dynasties of Europe. From royal marriages
and the birth of sons, to female sovereigns, mistresses and wicked uncles,
Robert Bartlett makes enthralling sense of the complex web of internal
rivalries and loyalties of the ruling dynasties and casts fresh light on an
essential feature of the medieval world.

Robert Bartlett is the author of many acclaimed history books, including

The Making of Europe: Conquest, Colonization and Cultural Change 950–1350
(1993), which won the Wolfson Literary Prize for History in 1994, and Why
Can the Dead Do Such Great Things? (2015). He is Professor Emeritus at the
University of St Andrews and is well-known as the writer and presenter of
several BBC documentary series, including Inside the Medieval Mind (2008),
The Normans (2010) and The Plantagenets (2014).
 THE JAMES LYDON LECTURES IN MEDIEVAL HISTORY
AND CULTURE

In the millennium between the fall of Rome and the Reformation – commonly
known as the ‘Middle Ages’ – Europe emerged as something more than an idea,
and many of the institutions, cultural forces and political ideas we associate with
the ‘modern’ world were born. What is the continuing relevance of this era for
contemporary society? And how are we to understand medieval history and
culture on its own terms, rather than through the distorting prism of presentist
concerns? These are among the most urgent and problematic questions facing
medieval scholarship today.
The James Lydon Lectures in Medieval History and Culture, delivered at
Trinity College Dublin and named for James Francis Lydon FTCD, Lecky
Professor of History at Trinity College Dublin (1928–2013), is a biennial series
providing a unique platform to reflect on these issues.

Series Editors:
Peter Crooks, David Ditchburn, Seán Duffy, Ruth Mazo Karras, Immo Warntjes

A full list of titles in the series can be found at:

www.cambridge.org/lydonlectures
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Information on this title: www.cambridge.org/9781108490672
DOI: 10.1017/9781108854559
© Robert Bartlett 2020
This publication is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception
and to the provisions of relevant collective licensing agreements,
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First published 2020
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A catalogue record for this publication is available from the British Library.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Bartlett, Robert, 1950– author.
Title: Blood royal : dynastic politics in medieval Europe / Robert Bartlett.
Description: Cambridge ; New York, NY : Cambridge University Press, 2020. | Includes
bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2019039298 (print) | LCCN 2019039299 (ebook) |
ISBN 9781108490672 (hardback) | ISBN 9781108854559 (ebook)
Subjects: LCSH: Royal houses – Europe – History – To 1500. | Kings and rulers,
Medieval. | Monarchy – Europe – History – To 1500. | Civilization, Medieval. | Kinship –
Political aspects – Europe – History. | Europe – Politics and government – 476–1492.
Classification: LCC D131 .B35 2020 (print) | LCC D131 (ebook) | DDC 929.7094/
0902–dc23
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For Ros and Len and all their descendants
 Contents

List of Figures page x

Preface and Acknowledgements xiii
List of Abbreviations xiv

Introduction: Royal Families 1

part i: the life cycle

1 Choosing a Bride 9
Marriage with Local Aristocrats 11
Foreign Queens 15
Homesick Queens 26
Foreign Ways 29
Inspection of the Bride 32
Marriage to the Royal Widow 34
Prohibited Degrees 43
The Case of Joan of Woodstock 48
2 Waiting for Sons to be Born 52
Death in Childbirth 55
The Uncertainties of Pregnancy 57
Celebration 59
Childlessness 62
Unmarried Kings and Kings Who Married Late 84
3 Fathers and Sons 89
Securing the Succession 89
Waiting for Fathers to Die 109
Minorities 114

vii
 CONTENTS

4 Female Sovereigns 124

The First Female Sovereigns in Medieval Europe 124
The Later Middle Ages 143
The Exclusion of Women from Rule 146
5 Mistresses and Bastards 155
Concubines 155
Noble Mistresses of the High Middle Ages 159
Mistresses Drawn from the Queen’s Ladies-in-Waiting 162
Bastards 165
Bastard Kings 168
Bastard Culture 175
Legitimization 180
6 Family Dynamics 187
The Shape of the Dynasty 187
Brothers 191
Wicked Uncles 210
Killing Cousins 220
Queens, Sons and Lovers 226
7 Royal Mortality 240
Death 240
Burial 251

part ii: a sense of dynasty

8 Names and Numbering 283
Terminology 283
Names of Dynasties 285
Naming Patterns within Dynasties 289
Numbering of Monarchs 301
9 Saints, Images, Heraldry, Family Trees 311
Dynastic Saints 311
Public Images 315
Heraldry 321
Family Trees 326

viii
 CONTENTS

10 Responses to Dynastic Uncertainty: Prophecy

and Astrology 340
Astrology 341
Prophecy 347
11 Pretenders and Returners: Dynastic Imposters
in the Middle Ages 360
Recognition 373
12 New Families and New Kingdoms 379
Foundation Legends and Founding Figures 381
Healing the Dynastic Rent 384
Excluded Dynasts 388
New Kingdoms 393
13 Dynasties and the Non-Dynastic World 397
Elective Monarchy 397
Dynasties and the Church 403
Republics 413
Dynasties and Cities 416
Dynasty and the Kingdom 419
Conclusion 429

Appendix A: Main Dynasties 435

Appendix B: Minorities 444
Appendix C: Female Sovereigns 447
Appendix D: Family Trees 448
Notes 450
Bibliography of Works Cited 561
Index 607

ix
 Figures

1 Map depicting marriage alliances of the kings of Aragon,

Denmark, England, France and Hungary, 1200–1500. page 16
2 Anne, Duchess of Brittany (1488–1514). 41
3 The Byzantine empresses regnant, the sisters Zoe and Theodora,
on a gold coin (histamenon) in 1042, the year of their joint rule. 128
4 Urraca, queen of Leon-Castile (1109–26). 132
5 Melisende, queen of Jerusalem (1131–52/61), and her husband
Fulk of Anjou. 137
6 The Battle of Aljubarrota, 1385. 173
7 The Dunois Hours showing the count of Dunois (d. 1468). 179
8 The murder of John the Fearless, duke of Burgundy. 223
9 The tomb of the Holy Roman Emperor, Frederick II (d. 1250). 266
10 The image of the ‘anti-king’ Rudolf of Rheinfelden (d. 1080). 268
11 Tomb effigies of Henry II of England (d. 1189) and his wife
Eleanor of Aquitaine (d. 1204). 270
12 The tomb of Richard II of England (d. 1400) and his wife Anne
of Bohemia (d. 1394). 272
13 The tomb of Peter I of Portugal (d. 1367). 273
14 The tomb of Ines de Castro (d. 1355). 274
15 The entrails tombs of Charles IV of France (d. 1328) and his wife
Joan of Evreux (d. 1371). 278
16 St Louis of Toulouse (d. 1297). 314
17 Wall paintings from Karlštejn Castle: Charles IV. 319
18 Wall paintings from Karlštejn Castle: Charles’ wife Blanche (d. 1348). 320

x
 LIST OF FIGURES

19 Coins of the Byzantine rulers Constantine VI and Irene from 780–92. 322
20 A twelfth-century depiction of the Carolingian dynasty. 329
21 Bernard Gui’s The Tree of the Lineage of the Kings of the French. 336
22 An English royal genealogical roll. 387

xi
 Preface and Acknowledgements

The subject of this book is the family politics of royal and imperial
dynasties in Latin Christendom and Byzantium in the period 500–1500.
Family politics means competition and cooperation within the ruling
family, shaped at every point by the human life cycle of birth, marriage
and death, and also by ideas of what a dynasty was. Hence the two parts of
the book, the life cycle and a sense of dynasty. The main dynasties are
listed in Appendix A. A full bibliography on this subject would fill
a library but references have been given for all direct quotations and
for facts other than those easily accessible. A few directly relevant titles
have also been cited.
The book grew out of an invitation to deliver the Lydon lectures at
Trinity College Dublin, a series of four lectures named in honour of the
distinguished Trinity historian James Lydon, who was Lecky Professor of
History at the College from 1980 to 1993 and died in 2013. The lectures
were delivered in April 2017. Warm thanks are due to my hosts, Peter
Crooks, David Ditchburn and Seán Duffy, and to the distinguished
invited commentators on that occasion, Stewart Airlie, Sverre Bagge,
Ana Rodríguez, Katharine Simms and Nicholas Vincent. Discussions at
that time helped shape the further development of the book. Warm
thanks for help of various sorts are due to Rory Cox, Michael Foster,
Tim Greenwood and the late Ruth Macrides. Chris Given-Wilson, John
Hudson and Simon MacLean had the great kindness to read through the
whole text. I have incorporated their corrections and (most of) their
suggestions and am extremely grateful to them for this act of collegiality
and friendship.

xiii
 Abbreviations

AN Archives nationales, Paris

BAV Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana
BHL Bibliotheca Hagiographica Latina (cited by item number)
BL British Library, London
BnF Bibliothèque nationale de France, Paris
CCCC Corpus Christi College, Cambridge
CCCM Corpus Christianorum, continuatio medievalis (Turnhout)
CCSL Corpus Christianorum, series latina (Turnhout)
JL Jaffé (rev. Löwenfeld), Regesta pontificum Romanorum (cited
by item number)
MGH Monumenta Germaniae historica
AA Auctores antiquissimi
DD Diplomata
SRG Scriptores rerum Germanicarum in usum scholarum
SS Scriptores
ODNB Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (60 vols., 2004)
OMT Oxford Medieval Texts
PL Patrologia Latina, ed. J.-P. Migne (221 vols., Paris, 1844–65)
Po. Potthast, Regesta pontificum Romanorum (cited by item number)
Reg. Vat. Registra Vaticana, Archivum Secretum Vaticanum
RHF Recueil des historiens des Gaules et de la France (24 vols.,
Paris)
RS Rerum Britannicarum Medii Aevi Scriptores (‘Rolls Series’)
(251 vols., London)
SHF Société de l’histoire de France
TNA The National Archives, Kew, London

xiv
 INTRODUCTION

Royal Families

M onarchies are now rare in the world, numbering

around twenty in a system of almost two hundred indepen-
dent states, but for hundreds of years monarchy was the way that politics
worked in most countries. And monarchy meant power was in the hands
of a family – a dynasty – and hence politics was family politics. It was not
elections or referenda that shaped political life, but the births, marriages
and deaths of the ruling family. This added further unpredictability to
the unpredictable business of ruling. Even in modern Western democ-
racies there have been political dynasties producing recurrent presi-
dents, such as George Bush (1989–93) and George W. Bush (2001–9)
in the USA, although this is rare. And the crucial thing about these
democracies is that while George W. Bush could legitimately inherit
personal property from his father, he could not inherit office. It was
this separation of property, which could legitimately be distributed on
family lines, from office, which could not, that marked the definitive step
away from dynastic politics.
In this earlier, dynastic, world where office, including the highest, was
family property, biology was a bigger determinant of political life than it
is today. Biology does not determine all of human life but it determines
a lot of it. Humans are born weaker and need more nurture than other
mammals. They become sexually fertile in their teens. The number of
children that a woman can bear is limited, the number that a man can
father less so, although paternity is notoriously more difficult to establish
than maternity. Old age advances on all humans, sometimes bringing
with it a weakening of physical and mental powers. In the Middle Ages the
absence of contraception meant that fertile women might have

1
 INTRODUCTION: ROYAL FAMILIES

numerous children, and poor sanitary conditions and rudimentary

health care meant that many of them died before their first birthday.
Average life span was low by modern Western standards. Even those who
made it to the age of twenty were unlikely to live far beyond fifty. All these
things shaped life for everyone, but their impact at the top of society,
among the rulers, could have major political consequences. Sometimes
those consequences were disastrous.
The main features of the life cycle of an individual can be sketched
out easily: birth, childhood, relationships with parents and, probably,
siblings, sexual maturity, sexual activity (usually), sexual partner or part-
ners, the birth of children, relationships with children, aging, death. But,
of course, this cycle takes place in a world where everyone else is also
going through his or her own life cycle, and at a different pace and with
innumerable variations. One can make generalizations about certain
overall constraints to the human pattern, but that pattern is only truly
discoverable in reality as a multitude of individual themes. The best
model when analysing dynastic history may well not be the theorems of
social science but a piece of baroque counterpoint.
In addition to these biological determinants, family life in the Middle
Ages was shaped by assumptions about proper social roles. Medieval
Europe was a patriarchal society, ruled, for the most part, by kings, who
wished to hand on power after their deaths to their sons. This patriarchal
concept of rulership is doubtless linked to the fact that kings were
expected to be war-leaders. And the business of war was ‘man’s business’.
An account of the upbringing of Godfrey de Bouillon, a hero of the First
Crusade, puts it very succinctly: ‘for training in war, there is his father; for
the veneration of God, there is his mother!’1 When recruitment was
taking place for the Third Crusade in the late 1180s, men who failed to
answer the call to arms were sent wool and distaffs – a parallel to the white
feathers of the First World War handed by women to men who had not
enlisted but one with a specifically sexual meaning: if you aren’t going off
to war, you might as well be a woman!2 A French scholar of the later
Middle Ages, explaining the purpose of the exclusion of women from
succession to the throne of France, put it simply: ‘to the end that the
commonwealth might be better and more powerfully defended by men
than by women’.3 Conversely, the long-lived fascination with stories of

2
 INTRODUCTION: ROYAL FAMILIES

Amazons, always located in distant lands or distant times or both, must

indicate that imagining a society of female warriors was an enthralling
violation of ordinary norms and assumptions.
The power-structures of medieval Europe, however, were not shaped
by Amazons but by the urge towards male-line succession. Even in the
case of monarchies that were in theory elective, fathers were usually
expected to be succeeded by sons. Some dynasties were extremely suc-
cessful in achieving this. The Capetians, who became kings of France in
987, managed to pass the throne from father to son until 1316, an
amazing 329 years later. Even when this direct transmission from father
to son was interrupted, the French Crown nevertheless continued to pass
exclusively through male lines of the dynasty, down to the deposition of
the last king of France in 1848. If other kingdoms attained nothing like
this kind of continuity, it was still customarily the goal to secure male-line
descent. The Plantagenet kings of England could not match the
Capetians in terms of father–son succession, but still managed to keep
the throne in the hands of the male line for 331 years, from 1154 to 1485.
Likewise, the Arpad kings of Hungary, however often they were at each
other’s throats, passed their title in the male line for 255 years, from 1046
to 1301. All the kings of Aragon from 1162 to 1410, a period of 248 years,
were related in the male line.
So, as measured either by father–son transmission or by the looser
yardstick of transmission in the male line, there were dynasties that
endured for centuries. But not all medieval ruling families attained
such dynastic continuity. A striking example is provided by Byzantium,
especially in the long period before the fall of Constantinople to the
Fourth Crusade in 1204. There are some complex decisions to make
when counting Byzantine emperors and their succession, since co-
emperorship was common, but a credible approximation is that, of
about sixty-five imperial successions between 476, the date of the abdica-
tion of the last western Roman emperor, and 1204, only eighteen or so
were simple father–son transfers of power, that is, not much more than
one in four. All the others involved transmission by marriage, collateral
inheritance or, very frequently, usurpation.4 Only two dynasties in the
whole history of Byzantium in this period, the Heraclians and
Macedonians, produced emperors in five successive generations. In this

3
 INTRODUCTION: ROYAL FAMILIES

respect succession in the Byzantine empire resembled that in the state

from which it had grown, the Roman empire, which also had very few
long-term dynasties. Foreigners noticed this distinctive pattern. ‘Why’,
asked an envoy from the Khazars of the Asiatic steppes, ‘do you follow the
evil custom of replacing one emperor with another of different lineage?’5
The eleventh-century Armenian writer, Aristakès of Lastivert, also recog-
nized this trait, contrasting Byzantine practice with that of other peoples,
among whom the ruler’s son succeeds him. Patrilineal succession is like
iron, he says, the Byzantine custom of intrusion by outsiders is like mere
brick.6
At the other end of Europe, it is also evident that in the Celtic and
early Scandinavian worlds the nature of a ruling dynasty was different
from that of, say, the Capetians or Plantagenets. Irish royal succession is
a subject which non-specialists approach at their peril, but it may be
possible for an outsider to sketch the general outline.7 It seems that in
Ireland, as in Wales and in early Scandinavia, it was assumed that the new
king would be an adult male, that hereditary right would be only one of
the grounds he would put forward to justify his claim to succeed, and that
this hereditary right could look different from the hereditary rights
asserted by royal claimants in other parts of western Europe. In particu-
lar, there was a much larger pool of candidates for kingship, because of
concubinage or frequent divorce and remarriage, the recognition of the
long-term rights of collateral branches of the dynasty, and hence
a smaller role for primogeniture.
The distinctive features of the family structures of the ruling classes of
Ireland, Wales and early Scandinavia were noted, usually disapprovingly,
by their neighbours. Adam of Bremen, a German observer of things
Scandinavian, remarked that when King Canute died in 1035, he left
three sons, two of whom ‘were born of a concubine, and who, as is the
custom among barbarians, shared an equal part of the inheritance as
Canute’s children’.8 He also described the polygamy practised by the
Swedish chieftains: ‘in coupling with women they know no measure; each
has two or three or more at the same time, according to his means; rich
men and rulers have them without number; the sons born from such
unions are deemed legitimate’.9 Anglo-Norman and English ecclesiastics
of the eleventh, twelfth and thirteenth centuries reiterated complaints

4
 INTRODUCTION: ROYAL FAMILIES

about Irish and Welsh practices: incest, that is, cousin marriage; the
dissolubility of marriages; the equal standing of legitimate and illegiti-
mate children.10 It is clear that if one combines recurrent divorce and
remarriage, or the public recognition of women other than the wife, with
acceptance of the rights of the children of several, or even all, sexual
partners, the chances of a ruler leaving sons will be greater than in
a system of indissoluble monogamy and rights only for the legitimate,
which was the rule, at least in principle, in many other parts of
Christendom. This is why Irish royal dynasties did not face the issues of
female succession or succession by minors, since there would always be
adult male claimants when a king died.
If we turn to look at the workings of the dynastic system prevalent in
most parts of Europe, we find its underlying and basic principle
expressed very cogently in the following statement by Margaret of
Burgundy, the sister of Edward IV and Richard III of England, writing
in 1495: ‘In this kingdom, as is well known, a king is constituted not by the
wishes of the people or by election or by the right of war but by the
propagation of blood.’11 ‘Propagation of blood’ means sex and child-
birth, and hence the human life cycle. One could begin one’s analysis at
any phase of that cycle, but the search for a bride is a reasonable starting
point.

5
 PART I

THE LIFE CYCLE

 CHAPTER 1

Choosing a Bride

F or a dynasty to survive, it has to reproduce. by the

eleventh century, in most parts of western Europe, for the ruling
families, reproduction meant marriage as defined by the Church. A king
was expected to have one wife at a time, marriage could be ended only by
death or in very precise circumstances laid down by the Church, and only
offspring of these sanctified monogamous marriages were legitimate.
Earlier, more casual, arrangements had been replaced or marginalized.
So, for these ruling families, formal marriages were an essential part of
their strategy and hence a never-ending subject of debate, discussion and
disagreement. Sometimes this even involved babies being committed to
future brides or bridegrooms. The first step, logically, was for a wife to be
found for the king or future king. Indeed, from the point of view of the
ruling dynasty and its advisers, one of the most important political
decisions to be made was which bride to choose for kings or princes.
Car feme prendre est molt grans cose – ‘to take a wife is a very big thing’.1
Marriage could even be classed, along with warfare, as one of the two
things necessary for the state: ‘those things and activities without which
the earthly commonwealth cannot be sustained, namely, marriage and
the use of weapons’.2
The bride’s status was important. In the early Middle Ages, the
Merovingian kings of the Franks sometimes took wives of very low social
status, including slaves. Charibert (561–7) married the daughter of
a wool worker, who had been a servant of his previous wife, and later
took as another of his queens the daughter of a shepherd.3 Bilichilde,
queen of Theudebert II (d. 612), was a slave who had been purchased
from some merchants by his grandmother.4 Nantechildis, queen of

9
 PART I: THE LIFE CYCLE

Dagobert I, was chosen by the king from among his servant girls.5 The
great historian of the Merovingian dynasty, J. M. Wallace-Hadrill, saw this
practice as a reflection of the eminence of the royal kindred: it was
‘a family of such rank that its blood could not be ennobled by any
match, however advantageous, nor degraded by the blood of slaves’.6
But this pattern, akin to the practices of the Ottoman sultans of Early
Modern times, was unusual. Sexual unions with slaves or commoners
were not characteristic of the ruling dynasties of Christian Europe later in
the Middle Ages. A royal bride had to be high-born. One of the objections
raised by his enemies against Charles of Lorraine, the last Carolingian
claimant to the throne of France, was his marriage to a woman below him
in status: ‘He has married a wife who was not his equal, from the knightly
class.’ How, they asked, could a great duke of France allow such a woman
‘to be made queen and rule him’?7
But, granted that a royal bride should be high-born, this still left a vital
decision: was she to be from a local aristocratic family or a high-born
foreign bride? It was a subject on which there were strong opinions.
Erasmus, for example, thought it would be ‘by far the most advantageous
to the state if the marriage alliances of rulers were confined within the
borders of the kingdom’.8 But both strategies had their advantages and
their drawbacks. Indeed, in a fictional dialogue composed in Russia in
1776, the protagonist of the view that the tsar should marry a foreign
princess claimed, ‘I can give you forty reasons to show the advantage’ of
that policy; his opponent, however, was not impressed: ‘And I could lay
before you 400 reasons to prove the advantage of marriages with their
own subjects.’9
When discussing the advantages and disadvantages of each policy, the
crucial point is that marriage not only created a new married couple but
also created in-laws, relatives by marriage. Ruling dynasties relied on
powerful noble families for support, and a marriage alliance with one
of these powerful kindreds could cement and symbolize internal alli-
ances of this kind. On the other hand, a miscalculation might upset the
balance of aristocratic power. The impulsive and imprudent marriage of
Edward IV of England to Elizabeth Woodville, one of his ‘own subjects’,
had this effect: the speedy advancement of the new queen’s relatives
seems to have irritated the established aristocracy and undermined

10
 CHOOSING A BRIDE

support for Edward’s regime.10 Foreign brides, on the other hand,

brought links with other ruling dynasties, which could be useful, and
they were free, at least initially, of any alignment with local aristocratic
factions. This could be attractive. After he seized the throne in 1078, the
Byzantine emperor Nicephorus Botaniates was advised to marry the
Georgian princess Maria of Alania, the wife of his predecessor, ‘because
she was a foreigner and there was no crowd of relatives attached to her to
pester the emperor’.11 Maria of Alania may have been exceptional in this
respect, however. Many foreign brides did bring crowds of relatives with
them, who provoked distrust and envy.

Marriage with Local Aristocrats

Some ruling families concentrated their marriage strategy upon creating
ties within the kingdom rather than beyond it. An example is the
Carolingians.12 They had long been the most powerful aristocratic family
in the Frankish realm before they seized the throne in 751 and they then
expanded Frankish power throughout western Europe, ruling territory
that covered all or part of nine or ten modern European states (some
historians assess the Carolingian empire at a million square kilometres or
more).13 Charlemagne was crowned not just king but emperor in 800.
Yet, despite the huge territories they ruled and their ascent to the
imperial title, the Carolingians tended to marry among the daughters
of their own Frankish aristocracy. Charlemagne’s son and successor,
Louis the Pious, married, first, Ermengard, daughter of the Frankish
duke (or count) Ingram, and then Judith, daughter of the Frankish
duke (or count) Welf.14 Louis actually forbade his sons from marrying
foreign wives. When he issued his ordinance of 817 regulating the succes-
sion, he urged the younger brothers, if they were to marry after his death,
to do so with the advice and agreement of their oldest brother, adding,
‘however, in order to avoid disagreements and to remove any pretext for
anything harmful, we decree that none of them should presume to take
a wife from foreign peoples.’15 Louis’ sons, Lothar, Louis the German
and Charles the Bald, followed this advice. Louis the German actually
followed his father’s example quite closely, marrying Hemma, Welf’s
daughter and hence the sister of his own stepmother. And Louis the

11
 PART I: THE LIFE CYCLE

German’s three sons, each of whom was granted a sub-kingdom, married

women from the Frankish aristocracy of Bavaria, Saxony and Alsace, the
areas where their power was initially based.16
This pattern was general in the dynasty. Of Charlemagne’s descen-
dants in the male line, twenty-six bore the title of king or emperor. The
last of these died in 987. It is not always possible to name their wives or say
much about their origins, but there are twenty-three cases where this can
be done.17 Of these twenty-three royal wives, twenty came from the
Frankish aristocracy in the kingdoms where their husbands ruled. The
pattern only begins to change slightly in the tenth century, when there
are three generations of West Frankish kings of Carolingian descent who
sought royal brides outside their kingdom. Around the year 919 Charles
the Simple, king of the West Franks, married Eadgifu, daughter of
Edward the Elder, king of Wessex, the first time a royal descendant of
Charlemagne had married into a foreign royal family. The son of Charles
and Eadgifu, Louis IV, who eventually succeeded to his father’s throne,
married Gerberga, daughter of Henry I of the East Franks. By the time
they wed, the kingdom of the West Franks and the kingdom of the East
Franks had been separate for fifty-two years (887–939), so the union
between Louis and the non-Carolingian Gerberga can be regarded as a
marriage between members of two separate royal families, although, for
Louis, what was doubtless of greater political importance was that
Gerberga was the widow of the duke of Lotharingia, a vast duchy much
disputed between the kings of the West Franks and the kings of the East
Franks. Finally, Louis and Gerberga’s son, Lothar, who ruled the king-
dom of the West Franks from 954 to 986, took as his bride Emma,
daughter of Lothar, king of Italy, and Adelheid of Burgundy. By the
time of this marriage Lothar of Italy was long dead and Adelheid had
remarried Otto, king of the East Franks, so the bond was in reality again
with the East Frankish kingdom. But these cases are exceptional when
placed in the context of the Carolingian dynasty as a whole.
Kings of the house of Wessex, who became kings of England from the
tenth century, tended, like the Carolingians, to marry the daughters of
their own great aristocrats (ealdormen). There were exceptions, such as
Æthelwulf (839–58) who married as his second wife Judith, daughter of
Charles the Bald, king of the West Franks, or Æthelred the Unready

12
 CHOOSING A BRIDE

(978–1016) who married Emma, daughter of Richard I of Normandy,

but the usual pattern was to create a bond with native families. An
example that shows both the advantages and disadvantages of such
unions is the tie between Edward the Confessor, last of the kings of
the Wessex line, and the family of Earl Godwin, whose daughter, Edith,
the king married. This powerful noble family provided support for
Edward’s succession in 1042, and the king in return bestowed earldoms
upon Godwin’s sons. The marriage between Edward and Edith took
place in 1045. But relations were complicated by factional divisions and,
in 1051, Godwin and his sons were outlawed and Edith placed in
a nunnery. However, the family had sufficient military might and sup-
port within England to return in the following year, re-establish their
position and make Edward take Edith back as his queen. After the death
of Godwin, his son Harold became the most powerful man in England
and succeeded the childless Edward in 1066. Whether it is fair to
describe Edward as a ‘puppet king’ of the Godwinsons is arguable,18
but they are clearly a good example of an aristocratic family whose
marriage tie with the king was both consequence of and contribution
to their immense political power. For Edward, this alliance was
a strength and a hindrance.
The Byzantines, as the embodiment of the Roman empire, were
especially conscious of the high prestige that a marriage alliance with
them might bring, and even claimed that there were strict rules govern-
ing such alliances. Around the middle of the tenth century, the emperor
Constantine Porphyrogenitus wrote that there was a law of Constantine
the Great, the first Christian emperor, engraved in Hagia Sophia, ‘that an
emperor of the Romans shall never make a marriage alliance with
a people who differ from and are alien in their customs to the Roman
order . . . except with the Franks alone’.19 A generation later, when the
envoy Liudprand of Cremona came to the Byzantine court seeking
a marriage alliance for his lord, Otto (later Otto II), he says he was told,
‘It is unheard of that a daughter born in the purple to an emperor born
in the purple should be joined to a foreigner.’20 This was in fact untrue,
although it might have been a way of avoiding simple rejection of Otto.
Anna porphyrogenita, sister of Basil II, was married to Vladimir, Prince of
Kiev, not long after Liudprand’s humiliating rebuttal at the Byzantine

13
 PART I: THE LIFE CYCLE

court.21 She brought with her to Russia not only the glamour of an older
and wealthier civilization, but also Christianity.
One function of internal marriages was to create bonds between great
families. If a marriage was arranged between two warring families as part
of a settlement, the bride might be described as obses pacis, which can be
translated as ‘pledge of peace’, but also as ‘hostage for peace’. For
example, when the rebellious noble Erchanger came to terms with
Conrad I of Germany, ‘the king received his sister in matrimony, as
a pledge of peace’. And the twelfth-century counts of Cappenberg prided
themselves on descent from the lineage of both Charlemagne and his
great Saxon opponent Widukind (called ‘King Widukind’ in their tradi-
tions): ‘they say that Charles gave a daughter of his sister to Widukind’s
son as his wife and a pledge of peace’.22 When the chronicler William of
Malmesbury described how the Frankish king Charles the Simple gave his
daughter Gisela to the Viking adventurer Rollo along with the land that
later was called Normandy (a purely legendary event), he calls Gisela
‘a vessel of peace and a pledge of the treaty’.23
The marriage of a king’s daughter with a powerful local aristocrat
might give that noble, or his heirs, the chance to claim the throne
themselves, if the king left no surviving sons. When, in 1079, the
emperor Henry IV betrothed his young daughter Agnes to Frederick,
duke of Swabia, he already had one son and was to have another, but
neither of those sons themselves had sons, so that when the second of
them died in 1125, the male line of Henry IV’s family was extinguished.
At this point the son of Agnes and Frederick, duke of Swabia, another
Frederick, became a candidate for the throne. Since the empire was
elective rather than hereditary, he could not claim hereditary right, but
his prospects and his expectations were clearly shaped by the fact that
he was the grandson of Henry IV.24 As it turned out, Frederick was not
able to establish himself on the throne, but his younger brother
Conrad was ultimately more successful and became the first German
ruler of the Hohenstaufen dynasty in 1138. A royal–aristocratic union
in 1079 had thus helped to bring a new dynasty to the throne fifty-nine
years later.
The ties that marriage created between a royal dynasty and local
aristocrats could clearly be both useful and awkward. This may explain

14
 CHOOSING A BRIDE

why some rulers kept their daughters unmarried, removing the problem
of sons-in-law entirely. Charlemagne famously kept his daughters to
himself:

Remarkable to relate, because they were very beautiful and greatly loved by
him, he was not willing to give any of them in marriage to anyone, his own
men or foreigners, but kept them at home with him until his death, saying
that he could not bear to lose their company.25

Since access to these beautiful princesses was not, apparently, completely

controlled, Charlemagne’s policy gave him, as an indirect result, some
illegitimate grandchildren, but it led to no other dynastic complications.
Two generations later, in 867, when Basil I seized the Byzantine throne,
he also avoided sons-in-law, but in a completely different way. He made
three of his sons co-emperors, but placed all his four daughters into the
family nunnery.26 But such cases of rulers keeping their daughters
unmarried were exceptional. Royal women were usually regarded as
a valuable medium of exchange. This is most clear in the case of foreign
queens.

Foreign Queens
In several kingdoms, the foreign queen was the rule not the exception.
Between 1066 and 1464 no English king married an English woman.27
Most English queens in this period were French, indicating the central
place of France in the world of the Norman and Plantagenet kings,
although, since many of the kings were more French than English,
perhaps the word ‘foreign’ for these queens is not quite right. ‘Foreign’
is a relative term. Of the thirty queens of Denmark between 1000 and
1500, only three were Danish.28 In the earlier part of that period, Danish
kings found their brides among princesses from other Scandinavian
kingdoms or from the Slavic world, including Russia, while in the late
Middle Ages marital links were primarily with the princely houses of
northern Germany, many of which by this time had a status and resources
only slightly below royalty.
The circulation of these high-born brides was one way in which the
various courts of Christian Europe maintained contact. In fact, one could

15
 1296
1363

1436

1406 1340
1248
1282 1307
1237
1464 1330 1290
1486
1239 1273 1320
1476
1445
1449
1299 1406
1282 1308 1328 1274 1318 1478 1306
1205
1396 1322 1342 1382
1420 1385/87
1332
1325 1307 1253
1380 1281/87
1491+1499 1385 1296
1476 1203 1496 1422
1215
1445 1306/07
1305 1315
1313
1350 1406/08
1200 1451/57 1235
1350
1284
1373
1403 1350 1353
1338 1262 1204
1420 1236 1234
1214 1221 1254
1229 1282
1291 1314
1329 1218
1322
1341 1373 1372
1415 1377
1444 1200 1476
1409 1422
1469

1403

1272
1262 1369
1349 1295 1390 1315

Figure 1 Map depicting marriage alliances of the kings of Aragon, Denmark, England, France and Hungary, 1200–1500.
Redrawn from Karl-Heinz Spiess, ‘Europa heiratet. Kommunikation und Kulturtransfer im Kontext europäischer Königsheiraten des Spätmittelalters’,
in Europa im späten Mittelalter: Politik, Gesellschaft, Kultur, ed. Rainer C. Schwinges et al. (Historische Zeitschrift, Beihefte, Neue Folge, 40 Munich, 2006),
pp. 435–64, p. 464, map 15.
 CHOOSING A BRIDE

define the culture-areas of medieval Europe by plotting which realms

exchanged brides and which did not.29 Although Byzantine brides were
occasionally sent to western Europe, Byzantine emperors rarely married
foreign brides in the early Middle Ages. There was one such marriage in
the seventh century, one in the eighth (both with Khazar brides), none in
the ninth, and one in the tenth.30 It is true that more marriages with
Westerners were negotiated than were finally concluded,31 but this pat-
tern still means there was a lack of the permanent links between courts
that international marriages produced. The marriage between the
emperor Isaac Comnenus (1057–9) and Catherine, daughter of
a Bulgarian ruler, is no exception because it took place long before
anyone expected him to become emperor, and, by the time he did,
Bulgaria had long ceased to be an independent state.32 After his reign,
however, the pattern began to change, with marriages such as that
between Michael VII Doukas and the Georgian princess Martha/Maria,
while, from the time of the marriage of John Comnenus, heir to the
imperial throne, and a Hungarian princess in the first decade of the
twelfth century, down to the extinction of the empire in 1453, foreign
brides, mainly from Latin Christendom, formed a majority of the
Byzantine empresses.33 The dramatic reorientation of the Byzantine
political situation from the late eleventh century is thus reflected in
imperial marriage patterns, as the large and autonomous empire of the
earlier period was transformed into the much smaller state of the later
Middle Ages, with its multiple connections, good and bad, with the West.
Marriages between eastern (Greek, Orthodox) and western (Latin,
Catholic) Christians were originally simply marriages between partners
of different cultures, but, as the theological temperature became heated
and political and military relations more confrontational, culminating in
the Latin conquest of Constantinople in 1204, such marriages might
indeed be considered ‘mixed marriages’. Innocent III, the pope at the
time of the capture of the Byzantine capital, certainly expressed himself
as if he thought so. He was considering the complicated case of Margaret,
daughter of the king of Hungary, who married the Byzantine emperor
Isaac II in 1185 when she was about ten. She took the Greek name Maria
and was brought up following Byzantine customs. After the death of Isaac
and the conquest of Constantinople, she married again, this time one of

17
 PART I: THE LIFE CYCLE

the Latin conquerors, Boniface of Montferrat. This marriage was carried

out according to Latin rites, but, according to the pope, Margaret-Maria
‘nevertheless shrank from returning to Latin ways so immediately, as
a too impudent champion of Greek custom’. Eventually, under pressure
from both her husband and the papal legate, she ‘accepted a Latin
blessing and received the body of Christ, consecrated according to
Latin traditions’. Pope Innocent wrote to congratulate her and took
her under his protection.34 In this case, some very palpable signs were
being read as markers of identity and allegiance: the use of leavened or
unleavened bread for the Eucharist, the language of ritual. Royal brides
had to decide.
Although it was not a very common practice, there were dynastic
marriages that crossed the boundary between the Christian and the
Muslim world. These were almost entirely between Muslim male rulers
and Christian princesses, for, while the Koran explicitly allowed a Muslim
man to marry a Christian or Jewish woman, Muslim societies prohibited
and penalized sexual relations between Muslim women and Christian or
Jewish men.35 An example is found in Iberia very soon after the Muslim
conquest, for both Christian and Muslim sources report that ‘Abd al-
‘Aziz, the Arab governor 714–16, married the widow of the last Christian
king of Visigothic Spain. She encouraged his separatist ambitions, which
led to his downfall.36 By the later eighth century, such unions were so
common that, when Pope Hadrian I (772–95) wrote a long letter to the
Spanish bishops, it was specifically the practice of Christian families
giving their daughters in marriage to Muslims that he condemned.37
Some of these marriages represented political dealings at a high level.
For instance, a Christian chronicler reporting the revolt of a Berber
leader in north-east Spain in the early 730s describes a marriage alliance
he had made earlier with the duke of Aquitaine: ‘A duke of the Franks
named Eudo had long ago given his daughter to him in marriage, for the
sake of alliance and to put off the attacks of the Arabs.’38 Occasionally
there were marriages between members of powerful Muslim clans and
aristocratic or royal women from Christian Spain during the ninth and
tenth centuries.39 An Arabic source which describes the fifty-six raids
undertaken by the great Muslim general al-Mansur records, of the six-
teenth raid, that he forced the Christian king (probably Sancho II of

18
 CHOOSING A BRIDE

Navarre) to make an agreement and give al-Mansur his daughter in

marriage.40 Such marriages were, however, rare, and ceased completely
after the eleventh century when the power balance between Christian
and Muslim states in the Iberian peninsula began to tilt in favour of the
former.
An exception to the pattern ‘Muslim male–Christian female’ is found
in the case of Zaida, wife or mistress of Alfonso VI of Leon and Castile.
She later became a legendary figure, but there seems no doubt that she
was real, and probably to be identified as the widow of al-Fath al Ma’mun,
son of the ruler of Seville. In 1091 Seville was conquered by the
Almoravids, invading from Morocco, and al-Fath al-Ma’mun was killed.
It was probably at this point that Zaida (the name is simply the Arabic for
‘Lady’) sought refuge with Alfonso and became his mistress and perhaps
his wife. Zaida is reported to have converted to Christianity and borne
a son, Sancho (see below, p. 69).41
Eastern Orthodox Christians had faced the pressure of the Muslim
world since its creation in the seventh century, and that pressure
increased as the Mongols and Turks, peoples who both eventually con-
verted to Islam, expanded their territories in the later Middle Ages.
Warfare was one reaction, but diplomacy was another, along with
its tool, the dynastic marriage. The Byzantine emperor Michael VIII
(1258–82) gave illegitimate daughters in marriage to the Mongol ruler
of Persia (the Ilkhan) and to the khan of the Golden Horde (in southern
Russia), while between 1297 and 1461 at least thirty-four Byzantine and
Serbian princesses married Mongol or Turkish rulers.42 When the
Muslim traveller Ibn Battuta visited the court of the Mongol khan
Uzbeg, ruler of the Golden Horde from 1313 to 1341, he was entertained
by one of the khan’s wives, who turned out to be a daughter of the
Byzantine emperor. She was pregnant and received permission to return
to Constantinople for the birth. Ibn Battuta travelled in her entourage
and remarked that, as soon as she was in Greek territory again, she
abandoned Islamic religious practice and commenced drinking wine
and eating pork.43 Both of the rival Byzantine emperors of the mid-
fourteenth century, John VI Cantacuzenus (1341–54) and John
V Palaeologus (1341–91), married their daughters to Ottoman rulers,
in the pursuit of Turkish military support. In 1346 Theodora, daughter of

19
 PART I: THE LIFE CYCLE

John VI, married the Ottoman ruler Orhan, who sent thirty ships and
a troop of cavalry to escort her from Greek to Turkish territory, and in the
following year John entertained Theodora and Orhan’s four adult sons
(by other wives) on a summer visit to Byzantium.44
Dynastic marriages between Muslim and Christian states were almost
entirely of one kind, with Christian princesses coming from countries
adjacent to, and often subordinate to, powerful Islamic realms, such as
those of al-Andalus in the earlier Middle Ages, or those of the Mongols
and the Turks in the later Middle Ages. The Muslim ruler, not bound to
having only one wife and allowed by the Koran to take a Christian wife,
could easily add one as an attribute of prestige and without regarding the
marriage as an alliance of equals. As an early Islamic authority put it, ‘Our
men are above their women, but their men are not to be above our
women.’45
When a royal bride passed from the Christian to the Muslim world she
would be surrounded by a different religion and culture. Passage from
Latin to Greek Christian society, or vice-versa, was not so drastic a voyage
but still involved adopting or adapting to unfamiliar language, religious
practice and social habits. Within Latin Christendom itself, some courts
exchanged brides more regularly than others, and these patterns might
change over time. The political and cultural geography of medieval
Europe is, in part, constituted by who gave brides to whom. For example,
the position of Bohemia and Moravia between eastern and western
Europe is reflected in the marriage choices of the ruling dynasty, the
Premyslids: most of the wives of the male members were from German
princely houses, sometimes including the highest, as in the case of the
wife of Wenceslas I, who was daughter of the German Hohenstaufen
king, Philip of Swabia, or the first wife of Wenceslas II, who was the
daughter of Rudolf of Habsburg, another German king, but there was
also considerable intermarriage with the ruling dynasties of Hungary and
Poland, links which in the last days of the dynasty even led to Premyslid
rule in those lands. On occasion, too, the Russian princely houses sup-
plied wives, such as Cunigunda, second wife of Premysl Otakar II, who
was the daughter of a Russian prince of the house of Chernigov and
a Hungarian princess. Premysl Otakar combined the introduction of his
new wife to Prague at Christmas 1261 with his regal coronation. The

20
 CHOOSING A BRIDE

archbishop of Mainz (the metropolitan of the diocese of Prague) offi-

ciated, in the presence of the two bishops of the Premyslid lands, plus the
bishop of Passau and two bishops from Prussia. Secular dignities present
included the margrave of Brandenburg and his family, Polish dukes and
the great men of Bohemia.46 With its Rhineland pontiff, its German,
Czech and Polish princes and its half-Russian, half-Hungarian bride, this
gathering is a good example of the way Bohemia and Moravia acted as
a literal point of contact between west and east, epitomized in the pattern
of its royal brides.
This circulation of women could produce unusual links and
connections. Adela, daughter of Robert the Frisian, count of Flanders
(1071–93), was married first to Canute IV (or II), king of Denmark, but,
after his murder in 1086, she fled back to Flanders with her young son
Charles; subsequently, in 1092, she married again to Roger Borsa, duke
of Apulia and Calabria, and bore him a son, William. William succeeded
his father in 1111, while, in Flanders, after the death of his cousin in
1119, Charles inherited the county. This is how it happened that in 1120
two rulers of territories a thousand miles apart, Apulia and Flanders,
were half-brothers.47
Rulers with several daughters might choose not to keep them at home,
like Charlemagne, but to send them out to foreign courts, creating
multiple ties and connections. Four daughters of Edward the Elder,
king of Wessex (899–924), went overseas as brides in this way, the first
of them, Eadgifu, between 916 and 919, to marry Charles the Simple,
king of the West Franks. The policy continued after King Edward’s death
under his son Æthelstan, brother or half-brother of these royal women.
During the early part of Æthelstan’s reign daughters of King Edward
married Hugh the Great, the most powerful noble in the kingdom of the
West Franks and ancestor of the dynasty later called Capetian; Otto, later
to be the emperor Otto I; and the brother of the king of Burgundy.48 In
the 930s, therefore, Anglo-Saxon royal sisters were prominent at royal or
ducal courts in three continental kingdoms. This has been called ‘the
high point in cross-Channel royal links in the early middle ages as
a whole’.49
A yet wider internationalism is expressed in the marriages of the three
daughters of Henry II (1154–89), first of the Angevin dynasty to rule

21
 PART I: THE LIFE CYCLE

England. The oldest, Matilda, married Henry the Lion, duke of Saxony, at
the age of eleven, while her younger sisters, Eleanor and Joanna, married
the king of Castile and the king of Sicily respectively. Contemporaries were
struck by these wide geographical vistas and exalted prospects. The three
daughters were ‘three bright beams that illuminated three different and
opposite parts of Europe’.50 The chronicler Ralph de Diceto, dean of St
Paul’s, showed a touching concern with the fate of these tender girls sent
out to foreign parts to fulfil their dynastic duties. He considered that they
could seek consolation from the example of their grandmother Matilda,
Henry II’s mother, who had herself been wed to a German emperor at the
age of eleven.

The stony barbarity of the Saxons, the doubtful conflict of the Spaniards
with the Hagarenes (i.e. the Muslims) and the wild tyranny of the Sicilians
could have induced continual horror in the daughters of the king of
England, dwelling among these peoples so far from England in diet,
clothing, behaviour and location. But the nobility of their grandmother,
the empress Matilda, and the manly heart in her female body had shown
beforehand to her granddaughters the paths of endurance . . . to be
imitated.51

This dynastic internationalism of the Angevin world, manifested in the

ties binding ruling families in different parts of the Latin West, had some
long-term political consequences. As a result of the first of these mar-
riages, between Matilda and Henry the Lion, a long-lasting alliance was
established between the English royal house and Henry’s family, the
Welfs. When Henry the Lion was forced into exile by the emperor
Frederick Barbarossa, he sought refuge with Henry II and spent long
periods with him in England and France. One of his sons was born in
Winchester. After the death of Henry II, his son Richard the Lionheart
proved as strong an ally. Bonds with a sister’s son were traditionally
important in the Germanic world, and Richard favoured his young
nephews, Matilda’s children, especially Otto, whom he made count of
Poitou and for whom he sought the succession to the Scottish Crown.
Under Richard’s successor, John, the alliance with Otto, now elected
Holy Roman Emperor, was a cornerstone of the English king’s policy.
Only after the crushing defeat of Otto and his English allies at the Battle

22
 CHOOSING A BRIDE

of Bouvines in 1214 did the connection between the two families

weaken.52
Eleanor’s marriage to Alfonso VIII of Castile also had important
results. Alfonso claimed the marriage deal had been sealed with the
promise of Gascony, perhaps with the proviso that the grant would only
take effect when its duchess, Eleanor’s mother and namesake, Eleanor
of Aquitaine, died.53 This happened in 1204, and Alfonso soon occu-
pied most of Gascony. It required considerable effort to eject him.54
The kings of Castile did not finally relinquish all claims to Gascony until
1254, claims that were described at that time, diplomatically, as arising
‘by reason of the grant that the lord Henry, former king of England,
made, or is said to have made’.55 Another political consequence of this
marriage arose through one of the children it produced. Blanche,
daughter of Eleanor and Alfonso, married Louis, the son of Philip
Augustus, king of France, and when Louis was offered the English
throne by rebel barons in 1216, he used this connection to support
his claim. John, king of England, he said, had forfeited his rights by his
treachery against his brother, Richard the Lionheart, so that, on
Richard’s death,

the right to the kingdom of England devolved upon the queen of Castile
and her heirs, since she was the sole survivor of his brothers and sisters,
except for this John. However, she and her heirs freely granted their right
in the kingdom to us and to her daughter, whom we have as wife.56

Being married to a granddaughter of Henry II was not enough to win

Louis the English Crown but it was a card worth playing.
The third of these Angevin marriages, that of Joanna and the king of
Sicily, also involved continued far-flung political and military activity.
Joanna’s husband, King William, died in 1189 and the throne was taken
by an illegitimate relative, Tancred. When, in the following year, Richard
the Lionheart arrived in Sicily on his way to the crusade, he found his
sister in an unhappy position. Tancred had refused to give her the
widow’s dower that she was owed and kept her in custody. The presence
of the famous military hero as his sister’s champion soon induced
Tancred to release Joanna and enter into negotiations about her
dower. This was settled at 20,000 ounces of gold. When Richard sailed

23
 PART I: THE LIFE CYCLE

on to the Holy Land in the following spring, he took his sister, and the
gold, with him.57
In these, often unpredictable, ways, the ambitious marriages that Henry
II had negotiated for his daughters in the 1160s and 1170s shaped the
politics of Europe for generations: the claims of the kings of Castile to
Gascony and the claims of the French prince Louis to the English Crown,
the alliance of Plantagenet and Welf that marked the politics of England,
France and Germany throughout the late twelfth and early thirteenth
centuries, and the unexpected funding of Richard the Lionheart’s crusade
partly from the gold of Sicily, all were consequences of those marriages.
Sometimes the advantages that a foreign marriage brought were
immediate and tangible. For instance, in 1428, when the French king,
Charles VII, arranged the marriage of his son and heir with Margaret,
daughter of James I of Scotland, the young fiancée crossed to France with
six thousand Scottish warriors, a useful reinforcement for the French in
the Hundred Years War.58 Dowries could be sizable, either in cash or
land. One of the more extensive territorial acquisitions that came as part
of a marriage arrangement between two royal families was the incorpora-
tion of the islands of Orkney and Shetland into the kingdom of Scotland.
The islands had been ruled by the kings of Norway since the tenth
century but in 1468 Christian, king of Norway (also at this time king of
Denmark), promised a dowry of 60,000 Rhenish florins with his daughter
Margaret on her marriage to James III of Scotland. Of this, 10,000 was to
be paid in cash, and Orkney was handed over to the king of Scots as
a guarantee that the remaining 50,000 would be paid. The following year,
since Christian was unable to raise the 10,000 florins, he also handed over
Shetland as a guarantee for this. The dowry was never paid; the islands
never returned to Norwegian rule and became an integral part of the
kingdom of Scots.59
The concrete benefits of marriage alliances with distant courts could
be valuable over a long term and in sometimes unforeseen ways, as was
demonstrated when the German ruler Conrad III came to
Constantinople en route to the Second Crusade, and encountered
a Byzantine emperor who was his brother-in-law and who treated him
with especial consideration:

24
 CHOOSING A BRIDE

For there was a bond between them, since their wives were sisters,
daughters of Berengar the Older, count of Sulzbach, a great and
outstanding ruler, most powerful in the kingdom of the Germans:
because of this he was overflowing with greater favour towards him and,
especially because of the empress’ requests, felt obliged to pour out more
plentiful generosity for him and his men.60

Later, after Conrad’s return to Germany, he maintained the close link

with the Byzantine empress, writing directly to her about the political
situation and proposing further marriage alliances between the two
dynasties. His young son also wrote enthusiastically to his aunt in
Constantinople, boasting to her of his first victory over enemy forces.61
The advantages that foreign queens brought could include providing
a safe haven in times of crisis. In the 920s, for example, Charles the
Simple, king of the West Franks, suffered the indignities of dispossession
and imprisonment on more than one occasion, and died in captivity in
929. His young son Louis, whose mother was the English princess
Eadgifu, ‘fearing to become entangled himself in the storms that had
been so disastrous for his father, betook himself to the Anglo-Saxons,
invited there thanks to the family connections of his mother’.62 Louis
stayed in England until 936, when circumstances allowed him to return to
France as king. His years in the safety of his mother’s homeland are
evoked by his nickname, ‘Louis d’Outremer’ – ‘Louis from across the
sea’.63 His case is a good illustration of something said centuries later by
Christine de Pisan, pointing out the advantages of such marriages: ‘the
marriage alliances of the beautiful ladies of the blood royal, through
which are born new relatives in foreign countries and bonds with distant
nations’.64
But marriages with foreign princesses might have disadvantages too.
Political circumstances might change, rendering the link with the
foreign court less relevant or even awkward. And if a king wished to
get rid of his wife, her powerful royal relatives might well object. As is
well known, one of the reasons Henry VIII of England had such
difficulty in divorcing his first wife, Catherine of Aragon, stemmed
from the fact that she was the aunt of the Holy Roman Emperor
Charles V, the most powerful ruler in Europe and one with leverage

25
 PART I: THE LIFE CYCLE

over the pope. A similar example of a foreign sovereign championing

a wronged queen (although not in this case one rejected because she
had not borne children) occurred in the late twelfth century, when
Philip Augustus of France repudiated his second wife, Ingeborg of
Denmark (see also below, pp. 46–8). She had the backing of her
royal brother, Canute IV, who could fund missions to the pope to
plead her case, and himself wrote to the pope and the cardinals, urging
the imposition on France of an interdict (the suspension of all eccle-
siastical services). ‘It has always seemed right to us to submit our necks
to the yoke of obedience to the Roman Church’, Canute wrote to Pope
Celestine III in 1196, ‘and only if the Roman Church first failed us will
we have any wish to separate from her’, a nicely phrased threat.65 As
soon as Celestine’s successor, Innocent III, was elected pope in 1198,
Canute’s envoys were on their way to the papal court, complaining
‘about Philip, king of France, who had unjustly abandoned his wife, his
(Canute’s) sister, and married another woman in her place’. Innocent
sent a legate to threaten the interdict.66 An interdict was eventually
imposed upon France in 1200 and only lifted when Philip Augustus
made a partial submission. After the death of Canute IV in 1202, his
brother and successor, Valdemar II, continued support for their sister,
until, in 1213, the French king agreed to at least a formal reconciliation
with his Danish queen. Ingeborg was grateful for the help she had
received from her royal brothers. When, many years later, in 1225, King
Valdemar was captured and imprisoned by his north German enemies,
a considerable portion of his ransom was sent from France by his
sister.67 If Ingeborg had not been a princess, perhaps Philip Augustus
would have been able to get rid of her with less trouble.

Homesick Queens
Foreign brides were not only powerful vehicles of dynastic policy, they
were also teenage girls sent into strange worlds, and one of the problems
they faced was homesickness. In the late sixth century, as the Visigothic
princess Galswintha was about to be sent north to be the bride of
a Frankish king, the sympathetic poet Venantius Fortunatus pictured
her reluctance, as she clung to her mother and lamented her fate:

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I am going as a stranger in those lands and I am apprehensive about what

I should learn first: the people, their character, their customs, the towns,
the countryside, the woodlands? Whom, I beg, shall I find, as a newcomer
in foreign lands, where no fellow countryman, no friend, no relative comes
to me?68

The Flemish monk Goscelin, writing around 1080, also drew a sad picture
of these young girls destined for foreign courts:

The daughters of kings and rulers are brought up in luxury from the time
they are babies and know nothing except the glory and happiness of their
native land, but then they are sent in marriage to other countries and
foreign kingdoms and must learn barbarous customs and unfamiliar
languages, and serve harsh lords and observe laws that are repugnant to
nature.69

These ‘barbarous customs and unfamiliar languages’ had to be learned,

and marriage negotiations often provided for that. When a marriage was
proposed between the Byzantine emperor Constantine VI and Rotrud
(Erythro to the Greeks), daughter of Charlemagne, the eunuch Elissaios,
a notary, was sent ‘to teach her the letters and language of the Greeks and
educate her in the customs of the empire of the Romans’.70 Likewise, in
the following century, when a marriage was envisaged between Hadwig or
Hedwig, niece of Otto I, and a member of the Byzantine imperial family,
eunuchs were sent to Germany to teach her Greek.71 Neither of these
planned marriages in fact took place, but they illustrate the general
principle that some kind of cultural training was considered necessary
for high-born brides being sent into foreign courts where the language
and customs were alien. Training on the job was also possible, so brides
might also be sent out in the expectation that they would acquire the new
tongue and new culture in their future homeland. Matilda, daughter of
Henry I of England, was sent to Germany as a bride for the emperor
Henry V when she was aged eight. She was betrothed at Easter 1110 and
crowned queen on 25 July the same year. The archbishop of Cologne,
who had presided at her coronation, then ‘commanded that the conse-
crated queen should be carefully brought up until a suitable time came
for her marriage, and, while she was being brought up, she should learn

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the language and behave according to German ways.’72 She married the
emperor in 1114, just before her twelfth birthday.
Foreign brides might not only have to learn new languages but also
become reconciled to a new name. Especially when women moved from
areas of one language family to another, the host court might expect
them to drop their barbarous names and adopt something more
familiar.73 When the daughter of Hugh of Arles, king of Italy (926–47),
married Romanos, son of the Byzantine emperor, she had to abandon
the Germanic aristocratic name of Berta, customary among the Frankish
ruling class to which she belonged, and assume that of Eudokia,
a favourite name of the Byzantine imperial family.74 Likewise, in the
middle of the twelfth century, when Berta of Sulzbach, sister-in-law of
King Conrad III of Germany, married Manuel Comnenus, son of the
Byzantine emperor, she became Irene, another traditional imperial
name.75 However, Byzantine commentators noticed that this German
noblewoman failed to adapt completely to Greek customs, remarking
especially on the fact that she did not use eye-liner.76 Similar condescen-
sion about names can be found elsewhere. Gunhilda, daughter of Canute
the Great, had to adopt a more acceptable German name form when she
married the heir to the German throne, Henry (later Henry III), in 1036:
‘the queen, Gunhilda by name, came to King Henry, son of the emperor,
and she received the royal crown there on the feast day of the apostles
(29 June) and at the blessing changed her name and was called
Cunigunda.’77 Gunhilda was an old royal name in Scandinavia,
Cunigunda a prestigious name among the German aristocracy and roy-
alty. To modern ears they might seem not dissimilar, but a contemporary
at the time complained of the difficulty he had tracing Gunhilda/
Cunigunda’s descent because of ‘the barbarity of Danish and
Norwegian names’.78 A similar disdainful tone can be heard at the end
of the eleventh century, after the Anglo-Scottish princess Edith
(Eadgyth) married the Norman king Henry I. She and the king were
mocked by hostile aristocrats as ‘Godric’ and ‘Godgiva’, common English
names that obviously sounded barbaric or rustic to aristocratic Norman
ears. This helps explain why she adopted the common Norman name
Matilda instead.79

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We sometimes get pictures of these foreign queens pining in their new

homes. When the twelve-year-old Blanche of Castile arrived in Paris in
1200 to marry the heir to the French throne, she had, the chronicler
Joinville says, ‘neither relatives nor friends in the whole kingdom of
France’; he repeatedly refers to her as ‘a (or the) foreign woman
(femme estrange)’.80 Soon after her marriage, the saintly bishop of
Lincoln paid her a visit, at the request of her new husband, and ‘cheered
her up’ (exhilarare is the verb).81 Perhaps Blanche, coming from the land
where the lemons grow, missed the Mediterranean fruit, as her great-
niece Eleanor of Castile certainly did later in the century. In 1289, thirty-
five years after her marriage to Edward I of England, Eleanor was still
having pomegranates, lemons, oranges and olive oil purchased at
Portsmouth from the ships coming from her native Spain.82

Foreign Ways
The strange and glamorous fruits that Eleanor of Castile took pains to have
delivered to her illustrate the way that foreign queens might bring foreign
ways with them. Byzantine brides coming to western European courts had
a reputation, at least among the more austere observers, of being preten-
tiously refined. For instance, the reformer Peter Damian, writing in 1059
or 1060, criticised the Byzantine wife of a doge of Venice for being so
delicate as to use a fork for eating: ‘She did not touch her food with her
fingers, but her meals were cut into small pieces by eunuchs, and she took
these to her mouth daintily, with little golden two-pronged forks.’ But,
Peter is pleased to add, God was so angry with her fancy affectations that he
inflicted upon her a terrible disease that caused her to rot and stink,
before finally dying.83 At almost the same time that Peter Damian was
writing, another monk recorded a vision of the empress Theophanu,
a great Byzantine lady who had been the wife of Otto II (973–83) and
regent for her son Otto III. After her death Theophanu had appeared to
a nun and explained that she was suffering torments in the afterlife,

Because I was the first to bring to the provinces of Germany and France,
where they were hitherto unknown, superfluous and luxurious ornaments
for women, such as the Greeks wear, and, conforming to these rather than

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to human nature, I went around wearing this harmful attire and led other
women to sin by desiring similar things.84

This is characteristic of foreign brides. They brought foreign culture with

them and this was not always welcomed. Two other cases from the
eleventh century illustrate the commotion that young foreign brides,
with their foreign ways, could cause in the royal courts to which they
came.
When King Robert of France married a lady from Provence in 1004 or
1005 (Provence at that time was not part of France), the Burgundian
monk and chronicler Ralph Glaber responded fiercely to the southern
influences she brought with her to the royal court. ‘Because of her’, he
wrote, southerners flocked north:

empty-headed men, given over to levity, with perverted manners and

costume, disordered in their weapons and their horse-trappings, with
their hair shaved from the middle of their head, beardless like actors,
shameful in their boots and leggings, completely lacking any bond of
loyalty or peace.85

Not all of this is clearly visualizable, but the strangeness of the new-
comers’ clothes and hair-styles is obviously objectionable and linked to
their moral failings. Worst of all, says Ralph, these new vanities were
contagious, and soon the people of northern France and Burgundy
became just as bad as the immigrants from the south. He was so incensed
by this ‘wicked behaviour’ that he burst into verse: ‘This life now creates
tyrants with perverted bodies, men with short clothes, improper, lacking
the bond of peace. Because of a woman’s counsel, the state is neglected
and groans.’86 It is ironic that this southern hair-style, beardless and with
the lower part of the head shaven, is precisely that shown on the Normans
in the Bayeux Tapestry. They had presumably picked up the style without
any corresponding effeminacy.
In 1043, almost forty years after the marriage of Robert of France,
a similar monastic uproar surrounded the proposed marriage of Henry
III of Germany to a lady from Aquitaine, Agnes. The objection in the first
instance was not her southern French roots but the fact that she and
Henry were too closely related.87 Abbot Siegfried of Gorze spelled out the

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relationship in detail in a long letter, but then, at the close of the letter,
turned to a denunciation of ‘the shameful custom of French follies’.
These included such novelties as shaving the beard and wearing
obscenely short clothes, two fashions also denounced by Ralph Glaber.
‘The honour of the kingdom’, Abbot Siegfried lamented, ‘which in the
time of earlier emperors flourished most properly in such matters as
clothing and deportment, and weapons and riding too, is neglected in
our days.’88 Like Ralph Glaber, he was particularly worried at the way
these foreign customs had been adopted by his own people, and even
won favour at court. He is not explicit that the disreputable French
customs are linked to the French bride, but the juxtaposition suggests
a thought association at the least.
In these two cases, the new bride from the south is associated with the
importation of novelties, obscenities and follies that are corrupting the
author’s own people. Both Ralph Glaber and Siegfried of Gorze combine
the gloomy moralism of the Benedictine monk with a lament for the
good old days and a strong dash of hostility to foreigners. The court was
always more cosmopolitan than the society around it, and the foreign
marriage, with the presence of foreign queens and their followers, was
one of the reasons for that disjuncture.
Ralph Glaber and Siegfried of Gorze just grumbled, but hostility to
foreign queens could take a crueller form. One of the most extreme cases
concerns Gertrude of Meran, the German wife of Andrew II of Hungary,
a king who ascended the throne in 1205. According to one source, when
the king had some difficulty in conquering an enemy castle, the queen
suggested, perhaps undiplomatically, that he should raise an army from
the Germans who had settled in Hungary. They, our German source says,
soon captured the place, and were rewarded with gifts and honours,
stirring up resentment amongst the native Hungarians, who plotted to
kill the king. The queen was informed of this and encouraged her
husband to flee, herself staying behind, confident that the attackers
would spare her, ‘being of the female sex’. But she had miscalculated.
The conspirators broke into the royal camp, wounded her, pushed her
down, and when she extended her hands in supplication, they cut them
off. They finished the job with their lances and pikes.89

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Inspection of the Bride

Whether the bride came from abroad or not, care and attention had to be
devoted to the process of selection. One of the more striking methods of
finding a bride is recorded in the Byzantine empire in the late eighth and
ninth centuries. This was the bride-show, where beautiful virgins were
sought out from every part of the empire and one was then selected to
marry the emperor or the emperor’s son.90 A particularly detailed
account of one such bride-show is found in the Life of St Philaretos.91 It
occurs there because Philaretos’ granddaughter was the victor, if that is
the right word, in this beauty contest (Philaretos was that unusual kind of
saint, a married lay man). The Life tells how the empress Irene sent out
emissaries to find a bride for her son Constantine VI. They carried three
things: an imperial measure, to check the height of candidates, something
called a lauraton, which has been interpreted as either an ideal portrait or
a device for measuring girls’ waists,92 and a shoe (presumably a glass
slipper was not available). Coming to Philaretos’ home town in
Paphlagonia, on the Black Sea, they encountered his beautiful grand-
daughter Maria. Rather than making a decision immediately, they took
her, her two sisters, and ten other girls back to Constantinople for jud-
ging, working on the principle that selection should be made from a field
of candidates. Maria was then chosen as the bride of Constantine VI.
An oddity about the Byzantine bride-show, apart from the custom
itself, is its chronology. Five instances are reported in the sources and
all date to the century between 788, when Maria married Constantine VI,
and 882, the date of the marriage of Leo VI and Theophano Martinakia.
There are none before or after. No obvious explanation for this pattern
springs to mind. And, making matters worse, many scholars think these
accounts should be regarded more as fairy stories than accurate historical
narratives. Historians are of course a dull lot and shy away from the exotic
and colourful, but these sceptics may have a case, pointing to the possible
influence of literary parallels from other times and places, especially the
biblical story of Queen Esther, who was selected by the king in this way,
after ‘all the fair young virgins’ had been gathered together. On the other
hand, perhaps the story of Esther inspired the practice and, in any case,
bride-shows are attested in reality in some societies, notably in Early

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Modern Muscovy, where there are seventeen documented and five

probable cases in the period 1505–1689.93
But, whether the Byzantine bride-shows correspond to any reality or
are simply the fruit of the heightened imagination of Greek monks, it
really was necessary to think carefully about the choice of bride for a ruler
or heir, and this might in fact involve a viewing. This seems to have been
the case with the Frankish emperor Louis the Pious in 818, who married
after ‘considering the daughters of his chief men, who were brought
from far and wide’.94 The inspection could involve a demanding physical
scrutiny. In one of the Byzantine bride-shows a decision was made
between three finalists after the empress, the future mother-in-law, had
inspected them in the bath.95 The envoy sent to Aragon in 1322 to
examine the king’s daughter Violante, who was under consideration as
a bride for Charles IV of France, was instructed ‘to see her naked breast’,
since this would indicate whether she were fit to bear children, ‘which the
king much desires’.96 Her capacity as breeding stock did not apparently
qualify her to be queen of France, since Charles chose instead Mary of
Luxemburg, despite the report that she was cross-eyed.97 When a later
king of France, Charles VIII (1483–98), was debating whether to marry
Anne, the fourteen-year-old duchess of Brittany, he sent to her
a committee of two dukes, a duchess and one of his most trusted Scots
Guards, the last being ‘someone employed very often in this kind of
business’, who reported back that ‘they have seen her naked and indeed
she limps a little’.98 The prospect of acquiring Brittany through marriage
to Anne was enough, however, to outweigh this little impediment.
Because a royal marriage was seen as a bond between families as much
as a union between two individuals, it sometimes did not matter much
who exactly was the bride. The English king Æthelstan sent two of his
sisters to Germany so that Otto, the heir to the throne, ‘might choose for
himself in marriage whichever of them pleased him’.99 He chose Edith
(Eadgyth). And this English princess was eventually buried in Magdeburg
Cathedral, where, remarkably, her tomb was found and opened in 2008,
and her bones and teeth were subjected to scientific analysis, showing
that she had indeed grown up in the chalk downlands of Wessex.100 In
1442, the twenty-year-old Henry VI of England was considering marriage
with one of the three daughters of the count of Armagnac, and in a letter

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to his envoys he underlined the condition ‘that we may have choice’.101

In 1481 an agreement was drawn up between Edward IV of England and
the duke of Brittany. Edward’s son, the Prince of Wales, was to marry the
infant daughter of the duke as soon as she was twelve. However, if she
died before that age, he would marry her sister. Likewise, if the Prince of
Wales died, his place would be taken by his younger brother.102 These
kinds of replaceable siblings clearly demonstrate that marriage in this
world was seen as a bond between dynasties, not individuals.
By the late Middle Ages, it was not unusual for portraits of the pro-
spective bride to be part of the negotiations.103 At this period they might
very well be accurate likenesses. But there are much earlier references to
such pictures of prospective brides. In the middle of the tenth century
a ‘eunuch painter’ was sent from Constantinople to Germany in order to
produce a painting of the high-born Hadwig, who was espoused to
a member of the Byzantine imperial family.104 And the belief that realis-
tic likenesses were possible was certainly expressed long centuries before
oil painting and perspective began to shape Western perceptions of
pictorial realism (see below, p. 376).

Marriage to the Royal Widow

A very distinct type of dynastic marriage was marriage to the previous
ruler’s widow. Examples from the sixth century are fairly numerous. In
the Visigothic kingdom of Toledo, Goswintha was successively wife of
King Athanagild (555–67) and King Leovigild (568–86).105 After the
death of Miro, king of the Suevi, a Germanic people ruling north-west
Spain, in 583, his son succeeded but was soon deposed by his brother-in-
law, Audica. Audica then married Miro’s widow – ‘he took the wife of his
father-in-law and obtained the kingdom’.106 During the course of his
fifty-year reign, the Frankish king Clothar (Lothar) I twice seized the
opportunity to unite with royal widows, who had, in both cases, been
wives of his own relatives. On the death of his brother Chlodomer in 524,
Clothar married his widow ‘without delay’, excluded Chlodomer’s sons
and took a large share of his kingdom.107 Thirty-one years later, in 555,
on the death of Theudebald, great-grandson of Clovis, Clothar, his great-
uncle, ‘received his kingdom and took his wife Waldrada to his bed’,

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although he gave her up after the clergy complained.108 Such marriages

could be interpreted as declarations of intent to rule, even if they did not
succeed. For example, after the assassination of King Sigebert in 575, his
widow Brunhild was quickly taken in marriage by the young Frankish
prince Merovech, Sigebert’s nephew. Merovech’s father was supposedly
upset at this breach of canon law but seems also to have suspected a plot
to dethrone him (‘he began to have his suspicions about his son
Merovech on account of this marriage with Brunhild’), and pursued
Merovech mercilessly.109
In the Lombard kingdom of Italy there are two cases of an interesting
variation on the theme, in that the royal widows were supposedly allowed
to choose their husband and hence the king. After the death of her
husband, King Authari, in 590, his widow Theodolinda ‘was so pleasing
to the Lombards that they allowed her to keep her royal status and
advised her to choose from all the Lombards the husband she wished,
such a man who could rule the kingdom successfully’. She decided upon
Agilulf, duke of Turin, and sent for him. When he respectfully kissed her
hand, she told him he should not be kissing her hand but her mouth.
They were soon married and in the following spring Agilulf was inaugu-
rated as the new king.110 A similar situation occurred again under
Theodolinda’s daughter, Gundeberga, who had married a later
Lombard king, Arioald. After his death, in 636, it was a condition of the
accession of the newly chosen king, Rothari, that he should abandon his
own wife and marry Gundeberga. Then ‘all the Lombards raised him to
the kingdom, through her (per ipsam)’.111 A story told of Gundeberga
recounts that she was falsely accused of plotting with Duke Tasso to kill
Arioald, marry Tasso and ‘raise him to the kingship’.112 Even though the
accusation was false, it demonstrates that among the Lombards marriage
to a widowed queen was a commonly imagined pathway to becoming
king.
A notable example of a conqueror marrying the widow of a defeated
rival occurred in 1017 when Canute of Denmark, after conquering
England, married Emma of Normandy, the widow of the vanquished
King Æthelred. The author of the Encomium Emmae, which was commis-
sioned by Emma after Canute’s death, gives an audaciously inaccurate
account of how this came about, turning the widow into a virgin:

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Nothing was now lacking to the king except a noble wife, and he ordered one
to be sought everywhere, so that, when she was found, he would take her in
legal marriage and make her partner in his rule. So, they ran about through
the kingdoms and cities, in search of a royal spouse, but it was with difficulty,
after seeking far and wide, they at last found one who was worthy . . . But she
said she would never be Canute’s wife unless he swore to her on oath that he
would never have the son of another wife rule after him, if it happened that
God gave her a son by him . . . The virgin’s words were acceptable to the king
and, once the oath had been sworn, the king’s will was acceptable to the
virgin, and in this way, thanks be to God, the lady Emma, most noble of
women, became the wife of that most powerful king, Canute.113

This picture of a supposedly free and unrestricted bride-search sits rather

uneasily with another comment that the author of the Encomium makes.
Writing of the violent struggle Canute had to undertake in 1016, he says,
‘perhaps the war would scarcely or never have ended if he had not at last
received this most noble queen in the bond of marriage’.114 Clearly the
significance of the link with Emma is that she was the widow of Canute’s
predecessor, although the author never says so. The German chronicler
Adam of Bremen, writing a little later, put it all more succinctly: ‘Canute
took Æthelred’s kingdom, and his wife’.115
There are also examples of this practice from Byzantium. Nicephorus
Phocas (963–9) married Theophano, the widow of his predecessor
Romanos II. Objections were raised to this marriage, not because
Nicephorus was marrying his predecessor’s widow, but because he had
supposedly acted as godfather to their children, hence creating a tie of
spiritual kinship that would make the marriage technically incestuous.116
In 1183, Andronicus Comnenus, who had forced his young cousin Alexius
II to accept him as co-emperor, had him murdered, and then married his
widow, Agnes-Anna, the twelve-year-old daughter of the king of France.
Andronicus was in his sixties, with a string of sexual partners behind him as
well as a current mistress. Archbishop Eustathios of Thessalonica
expressed, or imagined, the feelings of the poor young bride:

she shrank from the union. Being high-minded and having experienced
a different kind of gentle loving, she loathed his roughness. Sometimes,

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they say, she would imagine the young man in her dreams and would cry
out ‘O Alexius!’ She alone knew what she suffered.117

An exceptional variation of the practice of marrying one’s predecessor’s

widow was marrying one’s predecessor’s widow when she was also one’s
own stepmother. This happened in the case of Æthelbald, king of Wessex
(858–60), who married Judith, his father’s widow, in 858. Judith was no
older than fifteen at this time, since there had been an age gap of at least
thirty years between her and Æthelwulf, Æthelbald’s father. The sense of
revulsion in the account of this event given by Bishop Asser, writing in the
reign of Æthelbald’s youngest brother and eventual successor, King
Alfred, may be political as well as moral, since Asser regarded
Æthelbald as divisive and unfilial:

After King Æthelwulf died, his son Æthelbald, against God’s prohibition
and the dignity of Christians, and also contrary to the custom of all pagans,
climbed into his father’s bed and married Judith, daughter of Charles,
king of the Franks, to the great scandal of all who heard of it.118

The situation was indeed ‘against God’s prohibition’, since

Deuteronomy 22: 30 declares tersely, ‘a man shall not take his father’s
wife (non accipiet homo uxorem patris)’. Asser then underlines the scandal
of the marriage by claiming that even pagans do not marry their step-
mother, in this following the lead of St Paul, who had described marriage
with one’s stepmother as ‘such fornication as is not even found among
the pagans’.119 But there is contrary evidence that this was a pagan
practice. Eadbald, king of Kent, married his father’s widow in 616, and
although Bede, commenting on this marriage, cited Paul’s words, one
version of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle saw it as a consequence of
Eadbald’s paganism: ‘he lived according to pagan custom, so that he
had his father’s widow as wife’.120 He certainly abandoned that wife when
he converted to Christianity.121 And one of the missionary questions
supposedly put to Pope Gregory the Great was whether it was allowed
to marry a stepmother, suggesting that it was a practice found among
pagan populations.122 Moreover, a penitential apparently from the
eighth-century Frisian mission field allowed those who married their
stepmothers to remain married to them if they had done this while still

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pagans.123 And it seemed to be a practice that required general legisla-

tion. A law of the Frankish king Childebert II of 596, twenty years before
the marriage of Eadbald and his stepmother, specified the death penalty
for those who married their father’s wife.124 In her reforming mood,
St Margaret, foreign-born queen of Scots in the late eleventh century,
demonstrated to her subjects ‘that marriage to a stepmother, and like-
wise marriage of a surviving brother to his dead brother’s wife, such as
had previously been practiced there, were totally execrable and to be
avoided by the faithful like death itself ’.125 The implication is that mar-
riage to a stepmother was customary rather than an occasional scandal.
The sixth-century historian Procopius tells a story about marriage to
a stepmother which, although highly unlikely to be true, throws some
light on thinking about such a match. It concerns Hermegisclus, king of
a Germanic people, the Varni. Hermegisclus has married the sister of
Theudebert, ruler of the Franks (a Frankish king of this name ruled
534–48); Radigis, his son by an earlier wife, is engaged to an Anglo-
Saxon princess. But Hermegisclus learns that he is dying, and he gives
the advice that Radigis should break off his engagement and, after his
father’s death, marry his widow, that is Radigis’ own stepmother. This is
his reasoning:

I think then, for the Varni, it will be more profitable to make a marriage
alliance with the Franks than with the islanders. For the people of Britain
are only able to have contact with you after a long time and with great
difficulty. The Varni and the Franks have between them just the waters of
the Rhine, so that as close neighbours to you, who have increased their
power a great deal, they are at hand to do good to you and to harm you, at
a time when they wish. They certainly will harm you, unless they are
checked by this marriage alliance.126

In fact, the Anglo-Saxon princess turns out to be a determined and bold

champion of her own interests, leads a fleet of 400 ships across the
Channel, captures the fiancé who has spurned her and, taking pity on
him, accepts him as her husband after Theudebert’s sister has been sent
home.
None of this is eye-witness reportage. The story does, however, give
one view of why marriage alliances with neighbouring peoples were

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important: such neighbours can help you and harm you, and a marriage
alliance might prevent the latter. Moreover, in these circumstances, it is
a reasonable ground for marrying your predecessor’s widow, even if she is
your stepmother.
Marriage with a predecessor’s widow was not only a feature of the early
Middle Ages. In the summer of 1350, when the young king of Castile,
Peter I, fell gravely ill, two parties formed around two possible claimants
to the throne if he should die, and it is significant that both of these
potential successors were advised to marry the queen mother, Maria,
widow of Peter’s father and predecessor Alfonso XI. In fact, Peter’s
recovery meant that such a marriage did not take place, but the common
advice given to the rival candidates shows how valuable marriage to
a predecessor’s widow appeared.127 After the death of Albert of
Habsburg, king of Hungary and Bohemia, in 1439, the Magyar nobles
offered the Hungarian Crown to the young king of Poland, Wladyslaw III,
and wanted to confirm this offer by a marriage between Wladyslaw and
Albert’s widow, Elizabeth. As Elizabeth was the daughter of Sigismund,
king of Hungary (1387–1437), she embodied legitimacy and hereditary
right, and could bring those things to Wladyslaw just as she had brought
them to Albert. She pretended to agree, but in fact was committed to
ensuring the rights of the child she bore in her body at the time (see
below, p. 58). Although this too is a case where the royal widow did not
marry her husband’s successor, the assumption of the Hungarians was
that this would have been desirable and appropriate.128 A few years later,
when Christian I was elected to succeed Christopher III as king of
Denmark by the Danish State Council in 1448, it was agreed that he
should marry Christopher’s widow, Dorothea of Brandenburg, which
he did the following year. The main motive for this was financial: at her
marriage to Christopher, Dorothea was given a huge dower in all three
Scandinavian kingdoms; if she left the kingdoms, she was due 45,000
Rhenish guilders in compensation for this dower.129
Later in the fifteenth century another case, a fairly complex one, arose
in Hungary. The princess Beatrice of Aragon had married Matthias
Corvinus, king of Hungary, and, on his death in 1490 without legitimate
children, the Hungarian nobles insisted that the new claimant to the
throne, Vladislav II, king of Bohemia, marry her. According to the queen

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herself, the nobles supposedly said, ‘that if the devil should happen to
tempt him to refuse to take our majesty as a wife’ then they would
abandon him and adhere just to her.130 Vladislav was elected king on
14 July 1490. By 8 August the gossip in the north Italian courts was that
‘the king of Bohemia has been elected king of Hungary and has taken the
queen as his wife’.131 The gossip may have been premature but Beatrice
claimed that she and Vladislav exchanged vows. He was very happy to take
her money to pay his troops but showed a worrying reluctance about the
marriage. Beatrice noticed that he did not refer to her as his wife in his
letters, and he made endless excuses about having a public nuptial
celebration. Eventually he told her that he acted this way ‘because of
a certain secret impediment’ that he could not reveal.132 This impedi-
ment seems to have been the fact that he was already married. The
resulting legal case dragged on, as such cases do, until the marriage of
Beatrice and Vladislav was annulled in 1500. Vladislav had got Hungary,
and Beatrice returned to her childhood home, where, in 1507, a year
before her death, she was signing herself ‘the most unhappy queen of
Hungary’.133 The case shows several things: the demand of the native
aristocracy that a new king would be required to marry the royal widow;
the widow’s own desire to hang on to power; and the ability of the new
king to worm his way out of the situation by, in the long run, disregarding
both.
Another remarkable case occurred at just this time in France, where
marriage with a predecessor’s widow was actually agreed years ahead of
time. When Anne, duchess of Brittany, married King Charles VIII in
1491, she finally brought the semi-independent duchy to the French
Crown, and Charles was determined that it would stay in royal hands.
Hence, the marriage contract specified that, if he should die before
Anne, and they had no children, Anne ‘shall not remarry, except to the
future king’.134 Charles did indeed die before Anne and she did indeed
marry his successor, his cousin Louis XII (1498–1515), although Louis
had to have his existing marriage annulled first. Brittany became a full
part of France. The motives here need no discussion.
The explanations that modern historians give of the practice of mar-
rying a predecessor’s widow range from level-headed political calculation
to the extremes of cultural symbolism. On the one hand, some see it as

40
Figure 2 Anne, Duchess of Brittany (1488–1514), who married the king of France on
condition that, if he died without children, she could remarry only his successor. This did
happen, thus ensuring Brittany remained incorporated into the kingdom of France.
Paris, BnF, lat. 9474 (Jean Bourdichon, Grandes Heures d’Anne de Bretagne), fol. 3.
 PART I: THE LIFE CYCLE

‘a vehicle on which claims to the royal succession could be carried to

a second husband’, or a way for the new king to strengthen his
kingship.135 It ‘served as a lever in the attainment of power’.136
A widowed queen could be ‘a vessel of royal power’.137 The new king
would acquire the queen’s treasure and followers and, especially in the
case of conquerors and usurpers, such a union might serve to legitimize
the new ruler. But other historians look for illumination from a quite
different source, Celtic or Germanic paganism. In early Irish mythology,
sovereignty was imagined as female, and accession to kingship as
a marriage between the king and this female power, in origin
a goddess: ‘Sacred union with the goddess of the land was seen to initiate
the fertility and prosperity of a sovereign’s reign.’138 The legendary Irish
Mebh, like the Lombard queens Theodolinda and Gundeberga, chose
her own husbands, who then became kings. Germanic myth can be
interpreted in the same way, as marriage between goddess and mortal
king: ‘As the northern ruler had once been the husband of [the goddess]
Freyja, the new king must possess the old queen who came to represent
that deity.’139
But, in addition to rational calculations, on the one hand, and echoes
of the Golden Bough, on the other, there might also be a rougher kind of
sexual appropriation involved. After Fáelán mac Murchado defeated and
killed his older brother Dúnchad, king of Leinster, in 728, ‘he took the
kingship of Leinster, and married Dúnchad’s wife’.140 In a similar style,
after Vladimir of Novgorod killed Rogvolod of Polotsk and his two sons
around 978, he married Rogvolod’s daughter, and he also fathered
a child on the widow of his half-brother Yaropolk after having arranged
his assassination.141 Following up a killing by sleeping with the daughter
or wife of the man you had killed could be a way of finishing the job,
taking his women as well as his land. As Adam of Bremen said of Canute
(above, p. 36), ‘he took Æthelred’s kingdom, and his wife’. The associa-
tion of taking the royal widow and violent seizure of power also comes out
very clearly in Hungary in 997, when the Hungarian ruler Duke Géza
died, and his son Stephen (later St Stephen) had to face the rival claims
of Duke Koppány: ‘Koppány wanted to join himself in an incestuous
marriage with the mother of St Stephen the king and kill St Stephen
and subject his duchy to his power’.142 The accusation that the marriage

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was ‘incestuous’ implies that Koppány was a relative of Géza’s but it is not
certain how. In any event, Stephen got Koppány first and had his quar-
tered body displayed in four cities of the kingdom.
Apart from such ‘incestuous’ marriages, there is some evidence that
marriage to a predecessor’s widow could be seen in itself as violation and
pollution. In 683 a council at Toledo, summoned by the Visigothic king
Ervig, issued a long and animated ruling, of which the following is
a section:

It is an appalling crime and a deed of very frequent wickedness, to seek the

royal bed when kings die leaving behind their wives, and to befoul it with
the horrific stains of pollution. For which Christian can bear it with
equanimity when the wife of a dead king is enjoyed afterwards in
another union, or is subjected to the lust of the following ruler? . . . No
one therefore will be permitted to marry a surviving queen, nor stain her
with filthy touches. This shall not be permitted to the following kings, nor
to any man.143

The tone here is not exactly rational. The belief is that, once wedded to
a king, a woman should not be touched by any other man. Under Ervig’s
successor, Egica (d. 702), the rule was strengthened by specifying, in
addition, that the king’s widow must enter a nunnery.144 Some men, like
Fáelán mac Murchado and Vladimir of Novgorod, clearly regarded such
a taboo as a challenge to be broken. Yet for others, like the Danish and
Hungarian nobles of the later Middle Ages, there seems to have been no
taboo to overcome. The variety of responses meant that a king or prince
looking for a bride might find a royal widow prescribed or proscribed.

Prohibited Degrees
In the eleventh and twelfth centuries, the Church settled its rules on
marriage in ways that might appear paradoxical. On the one hand, it
came down decisively in favour of a view of what constituted marriage:
consent of the two parties. A church service was not necessary, the
presence of a priest was not necessary, and neither did consent of the
families or a transfer of property, however desirable or customary, have
any constitutive function. What mattered was two people agreeing to

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marry. This is remarkably informal. But in contrast, over the course of the
early Middle Ages, the western Church established the most restrictive
rules about choice of marriage partner that the world has ever seen. In the
fully developed system, as evidenced in sources of the eleventh and
twelfth centuries, the prohibition on marrying a cousin was extended
far beyond first cousins, to include second, third, fourth, fifth and sixth
cousins.145 In other words, having a common great-great-great-great-
great-grandfather debarred a couple from marrying.
Rigorous churchmen would label marriages that broke these rules
‘incestuous’. A conscientious layman might consequently have to look far
afield for a permissible bride. Constance Bouchard suggested that this
explains such unusual marriages as that of Henry I of France with Anna of
Kiev in 1051 (a taste of the exoticism that foreign queens could represent
is exemplified in a charter issued by Philip I of France in 1063, in which
his mother, Anna, signs her name in Cyrillic script),146 and also the
willingness of the great dukes and counts of eleventh-century France to
take brides from outside their caste, from among knightly families.147
Even if such brides were in reality the sixth cousins of the dukes and
counts they married, the chances are that such a distant relationship
would be unknown. The search for wives of the right status who were not
technically within the prohibited degrees could thus be complex and
convoluted.
The process of evolution towards this extreme situation had been
gradual and long. Marriage between first cousins was not unusual in
ancient Rome but had been prohibited by the Christian emperors of
the fourth century. Marriage to cousins beyond this degree of relation-
ship was accepted, as is shown by the case of the western emperor
Valentinian III, who in 437 married the daughter of his first cousin.
However, during the course of the early Middle Ages, in both east and
west, the prohibition came to be extended to marriage between second
cousins. Important milestones in this process are the council of Epaon in
Burgundy in 517, and the Ecloga of the emperor Leo III, issued in 741.148
A relationship with a second cousin was still likely to be within the
boundaries of what a family might know about its members. Indeed,
defining the prohibited degrees by the limits of known relationships
might seem to make sense, and some ninth-century rulings from popes

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and councils refrained from defining their exact extent but stipulated
‘we command that no Christian is permitted to take a wife from his own
relatives or kindred, as far as the relationship is recalled, known or
remembered.’149 This definition would usually mean that marriages
between very distant cousins would be possible because there would be
no memory of the kinship. It is the drastic extension of the prohibitions
around the year 1000 that created a dilemma. Given the complex net-
work of marriage alliances among western kings and aristocrats, it might
have seemed to them virtually impossible to find anyone to marry, given
the newly defined rules. The Church itself finally recognized that the
rules about illicit marriages were extreme, and, at the Fourth Lateran
Council in 1215, reduced the prohibited degrees from seven to four, thus
only debarring marriage with one’s third cousins.
Throughout the medieval period, therefore, choice of marriage part-
ner was limited by law, both Roman and canon. Marriage of first cousins,
which had been banned in the fourth century, was rare. Karl Ubl, in his
comprehensive analysis of this topic, found only three cases in the
Merovingian period.150 Later instances do occur, like the marriage of
the Welsh ruler, Owain Gwynedd, ruler of Gwynedd (d. 1170), and his
first cousin Cristina, but that was highly controversial. Charles IV of
France (1322–8) married his first cousin, Joan of Evreux, but required
a papal dispensation to do so. Cousin marriage beyond that limit, how-
ever, was a different matter, allowed with third cousins in the Byzantine
empire and in the early medieval west, and with fourth cousins in the
Latin Church after 1215. The really extreme regime was thus that in the
west from 1000 to 1215, and there are plenty of examples to show the
difficulties, as well as the opportunities, that such a system generated.
The first difficulty, of course, was knowing who your sixth cousins were.
Even today, when research into family history is the second most popular
use of the internet, it is not simple to establish a genealogy of this extent.
The development of genealogical literature in this period and the rise of
the pictorial family tree (discussed below, pp. 326–39) show how ruling
and aristocratic families grappled with their deep ancestry and the com-
plications it might bring to their choices of marriage partner.
The intrusive and sometimes combative nature of papal policy on
dynastic marriages can be exemplified by the activities of Pope

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Innocent III (1198–1216), recognized as one of the most energetic and

influential of all medieval popes.151 Innocent fought vigorously against
what he saw as a storm of incestuous marriages. ‘In the East’, he wrote,
‘one woman has been joined incestuously with two men, while in the
West one man has dared to join himself with two women through
incest.’152 In both these cases he was, of course, referring to consecutive
rather than simultaneous unions. The woman was Isabella, daughter of
Amalric I, king of Jerusalem, who brought royal power to her successive
husbands in the 1190s. The pope’s objections were to husbands two and
three, Conrad of Montferrat and Henry of Champagne. Conrad was the
brother of William of Montferrat, who had been married to Isabella’s
half-sister, a relationship close enough to qualify as incestuous, although
whether the relationship between Isabella and Henry of Champagne was
technically within the prohibited degrees is doubtful – later Innocent
simply called it ‘less than legitimate, as is said’.153 In any case, Innocent
saw the hand of God in the swift and unexpected deaths of the two
husbands, one of whom was assassinated in 1192, while the other fell
out of a window to his death in 1197. The other case Innocent mentions
(‘one man has dared to join himself with two women through incest’) was
Alfonso IX of Leon, who married first Teresa of Portugal, who was his first
cousin, and then Berenguela of Castile, who was the daughter of his first
cousin. Both marriages were eventually annulled, but not before Alfonso
had fathered eight children by these two wives. One of these children,
Ferdinand III, was to inherit both Leon and Castile, reuniting those two
kingdoms permanently. Although Pope Innocent had deployed all the
weapons at his disposal – interdict, excommunication, declaration that
Alfonso’s children were illegitimate – and although the marriage of
Alfonso and Berenguela had been ended, the dynastic bond proved
stronger than canonical rules: a marriage between members of two
royal families (or two branches of a royal family) had produced a new
(or restored) kingdom (see also pp. 183–4).
Innocent’s intransigence was also shown in the long and tangled case
of Philip Augustus of France and Ingeborg of Denmark, whom the king
married in 1193 and then repudiated the very next day (see also p. 26).154
His grounds for this action have been much debated, and there has been
speculation about some kind of pathological reaction on Philip’s part,

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but, be that as it may, he immediately made determined efforts to obtain

an annulment of his marriage to Ingeborg. His servants and ministers got
to work producing a lengthy genealogy designed to demonstrate that
Philip’s first wife and Ingeborg were too closely related for Philip and
Ingeborg to be married, and a tame council of bishops and nobles was
assembled to swear to this.155 A copy of the genealogy was even entered
into the French royal registers.156 When Pope Innocent took over the
handling of this case after his accession to the papacy, he was not
impressed: he described the sentence annulling the marriage, passed
by Philip’s council, as ‘a ludicrous fairy tale’,157 and went as far as to
impose an interdict on the kingdom of France in order to induce Philip
to take Ingeborg back. A complication was that Philip, relying on the
decision of the council of French bishops and nobles, had remarried. His
new wife (as he saw her), Agnes of Meran, bore him two children,
including a son, Philip’s second and a welcome insurance against the
possible death of the first. Innocent insisted that Philip and Agnes should
separate and Ingeborg be received back:

He commanded that the intruder (Agnes) should be removed from the

king’s company, both physical and local, so that she should be excluded
not only from the king’s embraces but also from the boundaries of the
kingdom, and that the queen should be solemnly received by the king and
treated as befits a queen.158

Philip eventually agreed to these terms, leaving open the question of

whether his marriage to Ingeborg might later be annulled. Further
proceedings were inconclusive, but then Agnes helpfully died. In
a conciliatory gesture, Innocent legitimized her children by Philip,
acknowledging the king’s plea that he had acted in good faith when he
married her and recognizing that Philip only had one other child and
that legitimizing the two new children would serve ‘the utility and needs
of the kingdom of France’.159 Innocent was determined, but also had to
balance competing ends. He wanted Philip’s political support despite
being committed to a strict line on marriage. Even when he had imposed
an interdict on the kingdom, suspending all religious services except
baptism and absolution, he had made an exception for crusaders, who
were allowed to hear mass and receive Christian burial – the crusade

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remained one of the pope’s highest priorities.160 The case of Ingeborg

and Philip dragged on over the years until eventually, in 1213, Philip
‘received into his favour and conjugal affection his legitimate wife, queen
Ingeborg’.161 The fact that he now had two adult sons, and his ability to
ignore Ingeborg henceforth, had convinced Philip that this was the
easier path in the face of Innocent’s persistence. Innocent did not always
gain complete victories in these matrimonial cases (and he had other
important ones to deal with too),162 but the decrees of canon law and the
attitudes of individual popes were things that the rulers of the high and
late Middle Ages had to take into account when choosing a bride.

The Case of Joan of Woodstock

A case-study can illustrate many of the procedures and perils of choosing
a royal bride. In 1345 envoys from the king of Castile arrived in London,
seeking a wife for their master’s son. ‘After a careful inspection of the two
daughters of the king of England, they chose Lady Joan of Woodstock,
the king’s younger daughter, saying that she suited her future husband
better because of her age.’163 Joan, the third child of Edward III and
Queen Philippa, was eleven at this time, her older sister thirteen. The
proposed husband, later notorious as Peter the Cruel, was exactly Joan’s
age. But, young as she was, this was not the first marriage that had been
proposed for Joan.164
Joan was born late in 1333 and by the summer of 1335, when she was
about eighteen months old, plans were being made for her marriage. On
18 July of that year, her father, campaigning on the Scottish border,
issued a letter authorizing his envoys ‘to deal and make agreement with
that noble and powerful man, the duke of Austria . . . about contracting
a marriage between the duke’s eldest son and our dear daughter Joan’.165
The duke of Austria in question was Otto of Habsburg, youngest son of
King Albert I. Otto’s eldest son, Frederick, was six years older than Joan,
so around eight years of age when these negotiations were taking place.
An agreement was reached that the young princess should actually be
sent to Germany to be brought up there until of marriageable age. It took
several years before this happened, and, in the meantime, the outbreak
of war between King Edward and his rival, Philip VI of France, gave the

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alliance with the Habsburgs greater significance, since Edward was hop-
ing to build up a coalition of Rhineland princes as a threat on France’s
eastern border. In the summer of 1338 the English royal family crossed to
Antwerp and made their way up the Rhine for a summit meeting with the
emperor Louis the Bavarian. Louis was married to Margaret of Hainault,
sister of Edward’s queen, Philippa of Hainault, so she was Joan’s aunt. It
was decided that she should take care of the young English princess, and
when her parents returned north, Joan went south to Munich, the court
of Louis and Margaret. Here she spent almost a year.
Her time there seems not always to have been easy, for the English royal
accounts record that money had to be spent on food for her and her
companions ‘when they did not have sufficient food and drink from the
emperor’.166 Duke Otto continued to request that she be sent to Austria,
and Edward appears eventually to have agreed to this, but all was put in
doubt by Otto’s death in February 1339. Joan was recalled in the spring of
1340 and joined her mother in Ghent, where the queen gave birth to
a young brother for her, John of Gaunt (that is, ‘Ghent’). By the summer,
Joan, now aged six, was in her apartments in the Tower of London, along
with her older sister Isabella and her loyal French nurse. The Habsburgs
continued to consider the marriage as agreed, despite discouraging noises
from the English side. In the summer of 1341 Edward III wrote to Albert of
Habsburg, Frederick’s uncle and head of the family, suggesting the mar-
riage be postponed, especially since the emperor Louis had now gone over
to the French side.167 Over a year later, on 28 October 1343, the young
Duke Frederick, now sixteen, wrote to Edward from Vienna, urging speedy
marriage to Joan.168
But by this time the Castilian marriage had already been mooted as an
alternative. King Edward’s cousin and friend, the earl of Derby, partici-
pated in the siege of the Muslim city of Algeciras in 1342–4, a major
military undertaking of Alfonso XI of Castile, and used the contact to
broach the question of a marriage alliance between Alfonso’s eldest son,
Peter, and one of King Edward’s daughters. Alfonso responded favour-
ably, and envoys began to cross back and forth between Spain and
England (or Edward’s duchy of Gascony). Edward’s instructions
required his ambassadors to drive as hard a bargain as they could.
Their opening offer for a dowry would be £10,000; if this was not

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acceptable, they could go to 20,000 marks (roughly £13,333); if this was

not enough, they could offer £15,000, then £20,000. If this still did not
secure the agreement, they should then consult the king again.169
Negotiations were hampered by various problems. One was simply the
difficulty of travel and communication. On one occasion, the king sent
his envoys by land across France to Bordeaux but he was unwilling to
entrust their documents and credentials to this risky journey across the
territory of his enemy, so sent them by sea; unfortunately, the ship
carrying them sank and duplicates had to be arranged.170 Another
issue was the competing offer from Philip VI of France, who also had
a daughter suited for the Castilian prince and could promise a dowry
more than twice as large as Edward’s maximum. Alfonso XI was happy to
accept Philip’s offer but did not see any reason to stop negotiations with
Edward. Indeed, he revealed Philip’s terms to Edward and promised that
he would prefer the English alliance, even with a lower dowry.171 The
English king was assiduous in cultivating support at the Castilian court
through letters and gifts, making sure that he had the backing of both
Alfonso’s wife, Queen Maria, and his mistress, Eleanor de Guzmán. Even
the lower dowry was a problem for Edward, engaged as he was in constant
warfare. One ingenious suggestion was that he could marry his eldest son,
later known as the Black Prince, to a daughter of the king of Portugal and
thus acquire a dowry from her that he could then use to provide one for
Joan. Queen Maria, who was herself a daughter of the king of Portugal,
was a supporter of this scheme.
Edward’s instructions to his officials show an insistence that any son of
Peter and Joan would have the right to succeed to the throne of Castile,
coupled with lingering doubts: ‘if they arrive at Bordeaux and have
certain news that the prince of Spain has married another, the lady will
return immediately to England.’172 Finally, in spring 1348, Joan set out
from Plymouth to sail to Bordeaux and then to travel on to Spain. Her
entourage contained knights, bishops, officials, ladies and 130 archers, as
well as a minstrel of Prince Peter returning to Spain. She took with her
a spectacular and enormously expensive array of clothes, textiles, jewels
and furnishings. On 31 March she reached Bordeaux, where the four-
teen-year-old girl was to await her Castilian prince. But the marriage was
never to be consummated, for, later that year, the Black Death swept

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 CHOOSING A BRIDE

through Europe, carrying her off on 2 September. Peter settled for

a French wife five years later.
The case of Joan of Woodstock illustrates the character of medieval
marriage diplomacy: plans made while the princess was just a baby, the
arbitrary switch from a proposed marriage that would take her to Vienna
to one that would see her in Burgos and Toledo, the seemingly intermin-
able negotiations, the double-dealing and dissimulation, the flattery and
hard bargaining, all at any moment to be punctured and dispersed by
sudden death. In the words of Mary Anne Everett Green, who in the
1840s delved into the English royal records to learn about the young
princess, ‘How little did she imagine while contemplating her luxurious
array, that it was all vainly lavished on one who was soon to be the bride of
death!’173

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 CHAPTER 2

Waiting for Sons to be Born

T he search for a bride, with all its complexities, its

political implications and its possible cultural consequences,
had a simple goal: the birth of a child. This was the biological event on
which the fortunes of kingdoms turned. Rulers in the patriarchal and
dynastic world of medieval Europe were expected to be brave, violent,
aggressive, forceful – qualities that were associated with men. But the
thing on which dynastic continuity, and indeed the very existence of
dynasties, relied was the female body and what it alone could do:
conceive and give birth. So, once the new bride had been chosen, atten-
tion focussed on her ability to conceive children, especially sons. The
natural fertility and mortality of upper-class and lower-class people were
probably quite similar, but age at marriage might be different. In late
medieval England, it has been calculated, women of the top level of the
aristocracy married, on average, at seventeen, men at twenty-two.1 It
seems, however, that practices at the very apex of the social hierarchy,
the rulers, often included much earlier marriage.
According to the canon law of the western Church, girls were per-
mitted to marry at the age of twelve, but ecclesiastical authorities recog-
nized the possibility of marriage before that age ‘for the sake of
reconciliation and peace between rulers or great men’.2 Richard II of
England married Isabella of France just before her seventh birthday.
Henry the Young King (as he is known), son of Henry II of England,
was married at the age of five to the even younger daughter of the king of
France. Contemporaries noted with some disapproval this marriage of
‘little children still wailing in the cradle’,3 but it brought Henry II the
important border territory of the Vexin as the baby princess’s dowry.

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 WAITING FOR SONS TO BE BORN

There are cases of aristocratic women in Ottonian Germany not only

marrying at twelve but also bearing children at that age,4 although it was
not usual that sexual activity would begin so young. One careful study of
upper-class marriages in late medieval England, by John Carmi Parsons,
suggests that, whatever the age at marriage, sexual relations usually did
not begin before the girl was around fifteen, and this is likely to be true of
royal marriages too.5 A good example of this pattern is provided by
Margaret, daughter of the king of Denmark and later ruler of all three
Scandinavian kingdoms, who was engaged to the king of Norway when
she was six and he was eighteen, married him aged ten and bore a child
aged seventeen. Matilda, daughter of Henry II of England, married
Henry the Lion, duke of Saxony, at the age of eleven; her husband was
then thirty-eight. She seems to have borne her first child around the age
of sixteen.
But the age imbalance was not always between older men and younger
women. When, in 1281, the twenty-year-old Margaret of Scotland was sent
to Norway to marry the Norwegian king Erik, who was not yet fourteen
years old, the Scots insisted that, when she arrive, she be given separate
lodgings until the wedding, ‘in such a way that the king of Norway might
have no dishonourable or carnal contact with her in the meantime’.6 The
raging hormones of a pubescent boy could not be allowed to upset the
course of a carefully negotiated dynastic marriage. Such disparities in age
between older brides and younger grooms are to be explained by the
politics of dynasty and inheritance. When Matilda, daughter of Henry I of
England, married Geoffrey of Anjou on 17 June 1128, she was a widow of
twenty-six and he fifteen, and when Constance of Sicily married Henry,
son of the emperor Frederick Barbarossa, on 27 January 1186, she was
thirty-one and he nineteen or twenty. These ten- or eleven-year differ-
ences in age were outweighed by the fact that in each case the bride had
a hereditary claim to the kingdom, a claim that was formally acknowl-
edged in the case of Matilda, and may have been in the case of Constance.
Both women bore sons, Constance at the age of thirty-nine, and these
sons became kings of England and Sicily respectively. In the case of
Matilda, relations with her younger husband were initially stormy,
though there is no reason to assume that the age difference was the
explanation. Less happy was the marriage of Louis V, joint king of the

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West Franks, and Adelheid of Aquitaine in 980. He was fourteen, she in

her thirties:

There was almost no wedded love between them. For, since he was still
a teenage boy and she was an old woman, they had quite different ways.
They did not sleep together . . . when they needed to speak, they did so
outdoors . . . Their ways were so discordant that not long afterwards they
separated.7

Perhaps, as has been suggested in a later, similar case, Adelheid felt their
marriage was ‘like being wed to an annoying younger brother’.8
In the dynastic world, it made a fundamental difference whether the
ruler had a son or not. The worry and concern about this issue are
often made explicit. ‘Woe to those peoples who have no hope that
offspring of their lords will succeed to rule’, wrote Thietmar, bishop of
Merseburg, in the early eleventh century.9 Everyone in a kingdom knew
whether the ruler could expect a son to succeed him, and knew too
that if he could not, there would be consequences for all. Thietmar was
here expressing a justified foreboding, for this was exactly the predica-
ment that would face the Germans when the ruling emperor, the
childless Henry II, died. Later in that same century, in the reign of
a subsequent ruler, the same note of concern is heard in the words of
the archbishop of Cologne calling for universal prayers ‘that a son
should be given to the emperor by the heavenly mercy, so that the
peace of the realm might continue’.10
Pregnancy brought no unqualified reassurance. The world of dynastic
politics was full of uncertainties, but these were of two kinds: there were
certain uncertainties and uncertain uncertainties. Among the certain
uncertainties was childbirth, which was always happening but, on any
given occasion, had a doubtful outcome. Would the child survive? Would
the mother survive? What sex would the child be? Careful negotiators
would have to think through the possibilities. After the wedding of
Isabella, daughter of the king of France, with Edward II of England in
1308, the French diplomats wanted to discuss all the permutations:

in the case where there are several sons and daughters, what provision
will be made for the younger sons and the daughters; in case my lady

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dies without sons and there are several daughters, what provision will be
made for the younger daughters; and if the eldest will be queen; and if
my lady dies without a son but there is a daughter or there are several
daughters, and the king of England has a son by a second marriage,
what provision will be made for the daughter or daughters of the first
marriage?11

Death in Childbirth
Among ruling families, childbirth was a political matter. It was also, for
the mother, one of the most dangerous moments in her life. Modern
maternal mortality rates vary enormously. In the early twenty-first
century, the maternal mortality rate in western European countries was
4 to 10 per 100,000 live births, but in Afghanistan it was 1,575. In other
words, it was 150 to 400 times more dangerous to give birth in Afghanistan
than in western Europe. We do not have such statistics for the Middle
Ages, but reasonably reliable figures for seventeenth-century England,
when conditions were probably similar, suggest a rate of 1,500–1,600 per
100,000, a rate like Afghanistan.12
High rank did not make the chances of death in childbirth any less.
There are examples of queens dying in this way throughout the Middle
Ages and in every part of Christendom. At least four Capetian queens of
France died in or immediately after childbirth. In 1160, Constance of
Castile, the second wife of Louis VII, ‘died during labour, but the
daughter who was the cause of her death survived’.13 Thirty years
later, Elizabeth (Isabella) of Hainault, the first wife of Philip
Augustus, died giving birth to twins.14 In 1324, Mary of Luxemburg,
the second wife of Charles IV, gave birth prematurely, both baby and
mother dying:

Around the middle of Lent, as King Charles was returning from the region
of Toulouse, and had arrived at the castle of Issoudun with his pregnant
wife, she, perhaps worn out by the journey, gave birth to a male child
a month or so before its term; he was quickly baptized and, after a little
while, breathed his last; and in a few days the mother followed her son and
departed this life.15

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And Joan of Bourbon, wife of Charles V, died on 6 February 1378, soon

after the birth of her daughter Catherine, according to one account
because she had taken a bath against her doctor’s advice.16 Joan was
just forty and Catherine was her ninth child.
One of the sadder cases of death in childbirth is Isabella (or Yolande),
queen of Jerusalem. Isabella’s mother, who was also queen of Jerusalem,
died giving birth to her; she was about twenty at the time. As queen of
Jerusalem, Isabella was a very desirable bride and she was engaged to the
Holy Roman Emperor, Frederick II, at the age of ten or eleven, marrying
him two years later. Frederick was seventeen years her senior. In 1228,
aged fifteen or sixteen, Isabella died giving birth to a son. This melan-
choly story shows how childbirth could sweep women away in each
generation. Another of the wives of Frederick II, Isabella of England,
also died in childbirth.17
Death soon after giving birth, from puerperal fever, was common. The
account of the death of Queen Guta or Judith of Bohemia in 1297
describes how she used her last days to set her affairs in order:

But as the sickness that she had contracted during the recent birth of
a baby grew stronger, the lady queen, the pious and renowned Guta,
recognized from the terrible pains, like unmistakable messengers of
death, that the last days of her life had come, and she began wisely to
make arrangements for her property and household and to think what
might benefit her soul.18

Guta, daughter of Rudolf of Habsburg, had married Wenceslas II of

Bohemia shortly before her fourteenth birthday, borne him ten children
and now died at the age of twenty-six.19
It is thus not surprising that pregnancy and childbirth constituted
a time when supernatural help was welcome. In November 1244 Henry
III of England ordered a thousand wax candles, each weighing half
a pound, to be placed around the shrine of St Thomas Becket in
Canterbury Cathedral, and a like number to be placed in St
Augustine’s, Canterbury, ‘for the preservation of the health and for the
safe delivery of the queen, who is pregnant’. Later, two nuns brought ‘St
Edmund’s cloak’ to Westminster ‘in preparation for our queen’s
delivery’.20 Probably the intention was to wrap this around the heavily

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pregnant queen. She gave birth to a son, Edmund, on 16 January 1245.

Likewise, when Scottish queens were preparing for labour, the ‘sark’ or
chemise of their saintly predecessor, St Margaret of Scotland, was sent
for.21 Judging from other similar use of saintly relics, it is probable that the
pregnant queens would wear this holy garment to ease the pain and ensure
a healthy birth.22 Isabella of Bavaria, the queen of Charles VI of France,
visited the relic of the belt of the Virgin Mary at St-Sanctin-de-Chuisnes,
near Chartres, during each of her twelve pregnancies.23

The Uncertainties of Pregnancy

In one case, we can actually hear the apprehensive voice of a queen
pregnant for the first time. One of the most remarkable documents of
the whole Middle Ages is that issued by Queen Petronilla of Aragon on
4 April 1152. Its opening words are, ‘I, Petronilla, queen of Aragon, lying
and labouring in childbirth at Barcelona . . .’24 The queen is actually
issuing this document during her labour. She wishes to make provision
for the child, whichever sex it may be – whether it is a boy that ‘is to
proceed from my womb, by God’s will’, or ‘if a daughter should proceed
from my womb’.25 The conjectural boy is to have the kingdom of Aragon,
although Petronilla’s husband, Count Raymond, will rule it during his
lifetime. If the boy dies, her husband will have the kingdom. He will also
have it if Petronilla’s child is a girl, being required only to ensure that she
marries well. Petronilla’s own apprehensions at this time may be signified
by the last clauses in the charter, whereby she grants 2,000 gold coins to
the churches of Aragon and Barcelona for the sake of her soul. She was
only fifteen at this time. As it turned out, Petronilla gave birth to a healthy
child, and survived to have four more. It is hard to imagine a more vivid
example of the bond between the female body and the body politic, as
this teenage girl strains in childbirth, wondering what will ‘proceed from
her womb’.
An even more uncertain situation could arise when a ruler died
leaving a pregnant wife. A famous instance, with far-reaching political
consequences, occurred in 1316. When Louis X of France died on 5 June
in that year, he left a daughter by his first wife, but she was of dubious
status, since her mother the queen had been found guilty of adultery and

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imprisoned for life. After the death of this imprisoned first wife, King
Louis had married again, to Clemencia, a distant cousin, and she was four
months pregnant at the time of his death. The succession to the kingdom
was now in suspense. If Clemencia gave birth to a boy, there was no
question that he would be king, with a long minority ahead of him, but
arrangements had to be made for the eventuality that she might give
birth to a girl. In the words of one contemporary account, the dead king’s
brother, Philip, was to control the government, ‘with the title of regent
(sub nomine regentis), until, if a male child was born, he reached the age of
understanding, that is, fourteen, but, if a daughter was born, Philip would
himself become king of France and rule’.26 Provisions were made for
a landed endowment both for Louis’ daughter by his first wife and this
possible daughter by his second wife: such hypothetical children were
often major actors in the world of dynastic politics. Meanwhile, from
5 June until the 14 November 1316, more than five months, the kingdom
and its ruling dynasty waited for Clemencia to come to term.27
Similar uncertainty went through the mind of Albert of Habsburg as
he lay dying on 23 October 1439 in the Hungarian village of Neszmély
(Langendorf) on the banks of the Danube. His thoughts turned first to
his own chances of salvation, but then to the future of the child that his
pregnant wife, Elizabeth, was carrying. Albert was not only ‘king of the
Romans’ (Holy Roman Emperor elect), a title that was not hereditary,
but also duke of Austria, king of Hungary and king of Bohemia. Albert
made careful stipulations for the event that his unborn child were a boy.
He named Queen Elizabeth and the oldest male of the house of
Habsburg as regents (verweser), who would exercise power in Austria,
Hungary and Bohemia, with the advice of councils from those three
domains; he instructed that the boy should be brought up in Bratislava
(Pressburg) because it was close to all three of his realms; and he directed
that officials in the three dominions should be chosen by the local
bishops and nobles with the advice of the two regents, and that these
officials should render accounts to his son when he came of age.28
A whole imagined future was passing through his mind. Albert died
a few days later, on 27 October 1439, and Elizabeth gave birth on
22 February 1440, almost four months later. The child was a boy,
known as Ladislas ‘Postumus’, and, after many years of struggle by his

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partisans, he was able to succeed to all three of his father’s titles, although
he died young.
Yet more perplexing difficulties arose when a ruler died leaving a wife
who might or might not be pregnant. When Alexander III of Scotland
died in a riding accident on 19 March 1286, he left no surviving children.
Just five months earlier he had, however, married a young French noble-
woman, Yolande of Dreux, and there was a possibility that she was
pregnant. For much of 1286, it seems, the regency council that had
been appointed was waiting to see whether Yolande would produce
a child. One sober chronicle source for that year simply reports: ‘the
event did not take place, or there was a miscarriage’.29 A much more
dramatic tale is told by a contemporary Franciscan, who had good con-
tacts at the Scottish court but whose account is also coloured by an almost
hysterical misogyny. He reports that Queen Yolande, ‘employing her
feminine wiles, said falsely that she was pregnant’. She refused to let
‘honest matrons’ inspect her state and ‘determined to deceive the people
forever by substituting someone else’s baby’. She had a new font made of
white marble and she arranged to acquire a baby boy, the son of an actor,
but her trickery was discovered at the last moment by a loyal earl, and ‘she
left the land covered in shame’. This all shows, concludes our author,
how much trust you can place in women.30 This might all seem like
fantasy, but a Scottish historian as hard-headed as Archie Duncan of
Glasgow accepted that the queen was pregnant, suggested she might
have lost the baby in August 1286, and was at least prepared to consider
the possibility that this might have been concealed, and hence, at that
stage, became a false pregnancy.31 We do know, at least, that Yolande was
fertile because she went on to have many children by her second hus-
band, the duke of Brittany.

Celebration
The story was told that when Margaret of Provence, the wife of Louis IX of
France (St Louis), gave birth to her first child, which turned out to be
a girl, ‘they did not dare to break the news to the king’ and called on the
bishop of Paris to convey this unwelcome information, which he did with
a jest to soften the blow.32 Conversely, the worry and concern about

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whether a son would be born could be explosively dissolved in celebra-

tion when one arrived. It was a time for grand public gestures, like the
one made by the Frankish king Chilperic in 582. When a son was born to
him, after several sons had been born and died, he celebrated by
a general amnesty: ‘the king commanded all the prisons to be opened,
those in chains to be freed and the fines that were owing to the treasury by
delinquents not to be demanded’.33 Despite this act of thanksgiving,
however, this little boy also died as an infant, aged two.
Elaborate celebrations for the birth of a son to the Byzantine emperor
are described in The Book of Ceremonies of Constantine VII Porphyrogenitus
(913–59). The patriarch of Constantinople and his clergy, and the senators
in ceremonial dress, are to visit the palace to offer prayers and congratula-
tions. On the third day after the birth, receptions are held and chariot
races take place in the hippodrome. On the fifth day, 200 representatives
of the Byzantine people assemble in the hippodrome and call out the boy’s
name. On the eighth day, the empress’ bedchamber is decked with golden
curtains and she receives a procession of high-born women, then high-
born men, bringing prayers, congratulations and gifts. For a week, a special
‘childbirth-brew (λοχόζεμα)’ is to be distributed freely in the streets.34
The longer the wait, the greater the relief, and sometimes the wait was
protracted. Louis VII of France was in his mid-forties and had been on the
throne for twenty-eight years when he finally had his long-desired son.
Ralph de Diceto, dean of St Paul’s, London, looking across the Channel,
describes how ‘in his last days a happier fortune smiled on Louis, king of
the French’. ‘The king had had only four daughters from his first
and second marriages; at last, from the third, much more happily, he
happily fathered a son, desired by the people and devoutly and keenly
besought by the clergy.’ Indeed, he says, the very reason for Louis’ three
marriages (trigamia) was ‘to bring forth masculine offspring’.35 Louis’
biographer describes how the king ‘feared that the kingdom of France
would not be governed by an heir who had issued from his seed’.36
A poem written to celebrate the birth of this son, Philip, in 1165, puts it
pithily: ‘The boy is peace (Pax puer est).’37 This same poem, which was
written by a French student in Paris at the time (Paris was in the process of
giving birth to the university as well as a Capetian prince), conveys the
suspense and tension of waiting to find out the sex of the new child:

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It was night and the queen was in labour in this famous childbirth;
the city beseeches you about this, O Christ, with wakeful prayer.
The eager wishes of the city beg that it be male;
the tearful court asks God for a male.38

Another student in Paris that night was woken from his sleep by the noise
of the city rejoicing:

As the news was heard in the city and received with a joy such and so great
that it cannot be expressed with the tongue, immediately such a great
sound and ringing of all the bells broke out everywhere throughout the
breadth of the city, and so many wax lights were lit through all the streets,
that those who did not know the cause of such a great sound or such an
unusual tumult or the vast amount of lights at night-time, thought that the
city was threatened with fire. Hence, also, the author of this work . . . woken
from the bed where he had already laid down to sleep, leapt at once to the
window, and, looking out, he saw in the street two old women, very poor,
but holding wax torches in their hands, rejoicing in expression and voice
and every movement of their bodies, and rushing to and fro with swift
steps. When he had asked them the cause for all this noise and rejoicing,
one of them looked at him and answered, saying, ‘We now have a king
given to us by God and a powerful heir to the kingdom by God’s gift.’39

Even two years later the bishop of Orleans made a grant ‘from joy at the
birth of the illustrious boy Philip, son of the lord king’.40 No wonder that
Philip, later to be famous as Philip Augustus, also had the soubriquet
Dieudonné, ‘given by God’.41
An account of the birth of the son of Charles VI on the night of
6 February 1392, over two hundred years later, depicts the Parisian
response in equally enthusiastic terms: all the church bells rang, and as
royal messengers cried out the news, everyone came onto the streets with
lighted torches, playing music and singing all night, while ladies doled
out wine and spices from trestle tables set up in the streets.42 Just like
King Chilperic in 582, more than eight centuries earlier, Charles VI
authorized the release of prisoners ‘because of the joyous arrival and
nativity of Monsieur the Dauphin’.43 Bells ringing, music and all-night
street parties show that the population at large might have shared the

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dynastic concerns of its rulers. The birth of a royal son, promising

dynastic continuity, might also promise peace to the kingdom at large.
But even when the long-awaited son was born, there was no certainty
he would live. High child mortality meant that rulers had to get used to
a rapid turnover in their presumed heirs. Edward I of England, for
example, had a son, John, born in the summer of 1266, before Edward
himself became king. For the following five years John was next in the
line of royal succession after his father. But the young prince died in the
summer of 1271, which meant his young brother Henry, who was four at
the time, took his place as heir. But in three years or so, with Edward now
king, Henry also died, leaving the role of heir apparent to the baby
Alfonso, who was not yet a year old. For almost ten years, from
October 1274 to August 1284, it was Alfonso who was treated as the
expected inheritor of the throne. But there was to be no Alfonso I of
England, as the prince died before his eleventh birthday. Fortunately for
King Edward, he had just had another son, born in April 1284 and
christened with the king’s own name. He grew up to be Edward II. But
the constant changes over many years show the uncertainties of succes-
sion, as well as highlighting the many ‘might have beens’ of history. If
Prince Alfonso had lived and succeeded his father, perhaps Alfonso
would have become as common a name in English history as Edward,
and we might admire the Decline and Fall of that great historian Alfonso
Gibbon, or laugh at the nonsense verse of Alfonso Lear.

Childlessness
The purpose of a royal marriage was to produce children, or, more
specifically, a son. A childless king not only created, and had to deal
with, uncertainty about the succession but was also more vulnerable in his
lifetime. If an opponent got rid of him, there would be no sons to fight
back or pursue revenge. When Henry Bolingbroke usurped the throne
from Richard II of England in 1399, he faced opposition, criticism and,
sometimes, rebellion, but Richard had no son to fan the flames. In
contrast, when Bolingbroke’s grandson, Henry VI, was removed by
Edward of York in 1461, there was a son, and Edward’s regime was not
truly secure until the killing of that son ten years later.

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There were occasions when childless rulers or nobles sought to

bequeath everything to ecclesiastical institutions but such radical mea-
sures faced opposition from their wider kindred. Alfonso the Battler,
king of Aragon and Navarre, who died in 1134, left a will in which he
bequeathed his kingdom to the Templars, the Hospitallers and the
Order of the Holy Sepulchre, international Orders based in the Holy
Land:

After my death I leave as my heir and successor the Sepulchre of the Lord
that is in Jerusalem, and those who keep it and watch over it and serve God
there, and the Hospital of the poor that is in Jerusalem, and the Temple of
Solomon with the knights who are on guard there for the defence of the
name of Christendom. To these three I grant my whole kingdom . . . so that
they should have and possess it in three fair and equal portions.44

If Alfonso’s will had been carried out, his kingdom would have become
three states run by the crusading Orders, just like the later Ordensstaat
(‘Order State’) of the Teutonic Knights in the eastern Baltic, or the
Hospitallers’ Rhodes.
Despite a papal command that the will be fulfilled,45 the leaders of
Aragon and Navarre were not prepared to tolerate this. In Navarre the
nobles chose as king a descendant of an illegitimate son of a king of
Navarre who had ruled eighty years earlier, thus separating the two
kingdoms again. In Aragon, Alfonso’s only close male relative, his
brother Ramiro, was a monk, but this did not stop the leaders of
Aragon hauling him out of his monastery, marrying him to a noble
French lady and only allowing him to return to it when she had given
birth to a child, a daughter who thus became queen of Aragon before her
first birthday. ‘This’, commented a Castilian chronicler, ‘was a great sin
before the Lord, but the Aragonese, having lost their dear lord, did this
so that sons might be raised up from the royal seed.’46 This infant queen,
Petronilla, mentioned above (p. 57), was betrothed to Raymond
Berengar IV of Barcelona, twenty-three years her senior, in 1137. He
took over the running of Aragon and secured renunciation of their
claims by the Hospitallers and the Order of the Holy Sepulchre in
1140, in return for generous grants within the realm.47 A few years
later, in 1143, the Templars accepted compensation in the form of

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a huge endowment in Aragon.48 Later, the renunciation by the Orders

and Raymond’s possession of ‘all the land which Alfonso, former king of
the Aragonese, dying without an heir, left to the Sepulchre of the Lord,
the Hospital and the Temple’ was confirmed by the papacy.49
The same urge that motivated Alfonso the Battler can occasionally be
found among the higher aristocracy as well as amongst sovereign rulers.
The childless Welf III (d. 1055) wanted to leave his entire estate to
a monastery but his nephew turned up from Italy to claim it.50 In
English law it was even forbidden to make a bequest of land to
a religious house on one’s deathbed, to avoid this situation.51 There
were to be states run by the international Orders in medieval Europe
but they were created by conquest, not by the wishes of childless kings.
The swift action of the Aragonese nobles in finding a blood-heir shows
very clearly that this was an elite who thought in dynastic terms.
One story that could be told about childless kings was that they
preserved their virginity to maintain their moral and spiritual purity, in
accordance with the teaching of the medieval Church that virginity was
one of the highest goods. Two childless eleventh-century kings, Henry II
of Germany and Edward the Confessor of England, were declared saints,
the former in 1146, the latter in 1161, and on each occasion the mon-
arch’s lifelong virginity, despite being married, was given as one of the
signs of their sanctity.52 But saints are, by definition, rare. Most childless
kings wished to take action to remedy the situation. Should a childless
queen be dismissed and replaced by another, possibly fertile, one? How
many times could this be done? Or was it better to wait out the first wife
and hope for her early death, perhaps while giving birth to a girl? And,
failing all else, was it desirable to make arrangements for a successor who
was not a son or daughter – perhaps a relative, perhaps not?

Repudiation of Failed Mothers

In the High Middle Ages, the Church did not permit divorce, in the sense
of the ending of a valid marriage, but did allow annulment, which was the
recognition that the marriage in question had never been valid in the
first place, and hence the partners could separate and marry others. One
of the most common grounds for annulment was too close a family

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relationship between the partners, and the Church defined ‘too close’ in
remarkably demanding terms (see above, pp. 43–5). But if that was the
most common grounds, in the sense of legal justification, then the most
common motive for an annulment was the fact that the wife had borne no
sons. Commentators sometimes blithely combined the motive and the
justification: ‘they had parted because they were closely related and she
had borne him no children’.53
An annulment of this kind with enormous political implications was
that of the marriage of Louis VII of France and Eleanor of Aquitaine in
1152. At this time, although the king of France had an undisputed
position as sole consecrated monarch in the kingdom, real power in
most areas was in the hands of the great dukes and counts. Amongst
the greatest were the dukes of Aquitaine, ruling the south-west of the
country from the Loire to the Pyrenees. Eleanor’s father, Duke William
X, died unexpectedly in April 1137, leaving no sons. Within four months
Eleanor was married to Louis, son of Louis VI and already crowned in his
father’s lifetime (the older Louis died just after this marriage). As hus-
band of Eleanor, the king of France now had direct authority over the
huge duchy of Aquitaine. It could have been a turning point in the
history of the French monarchy. But there were two sources of tension
in the marriage. One was a personal incompatibility. Eleanor supposedly
complained, ‘I have married a monk not a monarch!’54 The other was the
fact that during the fifteen years of the marriage she bore only daughters.
The Capetian dynasty had either to face the problem of the failure of that
series of father–son successions that had characterized it for well over
a century, or give up Eleanor and Aquitaine. The decision was made in
favour of the latter, justified, and perhaps even partly motivated, by the
discovery that Louis and Eleanor were related within the prohibited
degrees (they were fifth cousins). Louis’ rivals were willing to gamble
on the young Eleanor still being able to have sons in return for the
acquisition of Aquitaine, and wasted no time. The marriage of Louis
and Eleanor was nullified by a council held during Lent, that is,
February to March, 1152, and she married Henry of Anjou at Pentecost
(Whitsun), 18 May, the same year.55 Henry already ruled Anjou and
Normandy and with his marriage to Eleanor and then his accession to
the English throne in 1154 there came into existence the huge

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conglomeration of territories, sometimes called the Angevin empire, that

dominated the history of north-west Europe for the next half-century.
And Eleanor went on to have five sons with Henry. The accident of her
having borne only daughters with Louis VII thus shaped European
political and military affairs for generations.
Getting rid of a wife who produced no children, or only girls, had
political as well as legal consequences. If she were a member of a family
that was important within the kingdom, then her relatives might well
object and oppose. When the English king Edward the Confessor fell out
with the powerful Earl Godwin and his sons in 1051 (see above, p. 13),
driving them into exile, he also repudiated his wife Edith, Godwin’s
daughter, and sent her to a nunnery. Moreover, he stripped her of all
her property: ‘the king forsook the lady, who had been consecrated as his
queen, and had her deprived of all that she possessed, in land, in gold, in
silver and in everything’.56 Edward and Edith had been married for more
than six years but had no children. However, the next year the Godwin
family returned in force, were reinstated in power, and consequently ‘the
queen, the earl’s daughter, was brought back to the king’s bed’.57 The
king’s failure to break the Godwin family meant that he could not now
seek another, younger and potentially fertile bride, and that he died
childless, with the throne being taken by Godwin’s son, Edith’s brother,
Harold, a move that provided the impetus for the Norman Conquest of
1066.
Some royal marriages were ended without much fuss. In 1153
Frederick Barbarossa, who had become ‘king of the Romans’ (Holy
Roman Emperor elect) in the previous year, had his childless mar-
riage to Adela of Vohburg dissolved easily and with no long-term
consequences. The grounds were ‘the bond of consanguinity’, that
is, they were too closely related.58 Both remarried, he to the heir of
the county of Burgundy, she to a member of the German lower
aristocracy, and both had children from these second marriages.59
Their marriage had lasted only four years or so, and consequently it is
not clear that childlessness was the actual motive for this act rather
than political considerations, such as the acquisition of Burgundy.
The marriage was dissolved by papal legates, so the pope clearly raised
no objections.

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A very different situation faced Alfonso III of Portugal in the following

century. He had married a great French noblewoman, Matilda of
Boulogne, in 1239, many years before he became king – his elder brother
Sancho II was ruler of Portugal – but he replaced Sancho as king in 1248
and now had to think seriously about the succession. His marriage with
Matilda was childless and she was older than him, well into her forties. He
therefore contracted another marriage. It is not clear what form of separa-
tion with Matilda took place. His new bride, who was not yet twelve, was
Beatrice, the illegitimate daughter of Alfonso X of Castile, a match nego-
tiated as part of a wider settlement of territorial disputes between the two
kingdoms. Beatrice appears as ‘wife’ and ‘queen’ in Alfonso’s charters
from 1253.60 Matilda, however, did not accept this without protest and
appealed to the pope, who first delegated the case to the archbishop of
Santiago and then, when the king failed to respond to the archbishop’s
summons, himself cited the king. Alfonso failed to send representatives,
but Matilda’s lawyer argued that, although Matilda ‘was the king’s legit-
imate wife, the king had publicly contracted a de facto marriage, or rather
cohabitation, with the daughter of the king of Castile’, and hence the pope
should grant Matilda’s request for a formal separation and the return of
her dowry. The pope agreed to this.61
Alfonso continued to ignore the pope, even when he imposed an
interdict on Portugal, and soon his teenage bride produced three sons.
He was concerned that they should be declared legitimate, and his path
was eased by two developments: a new pope in 1261 and the death of
Matilda in 1262. In June 1263 the new pope, Urban IV, wrote to ‘his
dearest son in Christ, Alfonso, the illustrious king of Portugal’, recording
how the king had approached him, explaining

that in the past, at the time when you received the reins of government of
the kingdom of Portugal, on account of the pressing necessities with which
your highness was faced and in order to avoid the grave and manifest
dangers that were imminently at hand and also on account of the fear
which can strike even the steadfast, you contracted a de facto marriage
with the noble woman Beatrice, daughter of our dearest son in Christ,
Alfonso, the illustrious king of Castile, while Matilda of precious memory,
your legitimate wife, was still alive.62

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Not only had Alfonso married while his first wife was alive, he had also
married a girl who was underage and too closely related to him. But the
pope notes that he has the power to suspend the rules if public necessity is
great, especially in the case of rulers. Urban goes on to explain that he has
taken many things into account – the loyalty of past kings of Portugal to the
papacy, the fact that Portugal made an annual payment to the pope,
the support for Alfonso’s request from the king of France and from the
Portuguese bishops – and declares that Alfonso and Beatrice may stay
together and that their children are legitimate and have the right to inherit
the kingdom. The kings of the Iberian peninsula had a tradition of making
marriages that broke canon law and then outfacing papal disapproval to
get their desired end. This is exactly what Alfonso III had done: he had
dismissed his first, unfertile wife and found another, much younger one,
with whom he had the sons he desired; then he had them legitimated. His
male-line descendants ruled Portugal down to 1580.
A similar awareness of political realities is evident in the dealings of
Urban IV with Premysl Otakar II, king of Bohemia. Premysl determined to
obtain a separation from his wife, Margaret of Austria, ‘since they were not
able to have children’.63 In 1261 ‘the sterile queen was repudiated’ and
Premysl married Cunigunda, the teenage granddaughter of the king of
Hungary.64 The pope was willing to accept this on various grounds, even
though Premysl and his new wife were too closely related by the rules of
canon law. One reason was that it was argued that Margaret of Austria had
been a Dominican nun and therefore could not have entered a valid
marriage with the king. Another was that ‘from the continuation of the
marriage contracted between you and Cunigunda peace will be preserved
in the kingdoms of Hungary and Bohemia and the adjacent provinces’.65
Urban therefore confirmed the annulment of the marriage with Margaret
and gave a dispensation for the marriage with Cunigunda. Premysl was
indeed succeeded by his son by Cunigunda. International peace was
a good reason for being flexible in the application of rules about marriage.

Remarriages
The Byzantine emperor Manuel Comnenus, who had only daughters
from his first marriage, married again, ‘since he longed to be called the

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father of a male child’.66 Remarriage was not uncommon after the death
or repudiation of a childless queen, or one who had borne only daugh-
ters, and kings could then continue to father children with young brides.
The English king most notorious for notching up wives is Henry VIII, who
had six all told, motivated mainly by the desire to secure his relatively new
dynasty through male heirs. In the end, he produced a son and two
daughters, but all three died without children and so with them the
Tudor dynasty came to an end. Henry’s activities even left a mark on
popular culture, with a mnemonic about how to remember the fate of his
six wives: ‘Divorced, beheaded, died; divorced, beheaded, survived.’
One medieval king who came close to rivalling Henry was Alfonso VI
of Leon and Castile (d. 1109), although he did not execute any of his
wives.67 His first wife, Ines or Agnes of Poitou, who is recorded as queen
in the 1070s, when Alfonso was in his thirties, left no children. After her
death or divorce, Alfonso married another great French noblewoman,
Constance of Burgundy, who gave birth to a daughter, Urraca, later to be
the first queen regnant in medieval west European history. Constance
seems to have had no further surviving children, and very quickly after
her death in 1093, the king married again, to Berta, of uncertain but
probably Italian descent. No children are recorded. The year after
Berta’s death in 1099 Alfonso married Elizabeth (or Isabella), another
queen of uncertain descent but probably French, like two of his earlier
wives. By her Alfonso had two more daughters, Sancha and Elvira. By this
time the king also had several illegitimate children, two of them daugh-
ters, Teresa and another Elvira, by a Spanish noblewoman, and, most
significant from his point of view, a son, Sancho, by his Muslim mistress
Zaida (on her, see p. 19). A contemporary chronicler reports that Zaida
converted to Christianity and took the new name Elizabeth, and this has
led to conflicting theories about whether she is to be identified with
Alfonso’s fourth wife or whether she succeeded her, confusingly with
the same name. At the very end of his life, when the king was again free to
marry, after the death or divorce of the preceding Elizabeth or
Elizabeths, and now around seventy years of age, Alfonso took a wife
called Beatrice, who survived him. He thus had five or six wives but
fathered only one son. This son, Sancho, died in battle the very year
before the death of his father, hence the succession of Urraca. Alfonso’s

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matrimonial history suggests that the pursuit of a male heir was a constant
purpose and led to remarriage very quickly after the death of a queen.
One of the most controversial remarriages of a medieval monarch was
the fourth marriage of the Byzantine emperor Leo VI.68 His first wife,
Theophano Martinakia, whom he had married in 882, was chosen for
him by his parents. They had one child, a daughter, Eudokia, but rela-
tions between the spouses were not good, and the emperor began
a relationship with another woman, Zoe Zaoutzaina. There were discus-
sions about a separation between Leo and Theophano, especially after
the death of their daughter. After Theophano’s death in 897, Leo’s plans
to marry Zoe Zaoutzaina met with some opposition. Partly, this was due to
a general Christian hostility towards second marriages, which can be
traced back as far as St Paul and was also expressed in penitentials and
canon law. St Jerome gave practical advice to those contemplating
a second marriage: ‘think every day that you are going to die, and you
will never think about a second marriage.’69 A century before Leo faced
his own decision, Theodore, influential abbot of the Stoudios monastery
in Constantinople, had put it very succinctly: ‘a second marriage, even
though it is permissible, still requires penance’.70 But opposition was also
inspired by Zoe’s moral reputation, which was not good, since she was
suspected of poisoning her husband, as well as being acknowledged as
the emperor’s mistress. Because of this, the patriarch of Constantinople
refused to take part in the marriage ceremony, and the priest who did so
was degraded from office. Zoe Zaoutzaina gave birth to a daughter, Anna,
but died after only twenty months as empress. Leo now took a third wife,
Eudokia Baiane, but she died in childbirth on 12 April 901, her baby boy
also dying.71
If a second and third marriage were deemed ‘permissible but requir-
ing penance’, a fourth was unprecedented in Byzantium. Yet, after Leo
had buried his third wife alongside his first two in the Church of the Holy
Apostles, the imperial mausoleum in Constantinople,72 he not only took
as his mistress Zoe Karbonopsina (‘black-eyed Zoe’), but, after she had
given birth to the long-desired son, Constantine, on 3 September 905, he
married her. In a reprise of his second marriage, the priest who con-
ducted the ceremony was later degraded from office. This fourth mar-
riage was, however, an even more serious matter, and Nicholas, the

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patriarch of Constantinople, who had been willing to baptize the baby

Constantine, was not willing to countenance the marriage and debarred
Leo from entering church. He could be justified by the strong tradition
in the eastern Church that condemned fourth marriages as bestial and
iniquitous.73 Patriarch Nicholas later claimed that he had agreed to
baptize Constantine only in return for a promise from Leo to give up
Zoe.74 Matters became embattled. The emperor sought support for his
position from Rome, for western canon law put no limit on the number of
remarriages. Patriarch Nicholas berated the western Church for allowing
not only fourth marriages, but fifth marriages, sixth marriages and so on
indefinitely, and this was not a caricature.75 The greatest legal expert of
the thirteenth-century Roman Church argued that second marriages
were licit and defined ‘second’ to mean any marriage after the first,
‘even the thousandth’.76 Nicholas vacillated in his position, but even-
tually came down for a hard line. Leo then pressured him into resigning,
sent him into exile and secured a new patriarch. He obtained his dis-
pensation and Zoe stayed on, later ruling as regent in the reign of her son
Constantine.77
The emperor’s fourth marriage created deep and long-lasting divi-
sions in the Byzantine Church. Some episcopal sees had two bishops for
a period, one loyal to the old patriarch, one to the new. Seemingly as part
of the process of obtaining a dispensation for his marriage, Leo had to
agree to a law forbidding fourth marriages, which thus made him ‘the
first and last person in the history of Byzantium to have been allowed to
marry for a fourth time’.78 His persistence in the face of opposition, his
willingness to endure the disruption this entailed and his disregard of
deep moral traditions all indicate a total commitment to the dynastic
ideal of having a son to succeed him.
Leo VI finally obtained his son, and his dynasty continued on the
Byzantine throne for another 150 years. But having just one son was
a precarious position, given the high rate of infant death in the period.
Most rulers would prefer more, ‘an heir and a spare’ as it is sometimes
flippantly expressed. Edward I of England, after producing at least four-
teen children with his first wife, Eleanor of Castile, had three more when
he was in his sixties, with his young bride, Margaret of France. This was
not simply from emotional or sexual motives. When Eleanor died, only

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one of the four sons she had borne survived, so Edward’s line hung on
a thread. The two further sons that Margaret bore were a guarantee.
Extinction of the line was a frightful prospect for patriarchal dynasts like
Edward.

The End of the Line

Kings often died without children, or without sons, or without male
descendants, or without legitimate children. In all such cases, there
would almost certainly be more than one claimant to succeed and the
politics of the kingdom would be dominated by the issue until a secure
outcome was reached, which might take years or even decades and
involve the shedding of large amounts of blood. The long-term fate of
kingdoms could be decided by a ruler’s childlessness. After the death of
the childless Rudolf III in 1032, his kingdom of Burgundy came into
the hands of the Holy Roman Emperors and lost its political identity.
Thirty-four years later, in 1066, the death of the childless Edward the
Confessor, king of England, set off a ferocious conflict among his poten-
tial successors and led to the most dramatic transformation ever experi-
enced by the medieval kingdom of England. In Germany, kings died
without leaving children in 911, 918 (although in this case with an adult
brother), 1002, 1024, and 1125. This was one reason why German king-
ship remained elective, since on these occasions the great nobles
and higher clergy decided the succession, establishing precedents for
election rather than hereditary monarchy. Famous dynasties that died
out though lack of male heirs included the Arpad kings of Hungary in
1301 and the Premyslids of Bohemia in 1306, in each case after ruling for
centuries in their ancestral realms. In both cases, many years of political
uncertainty, military conflict and outside intervention followed. Neither
Hungary nor Bohemia was ever ruled by a native dynasty again (as distinct
from one individual king), and in the long term both became part of the
domains of the Habsburgs, who acquired these realms permanently in
1526 and 1527 and lost them only in the turmoil at the end of the First
World War.
The cases of Scotland in 1286 and Aragon in 1410 show very well the
big political consequences that could result from kings dying without

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male descendants. The Scottish example is exceptionally enlightening

about the thinking of the nobility and higher clergy in such times of
dynastic crisis.79 The unexpected death of Alexander III in 1286, leaving
no male descendants, did not result immediately in a contest for the
throne, as it would in many dynastic systems, since, by this time, Scottish
royal succession had not only been monopolized by one lineage, but also
explicitly recognized the right of female heirs. In 1284, two years before
Alexander’s death, the nobles of Scotland acknowledged Margaret, ‘the
Maid of Norway’, the king’s daughter’s daughter, as heir to the
kingdom.80 So, after the king’s death, there was no question about who
should succeed.81 But Margaret would be the first female ruler in Scottish
history. The nobles could accept this, but presumed that Margaret would
marry, not only to have children to continue the dynasty, but also to have
a man to govern and make war. The question then arose as to whom she
would marry. Edward I, king of England, Scotland’s large and powerful
southern neighbour, had a suggestion: his own son and heir, also called
Edward, who was two years old in 1286, a year younger than the Maid of
Norway.
The committee of Scottish lords and bishops that acted as a regency
council for Margaret, the absent child ruler, entered into negotiations
for this marriage and in 1290 a detailed agreement was drawn up, care-
fully designed to preserve the separate identity of Scotland after the
marriage of the heir of England and the heir of Scotland.82 If Margaret
and Edward had married, any son of theirs would have become both king
of Scotland and king of England, but the two realms would not then be
united into one (this exact situation did occur in 1603). All this care came
to nothing, however, with the death of Margaret on her way to Scotland.
There now really would be a contest for the succession.
Fourteen claimants made their case to succeed, but it was generally
recognized that only two, John Balliol and Robert Bruce, had a strong
basis for their claim (see the family tree in Appendix D). Rather than see
civil war, the leaders of Scotland agreed to seek a judgment on the matter
from Edward I of England. He first required recognition as overlord of
Scotland, and then set up a court of 104 men, twenty-four from his own
council, forty nominated by Balliol and forty by Bruce. Both Balliol and
Bruce were descended from David, earl of Huntingdon, brother of King

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William the Lion. The legal argument boiled down to a simple issue: did
Balliol, as grandson of Earl David’s oldest daughter, have the better case,
or Bruce, as son of a younger daughter of Earl David? On grounds of
primogeniture, Balliol’s case was hard to refute, so Bruce’s lawyers had to
argue that, as a son of David’s daughter, not a grandson, he was ‘nearer in
degree’, that is, closer as counted by generations.83 This did him no good.
On 17 November 1292, at a great assembly of the lords and bishops of
Scotland and England in the castle of the border town of Berwick-upon-
Tweed, judgment was pronounced in favour of John Balliol.84
It might seem that the matter had been resolved, but that was not the
case. Edward I had used his opportunity to win recognition as overlord of
Scotland and Balliol had to swear fealty and perform homage to him.
Although Balliol was now ‘King John’, he had a superior in England with
a powerful sense of his own rights and privileges. Very quickly points of
tension arose, notably the hearing of appeals from Scotland in the
English royal lawcourts and the demand for Scottish military service in
King Edward’s war in France. The Scots leaders decided that resistance
was better than compliance and entered into an alliance with Edward’s
enemy, the king of France. As soon as he could, Edward invaded and
conquered Scotland, deposed John Balliol and took the country into his
own hands. This was a turning point in relations between Scotland and
England. In the previous two centuries, there had been only nine years of
war between the two kingdoms but after Edward’s invasion of 1296
warfare was the usual condition, down to 1560. It was the deaths of
Alexander III, last of the old line of Scottish kings, and of his grand-
daughter Margaret, that triggered this shift from two centuries of almost
continuous peace to two and a half centuries of almost continuous war.
An entirely different history of relations between the two countries could
be imagined if the Scottish royal dynasty had not faced the crisis of
extinction in the male line.
More than a century later, in 1410, Martin I of Aragon died leaving no
legitimate male descendants.85 He did, however, have an illegitimate
grandson, son of his predeceased son, and a nephew and a great-
nephew who descended from the Aragonese royal family in the female
line. Moreover, there were two more distant relatives who descended in
an unbroken male line from earlier kings of Aragon (see the family tree

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in Appendix D). The complexity of the situation, of weighing the claims

of legitimate versus illegitimate birth, male-line versus female-line
descent and closer or more distant relationship, was compounded by
the starker question of the balance of power between the claimants.
Unlike the Scots lords in the later thirteenth century, the ruling classes
of the lands of the Crown of Aragon (which comprised Aragon, Catalonia
and Valencia) decided to settle the question of the succession them-
selves, not by referring it to any outside power. This involved a long and
sometimes difficult process, harmonizing the parliaments of Aragon,
Catalonia and Valencia, dealing also with those claimants who were
resorting to violence, and maintaining authority in the islands of the
Mediterranean subject to the Crown of Aragon, where, in Sicily, there was
a move to have Martin’s illegitimate grandson crowned.
The five contenders were Alfonso de Gandía, grandson of James II
and quite old at the time of this crisis, who died early in 1412, whereupon
his claim was taken up by his younger brother, John of Prades; James of
Urgell, great-grandson of Alfonso IV and notorious for his violence;
Frederick de Luna, the young illegitimate son of Martin I’s son; Louis
(III) of Anjou, always on the lookout for a crown; and Ferdinand of
Antequera, the younger son of John I of Castile, and from 1406 regent
for his young nephew John II of Castile, who was the son of Ferdinand’s
older brother Henry III. Ferdinand was also extremely wealthy and
experienced in warfare, both attractive qualities in a candidate for the
throne.
In February 1412, almost two years after the death of Martin I, the
parliaments of Aragon, Catalonia and Valencia each chose three repre-
sentatives, thus forming a committee of nine, who were granted the
power to decide who should be the next king. Among the nine commis-
sioners were bishops, legal experts, representatives of the towns and also
Master Vincent Ferrer, a Dominican friar from a wealthy Valencian family
who was one of the most celebrated charismatic preachers of his time
(and who was canonized in 1455). A decision of at least six of the nine
would be valid, on condition that they included one from each of the
three lands of the Crown of Aragon. The nine spent the spring and early
summer of 1412 in their deliberations in the town of Caspe, close to
where Aragon, Catalonia and Valencia adjoined. They read the

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documents submitted to them and heard the arguments made on

behalf of the claimants. On 28 June 1412 they went to the church of
Caspe to publish their decision. An altar had been set up at the doors of
the church, facing the square, and benches placed around it.
Representatives of Aragon, Valencia and Catalonia, including lawyers,
nobles, clergy and others, took their places here. The archbishop of
Tarragona celebrated mass at the altar. Master Vincent Ferrer preached
a sermon and then proceeded to announce the decision about the
succession:

There, publicly, in a loud and comprehensible voice, before the lord

ambassadors and the people assembled in that place, he solemnly
published one of the documents concerning our lord and king, reading
word for word. And when in this publication there was a passage in which
the name was mentioned of the most excellent and magnificent ruler and
lord Ferdinand, our true king and lord, Master Vincent and the others and
all present, expressing their happiness and joy in a great and loud voice,
exclaimed many times, ‘Viva, viva nostre rey e senyor don Ferrando!’86

The local garrison then raised a huge banner with the arms of the kings
of Aragon, and church bells were rung and trumpets sounded.
Everything was being done to make this decision as public and as loud
and joyful as possible, and hence irreversible.87 Not everyone rejoiced.
James of Urgell refused to recognize Ferdinand and had to be defeated in
battle. He spent twenty years a prisoner and his county of Urgell was
incorporated into the lands of the Crown. This is how a junior branch of
the royal family of Castile came to rule also in Aragon. Ferdinand’s
grandson, also called Ferdinand, married his cousin, Isabella of Castile,
thus effecting the dynastic union of Aragon and Castile on which modern
Spain is based.
In both Scotland and Aragon the ruling classes, lay and ecclesiastical,
had contrived to create institutions and procedures to deal with a crisis
in the succession without simply lapsing into civil war. The Scots, how-
ever, had submitted their case for judgment to a ruler outside the
kingdom, and moreover one who would have a very determined and
intransigent view of the proper relationship between England and
Scotland. That is why, although the judgment in favour of John Balliol

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was undoubtedly the correct one in terms of the rule of primogeniture,

recourse to Edward had left the Scottish kingdom in a vulnerable subordi-
nate position. Perhaps the Scots ruling classes thought they had little
choice between accepting Edward as arbiter and seeing a Bruce–Balliol
war, although in the long run they got both, since in 1332 John Balliol’s
son launched a campaign for the kingship against the incumbent Bruce
dynasty that lasted for a quarter of a century. In the lands of the Crown of
Aragon the decision was put into the hands of a committee representing
the three constituent lands and was reached as much on grounds of utility
as of legal custom. Indeed, one account of the proceedings at Caspe
alleged that one of the nine commissioners, the archbishop of
Tarragona, ‘believed that the duke of Gandía and the count of Urgell, as
legitimate males and descendants in the male line of the stock of the kings
of Aragon, had greater right’, but had to concede that ‘don Ferdinand was
more useful for the government of the realm’.88
The failure of a dynastic line, especially if it was dramatic, often
stimulated chroniclers and others to provide an explanation, usually
in terms of providence and punishment rather than in terms of
biology. One of the more notable cases was the successive deaths in
1314, 1316, 1322 and 1328, of Philip IV (‘the Fair’) of France, his
three sons and a grandson. A king who was the most powerful in
Europe and had, at the time of his death, three adult sons, left no
male-line descendants just fourteen years later. It is a perfect example
of the uncertainty of the dynastic world and no surprise that these
kings have been christened les rois maudits – ‘the accursed kings’.
A chronicler writing in Castile a little later tells the story of the
successive deaths, concluding,

and in this way there came to an end the line of King Philip of France,
whom they call ‘the Great’ and in France ‘the Fair’. And some say that this
death of King Philip and also the failure of his line came about because this
King Philip had the pope captured. And others say . . . because this King
Philip in his time made great extortions in the kingdom of France . . . and
some say because this King Philip expelled the Jews from all his realm . . .
but the reason why this happened, God knows.89

Such a superfluity of explanation suggests the inexplicable.

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Adoption
There was one institution that might seem to solve the problem of the
childless ruler. In his will, which was read out after his assassination in
44 BC, Julius Caesar bequeathed three-quarters of his property to his
great-nephew Gaius Octavius, and also ‘adopted him into his family and
name’.90 Octavius then became ‘Caesar’ and was launched on his path to
becoming ‘Augustus’, conventionally regarded as the first Roman
emperor.91 When planning for the future, Augustus himself also
employed the institution of adoption. After the death of two of his grand-
sons, Augustus adopted the remaining grandson and also Tiberius, who
was both his stepson and his son-in-law. The grandson proved unsatisfac-
tory and was soon disinherited, but Tiberius entered fully into the role of
adopted son. In return Augustus made every effort to increase Tiberius’
power and glory, for ‘it was now certain that hope of the succession
inclined to one person alone’.92 These examples show how important
adoption was in Roman society, often determining the transmission of
power at the highest level.
This tradition continued in the Byzantine empire, where succession to
the imperial throne was sometimes by means of adoption: thus the
emperor Justin (518–27) adopted his nephew, who took the name
Justinian, and succeeded him as emperor, and Michael III (842–67)
adopted Basil, his chamberlain, with a view to Basil succeeding (although
Basil hastened events by murdering Michael), while the eleventh century
saw several examples of adoption being practised or proposed to secure
imperial succession.93 It was such a readily conceivable possibility in
Byzantium that when Nicholas, patriarch of Constantinople, was justify-
ing his refusal to sanction the fourth marriage of the emperor Leo VI to
his mistress Zoe in 906 (discussed above, pp. 70–1), he rejected Leo’s
argument that the marriage was required to legitimize the son Zoe had
borne him, by saying that it would be perfectly easy for Leo to adopt the
boy; this would legitimize him and there would then be no need for the
marriage.94
In contrast to Byzantium, adoption became marginal in the medieval
west.95 It is mentioned in the Frankish and Lombard laws of the early
medieval period, and legal formulae for the procedure are found in

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formularies from the Frankish empire,96 but cases are few, and even
fewer among rulers. There are three instances of adoption among the
Merovingian kings, although one of them is doubted by some scholars.97
The most fully depicted case, because it is described in the history of
Gregory of Tours, is the adoption of the child king Childebert II by his
uncle King Guntram – this was a period when the Frankish realms were
divided amongst several members of the Merovingian dynasty. Gregory
describes how, in the spring of 577, Guntram arranged a meeting with
the young Childebert, along with the chief men from both their king-
doms, and said, ‘It has befallen me, because of my sins, that I am without
children, and so I request that this nephew of mine should be as a son to
me.’98 He then placed Childebert on a throne, bestowed on him the
entire kingdom99 and promised that, even if he had a son in the future,
Childebert would be that child’s equal. Thereafter, Guntram referred to
Childebert as his son or adopted son.100 Some years later, in 585, this
bond was strengthened. At a meeting between the two kings, Guntram
placed a spear in the hands of Childebert, who was now about fifteen, and
said, ‘This is a sign that I have handed over my whole kingdom to you . . .
For, because of my sins, none of my stock remains except you alone, the
son of my brother. For you succeed in all my kingdom, all others
excluded from inheritance.’101
In whatever way one interprets these early medieval cases and the
references in laws and formularies, there is no doubt that they are few
in number and dry up soon after the Merovingian period. From the tenth
to the twelfth century there is virtually silence on the subject of adoption
in west European sources. The story then recommences but at a very
abstract level. The learned lawyers of the twelfth, thirteenth and four-
teenth centuries often discussed adoption, since it appeared in the texts
of the Roman Law that they studied, but it is clear that, in general, these
discussions were theoretical and hypothetical.102 In Spain adoption
appears in law codes such as the famous Siete Partidas, but ‘research
undertaken in judicial and notarial sources to study the practical applica-
tion of adoption has produced nothing’.103 Only in the late Middle Ages
was there a muted revival of the practice of adoption. There is evidence of
adoptions, at various social levels, from the fourteenth century in Sicily
and from the fifteenth century in Florence, Provence and southern

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France, with isolated examples elsewhere.104 These were all areas where
written law, as distinct from unwritten custom, was important, and this
distinction was recognized at the time, one legal expert, after defining
adoption, pointing out ‘this happens more in written law than in
custom’.105 Roman Law, with its prominent place for adoption, provided
a model in these regions.
Adoption could be used by peasants to bring a strong young man into
the family, who would support them in their old age, but it could also be
used by aristocrats for dynastic purposes, especially to preserve the family
name if they had no sons of their own. The ‘adoption of name and coat-of-
arms’, as it is called, enabled dynastic continuity to be salvaged even if the
biological male-line transmission was broken. Thus, Lourdin de Saligny,
chamberlain of the duke of Burgundy in the mid-fifteenth century, lacking
a son, named his daughter as his heir but then ‘substituted’ her son for her.
His grandson thus became ‘his substitute son’. This substitute son would
inherit all Lourdin’s property, and so would his sons after him if he had any;
if not, the property would pass to his younger brothers in turn. A condition
of their receiving the inheritance was that they ‘should be held to bear the
name, surname, heraldic motto and arms of the testator’.106 In this way
generations of men with the name Lourdin de Saligny, and with Lourdin’s
coat-of-arms, would march into the future, bridging the gap in male trans-
mission that Lourdin’s daughter represented.
In adoption, the dynastic world would seem to have found an ideal
safeguard against rupture of the family line. This was indeed how the
institution was used in ancient Rome. However, medieval cases of trans-
mission of royal power in this way are few. Apart from the Merovingian
examples already discussed, there are isolated later cases, some of which
are hard to interpret. For example, annalists describe a meeting in 887
between the emperor Charles the Fat and his young kinsman Louis,
‘whom the emperor attached to himself honourably as his man, like an
adopted son’.107 This word ‘like (quasi)’ can be interpreted as having
a stronger or weaker meaning, and some scholars have viewed this as
a genuine adoption with Charles accepting Louis as his heir, while others
view it as a vaguer ‘ritual of peacemaking’.108
A case of royal succession by adoption occurred in Hungary in 1038.
A well-informed Bavarian chronicler describes how Peter Orseolo, whose

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father was Otto Orseolo, doge of Venice, and whose mother was a sister
of King Stephen of Hungary, came to the throne: ‘Since his own son had
died during his lifetime, and he had no other, Stephen, his uncle, made
him his adoptive son (adoptivum) and appointed him heir to the
kingdom.’109 To do this, Stephen had to kill or exile other relatives,
and Peter’s reign was precarious: he was deposed in 1041, restored by
the German emperor in 1044, and again deposed and blinded in 1046.
This adoption of a sister’s son, which is a particularly close relationship in
some societies, thus misfired in the face of the claims of other members
of the ruling dynasty and also hostility to Stephen’s christianizing
policies.
A more successful attempt to alter the succession by some kind of
adoption marked the end of the civil war in the reign of King Stephen
of England (1135–54). Stephen had faced the competing claims of his
cousin, the empress Matilda, and her son Henry of Anjou. Eventually,
in 1153, after years of war and the death of his eldest son, King Stephen
came to terms, agreeing that Henry would succeed him when he died.
The document recording this agreement does not use the language of
adoption explicitly, Stephen saying ‘I have appointed Henry my suc-
cessor in the kingdom of England after me and my heir by hereditary
right . . . I have also given him my assurance on oath that I will support
him as my son and heir’, but the chroniclers did not hesitate to
describe this act as adoption: ‘the king accepted him as his adoptive
son and made him heir of the kingdom’; ‘an agreement of mutual
adoption was made between Stephen, king of England, and Henry’;
‘Henry, whom King Stephen adopted as his son’.110 This language of
adoption might have inspired the fantastic story, current in the thir-
teenth century, that Henry was actually Stephen’s biological son, whom
he had fathered on the empress Matilda in a ship in the English
Channel.111
The most notable instances of adoption by a ruling sovereign
occurred in the late medieval kingdom of Naples: both Queen Joanna
I (1343–81) and her great-niece Joanna II (1414–35) adopted heirs. The
kingdom of Naples, which covered the whole of mainland southern Italy,
was in the region of written law where, as was noticed, adoption was more
common than in northern Europe. The background to these adoptions

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was the long and vicious feuding between different branches of the ruling
family. In 1380 Joanna I was facing a serious threat from Charles of
Durazzo, representative of one of these rival branches. Joanna was in
her fifties at this time and, although she had had three children from her
four marriages, none had survived beyond their third year. She was thus
able to offer to adopt an heir, who would be chosen for his ability to back
her cause against Charles of Durazzo. She therefore negotiated with her
cousin, Louis of Anjou, younger brother of the king of France, and, on
29 June 1380, issued a document adopting him:

we have adopted, received, admitted and ordained lord Louis as our

legitimate son, wishing that lord Louis, our legitimate son, should enjoy
and possess all the privileges and rights that legitimate adopted sons can
and should enjoy and possess. Moreover, we, honouring lord Louis, our
legitimate adopted son, with full and maternal affection, have named,
pronounced, declared, made, instituted and ordained, him, and his
successors after him, as future king, as our legitimate heir and successor
after our death.112

Joanna could now hope for military backing from the powerful French
prince. Louis, however, acted with deliberation rather than haste.
Charles of Durazzo was able to conquer the kingdom of Naples, capture
Queen Joanna and have her murdered before Louis even arrived in the
kingdom. But Louis was not deterred from pursuing his claim, just as his
son and his grandsons did after him. The act of adoption of 1380 thus
helped to shape the politics of Italy, and beyond, well into the fifteenth
century.
During the course of this long struggle, adoption was again used as
a tool. Joanna II, daughter of Charles of Durazzo, succeeded to the
throne of Naples in 1414 but soon faced a serious threat from Louis
(II) of Anjou, the son of the man adopted by Joanna I, and, after his
death, from his son Louis (III). Joanna was childless and in her forties
and hence, like her earlier namesake, was free to offer her inheritance in
return for immediate military support. She turned to the king of Aragon
and Sicily, Alfonso V, whom she adopted as her son and heir in 1421.
Alfonso could provide powerful fleets and had a nearby base in the island
of Sicily. He made a grand entrance to the city of Naples on 8 July 1421

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and was greeted warmly by his adoptive mother. But these good relations
did not last. Alfonso’s military success was limited, and soon serious
distrust arose between him and his followers and Joanna and her court.
By 1423 relations had broken down completely and Joanna revoked her
adoption of Alfonso and Alfonso himself sailed back to Barcelona, while
Joanna changed her position entirely and adopted Louis of Anjou in his
place.113
There seem to be a few other late medieval cases, but the total
number of adoptions by rulers in the Middle Ages, outside of
the Byzantine empire, cannot exceed ten or twelve.114 The question
naturally arises of why so few childless, or sonless, medieval rulers took
this route. The influential anthropologist Jack Goody advanced the
thesis that the disappearance of adoption as a general practice in
medieval Europe was the result of a concerted effort on the part of
the Church, which attacked cousin marriage and concubinage as well as
discouraging adoption:

If the Church introduced and encouraged procedures for acquiring land

and other property for itself, did it also discourage, at least in
consequence if not in intention, those practices that might provide
a family heir for the property of a dead man or woman? If so, this
would provide some explanation for the dramatic shift from close to
distant marriage, as well as the abandonment of adoption, widow
inheritance, concubinage, divorce and remarriage and other strategies
of heirship.115

Goody sees a pattern here: ‘it does not seem accidental that the Church
appears to have condemned the very practices that would have deprived
it of property’.116 It is not quite clear how attacks on cousin marriage
helped the Church accumulate property, although the other two prongs,
hostility to concubinage and adoption, would indeed increase the
chances of childlessness, and hence of a bequest to the Church. But
there is little evidence of official ecclesiastical hostility to adoption, with
one exception, Salvian, a priest from fifth-century Gaul. The uncompro-
mising Salvian is indeed scathing about childless people adopting rather
than bequeathing their property for pious purposes, that is, to the
Church:

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A number of people without sons, paying no attention to their own

salvation and the remedy for their sins, even though they lack seed of
their blood, nevertheless seek others, to whom they award their property,
that is, to whom they ascribe the shadow name of family relationship,
whom they, as imaginary parents, might make their adopted sons, as it
were, and have these offspring born of perfidy succeed in place of those
they do not have.117

Salvian was, however, a more or less isolated voice. The decline of adop-
tion as a general practice cannot be explained by overt hostility on the
part of the Church, because there is so little of it. There remains an
enigma. If some rulers, at some times, could use adoption to deal with the
problem of childlessness, why didn’t all childless rulers do so?

Unmarried Kings and Kings Who Married Late

There is another enigma, although of different degree. If the dynastic
world was obsessed with the search for high-born wives to be the mothers
of princes, what can explain those cases where kings married late or not
at all? There is no doubt that rulers received a constant barrage of advice
that they should marry. Ivo, bishop of Chartres, was delighted to hear that
Louis VI was intending to marry and urged him to do so without delay,
especially since if he died without an heir the kingdom would be torn
apart by ambitious men:

Do not devise any delay for entering the order of married life . . . Hasten so
that from your loins there should proceed one who may destroy the vain
hope of so many ambitious men and replace fickleness with the hope of
one man.118

By marrying, Ivo said, Louis would simultaneously serve his own interest,
the stability of the kingdom and the peace of the Church.
James I of Aragon, who succeeded to the kingdom in 1213 at the age of
five, recalled in his memoirs how his nobles had urged him to marry:

And we took as our wife the queen, Doña Eleanor, at the advice of our
men, who counselled us that, because our father had no other son besides
us, that we should take a wife when young, since they had great concern for

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our life and that above all they wished that an heir should issue from us, so
that the kingdom would not pass from the natural line.119

James married Eleanor, a member of the royal house of Castile, just after
his thirteenth birthday.
Such advice crops up also in largely fictional accounts. When
a hagiographer wrote the Life of Æthelbert, saintly king of the East
Angles (d. 794), he needed an explanation for his hero actually agreeing
to marriage, a rare thing for a saint. It is the king’s advisers who suppo-
sedly urged him to take this step:

Since he had not yet taken a queen in marriage, the whole gathering of his
court feared that, if he were snatched from their midst without children,
they would fall under foreign rule. Therefore, they counselled the king
that he should receive in matrimony a woman worthy of the royal
dignity.120

Given all this, one would expect that the early betrothal of kings, or heirs
to the throne, would be a universal practice. There are indeed, as we have
seen, many examples of the betrothal of very young children or even of
babies, and the vast majority of kings did marry. But the exceptions to this
pattern raise a question: what motivated kings who did not marry, or
married late?
The Byzantine emperor Basil II, who died unmarried and childless in
1025, despite the risk to the continuation of his dynasty, presents a rare
case. Contemporaries sought to explain his choice by a vow of celibacy
that Basil had taken, renouncing sex and marriage in exchange for divine
help in war – Basil was a famously successful war-leader (see below,
p. 130). Clearly, they thought there had to be some such good reason
for his decision never to marry. Later in the eleventh century the case of
another unmarried king has provoked speculation about a reason of
a different kind. William II Rufus, king of England, came to the throne
in 1087 in his late twenties.121 He never married and his court was
criticized by a contemporary monastic writer as a centre of effeminacy,
with its ‘courtly youths who almost all let their hair grow long like girls’.122
Monks of the following generation also characterized William’s court in
this way, adding specific accusations that it was a ‘homosexual brothel’123

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and writing of the king that ‘he never had a legitimate wife but he applied
himself insatiably to obscene fornication and constant adultery’.124
These authors also launch general attacks on the sodomy that they see
all around them, but without making a specific charge against the king.
The most thorough biographer of the king concludes that he was prob-
ably bisexual.125
A similar view has been advanced about Richard I of England, the
‘Lionheart’.126 Richard married Berengaria of Navarre at the age of
thirty-three. The lateness of this marriage may be partly explained by
his prior, and very long, engagement to another princess. But contem-
porary sources do report that, during his marriage to Berengaria, he was
criticized for neglecting his conjugal duties. The saintly bishop of
Lincoln told him to his face, ‘the public gossip is that you are not faithful
to your own wife’, while, after a hermit warned him, ‘Remember the
overthrow of Sodom and abstain from illicit deeds’, the king eventually
repented and ‘took back his own wife, whom he had not slept with for
a long time, and abandoning illicit sexual intercourse, cleaved to his
wife’.127 Some have interpreted these words as indications that Richard
was accused of homosexual activity, but it is clear that the invocation of
Sodom can often imply only the punishment of wickedness in general,
rather than this specific sin.
The matter of Richard’s sexuality might have been clarified by
a passage by the chronicler Helinand of Froidmont, but we have this in
a tantalizing incomplete form. The relevant part of Helinand’s chronicle
survives only in a seventeenth-century printed edition, not in manuscript,
and the passage about Richard describes how the king, during his captiv-
ity in Germany on his way home from crusade, made his confession to
a certain bishop and proposed ‘to be continent henceforth’, but another
bishop, coming from England and wishing to ingratiate himself with the
king, ‘persuaded him, for the sake of his bodily health, that he should . . .
dot dot dot . . . and thus confirmed the unhappy man in his wickedness’.
The learned Cistercian editing Helinand in 1669 obviously thought that
what the bishop prescribed was unfit for his readers to know. How bad
could it have been? And is this the earliest example of the bowdlerizing
ellipsis in print? Helinand vouchsafes this story as being told by King
Richard himself on his death bed.128 There is thus no clear and

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convincing evidence for Richard engaging in homosexual activity but

very strong evidence for his sleeping with people other than his wife, and
an illegitimate son is recorded. He obviously did not feel that his duty to
produce a legitimate male heir was paramount, and he was indeed
succeeded by a brother. In this he resembles his predecessor, William
Rufus. Both kings, coincidentally or providentially, died in similar ways,
the former from an arrow, the latter from a crossbow bolt, a ‘coupling of
similar things’ that was noticed at the time.129
Basil II and William Rufus are certain cases of kings who died as
unmarried adults. There is also no evidence that Æthelstan (d. 939),
often seen as the first king of England, was married. The chronicler
William of Malmesbury, writing two centuries later, but perhaps having
access to reliable source material, says that the king raised his young
brothers with great affection and that ‘when they were adults, he made
them partners in the kingdom, and, out of consideration for them, he
never made any effort to get married’.130 The implication here is that
Æthelstan expected and approved the succession of a younger brother,
which indeed was what happened. Such a motive is one of several con-
sidered in Sarah Foot’s substantial biography of the king. She also men-
tions his sexuality, along with a sensible caveat:

Any attempt to talk about the sexual orientation of a tenth-century man is

doomed to be anachronistic . . . Hypothetically, we could concede that,
given both the vocabulary and the opportunity to express such desires,
Æthelstan’s interests might have tended towards same-sex relations.

Alongside a succession strategy and a sublimated homosexuality, the

possible motives for the king’s celibacy, she suggests, might also include
‘a religious vocation to chastity’ (as was suggested for Basil II) although
we are warned against the more psychoanalytical theory that it sprang
from ‘a revulsion against the suffocatingly feminine atmosphere of his
father’s household’. Foot also seeks to depict the king’s unmarried status
as nothing extraordinary: ‘While bachelorhood was uncommon among
secular European princes of his day, it was not a wholly inexplicable life-
choice and need not be treated with particular suspicion.’131 Whether we
treat it with suspicion or not, the variety of explanations for the life-
choice of unmarried rulers like Æthelstan, whether such explanations

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appeal more strongly to medieval assumptions (a vow of celibacy) or

modern ones (latent homosexuality), shows that an explanation is
demanded. Because the number of unmarried kings is so small, and
their motivation so uncertain, it remains a safe generalization that
kings took it for granted that one of their main responsibilities was to
produce a son and heir.

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 CHAPTER 3

Fathers and Sons

Securing the Succession

T h e th i rt e e n t h - c e nt u r y s p an i s h l aw bo o k , t h e
Siete Partidas, explains that a king can obtain sovereignty justly in
four ways: by inheritance (by being the eldest son, or other near relative);
by election by the people when there is no such heir; by marriage to the
heir to the kingdom; and by grant of pope or emperor.1 There are
examples of all four types in medieval Europe: cases of inheritance are
too numerous to mention; cases of election are less common, but there
are many examples, some of them very significant, such as that of the
Holy Roman Empire, where, eventually, elaborate rules about election
were developed and a class of ‘Electors’ was defined (see below, pp. 401–
2); the third way, marriage to an heir, brought the Hohenstaufen dynasty
the kingdom of Sicily in 1194, and led to the fifty-year reign of Sigismund
of Luxemburg in Hungary (1387–1437); grants by the pope created the
kingdom of Sicily in 1130 and transferred it to a new dynasty in 1265,
while grants by the emperor conferred the royal title on Polish and
Bohemian dukes, either for an individual’s lifetime or permanently.2
If we turn to the first category in this list, inheritance, it is clear that in
medieval Christian Europe there was a range of inheritance patterns,
both in the sense of varying norms and customs and in the sense of actual
degrees of order or disorder. In Ireland a large group of relatives, more
or less distant, was eligible to succeed, and there were also overlapping
hierarchies of kings, and in Merovingian Gaul division of the inheritance
among members of the ruling dynasty was common, while, in contrast,

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the main continental dynasties of Frankish descent had, by the tenth cen-
tury, adopted unitary and impartible kingship. If we look at actual practice,
in eleventh- and twelfth-century England there was only one case where the
throne passed uncontestedly from father to eldest son, but in France in the
same period this was the situation at every transmission of power. Crucial
variables were family structure, especially the number of spouses, the num-
ber of sons and the rights of daughters and ‘illegitimate’ sons, rules and
customs of succession, and the ambitions and scruples of family members.
In the early Middle Ages rules about succession were not usually clear,
and rarely written down. This left plenty of room for disagreement and
dispute. After the death of Henry I of Germany in 936, leaving three sons,
Otto, Henry and Bruno (who had been placed in the Church),

the chief leaders assembled and discussed the state of the kingdom. Many
judged that Henry should rule the kingdom, because he had been born in
the royal palace; but others wanted Otto to possess the honour of ruling,
because he was older and more prudent.3

Here we find three different justifications being advanced for preferring

one son to another: being born after one’s father had become king;
seniority in age; and greater prudence. The first of these was not com-
monly advanced as a ground, although in Byzantium being born ‘in the
purple’, that is, born when one’s father was emperor, and in the imperial
palace, was recognized as conveying exceptional status, which might help
support a claim to rule. Henry I’s case was, however, unusual, in that he
was the first king in his family, having been chosen to succeed the child-
less Conrad I. He did not therefore have the expectation of being a king,
so the fact that his son Otto was born while he was just a duke, but his next
son Henry was born after he came to the throne, created a sharper and
more unusual distinction than would have been the case if the elder
Henry had himself been the son of a king. Henry’s party supposedly
thought that, because of this difference between the brothers, the old
king had done wrong in preferring Otto to his younger brother. They
asked the younger Henry, ‘Do you think your father acted rightly in
preferring one who was not born into royal dignity to you, who were so
born?’4 Otto’s champions put forward two different criteria of suitability,
one entirely objective, Otto was older, and one entirely subjective, he was

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more prudent. Both types of argument were common when succession

was being debated.
A king who wanted to ensure that his son would succeed him, or that
a particular son of several would succeed, could employ various methods.
Crowning a successor during a ruler’s lifetime was one. There were other,
weaker, methods, such as designation. Or the ruler might have the great
men of the kingdom perform homage to the designated successor, with
or without official recognition as heir. Eventually, as medieval Europe
moved from the world of memory to the world of written record, to
borrow the title of Michael Clanchy’s famous book,5 complex rules
about succession came to be written down and endorsed by official
bodies, such as parliaments.
In 1115 Henry I, king of England and duke of Normandy, ‘had all the
chief men of Normandy do homage and swear allegiance to his son
William’.6 William was twelve years old. There was nothing unusual
about this, since the Norman dukes of the tenth and eleventh centuries
had designated their sons as successors, a process which is described as
involving the chief men doing homage and swearing fealty to the son,
who might be very young.7 In the following year King Henry summoned
the bishops, abbots and chief men of England to a meeting at Salisbury,
since ‘he wished to appoint William his heir in the kingdom’. As in the
previous year in Normandy, the chief men did homage and swore fealty
to William. The bishops and abbots swore that, after Henry’s death, they
would transfer the kingdom and the crown of the kingdom to William.8
A contemporary chronicler, recording William’s death in the wreck of
the White Ship in 1120, calls him ‘king and duke designate’.9 Henry had
done what he could to ensure his son’s succession. The wreck of the
White Ship was also the shipwreck of these hopes.
On occasion, designation as successor might involve handing over
regalia, objects with a special power and significance that indicated ruler-
ship. For instance, after the death of the Carolingian ruler Charles the
Bald in 877, his wife Richildis brought the regalia to Louis, Charles’ son
and her stepson:

She brought to him the mandate by which his father, before his death, had
transmitted the kingdom to him, and the sword called St Peter’s Sword, by

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means of which she was to invest him with the kingdom, and also the royal
robes and crown and a staff of gold, decorated with jewels.10

Within a few years, Louis himself felt death drawing near: ‘sensing that he
could not escape death, he sent the crown and the sword and the other
royal trappings to his son Louis, commanding those who were with him to
have him anointed and crowned king’.11 A particularly important piece
of regalia was the Crown of St Stephen employed in the coronation of
Hungarian kings in the later Middle Ages. When two rivals were contest-
ing the kingship in the fifteenth century, this actually had to be stolen by
one party to ensure that their candidate’s coronation was legitimate.12
Transmission of the regalia need not be a deathbed act. When the
childless Rudolf III, king of Burgundy, recognized the emperor Henry II
as his heir, he handed over to him his crown and sceptre, although he
continued to rule for another fourteen years, until his death in
1032, being then succeeded by Henry’s successor.13 Another case, like
this one, of transmission of the regalia to someone who was not a close
relative, occurred in December 918, when, according to the chronicler
Widukind of Corvey, the dying German ruler Conrad I summoned his
brother to him and told him that, although they had fighting men,
fortifications and weapons, they lacked one thing: the favour of fortune
(fortuna). This, Conrad said, Henry, duke of the Saxons, did have. So he
told his brother to take the royal insignia – the holy lance, the golden
arm-rings, the cloak, the sword and diadem of the old kings – to Henry,
who ‘would truly be a king and ruler of many peoples’.14 It has been
pointed out that Widukind was writing for Henry’s descendants and
might have invented this vivid legitimizing scene.
The most drastic way for a ruler to ensure the succession was to have
his successor crowned in his own lifetime, with the result that there would
be two kings in the kingdom, possibly for a long time. Lothar, king of the
West Franks, had his thirteen-year-old son Louis V crowned at Pentecost
(Whitsun), 8 June 979.15 This was the first time a king of the West Franks
had associated a son as joint king in his own lifetime.16 Lothar did not die
until 2 March 986, so for almost seven years there were two kings of the
West Franks, a situation sometimes acknowledged quite explicitly in their
documents: two royal charters issued in 981 are dated ‘in the twenty-

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seventh year of the reign of lord Lothar, his most serene majesty, and the
third year of the reign of his son, the distinguished youth lord Louis’.17
The Capetian kings of France followed this practice of crowning their
sons consistently from 987 to 1179, with the exception of Philip I, who
designated his son, later Louis VI, as his heir but did not have him
crowned.18 And these ceremonies that took place in the lifetime of the
father were genuine coronations. Philip Augustus was crowned and
anointed at Rheims on 1 November 1179 and received the acclamation
‘Long live the king!’, while his father Louis VII was still living, although
very infirm.19 Louis died, within the year, on 19 September 1180, and
most modern textbooks give 1180 as the date of the commencement of
Philip’s reign. He himself, however, dated it from 1 November 1179.20
Coincidentally, just as France had two kings from November 1179 to
September 1180, so, at this very same time, and quite exceptionally, did
England, since Henry II had arranged for the coronation of his oldest son
and namesake in 1170.
There was a long tradition behind such rituals. In the last months of
his life, in September 813, the emperor Charlemagne called a great
assembly at Aachen, crowned his only surviving son, Louis, and had
him proclaimed co-emperor.21 A few years later, in 817, Louis conducted
the same ceremony at the same place for his own eldest son, Lothar,
making him co-emperor ‘just as his father Charles had made him’.22 In
both cases the purpose was to ensure a smooth succession: when
Charlemagne died, there was already an emperor, Louis, and hence no
need for a decision to be made about a successor (although the sitation
was simplified by the prior death of all Louis’ legitimate brothers); Louis
planned a similar outcome, but was less successful in achieving it, largely
because he had several squabbling sons, so that, although his oldest son
Lothar was emperor after him, he ruled over only a fraction of the
empire.
Sharing the throne in this way was a practice commonly found in the
Byzantine empire.23 A French bishop writing in the late tenth century
even called such joint rule ‘the Greek way’.24 One advantage of the
practice was that it often meant that, when one ruler died, there was
already another in place. If an emperor had a son, he might have the
child crowned at a very young age. These child co-emperors generally

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appeared on coins. In the 870s, for example, Basil I appeared on coins

flanked by his sons and co-emperors Leo and Alexander, represented on
a smaller scale.25
The exact status of Byzantine co-emperors, especially child co-emperors,
could be complex and variable. An extreme case is that of Constantine VII
Porphyrogenitus, son of Leo VI, who was born in 905 and became
co-emperor in 908 at the age of two, joining his uncle Alexander who had
been Leo’s co-emperor for many years.26 After Leo’s death in 912,
Alexander became chief emperor and Constantine continued as
co-emperor. Alexander died in 913 and Constantine succeeded as chief
emperor. In the following years he was depicted on coins alongside his
mother and co-ruler Zoe. Although Constantine was named first on these
coins, there is little doubt that Zoe was governing, not her son, who was not
yet in his teens. In 919, when Constantine was fourteen, Zoe’s regime was
overthrown and Constantine had to accept the strongman Romanos
Lecapenus as chief emperor the following year, Constantine now being
in the secondary position. Shortly afterwards, Romanos had his wife,
Theodora, crowned empress, and his eldest son, Christopher, crowned
co-emperor. In 924, Romanos’ other two sons, Stephen and Constantine,
were also crowned. There were now five emperors: Romanos, Christopher,
Stephen, Constantine Lecapenus and Constantine Porphyrogenitus, who
was ‘last of all . . . having only the appearance and name of emperor’.27
Constantine endured this position for many years, but was eventually able to
change it. Romanos’ son Christopher died in 931, and Constantine was
able to come to some kind of understanding with the remaining sons,
who together overthrew Romanos in December 944. Within a month
Constantine Porphyrogenitus outmanoeuvred and removed them and, at
the age of thirty-nine, finally became chief emperor in both name and fact.
He soon appointed as co-emperor his own son, Romanos, who succeeded
him as Romanos II on his death in 959. Constantine is remembered
particularly for his scholarly interests and the works he wrote, but his life
also demonstrated the dizzying paths that the institution of co-emperorship
could follow.
Categorizing co-emperors was a delicate matter for medieval histor-
ians, as it is for modern ones. A year after the death of Constantine
Porphyrogenitus, Romanos II had his young son Basil crowned on

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22 April 960, which was Easter day.28 Since Basil died on

15 December 1025, he had, from one point of view, a reign of more
than sixty-five years. Modern historians, however, date his reign from 976
to 1025, starting it from the time that his co-emperor and guardian, and
the real ruler, John Tzimiskes, died. Byzantine chroniclers sometimes
distinguish the two periods of his rule. Michael Psellos writes that Basil
shared imperial power (συνεβασίλευσεν) until his twentieth year, then
reigned fifty-two years ‘as sole or chief monarch (autokrator,
αὐτοκράτορα)’.29 John Skylitzes, followed by George Cedrenus, says that
he lived seventy years, during all of which he ruled as emperor
(βασιλεύσας), and for fifty years of which he ruled ‘as sole or chief
monarch (αὐτοκράτορα)’.30
Sometimes, of course, kings who were crowned in their father’s life-
time died before them. Philip, son of Louis VI, was born on
29 August 1116, designated heir on 18 April 1120 and crowned
on 14 April 1129, aged twelve, but died in a fall from his horse on
13 October 1131; his younger brother Louis (later Louis VII) was
crowned almost immediately to replace him, on 25 October 1131.
Louis VI, their father, died in 1137. Tancred, king of Sicily (1190–4),
had his son Roger crowned in his lifetime but Roger died a few weeks
before Tancred, so never ruled alone. The fact that these young kings
were real kings is sometimes reflected in their numbering (see below, pp.
301–10 on numbering). Henry the Young King, the son of Henry II who
was crowned in 1170 but predeceased his father, was known as ‘Henry III
(Henricus tertius)’ by many contemporaries as well as writers of a later
generation. Even in 1307 one learned man referred to the king we know
as Henry III (who reigned 1216–72) as ‘Henry IV’, presumably still
reckoning the Young King as ‘Henry III’.31 Writing about this same
time, Bernard Gui, in his history of the French kings, took into account
the young Philip, son of Louis VI, who had died in 1131; since Gui
included this Philip in the numbering, all the kings whom we know as
‘Philip II’, ‘Philip III’, etc., appear in his history as ‘Philip III’, ‘Philip IV’,
etc.32
Between the mid-tenth and the mid-thirteenth century, all German
kings with sons ensured that they were acknowledged as king during their
father’s lifetime. There are eleven examples.33 Not all succeeded their

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fathers, since some predeceased them, but the majority did, indicating
that this tactic worked. It was a way of giving the ruler’s child a public and
formal status rather than a mere presumption of future succession. These
sons were not child heirs but child kings (their average age at election was
seven), even if real power was in their fathers’ hands. Examples of the
father–son relationship exploding are rare (Henry IV and Henry V,
Frederick II and Henry (VII) are the notable examples, as discussed
below, pp. 111–12). The succession in 983, 1039, 1056 and 1190 all saw
crowned kings ready to succeed their fathers, as planned (Conrad IV who
succeeded his father Frederick II in 1250 had been elected king but not
crowned).
The earliest of this sequence took place in 961, when Otto I arranged
for the crowning of his son, also called Otto, during his lifetime. The
younger Otto was elected king at Worms and crowned at Aachen in 961,
and later crowned emperor by the pope in St Peter’s in 967. He some-
times appears in charters during his father’s lifetime as ‘Otto the
Younger . . . co-emperor’.34 Likewise, when the emperor Henry III of
Germany had a long-awaited son in November 1050, he sought at once
to make his succession secure. At Christmas 1050, when the child was not
yet two months old, he had the chief men of the kingdom swear fealty to
him. In 1053, at a great council in the imperial stronghold of Tribur, he
arranged for his son’s formal election as king, and the following year had
him consecrated king in Aachen, the traditional coronation site.
Henceforth the young boy appears formally in his father’s charters as
‘our dearest son, King Henry IV’.35
Conrad IV, who succeeded in 1250, was the last of such cases for
many years. After the extinction of the Hohenstaufen, during the
period of alternating dynasties in Germany between 1254 and 1439,
kings were not able to secure the election of their sons during their
lifetimes, with one exception, Wenceslas (Wenzel), son of Charles IV,
in 1376, and the practice did not revive until the Habsburgs estab-
lished their de facto monopoly of the German and imperial throne at
the end of the Middle Ages. There is thus a correlation between the
period when the empire was usually hereditary in practice and the
custom of child election and designation; the latter was indeed an
instrument of the former. Powerful German kings of this period

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could employ the custom of election as a dynastic tool. In the changed

political circumstances of the later Middle Ages, this tool was no
longer available.
The custom of crowning sons during their father’s lifetime was found
outside of the Frankish kingdom and its successor states in France and
Germany. It was not uncommon, for example, in the south Italian princi-
palities of the tenth century. Gisulf I of Salerno was appointed co-ruler
when he was three: ‘When the boy was three years old, all the people, and
the great men, along with his father, appointed him to the office of
Prince, and they swore oaths to him.’36 There are examples of Irish
kings associating their sons in their rule from the eleventh to the
fifteenth century; they are sometimes titled ‘king by the side of his
father’.37 It was not always sons who were appointed or crowned.
Baldwin V of Jerusalem was crowned during the lifetime of his uncle
Baldwin IV (the ‘Leper King’). It was clear that Baldwin IV would have no
children, and this secured the succession, even though Baldwin V was
a child of five:

He was adorned with royal unction and solemnly crowned in the Church
of the Resurrection of the Lord, and immediately and without delay fealty
was paid to the boy by all the barons, with their hands and accompanied by
the customary oaths.38

The sons, and others, crowned in this way were not future kings, but
kings. When Valdemar I of Denmark elevated his son Canute as joint king
in 1170, the chief men of Denmark ‘agreed to assign royal honours to
Canute, Valdemar’s son, who was acknowledged not only as future pos-
sessor of his father’s majesty but also as present partner in the office’.39
Canute succeeded his father as sole ruler in 1182, after being joint king
for twelve years. He died childless but his brother and successor
Valdemar II continued the practice of having royal sons crowned in
their father’s lifetime, Valdemar in 1218, then, after Valdemar’s death
in 1231, his younger brother Erik (Erik IV) in 1232.40
When fathers arranged to have their sons crowned during their own
lifetimes in this way, it was intended as a guarantee of a smooth succes-
sion. Hugh Capet supposedly wanted his son crowned in his lifetime
because ‘if the king were killed and the country deprived of him, then

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there could follow discord among the nobles, oppression of the good by
the wicked and servitude of the whole people’.41 Having two kings
reduced the chances of this anarchy, since there already was ‘a reserve
king’.42 Abbot Suger writes that the purpose of crowning Louis VII
during the lifetime of his father, Louis VI, was ‘to confute the sedition
of rivals’.43 There could be no clearer way for a king to indicate his choice
as successor, and the ceremony of anointing and crowning marked out
the new and future king in an unmistakable and indelible way that would
pre-empt and deter rivals, including other possible claimants within the
dynasty.

Interregna
The association of sons with their fathers during their lifetime was
intended to remove the danger of any gap between reigns, interregna.
In some kingdoms, in some periods, if the heir had not been designated
or inaugurated before the old king’s death, then the new reign was not
deemed to begin until the election or coronation of the new king. The
period in between was a kind of no-man’s land. It could last some time.
Henry II of England died on 6 July 1189 but his son Richard was not
crowned king until 3 September, more than eight weeks later. Ten years
later Richard himself died, shot by a crossbow bolt during a siege. This
was on 6 April 1199. The coronation of his brother John took place on
27 May. In the intervening seven weeks, knights were paid ‘to guard the
country after the death of King Richard’ and ‘all who had castles fortified
them with men and provisions and weapons’.44 The interregnum was
a nervous time. In the case of kings dying without clear heirs, or of
elective monarchies, the interregnum could be even longer than these
seven or eight weeks. Conrad I, king of the East Franks (Germany) died
on 23 December 918. There was then no king in Germany until
12 May 919, when Henry, duke of the Saxons, was elected, but even
then, only by the Franks and Saxons, not by all the peoples of the king-
dom. The interregnum had lasted for almost five months. After the death
of the childless Christopher III of Denmark on 6 January 1448, it took
eight months of negotiations before Christian of Oldenburg was elected
as his successor on 1 September.

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People were very aware of the dangers of an interregnum. When the

emperor Frederick II had his eight-year-old son Conrad elected king of
the Romans in 1237, the electors gave as one of their reasons ‘because,
after the death of a ruler, the interval of time between the death of
a predecessor and the full rule of his successor, which the men of old
used to call an “interregnum”, could bring great danger to the empire’.45
An interregnum was viewed as so perilous a time that the chronicler
Henry of Huntingdon could scarcely believe the peace and stability that
characterized the period of eight weeks between the death of Stephen,
king of England, in 1154, and the beginning of the reign of his acknowl-
edged heir, Henry II: ‘The king was dead, but kingless England did not
lack peace. You, Henry, are the first in the world to have performed this
wonder.’46 Election or coronation during a predecessor’s lifetime
ensured there would be no interregnum and hence no need to wish for
wonders.
The later Middle Ages saw two developments in succession practice:
first, the elaboration of written rules of succession, sometimes quite
complex ones, often backed by the authority of assemblies or represen-
tatives of the kingdom; second, in those kingdoms where coronation had
been seen as the constitutive act, the attempt to remove the gap between
one reign and the next by deeming that the new king’s reign began on
the day after the old king’s death, or at the very moment of his death,
instead of at coronation.

Writing Down the Rules

In the case of societies which had no written rules about succession to the
kingship, it might still be possible that unwritten rules and customs can
be deduced from actual practice. This has been attempted for early
medieval Ireland, although sceptical voices have also been raised.
Francis John Byrne wrote:

Most Irish kings were the sons of kings, though few succeeded their father
directly. The great majority were grandsons of kings, and few who were not
great-grandsons had any chance. Whether this was a ‘law’ or a fact of
political life can be a matter of debate.47

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Likewise, J. Beverley Smith doubted whether the divisions of the Welsh

principalities between kinsmen in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries
reflected a rule or law of partible inheritance rather than being simply
the outcome of political and military competition.48 Writing about
succession to the throne of Aragon in the first half of the twelfth
century, Alan Forey questioned whether there was a ‘juridical tradition’
on the matter: ‘As it has been set out, the juridical tradition is merely
a series of rules formulated by historians on the basis of what happened
on a few particular occasions.’49 These scholars are suggesting that it is
possible to describe what happened but not to deduce conscious cus-
tom or explicit norms from what happened. It is very unlikely, however,
that royal or princely opponents would not make arguments for their
case, or that their followers would simply dispense with the need for
justifications and explanations for their choice of successor. These
would be expressed in a language of right or custom, even if there
were no body of law to refer to. The debate over the German succession
in 936 (see above, pp. 90–1) is a good example of the way that appeals
could be made to general principles, even if they cannot be classified as
‘law’ or ‘juridical tradition’.
Some early medieval societies, however, did produce written docu-
ments regulating succession. Writing down the rules about succession
can mean two slightly different things: (1) specifying named individuals
and the circumstances in which they would succeed to the throne or (2)
setting out some general rules (e.g. no woman can succeed). In the
early Middle Ages, several written ordinances and agreements of the
first kind can be found, sometimes with quite simple provisions, such as
the agreement between the Merovingian kings Guntram and
Childebert II, who were uncle and nephew, that if one died without
sons, the other would inherit his whole kingdom,50 sometimes with
much more elaborate stipulations, as found in some of the
Carolingian ordinances about future divisions of the kingdom and
relations between successors.51
In the later centuries of the Middle Ages, as literacy spread and
governments became more bureaucratic, it is not surprising that rules
and practices of succession were written down in increasingly exact
forms. Sometimes the incentive to do so was a projected marriage,

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especially with a foreign dynasty, whose members would be very inter-

ested in the precise prospects opened up by the match. For example, in
1255, when Alfonso X of Castile negotiated a marriage between his two-
year-old daughter Berengaria (or Berenguela) and Louis, eldest son of
Louis IX of France, who was then aged eleven, the French court obviously
wanted assurances about the girl’s expectations, for Alfonso convened an
assembly at Palencia to clarify the issue. There, the special rules govern-
ing succession to the kingdom were spelled out. Unlike private property,
succession to the kingdom was ‘indivisible and whole’, and, ‘according to
the general and approved custom of Spain’, if the king had sons, the
firstborn succeeded to the kingdom; likewise, if he had only daughters,
the firstborn daughter would succeed; if he had sons and daughters, the
eldest son would succeed, even if there were older daughters. Since, at
this time, Alfonso’s only legitimate child was his daughter Berengaria,
she was his presumed heir, and he had the assembled bishops, nobles and
representatives of the towns swear to accept her as queen if Alfonso died
without a son. All this was written down, sealed with the seals of the king,
his wife, and eight of the nobles and bishops, and sent off to Louis, the
young fiancé. The document, with its ten seals, is still in the Archives
Nationales in Paris.52
The document is significant in two ways. First, it demonstrates very
well the unpredictability of dynastic politics and the alternative histories
that it could have produced. If Alfonso had had no sons and if the young
Louis had not died as a teenager, then France and Castile would have
been joined in a dynastic union. Such multiple kingdoms were not at all
exceptional (see below, pp. 419–20). In fact, however, a son was born to
Alfonso in the very year of the document, 1255. Second, the negotiations
over this specific marriage had prompted the king and the ruling classes
of Castile to make a very general public statement about the rule of
succession to the throne and had it put down in an official document.
A very similar situation occurred in the kingdom of Scotland twenty-
six years later, in 1281, when a marriage was arranged between
Alexander, eldest son of King Alexander III of Scotland, and Margaret,
eldest daughter of Guy, count of Flanders and margrave of Namur.
Alexander issued an open letter explaining that, to expedite this mar-
riage, he had consulted with his barons and could affirm that

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the custom and usage of the kingdom of Scotland has been from time out
of mind and still is today that if the son and male heir of a king of Scotland
has an heir of the body [i.e. a child, grandchild, etc.] and this son dies
before his father the king, the heir who issued from this son remains and
ought to remain heir to the kingdom.

Consequently, the king can reassure Guy of Flanders that any son of
Alexander and Margaret ‘would be heir to the kingdom of Scotland
according to this custom and usage’. No brother of the younger
Alexander would have a superior claim. Moreover, if Alexander and
Margaret had only a daughter or daughters, and Margaret then died
and Alexander remarried, the eldest daughter of Alexander and
Margaret would become heir if any male heirs of the second marriage
died without heirs of their body. Count Guy was being told, as clearly as
the biological uncertainties allowed, ‘you will be a grandfather to a king
or queen’. The nobles and bishops of Scotland swore to observe these
customs and usages.53 Just as the document issued by Alfonso X survives
today in the Archives Nationales in Paris, so this statement of the Scottish
laws of succession is housed in the archives of Namur. In both cases, it was
the court of the proposed foreign spouse that had demanded these
written guarantees.
Some of the features of these two occasions – the assembly of the great
men, their oath, the written record of ‘customs and usage’ – can be found
in other ordinances about royal succession that were drawn up in other
circumstances, unconnected with any projected marriage. Kings without
a son needed to make decisions about the succession, and these might
have to be revised as their situation was changed by deaths and births in
their family. In 1315 Robert Bruce, king of Scots, who had a daughter,
Marjorie, but no son at the time, convened an assembly at Ayr to deter-
mine the succession. It was agreed that, if King Robert died without
a male heir of his body, he would be succeeded by his younger brother
Edward Bruce, who is described as ‘an energetic man, extremely experi-
enced in warlike deeds in defence of the rights and liberty of the king-
dom of Scotland’; if his line died out, then Marjorie would succeed, or, if
she were dead, the next descendant of King Robert in line. Provision was
made for Marjorie to marry and a regent was named in case any of these

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hypothetical successors were under age.54 All this was sworn to by the
assembled nobles, clergy and representatives of the community of the
realm and recorded in a document with their seals. Unlike the docu-
ments issued by Alfonso X and Alexander III, this makes no claim to
represent ancient custom or usage. In fact, by displacing the king’s
daughter by his younger brother, it could be argued that it was ‘neither
lawful nor logical’.55
A whirl of birth and death quickly rendered all this effort redun-
dant. Within a year or two, Marjorie Bruce was married, gave birth to
a son, Robert, and died. And, despite his warlike experience, Edward
Bruce was killed fighting in Ireland in 1318. Since two of the main
figures named in the document of 1315 were now dead, and King
Robert had a male heir of the body in his tiny grandson, new arrange-
ments had to be made. At a Parliament in Scone in late 1318, the infant
was recognised as the king’s heir. On this occasion, however, more was
done, since a general principle governing the succession was enacted,
sworn to and recorded in writing:

Moreover, since, sometimes in the past, some people have called into
doubt by which legal principle the succession to the kingdom of
Scotland should be decided, if it was not clear, it was declared in
this parliament that succession should not in future be decided by the
custom that applies to lesser fiefs or inheritances in the kingdom,
since such a custom has not been introduced hitherto in succession
to the kingdom, but that at the time of the king’s death the nearest
male in the direct line ought to succeed to the kingdom, and, if there
is no male, the nearest female of the same line, or, if that line fails
completely, the nearest male in the collateral line. This accords with
imperial law.56

Here there is no mention of named individuals but a statement of

general legal principle, specifying the order of succession to the throne,
and buttressed by association with the authority and universality of
Roman Law, although without any specific citation of any passage from
that law. Such ordinances were to become common across Europe and
govern the politics of states up to the present day.57 They were not always
observed. In the long term, patterns of succession were determined by

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three things in interplay, not just by rules and customs of succession, but
also by the biological fortunes of the family and by simple power and
violence. All written regulations of succession are attempts to dictate the
future, so one would expect a high failure rate. But, as has been pointed
out, ‘no system of dynastic reproduction and succession ever steadily
conformed to its own rules’.58

The Prince as Heir

In some kingdoms, the expected successor was designated by a specific
term, such as the tanist (tánaiste) of later medieval Ireland, although in
practice tanists rarely did succeed the king.59 In Anglo-Saxon England
the title atheling (æðeling) was used of close male relatives of the king, one
of whom might well succeed him, but it did not mean ‘designated heir’.60
The Latin equivalent of atheling was clito, an unusual word that crops up
in sources from England from the tenth to the twelfth centuries and is
apparently an ostentatiously learned coinage, based on the Greek
κλειτός, ‘famous, splendid’. William, son of Robert, duke of Normandy,
who died in 1128, is regularly called ‘William Clito’, perhaps the last to be
so styled. ‘Tanist’ and ‘atheling’ were generic terms, referring to a class of
person. A new practice that developed in several kingdoms in the later
Middle Ages was the association of specific titles with designated heirs.
Many of these titles included the term ‘Prince’, which had not previously
been generally used to denote the son of a king. The figure of ‘Prince
John’, wicked younger brother of Richard the Lionheart of England, who
appears in Robin Hood stories, never bore this title in reality. The earliest
occurrence of his title appears to be in the anonymous Robin Hood play
Looke about you of 1600, but it only became common usage around 1800,
and was then popularized by Walter Scott’s Ivanhoe. An early example of
actual usage of such a title is the creation of the style ‘Prince of Salerno’
for Charles, son of Charles I, king of Sicily, in 1272, although the next
generations of the dynasty more commonly used the title duke of
Calabria for the designated heir.61
In England, the earldom of Chester was conferred on Edward, son of
king Henry III, in 1254, and was thereafter regularly granted to the oldest
son of the monarch. In 1301 Edward I’s son, also called Edward, was not

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only granted the earldom of Chester but also made Prince of Wales.
Edward senior had conquered Wales and incorporated the lands of the
last native prince into the domains of the English Crown. When Edward
junior succeeded to the throne in 1307 as Edward II, he did not follow
suit and make his own son Prince of Wales, but the practice was revived
when this son became king as Edward III. Edward III’s oldest son, Edward
the Black Prince, was created earl of Chester in 1333, duke of Cornwall in
1337, the first time the title of duke had been used in the English
aristocracy, and Prince of Wales in 1343. Since that time the three titles,
Prince of Wales, duke of Cornwall and earl of Chester, have made up the
standard style of the heir to the English and British throne. After the
union of the Crowns in 1603, when James VI of Scotland became James
I of England, the title duke of Rothesay, which had been created in 1398
for the heir to the Scottish throne, has also been part of this style.
In France, it was the acquisition of the Dauphiné by the French Crown
that provided an equivalent to the English title ‘Prince of Wales’. The
Dauphiné was a lordship east of the Rhone and hence technically part of
the Holy Roman Empire, but it was acquired by the king of France by
purchase in 1349, and bestowed on his grandson Charles, later Charles V,
who took the title ‘Dauphin’, which the rulers of the Dauphiné had
employed, and quartered his own coat-of-arms with their dolphin.62
The first royal dauphin was thus the son of the son of the king, rather
than the son of the king. After Charles V succeeded to the throne of
France in 1364, it was several years before he had a son. During that time,
he dealt with his subjects in the Dauphiné as ‘king-Dauphin’.63 When his
son, later Charles VI, was born in 1368, his father immediately granted
him the Dauphiné, ‘and because of this he was called Monsieur the
Dauphin’.64 Subsequently the title was always borne by the oldest son of
the king of France, if he had one.
The Iberian peninsula saw similar developments in the fourteenth
and fifteenth centuries, with the heir to Aragon receiving the title Prince
of Girona from 1351, the heir to Castile that of Prince of Asturias from
1388 and the heir to Navarre that of Prince of Viana from 1423. This last
was created by King Charles III of Navarre for his new-born grandson,
also called Charles. In the foundation document of 1423, after a general
preamble – ‘As the human race is inclined and desires that men should

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wish to consider promoting the status and honour of their children and
their children’s descendants’ – the king turns to Charles, ‘our very dear
and very beloved grandson’, granting him Viana and several other places,
and continuing, ‘and we have raised and do raise, by this present docu-
ment, those towns and places to the name and title of Principality, and we
have given and do give to him the title and honour of Prince’.65 Charles,
who was the son of Blanca, daughter and heir of Charles III, and John of
Trastámara, was not yet two years old when created Prince of Viana.
These new titles gave a clear public recognition to the designated heir
and a grander style than had existed hitherto. They did not, of course,
ensure that those who bore these titles always succeeded smoothly. Of the
eight young men who bore the title Prince of Wales in the medieval
period, only four actually succeeded to the throne and, of the four who
did, three were deposed and murdered. Charles, Prince of Viana, did not
succeed his mother, Queen Blanca, on her death in 1441, since his
father, John of Trastámara, retained the royal title he had borne as
Blanca’s husband. Eventually civil war broke out in Navarre between
supporters of John and supporters of Charles, and the son was more
than once held captive by his father. He died in 1461 without ever being
crowned king of Navarre. Nor did the title of dauphin prevent Charles,
son of Charles VI, being disinherited by his father in favour of Henry V of
England in 1420. He had to fight for decades, even with the help of Joan
of Arc, before he could be crowned, enter his capital and expel the
English from France. These titles thus represent the late medieval pro-
liferation and elaboration of titles and honours rather than any new
certainty in succession practice.

Abolition of Interregnum
Some medieval lawyers advanced a radical view of coronation. ‘A ruler’s
grants have no validity before his coronation’, wrote Accursius, whose
views formed the basis of the standard Roman Law commentary.66 This
was an oversimplification. In some kingdoms, such as Scotland before
1329, and intermittently in the Iberian kingdoms, kings were not
crowned in any case, as an observer pointed out around 1200: ‘the rulers
of the Scots, who are also called kings, just like the rulers of Spain, despite

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the fact that they are not customarily crowned or anointed’.67 In those
kingdoms where coronation was the usual practice, it might still have
different meanings. One way of assessing this is by looking at the kings’
regnal years, that is, dating in the form ‘in the first year of king X’,
‘the second year of king X’, etc., for this shows their own, or their
counsellors’, idea of when their reign actually began. In the ninth cen-
tury, for example, the rulers of the West Franks dated their regnal years
from the death of their predecessor, but they then began using their
coronation as the start of their reign, thus regarding it as the moment
when they became kings. In the tenth, eleventh and early twelfth
centuries, all French kings used this method, although a few, quite
inconsistently, also used the death of their predecessor. In the twelfth
century, there was a pronounced vacillation. Louis VII (1137–80) always
took the death of his predecessor as the start of his reign, even though he
had been crowned in his father’s lifetime, but his son Philip Augustus
always dated his reign from his coronation, which had also taken place
during his father’s lifetime. From the reign of Philip’s son, Louis VIII
(1223–6), however, the Capetians all dated their charters from the dates
of their father’s death.68 A final decision had been made in favour of
absolute dynastic continuity.
By coincidence, the final abandonment of any hint of an interregnal
period occurred in both England and France within a few years and for
similar reasons. In 1270, on 25 August, Louis IX of France (St Louis)
died outside Tunis, while on crusade. His son Philip was with the army
there and immediately received the oaths of his chief nobles and
assumed the title of king. Making his will in the camp outside Tunis on
2 October 1270, he styles himself ‘Philip, by grace of God king of the
French’.69 He was crowned on 15 August 1271, almost a year after his
father’s death. Edward, son of Henry III of England, arrived in Tunis
shortly after St Louis’ death and then continued to the Holy Land to
crusade there. Two years later, he was in Sicily returning from the crusade
when his father Henry III died, on 16 November 1272. The royal govern-
ment proclaimed the new king’s peace on the following day and buried
the old king and organized an oath of fidelity to the new one on
20 November 1272. This last date was taken as the start of Edward’s
reign, even though he was not crowned until 19 August 1274. The

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coronation of a French king almost a year after his father’s death, not
before it, as with the early Capetians, and of an English king almost two
years after his father’s death, show the stability of these important med-
ieval kingdoms at this period. There was no rush to coronation. In
England, the king’s reign, which in the Norman and Angevin period
had been taken to commence at coronation, was henceforth taken to
commence on the day after the death of the preceding monarch. Later,
from the time of the Tudors in the sixteenth century, the reigns of
English, and subsequently British, monarchs have been deemed to
begin on the day of their predecessor’s death: ‘The king is dead, long
live the king!’
Several late-medieval thinkers asserted that coronation actually made
no difference to the ruler’s power or authority, adopting a position
completely opposite to that of Accursius. ‘As far as the transmission of
succession is concerned, coronation does nothing at all’, wrote one legal
expert in the 1370s.70 He was defending the rights of a claimant to the
throne of the kingdom of Sicily, who had not been crowned, against the
incumbent ruler, who had, so it was important for him to stress that
coronation had no constitutive effect. This view tied in with another
strand of thinking at the time, which sought to free secular authority
from any dependence on ecclesiastical authority. Since coronation
usually involved clergy and took place in a church, and the anointing
associated with it was indubitably a ritual conducted by ecclesiastics, it was
natural to assume that the Church was bestowing something on the
person being crowned. Opponents of this view wanted to stress that the
king was the king, crowned or not. This was a position advanced with
particular energy by the learned men who supported Louis the Bavarian,
emperor-elect from 1314, in his conflict with the papacy. William of
Ockham, for example, one of the greatest thinkers of the Middle Ages,
who was in Louis’ retinue after himself escaping persecution by the pope,
recorded the argument that ‘A king who succeeds by hereditary right
does not necessarily receive any power over temporal things from the fact
that he is crowned by an ecclesiastical person.’71 Later writers who
followed Ockham dropped that little proviso, ‘necessarily’. ‘A king who
succeeds by hereditary right receives no power over temporal things from
the fact that he is crowned’, wrote a French royalist author in the 1370s.72

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This did not mean that French coronations were not extravagant and
memorable occasions, of course, and nor did it mean that kings in those
countries where there was no custom of coronation were not eager to
introduce it. Popes granted this right to the kings of Norway and the
kings of Scots, with the first actual ceremonies taking place in 1246 and
1329 respectively. But the implication of the view expressed by Ockham
was that they were purely ritual, not constitutive. This way of thinking was
well summed up by the seventeenth-century English legal expert Edward
Coke, who wrote that, because ‘the king holdeth the kingdom of England
by birth-right inherent, by descent from the blood royal’, ‘coronation was
but a royal ornament’.73 If kingship was in the blood, it did not need
priests to convey it.

Waiting for Fathers to Die

Kings wanted sons who would succeed them and keep power and author-
ity in their blood line. But adult sons with the expectation of succession
also presented a problem in the dynastic system.74 The novelist
Thackeray puts it very well in Chapter 47 of Vanity Fair:

You who have little or no patrimony to bequeath or to inherit, may be on

good terms with your father or your son, whereas the heir of a great
prince . . . must naturally be angry at being kept out of his kingdom . . .
the fathers and elder sons of all great families hate each other. The crown
prince is always in opposition to the crown or hankering after it . . . and it
stands to reason that every great man having experienced this feeling
towards his father, must be aware that his son entertains it towards himself.

This is an excellent summary of the internal dynamics of dynasties. Long-

lived kings presented problems. Heirs might become impatient and
fractious. Otto, son and heir of the emperor Otto I (936–73), supposedly
grumbled about his father, ‘He holds onto the kingdoms he has acquired
most tenaciously, like a lion, and does not give me, even though I am his
son, even one portion.’75
Dashing off to the court of your father’s enemy was a clear gesture of
alienation and defiance. This is what the sons of Henry II of England did
in the spring of 1173, when they secretly fled to the court of Louis VII of

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France, who was delighted to welcome them, and thus initiated eighteen
months of war and devastation across France and England. This is also
exactly what Louis the Dauphin, son of Charles VII of France, did on
31 August 1456, when he fled to the court of his father’s enemy, the duke
of Burgundy. Charles and Louis were already estranged; in fact, the two
did not meet for the last fourteen years of the king’s life (1447–61).76 It
was known that Louis ‘had, for a long time, desired to reign and to have
the crown on his head’ and this feeling was deepened by the harshness of
his father’s dealings with him.77 Louis was thirty-eight when he finally
succeeded his father and could return from the Burgundian court to the
kingdom of France.
If the young prince had actually been crowned king, as happened in
cases where fathers associated their sons with them during their lifetime,
he might be particularly prone to impatience, especially if not granted
resources of his own. Hugh, the eldest son of Robert II of France, was
crowned in 1017 while still a boy. In the course of time, however, ‘he
realized that he could exercise command over no lordship of his own in
the kingdom over which he had been crowned, apart from receiving his
food and clothes.’ He pressed his father for a lordship of his own, and,
when this was refused, ‘he joined with some young men of his own
age and began to attack and plunder his parents’ property at will.’
Soon afterwards, however, he was reconciled to them, and was granted
‘authority and power everywhere in the kingdom’, but then ‘suddenly
envious death snatched him away from this world’.78 This was in 1025.
The next son, Henry, was crowned in 1027 and succeeded his father as
sole ruler on the latter’s death four years later.
The fortunes of the restless and ill-fated Hugh were reprised exactly
a century and a half later by Henry the Young King, son of Henry II of
England.79 Like the French prince Hugh, Henry was crowned during his
father’s reign, a unique case in the history of the kingdom of England.80
And, like Hugh, he grew restless. During the absence of Henry II in
Ireland in the winter of 1171–2 some powerful nobles and also, rumour
said, Queen Eleanor herself stirred up the Young King’s mind against his
father, ‘suggesting that to some people it seemed incongruous that he
was a king but did not exercise proper lordship in the kingdom’.81 This
led to the great rebellion of 1173–4, just mentioned, when the Young

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King and two of his brothers, but not John, the youngest and his father’s
favourite, allied with the king of France and came close to defeating their
father. The end of this war did not bring harmony, and fighting between
father and son, and among the brothers, continued up to and indeed
beyond the death of the Young King in 1183. Writing of his death,
a contemporary noted ‘He became a parricide of such immoderate
passion that his greatest wish was for his father’s death.’82
Another contemporary observer lamented these notorious family
dissensions:

O good gods! If such brothers had observed fraternal agreement among

themselves and filial affection as sons to their father and had been bound
together by the double bond of good will and nature, how great and
beyond estimation, how illustrious and unsurpassed in the ages would
have been the father’s glory and the sons’ victory!83

Both the case of Hugh and that of Henry show that, even if a son’s right to
inherit had been recognized by something as formal as coronation dur-
ing his father’s lifetime, there remained the potential for resentment,
conflict and even violence, especially if there were powerful allies of the
young prince interested in using him for their own ends. In both these
cases, too, the son died before the father, so never attained sole rule.
Cases of warfare between royal father and son are numerous, and the
outcomes varied. The Holy Roman Emperor Henry IV was imprisoned
and forced to abdicate by his son, Henry V, in December 1105, and we
can read the old emperor’s complaints about the way he had been dealt
with in several letters from the last months of his life. He has been
treated, he says, ‘without due deference, inhumanely and unworthily’;
his son ‘desired to deprive him of his kingdom and his life’; he had been
held in the strictest confinement, suffering hunger, thirst and fear of
death.84 Is there just a touch of ambiguity, or perhaps irony, when he calls
his son ‘my dearest Absalom’?85
Another father–son conflict in the Holy Roman Empire 130 years later
had a quite different outcome. Frederick II, whose father, Henry VI, had
been both Holy Roman Emperor and king of Sicily, was left an orphan at
the age of three in 1198 and had to fight to win his father’s thrones, but by
the age of twenty he had done so. By that time, he had also married and

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fathered a son, Henry. Frederick’s dominions were vast, since the Holy
Roman Empire contained the areas of modern Germany and northern
Italy, so Frederick II, who was both king of Sicily and emperor, delegated
the rule of Germany to his son Henry in 1220 when the boy was nine years
old.86 They did not see each other for twelve years and by the time they
met again in 1232 differences between them had arisen, especially about
the policy towards the great princes of Germany. In a letter of
January 1235 Frederick complained of his disappointment in his son.87
That summer he deposed Henry and took him back as a captive to Italy.
Here the young man spent seven years as a prisoner, presumably even-
tually despairing, since while out with his jailors one day taking exercise,
he galloped his horse off a high ridge into the depths below.88 His father
expressed his grief in a letter beginning ‘at the death of a son nature
grieves with us and draws out from the paternal feelings tears which
cancel the offenses of the son’.89
The chronicler Ralph de Diceto, dean of St Paul’s, London, listed
numerous examples of father–son conflict from all periods of history.
The root of these ferocious struggles was ‘the immoderate lust for power
(inmoderata dominandi libido)’. His examples include some in which
fathers triumphed, some in which the sons were victorious, and there is
always a moral tone to his reflections: the emperor Henry V, for example,
died without children as a divine punishment for his rebellion against his
father.90
There were occasions when kings disinherited their sons. Two impor-
tant instances of this type, when a king wrote his son out of the picture, in
one case successfully, in the other unsuccessfully, occurred in 1153 and in
1420, in the first case when Stephen of England agreed that he should be
succeeded not by his son William but by Henry of Anjou (later Henry II),
in the second when Charles VI of France acknowledged as his heir Henry
V of England, not his own son Charles, although this Charles did in fact
succeed in becoming Charles VII. There were some remarkable simila-
rities between the situations that prompted these unusual decisions. In
both cases the throne had been disputed between a crowned and an
uncrowned contender: Stephen versus Matilda, whose claim was then
taken up by her son Henry, and Charles versus Henry V, who was
a crowned king of England but not of France. In both cases the

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uncrowned contender had had military success. Henry of Anjou waged

effective campaigns in the years leading up to his agreement with
Stephen, and Henry V won the spectacular victory of Agincourt in 1415
and allied with the duke of Burgundy to begin a sustained war of con-
quest in France. But it was also probably important that both Stephen and
Charles VI lost older sons in the years prior to the treaties they made.
They thus were not disinheriting their firstborn, who had lived long years
expecting to succeed their fathers.
Stephen’s oldest son, Eustace, was five or six years old when his father
became king, and from that time he was recognized as the heir to the
throne. Stephen even tried to have him crowned joint king during his
own lifetime, following a custom of the contemporary French kings.
Eustace married royalty: his bride was Constance, sister of Louis VII of
France. But Eustace was not only heir to his father’s throne but also to his
endless war against his cousin Matilda. From the late 1140s he had to face
up to Matilda’s son Henry. Eustace and Henry of Anjou, the former in his
early twenties, the latter in his late teens, campaigned in England and
France, with Henry slowly gaining the upper hand. In August 1153,
unexpectedly and leaving no children, Eustace died. His father obviously
decided that a negotiated settlement, leaving him the Crown and secur-
ing a proper place for his younger son William, was acceptable. Within
three months of Eustace’s death, Stephen agreed terms with Henry of
Anjou, recognizing him as his heir and arranging a huge lordship for his
son William, and, within another year, Henry had become King Henry II
on Stephen’s death.
The Treaty of Troyes in 1420 between Charles VI of France and Henry
V of England likewise recognized the disinheritance of a royal heir, in this
case Dauphin Charles. But Dauphin Charles had only been dauphin, the
title held by the heir to the French throne, for a few years at this time.
Four of his older brothers had, in fact, preceded him as dauphins, but
they had all died without sons. At the time of the great French defeat of
Agincourt, Charles’ brother Louis was dauphin, but Louis died the
same year as the battle, 1415, and was succeeded by the next brother
John. John, however, died in less than eighteen months. So, in
April 1417, at the age of fourteen, Charles became dauphin. He had
not been raised as an heir, and it may be this was one thing that made it

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easier for some of the French to accept his disinheritance three years
later. But Dauphin Charles refused to be disinherited, and he had some
unexpected help from Joan of Arc. Her energy and faith brought Charles
to Rheims, traditional coronation site of the French kings, in July 1429,
where he was crowned. He had regarded himself as king of France since
the death of his father in 1422, but there is a possibility that Joan had
more old-fashioned ideas and thought of him as simply the ‘noble
Dauphin’ prior to coronation. One of the witnesses at her rehabilitation
trial in 1455–6 reported that, after she had sought out Charles in the
spring of 1429, saying that she had been sent by God to help ‘the noble
dauphin’, she had been asked why she called him dauphin and not king.
She supposedly replied that she would only call him king after he had
been crowned at Rheims.91 Joan was betrayed and burned, but Charles
went on to expel the English from their possessions in France, except
Calais, and could thus take his revenge on ‘the damnable Treaty of
Troyes’ as later French royalists called it.92

Minorities
If royal sons might wait impatiently for their fathers to die, the unpre-
dictable biology of dynasties could also sweep fathers away while their
children were still very young and vulnerable.93 In a world where kings
were war-leaders facing endless threats from aggressive competitors, it
might seem obvious that the succession of a child would be ruled out. In
some dynastic systems, this was in fact the case. In Ireland it was expected
that the new king would be an adult male, and he certainly need not be
the son of the preceding ruler. In Scotland there are no minor kings
before the mid twelfth century, when the model of the dynasty and the
nature of succession had shifted towards the kind of primogeniture
found in other west European kingdoms. Military needs were indeed
cited as an argument against the succession of babies. After the death of
Albert of Habsburg, king of Hungary, in 1439, the Hungarian aristocracy
was divided between supporters of the succession of his posthumous son
Ladislas, and supporters of the king of neighbouring Poland as king of
Hungary too. When some of the Polish king’s supporters were negotiat-
ing with Ladislas’ mother, Queen Elizabeth, they were blunt: ‘Gracious

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lady, even if you had a son who was ten years old, we would not accept him
as our lord, because he could not lead us against the Turks.’94
When, in 890, the bishops and nobles of Provence chose as their king
the nine-year-old Louis (later nicknamed ‘the Blind’), they acknowl-
edged that ‘his age was not suitable to repress the savagery of the barbar-
ians’, that is, Viking and Muslim raiders, but stressed, first, that he was
of high descent, ‘coming from imperial stock’, since his mother was
a Carolingian, mentioning also that he had grown to be ‘a boy of good
abilities’, and concluding with the confident assertion that the barbarian
attacks would certainly be repelled ‘by the advice and bravery of the
nobles of this kingdom, who are not few in number, and God’s help’.95
They recognized the power of the argument for having an adult male
king as a defender of the realm, but thought that high descent, innate
ability and a supportive aristocracy could be adduced to outweigh that
consideration. The very existence of child kings indicates a strong sense
of dynasty. A boy king or girl queen might seem a ludicrous idea in
a world of constant armed conflict between competing lords, but, in
the dynastic system, the claims of blood counted for much.
Cases where the claims of blood-right outweighed the obvious need
for a military aristocracy to have an adult male as their war leader are not
rare. There are at least ninety instances from the period 500–1500 (see
Appendix B).96 In Byzantium, minorities, excluding child co-emperors,
occur roughly once a century.97 About half of the Merovingian kings who
ruled between Clovis (d. 511), conqueror of Gaul, and 751, when the last
member of the dynasty was deposed, came to the throne as minors. For
instance, when Chilperic I was murdered in the autumn of 584, he left
a four-month-old son. The boy’s mother, Fredegund, called on his uncle,
Guntram, to act as protector to the baby and regent of his kingdom. The
nobles assembled, named the child with the royal name Clothar (Lothar)
and secured from the cities of Chilperic’s kingdom oaths of loyalty to
King Guntram and his nephew Clothar.98 As Clothar grew up, he, like
most Merovingian kings, faced threats from his relatives, and he suffered
defeats, but he was also able to reunite the Frankish realms under his rule
and died a natural death at the age of forty-five. He is a good example of
the way that succession of a tiny infant could work in the Merovingian
kingdoms.

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The Carolingians, who succeeded the Merovingians, had no child

kings for over a century (751–855), excluding those crowned in their
father’s lifetime, but they are found in the second half of the ninth
century in several of the component parts into which the Carolingian
empire had broken, the kingdoms of the West Franks, the East Franks
and Provence. Thereafter, the situation in the east (Germany, the
Empire) came to diverge from that in the west (France). Minor kings
inherited the throne in France in 954, 1052, 1226, 1316, 1380 and 1483,
roughly once a century, like Byzantium, but because the Empire was not
in theory hereditary, there are very few cases of minorities there. There
are two cases of very young sons succeeding their fathers as rulers in the
tenth and eleventh centuries: Otto III in 983 at the age of three, and
Henry IV in 1056 at the age of five. But after 1056 there are no further
cases. As election became a stronger tradition with clearer rules, the
chances of electing a child vanished.
Minorities were often the result of an unexpected death, which could
be natural but might be violent. There is thus sometimes a correlation
between the frequency of the violent deaths of kings and that of mino-
rities. In fifteenth-century Scotland, for example, there were four mino-
rities, and three of these resulted from the violent death of the child’s
father: James I was murdered, James II blown up by one of his own
cannons and James III killed by rebels, who included his son, either in
or after battle (see also below, pp. 248–9). It is significant, however, that
when the lives of these kings were cut short, their young sons were
accepted in their place. In eleventh-century Scotland, in contrast,
which was even more violent, with six of eight kings being killed in battle,
there were no boy kings, for the dead rulers were succeeded by adults of
either their own or a rival line. By the end of the Middle Ages the violence
was taking place in a different kind of dynastic world.
Minorities meant regencies, rivalries, decisions about and by queen
mothers, and, of course, endless negotiations about future brides for the
child ruler. Figures at court or noble factions might compete for control
of the child king, who could then be their tool. Queen mothers com-
monly served as regents for their child and were often both protagonists
and victims of such factional politics. An early example is Amalswintha,
widowed daughter of Theodoric, ruler of Ostrogothic Italy, who acted as

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regent for her son Athalaric after he succeeded his grandfather as king in
526 when aged eight.99 For the next eight years she was a major figure in
the politics of Italy and beyond, praised for her wisdom and justice, but
willing to take harsh measures against her enemies among the
Ostrogothic nobility. In 534 her son, the young king, died, and
Amalswintha arranged for her cousin Theodehad to become king in his
place, reportedly with the stipulation that she would continue to exercise
real power. If that were so, she was quickly double-crossed, imprisoned by
Theodehad and murdered by her enemies, strangled in the bath accord-
ing to one account.100 Her killing provoked Justinian, the eastern
emperor, with whom she had had mainly friendly relations, to attack
Italy, beginning a war that would last twenty years and end with the
complete destruction of the Ostrogothic kingdom. Amalswintha pro-
vides a clear example of the way high-born queen mothers could exercise
great political power, and of the dangers as well as the influence that
brought.
On numerous occasions widowed queens of the Merovingians acted as
regents for their minor sons.101 It was also standard practice in the
Byzantine empire: of the seven child emperors in the period 500–1500,
six began their reigns under the regency of their mother.102 In the
Western Empire, Empress Theophanu, who acted as regent for her
young son Otto III for six years (985–91), won praise for her government
during that time, even if clerical writers cannot avoid a note of surprise
that a woman could do so well: ‘although she was of the weaker sex, she
guarded her son’s kingdom with masculine care’.103 After the unex-
pected death of Louis VIII of France in 1226, at the age of thirty-nine,
the misogynist rhetoric was stronger amongst the nobles who opposed
the regency of Louis’ widow, Blanche of Castile, for her young son. Their
spokesman put the feeling into verse: ‘France is truly made a bastard,
hear me lord barons, when a woman has it to rule.’104 Blanche went on to
devote the next eight years to suppressing or bribing dissident aristocrats,
facing down the king of England, leading armies on occasion, and
ensuring that by 1234, the year that her son turned twenty-one and
took a wife, he could embark on his adult reign with a relatively loyal
kingdom.105 Such struggles between queen mothers serving as regents
and aristocratic groups were recurrent features of minority politics.

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Ingeborg, daughter of King Haakon Magnusson of Norway, served as

regent for her son Magnus VII Eriksson, who became king of both
Norway and Sweden in 1319, aged three, but she was deposed by
a group of Norwegian nobles in 1323, who accused her of squandering
royal revenues and of going to war with Denmark to further the interests
of her lover, Canute Porse.106
A dramatic example of a struggle to control the young ruler occurred
during the minority of Henry IV of Germany, who succeeded his father in
1056 just before his sixth birthday.107 In the early months of his minority
events were controlled by Pope Victor II, who was a German bishop as
well as pope and happened to be in Germany at the time of the death of
Henry’s father, but the regency was exercised by Henry’s mother,
Empress Agnes. The chronicler Lampert of Hersfeld gave her a warm
endorsement: ‘Supreme government of affairs and of everything that
needed to be done remained in the hands of the empress, who safe-
guarded the endangered state with such skill that the unexpected turn of
events resulted in no disturbance or dispute.’108 The German nobles
swore an oath that, should the young Henry die, they would consult the
empress about his successor.109 But in the sixth year of her regency
a group of dissatisfied nobles, headed by the ambitious archbishop
Anno of Cologne, plotted a coup. The key was physical possession of
the king, now eleven. He was at the royal palace at Kaiserswerth, at that
time an island in the river Rhine. After the archbishop and the boy king
had enjoyed a banquet, and were talking cheerfully, Anno invited Henry
to inspect his new ship, moored in the river nearby. The moment they set
foot on it, the plotters cast off and rowed out to the centre of the river.
Henry, fearing for his life, threw himself overboard and was only saved by
Count Ekbert of Brunswick, one of the conspirators, diving in to rescue
him. Anno tried to reassure the panicking boy, and the ship rowed off to
his city of Cologne.110 Having gained control of the king, Anno was now
able to exercise governmental authority himself.
Henry IV grew into a controversial adult ruler with a dramatically
disruptive reign and a sorry end. It is not clear if the kidnapping played
any part in shaping his character or his political assumptions. In the case
of Wenceslas II of Bohemia (1278–1305), however, there is an account
that details some of the trauma of a boy king. The opening section of the

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chronicle written at the Cistercian abbey of Zbraslav (Königssaal) in

Bohemia, which comprises an account of Wenceslas II, provides one of
the most arresting and personal pictures of a medieval king to be found
anywhere (see also below, pp. 233–5). It starts with the pathos of the boy
king, whose father was killed when he was not yet seven, being brought up
by his uncle in Brandenburg with inadequate revenues, while his mother
and her lover, the powerful noble Zawisch von Falkenstein, dominated
Bohemia. The psychological consequences for the child included
a phobia about cats and about thunderstorms. One way he tried to deal
with this latter fear was the construction of a hollow altar within which he
hid during storms, while one of his clerks lay at the entrance to the altar,
reading to him from the Bible.111 Wenceslas eventually established him-
self as king of Bohemia, had Zawisch executed, after his mother’s death,
and succeeded in becoming king of Poland too.
Queen mothers often acted as regents but they were not always either
available or suitable. Another choice would be a senior churchman, who
would have authority, experience of administration and, at least in prin-
ciple, no sons of his own to complicate loyalties. Engelbert, archbishop of
Cologne, was the first regent of Henry (VII), who was elected German
king (‘king of the Romans’) in 1220 aged nine. The archbishop is
described as the boy’s ‘guardian, and administrator of the whole of the
Roman kingdom in Germany’.112 Sometimes the pope himself was
involved, particularly in those kingdoms with a special tie to the papacy,
such as Sicily. This was acknowledged by Constance, queen of Sicily, in
her will. When she died in November 1198, she left the ‘custody of the
kingdom’ to Pope Innocent III ‘as superior lord’, although actual physi-
cal custody of her three-year-old son was in the hands of members of the
royal household.113
Adult male relatives were also available as regents, although relations
between uncles and nephews could be tense or worse. Charles VI of
France was eleven when he became king in 1380; several years earlier,
his father, Charles V, had already made arrangements for a possible
regency, entrusting his own younger brother, Louis, duke of Anjou,
with the government of the kingdom until his son and successor was
fourteen, while reserving a large royal estate for the minor king, who was
to be under the guardianship of the queen mother and his two younger

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uncles, the duke of Burgundy and a maternal uncle, the duke of

Bourbon.114 This rather complex system did not work smoothly, but it
gave the royal dukes the chance to run the kingdom in their own interests
in the 1380s, although, of course, their interests did not always coincide.
The king’s fourteenth birthday, stipulated by his father as the age of his
majority, was ignored. Throughout these years the king’s uncles, includ-
ing the duke of Berry, who had been excluded from the original scheme,
dominated royal government, using royal resources to support their own
projects, such as the duke of Anjou’s attempts to become king of Naples
and the duke of Burgundy’s efforts to establish himself in his wife’s
inheritance of Flanders. These were also years of war with England and
serious popular revolts. Eventually, in 1388, as he approached the age of
twenty, Charles asserted his personal control of government. At
a meeting of the great nobles and clergy in Rheims, the cardinal of
Laon acted as his mouthpiece. After praising Charles’ qualities and
describing the experience he had gained in war, he concluded:

Since nothing is lacking in him that ought to adorn the royal majesty, I, by
the oath of fealty by which I am bound, declare that henceforth he does
not need guardians, but the business of government in war and at home
ought to be directed by him himself.115

The majority present, though not the king’s uncles, approved the cardi-
nal’s proposal. The king himself tactfully thanked them for the care they
had taken during the time of their guardianship and promised that he
would continue to value the advice. It was a disputed matter whether the
cardinal’s death a few days later was due to poisoning.
When a minority was going to end was clearly a big question. There
were various rules and customs about when a child ruler reached the age
of majority, though they are not all a good guide to actual practice. The
laws of the crusader kingdom of Jerusalem, for example, specified that
a minor king should be crowned at the age of twelve, but no such case is
recorded, and Baldwin V was crowned at the age of seven.116 Fourteen
was a common age of majority. As mentioned, Charles V, in a royal
ordinance of August 1374, specified the age of majority for his son as
fourteen, citing both biblical and Merovingian precedents for kings of
a young age.117 Majority could be marked by rites of passage: Alfonso II of

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Aragon was knighted, got married and issued a new coinage in

January 1174.118 He was sixteen at this time and these were all acts that
proclaimed his entry to adulthood. Later ages were also possible. In the
kingdom of Navarre a document of 1329 stipulated that if Queen Joanna,
who was a queen regnant, died leaving a minor heir, her consort could
act as regent until that heir was twenty-one.119
The case of Henry III of England, like Wenceslas II a boy king who
grew up with a fear of thunderstorms, shows that the end of a minority
could be a multi-stage process.120 Henry succeeded his father, King John,
in 1216 at the age of nine, and William Marshal, a tried and loyal servant
of the dynasty, was appointed regent: ‘our ruler and the ruler of our
kingdom’, in the boy king’s words.121 The Marshal was supported by the
papal legate, Guala, an especially important figure since England was
a papal fief at this time, while the bishop of Winchester would look after
Henry on a day-to-day basis. Henry was crowned quickly but not at
Westminster, the traditional coronation site, since this was in the hands
of his enemies, rebel barons and their ally Louis of France. The Marshal’s
first job was to win the war against them, which he did. In the meantime,
royal documents were sealed with his seal since the king did not yet have
one. In November 1218, when a new Great Seal was made, the young king
proclaimed that ‘it has been provided by the common council of our
kingdom that no charter, no letters patent of confirmation, alienation,
sale or gift, or anything else that can be granted in perpetuity, shall be
sealed with our Great Seal until we are of full age’.122 Clearly there was
a worry that royal resources might be squandered, as Ingeborg, regent for
Magnus VII Eriksson in Norway, had supposedly done. Henry became
fourteen on 1 October 1221, and this is probably the date that the
personal guardianship of the bishop of Winchester came to an end.
Two years later the king took control of his seal, but still without being
able to authorize grants in perpetuity. Finally, in January 1227, when he
was nineteen, Henry declared that henceforth he would issue royal
charters. Even this was not the end of the matter, for some people
thought that the king would only come of age when he was twenty-one,
the age of majority for English barons and knights.
Child-rulers faced a wave of critical opinion. It was commonplace to
cite the text from the Book of Ecclesiastes: ‘woe to you, the land whose

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king is a child’.123 And ‘boy’ was an insult. In 1219, when he had been
king for three years, some of his subjects were still deriding Henry III of
England as ‘not a king but a boy’.124 Critics sometimes associated the evils
of child rule with those of female rule, as during the regency of the
empress Agnes for Henry IV of Germany: ‘For the king was a boy, while
his mother, just like a woman, easily gave way to whatever was suggested to
her.’125 It was this supposedly hazy, yielding quality of rule by children
and women that hostile clerical observers stressed: ‘The land is cursed
where a boy rules and a woman holds the government; a kingdom should
be ruled by laws and command, not by entreaties or blandishments.’126 It
was said of Philip Augustus of France, who succeeded his father aged
fifteen, that he was a plaything in the hands of his noble advisers: ‘For the
king was a boy and they could bend him like a reed to their will as they
wished.’127
But counter-arguments were also made, and it is hard to believe that
there could be ninety boy kings and girl queens if the hostile views were
the only ones. A letter, written in the year 900, sets out the reasons that
had led the bishops and nobles of the kingdom of the East Franks
(Germany) to accept as their king Louis, son of the emperor Arnulf,
even though he was only aged six – he is indeed traditionally known as
‘Louis the Child’.128 Louis’ father, the emperor Arnulf of Carinthia,
had made determined efforts to ensure his son’s succession. In 897,
two years before his death, he ‘demanded from everyone an oath of
fidelity to himself once more and to his little son Louis’.129 After
Arnulf’s death and Louis’ recognition as king, Hatto, archbishop of
Mainz, one of the leading figures in the kingdom, wrote to the pope
justifying this action:

It remained uncertain for a while whom to elect as king, and, because

there was great fear that the unified kingdom would break into separate
parts, it was decided, by divine impulse (as we believe), that our lord’s son,
although he was very little, should be raised to the kingship, by the
common counsel of the chief men and with the consent of the whole
people; and because the kings of the Franks always come from one family,
we preferred to keep the old custom rather than settle on some novel
arrangement.130

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This passage is short but covers a lot of ground: fears of a kingdom

disintegrating, something of which there was a lot of experience in 900;
the justification derived from the common counsel of the top level of the
aristocracy and the agreement of ‘the people’, usually taken to mean the
rest of the aristocracy; a nod to divine will; and, overriding even the fact
that Louis was ‘very little’, the old custom that kings come from one
family – one dynasty.

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 CHAPTER 4

Female Sovereigns

The First Female Sovereigns in Medieval Europe

T here is no question that during the middle ages

many female members of ruling dynasties exercised consider-
able power and influence. The king’s wife might be influential, the king’s
mother might be even more so. Cases of powerful female regents, like
Blanche, mother of St Louis, who governed vigorously on behalf of her
son for over a decade in all, or queens fighting for the rights of their sons,
like Margaret of Anjou, wife of the mentally incapacitated Henry VI of
England and champion of the young Prince of Wales, are not uncom-
mon. Sometimes women might also rule in their own right, although it is
not always easy to identify which of them ruled formally in this way, rather
than as regents and consorts. There seem to be no cases in the medieval
west as unambiguous as the long reign of an unmarried queen, like the
sixteenth-century Elizabeth of England or the seventeenth-century
Christina of Sweden. And the example of Elizabeth’s sister and prede-
cessor, Mary Tudor, shows that marriage could change a queen from
a sole monarch to a joint ruler, since, after her marriage to Philip of
Spain, the royal style became ‘Philip and Mary, by the grace of God, king
and queen of England and France, Naples, Jerusalem and Ireland’ (per-
haps the only time when Jerusalem and Ireland had the same ruler).
In Byzantium, it is not clear whether the empress Eudokia
Makrembolitissa should best be viewed as a regent or a co-empress. She
certainly exercised imperial authority after the death of her husband
Constantine X Dukas on 22 May 1067, but on behalf of her young sons.

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After she remarried, to Romanos Diogenes, he was proclaimed emperor on

1 January 1068. Then, after Romanos’ defeat and capture at Manzikert in
August 1071, she again exercised power along with her son Michael, but he
exiled her in October 1071 and sent her to a nunnery.1 Berenguela (or
Berengaria) of Castile is another uncertain case. She was the daughter of
Alfonso VIII, who died in 1214 and was succeeded by his son Henry, the
much younger brother of Berenguela. In 1217, after her young brother’s
death, Berenguela and her sons attended a great assembly of her supporters.
There

one of them spoke for all, with their universal consent, recognizing, on
behalf of the people, that the kingdom of Castile rightfully belonged to the
lady queen Berengaria and that they all acknowledged her as lady and
queen of the kingdom of Castile. But they all unanimously begged her that
she should grant the kingdom, which was hers by proprietary right, to her
eldest son, that is, lord Ferdinand, since, because she was a woman, she
would not be able to bear the exertion of ruling the kingdom.

She agreed and ‘granted the kingdom to her son’.2 Taking this literally,
Berenguela was thus a sovereign for a short time in 1217, but this may not be
a useful categorization. Moreover, it has been argued that Berenguela was
not merely ‘queen for a day’ in 1217, but actually co-ruler with her son
Ferdinand.3
The problem of categorizing Berenguela is compounded by the
fact that, in the twelfth and early thirteenth century sometimes the
daughters of the kings of Castile, as also the daughters of the kings of
Portugal, were called queens.4 This caused annoyance when they
married into the great families outside the Iberian peninsula. The
chronicler Gilbert of Mons scarcely ever mentions Matilda, daughter
of the king of Portugal and wife of Philip, count of Flanders (d. 1191),
without adding ‘who had herself called queen’, ‘who had herself
named queen’, ‘who named herself queen’, or ‘called queen’.5 It
was clearly a practice that irritated him. Another contemporary
explains her title more neutrally: ‘She was called queen because she
was the daughter of a king and had exercised rule over the kingdom
of her father on behalf of her brother, who was not strong.’6 Here the
explanation involves not just the position of being the daughter of

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a king but also the actual exercise of power. It was clearly a practice
that non-Iberian observers thought needed explanation.
However, while one must recognize some ambiguities, it is possible to
draw up a provisional list of at least twenty-seven women who ruled
medieval European kingdoms and empires as sovereigns rather than as
regents or consorts. They are listed in Appendix C, which also indicates
those who were named or depicted on the coinage, since this can be
a prima facie indication that they were sovereigns not consorts (although
absence of such evidence does not indicate they were not sovereigns and
their presence on coins is not always definitive evidence that they were).

Byzantium
The earliest were in the Byzantine empire, where there are three cases of
empresses ruling in their own right. The first is Irene, who, after blinding
and deposing her own son, ruled alone from 797 to 802, issuing coins
with her image on both obverse and reverse, and promulgating laws as
‘emperor (βασιλέὺς)’.7 All this was quite exceptional. Indeed, according
to one western account, the reason that the Frankish ruler Charlemagne
was crowned emperor in the year 800, in the middle of Irene’s sole reign,
was ‘because at that time the name of emperor ceased among the Greeks
and they had female rule (femineum imperium)’.8 While Irene saw herself
as ‘emperor’, the hostile Franks chose to regard the empire as vacant.
After Irene, there are no examples of sole female rule in Byzantium for
the next two hundred years, but in the eleventh century there was the
remarkable Zoe, daughter of Constantine VIII.9 In his last days, in the
autumn of 1028, Constantine, having no sons, decided that his successor
would be the aristocrat Romanos Argyros. He forced him to put away his wife
and marry Zoe instead. Since Zoe was fifty, this could not have been in the
hope of grandchildren but must rather have been intended to maintain
a family link of some kind into the new reign. But the marriage of Zoe and
Romanos was not a success. They soon stopped sleeping together, and Zoe
then fell for a young man named Michael, who became her lover. Reports
circulated that, when Romanos drowned in his bath, this was no accident.
Without delay Zoe married Michael and had him proclaimed emperor, as
Michael IV. Their marriage had problems too. Michael’s family then

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arranged for Zoe to adopt Michael’s nephew, also called Michael, to ensure
that power did not slip from their hands on the death of the older Michael.
When this came about, in 1041, Michael the nephew ascended the throne as
Michael V. As her adopted son, he did not, of course, have the option of
marrying Zoe, but instead he tried to freeze her out of power, and eventually
expelled her from the imperial palace and sent her away from
Constantinople and into exile. The historian Michael Psellos, our main
source for all these events, gives a vivid picture of her, standing on the deck
of the ship that was carrying her away, looking back at the palace and
recalling her imperial ancestors.10 But Michael V had miscalculated.
A wave of sympathy for Zoe spread through the city. The emperor sought
to defuse the opposition by recalling her, but the rebels then found another
focus in Zoe’s long-forgotten younger sister Theodora. In April 1042 Michael
V was blinded and exiled, Zoe and Theodora met, embraced, and, says
Psellos, ‘the empire now devolved upon the two sisters’.11 Until now, Zoe
had been empress as wife and adoptive mother. In 1042, briefly, she ruled in
her own right alongside her sister. Zoe and Theodora are depicted side-by-
side on their coins.
Psellos is quite clear that in this short period ‘the sisters chose to rule
alone’.12 But, he says, after less than two months, Zoe ‘sought strength in
marriage’ and took Constantine Monomachos, a member of an impor-
tant Byzantine family, as her husband.13 He was crowned emperor as
Constantine IX. This, writes Psellos, ‘marked, for the empresses, the end
of their power to act and rule as sovereigns, but, for Constantine
Monomachos, the beginning of the establishment of his imperial
authority’.14 Whatever traces of joint rule between Constantine and the
two sisters may be found in symbolic language and iconography, notably
the so-called Monomachos Crown showing the three of them,15 the
reality was clear. Zoe retired from public life to experiment with the
manufacture of different kinds of perfume. She even had to tolerate
Constantine’s mistress moving into the palace. Zoe died in 1050. She
had transmitted her imperial magic to three husbands but had only ruled
herself for a few months and then jointly with her sister.
Surprisingly, it was the sister, Theodora, who was to rule alone, out-
living and succeeding her brother-in-law Constantine Monomachos, and
having a sole reign for more than a year and a half in 1055–6.16 Psellos

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Figure 3 The Byzantine empresses regnant, the sisters Zoe and Theodora, on a gold coin
(histamenon) in 1042, the year of their joint rule.
© Dumbarton Oaks, Byzantine Collection, Washington, DC.

expressed the general surprise that she did not delegate authority to
some noble man but ‘took on the supreme authority of the Romans
herself with no bad consequences (ἀνατί)’.17 He describes her as ‘acting
like a man’ or ‘taking on the duties of a man’,18 appointing officials,
hearing court cases and making decisions. He notes, somewhat bemu-
sedly, that all seemed to go well: the empire was peaceful and prosperous,
and equity (ἰσότης) was maintained. Theodora’s reputation was high too
among neighbouring peoples, the Armenian chronicler Aristakès of
Lastivert calling her a ‘lioness’.19
Irene from 797–802, Zoe and Theodora for two months in 1042, and
Theodora alone in 1055–6: these are the only examples of Byzantine
empresses ruling alone. All other cases of female rule involve joint rule
with husbands or sons, or regencies. Irene’s story is extraordinary, as the
wife of an emperor who came to exercise sole rule through the violent
removal of her own son. The story of Zoe and Theodora, although still

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unusual, is less strange, and, especially since the sources for it are quite
rich, can be used to explore the issue of female rule. Two contradictory
points stand out in these sources: the general assumption among men
that sole female rule was unnatural and undesirable; and the strong
contrary widespread feeling that the imperial sisters had unassailable
hereditary rights.
The fact that Zoe and Theodora were female rulers did raise com-
ment. Psellos, although balanced in his judgment of them, expressed
the thought that the joint rule of Zoe and Theodora represented
a muddling or jumbling of spheres that should be distinct. ‘For the
first time’, he wrote, ‘our age witnessed the transformation of the
women’s quarters into an imperial council chamber.’20 He accused
the empresses of ‘mixing the trifles of the women’s quarters with the
serious matters of the empire’.21 Incidentally, the Penguin translation
of Psellos’ history, a translation first published in 1953, renders ‘the
trifles of the women’s quarters’ as ‘the trifles of the harem’, thus
orientalizing as well as trivializing the issue. Psellos thought that the
empire needed ‘a man’s care’,22 especially to deal with outside attacks.
When describing the sole rule of Theodora in 1055–6, he reports the
views of those who claimed that ‘it was not fitting for the empire of the
Romans to become feminine (ἐκθηλυνθῆναι) after having had a man’s
wisdom’.23 He says that this was notably the view of Michael Cerularius,
the patriarch of Constantinople at the time, who supposedly gave his
opinion that ‘sovereign power stands in need of a masculine mind and
soul’.24
Yet despite this current of definite, but not ferocious, misogyny, con-
temporaries also stressed the hereditary claims of the two sisters. Psellos
recognized that the empire belonged to Zoe ‘through inheritance
(κλῆρος)’; she was popular, he says, ‘as a woman and as an inheritor of
power’.25 He describes her supporters at the time that Michael V sent her
into exile asking ‘where can she be . . . she who has the inheritance of the
empire according to law?’, and they recall her descent from a line of
emperors.26 The other main source for Zoe’s and Theodora’s activities,
John Skylitzes, writes that, on the death of Michael IV, ‘supreme power
passed to the empress Zoe, as heir’, while in 1055, he says, Theodora
acquired ‘her hereditary empire’.27 The Armenian chronicler Aristakès

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of Lastivert writes that Theodora possessed the empire as ‘her own

patrimonial inheritance’.28
Psellos even writes of Theodora’s ‘natural (συμφυής)’ right or
property.29 Her right was ‘natural’ because it was a matter of blood and
birth. Theodora’s blood was imperial.30 Both Zoe and Theodora were
porphyrogenitae, born when their father was emperor, and in the imperial
palace. This made them unique at this time, for there were no living male
equivalents after their father’s death. And it gave them a status that was
generally recognized by contemporaries. Aristakès of Lastivert describes
the Constantinopolitan crowd asking for Zoe, ‘our empress porphyrogen-
ita, who has received the empire as an inheritance from her fathers and
grandfathers’.31 In the reign of Constantine Monomachos, according to
Skylitzes, another restive crowd in the imperial city expressed their rever-
ence for Zoe and Theodora, ‘our mothers and porphyrogenitae’.32 During
the period of her sole rule, Theodora’s coins and seals bear the legend
‘Theodora, lady (δέσποινα) and porphyrogenita’ and ‘Theodora, Augusta
and porphyrogenita’.33
One could thus say that the two empresses had a strong sense of
dynasty. Yet it was very different from the dynastic sense to be found in
the west. Future transmission of the line appears to have been treated
with astonishing casualness. According to Psellos, neither Constantine
VIII, the father of the princesses, nor their uncle Basil II had made any
plans for them, even though Basil and Constantine were the last male
members of the so-called Macedonian dynasty, the descendants of Basil
I who had reigned since the late ninth century.34 Basil II never married,
and a contemporary western chronicler accounts for this by a vow that
Basil had taken, promising to live like a monk if God gave him victory in
war; from a western viewpoint, a ruler’s celibacy needed explanation.35
Basil’s brother Constantine VIII had three daughters: the eldest went
into a nunnery; Zoe, the second, was married, as mentioned, only when
fifty; the third, Theodora, never married. Psellos describes the ointments
and magic charms that Zoe and her first husband Romanos used to try to
secure offspring,36 but it is difficult to believe that continuance of the line
could have been a pressing concern if only one of the three imperial
daughters was given in marriage, and then at an age when people must
have known that a pregnancy was very unlikely. It is hard to imagine

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western rulers in similar circumstances who would not have started

marriage negotiations when the daughters were still in the cradle. The
transmission of power in Byzantium was not only different in fact from
the transmission of power in the west, but contemporaries conceived of it
differently. Psellos, in a panegyric to the empress Theodora, praised her
for her virginity and her ‘unmarried life’.37 But, while a virgin queen
could have enjoyed such compliments, those who were concerned about
the succession knew that she brought only uncertainty.

Latin Christendom
The contrast between the sole rule of women in the Byzantine and
western worlds can be explored through the prism of the first western
queens regnant. The very first queen to rule in her own right in western
Europe was Urraca, queen of Leon and Castile, who reigned from 1109 to
1126.38 It is worth dwelling on her for a moment, since her story high-
lights both the possibilities and the limitations of female rule. Her father,
Alfonso VI, had fought his way to sole rule in the kingdom and had
expanded its territories, most memorably by capturing the great city of
Toledo from the Muslims. Unlike the last of the Macedonian emperors in
Byzantium, Alfonso had made determined efforts to secure a male heir,
marrying five (or possibly six) times but without producing a legitimate
son (see above, p. 69). Urraca was his oldest daughter and he arranged
a marriage for her with the immigrant French noble Raymond of
Burgundy, with whom she had a son, another Alfonso. Lacking
a legitimate son, Alfonso VI had supposedly promised the succession to
the kingdom to this son-in-law, Raymond of Burgundy, but Raymond
died before him.39 Alfonso then seems to have viewed his own illegiti-
mate son Sancho as his heir, but he too predeceased the king, being
killed in battle in 1108, the year before Alfonso died.40
Our main chronicle source for Urraca’s reign, the Historia
Compostellana, is written to glorify Diego Gelmírez, the first archbishop
of Santiago, who was sometimes Urraca’s ally but often her opponent, so
what it says has to be viewed in that light, but, nevertheless, it can
probably be trusted when it reports King Alfonso’s plans after the deaths
of his son-in-law, Count Raymond, and his illegitimate son, Sancho. This

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Figure 4 Urraca, queen of Leon-Castile (1109–26), the first queen regnant in western
Europe.
The Picture Art Collection/Alamy.

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 FEMALE SOVEREIGNS

is what Urraca herself says, in a speech put into her mouth in the Historia
Compostellana:

it is well known to all the inhabitants of the kingdom of Spain that as my

father, the emperor Alfonso, was approaching death, he transmitted to me
the whole kingdom, and Galicia to my son Alfonso, his grandson, if
I should take a husband.41

So Urraca was to inherit the kingdom, but part of it, Galicia in the north-
west, would be reserved for her son Alfonso if Urraca remarried. Galicia
had been Count Raymond’s great fief and it would thus be secured to his
son in the event of Urraca marrying again.42 This did happen, in 1109,
when, in the immediate aftermath of her father’s death and her own
succession, Urraca succumbed to pressure to take a new husband.43 One
chronicler, who says he was actually present at the deathbed of Alfonso
VI, reports that, as soon as the king had been buried, ‘the nobles and the
counts of the land gathered together and went to the lady Urraca his
daughter, saying, “You will not be able to rule or retain your father’s
kingdom or reign over us unless you take a husband.”’44 In the speech
attributed to her in the Historia Compostellana she says that the dying king
had ordered her to do nothing important without the advice of the great
nobles of Spain, and hence it was at their recommendation that she
married, although ‘unwillingly’.
The husband chosen for her brought immediate complications, both
political and personal. He was Alfonso the Battler, king of Aragon. The
marriage of Urraca and Alfonso could have brought about a union of the
kingdoms, as happened much later in the Middle Ages with the marriage
of Ferdinand and Isabella, if Urraca’s son by Count Raymond, Alfonso,
had been excluded, but, in any case, arrangements had to be made to
deal with the presence of the powerful and warlike Aragonese king as
joint ruler of Leon, and negotiations were undertaken about the rights of
any children of Urraca’s new marriage.45 The major change that all this
involved is reflected in the language of the charters. In a document she
issued on 22 July 1109, soon after her father’s death, Urraca styles herself
‘Urraca, by God’s command queen of the whole of Spain’, but the
following December, after her marriage, a private document is dated
‘when Alfonso, king of Aragon, was ruling in Leon’.46 Her sole reign had

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lasted about three months. Like the empress Zoe, she had been forced ‘to
seek strength in marriage’.
Alfonso the Battler deserved his nickname. Soon after the marriage
with Urraca he was deeply involved in suppressing a rebellion in Galicia,
where the local nobles who were guardians of Urraca’s son Alfonso
formed a nucleus of opposition. Alfonso the Battler conducted his cam-
paign with all the usual brutalities of medieval warfare and was imper-
vious to reproaches and pleas for mercy. When complaints were made
that his Muslim troops had raped nuns in their churches, he supposedly
replied, ‘I do not care what my army and my fighters do.’47 More drama-
tically yet, when a rebel knight, well known to Queen Urraca, fled to her
seeking grace, and she wrapped her mantle and her arms around him as
a sign of protection, Alfonso, ‘like a savage barbarian’, grabbed a spear
and thrust it through him. Urraca decided to separate from her pitiless
husband and made her way back to Leon.48
Alfonso the Battler was a man’s man. A Muslim historian reports:

No Christian ruler had more courage than him, more ardour to fight the
Muslims without break, more power of resistance. He slept with his mail-
coat and without a mattress; and when one day he was asked why he did not
sleep with the daughters of the Muslim chiefs he captured, he said, ‘A real
soldier must live with men, not with women!’49

Whether he had slept with Urraca, we do not know. She supposedly

complained that he regularly insulted her, struck her in the face and
kicked her.50 The marriage was now effectively ended, and the fact that
Urraca and the Battler were closely related allowed the pope to declare
an annulment on grounds of consanguinity. Alfonso, however, was not
going to surrender his claims to Leonese and Castilian territory. By early
1113 Urraca was appealing for help against ‘the Aragonese tyrant’.51
Urraca was now at war with both her husband and the supporters of
her son. Adding to the family fun was the claim advanced by Urraca’s
illegitimate half-sister, Teresa. Like Urraca, Teresa had been married to
an immigrant French noble, Henry of Burgundy, who had been endowed
with a county in the west of the kingdom, a territory that included such
important centres as Coimbra and Porto. Teresa had definite ambitions.
A sceptical chronicler noted that, soon after the beginning of Urraca’s

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reign, Teresa suggested to her husband that a division of the kingdom

would be justified and, ‘as is the custom of flattering tongues, this wife of
the count was now called “queen” by her household and her knights’.52
But the essence of being a queen is being called a queen, and the practice
has to start somewhere, even if only in one’s own home. By 1116, several
years after the death of her husband Count Henry, it was not only her
servants and retainers who were giving Teresa this pleasant distinction,
for a papal letter of that year about a dispute between the bishops of
Coimbra and Porto is addressed not only to the archbishop of Toledo but
also to ‘queen Teresa and her barons’.53 From 1117 at the latest Teresa
was calling herself queen in official documents. And of what was she
queen? She was ‘queen of Portugal’, the name of her husband’s county.54
In this way, from the rivalry of squabbling sisters, a new country emerged
on the European scene.55 In the dynastic world, power-struggles within
the family could leave a permanent imprint on political geography.
The problems of Urraca’s reign do not appear to have discouraged
other western European rulers from attempts at ensuring female succes-
sion. Indeed, less than ten months after Urraca’s death, Henry I of
England, a king just as domineering as Alfonso VI, demanded that his
nobles accept his only surviving legitimate child, his daughter Matilda, as
his heir.56 She had been born after his accession, so was a western
equivalent of a porphyrogenita. The oath the nobles swore on that
occasion (Christmastide 1126), and which was subsequently renewed,
did not prevent them ignoring their promise and accepting Henry’s
nephew Stephen as king after him, but it is unlikely that Urraca’s exam-
ple had much part to play in that choice. Like Alfonso VI, Henry I was
willing to envisage a woman on his throne, and her supporters in the civil
war that eventually flared up between her and Stephen obviously took the
same position. But when Henry made his plans for his daughter, and had
her recognized as his heir, he still expected her to marry at his command,
both for political advantage and to produce a son to continue the
dynasty. Her marriage, to Geoffrey of Anjou in 1128, at first looked as if
it would be as rocky as that between Urraca and the Battler, with an early
separation, but Matilda and Geoffrey were reconciled and produced
three sons, one of whom became Henry II of England. She herself
never attained the title ‘queen’, being only ‘Lady of England’, that is,

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uncrowned queen, although she preferred to call herself ‘empress’,

referring to the status she had from her first husband, the Holy Roman
Emperor. This is her title on the coins she issued during the civil war.57
But, while she was never crowned queen, she maintained her cause
through war, effectively ruling parts of England for most of Stephen’s
reign, and passed on her claim to her son Henry, who did eventually
succeed to the throne.
And in the very years when Henry I of England was attempting to
secure the succession of his daughter and arranging her marriage,
exactly the same was happening at the other end of Latin Christendom,
in the crusader kingdom of Jerusalem. Baldwin II, king of Jerusalem, had
four daughters but no sons, and he determined that his eldest,
Melisende, should succeed him.58 She was in her early twenties and
unmarried, so Baldwin saw his first duty as choosing a husband for her.
He looked west, to the great princes of France, and in 1127, the year after
Urraca’s death and only months after the recognition of Matilda as heir
to Henry I of England, he negotiated a marriage alliance with Fulk, count
of Anjou. Fulk was the father of Geoffrey of Anjou, just mentioned. Fulk
surrendered the county of Anjou to his son and went off to the east to
marry Melisende, which he did in 1129.
Just as the Historia Compostellana is the main narrative source for
Queen Urraca, so William of Tyre’s Chronicle offers the most substantial
contemporary comment on Queen Melisende. In his text, the exact
status of Melisende’s sovereignty is not always quite clear. In William’s
words, Fulk of Anjou had been promised that after his arrival in the East,
‘the king’s eldest daughter would be handed over to him with the pro-
spect of the kingdom (spes regni) after the king’s death.’59 What exactly
this ‘prospect’ was might of course be debated. Did it mean sole rule with
his wife as consort, or would she be queen regnant and Fulk a king ‘in
right of his wife’? On his deathbed in 1131, King Baldwin summoned
Melisende, his son-in-law Fulk, and their child, his baby grandson
Baldwin, and ‘handed over to them the care of the kingdom and full
power’.60 Three weeks later Fulk ‘was solemnly and according to custom
crowned and consecrated in the Church of the Holy Sepulchre along
with his wife’.61 The anodyne phrase ‘along with his wife’ is paralleled in
William’s description of what happened after the death of Fulk in 1143,

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Figure 5 Melisende, queen of Jerusalem (1131–52/61), and her husband Fulk of Anjou.
BL, MS Yates Thompson 12, fol. 82v, © The British Library.

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when his son by Melisende, Baldwin III, was ‘solemnly anointed, conse-
crated and, along with his mother, crowned’.62 Both phrases imply a joint
ceremony of some kind, but leave many open questions. The joint rule of
Melisende and her young son, if that is what it was, broke down as he
entered his early twenties, when frivolous advisers, according to William
of Tyre, told the young man that it was unworthy of a king ‘that he should
always dangle from his mother’s breasts’.63 It was ‘shameful’, they said,
‘that he should be ruled by the will of a woman’.64 The kingdom was first
divided between them; but soon Baldwin besieged his mother in
Jerusalem and forced her to retire to the city of Nablus, where she
ended her days.
In the cases of Urraca, Matilda and Melisende, the pattern is clear:
successful warrior kings of the early twelfth century were willing to
champion their daughters as their heirs in the absence of sons, or
legitimate sons, but expected them to have powerful husbands. Given
that the right of female succession could be asserted as a general princi-
ple, it was also clear that female rulers were expected to have a man. With
her customary cogency, the late Marjorie Chibnall pointed out that in
these cases, ‘it was essential to bring in either a husband or a son as
a nominal co-ruler’.65 Alfonso VI told Urraca to follow the advice of his
nobles, and their advice was to marry the king of neighbouring Aragon;
Henry I married his daughter and heir to Geoffrey of Anjou, who indeed
did later provide important military support for Matilda, while Baldwin of
Jerusalem married his daughter and heir to Geoffrey’s father Fulk,
expecting him to bring military and monetary resources to the crusader
kingdom. And both Geoffrey and Fulk also fathered sons through their
royal brides.
There is not much evidence for how these ruling women viewed
themselves. Charter terminology may give some hints, as in the way
Matilda seems to have insisted on being styled ‘empress’, or
Melisende’s use of the ‘by grace of God (Dei gratia)’ formula, but more
explicit and developed images of these queens or would-be queens can
only be found in contemporary chronicles, all written by men, either
clergy or monks. What we find there cannot be expected to yield a self-
image but rather a view of the female ruler from outside, not without its
interest despite that.

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During her seventeen-year reign Urraca had to fight and negotiate

without respite, sometimes in alliance with her son, sometimes in opposi-
tion to him, almost always struggling with her half-sister, although gra-
dually less troubled by her battling ex-husband, who, however, retained
some important territories in Castile, notably the major centre of Burgos.
But heads that wear the crown are often uneasy. Is there any evidence
that there was anything different about her reign because she was female?
Urraca had determined opponents, some of whom made a point of the
fact that she was a woman. A Spanish chronicle written soon after her
death reports that ‘she reigned for seventeen years tirannice et muliebriter –
tyrannously and like a woman’, adding the detail that she died giving
birth to a child born of adultery.66 This is actually not impossible, for the
Historia Compostellana reports that Urraca had both sons and daughters
with her lover, the count of Lara,67 and the chronicler Orderic Vitalis,
writing in Normandy little more than a decade after Urraca’s death, also
claims that she died in childbirth. His comments on the queen are
disapproving. He calls her war against her husband a rebellion, and
says she was the cause of destruction to many, and that her death was
‘at God’s command’.68
The author of the Historia Compostellana, the fullest contemporary
source, describes how Urraca, after being on good terms with bishop
Diego Gelmírez, was persuaded by evil counsellors to plan his arrest.
‘A woman’s mind’, the chronicler reflects, ‘is weak and unstable and
quickly wanders, as is written: Better is the wickedness of a man than
a woman who does good.’69 The last line is a quotation from the book of
Ecclesiasticus, which has a claim to be the most misogynistic book in the
Bible. Later he returns to the attack.

What does woman’s fury not dare to do? What does the cunning of the
serpent not presume? What does the most wicked viper not attack? The
example of Eve, our first parent, informs us well enough what female
creatures dare, presume and attack. Woman’s most audacious mind
rushes to the forbidden; it violates the holy and confounds right and
wrong.70

Monastic and clerical opponents of the queen thus wheeled out standard
misogyny. There is nothing surprising about that.

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Positive evaluation of these queens avoided simple misogyny – women

are wicked and fickle – by embracing its more complex twin – women can
rise above their natural wickedness and fickleness. William of Tyre’s
praise of Melisende, which is frequent and warm, stresses the way that
she transcended her sex: ‘The mother was a most wise woman, with great
experience of almost all secular business, overcoming the condition of
the female sex so completely that she could set her hand to great
deeds.’71 He describes how she undertook the care of the kingdom
‘energetically and fortunately, transcending female power and spirit’,
although also ‘with the advice of the chief men of the region’.72 When
talking of her government, he uses the straightforward vocabulary of
rule: ‘she ruled the kingdom, she had ruled the kingdom (regnum . . .
rexit, regnum . . . rexerat)’.73 Writing of her last illness, William says she had
ruled the kingdom for more than thirty years, thus clearly referring to the
time between the death of her father in 1131 and her own in 1161 or
1162, including the years after 1152, when her rule had in fact been
confined to the city of Nablus. She was ‘a resourceful woman, wise
beyond the female sex’, and ‘transcending female power’.74
William of Tyre’s comments can be compared with those of St
Bernard, who wrote to Melisende on the occasion of the death of her
husband Fulk and encouraged her in her difficult situation, a widowed
mother of a young son. ‘The eyes of all are on you’, he wrote.

It is necessary that you set your hand to hard things75 and show the man
in the woman. You must administer everything with such prudence and
moderation that all who see you will judge from your deeds that you are
a king rather than a queen. But, you will say, I am inadequate for this
task. These tasks are the tasks of a man, but I am a woman, weak in
body, unstable of heart, neither wise in counsel nor accustomed to
business.76

Whether Melisende would say anything of the kind is doubtful. But, like
William of Tyre, or like Psellos on the empress Theodora, Bernard
envisaged Melisende’s responsibilities as requiring male rather than
female qualities. Matilda, too, was commended in this way. An epitaph
written after her death in 1167 praises the empress for ‘having nothing of
the woman (nil mulieris habens)’.77 Praise indeed!

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What may also be significant is that there seems to have been no, or
virtually no, opposition to the succession of Urraca, Matilda and
Melisende explicitly on the grounds that they were female. Alfonso VI,
Urraca’s father, was willing to designate her as his successor, although it
may be relevant that Urraca came to the throne already the mother of
a male child, and accepting the rule of a woman with a living male heir
may have been easier for a male aristocracy, because they could picture
a future king. What seems to have brought the kingdom into crisis was
not the succession of a woman but the imposition on her of an ill-chosen
husband, the Battler. This opened up the rivalry of factions, each with
a regional base: the Galicia of her son’s supporters, the Portugal of her
half-sister. Urraca’s reign was not a model, but it can hardly be inter-
preted as a warning against female rule.
Modern historians, including the present writer, have often said that
one objection to Matilda’s succession was that she was a woman.78 In fact
there is little contemporary evidence for anyone taking this position.
There were plenty of other objections to Matilda, or, at least, justifications
for opposing her. Some of Stephen’s supporters argued that the oath they
had sworn to her had been extorted by force; some that Henry I had
changed his mind on his death-bed; some that Henry’s marriage was
‘incestuous’, in the medieval sense, since the king’s wife had earlier
been a nun, and so Matilda had no right of succession; some that
Matilda’s marriage to Geoffrey of Anjou, made without their consent,
cancelled their earlier oath to her.79 None of this concerns simply her sex.
The only time there is mention of this is in a letter of Gilbert Foliot, abbot
of Gloucester at the time, and one of Matilda’s supporters, who is under-
taking to refute the arguments of Stephen’s party. He writes that some
might object that ‘royal sceptres, which suit a son, ought not to be given to
a daughter’.80 He dismisses this idea by citing an Old Testament passage
in which God himself upheld inheritance by daughters in the absence of
sons.81 He also emphasizes the natural affection that parents have for
their children, both male and female, and defends King Henry’s designa-
tion of Matilda as his heir on the grounds of divine, natural and human
law. But this discussion forms only one part of Abbot Gilbert’s argument
and is an isolated case. The barons of Norman England were perfectly
familiar with female inheritance and did not really require much analysis

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of it. Between the Norman Conquest of 1066 and 1150 thirty baronies
had descended through the female line, and the respondent in one of
the most famous cases from twelfth-century England argued simply
that ‘a daughter is to be preferred to a nephew in cases of a parental
inheritance’.82 In the case of Matilda, her illegitimate half-brother
Robert of Gloucester not only recognized her right but became the
chief and most loyal supporter of her cause, although her cousin
Stephen, nephew of Henry I through the maternal line, obviously did
not!
These three active and powerful women, Urraca, Matilda and
Melisende, were recognized as heirs to their fathers’ kingdoms (the
word heiress is a seventeenth-century novelty). An eye-witness account
tells how Alfonso VI ‘left the lordship of his kingdom to the lady Urraca,
his daughter’.83 Urraca herself constantly stressed her descent, styling
herself in her charters most often ‘Urraca, by grace of God, queen of
Spain, daughter of king Alfonso’, and sometimes dating them ‘when the
lady queen Urraca was ruling in the kingdom of her father’.84 She never
ceased to emphasize her parentage, appearing in a charter the year
before her death as ‘the lady queen Urraca . . . daughter of the lord
king Alfonso of worthy memory’.85 Likewise, when, at Christmastide
1126 Henry I of England insisted that, if he had no sons in the future,
his bishops and barons should recognize his daughter Matilda as his
successor, ‘they solemnly promised the king’s daughter, pledging their
faith and swearing an oath, that, if she survived her father, they would
defend the whole kingdom of the English for her against everyone’.86
After Henry’s death Matilda described herself as ‘rightful heir to the
kingdom of England’.87 In a document of 1129 Melisende is referred to
as ‘the daughter of the king and the heir to the kingdom of Jerusalem’.88
In these cases, therefore, the female sovereign’s right to rule was being
asserted as a right of inheritance as a daughter, a right that was seen, in
the case of Matilda, as greater than the right of either illegitimate sons or
male collaterals such as nephews. As with Zoe and Theodora, the claims
of Urraca, Matilda and Melisende were conceived of as the claims of
heirs. But, unlike Zoe and Theodora, these western female rulers were
expected to marry early enough to produce heirs of their own and
transmit their claims to them.

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The Later Middle Ages

As mentioned, a provisional list of medieval female sovereigns contains
twenty-seven names.89 The three Byzantine examples occur in the late
eighth/early ninth century and in the eleventh century. In Latin
Christendom there were seven ruling queens in the course of the twelfth
century, beginning with Urraca, but only three in the thirteenth. Then
the later Middle Ages sees seven in the fourteenth century, seven again in
the fifteenth. A high point of a sort occurs in the 1380s, a decade during
which Naples, Sicily, Hungary, Poland and Portugal all had sovereign
queens, while at this same time the three Scandinavian kingdoms were
ruled by Margaret, who seems never to have borne the title ‘queen’ except
as queen consort but who had all the other trappings of sovereignty – the
queen of Denmark who acceded in 1972 clearly thought her medieval
predecessor was a genuine sovereign since she chose to style herself
‘Margaret II’.
There is a geographical pattern. Of these twenty-seven queens and
empresses regnant, twenty-four were from Mediterranean and Iberian
realms. The other three comprised one from Scandinavia, if we include
Margaret, and two from eastern Europe, all three of these in the late
fourteenth century. In recent times, for some reason, European monar-
chy has had its most solid base in the mainly Protestant social democra-
cies of northern Europe: Scandinavia, the Low Countries and Britain.
Several monarchs of these countries have been female. Indeed, the
Netherlands was ruled by queens from 1890 to 2013. Meanwhile,
Mediterranean monarchy disappeared in the twentieth century, with
the unusual exception of Spain, where it was restored by Franco in
1975. The pattern in the Middle Ages, with its strong tradition of female
sovereigns in the Mediterranean region, was clearly different. It does not
seem to be the case that the contrast reflects a difference in the rules of
inheritance of landed property, and it remains a clear geographical
pattern without an obvious explanation.
Although it appears there were only three female sovereigns in the
thirteenth century, this does not mean that there was a tide of opinion
against female rule at that time. In the later centuries of the Middle Ages,
as it became more common for rules about royal succession to be set out

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formally in documents, these rules often explicitly envisage women suc-

ceeding as sovereigns. In the negotiations of 1255 about the marriage of
the daughter of Alfonso X of Castile, her right to succeed, if the king were
to have no sons, was explicitly recognized (see above, p. 101), and the
king’s law-code, the Siete Partidas, was also clear on the subject: ‘wise and
learned men ordained that if there was no son, the eldest daughter
should inherit the kingdom’.90 In 1265, when Pope Clement IV bestowed
the kingdom of Sicily upon Charles of Anjou with the intention of
rooting out the last of the Hohenstaufen dynasty, which ruled Sicily at
this time, the terms and conditions were spelled out carefully, including
the rules of succession. Charles’ throne could be inherited by males or
females, although preference would be given to sons over daughters. If
there were no sons and several daughters, the eldest daughter would
succeed, for the kingdom could not be divided. In the case of a ruler of
Sicily dying without children, a brother or sister, or an uncle or aunt,
could inherit. Female inheritance was thus written into the dynastic
structure of the kingdom.91 Likewise, when Pope Martin IV bestowed
the kingdom of Aragon upon a son of the king of France in 1283, he
specified that ‘if he happens to be survived only by children of the female
sex, the oldest of them shall succeed’.92 As it turned out, this attempt to
impose a French prince on Aragon was a disastrous failure, but the
recognition of the principle of female succession is just as clear and as
explicit as in the case of Sicily. In the following year, 1284, Margaret, ‘the
Maid of Norway’, was recognized as ‘the right heir’ of her grandfather
Alexander III of Scotland,93 and was expected to become queen of
Scotland after his death two years later, although she died at sea on her
way from Norway to Scotland in 1290, aged only seven. She was almost
never styled ‘queen’ by the Scots, simply ‘Lady of Scotland’, just as the
empress Matilda was ‘Lady of England’, that is, uncrowned queen (see
above, p. 135).94 In that very same year, 1290, Edward I of England
ordained that his eldest daughter Eleanor should succeed to the king-
dom if his son, or any future sons, died without heirs; if Eleanor died
without heirs, her younger sister would succeed.95 These five cases, from
Castile, Sicily, Aragon, Scotland and England, did not immediately result
in female sovereigns, although the kingdom of Sicily was eventually to
have memorable queens regnant, but they do underline the fact that

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female inheritance of the throne was perfectly conceivable in the minds

of thirteenth-century popes, kings and nobles.
It is also certain, however, that these ruling women were expected to
have suitable husbands, who might well bear the royal title. In the king-
dom of Sicily, the pope ruled, that ‘if, in the absence of males, an
unmarried female should succeed to the kingdom, she should be mar-
ried to a person who is suitable for the rule and defence of the realm,
after the advice of the Roman pontiff has been obtained’.96 In the
crusader kingdom of Jerusalem men often obtained royal power through
marriage to a sovereign queen. Sybilla, daughter of Amalric I, married
William of Montferrat, but he died after only a year of marriage, leaving
her pregnant with the future, and short-lived, Baldwin V. She married
again, to Guy of Lusignan, and, when she inherited the throne in 1186,
she crowned him too. Guy used the royal title as ‘eighth king’ of
Jerusalem and kept it for a while even after Sybilla’s death in 1190. But
the right to the throne now passed to Isabella, Sybilla’s younger sister.
Isabella married four times, to Humphrey of Toron in 1183, then to
Conrad of Montferrat in 1190, after a semi-coerced divorce from
Humphrey. Conrad did not take the title king but called himself ‘king
elect’ in a charter of May 1191. The daughter of Isabella and Conrad,
Maria, was born that year. After Conrad’s murder in 1192, just before his
planned coronation, Isabella took a third husband, Henry of
Champagne. He was not styled ‘king’ but is called ‘lord of the land of
Jerusalem’ in some documents. After he died in 1197, Isabella married
Amalric (Aimery) of Lusignan, king of Cyprus, brother of Guy of
Lusignan, her former brother-in-law. Isabella and Amalric were crowned
in 1198, and she is then called queen, and he styled himself ‘ninth king’
of Jerusalem, therefore ignoring both Conrad of Montferrat and Henry
of Champagne. He died in 1205, she soon afterwards, leaving as her heir
her daughter Maria. Maria brought the throne to her husband John of
Brienne, and it passed after her early death to her daughter Isabella, who
brought it to her husband, Emperor Frederick II. Four successive ruling
queens of Jerusalem had thus brought the royal title to their husbands.
In the 1380s eastern Europe had its first female rulers. Louis the
Great, king of Hungary and Poland, died in 1382, leaving daughters
but no sons. His elder daughter Mary inherited the kingdom of

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Hungary, while the younger, Hedwig or Jadwiga, was accepted by the

Polish nobility as their ruler on condition that she married Jagiello,
prince of Lithuania, who had to convert to Christianity to marry her. In
this way the last pagan state in Europe was brought into Christendom and
the Polish–Lithuanian union came into being. In Hungary, some of the
novelty of the situation, and perhaps also the difficulty her Hungarian
subjects had in conceptualizing the unfamiliar role of female sovereign,
is revealed in Mary’s title. The Venetian chancellor, always keeping an eye
on Venice’s giant neighbour Hungary, reported the young queen’s
accession, under the regency of her mother Elizabeth: ‘Queen
Elizabeth, wife of king Louis, along with Mary her daughter, took up
the reins of government in Hungary. This Mary was called “king of
Hungary”.’ He goes on to discuss the events in the early years of ‘King
Mary’.97 This style is confirmed by the reports of the Hungarian chroni-
cler John of Thurocz: ‘all the common people agreed to call this maiden
“king”’. After the challenge to her rule by her kinsman Charles of
Durazzo had been repressed, Mary’s supporters ‘gathered in the streets
shouting, “King Mary rules!”’. John of Thurocz himself terms Mary ‘the
female king’.98

The Exclusion of Women from Rule

But although female rule was certainly conceivable, it was not always
embraced. The most famous case of the exclusion of women from inheri-
tance to the throne occurred in late medieval France. After a remarkable
eleven generations of father–son succession, the death of Louis X in
1316, leaving a daughter by his first wife and a pregnant second wife,
placed the French monarchy in an unprecedented situation. Louis’ wife
did indeed give birth to a male child but he lived only five days. This
raised the question of female succession for the first time. If female
succession were permissible, then Louis’ daughter Joanna was clearly
the heir. But she was young, about four years old, and, since her mother,
the king’s first wife, had been convicted of adultery, there were doubts
about her paternity.99 Worse than all this, Joanna had uncles. One of
these, her maternal uncle the duke of Burgundy, did seek to protect her
rights, which coincided with his own interests, but her paternal uncles,

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Philip and Charles, the younger brothers of Louis X, saw her simply as an
obstacle. Writing of these uncles, the great French medievalist Robert
Fawtier judged that they ‘may have been good fathers, good sons, good
husbands, and perhaps even good brothers, but they certainly qualified
for the title of wicked uncles’.100 Joanna’s uncle Philip, who had already
been appointed regent, moved quickly and ruthlessly to exclude his little
niece. The posthumous baby son of Louis X, known as John I, had been
born and died in November 1316. On the following 9 January Philip was
crowned, as Philip V, in Rheims, the traditional coronation site of the
French monarchy. One chronicler describes this, tellingly, as happening
‘in the presence of the great men and peers of the kingdom (although
not all of them)’.101 Within four weeks a large assembly was held to ratify
this act, the masters of the University of Paris adding their approval.
‘Then also’, says a contemporary chronicler, ‘it was declared that
a woman could not succeed to the crown of the kingdom of France.’102
This general statement was clearly fashioned to justify the wicked
uncle’s coup. The issue of female succession had not in fact arisen in
the previous history of the kingdom, because of reproductive chance.
Now the exclusion of women became a general principle, and was
applied again in 1322, when Philip’s own daughters were excluded, and
in 1328, when a male cousin was preferred to the daughters of kings. On
this last occasion, one issue at law was whether a woman could transmit
a claim even if she could not herself rule. If she could, Edward III of
England would become king of France, if not, then Philip of Valois would
succeed. Learned lawyers were consulted, but, as a contemporary chroni-
cler makes clear, it was not only law that mattered: the French lawyers,
‘not bearing it with equanimity to be subject to the rule of the English’,
denied the right of a woman to transmit a claim.103 Later, the French
royal ordinance of August 1374 about royal minorities simply assumes
male succession.104
At first there was no mention of the roots or basis of this rule, but
during the century after the compliant assembly summoned by Philip
V there appeared the claim that the exclusion of women was actually
based on the ancient Salian or Salic Law of the Franks. Some cooking of
texts was necessary for this to have any plausibility, but texts can be
cooked. Although there are isolated references to the Salic Law in royalist

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discussions of the second half of the fourteeth century, it was the work of
Jean de Montreuil in 1413 that was really significant. This was because he
took a clause of the Salic Law, which deals with the exclusion of females
from the right to inherit a particular kind of private property and aug-
ments it with two words which are not in the text: ‘A woman shall have no
share in regno – in the kingdom.’105 Thereafter Salic Law became a kind
of shorthand term for the exclusion of females from succession, or, yet
more restrictive, even the transmission of a claim to succession through
the female line. In the age of the Hundred Years War, when the English
kings claimed the French throne on exactly this basis, the political point
was clear.106 This is one of the most obvious cases of an ancient law or
custom being invented to meet pressing contemporary political needs.
Women were not excluded from the throne of France because of the
Salic Law, rather the Salic Law was dug up and doctored because women
were excluded from the throne of France.
After this political choice had been made at the beginning of the
fourteenth century, arguments for the exclusion of women from
French royal succession could be elaborated. There was indeed virtually
a literary genre on the topic in the late Middle Ages.107 Of these many
tracts, one of the most influential is known by its opening words as Pour ce
que plusieurs.108 This was written in 1464 and is bold in its assertion that
the Salic Law, which was the first law of the Franks, going back to ‘the
time when the French still lived on the banks of the Rhine’,109 unequi-
vocally prohibited women from inheriting royal power. But the author is
not content simply to appeal to ancient law. The exclusion of women
from sovereign power can be supported by other arguments. God had
commanded women to be subject to men. As God said to Eve in Genesis
3: 16, ‘you will be under the power of the man and he will be your lord’.110
And women should not have the power to hear criminal cases and
condemn people to death ‘because their thoughts and their judgments
could be a little too sudden (un pou trop soudains)’.111 Or a queen might
marry a low-born man, or an enemy of the kingdom, and, in such cases,
there was almost certain to be civil war. Moreover, the custom of the Ile-
de-France is that, if there are only daughters, the estate should be divided
among them, so, if women were allowed to inherit, and the king of France
had fifteen daughters, France would be divided into fifteen.112 The

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author concedes that ‘great and notable things’ had been done by past
queens of France, but these queens were widows and mothers of kings,
not queens by hereditary right.113 And these are not all of his arguments.
It is, of course, an old and wise piece of advice, that if someone gives you
more than one reason for something, you should never believe them.
The author of Pour ce que plusieurs does not enhance his case by multi-
plying his points. But what is perhaps worth pointing out is that his
misogyny is mild, conventional and can hardly be regarded as the animat-
ing principle of his text. He has to justify the exclusion of women from
succession, or transmitting the right to succeed, because by his time the
French royal dynasty was founded on that rule, and this rule (so-called) in
its turn sprang from the political circumstances of 1316 and 1328.
In other situations, in other kingdoms, where general objections to
female rule were made, often a closer analysis suggests that the real
argument on these occasions was not ‘we do not want a woman to rule
us’ but ‘we do not want this woman to rule us’, or, perhaps, ‘we do not
want this woman, with this husband, to rule us’. This certainly seems to
have been important in the opposition to Matilda, who was not only
daughter of Henry I of England but also the wife of Count Geoffrey of
Anjou, a figure who was at best distant and at worst hostile in the eyes of
the Anglo-Norman barons. Some contemporary chronicles did indeed
speak as if Henry I viewed Geoffrey of Anjou as a future king of England,
one writing that Henry I agreed that, after his death, if he had no
legitimate son, ‘his son-in-law would succeed him in the kingdom’.114
Another, writing of the time after Henry’s death, when Geoffrey and
Matilda were fighting Stephen, notes ‘husband and wife were claiming
England’.115 Another tells how, after Henry’s death, Geoffrey ‘aspired to
the sceptre of the kingdom across the sea’.116
Again, after the death of William II of Sicily in 1189, his nearest
legitimate relative, his aunt Constance, was passed over in favour of his
illegitimate cousin Tancred (see the discussion below, pp. 170–1).
According to one contemporary, the issue here was not Constance’s sex
but her husband:

The illegitimate Tancred succeeded, by the judgment and election of the

chief men, who all rejected German authority, for Constance, the dead

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king’s aunt, who appeared to have the right to succeed him, had married
Henry, the son of the German emperor Frederick.117

Likewise, a few years later, in 1195, when William the Lion, king of Scots,
lay ill and wanted to arrange for the succession by having his eldest
daughter Margaret recognized as queen, and a marriage arranged
between her and the German prince Otto of Brunswick, a group of
Scottish nobles declared

they would not accept his daughter as queen, because it was not the custom
of the kingdom that a woman should have the kingdom while there was
a brother or nephew in his lineage who was able to have the kingdom by
right.118

The general statement of custom here, however, may well conceal a more
specific and personal objection to having Otto, a nephew of Richard the
Lionheart of England, as king of Scots. Just like the chief men of Sicily,
they resisted the prospect of having a powerful German ruler foisted on
them. In this they were successful, unlike the nobles of Sicily who found
out just how powerful and ruthless Henry, Constance’s husband, was,
when he conquered the kingdom of Sicily and established his
Hohenstaufen dynasty on the throne for the next seventy years.
In 1406 the English Parliament turned an amazing somersault on the
issue, excluding female heirs in June and reinstating them in December.
The ‘Act for the Inheritance of the Crown’ of 7 June declared that Henry
IV’s eldest son, Henry (later Henry V), was heir apparent; if Henry died
without a son, the throne would then pass to his next brother; if that
brother died without a son, it would go to the third brother, and so on.
Any daughters were to be ignored, although they could inherit the Duchy
of Lancaster, which Henry IV had held before his usurpation of the
throne and was now in the hands of his son. Six months later, on
22 December, this was reversed, because, as the king put it, ‘a statute
and ordinance of this kind, by excluding the female sex, restricted too
much the right of succession of our sons and their children’.119
Apart from these very specific political situations, the issue of female
succession was sometimes discussed in abstract and general terms. In the
scriptural and scholastic world of medieval debate, this involved

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the citation of proof texts, passages from authoritative works, especially

the Bible, that could be considered to support one side or the other of an
argument. As mentioned above (p. 141), when he was writing in support
of Matilda’s claim to the English throne, Gilbert Foliot, abbot of
Gloucester, cited from the Old Testament. The biblical passage he
invoked is from the Book of Numbers and concerns the daughters of
Zelophehad (Salphaad in the Vulgate), whose father had died without
sons. The daughters consult Moses who in turn consults God, who
declares, ‘When a man dies without a son, his inheritance shall pass to
his daughter’ (Numbers 27: 8). This obviously vindicated the principle of
female inheritance and could be brought up when expedient.
The passage was invoked, for example, in an illuminated parchment
roll glorifying Edward IV of England, who had deposed his distant cousin
Henry VI in 1461. Henry was descended from the third son of Edward III
(1327–77), Edward from the second, but through females, and hence his
claim to the throne rested on acceptance that the right of inheritance
could pass through daughters in the absence of sons. The roll includes
a family tree of the English royal dynasty showing all this, and identifying
Henry VI’s grandfather, Henry IV, as the usurper who had robbed
Edward’s line of the throne. The figure of Moses is portrayed, pointing
accusingly at Henry IV and saying, ‘By the law divinely given to the
daughters of Zelophehad, you are proved to be the usurper of the rights
of the lawful heir.’120
A rather curious example of the use of this biblical passage is the
appeal in verse by the men of Cork to the men of Dublin in 1487, after the
latter had recognized the pretender Lambert Simnel, a challenger to
Henry VII. This brings in these daughters of Zelophehad to defend
Henry VII’s right to the throne, for Henry’s claim was unambiguously
through the female line:

Moses had of God, by commaundement,

If a man died without issue male
His lands should, by lyniall discent,
Descend to daughters, his heires generall.

The men of Cork appeal to the men of Dublin:

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O Dublin! Dublin! Where be the jurours,

Thy noble men of aureat glorie?

And they provide their authority:

. . . Ye may read this story

Of Sulphact (Zelophehad) his daughters in the booke of Numery.121

(‘Numery’ is an old form of Numbers, and here is rhymed with ‘story’). It

is a striking example of how biblically based argument of this type could
reach far beyond the world of Latin learning.
One significant development occurred in the thinking of theorists on
the topic of female inheritance. Those who wished to assert that women
could not succeed to kingdoms had no desire to extend this exclusion to
fiefs and estates within kingdoms, and would find customary law against
them if they tried to do so. Hence, they distinguished the rules governing
succession to the throne and those governing inheritance of fiefs and
estates. This is what we find, for example, in the views of François de
Meyronnes, a Franciscan from Provence, a disciple of Duns Scotus.
Among many other, more demanding, theological works, he produced
an anthology of extracts from Augustine’s City of God, and this is where
the issue of female inheritance crops up. Augustine mentions the old
Roman Lex Voconia, a law of 169 BC that prohibited wealthy Romans
from making women their heirs. Augustine condemns it in strong terms:
‘I do not know what could be thought or said more iniquitous than such
a law.’122 François de Meyronnes cites Augustine’s condemnation of the
Lex Voconia, and then adds his own comments. A supporting argument
for Augustine’s hostile attitude to the law, he says, is the passage in
Numbers in which the daughters of Zelophehad claim the right to inherit
from their father, in the absence of sons, and are given permission to do
so by the explicit authority of God. Moreover, he continues, ‘by natural
law a father is obligated to any one of his children more than to
a stranger’.123 Hence he has patristic, scriptural and natural arguments
for female inheritance.
Then, having established this point, François de Meyronnes, in good
scholastic style, moves to the arguments for the opposite case. The chief
of these is empirical, based simply on what is the case: ‘But doubt arises

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why in kingdoms where the rulership is hereditary women usually do not

succeed?’124 He explains this by a distinction: ‘a kingdom is not only an
inheritance but also an office that concerns the whole state’ and women
‘are not entitled to office as they are to an inheritance’.125 This is an
important distinction, and one that would eventually undermine the
dynastic system itself. Rule of the state is one thing; the transmission of
private property another. François de Meyronnes does not use the words
‘private’ and ‘public’ here, but those are terms that would spring to
modern minds when considering his distinction between an ‘inheri-
tance’ and an ‘office’, although one should note that he says ‘a kingdom
is not only an inheritance’, implying that it is an inheritance. A slightly
later author who does couch the discussion in terms of ‘private’ and
‘public’ is the Dominican Thomas Waleys, in his commentary on
Augustine’s City of God, a work which survives in more than seventy
manuscripts. He notes Augustine’s view that the Lex Voconia was unjust,
but adds, ‘it seems truly iniquitous as far as private persons are concerned
although it could be reasonable as far as public persons, such as kings and
rulers, are concerned’.126 He then moves on to the daughters of
Zelophehad, but has made an important distinction: exclusion of
women may be unjust when it is a matter of private inheritance but just
when public persons and rule of the state are concerned. By the time the
French apologists for the exclusion of females from the throne of France
were elaborating their case, they could cite François de Meyronnes and
Thomas Waleys, as well as pointing out the parallel between the Lex
Voconia and the Salic Law.127 A basic difference between private prop-
erty and public office had been clearly formulated.
Despite this development in France, most kingdoms in medieval Latin
Christendom experienced the rule of a female sovereign, once or more
than once. In some cases, it might be purely accidental that it did not.
England, for example, could well have had a Queen Matilda in the twelfth
century. The fact that John of Gaunt, son of Edward III, was unsuccessful
when he supposedly tried to induce the English Parliament, ‘following the
example of the French, to pass a law debarring a woman from being heir to
the kingdom’, shows that there can have been no assumption that women
were debarred.128 In France, as has been discussed, the exclusion of
women was late, and explained entirely by the circumstances of one

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particular political crisis. Only in the Holy Roman Empire, where mon-
archy was elective, and continued to be elective despite all attempts to
establish hereditary dynasties, was the exclusion of women structural, one
might even say constitutional: if the nobles had the right to choose a ruler,
they would not choose a woman. No one can deny the patriarchal nature
of medieval Europe, but, from Byzantium to Scotland, from Leon to
Poland, it was not without its windows and opportunities for female
sovereigns.

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 CHAPTER 5

Mistresses and Bastards

Concubines

I n his study of dynastic systems across the world during

the late Middle Ages and Early Modern period, Jeroen Duindam
contrasted the harem system, in which the sovereign kept numbers of
women for himself (often in seclusion and served by eunuchs), and their
numerous children might all be potential claimants to succeed to the
throne, with the system established in medieval Europe, where the
Church upheld monogamy as a principle and when married rulers
slept with women other than their wife it was deemed adultery. He goes
on: ‘Royal adultery, not uncommon in most dynasties and an acclaimed
practice in some, created two characters absent in harem-based repro-
duction: the mistress and the bastard.’1
This is an acute and memorable formulation, and a good description of
the contrast between the dynastic world of late medieval Christian Europe
and that of, say, the Ottoman or imperial Chinese courts, but it is impor-
tant to remember that the sharp contrast between harems and (official)
monogamy was not so sharp earlier in the Middle Ages, or in some parts of
Christian Europe. This is because at that time, or in those places, rulers
often had acknowledged female sexual partners who had a status some-
where between a casual lover and a fully legitimate wife. Among writers in
Latin, the usual term for such a partner was ‘concubine’ (concubina).
An example from the Carolingian period illustrates some features of the
institution of concubinage. In October 869 the Frankish ruler Charles the
Bald, having been informed of the death of his wife, took the noblewoman

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Richildis ‘as his concubine’. In January 870, just a few months later, ‘he
espoused her, gave her a dowry and took her as his wife’.2 One can conclude
a few things from this: a concubine and a wife had recognized, and differ-
ent, statuses; a marriage ceremony (desponsatio) and a dowry were crucial
elements in distinguishing the two;3 and a concubine could be noble. It is
also worth pointing out that this account, written by an archbishop, shows
no overt signs of moral disapproval of Charles’ actions.4
Concubines had been a common and recognized part of both ancient
Greek and ancient Roman society. Justinian’s Digest, the sixth-century
compendium of Roman Law, mentions the term ‘concubine’ some forty
times and even has a separate section ‘On Concubines’. From these
references, it is clear that concubines were systematically distinguished
from wives (uxores) and concubinage distinguished from marriage (nup-
tiae, matrimonium). They also demonstrate that many concubines were
former slaves, but that it was possible for a concubine to become a wife.
The legal rulings sometimes throw a little light on social realities: we hear
of concubines accused of theft, concubines becoming the concubine of
their former lover’s son, rules that concubines had to be at least twelve,
prohibitions on taking a niece as a concubine, acceptance that officials
sent to the provinces could take a local woman as a concubine, rules
about bequests to concubines, concubines who were given the clothes of
former concubines. A concubine may have been ‘she who is in the house
in the place of a wife but without marriage’, but these references show
that she would definitely know she was not a wife.5
In the early Middle Ages, Christian writers and ecclesiastical authorities
expressed disquiet about concubines, and ruled that men who kept them
could not be promoted to the higher ranks of holy orders, but the campaign
against concubinage was hardly sustained or zealous. The great canon law
collection of the twelfth century, Gratian’s Decretum, contains the rulings: ‘He
who does not have a wife and has a concubine instead should not be barred
from communion, but he should be content to be joined to just one woman,
either a wife or a concubine’ and ‘I would not say that it is licit for a Christian
to have several women or even two women at the same time, but one only,
either a wife, or, if there is no wife, a concubine instead.’6 There is nothing
here to suggest outrage at the prospect of a laity happily cohabiting with
women not their wives. The tone is quite different from the, sometimes

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hysterical, note to be found in the utterances of clerical and monastic

authorities about ‘incest’, that is, marriage between cousins.
Perhaps the low temperature of the churchmen on this subject may be
linked to the fact that early medieval rulers, and, in some parts of Europe,
rulers well into the later centuries of the Middle Ages, took concubinage
for granted. These concubines were not necessarily the counterparts of
the low-born concubine envisaged by Roman Law, who might have been
a slave, who could conceivably be inherited by the master’s son and who
was expected to tolerate being decked out in a previous concubine’s
dresses. Merovingian kings had both wives and concubines, sometimes
numbers of them. Of Dagobert I it was said:

He was given to lust beyond measure and had three women as queens and
many concubines. These were the queens: Nantechildis, Wulfegundis and
Berchildis. It would increase the length of this chronicle too much to
insert the names of the concubines, because there were so many.7

The four sons of Theuderic II were all born from concubines. One of
them was the boy king Sigebert II.
The Merovingians recognized all sons of kings, not just those born of
wives: ‘those who are born of kings are called the children of kings,
regardless of who their mother is’.8 Their successors, the Carolingians,
changed this. They continued to have concubines but their children were
generally excluded from succession. This narrowed the field. Thus
Charlemagne, who had twenty children by nine or ten different
women, did not leave a succession crisis on his death but was succeeded
by his only surviving legitimate son, Louis the Pious. And, when the
emperor Louis the Pious made arrangements for his own successors in
817, he explicitly excluded ‘children born from concubines’.9 In other
societies, like early Ireland, the sons of kings by women other than their
wives (‘concubines’) would not have accepted their exclusion so peace-
fully. And in some parts of Europe the Merovingian approach continued.
A commentator of the late twelfth century noted that ‘the custom of the
kingdom of Norway until today is that anyone who is known to be the son
of a king of Norway, even if he is illegitimate and born of a servant girl,
can claim as much right to the kingdom of Norway as a son of the king’s
wife born of a free woman’.10 Jan Rüdiger pointed to the parallel: ‘In fact

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the Norway of the sagas followed the view of the Merovingians, that the
father’s blood was enough to transmit eligibility to the throne.’11
While the Merovingians sometimes took slaves as their wives, the
Carolingians usually sought high-born women as their concubines,
such as Liutswind, concubine of Carloman, son of Louis the German,
whose child was Arnulf, ‘born of a most noble woman but one not legally
married to him’, or the unnamed concubine of Carloman’s brother
Louis, described as ‘a concubine of extremely high birth’.12 Not all
Carolingian concubines were of this status, however. The wife of the
emperor Lothar died on 20 March 851; less than a month later, on
19 April, Lothar granted her freedom to his slave mistress Doda, by
whom he had a son with the royal name of Carloman.13 The average
age at marriage of the Carolingian kings of the ninth century was twenty-
five, well after sexual maturity, and they commonly had concubines
before marriage.14
The chroniclers of the early dukes of Normandy distinguished the
sexual partnerships of these rulers as being either ‘in the Danish way
(Danico more)’ or ‘in the Christian way (Christiano more)’.15 One of these
chroniclers, Robert of Torigny, writing in the abbey of Bec in the
1130s, tells how Duke Richard I had several children by his countess,
Gunnor, but that when he wanted to appoint one of them as archbishop
of Rouen, he was told ‘this could in no way be, according to the decrees of
the canons, because his mother had not been married’. The duke
responded by uniting with Gunnor ‘in the Christian way’. During the
ceremony, they and their children were draped symbolically in a cloak,
and, with everything righted, their son could become archbishop.16 What
is being applied here is the canon law principle that subsequent marriage
legitimized the children. Whether it was actually applied in 989, when the
event supposedly occurred, or is a retrospective piece of imagination by
Robert of Torigni, it is not possible to say for certain.17 But the distinction
between unions in the Danish way and in the Christian way seems to
parallel the distinction between concubine and wife. The Burgundian
chronicler Ralph Glaber, who died in the 1040s, noted that Norman
dukes were born of concubines, but pointed out the good precedents
for this: several of the children of the patriarch Jacob, as well as the first
Christian emperor, Constantine, were born of concubines.18

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It is not always easy to ascertain whether a woman was regarded as

a wife or a concubine. Charles Martel’s mother was called both ‘wife’ and
‘concubine’ in the medieval sources, and modern historians continue to
disagree about her status.19 Cases of Carolingian concubines becoming
wives may include Pippin III’s Bertrada, Louis the Pious’ Ermengard and
Louis II’s Angilberga.20 Indeed, when chroniclers classify women as
either ruler’s wives or their concubines, they may be making choices
that have nothing to do with the status of these women in fact. As Sylvia
Konecny observed, ‘the success or failure of a woman’s sons or the
partisan position of a chronicler often determined whether a woman
would be described as a concubine or a wife’.21 Nevertheless, the distinc-
tion existed, and could have political consequences, especially for inheri-
tance (see below, pp. 166–8).
To classify a woman as a concubine could be a hostile act or it could be
a simple statement of fact in a world where concubinage was a recognized
status. The Latin word pelex was used less often than concubina and usually
with a negative implication. In the interminable dispute involving Lothar
II of Lotharingia and his two women, Teutberga and Waldrada, those
who championed Teutberga as Lothar’s lawful wife and queen frequently
labelled Waldrada a pelex (or pellex).22 Some Bible commentators, dealing
with the rare word pellicientes in the Latin text of the Second Epistle of
Peter, which means ‘alluring’ or ‘enticing’, linked it to pellices, the plural
form of pellex, adding ‘that is, prostitutes, who take their name either
from pollution or from the beauty of their skin (pellis) by which they
entice the unwary’.23 Pellex is not a term in Roman Law, like concubine,
and it becomes very rare in the later Middle Ages.

Noble Mistresses of the High Middle Ages

When we turn to the twelfth century and later, especially in the central
regions of western Europe, the picture is different. Semi-official concu-
bines disappear, while, as Duindam observed, we enter a world of mis-
tresses and bastards. Although these mistresses could be noble and
powerful, and produce offspring whose interests they might protect
and further, their status was never officially defined, as that of concubine
had been by Roman Law or customary law.

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Most of these mistresses came from the landed aristocracy. Rosamund

Clifford, the most well-known mistress of Henry II of England, belonged
to an Anglo-Norman baronial family with landholdings in the Welsh
Marches.24 Her relatives benefited from the connection, since her
father’s estate was increased by a valuable manor that the king gave him
‘for love of Rosamund his daughter’.25 Henry’s affection for her was
shown by the care he took over her burial place in Godstow nunnery
outside Oxford, endowing the nunnery with lands and having an elabo-
rate tomb constructed for her inside the church, ‘in the middle of the
choir before the altar, covered with silk cloths and surrounded by lamps
and candles’.26 She entered legend as ‘Fair Rosamund’.
Spain saw several royal mistresses who were of great importance and
had dramatic lives (and deaths). One was Eleanor de Guzmán, mistress of
Alfonso XI of Castile (1312–50). Alfonso had married Maria, the teenage
daughter of the king of Portugal, but, after two years, she had borne no
children. ‘And because the king was a very accomplished man in all his
actions’, says the chronicler of his reign, ‘he felt himself diminished by
the fact that he had no sons by the queen; and, for this reason, he sought
a way to have sons otherwise.’27 In 1330 Alfonso met the noble young
widow, Eleanor de Guzmán, in Seville, and they formed a liaison that was
to last the whole of the king’s life and produce numerous offspring.
Queen Maria did eventually also have children, two sons, one of whom
died in infancy. The other, Peter, was born in 1334, the same year as
Eleanor de Guzmán gave birth to her fifth son by the king. The rivalry
between the legitimate son and the illegitimate ones was to shape
Castilian politics in a fundamental way. Alfonso’s concerns are illustrated
by a remarkable clause he insisted on including in the treaty he made
with the king of France in 1345: that if any future king of Castile should
not respect the grants and favours he had bestowed on Eleanor de
Guzmán and her children, the whole treaty would be void.28 It is an
attempt to secure the support of the powerful French king for the posi-
tion of Alfonso’s mistress and their many children. Alfonso’s apprehen-
sions on this point were realistic. After his death and the succession of his
legitimate son, Peter, the new young king sent his father’s mistress under
guard to Queen Maria’s castle of Talavera, where, on Maria’s instruc-
tions, Eleanor was soon killed.29

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Alfonso’s son and successor, Peter, nicknamed ‘the Cruel’, also had
a complex series of relationships with women.30 A marriage agreement
was drawn up between the young king and a French princess, Blanche of
Bourbon, in July 1352, but, when Blanche arrived in Valladolid for the
wedding the following February, Peter was not there, since he was 250
miles away in Cordoba awaiting the birth of his first child by his mistress
Maria de Padilla. Once that child, a girl named Beatrice, had been born,
and endowed with an estate, Peter finally came to Valladolid for
his wedding, which was celebrated with pomp and festivity. But then,
two days later, he abandoned Blanche and returned to Maria.31
Subsequently, under pressure from his mother and his senior ministers,
he revisited Blanche but only for two days. After that, says a contemporary
chronicler, ‘he never again saw the queen, Doña Blanche his wife’.32
Maria de Padilla lived with Peter for a decade (1351 until 1361, when
she died) and had four children by him. The only serious disruption to
their relationship occurred in 1354, when Peter married another woman,
Joanna de Castro, after having had two tame bishops confirm that his
marriage to Blanche was null. It remains a complete enigma why he did
this and also why, immediately after the marriage, Peter left her and, in
the words of the same chronicler, ‘never again saw Doña Joanna de
Castro’, although she was given an estate and always called herself
‘queen’.33 Blanche remained in Spain and was able to obtain the support
of the citizens of Toledo for her cause but was eventually unsuccessful in
her efforts and became a permanent prisoner of her husband. She died,
still under guard, in 1361, the same year as Maria de Padilla. The circum-
stances of her death are unclear, but could have been simply natural.34
She entered the literature of romance, in more than one language,
including a full-length English poem of 1855, where she appears ‘pale,
pensive and alone’, as she might.35
Throughout her travails, Blanche had a determined champion, the
pope, Innocent VI (1352–62). He wrote a series of letters: to Blanche,
first telling her to be obedient to her husband and mother-in-law, later
writing to console her in the face of Peter’s terrible treatment; to Peter,
telling him to treat Blanche with marital affection, later congratulating
him on the, mistaken, news that the king had separated from Maria de
Padilla, eventually exploding at the news of Peter’s marriage to Joanna de

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Castro – ‘you, doing recent things that are worse than what you did
before, not dismissing your adulteress nor taking back the queen, have
brazenly taken up with another adulteress’; to the queen mother, Maria,
encouraging her support for her daughter-in-law; to his legates,
Bertrand, bishop of Senez, and William, cardinal-deacon of St Mary in
Cosmedin, urging them to vigorous action; to Blanche’s supporters in
Toledo and to the Spanish bishops; to the king of France and the duke of
Bourbon, Blanche’s father; to the nobles of Spain.36 All this epistolary
and rhetorical activity had no effect. Peter remained with Maria de
Padilla until her death, which was followed the next year by that of
Pope Innocent.
After the deaths of Blanche and Maria de Padilla in 1361, Peter
announced publicly that he had in fact married Maria before Blanche,
so that Maria was truly queen of Castile and his marriage with Blanche
null. He had his son by Maria declared his heir and exhumed her body to
be re-interred in Seville.37 It is not possible to say how much truth there is
in this claim. The witnesses the king produced to testify to the earlier
marriage included relatives of Maria, with a clear interest at stake, but
Peter’s matrimonial history is impulsive enough to make it possible. In
his will Peter expresses the wish to be buried alongside her.38 Peter was
deposed and murdered by his half-brother, Henry of Trastámara (see
below, p. 174) but his daughters by Maria de Padilla carried claims to the
Castilian throne to their husbands, both of them sons of Edward III of
England.

Mistresses Drawn from the Queen’s Ladies-in-Waiting

One pool from which royal mistresses were recruited was the body of
ladies-in-waiting around the queen, who were mostly young, unmarried
and of relatively high social class. These ladies could be seductive. Robert
de Vere, earl of Oxford, scandalously separated from his wife and mar-
ried one of the foreign ladies-in-waiting who had come with Anne of
Bohemia, queen of Richard II of England. The inventory of his property
after his death included two new saddles ‘for the ladies from Bohemia
(pour damoiselles de Boeme)’, and one old saddle ‘in Bohemian style’.39
Queens who were concerned about the reputation of their entourage

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would keep their ladies busy. The austere St Margaret of Scotland sur-
rounded herself with ‘ladies of noble birth and proven sobriety of morals’
who spent their time sewing liturgical vestments and whose contact with
men was limited to those whom the queen allowed and had no ‘disrepu-
table familiarity’ or ‘wanton levity’, while the revered Guta, wife of
Wenceslas II of Bohemia, ‘did not allow her ladies-in-waiting to be idle
but allocated each of them their work, instructing this one in weaving,
this one in spinning, this one in sewing’.40
But all this needlework did not always keep ladies from the attention
of the king. When the illegitimate daughter of the emperor Frederick II,
Constanza-Anna, arrived in Nicaea in 1241 as the bride of the Byzantine
emperor, John III Vatatzes, she was accompanied by an Italian lady-in-
waiting named Marchesina, who soon became the emperor’s favourite
mistress. He gave her red shoes, customarily reserved for the empress
alone, along with a red saddle and bridle, and provided her with a larger
retinue than the empress had herself. She was very publicly the empress’
‘rival (ἀντίζηλος)’.41
Ines de Castro also met her royal lover when serving in the household
of his wife. Ines was a high-born but illegitimate Castilian noblewoman,
and half-sister of Joanna de Castro mentioned above, who came to
Portugal in 1340 in the entourage of Constance, bride of Peter, son
and heir of the king of Portugal. Ines and Peter became lovers and,
after Constance’s death, had four children. Peter’s father, King Alfonso
IV, was unhappy with the situation, perhaps because of the dominant
position being assumed in Portugal by Ines’ family, the de Castros,
perhaps because of fears about the legitimate successor, Constance’s
son, and he eventually came to countenance Ines’ murder, which took
place with his permission in 1355. After Peter became king in 1357, he
took a terrible revenge on those who had perpetrated her murder,
supposedly having their hearts torn out and then watching from
a window, eating his dinner, while their bodies were burned. Peter said
that he and Ines had been married and referred to her as ‘the queen
Doña Ines’ and tended her memory. The parallel with the case of Peter
I of Castile and Maria de Padilla is striking. Peter of Portugal had an
ornate stone tomb made for Ines in the royal mausoleum, the monastery
of Alcobaça, which was carved with scenes of the life of Christ and the Last

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Judgment and had her effigy above, wearing a crown – if she had not
worn one in life, she wore one in death. Ines’ body was transferred from
its initial resting place in Coimbra to the new tomb, with an escort of
knights and a crowd bearing lighted candles. The king prepared an
equally elaborate tomb for himself in Alcobaça, where he was eventually
placed by Ines’ side.42
Another lady-in-waiting to the queen who made her way to the king’s
bed was Alice Perrers, mistress of Edward III of England, who served in
the household of Edward’s queen, Philippa of Hainault, and was a young
widow at the time their sexual relations began. She had a son and two
daughters by the king, was publicly acknowledged after Philippa’s death
in 1369 and was notorious for accumulating lands and wealth. This made
her vulnerable when the king was no longer there to protect her, and
soon after his death in 1377 Alice was tried, condemned and deprived of
all her lands. She spent the rest of her life – more than twenty years –
trying to recover what she could. Unlike most royal mistresses of the
period, she was not from a noble or knightly background but from
a family of London goldsmiths and jewellers, who provided her first
link with the royal court.43 Also recruited from the queen’s household
was Agnes Sorel, mistress of Charles VII of France. Their liaison began in
1443, when she was twenty-two and he forty-one, and she bore him four
daughters, dying in the fourth childbirth in 1450, aged twenty-eight. She
came from the lesser nobility of Picardy and was endowed with several
manors by the king. Charles erected two grand tombs for her, one in the
abbey of Jumièges, where her heart was buried, and which included
a statue of Agnes offering her heart to the Virgin Mary, the other at
Loches, where her body was buried.44
Wives and mistresses were not always rivals. Odette de Champdivers, of
a knightly Burgundian family, was provided as a mistress for the mad
Charles VI with the agreement of his wife, Queen Isabella, who was not
willing to suffer the violence the king sometimes inflicted on her. Odette
was ‘a very beautiful, delightful and pleasing young woman’, bore the
king a daughter, and was rewarded with two fine manors. She was nick-
named ‘the little queen’.45 Mistresses, and their relatives, including
sometimes their husbands, could gain a lot from the relationship with
the ruler. Apart from the intangibles of the emotional bond, they were

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usually endowed with lands, and their family might gain titles and posi-
tions. They could be highly prized: ornate tombs such as those of
Rosamund Clifford in Godstow, Ines de Castro in Alcobaça and Agnes
Sorel in Jumièges and Loches were permanent, visible witnesses to the
affection and sense of loss felt by powerful royal lovers. But the life of
a royal mistress could be dangerous. Three were murdered in the space
of nine years in the middle of the fourteenth century: Eleanor de
Guzmán in Castile in 1351, Ines de Castro in Portugal in 1355 and
Katherine de Mortimer in Scotland in 1360, the first by a vengeful wife,
the second by a repressive father, the last by Scots lords unhappy to see
their king return from imprisonment in England with an English
mistress.46

Bastards
Most kings were powerful, wealthy and aggressive males, and might be
expected to produce offspring from women other than their wives.
Henry I of England has the record for the number of bastard children,
over twenty, ten times as many as all the Capetian kings of France
together achieved.47 The emperor Frederick II had twelve. The kings of
the Iberian peninsula also tended to have large extra-marital families.
Alfonso IX of Leon (1188–1230) had eleven illegitimate children by five
different noblewomen, as well as eight by his two wives.48 Alfonso X of
Castile (1252–84) had four illegitimate children, the eldest of them,
Beatrice, by a noblewoman of the house of Guzmán, Mayor Guillén de
Guzmán; Beatrice married the king of Portugal. Alfonso XI (1312–50)
had two children by his second wife, but a total of ten with his long-term
mistress, the noble widow Eleanor de Guzmán, who was the great-great-
niece of Mayor Guillén.
Sometimes these children were thus the offspring of a long-term and
publicly acknowledged relationship. Their mother might be classified as
a ‘concubine’, with or without derogatory intention, and the sons of such
women could then be identified by the status of their mother. For
example, one chronicle introduces Tancred, king of Sicily (1190–4),
the illegitimate son of Roger, duke of Apulia, and grandson of Roger II,
as Roger’s son by a concubine: ‘He had had a son by a concubine, who

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was called Tancred, and that concubine had been the daughter of the
count of Lecce.’49 Likewise, Manfred, illegitimate son of the emperor
Frederick II, is described as ‘born of a concubine’.50 This way of referring
to such children does not label them with a specific term, identifying
them instead by the status of their mother. Such terms were, however,
also available. Isidore of Seville, whose work was the first recourse of
medieval authors in search of a definition, wrote that ‘he is called nothus,
who is born of a noble father and an ignoble mother, such as from
a concubine . . . the contrary is a spurius, who is born of a noble mother
and an ignoble father’.51 Isidore’s emphasis on the unequal status of the
parents, rather than the simple fact that they were not married, can be
traced in later writers who repeated his words.52 Canon lawyers, however,
could use the term spurius differently, for a child of prohibited unions,
such as incest or adultery, or of a casual encounter, as distinct from
a long-term concubinage.53
These Latin terms stand alongside the more robust label of ‘bastard’.
A curious etymology has been proposed for this word. The Oxford English
Dictionary says it derives from the Old French bast, meaning pack-saddle.
The pack-saddle, the Dictionary helpfully explicates, was ‘used as a bed by
muleteers in the inns’.54 This conjures up a picture of casual sex in the
straw rather than noble mistresses, but the term was certainly not limited
in this way. The earliest occurrence of the word in England is in the
Domesday Book of 1086, where a Norman landholder in Devon bears the
name ‘Robert Bastard’, or ‘Robert the Bastard’.55 Another early use is in
the chronicle of John of Worcester, who, describing the arrival of Robert,
earl of Gloucester, in England in 1139, calls him ‘the son of Henry,
former king of the English, but a bastard’.56 This is a strictly contempor-
ary record. The word is found in several European languages and was
even borrowed into medieval Greek.57 The Church courts could ‘bastar-
dize’ someone by declaring that they were illegitimate, like Hamo de
Masci ‘who was declared a bastard (abastardatus) in the church court’.58
In the dynastic world, the crucial question about illegitimacy was
whether or not it was a bar to inheritance. When Henry I of England
died in 1135 he left numerous illegitimate children including one, just
mentioned, Robert, earl of Gloucester, whose wealth and talents could
have made him an excellent contender to succeed. A report did indeed

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circulate that Earl Robert had been advised to seek the throne on the
death of his father but that he had followed ‘sounder advice’ and com-
mitted himself instead to the cause of his nephew Henry (later Henry II),
son of the Empress Matilda.59 It seems that on this occasion his illegiti-
mate birth weighed heavily not only with the Anglo-Norman barons but
also with Robert himself.60
The complex way that the rights of bastards might sometimes be
denied and sometimes asserted is revealed in the events of the 880s and
890s, a period when the Carolingian empire finally disintegrated.61 In 885,
the emperor Charles the Fat, lacking a legitimate child, was rumoured to
be planning to have Bernard, ‘his son by a concubine’, made his heir, but
was frustrated in the attempt. His intention was to summon the pope to an
assembly in Germany, where Bernard’s status would be recognized by
papal authority, since Charles ‘doubted whether this could be done by
him himself’, but the pope’s death en route upset his plans.62 Charles’
doubt and his appeal to the pope suggest that he was considering not
simply designating Bernard as his heir but also having him declared
legitimate and, if so, this would be the earliest, and for this period an
isolated, mention of the possibility of legitimation by the pope.63
In 885, therefore, Charles the Fat thought it essential to secure papal
backing for the legitimation of his illegitimate son so that he could
succeed to the throne. Just over two years later, however, Charles’ illegi-
timate nephew, Arnulf, showing no doubts on the grounds of his birth,
deposed Charles and himself became ruler of the East Frankish kingdom
and eventually emperor. Partly this is to be explained by Arnulf’s ambi-
tion and political and military skill and strength, but it also reflects the
very narrow range of choice available in the Carolingian dynasty. Apart
from Charles the Fat, there were only five Carolingian males in 887:
Charles’ illegitimate son Bernard, the illegitimate Arnulf and his two
illegitimate sons, and Charles the Simple, the eight-year-old representa-
tive of the West Frankish branch of the family, whose own legitimacy
could also be questioned. As the chronicler Regino of Prüm put it,

After the death [of Charlemagne] fortune changed and the glory of
things, which had overflowed beyond expectation, now, in the same way,
began gradually to drain away, until, after kingdoms had fallen away and

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the royal stock had partly been extinguished by early deaths and partly
withered by the sterility of wives, he alone [Arnulf] of all the numerous
descendants of kings could be found suitable to take up the sceptre of the
empire of the Franks.64

Arnulf was able to have the rights of his two illegitimate sons recognized
by the East Frankish aristocracy, but only ‘if an heir was not born to him
by his legal wife’. In fact, he did have a son by her, and this son, although
a child, succeeded him in 900 as ‘the only one born of his legal wife’ (see
above on Louis the Child, pp. 122–3).65

Bastard Kings
It is not known exactly why there was opposition to the declaration of
Bernard as heir to Charles the Fat, and the case of Arnulf shows that
bastards sometimes could inherit, but there is no doubt that there was
frequently opposition to bastards succeeding to power, both in general
principle and practical politics. A possible early example is Aldfrith, king
of Northumbria (685–704/5), an illegitimate son of King Oswiu, fath-
ered during Oswiu’s time in Ireland on a princess of the O’Neil dynasty.66
His contemporary, Bede, calls Aldfrith a bastard (nothus).67 Writing very
much later, the historian William of Malmesbury says that Aldfrith was
the older son of Oswiu but did not succeed him ‘because he was a bastard’
and only came to the throne after the death of his younger but legitimate
half-brother Ecgfrith.68 Despite the lateness of this testimony, it is clear
that William of Malmesbury had access to materials for Anglo-Saxon
England that no longer survive, so what he says may be credible.
Be that as it may, a council held by papal legates in England in 786 was
explicit about the issue of legitimacy and royal succession:

in the ordination of kings no one shall permit the assent of wicked people
to prevail, but kings are to be chosen lawfully by the priests and elders, and
not from among those born from adultery or incest, for, just as in our own
times according to the canons a bastard cannot be promoted to the
priesthood, so neither can he who was not born of a legitimate marriage
be the Lord’s anointed and king of the whole kingdom and heir of the
land.69

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The most famous bastard of the eleventh century was William the
Bastard, duke of Normandy and king of England, whose conquests not
only enormously enlarged his wealth and power but also enabled him to
go down in history with the more refined nickname William the
Conqueror. He succeeded his father as duke in 1035 while still a boy.
His soubriquet dates to his own lifetime, for a German chronicler, writing
in 1074, refers to ‘this William, whom the French call “the Bastard”’.70
Orderic Vitalis, writing much later but with good knowledge of the
traditions of the Norman aristocracy, says William ‘was despised as
a bastard by the native nobles and especially by those descended from
the earlier dukes Richard’ (that is, Richard I and Richard II who reigned
942–1026).71 Two of these descendants of earlier dukes, Guy of
Burgundy and William, count of Arques, were to prove William’s most
dangerous enemies. Orderic gives William the Conqueror a death-bed
speech in which he recalls how Guy ‘called me a bastard and ignoble and
unworthy to rule’, while William of Arques and his brother ‘despised me
as a bastard’.72 In the following century, those who resisted the attempt of
William of Ypres to become count of Flanders in 1127 declared that they
opposed him ‘because he is a bastard, born from a noble father and an
ignoble mother, who carded wool all her life’.73 Here the word for
‘bastard’ is spurius, and hence an inversion of the definition in Isidore
of Seville (above, p. 166).
Despite such objections, some bastards established dynasties, or even
kingdoms. The first kings of Aragon were descended from an illegitimate
son, Ramiro I, who was supposedly endowed with Aragon in 1035 by his
father, since it was ‘a little portion of his kingdom set apart’ and would
not suggest he was being put on the same level as his brothers, ‘because
he was not their equal on the maternal side’.74 There are two notable
cases in which illegitimate members of the royal dynasty succeeded to the
throne in preference to a legitimate female heir: in the kingdom of Sicily
after the death of William II in 1189, and in Portugal after the death of
Ferdinand I in 1383. The situations are remarkably similar. In both we see
the death of a king leaving a legitimate female heir, but one who was
married to a foreign ruler; preference in the kingdom for an illegitimate
male member of the dynasty, Tancred of Lecce in the Sicilian case, John
of Avis in the Portuguese; and invasion by the foreign king married to the

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female heir. The only difference was the outcome. Tancred’s family was
wiped out; John’s ruled Portugal for the next two centuries.
The childless William II of Sicily designated his only surviving legit-
imate relative, his aunt Constance, as his heir, and had the great men of
the kingdom swear an oath to ‘accept her as mistress and queen if he died
without children’.75 This oath of the Sicilian nobles to Constance, which
took place at Troia, probably in 1184 or 1185,76 is strongly reminiscent of
the oath, taken a half century earlier, that Henry I of England made his
barons swear, to acknowledge his daughter Matilda as his heir (above,
p. 135). As in the case of Matilda, an unpopular marriage complicated
the situation. Just as the Anglo-Norman barons objected to Matilda’s
marriage with Geoffrey of Anjou, so it seems the chief men of Sicily
were not pleased at the prospect of having as their ruler Constance’s
husband, Henry, son of the Holy Roman Emperor and already desig-
nated as his successor. In November 1189, when William II died, it was
not Constance and Henry who were recognized as successors, but
Tancred, count of Lecce, an illegitimate member of the royal dynasty.
He was the son of Constance’s older brother, who had died in 1149.
A letter written by a prominent Sicilian, probably early in 1190,
expresses the fears that the inhabitants of the kingdom had at the pro-
spect of Constance’s German husband and his German army. The author
of the letter had just heard of the death of the childless William II, and he
reflects on ‘how great a calamity this change will bring’. The only two
possible futures seem to him either ‘the storm of hostile invasion’ or ‘the
fierce whirlwind of civil war’. His imagination is heated:

I seem already to see the turbulent battle lines of the barbarians carried
forward in a rush, bringing terror to rich cities and places that have long
flourished in peace, slaughtering the inhabitants, devastating them with
their plundering, befouling them with their lust.77

He pictures men cut down by the sword, virgins raped before the eyes of
their parents. ‘German frenzy (teutonica insania)’ knows no bounds. He
talks of the Germans as ‘a most foul people’ and ‘a hard and stony race’,
paints a scene of the native children ‘terrified by the gruffness of the
barbarian language’ and expresses his fears that Palermo, the capital and
the focus of his affections, might be ‘polluted by the entry of the

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barbarians’.78 The only hope for this writer was that the Sicilians would
elect a king of their own and then, especially if the Christian and Muslim
inhabitants of Sicily could collaborate, ‘summon up their forces and fight
the barbarians’. But would they be willing to take this course, ‘or would
they prefer to submit to the yoke of servitude, however harsh, rather than
be mindful of their reputation and dignity and the liberty of their
country?’79 Probably already by the time this letter was written, some at
least of the Sicilians had decided to elect a king of their own, even if he
was illegitimate. Another source represents the arguments that
Tancred’s supporters advanced against the claims of the legitimist adher-
ents of Constance: ‘First learn the emperor’s ways, learn his fury! Who
can bear German frenzy? . . . will it be possible for you, like a child, to
learn to make barbaric sounds like a barbarian?’80 Just as in the case of
the letter, the German reputation for ferocity and their ‘barbaric’ lan-
guage could stir up hostility to the rule of a foreign king. Tancred reigned
for four years and was succeeded by his young son, but the dynasty was
then annihilated by the irresistible force of Henry and his Germans.
Similarly, two centuries later, when Ferdinand I of Portugal was mak-
ing arrangements for the succession, there was a legitimate female can-
didate, his daughter Beatrice, but no son. Ferdinand anticipated that
Beatrice and her husband, the king of Castile, would produce a son who
would inherit Portugal when of age. Ferdinand died in 1383, when
Beatrice was ten, and very quickly Castilian troops crossed the border.
Just as in the Sicilian case, the nobles and populace of Portugal were
presented with a clear successor, who was legitimate, but one who had the
potential disadvantage, in some contemporary views, of being female,
and the definite disadvantage of bringing with her as consort the king of
a large neighbouring country which had fought wars with Portugal only
a few years earlier.
Ferdinand had declared that his wife, Eleanor, should be regent after
his death, but there was considerable opposition to her and to the
Castilian king’s claim to be king of Portugal in right of his wife. The
eventual head of the resistance was John, the illegitimate son of Peter I of
Portugal (Ferdinand I’s father) and his mistress Teresa Lourenzo, and
hence Ferdinand’s half-brother. John had been publicly acknowledged
as King Peter’s son – we even know exactly when he was born, 3:00 in the

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afternoon on 11 April 1357 – and he was raised by a rich citizen of Lisbon,

later educated by the Master of the Knights of the Order of Christ,
a Portuguese crusading order, and he himself became Grand Master of
the Order of Avis at the age of seven, which is why he is usually known as
John of Avis.81 In 1383, in the face of Castilian aggression, an opposition
party chose him as regent instead of the queen mother Eleanor, and for
two years war was waged between John of Avis, on the one hand, and
Eleanor’s supporters and the Castilians. John had the backing of the city
of Lisbon, which withstood a Castilian siege in the summer of 1384, and
on 6 April 1385 he was accepted by the Cortes (Parliament) as king.
A crushing victory over the Castilians at Aljubarrota on 14 August 1385
confirmed his position.82 John of Avis was not only illegitimate but had
also taken vows as a member of the Order of Avis. In order to marry, he
needed a dispensation from the pope, and he was as assiduous in pursu-
ing this as he was in resisting Castile’s armies. In 1391, six years after he
had been accepted as king, he received letters from Pope Boniface IX
declaring that, although John was of illegitimate birth and had taken
vows of poverty, chastity and obedience, he was now legitimized, could
marry (which he had already done) and rule as king.83 Despite continued
conflict with Castile, he ruled for forty-eight years. John I entered history
and legend as a champion of Portuguese independence and, as such, has
a grand equestrian statue in Figueira Square in Lisbon, as well as
a medieval effigy, holding hands with his queen, over his tomb.84
Sometimes the application of fairly strict rules about illegitimacy
increased the chance of there being a female ruler. Blanca of Navarre
(1425–41) succeeded her father Charles III in preference to any of his
illegitimate sons, as he explicitly recognized: ‘Due to a lack of legitimate
male sons . . . the daughters of ours will be held to be the first by law to the
land of Navarre.’85 In contrast, in dynastic systems like the Irish, with
numerous sons from different unions and recognition of the rights of
collateral branches, such a development would be impossible as there
was simply no space for sovereign queens. In the case of Sicily in 1189 and
Portugal in 1383 the illegitimate male was preferred to the legitimate
female largely, it seems, because of the desire to have a native ruler. This
preference for a local but illegitimate son over an alien married to
a legitimate woman is expressed very well in a parallel case from twelfth-

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Figure 6 The Battle of Aljubarrota, 1385, in which John of Avis, bastard son of the
king of Portugal, defeated his Castilian rivals and established his dynasty on the
throne.
IRHT-CNRS, Bibliothèque municipale de Besançon, Ms 864–865. Besançon, Bibliothèque
municipale, MS 865, fol. 239v, digital photography by Colin Dunn, in ‘The Online
Froissart’, ed. by Peter Ainsworth and Godfried Croenen, version 1.5 (Sheffield:
HRIOnline, 2013), www.hrionline.ac.uk/onlinefroissart/apparatus.jsp?type=vv&xmlid=B
es-1_27r [accessed 15 August 2019].

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 PART I: THE LIFE CYCLE

century Normandy: ‘they preferred to have over them a bastard who was
a compatriot’.86
One of the most successful dynasties to originate in an illegitimate son
of a king was the house of Trastámara, which ruled Castile from 1369,
after a short abortive earlier attempt, and later acquired the thrones of
Aragon, Sicily, Naples and Navarre. The founder of the dynasty was
Henry, one of the ten children of Alfonso XI of Castile and his long-
term mistress, Eleanor de Guzmán. Understandably, Alfonso’s wife,
Maria, and their legitimate son, Peter, regarded them with hostility. On
Alfonso’s death in 1350, the competition became bloody. Henry and his
brothers rebelled, with varying degrees of success, while Eleanor de
Guzmán, as mentioned above, was taken into custody and executed.
After many years of fighting, Henry was able to defeat Peter and kill
him with his own hand. This was in 1369.
Henry’s opponents naturally stressed his illegitimacy. The Chandos
Herald, who wrote a life of Peter’s ally, Edward, Prince of Wales
(‘the Black Prince’), always calls him ‘the bastard’, and has Peter’s loyal
supporter, Ferdinand de Castro, say ‘he could not consent that a bastard
should hold the kingdom’. In a letter that Chandos Herald claims the
Black Prince wrote to Henry before confronting him in the Battle of
Nájera, the Prince says, ‘you must feel in your heart that it is not right for
a bastard to be king’.87 It is not clear whether Henry felt this. The
chronicler Froissart writes that Urban V excommunicated Peter and
legitimized Henry in 1362: ‘And the Holy Father placed the whole king-
dom of Spain in the hands of Henry, bastard brother of King Peter, and
he legitimized him to hold the kingdom and the inheritance.’88 There
does not seem to be any corroboration of Froissart’s statement but, if it is
true, then, at the very least, some of Henry’s supporters thought that
legitimation would be an asset.
It is customary to label the descendants of Henry of Trastámara ‘the
house of Trastámara’ and the descendants of John of Avis ‘the house of
Avis’, although in both cases there was no break in male-line descent.
When the royal secretary and archivist of Portugal, Fernão Lopes, was
commissioned by John of Avis’ son and successor, King Duarte, to write
a chronicle, his task was described as ‘setting down in a chronicle the
histories of the kings that had previously reigned in Portugal, right up to,

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and including, the great and most noble deeds of my most able and
virtuous father’.89 This was to be a continuous history of all Portuguese
kings, with no hint of a dynastic rupture. Likewise, Pero López de Ayala,
commissioned by Henry of Trastámara to write a history of the reign of
his enemy Peter I and his own reign, justified Henry’s succession to the
throne and made his illegitimacy invisible.90
In the fifteenth century the kingdoms of Naples and Cyprus
were entangled in a web of dynastic and political manoeuvres in which
rulers of illegitimate birth figured prominently. Ferdinand (or Ferrante),
illegitimate son of Alfonso of Aragon, king of Naples, was legitimized by
his father in 1440.91 After succeeding to the throne of Naples in 1458, he
attempted to make his own illegitimate son, Alfonso, king of Cyprus
through marriage to the illegitimate daughter of the illegitimate James
II of Cyprus.92 In James’ will of 1473 he left the kingdom of Cyprus to his
pregnant wife and to the child that she would bear; if that child died, the
succession would pass to James’ oldest illegitimate son, and, if he died
childless, to his next illegitimate son, and so on; if these sons produced
no heir, the kingdom would go to his illegitimate daughter, Charla, the
girl who was betrothed to Alfonso of Naples.93 Nothing eventually came
of all these plans but the fact that the illegitimate son of an illegitimate
but legitimized ruler could seek a kingdom through marriage to the
illegitimate daughter of an illegitimate king shows that legitimate birth
was not considered indispensable in this world. The succession of James
II himself had been a matter of ruthless power by a talented man:

At this time James, the son of John, king of Cyprus, from a concubine
(e pellice), took possession of the kingdom after his father’s death; his father
had understood that he was very eager to rule, it being natural that as he was
extremely well formed, of great physical size, very eloquent and gifted with
exceptional intelligence, he thought himself worthy of the royal dignity.94

Bastard Culture
During the great revolt of 1173–4, when the adult sons of Henry II of
England rebelled against him, his bastard son Geoffrey, at that time
bishop-elect of Lincoln, fought bravely and successfully on his father’s

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behalf. When Henry and Geoffrey met, the king is reported as saying, ‘My
other sons have proved themselves to be the real bastards, this one alone
has proved to be legitimate and true.’95 There is plenty of evidence for
affection between rulers and their illegitimate children. They were, after
all, the offspring of a relationship based on warm personal feelings of
love and/or desire, rather than of a marriage that might well have been
initially between two complete strangers and was certainly politically
motivated. In addition, if it was recognized that they had no right to
succeed, a source of major intergenerational tension would not exist.
There is no mistaking the note of paternal pride when Richard III of
England, appointing his ‘beloved bastard son, John of Gloucester’, as
captain of Calais (then an English possession) in 1485, praised ‘the great
vivacity of his mind, agility of his limbs and inclination to all good
morals’.96
The favourite son of the emperor Frederick II, it seems, was Enzio,
‘whom’, Frederick himself says, ‘some time ago we fathered on the
German noblewoman Adelheid, when she was single and we were
not’.97 Frederick legitimized Enzio on his own authority in 1239,
a power accorded to the emperor by both Roman and canon law, at the
same time appointing him his lieutenant in Italy. Enzio was later cap-
tured by Italian enemies and spent twenty-two years as a prisoner in
Bologna, writing poems lamenting his fate. The fact that those hostile
to the emperor and his family said that Enzio’s mother was ‘disreputable
and ignoble’ shows the type of invective that was often employed to
discredit illegitimate enemies.98 If we believe the emperor, however, his
mother was an example of a well-born mistress providing valued and
cherished sons outside of marriage.
Sometimes bastards were marked out by their very names. The
Carolingians tended to give different names to their legitimate and
illegitimate sons, reserving the ‘royal names’ like Charles, Louis and
Lothar exclusively for the former, while christening their bastards with
a variety of names, some of them shared with legitimate Carolingians
(Carloman, Pippin) but most not.99 When a Carolingian king like Lothar
II named his illegitimate son Hugh, this was virtually a statement that the
boy was not to be considered as an heir or successor to the kingdom.100 It
has also been pointed out that in the ninth century no legitimate

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Carolingian fell in armed conflict but five illegitimate ones did, suggest-
ing the former were protected more carefully on the battlefield, so those
‘bastard names’ implied dispensability.101 In the late Middle Ages, the
rulers of Savoy and Piedmont often gave their bastard sons exotic names,
some drawn from ancient names of their dynasties that had fallen out of
use, so with an archaic ring, some taken from the heroes of fashionable
chivalric literature, such as Lancelot. Later, with the impact of humanism
in these courts, illegitimate sons might bear names such as Hector,
Achilles and Hannibal.102 There are examples elsewhere in late medieval
Europe, such as Lancelot (d. 1422), son of Charles III of Navarre, or
Hector, bastard of Bourbon and archbishop of Toulouse (1491–1502).103
Humphrey, duke of Gloucester, brother of Henry V of England, followed
this custom by naming his two illegitimate children Arthur and, amaz-
ingly, Antigone.104
One very visible way in which bastards might be distinguished was in
their coats-of-arms. By the later Middle Ages the custom had developed
of distinguishing the arms of illegitimate branches of the family by
a small change or an additional symbol, a ‘difference’, as it was
known. ‘In some countries’, wrote a French author in the 1370s, ‘the
bastards bear the arms of the lineage from which they descend with
some difference, a custom that seems reasonable’.105 About twenty
years later, a writer in England wrote ‘there are those who bear the
mark of bastardy, and such people bear the entire arms of their parents
with a diagonal bend’.106 The ‘bend sinister’, that is, a diagonal band
running from (viewer’s) upper right to lower left on the shield, became
a common difference indicating illegitimacy. It was even made com-
pulsory for bastards by the first king-of-arms of the Burgundian Order
of the Golden Fleece in his instructions of 1463 and by Manuel I of
Portugal (1495–1521).107 It was also possible for bastards to bear
a blank shield with their father’s arms in one quarter, or to place
their father’s arms on the bend.108
In the aristocratic world of those bearing coats-of-arms, the illegiti-
mate were thus being publicly marked out, but it does not seem that
this was intended to shame, rather to make an open acknowledgement
of their family connections. The bend sinister was borne, for example,
by the great French noble, the count of Dunois, illegitimate son of

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Louis of Orleans (younger brother of Charles VI) and a companion-in-

arms of Joan of Arc, whose arms were ‘France, a label argent, a bend
sinister of the same over all’, that is, the royal arms of France (three
golden fleurs-de-lys on a blue ground), differentiated by a silver label
(a narrow horizontal band at the top of the shield with three pendants)
and a silver bend sinister over all.109 The label was a difference of Louis
of Orleans, so Dunois bore his father’s arms with the addition of the
silver bend sinister. It proclaimed his illegitimacy at the same time as
his royal descent. The sumptuous Dunois Hours, now in the British
Library, which he commissioned in the 1430s or 1440s, shows him
feasting in a room with a huge wall-hanging decorated with these
arms.110 He was not sheepish about his bastardy.
The dukes of Burgundy, who came close to creating an independent
state in the borderlands between France and Germany during the fif-
teenth century, were well known as fathers of bastards. As in the case of
Dunois, there was no attempt to hide or conceal their status; an illegiti-
mate son of John the Fearless, duke of Burgundy, is recorded in the
matriculation list of the University of Louvain in 1436 as ‘John, bastard of
Burgundy’. This John went on to become bishop of Cambrai and himself
had at least fourteen illegitimate children by eight different women.111
A delegation from Bohemia visiting the Burgundian court in 1466 was
surprised to be joined at dinner by three of the duke’s bastards:

In those regions, they are not considered shameful, as they are among
us . . . Some kings and rulers have the custom of maintaining mistresses in
their palaces, and they endow the sons they have from them, however
many, with lordships for their lifetimes. When the father dies the
legitimate sons do not take these away.112

The duke of Burgundy at this time was Philip the Good, whose oldest
illegitimate son bore the unusual name of Cornelius (Corneille) and
signed himself ‘Bastard of Burgundy’, a phrase also appearing on his
seal. After his death, his younger bastard brother, Anthony, bore the title
‘Grand Bastard of Burgundy (Grand Bâtard de Bourgogne)’.113
Illegitimate sons could attain prestigious positions, in the secular or
the ecclesiastical world. Two of the many illegitimate sons of Henry I of
England became earl of Gloucester and earl of Cornwall, and both of

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Figure 7 The Dunois Hours showing the count of Dunois (d. 1468), illegitimate son of
Louis of Orleans and companion of Joan of Arc, in a room decorated with his coat-of-arms,
which publicly proclaimed his illegitimacy through the bend sinister (the silver diagonal).
BL, MS Yates Thompson 3, fol. 1, © The British Library.

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them proved loyal champions of their legitimate half-sister, the

empress Matilda, and her son, Henry of Anjou, in the political turmoil
after Henry I’s death in 1135. An illegitimate son of Henry of Anjou,
who succeeded as Henry II, became earl of Salisbury, through the
patronage of his legitimate half-brother, Richard I. Another rose to
be archbishop of York. Illegitimate daughters of rulers might make
prestigious marriages. Constance, illegitimate daughter of Peter II of
Aragon (1196–1213), was married to a member of the aristocratic
house of Montcada, endowed by her father with valuable lordships
and proudly bore on her seal the title, ‘the lady Constance, infanta of
Aragon’.114 Sybilla, daughter of Henry I of England, married
Alexander I, king of Scots. As mentioned above, the illegitimate daugh-
ter of Alfonso X of Castile became Queen Beatrice of Portugal. The
illegitimate daughter of Frederick II married a Byzantine emperor.
There is even a case of marriage to an illegitimate daughter of a ruler
being a step to the succession. Filippo Maria Visconti, duke of Milan
(1412–47), had no legitimate children but an illegitimate daughter,
Bianca Maria, whose mother was a lady-in-waiting to the duke’s wife.
Bianca Maria’s engagement to the mercenary leader Francesco Sforza,
despite an age difference of twenty-four years, and their subsequent
marriage in 1441, was one part of Sforza’s ascent to the duchy of Milan,
which he ruled from 1450 to 1466.

Legitimization
Some inheritance systems did not care whether a child was legitimate or
illegitimate – the Merovingian dynasty and the dynasties of Ireland or
early Scandinavia have already been cited as examples. Others stressed
legitimacy. In the kingdom of Sicily it was ruled in 1265, ‘No one shall
succeed to the kingdom and land who is not born of a legitimate
marriage.’115 But even in systems where it mattered very much, it might
be possible for a child to cease to be illegitimate and become
legitimate.116
The illegitimacy and legitimacy of children was something that the
Church devoted a great deal of effort to defining. The Church’s defini-
tion of illegitimacy was closely linked to its definition of marriage. Sons

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and daughters of people who were not married to each other were
illegitimate; sons and daughters of those who had married in full com-
pliance with the rules of the Church were legitimate. But, in between
these clear-cut situations there were dubious cases. As a very restricted set
of rules about choice of marriage partner developed, excluding even
distant cousins (see above, pp. 43–5), decisions had to be made about the
consequences for the offspring of ‘incestuous marriage’, i.e. that
between cousins. A hard line could sometimes be found. In 1065 Pope
Alexander II wrote to a Sardinian grandee who had married a relative in
the third degree, thundering that this was ‘detestable according to divine
and human laws’ and that if a son were born from such a union he ought
not to be regarded as a legitimate heir.117 This letter, however, was not
incorporated into any influential canon law compilation.
Important decisions about the canon law of marriage and legitimacy
were taken early in the thirteenth century. At the Fourth Lateran Council
of 1215, along with a reduction in the number of the prohibited degrees
(above, p. 45), the Church adopted a new definition of ‘clandestine
marriages’, as those that were celebrated without the banns having
been previously read, and ruled that the children of such marriages
were ‘to be deemed completely illegitimate (prorsus illegitima censeatur)’.
Although the marriage itself was valid, the children could not be deemed
legitimate. The same applied to the children of those married even after
proper publication of banns if the spouses were related within the pro-
hibited degrees and, crucially, knew of the relationship.118 For children
to be legitimate according to these newly clarified standards, their par-
ents’ marriage would have to be a properly publicized union between
partners who were either not related within the prohibited degrees or did
not know they were. The Decretals of 1234, an official codification, have
a specific section, ‘which children are legitimate’.119 It contains rulings
that, if a marriage was public and had not faced ecclesiastical prohibition,
the children are legitimate and can succeed to paternal property even if
the couple are subsequently separated; that a child born of adultery is
illegitimate and cannot inherit; and that if two single people had
children, their subsequent marriage made their children legitimate:
‘The power of marriage is so great that those who were born before
marriage are deemed to be legitimate after it.’120

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Since annulment of a marriage was, technically, not a divorce but

a declaration that the marriage had been no marriage at all, the question
naturally arose whether the children of such a union were legitimate or
not. In English Common Law, the rule was that, if a marriage was
dissolved because of consanguinity (being too closely related), the wife
could have no dower but the children could inherit.121 Important ques-
tions of royal succession might depend on the issue. When the marriage
of King Amalric of Jerusalem and Agnes of Edessa was annulled in 1163
on the grounds of consanguinity, it was specifically stated that ‘those who
had been born to the two of them should be regarded as legitimate and
should obtain the full right of succession to their father’s possessions’.122
The throne of Jerusalem did indeed descend through their children.
Similarly, after the marriage of James I of Aragon and Eleanor of Castile
was nullified on the grounds of consanguinity, a special effort was made
to ensure the succession of their son Alfonso. In 1235, Pope Gregory IX
wrote to Alfonso, legitimizing him, ‘so that no one can raise an objection
to you on the grounds of your birth’.123
A separate issue from the legitimacy of children born from consan-
guineous marriages was the legitimization of children who were
admitted to be bastards. From the late 1330s, Robert Stewart, recog-
nized as heir to the Scottish throne, had many children by Elizabeth
Mure, daughter of a Scottish knight, but was not married to her. This
situation was regularized by a papal letter of 22 November 1347
responding to Robert and Elizabeth’s petition, which had the powerful
backing of both the king of Scots and the king of France. In it, Pope
Clement VI authorized the bishop of Glasgow to grant a dispensation
to allow them to marry, which was necessary both because Robert had
also slept with one of Elizabeth’s relatives, creating an impediment to
their marriage, and because they themselves were related. ‘They had
lived together for a long time, producing a multitude of offspring of
each sex’, but they had at first been ignorant of the relationships that
constituted the impediments. Now, because these offspring ‘are hoped
to be a great future support’ to the king and kingdom of the Scots, the
bishop should allow the public marriage of Robert and Elizabeth and
declare their children, past and future, legitimate. They did marry in
1349. Robert succeeded as king of Scots in 1371, the first Stewart king,

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and his oldest son by Elizabeth, who was born illegitimate but legiti-
mized by the papal action of 1347, followed him on the throne.124 This
long-lasting royal dynasty thus needed an act of legitimization at its
outset.
Canon law and secular law sometimes disagreed on their definitions of
illegitimacy. For example, the twelfth-century treatise on English law that
goes under the name of Glanvill noted explicitly that a child born before
his parents’ marriage was a bastard according to the law and custom of the
kingdom of England but not by canon or Roman Law and that, according
to English law, a bastard cannot be an heir.125 A famous clash between the
two views took place at a royal council in Merton in 1236:

All the bishops asked the magnates to agree that those born before
marriage should be legitimate, just like those born after marriage, as far
as the right of hereditary succession is concerned, for the Church regards
such children as legitimate; and all the earls and barons answered with one
voice that they did not want to change the laws of England.126

Popes might be willing to be flexible in applying the strict letter of the law
in matters of legitimacy if political circumstances warranted it. During his
long tussle with Philip Augustus of France over the king’s repudiation of
Ingeborg of Denmark (see above, pp. 46–8), Innocent III was prepared
to take into account the fact that Philip had only one legitimate son and
that this made the dynasty vulnerable. In 1201 he therefore responded
favourably to Philip’s request that he legitimize his children by Agnes of
Meran:

Since Philip, king of the French, has no children other than his first-born
son, born of his first wife, except for the boy and girl that the noblewoman,
daughter of the duke of Meran, recently deceased, bore him, he, carefully
considering posterity, has humbly asked us that we should legitimize them
as a favour of the apostolic see.

Innocent, weighing up, among other things, ‘what is useful and necessary
for the kingdom of France’, granted his request.127
But Innocent was not always accommodating, as his dealings with
Alfonso IX of Leon show (see also above, p. 46). Alfonso had married
his first cousin, a Portuguese princess, in a remarkable breach of the

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canon law of marriage, and, after having had children with her, had
finally repudiated her, and then, in the year before Innocent became
pope, had undertaken an almost equally ‘incestuous’ marriage with
Berenguela of Castile, the daughter of a first cousin. Innocent III’s letters
on the subject are inflamed. He demanded that the couple separate and
decreed that ‘if any offspring has been or should be produced from
such an incestuous and damnable union, they should be regarded as
completely bastard and illegitimate, with no claim to succeed to paternal
property according to the statutes of the law’.128 Some years after this
letter, the pope’s anger is evident in a letter he sent to Berenguela’s
father, the king of Castile, who had arranged for his grandson, the child
of the union of Berenguela and Alfonso IX, to be recognized as heir to
the throne of Leon:

although we have declared that offspring produced from an incestuous

union of this kind are bastards and at no time whatsoever should succeed
to paternal property according to the rulings of the law, you, to our great
amazement, cunningly arranged that almost the whole kingdom of Leon
should swear an oath to him.129

Although Berenguela and Alfonso did separate, Innocent’s indignation

about the prospect that their offspring might succeed to their inheri-
tance had no effect. Their son Ferdinand became king of both Leon and
Castile, reuniting the two kingdoms permanently and becoming one of
the most successful Christian rulers in the attempt to conquer territory in
Muslim Spain, adding Cordoba and Seville to his kingdom.
Sometimes illegitimate royal children were legitimized with the expli-
cit reservation that this did not give them any claim to succeed to the
throne. When the pope legitimized the illegitimate children of Premysl
Otakar II of Bohemia in 1260, he explicitly stated this.130 A similar step
was attempted in the case of the Beauforts, the illegitimate, but legiti-
mized, children of John of Gaunt, son of Edward III of England, and his
mistress Katherine Swynford, who won the backing of both pope and
king to be declared legitimate. Katherine was the daughter of one of the
knights of Hainault who had come to England with Philippa of Hainault,
queen of Edward III. Katherine had married an English knight, which is
how she acquired her surname, but had also been recognised as Gaunt’s

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mistress. In the 1370s she bore him four children. In February 1396, after
the death of Gaunt’s second wife, he married Katherine. The high-born
ladies of the royal dynasty were not amused at this. ‘We will not go
anywhere she is’, they said. ‘It would be a disgrace if this duchess, who
is low born and was his mistress for a long time when he was married,
should have precedence over us. Our hearts would break with grief, and
with good reason.’131 But the ladies were ignored.
It is probable that Gaunt married Katherine in preparation for the
next step, because in September 1396 he obtained papal dispensation for
the marriage, with explicit legitimation of their children, and in the
Parliament of January to February 1397 the chancellor reported that
the pope had legitimized Gaunt’s children by her and that the king had
done the same. The royal charter was read out and at the same time the
oldest of the children, called John like his father, was created earl of
Somerset.132 The children of Gaunt and Katherine were given the aristo-
cratic-sounding surname Beaufort, and they and their descendants were
to be one of the most important political families in England for the next
century. In 1407, ten years after their legitimation, John, earl of
Somerset, sought a confirmation of the act, and this was issued but with
an extra clause excluding the Beauforts from any claim to the throne,
which was perhaps inserted by a political rival.133 The Beauforts were
supporters of the Lancastrian kings and suffered heavily in the Wars of
the Roses between Lancaster and York, but their line did eventually sit on
the throne, since Margaret Beaufort, great-granddaughter of Katherine
Swynford, was the mother of the first of the Tudors, Henry VII.
The purpose of legitimation was to clear the way for succession.
Conversely, an attempt to demonstrate illegitimacy was intended to bar
the way. This could be an important political weapon. When Richard III
of England decided to take the throne from his nephews, he thought it
necessary to undertake an elaborate process to declare them illegitimate.
In English Common Law, although the children of a marriage annulled
on the grounds of consanguinity were deemed legitimate, those of
a marriage annulled on the grounds of pre-contract, that is, a previous
engagement to marry, were not. This is why Richard III was so keen to
demonstrate pre-contract by his brother Edward IV, this delegitimizing
Edward’s sons, the unfortunate Princes in the Tower. Even if no one

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believed his arguments, he felt it was a case he had to make: if the princes
were not of legitimate birth, they could not be kings.134
Thirteenth-century Norway provides a good example of a society mak-
ing a transition from one way of thinking about illegitimacy to another.
In 1218, the mother of King Haakon Haakonsson, who had just begun his
reign, had to prove his paternity through the ordeal of the red-hot
iron.135 She asserted that his father was King Haakon Sverresson, who
had died fourteen years earlier. She carried the red-hot iron and, when
her hand was inspected three days later, it was declared to be healing
cleanly, thus proving her claim. In 1246 Haakon thought it worth obtain-
ing a papal dispensation for his illegitimate birth, even though by then he
had been on the throne for almost thirty years. Innocent IV acknowl-
edged that Haakon’s father and mother had both been single when he
was born, which was the simplest case in canon law, and granted the
dispensation, so that ‘notwithstanding this defect, you may be admitted
to the honour of the royal throne . . . and also your legitimate heirs may
succeed you in lordship and title’.136 This dispensation was granted a few
days after Innocent had allowed Haakon to be crowned, as the first
Norwegian king to enjoy a coronation, and must be linked to that.137
As a crowned Christian king, both he and the pope, it seems, thought it
right that he should be legitimate, while the mention of his heirs was
intended to secure the succession. Haakon’s son, Magnus (1263–80),
specified in his law code that the right of succession belonged to ‘the
oldest legitimate son of the Norwegian king’.138 Prior to this time, that
had been an exceptionally rare qualification for a Norwegian king.139
When Haakon’s mother bore the red-hot iron, she was undergoing this
ancient and direful form of proof in order to verify her claim that
Haakon was a king’s son, for, as in Merovingian Gaul, being the son of
a king was grounds enough to raise a claim to kingship. Legitimacy was
not an issue. When, a generation later, Haakon decided it was useful to
do so, his legitimacy could be obtained through a more bureaucratic and
less painful process. A papal ruling could legitimize him, in this new
world where educated and legally trained clergy had outlawed trial by
ordeal.

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 CHAPTER 6

Family Dynamics

The Shape of the Dynasty

F amilies are always changing. as they do so, the indi-

vidual members assume new roles and identities, sometimes hap-
pily, sometimes less so. Children become parents, parents become
grandparents, wives become widows. And these identities and roles are
never singular and simple. Younger sons are also younger brothers and
may well become uncles. Your sister is your child’s aunt. And a sudden
death might mean new roles had to be assigned. The future Louis VII was
ten or eleven when his older brother Philip died in an accident. Until
then, for fifteen years, Philip had been the presumed heir, and Louis,
who had not been brought up expecting to inherit, now had to take his
place. As a result of these instabilities, family dynamics are complicated
and ever-changing. This is as true for ruling dynasties as for other
families, and hence shaped the high politics of the dynastic world.
Dynasties were never biologically stable. The dynasty that ruled the
Mark of Brandenburg from the time of Albert the Bear in the twelfth
century provides a good example of the way a family could change shape
dramatically in a short time. Albert’s great-grandsons founded two dis-
tinct lines, each with numerous sons and grandsons. In the year 1295
there were at least fifteen male members of this family alive. Yet in 1320,
a bare generation later, the house became extinct in the male line. This
dynasty had blossomed and then suddenly withered. Childless marriages
and early deaths removed it from history. Processes like these were visible
to contemporaries and are sometimes mentioned explicitly.1

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For example, a speech attributed to Bretislav I of Bohemia, who died

in 1055, has him contemplating the changing biological fortunes of his
dynasty, the Premyslids:

Since my destiny is calling me and black death is now flying before my eyes,
I wish to declare to you and commend to your good faith the one who should
govern the state after me. You know that our ruling line, partly through
sterility, partly through early deaths, was reduced to me alone. But now, as
you see, five sons have been granted to me by God. It does not seem to me
expedient to divide the realm of Bohemia among them, because every realm
divided against itself will be ruined. Proven examples testify to us that from
the origin of the world and from the beginning of the Roman empire and up
to these present times, friendship between brothers has been rare. For if you
observe what two brothers did – Cain and Abel, Romulus and Remus, and my
forebears, Boleslav and St Wenceslas – what will five do?2

Bretislav was mulling over two kinds of extremes, each of which

presented problems for dynasties: too few children or too many.
His solution to the problem of having too many sons was to recommend
the principle of seniority. ‘Seniority’ describes a rule of succession whereby
the position of ruler is transmitted not from father to son but to the next
oldest member of the dynasty. Bretislav I on his death bed in 1055 urged his
family to follow the principle, ‘that among my sons and grandsons the oldest
by birth should always possess the highest authority and the ruling throne’.3
The subsequent transmission of ducal authority in Bohemia does indeed
show the influence of this principle, even if it was not respected invariably,
down to the time of the establishment of the hereditary kingship under
Premysl Otakar I. It could even be explicitly invoked during succession
disputes, as in 1101, when the Premyslid Udalric objected to the accession
of his younger cousin Borivoj, as this was not ‘according to the proper
custom of the fatherland’.4 Udalric based his own power in Moravia,
a dependency of Bohemia, and this also illustrates the way that subordinate
lordships there (for Moravia usually contained two or three duchies) con-
tinued to provide a basis for the claims of the junior branches of the dynasty
to the title of duke of Bohemia. These claims could be nurtured over many
years. An extreme case is Conrad-Otto of Znojmo, who ruled as duke of
Bohemia from 1189 to 1191. Neither his father nor his grandfather had held

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that title, which had last been held in this line by Conrad-Otto’s great-
grandfather, who had died a century earlier in 1092.
Neither succession by seniority nor the existence of subordinate lord-
ships was unique to the Premyslid lands. Both in Russia and in Poland the
principle of seniority governed princely succession for considerable periods
of the Middle Ages. The Russian Primary Chronicle includes, under the year
1054, a deathbed speech by Prince Yaroslav very similar in its nature to that
attributed to Bretislav I, while in Poland it was Boleslaw III (d. 1138) who was
credited with instituting the system.5 Succession to Irish kingships was also
marked by a preference for the oldest member of the ruling dynasty to
succeed and a pattern of alternation between different branches.
The political history of the Premyslid dynasty between 1050 and 1200
was in fact determined less by the seniority system or the co-existence of
superior and inferior dukes than by the biological accident of
a superabundance of male members. As mentioned, Bretislav I left five
active adult sons, and four of these ruled as dukes of Bohemia or Moravia,
the other becoming bishop of Prague, and three of these brothers pro-
duced lines of descendants who continued to the end of the twelfth
century or beyond. Cosmas of Prague, the most important Bohemian
chronicler of the time, applauded this ‘noble set of brothers’,6 but such
a multiplication of males was a source of political instability. This was noted
at the time. One of the Premyslid castellans remarked on the number of
claimants to ducal power in 1109: ‘Woe to you, Bohemia, you are not large
enough to be subject to many lords in common. Unless I am mistaken,
there are now twenty lordlings (dominelli) born of the ruling line and of the
male sex.’7 He was right. The third, fourth and fifth generation of
Premyslids from Bretislav I each counted ten or more male members,
and hence an estimate of twenty or so alive at any time is quite accurate.
The establishment of the hereditary kingship in Bohemia at the turn
of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries coincided with a change in the
biological fortunes of the dynasty. At the time of the death of Premysl
Otakar I in 1230, the only male Premyslids surviving were his son
Wenceslas and a few of the ‘Dipoltici’, exiled descendants of Premysl
Otakar’s uncle Dipolt. Although long reigns by powerful monarchs char-
acterized the thirteenth century (Premysl Otakar I, Wenceslas I, Premysl
Otakar II), a single murder in 1306 brought this ancient native dynasty to

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an abrupt end when Wenceslas III, the last male Premyslid, was stabbed
by an unknown assailant while he relaxed in the summer heat. The
continuous succession crisis of too many sons that had troubled the
thoughts of Bretislav I was now overshadowed by the stark and evident
succession crisis of there being no sons: ‘Thus the powerful dynasty of
kings was conquered by the bite of death, leaving no male stock.’8
Precisely the same thinning process had taken place in Scotland,
where the rivalry between different segments of the old ruling dynasty
characteristic of the tenth and eleventh centuries was replaced by undis-
puted male primogeniture in one line by the thirteenth century. The
process came to a bloody conclusion in 1230, when a final rising of the
MacWilliam family, descendants of King Duncan II (d. 1094), was sup-
pressed, one of the girls of the family having her brains dashed out on the
market cross at Forfar.9 This pruning of the dynasty eventually produced
a reasonably clear line of succession, with long reigns by powerful mon-
archs – William the Lion, his son, Alexander II, and Alexander’s son,
Alexander III, ruled for a total of 121 years. Yet this narrowing of the
dynasty carried with it risks, and a single accident in 1286 ended the male
line. The Scottish ancestral dynasty had resolved the problems of intra-
familial conflict only at the price of extreme genetic vulnerability, just as
the Premyslids of Bohemia had done. An accident in 1286 and a murder
in 1306 snapped the thin thread on which the continuity of the dynasty
hung.
In the last centuries of the Middle Ages, father–son succession was
taken as the norm in most European kingdoms, and people might recall
earlier succession practices with curiosity. In the later twelfth century,
Sven Aggesen, writing his Brief History of the Kings of Denmark and looking
back on the early history of Denmark, tells of the legendary kings
descended from Skiold (‘Shield’), the first man to rule the Danes. The
kingship passed from father to son among his descendants until the time
of Ingeld. ‘After his time’, writes Sven, ‘for a period of many centuries no
son succeeded his father in the kingdom.’ During that time, he says, the
kingship passed to the previous king’s nepotes, which can mean either
nephews or grandsons. But these heirs, whether nephews or grandsons,
were all, Sven stresses ‘descended from the royal stock on one side’.10 So
he is picturing a loose royal lineage of a kind familiar from other parts of

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the medieval world, such as Ireland. Kingships like those in Scandinavia

or Scotland moved from the broader to a narrower concept of the royal
kindred.

Brothers
Legend tells of many pairs of brothers, some of them mythic founders or
ancestors: Romulus and Remus, Hengest and Horsa. As is clear even from
these two examples, brothers might compete or they might collaborate.
Not all alliterated. In historical time, the same is true.11 And there were
often many more than two brothers. Medieval families could be large.
A healthy, sexually active woman can become pregnant every couple of
years, and upper-class women of the Middle Ages married young and did
not have their fertility reduced, as the lower classes did, by malnutrition
or by breast-feeding, since aristocrats had wet-nurses to suckle their
babies. Long marriages and fertile wives could produce large numbers
of children. The Holy Roman Emperor Frederick Barbarossa and
his second wife Beatrice of Burgundy had ten or eleven children in the
1160s and 1170s; the marriage of St Louis and Margaret of Provence also
produced eleven children in the 1240s and 1250s; Eleanor of Castile,
queen of Edward I of England, had at least fourteen children between
1264 and her death in 1290; Albert I of Habsburg and Elizabeth of the
Tyrol had twelve children over a quarter-century (c. 1280–1305); Isabella
of Bavaria, queen of France, wife of Charles VI, bore twelve children in
twenty-two years (1386–1407); one of them, Charles VII, went on to have
fourteen children with Mary of Anjou over a similar period (1423–46).
These numerous children were, of course, not immune from the high
child mortality of the time, so the number reaching adulthood or surviv-
ing their parents was much smaller. Only five of the fourteen children of
Charles VII survived him. But if custom allowed serial monogamy or
polygamy and gave concubines a recognized status, as in native Ireland,
then the number of acknowledged sons could be even higher.
Toirdelbach Ua Conchobair (Turlough O’Connor), king of Connacht
(1106–56), had twenty-two sons by at least six partners.12 In the harem
systems of such societies as imperial China or Ottoman Turkey the
numbers were comparable or higher. The emperors of the Tang dynasty

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(618–907) had an average of 24.4 children, while the Ottoman sultan

Murad III had, at his death in 1595, forty-nine living children.13

Fratricidal Impulses
Chapter 47 of Thackeray’s Vanity Fair not only provides a telling quota-
tion about the relationship of fathers and oldest sons (see above, p. 109)
but also has something to say about relations between older and younger
brothers:

Then again . . . you ought to know that every elder brother looks upon the
cadets of the house as his natural enemies, who deprive him of so much
ready money which ought to be his by right. I have often heard George
MacTurk . . . say that if he had his will when he came to the title, he would
do what the sultans do, and clear the estate by chopping off all his younger
brothers’ heads at once . . . they are all Turks in their hearts.

If kings were usually distressed at the lack of a son, they might also have
reasonable apprehensions about having too many sons, with the danger
of fraternal discord that this brought.
Relations between royal brothers could range from the collaborative
to the lethal. It was often the death of the father that was the starting gun
opening the contest. As one Spanish chronicler put it, ‘royal funerals
have been moistened with the blood of brothers’.14 Another remarked
upon the fratricidal strife of their rulers:

Such was the discord of the brothers in their desire to rule . . . If you read
carefully through the deeds of kings, you will find that there is scarcely ever
a lasting peace when royal power is shared. Moreover, the Spanish kings
are said to have been of such ferocity that when some prince of their line
came of age and took up arms for the first time, he was ready to strive for
his rights against his brothers, or his parents if they were alive, in order to
obtain royal power for himself alone.15

Sometimes conflict between brothers was to the death. The Merovingian

dynasty was in almost constant family conflict and this often pitted
brother against brother. In 612 Theuderic II defeated his half-brother
Theudebert II in a series of bloody battles and ordered that his little son

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should have his brains dashed out on a rock. Theuderic either believed or
pretended to believe that Theudebert’s paternity was in doubt, and
hence he was no brother to him, and not a grandson of his grandmother,
the fearsome Brunhild, either. Brunhild was certainly not an ideal grand-
mother, if that was what she was, since, after the defeated and humiliated
Theudebert was placed in her custody, she first had him forcibly
ordained a cleric and soon thereafter killed.16 Forcible tonsuring, mak-
ing defeated dynastic rivals a cleric or monk, was a not infrequent way of
dealing with them, even if they were left to fight another day, but
Theudebert was not given that chance.
A dramatic instance of fratricide occurred in Sweden in the early
fourteenth century. The king, Birger Magnusson, had two ambitious
younger brothers, Erik and Valdemar, who attempted to create their
own independent or semi-independent principalities. In 1306 the king
was at his manor house at Håtuna, south of Uppsala, when the brothers
took him by surprise and imprisoned him. He was eventually released but
had to concede to his brothers the whole western half of Sweden and
Finland, which was part of the Swedish realm in this period. Birger bided
his time. In December 1317 he invited Erik and Valdemar to a feast at the
royal castle of Nykoping. Erik was doubtful but Valdemar had already
visited the king and thought ‘he has utterly changed his mind and
only wishes us well’. The two royal brothers went to Nykoping.
Accommodation in the castle was limited, so the king suggested their
followers lodge in the town. The royal brothers sat down to a feast with
plenty of mead and wine. Conversation flowed. ‘It is said that one never
saw the queen so happy as then.’ In the small hours, Erik and Valdemar
went to their sleeping quarters, but, as they slept, the door burst open
and twenty armed men entered and seized them. King Birger soon
followed. Referring to the time when they had captured him eleven
years earlier, he asked, ‘Do you recall anything of the Håtuna game?
I remember it very well.’
The brothers were bound and led off, to be shackled in the dungeon.
At dawn a large royal force went into the town and seized all their
followers. One knight, attempting resistance, was shot through the
heart with a crossbow bolt. Erik and Valdemar were kept in stocks and
neck irons. However, as the news spread, opposition to King Birger was

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aroused, and he was unable even to enter Stockholm because of the

townsmen’s resistance. At this point he went back to Nykoping, locked
up the tower in which his brothers were imprisoned, threw the key into
a nearby river and left. Erik survived for nine days without food and drink
before dying of starvation, Valdemar for eleven days.17 The opposition to
Birger was so strong that eventually he and his queen had to leave Sweden
and take refuge in Denmark, the queen’s home country, while the
supporters of his murdered brothers executed his son and, in 1319,
elected Erik’s son, Magnus, king. The fratricide has thus led to the
extinction of the perpetrator’s line and the victory of the victim’s.
Killing your brothers was only one tactic. It was possible to leave them
alive but to make them ineligible for rule by blinding them. This was
a common way of dealing with deposed emperors in Byzantium, although
the emperor Isaac II Angelus, who was deposed and blinded by his
brother Alexius III in 1195, remarkably made a brief comeback, ruling
again, jointly with his son, in 1203–4 (see pp. 250–1 for blinding).
Another, perhaps more humane, method was to lock defeated brothers
up for life. After Alfonso VI of Leon-Castile had, in all probability,
arranged the murder of one of his brothers, Sancho, he was more
restrained with the other, García, simply dispossessing him in 1073 and
keeping him in captivity for the remaining seventeen years of his life.
Although García was held in chains, he was otherwise treated well and
even regarded by Alfonso as a possible successor, should the king have no
other heir.18 Another trio of brothers who sparred in the late eleventh
century were the sons of William the Conqueror, and the least successful
of them, Robert, endured an even longer captivity than poor García.
After being captured in battle in 1106 by the troops of his younger
brother, Henry I of England, Robert was a prisoner for the next twenty-
eight years, until his death. He was held in various castles in England and
Wales, dying in Cardiff castle in 1134 aged over eighty and being given an
honourable burial before the main altar in Gloucester Abbey.19 His
captor, King Henry, even handed over a royal manor to the abbey ‘to
provide a light to burn before the main altar perpetually for the soul of
Robert his brother’.20 In a similar way, Alfonso’s brother García had been
buried in the royal mausoleum at Leon in the presence of his two sisters,
the funeral being conducted by a large number of clergy, including the

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archbishop of Toledo and a future pope.21 So, as long as they were kept
tightly under lock and key for the whole of their lives, defeated brothers
need not be killed, mutilated or treated dishonourably. Robert indeed
was said ‘to have suffered no evil except solitude, if you can call it solitude
when there were endless games and banquets’.22
A particular problem in relations between brothers was presented by
the ‘late lamb’, a child born many years after its siblings. Because men
have the potential to father children throughout their lives, their oldest
sons could never feel quite secure that rivals might not arise in the form
of unwelcome baby half-brothers. The unexpected newcomer might well
upset property arrangements that had already been made and intrude
into a pattern of relationships forged long before. A conspicuous exam-
ple is Charles the Bald, son of the Carolingian emperor Louis the Pious,
born in 823, when the youngest of Louis’ other sons, Charles’ half-
brothers, was already in his late teens. Six years before the young
Charles arrived, his father had made an elaborate plan for the three
sons he had at that time: Lothar the oldest was crowned co-emperor,
while his younger brothers were given sub-kingdoms under him.23 The
question now arose of how to fit Charles into the plans for the succession.
The emperor himself supposedly ‘did not know what to do for him’.24
Lothar’s two younger brothers had been ‘indignant’ at the earlier
settlement,25 but all three of them had the chance to be ‘indignant’
again when their father gave the six-year-old Charles a huge landed
endowment in the heart of the empire.26 This was the beginning of
a crisis that would end with the permanent destruction of the
Carolingian empire.
The motives for Louis’ second marriage are unclear, since he already
had three sons by his first wife. This first wife died in October 818, and
within a few months a second bride for Louis was being sought. The
contemporary annals report that, ‘after considering many daughters of
his nobles, the emperor took as wife the daughter of count Welf, Judith
by name’.27 A later source, written shortly after Louis’ death, expands on
this:

At this time, at the pressing advice of his men, he was contemplating

entering the bond of marriage, for it was feared by many that he might

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wish to put down the reins of government. But he was compelled and,
finally satisfying their wishes and, after considering the daughters of his
chief men, who were brought from far and wide, he was joined in
matrimony to Judith, daughter of the most noble count Welf.28

One wonders why his nobles wanted him to remarry, and whether it was
a good idea to have an extra son, half-brother to the other three. The
avowed purpose, to keep him from abdicating, seems hard to
understand.29 The consequences, decades of struggle between the broth-
ers, are, however, clear.
In the following century, it was rumoured that Liudolf, son of the
German King Otto I by his first wife, was to be disinherited when Otto had
a son by his second wife:

After a son was born to the king from his more recent wife, it was said that
the king promised to that child his kingdom, which he had earlier assigned
to Liudolf, and had had his chief men swear fealty to him.30

Liudolf was twenty-three when this younger brother arrived. Whether the
rumour of disinheritance was true or not, Liudolf was sufficiently dis-
turbed to rebel against his father, and throughout 953 and 954 led
a widely based and serious revolt. Rebellious sons could often rally sup-
port from restless aristocrats of their own age, and Liudolf’s followers
included Duke Conrad of Lotharingia, ‘a spirited and bold young
man’.31 The rebels were eventually forced to submit and Liudolf died
three years later, in 957. The nineteenth-century authors of the standard
factual survey of Otto’s reign comment loftily, ‘perhaps for him and for
the Empire it was fortunate that he was not allotted a longer time of
action’.32 It was good for the Empire, presumably, because the unity of
the imperial family was now unimpaired, and good for Liudolf because
he did not have to recognize the authority of his younger half-brother!
Otto I was indeed succeeded by a son born of his second marriage.
The case of John ‘Lackland’ did not involve a child of a second
marriage but still upset existing territorial arrangements and had big
political consequences. John, the youngest son of Henry II of England,
was born in 1167, nine years after the youngest of his older brothers, so
they were all knights and leaders of men before he had even entered his

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teens. Moreover, they had all been promised lands and lordships when
John was still a baby: Henry the eldest was to have England, Normandy
and Anjou, Richard, the next son, Aquitaine, and Geoffrey Brittany.33
This left nothing for John. Hence his nickname, ‘Lackland’ (Sine Terra,
Sanz Terre), which is attested as early as 1185, the year when John sailed to
Ireland to visit the new lordship he had been granted there. By that time
the nickname was already recognized as out of date: ‘John, youngest son
of the king of the English, whom they call “Lackland”, although he has
many and wide possessions and many counties, travelled to Ireland.’34
The chronicler William of Newburgh, writing in the 1190s, even says that
King Henry himself ‘gave his fourth and youngest son John, the nick-
name “Lackland”’.35 This notion, improbable though it may sound, was
also credited by the French writer William the Breton, who wrote a poem
in praise of John’s enemy Philip Augustus. Addressing John in the poem,
William writes, ‘Before a trick of fate made you a monarch, you had
received the name “Lackland” from your father’s mouth.’36
It was King Henry’s attempt to find a grand landed endowment for
this youngest, and favourite, son that triggered one of the great crises of
his reign, the rebellion of 1173–4. Marriage to a female heir was
a familiar and relatively cheap way of providing for a younger son, and
Henry thought he had found one in the person of the daughter of
Humbert, count of Maurienne, who possessed numerous lordships on
both sides of the Alps, which was the core of the later County of Savoy.
Early in 1173 an agreement was drawn up between the king and the
count, arranging the marriage of John and the count’s daughter Alice,
and specifying that John would inherit all the count’s lands in the event
of his not having a son. Even if Count Humbert did have a son, however,
John would still inherit a very large portion of his lands. At some point in
the discussions, Humbert asked King Henry what he was going to give
John, and Henry specified three castles in Anjou, disregarding the fact
that Anjou had already been promised to his oldest son, Henry the Young
King. Henry the father and Henry the son quarrelled and soon Henry the
son sought out the king of France and began the great rebellion against
his father.37 This was the first episode in the long story of violent conflict
within the family of Henry II, which only ended thirty years later with
John’s murder of his nephew and his own humiliating defeat and

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dispossession of his French lands. In such cases as these, Charles the Bald,
Liudolf’s new brother and John Lackland, the birth of a brother or half-
brother some years after his older brothers (seventeen, twenty-three and
nine years respectively) caused family strife, and family strife in ruling
dynasties means political conflict and war.

Provision for Younger Brothers

In order to avoid fraternal strife, some kind of provision had to be made
for the sons who did not succeed to the throne. One way of attempting to
deal with their demands and needs, if the circumstances were right, was
to assign to them any lands acquired by conquest or marriage, reserving
the ancestral, inherited lands for the firstborn. This is what happened on
the death of William the Conqueror in 1087, when his eldest son Robert
inherited the duchy of Normandy and his second son became ruler of
William’s most spectacular acquisition, the kingdom of England.
Likewise, after the death of James I of Aragon in 1276, the Balearic
Islands, which James had conquered, were formed into a new realm,
the kingdom of Majorca, for his younger son James, while Aragon and
the other mainland territories, which also included some conquests, went
to his eldest surviving son, Peter. In neither case were the sons happy with
these arrangements, but they demonstrate one way the claims of older
and younger brothers might be addressed.
The younger sons of the English royal family were involved in several
schemes intended to set them up in kingdoms of their own. After the
failure of the attempt to give John ‘Lackland’ the lordship of Maurienne,
a higher ambition arose. He was meant to be king of Ireland and was sent
a peacock crown, although he had to settle for ‘lord of Ireland’ instead,
a title the kings of England bore down to the time of the Tudors, when it
was upgraded to ‘king of Ireland’. But if the original plan had worked,
and if John’s older brother, Richard the Lionheart, had not been
killed, childless, at the age of forty-one, the result would have been
a Plantagenet kingdom of Ireland as a neighbour to a Plantagenet king-
dom of England. Edmund, younger son of Henry III, was proposed as
king of Sicily, although the only result of this scheme was an explosion of
resentment among the English baronage which would contribute to the

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civil war of 1264–5. John of Gaunt, son of Edward III, claimed and fought
for the Crown of Castile. The only English prince actually to establish
himself on a distant throne, however, was Richard of Cornwall, the
younger brother of Henry III, who became ‘king of the Romans’, which
meant Holy Roman Emperor elect, and was crowned in Charlemagne’s
old capital of Aachen.
A different approach to balancing the claims of the oldest and the
younger brothers is found in the arrangements of 817, mentioned earlier
(p. 195), in which the emperor Louis the Pious envisaged that he would
be succeeded as emperor by his oldest son, Lothar, but that the two
younger sons, Pippin and Louis junior, would be kings under their
brother, based in sub-kingdoms in Aquitaine and Bavaria respectively.
The brothers would meet together once a year to discuss ‘matters relating
to common utility and perpetual peace’. The older brother would give
the younger brothers aid in war against foreign peoples, but they would
make war and peace only with his advice and would keep him informed at
all times of the arrival of foreign envoys and their dealings. They would
choose a wife only with his consent.38
This concept of a ‘family firm’, of royal brothers guided by the oldest
member, failed spectacularly in the Carolingian case, but something like
it can be found in Capetian France under Louis IX (St Louis). Louis was
the oldest of a number of brothers, all of whom fought for him, sup-
ported him and never posed a threat to his rule or his line. There are
structural features that might have shaped such sibling relations. Clearly
the custom of apanages, large territorial endowments for younger broth-
ers, as was the case with Louis’ brothers, gave them power, status and
a field for action that might satisfy them. When Louis’ father, Louis VIII,
made his will, establishing these huge lordships for his younger sons, he
explained that he did this ‘so that no discord could arise among them’.39
Apanages were a natural device for a dynasty seeking to balance the
claims of younger sons of royal or princely blood with the desirability of
unified and enduring political units.
But, in the long run, apanages could lead to decentralization or even
disintegration of the realm unless they were reincorporated, and this would
only happen if the junior branch died out. The royal house of Bourbon,
for example, had its origin in the endowment of Robert, a younger son of

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St Louis, with the county of Clermont-en-Beauvaisis. Robert married the

heir to the lordship of Bourbon, and their son, Louis, was created first duke
of Bourbon in 1327, and from him descended two branches in the male line
down to the sixteenth century, when the head of the younger branch,
Henry, became Henry IV of France. It thus took four centuries for the
cadet line’s lordships to be reintegrated with the royal domain.
It might also require vigorous action to reincorporate apanages.
When Alphonse of Poitiers, younger brother of St Louis, died in
1271, the year after the king, leaving no children, the new king, Philip
III, presumed that Alphonse’s great apanage would revert to the Crown.
He faced a challenge, however, from Alphonse’s brother, Charles of
Anjou, who claimed that as a brother of Alphonse, he was a nearer heir
than the king, who was only Alphonse’s nephew. The case took thirteen
years to resolve. King Philip’s lawyers claimed that it was ‘the custom of
France’ that, ‘if the king gives to anyone a county, barony, castle or fief,
and that person dies leaving no legitimate children, the gift reverts to the
king who gave it, or to his heir’. Charles’ lawyers fought back with
a motley assortment of arguments, backed by a fusillade of Roman Law
citations: this so-called ‘custom’ could not be demonstrated; if it did exist
it did not apply to this case; the transfer of land from a father to a son,
as in the endowment of Alphonse, was not technically a ‘gift’ but
a ‘provision’; there was no tacit condition involved in the endowment;
it would be ‘hard and absurd’ to deny to kings’ sons the right to collateral
inheritance enjoyed by all the barons of the kingdom. In 1284 the final
ruling, by the Parlement of Paris, the supreme royal court, dismissed
Charles’ plea, a judgment that has been called ‘a milestone in the devel-
opment of the reversion clause’, since henceforth it was presumed that
apanages would revert to the Crown on the failure of direct heirs.40

Dividing the Kingdom

Claims of younger brothers could also be settled by a division of their
father’s realm. In the early Middle Ages, it was not uncommon for
a kingdom to be divided on the death of a king. Each of his sons would
take a share. This was standard practice in the early generations of the
Merovingian dynasty, which ruled the kingdom of the Franks until 751,

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and could be found at times in Anglo-Saxon England and elsewhere. In

511 the four sons of the Frankish king Clovis split up his realm between
them and fifty years later in 561 Clovis’ grandsons again divided the
kingdom into four.41 But there was no fixed system: for much of the
sixth and seventh centuries the Frankish kingdom was divided not into
four but into two or three component parts. Only after 679 was there
virtually always just one Merovingian king at a time. It is not clear whether
the divisions of the earlier generations represented some kind of
accepted norm or custom, or whether they were simply the outcome of
a power struggle. The Carolingians, who displaced the Merovingians in
751, reverted to the custom their predecessors had practised in earlier
times, with significant divisions or subdivisions of the kingdom in 768,
843, 855, 870, 876, 879 and 888, not to mention numerous other territor-
ial readjustments or planned divisions that did not in fact come to pass.
Some of these partitions only lasted a short while, but others shaped
European history to the present: it was from these ninth-century territor-
ial arrangements that France and Germany emerged as separate
countries.
But there was nothing predestined about this. Other possibilities were
numerous. For instance, in 865 Louis the German, who ruled the king-
dom of the East Franks, arranged a division of his kingdom between his
three sons, to take full effect after his death. Roughly speaking, the oldest
son received Bavaria, the second son Franconia and Saxony, the third son
Swabia, each with adjoining lands.42 Accordingly, after their father’s
death ‘the sons of King Louis came together and divided their father’s
kingdom among themselves and confirmed with an oath that they would
keep faith with each other. The text of this oath, written in German, can
be found in many places’.43 If this division had taken effect, there is no
reason why these kingdoms might not have become permanent features
of Europe’s political geography.
The formation of the kingdom of England is often dated to the reign
of Æthelstan, who died in 939, but there was also nothing inevitable
about England either, and there are later occasions when the kingdom
was divided, and these partitions could have endured and become per-
manent, like that between France and Germany. Sometimes these divi-
sions were based upon the earlier independent kingdoms, as in 957,

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when the men of Mercia chose Edgar as king in place of his brother
Eadwig, who continued to rule in Wessex.44 This arrangement lasted
until 959, when Eadwig died, and England was reunited under Edgar.
But it was divided again, albeit for a short time, in the same way in 1016,
when the beleaguered English king Edmund Ironside received Wessex
and the Danish invader Canute took the rest.45 After Canute’s death in
1035, because of the rival claims of his two sons, ‘the kingdom of England
was divided by lot’.46 The nobles north of the Thames chose his son
Harold as regent of all England but the leaders of Wessex opposed this
and arranged for an alternative kind of regency in Wessex on behalf of
Harthacnut, Canute’s son by a different mother. This temporary de facto
division of the kingdom did not last long, however, and in 1037 Harold
was chosen unanimously as king.47
Such divisions of the kingdom, however, became unusual later in the
Middle Ages. The kingdom of the West Franks (France) and the king-
dom of the East Franks (Germany) were not partitioned again after they
finally emerged from the last breakup of the Carolingian empire in 888,
although they fought over their borders, while the last division of the
kingdom of England, as just mentioned, ended in 1037.48 There were
some unsuccessful later medieval attempts to divide kingdoms. During
the disputed succession to the Scottish throne in the late thirteenth
century, the less plausible candidates argued that the kingdom should
be divided, just as great fiefs would be between female heirs, so that they
could have something at least. The king of England, who had been called
in as arbiter, was not sympathetic: ‘the kingdom of Scotland is not
partible’.49 This statement, laconic as it is, unequivocally asserts the
unity of the kingdom.
The fate of Galloway in the thirteenth century shows another path, in
which loss of regality had as a consequence loss of impartibility. This
region, the south-western part of modern Scotland, had its own rulers in
the twelfth century, one of whom, Fergus (d. 1161), was actually styled
‘king of the men of Galloway’, at least on one occasion, and given exactly
the same status as the king of Scots.50 Fergus’ descendants did not bear
this title but continued to rule their semi-independent lordship until the
death of Alan, lord of Galloway, without legitimate male heirs in 1234.
His lands were then divided among his three daughters according to

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feudal custom, although not without resistance. The kingdom of

Galloway thus did not become a permanent feature of the political map
of Europe but was treated as a fief, divisible among female heirs and
subject to the lordship of the kings of Scots, who must have been pleased
to see this great lordship subdivided.
In 1316, soon after the judgment that the kingdom of the Scots was
not partible, there was another attempt to use the law of fiefs to dismem-
ber a kingdom. Upon the death of Louis X of France and of his post-
humous son in that year, Louis’ younger brother Philip proclaimed
himself king, but was faced with the objections of the third brother,
Charles, who wanted his legal portion of the kingdom. He does not
appear to have suggested sharing the Crown, but wanted a division of
the territories that had been acquired by the Crown in the last hundred
years, applying a principle familiar from the private law of the Ile-de-
France, that is, equal division in the case of collateral succession. Some
opportunists also contacted Edward II of England, whose wife Isabella
was a sister of Louis and Charles, suggesting that he put in a claim for her
share (purpartie) of France too.51 Nothing came of all this, but it shows,
like the Scottish case, that the rules about succession to estates could be
brought up by interested parties when what was actually at issue was
succession to a throne.
There were places where partible inheritance of political units could
be found after 1100. The kingship of Norway was shared between two
sons of Harald Gille on his death in 1136, and they acknowledged the
claims of a third son in 1142. The Welsh principalities of the twelfth and
thirteenth centuries, down to the English conquest of 1282, were
frequently shared out between members of the ruling dynasty, although,
as in the case of the Merovingians, it can be debated whether this was
because of a custom or simply the result of power struggles.52 In that
same period, the composite kingdom of Castile-Leon periodically broke
into constituent parts, or new ones, ruled by siblings or cousins. Before
his death in 1065 Ferdinand the Great divided his realm between his
three sons: the eldest, Sancho, received Castile; the second son, Alfonso,
Leon; and the third, García, Galicia. He supposedly did this ‘so that they
might live a quiet life together after his death, if this were possible’, but
since Leon was the traditional heartland of the kingdom, Sancho might

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well have felt ill-used, and indeed Ferdinand is said to have loved Alfonso
more than the others.53 Alfonso reunited Castile and Leon in 1072, but
they split into the two constituent kingdoms again between 1157 and
1230, each ruled by a branch of the royal dynasty. Before that, Portugal
had emerged as an independent kingdom, with an illegitimate daughter
of Alfonso VI as its first ruler. But after 1230 the number of Christian
kingdoms in the Iberian peninsula was stable and none was to be formally
divided again, with the exception of the creation of the kingdom of
Majorca (which lasted from 1276 to 1285 and 1298 to 1343) from
Aragonese territory.
The country in high medieval Latin Christendom most shaped by
partible inheritance was Poland, where after 1138 the ruling dynasty,
the Piasts, split into numerous lines, each at the head of a duchy. There
were as many as ten or twelve of these at any one time and they were
subject to repeated subdivision. Silesia, for example, split into Upper and
Lower Silesia, both of which then spilt into three further subdivisions in
the thirteenth century, and this was not the end of the process. Repeated
division between brothers thus created numerous small states, although
the more successful dukes might obtain more than one duchy. During
this period, although individual Piast rulers of the eleventh century had
borne the title ‘king’, that title lapsed and there were no Polish kings,
only dukes. The revival of the royal title in 1295–6 and 1300–6 and then,
permanently, in 1320 marked the end of the extreme fragmentation of
the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. The situation in Poland in the years
1138–1320 resembled that in its large neighbour, Russia, where the
Rurikid dynasty followed a similar pattern of inheritance and division.
Partibility also came to be a common practice among the great territor-
ial princes of late medieval Germany, such as the rulers of Saxony or
Bavaria, producing those hyphenated entities that give a Ruritanian
flavour to the map of the Holy Roman Empire: Bavaria-Munich, Bavaria-
Straubing, Bavaria-Landshut, Bavaria-Ingolstadt; Braunschweig-Lüneburg,
Braunschweig-Wolfenbüttel, Braunschweig-Grubenhagen, and so forth,
the example best known outside Germany being Saxe-Coburg-Gotha,
a great exporter of monarchs and consorts, including Prince Albert, hus-
band of Queen Victoria of Great Britain.54 Division had not been practised
at the level of the great duchies and counties, as distinct from ordinary

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aristocratic holdings, before 1250 but it was to mark Germany down to the
nineteenth century. The small German mini-states, like the Polish duchies,
demonstrate the point that partible inheritance solved the problem of
disputes between brothers, but only at the risk of diminishing the family’s
overall power. The impartible inheritance of Flanders was indeed
explained in just these terms by a chronicler writing in the 1070s: ‘this
was done to avoid the glory of the family being brought low by lack of
family property if the province had been divided into many parts’.55
Efforts might be made to stop endless subdivision. When Louis the
Pious stipulated the territorial division of his empire between the three
sons he had at the time, he also specified ‘if any of them dies, leaving
legitimate children, power should not be divided among them, but
instead the people should assemble and choose one of them, according
as the Lord wishes’.56 Louis envisaged three rulers in his place, but not
more than three. It has been wisely observed that ‘Every dynasty sooner
or later faces the choice of either dividing the realm or shedding some of
those eligible for the succession, or both.’57 Louis planned to divide the
realm between his three sons, and thereafter to shed any younger sons in
each generation.
When Charlemagne dictated the terms of the division of his empire
between his three sons after his death, he explained his purposes very
clearly: ‘We do not wish to bequeath to them, in confusion and disorder,
the contention of quarrel and dispute by referring to the whole kingdom
but, dividing the whole body of the kingdom into three portions, we are
specifying and describing which portion each of them will protect and
rule.’58 This division, which he proposed in 806, included provisions for
future relationships between the three parts: the king of one kingdom
should not receive political exiles from another kingdom; a king’s fol-
lowers should only be granted fiefs (beneficia) within that king’s kingdom,
although this did not apply to inherited property; a woman from one
kingdom could marry a husband from another kingdom, and keep
control of her property in her original kingdom, even though living in
another; disputes over the boundaries of the kingdoms should always be
settled peacefully.59 These are imaginative precautions addressing prac-
tical problems. The issue of men in one kingdom holding lands in
another was indeed to be a recurrent issue in medieval politics, as, for

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example, in the case of England and France and England and Scotland.
The harbouring of political exiles from another kingdom was another
such issue, with one case, that of Robert of Artois, cited as a justification
for the hostilities that were eventually to be known as the Hundred Years
War.60 Division solved one problem, the competing claims of ambitious
sons, but created others.

Verdun
The political map of modern Europe is partly a result of family squabbles
among the ruling dynasties of centuries past. The clearest, and one of the
most important, examples is the division between France and Germany.
Neither of these countries existed in the early Middle Ages, since the
territories comprising those modern states were included in one vast
Frankish kingdom, which, at its greatest extent under Charlemagne,
stretched from Barcelona to Hamburg and from the frontier of
Brittany to central Italy. But after Charlemagne’s death, his descendants
fought over the inheritance, and, following a particularly bloody civil war
in the early 840s, three of his grandsons agreed on partition. The Treaty
of Verdun of 843 specified who got what. It was quite a complex business,
involving 120 delegates, forty from each brother, and an empire-wide
survey of imperial resources.61 The partition allotted most of the eastern
part of the empire to Louis, the middle brother, and most of the western
part to Charles, the youngest, but the oldest brother, Lothar, who already
bore the imperial title, was allotted a strange elongated territory, com-
posed of northern Italy, Provence and a swathe of land extending north-
wards from Provence to the North Sea. Although his realm looks odd on
a map, it did give Lothar both Aachen and overlordship of Rome, the two
imperial cities; in the negotiations leading to the Treaty of Verdun he
had indeed put forward claims for a larger share than his brothers ‘on
account of the title of emperor and the dignity of the empire’.62
After Lothar’s death in 855, his unusual amalgam of territories was
divided among his three sons, with the northern section, from the North
Sea to Burgundy, going to his namesake, Lothar II, who gave his name to
the region (regnum Lotharii, i.e. ‘Lothar’s kingdom’, whence Lotharingia,
Lothringen, Lorraine). After the death of Lothar II in 869, Lotharingia

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went through an unsettled period, sometimes part of the kingdom of the

East Franks, sometimes part of the kingdom of the West Franks, some-
times divided between them, but from 925 it was permanently part of the
kingdom of the East Franks.63 In this manner the lines drawn by the
squabbling grandsons of Charlemagne came to be impressed right
through the heart of western Europe.
In particular, the line between the kingdom of the West Franks and
the kingdom of the East Franks (and its later development, the Holy
Roman Empire) was to be the site of future struggle.64 There were two
important features of this political boundary: it did not correspond to
a linguistic border, and it carved its path through densely populated
landscapes which had centuries of common history. While most of
the kingdom of the East Franks, or Germany, was German-speaking,
Lotharingia was divided between Romance and Germanic speakers.
Likewise, within the kingdom of the West Franks, or France, most of
the county of Flanders was Germanic-speaking. Linguistic nationalism
was not unknown in the Middle Ages, but this lack of fit between political
and linguistic frontiers was rarely an issue in the medieval period and was
only to have its full impact in the hyper-nationalism of the nineteenth
and twentieth centuries.
This border cut right through the middle of the settled lands of the
Carolingian empire. There were wild frontiers in medieval Europe,
highly militarized borders that divided peoples of different religions or
cultures. The word ‘frontier’ itself arose in such a borderland, the shift-
ing and dangerous boundary between Christian and Muslim in the
Iberian peninsula.65 The frontiers that were carved through the former
Carolingian empire, however, were nothing like that. They were imagin-
ary lines between farms, estates, villages, towns and churches that were
otherwise indistinguishable. Later in the Middle Ages, the boatmen on
the Rhone and Saône, rivers that divided France from the Holy Roman
Empire, simply called the western bank ‘kingdom’, the eastern bank
‘empire’.66 Their day’s work might well take them from kingdom to
empire and back many times. The very fact that these boundaries were
defined by rivers is significant, since boundaries that follow rivers cut up
natural unities, simply for the convenience of a clear demarcation.
A contemporary of these ninth-century divisions lamented the

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fragmentation they entailed: ‘instead of a kingdom, we have fragments of

a kingdom’.67
Later historians recognized that France and Germany had a common
origin. A monk of St-Denis near Paris, writing in the 1190s, explained that
the phrase regnum Francorum had both a larger and a more restricted
meaning. In the wide sense, it was a historical term and meant ‘kingdom
of the Franks’ and included Germany, northern France and southern
France, but in its narrower sense it meant simply the land between Rhine,
Meuse and Loire, ‘which is properly called Gaul but modern people call
France’. He invoked a helpful parallel from biblical history: both the
large kingdom of David and Solomon, and the later truncated version
with just ten tribes were called the kingdom of Israel.68 He clearly sees the
kingdom of France of his own time as arising from fission.
These divisions, entirely dynastic in origin, thus determined there
would be an eastern kingdom, mainly German-speaking, and a western
kingdom, mainly Romance-speaking, and that the fate of the lands
between them, which were partly Romance-speaking but fell eventually
to the eastern kingdom, would be a tense political issue for a thousand
years. As the French monarchy asserted its power within the kingdom of
France in the late twelfth and thirteenth centuries, it also began to cast its
eyes beyond the boundaries of the kingdom. The eastern boundary of
France was long and bordered the highly fragmented lands of the Holy
Roman Empire. This was the area where French expansion was to be
most decisive in shaping the political and military history of western
Europe. The first inroads across the border made by the French royal
house were not through direct annexation but by the acquisition of fiefs
and lordships. Provence came into the hands of Charles of Anjou,
brother of Louis IX of France, in 1246, when he married the heir to the
county, and thereafter it passed through the hands of his descendants
and later into the possession of yet another cadet branch of the French
royal house before being finally incorporated into the kingdom of France
in the 1480s. Another important lordship in the Empire was acquired by
purchase in 1349. This was the county of Vienne, which had become
known as the Dauphiné from the name borne by many of its rulers,
Dolphinus, a name that had then turned into a title. After its acquisition
by France, the Dauphiné became the usual apanage of the heir to the

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throne, who consequently was known as the Dauphin (see above, p. 105).
This French nibbling gathered pace in the Early Modern period. The
bishoprics of Metz, Toul and Verdun were seized in 1552 and officially
ceded in 1648, while Louis XIV pushed the French frontier to the Rhine,
annexing Strassburg in 1681. How far east France would extend was an
open question, and one that constantly provoked war.69 It is only since
1945 that the frontiers of the French state have had a long period of
stability in modern times.
The politicization of Carolingian history visible in French and
German textbooks of the nineteenth century has, as its background,
this division between the two countries and the struggle over the delimi-
tation of their borders. The millennium of the Treaty of Verdun in 1843
was celebrated in Germany as ‘the founding of the German Reich’. The
famous German medievalist Georg Waitz gave a lecture with that title and
the following year the king of Prussia founded a valuable Verdun Prize, to
be awarded every five years for the best work on German history.70 The
Treaty of Verdun was still a standard set-piece of those twentieth-century
historians who wrote books with titles such as La naissance de la France
(‘The Birth of France’)71 or Wie das erste Reich der Deutschen entstand (‘How
the First German Reich was Born’).72
Historians were aware that no one in the ninth century planned or
envisaged this long-term effect but they nevertheless stressed the forma-
tive nature of those Carolingian divisions:

Just as no one at Verdun intended to destroy the unity of the Christian

world forever, so no one believed that the borders that were defined there
would last for long. In fact, the treaty determined the political geography
of France for the whole of the Middle Ages and beyond, and, to a lesser
extent, that of the future Germany. No one expected these results.73

It can still be reasonably argued that ‘the treaty of Verdun is like

a prefiguration of the political map of western Europe’.74
When young Germans and Frenchmen died in the hundreds of thou-
sands fighting each other in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the
frontier they were fighting on was an inheritance from that distant time.
In 1916 Verdun indeed cropped up again as a name of significance. Who
would believe that some makeshift dynastic arrangement of the ninth

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century would be etched permanently on the map of Europe, and that

young men might die for that line in 1870 or 1914, a thousand years after
it was devised?

Wicked Uncles
Relations between uncles and nephews were different in partible dynastic
systems, where the kingdom was customarily divided, and impartible
systems. In the former, younger brothers could expect their share,
although they could only expand it at the expense either of their brothers
or their nephews. The kingdom of the Franks in the early Middle Ages
provides a perfect example. As mentioned above, the custom among the
Merovingian kings of the Franks was to divide the kingdom among all the
old king’s sons. This led not only to rivalry between the brothers but also,
as their children grew up, conflict between uncles and nephews, which
could be brutal. After the death of Clovis, the first Christian king of the
Franks, in 511, his kingdom was divided between his four sons. One of
these, Chlodomer, was killed in battle, leaving young male children.
Their uncles, Chlodomer’s brothers, were envious of these boys,
especially since they seemed to be favourites with their grandmother.
Two of the uncles, Childebert and Clothar (Lothar), asked the grand-
mother (that is, their own mother) to send the boys to them, ‘so that they
may be raised to the kingdom’. Unsuspecting, she did as they asked.
Events at this point became complicated, but the eventual outcome was
that the two brothers were alone with the two nephews: ‘Without delay,
Clothar seized the older boy by the arm, threw him to the ground and,
driving a knife into his armpit, cruelly killed him.’ The boy’s younger
brother knelt at Childebert’s feet, wrapped his arms around his legs and
begged for his life. Childebert, clearly the softer of the two uncles, then
asked Clothar not to kill the boy. Clothar was unmoved: ‘Either you push
him off or you will die in his place!’, he cried. Childebert pushed the boy
towards Clothar, who stabbed and killed him. The uncles then killed the
boys’ servants and nurses. ‘After they had been killed, Clothar mounted
his horse and departed, little bothered by the killing of his nephews.’ Nor
does he seem to have been bothered by the fact that, since he had married
his brother Chlodomer’s widow, they were also his stepchildren.75

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The Merovingians have a particularly strong reputation for vio-

lence within the family. This is only in part to be explained by their
individual emotions; it is also linked to the dynastic pattern of recur-
rent territorial divisions. However, impartible systems, such as those
based on primogeniture, also had an intrinsic tendency to produce
wicked uncles. If your father was a king, you might well dream of
being a king yourself, and, although you might have to tolerate your
older brother inheriting the throne, why should his snivelling chil-
dren have precedence over you? In the early Middle Ages, and in
some regions much later than that, the logic of kingship demanded
that a dead king’s younger brother was preferable as a successor to
that king’s young children. A king had to be a war-leader, and the
advantages of an adult war-leader are self-evident. But with the crystal-
lization of rules of succession that favoured the sons of kings, even
infant children were regarded as rightful heirs. Their uncles might
not all take a legalistic view, however, and this is when ambitious and
ruthless uncles crop up: the wickedness of wicked uncles is deter-
mined by these rights of child inheritance.
One of the wickedest of the wicked uncles was King John of England.
When Richard I ‘the Lionheart’ was struck by a mortal crossbow bolt
while campaigning in the south of France in 1199, the two main clai-
mants to succeed him were Arthur, the son of his deceased brother
Geoffrey, and John, younger brother of Richard and Geoffrey. Arthur
was not yet a teenager – he turned twelve just before Richard’s death – but
he had the support of the lords of Brittany, where he had grown up. His
mother Constance was a member of the old ruling family of Brittany and
the Bretons recognized Arthur as their duke. At first he was also able to
win the support of other parts of Richard’s French empire, Anjou and the
surrounding regions, and had the backing of the French king Philip
Augustus. But the war of 1199–1200 saw some serious reverses for
Arthur, and eventually he had to settle for Brittany alone, held as a fief
from his uncle John. War broke out again in 1202. On one side were
Philip Augustus and Arthur, on the other John. In the summer of 1202,
John, showing rare military flair at this point, managed to defeat and
capture his nephew and many of his supporters. Arthur was imprisoned
in Normandy and was never seen again.

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What exactly happened will always be uncertain, but there is no

doubt that John had both the means and the motive for getting rid
of Arthur. Shakespeare, who knew that stories of wicked uncles make
great theatre, puts these words into the mouth of an acute observer in
his play King John:

John hath seiz’d Arthur, and it cannot be,

That whiles warme life playes in that infants veines,
The mis-plac’d John should entertaine an houre,
One minute, nay one quiet breath of rest.

There is indeed one contemporary chronicle that probably had a good

source for the story it tells of Arthur’s fate:

When King John had captured Arthur and held him alive in prison for
some time, he finally killed him with his own hand, in the keep of Rouen
castle, on the Thursday before Easter [3 April 1203], after dinner, when he
was drunk and filled with the devil. Tying a great stone to his body, he
threw it into the river Seine. It was found in a fisherman’s net and dragged
to the shore, where it was recognized, and then buried in the priory of Bec,
secretly for fear of the tyrant.76

As rumours of Arthur’s murder spread, a sense of outrage stirred up his

supporters and gave a propaganda advantage to John’s great enemy,
Philip Augustus of France. William the Breton, a trusted servant of the
French king and a propagandist for his cause, painted a pathetic picture
of the murder in his verse epic, the Philippis, as Arthur pleaded for his life:
‘Uncle’, he cried, ‘have pity on your little nephew; uncle, good uncle,
spare, o spare, your nephew; spare your own kindred; spare your broth-
er’s offspring.’77 William the Breton goes on to compare John with Nero,
Judas and Herod, the king who ordered the massacre of the Innocents,
although Arthur, sixteen at the time of his death, would certainly have
been viewed by contemporary standards as a leader of men rather than
a ‘little nephew’. The murder and the reaction to it thus played some part
in John’s defeat and his loss of his northern French territories. Perhaps
he should have let his nephew live.
John’s succession to the English throne in preference to Arthur threw
up a delicate legal question.78 Geoffrey, Arthur’s father, had been John’s

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older brother, so, according to one reading, his right to succeed would be
superior to John’s. Arthur, it could be argued, had inherited his father’s
right; the legal term for this is ‘representation’. Alternatively, it could be
said that John had the superior right, as closer in blood to Richard, being
a brother, not merely a nephew. These differences could not be resolved
by looking up a list or a table, for none such existed, and eventually the
issue was determined by war and murder, but it had repercussions in the
courtrooms.
Uncertainty about such a case is recognized in the contemporary
English lawbook known as Glanvill, which says that ‘when someone dies
having a younger son and a grandson born to his predeceased oldest son,
there is great doubt in law which of them is to be preferred in the
succession, the son or the grandson’.79 The custom of Normandy,
which was also ruled by the king of England at this time, was more
definite: ‘a son, although younger, is the nearer heir of his father than
the grandchildren, sons of the older son’.80 The chief men of both
England and Normandy, although not of Anjou, the other main part of
the inheritance, accepted John as their lord in 1199. The impact of this
decision, that John the younger brother should succeed, not the son of
a deceased older brother, has been traced in the ordinary land law of
England. In a case heard in the first year of John’s reign, for example, in
which the descendants of a deceased older brother obtained an inquest
into the rights of a younger brother who actually held the land in ques-
tion, the record concludes, ‘it should be noted that this inquest was made
through command of the lord king and not through the decision of the
court or according to the custom of the realm’.81 John might well be
interested in such an issue. In 1201, two years after John came to the
throne, a case was heard in Cornwall, in which a younger brother claimed
that he should succeed to his older brother’s acre of land, not the son of
a deceased middle brother, which was exactly the issue between John and
Arthur. The judges record the detail of the case and then conclude ‘sine
die’ – adjourned with no set date for resumption – ‘because the judgment
depends on the king’s will’.82 It sounds as if they were well aware of just
how delicate such cases were. The learned judges of the 1220s and 1230s
recognized that the precedent of ‘the king’s case’ (casus regis) would
prevent a son of a deceased older brother getting a court judgment

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against his uncle, although this rule silently disappeared in the course of
the later thirteenth century.83
A similar dispute between uncle and nephew occurred in the kingdom
of Sicily a hundred years later. Charles II of Sicily (1285–1309) had
several sons. The second one, Louis, became a friar (and later a saint)
so was not a contender to inherit. The oldest son, Charles Martel, was
recognized as heir in 1289 but died before his father, in 1295, leaving
a seven-year-old son, Charles Robert or Canrobert. Charles II decided
that he would prefer his third son, Robert, to succeed him, rather than
this grandchild, and arranged the support of the pope for his position.
On his death, Robert became king of Sicily (that is, the mainland terri-
tory also known as the kingdom of Naples). But the older line had not
given up its claims, and the situation was complicated by the fact that
Canrobert had, through his mother, a claim to the kingdom of Hungary,
and this he had eventually been able to assert. The kings of Hungary thus
nurtured a grievance and believed that they, not Robert and his family,
should be kings of Sicily. The issue was the same as that with John and
Arthur, the rights of a younger brother versus those of a son of a deceased
older brother.
Both the political implications of the Sicilian case, and its intellectual
and legal ramifications, far outstripped those of the earlier one. The king
of Hungary invaded the kingdom of Sicily more than once. As early as
1312, just three years into his reign, King Robert was reportedly worried
about such an invasion.84 Hungary and Sicily were not then so far apart as
their present geographical associations would lead one to imagine, since
in the middle and eastern parts of Italy the kingdom of Sicily extended to
latitudes further north than Rome, and the kingdom of Hungary
included Croatia, with its coast only 100 miles away, not to mention the
land routes around the head of the Adriatic. When he attacked the
kingdom of Sicily in 1347, King Louis of Hungary took just six weeks to
get from his base at Visegrád on the Danube to the northern frontier of
the kingdom of Sicily in central Italy.85
Italy was also the home of the lawyers, whom both sides enlisted to
back their case.86 Lawyers can, of course, always produce plenty of argu-
ments. Baldus de Ubaldis, one of the most famous academic lawyers of
the Middle Ages, gave ten reasons for and ten reasons against the right of

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Robert of Naples to succeed to the throne instead of his older brother’s

son. He noted that Canrobert’s claim was ‘in the person of his father’,
that is, through representation, he thought that the usual law of fiefs
would give the succession to the grandson, but he acknowledged that
Pope Boniface VIII, the Vicar of Christ, had backed Robert’s succession
instead and that Boniface had probably taken into account some prac-
tical considerations, ‘since it is better to be ruled by an older person’.
One of the technical issues in Baldus’ discussion was the meaning of
primogenitus, ‘firstborn’. Even if it were acknowledged that the firstborn
had a greater right to succeed, wrote Baldus, ‘a grandson cannot be
called firstborn, except by fiction and incorrectly, since that would be
against the natural bounds of the truth, and we ought to pay no attention
to fictions’.87
The main participants in the initial decision to exclude Canrobert in
favour of his uncle had also fastened upon this word primogenitus. Writing
to Charles II in 1297, after the death of the king’s first son Charles Martel
and the entry into the religious life of his second son Louis, Boniface VIII
declared, ‘Among your children, he is to be understood as primogenitus
and to be your successor and heir in the kingdom who, at the time of your
death, is found to be prior in degree and older in birth.’88 The pope was
thus authorizing the succession of Charles’ oldest surviving son, as
indeed occurred. The rather special meaning that primogenitus thus
acquired comes out vividly in Charles’ will of 1308, the year before his
death: ‘We institute as our heir and universal successor in our kingdoms
Robert, our firstborn; we bequeath to Charles, our grandson, the first-
born of our former firstborn, the king of Hungary, 2000 ounces of
gold.’89 Robert was now primogenitus, oldest surviving son, while
Charles’ grandson was the primogenitus of a former primogenitus.
Lawyers were naturally found to make the case for the king of
Hungary. They asserted that, in fiefs, the grandson should succeed the
grandfather in the place of his deceased father, and this rule covered the
kingdom of Sicily.90 A memorandum drawn up by a learned Italian lawyer
for the king of Hungary in 1376 gave it as ‘common opinion that a son of
a firstborn son is to be understood as a firstborn (primogenitus) in succes-
sion and is to be preferred to an uncle’, echoing and refuting the phrase
of Boniface VIII. He also denied that a mere declaration by Boniface and

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the agreement of Charles II could change this.91 The case shaped

European politics for almost a century. There was even a brief period
in 1385–6 when a great-grandson of Charles II ruled both Sicily and
Hungary. And it aroused strong feelings. Dante placed Charles Martel
in Paradise and referred to ‘the treacheries his seed would suffer’.92 This
uncle–nephew conflict thus won a mention in the greatest poem of the
Middle Ages.
The late fourteenth century saw boy kings in both England and
France, each with powerful uncles. Richard II succeeded to the English
throne in 1377 aged ten, Charles VI to the French throne three years later
aged eleven. Three of Richard’s paternal uncles were alive: John of
Gaunt, Edmund of Langley and, by far the youngest, Thomas of
Woodstock, who was twenty-two when Richard came to the throne.
Charles VI also had powerful uncles: Louis, duke of Anjou, Philip the
Bold, duke of Burgundy, John, duke of Berry, and, on his mother’s side,
Louis, duke of Bourbon.
Since the difference in age between Richard II and Thomas of
Woodstock (who became duke of Gloucester in 1385) was only twelve
years, this was a possible difference in age between brothers, rather than
uncle and nephew, and it may be one reason that Thomas felt competi-
tive with, rather than protective of, his young nephew. He spoke deri-
sively of Richard’s lack of warlike spirit in the conflict with France: ‘If
there were a good king in charge in England’, he reportedly said, ‘who
desired war and the recovery of his inheritance, he would find 100,000
archers and 6,000 men-at-arms to serve him. I am the youngest of all the
princes of England, but I would be the first to renew the war.’93 In 1387,
when Richard was twenty, five great nobles, including Thomas of
Woodstock, staged a coup against him. The king remained in power
but his favourites were tried for treason and executed or exiled. Among
those executed was Simon Burley, former tutor of the young king
Richard. Duke Thomas was particularly insistent on the death sentence
for him, despite strong opposition to it on the part of his older brother
Edmund of Langley. After this, it has been memorably said, ‘if Richard
had been prepared to bury the hatchet, he had not forgotten where he
had buried it’,94 and in 1397 he had three of the five nobles responsible
for the coup of 1387 arrested, including Thomas of Woodstock. When

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the king came with a powerful body of men to arrest his uncle, Thomas
pleaded, ‘May you act towards me mercifully and spare my life.’ The
king’s chilling reply was, ‘You will have the same mercy that you showed
to Simon Burley.’95 Thomas was sent off under guard to Calais, then an
English possession, and murdered soon afterwards. He was declared
a traitor posthumously, and the king took all his possessions, but he did
allow his uncle’s body to be buried honourably in Westminster Abbey.
In the case of Charles VI of France, Richard’s contemporary, the
balance between nephew and uncles was different. Although Richard
became king at the age of ten, there was no formal regency, but the
arrangements for Charles’ minority had been set out by his father,
Charles V, some years before, and they gave official positions and authority
to his uncles (see above, pp. 119–20). Charles V declared that his oldest
brother, Louis of Anjou, ‘on account of the very singular, perfect, loyal and
true love that he has always had towards us and our children, should have
the government of our kingdom’, but that another brother, Philip of
Burgundy, and his brother-in-law, Louis of Bourbon, ‘should be tutors
and governors of our children’.96 What this arrangement guaranteed was
a period of fierce rivalry during Charles’ minority, as each uncle sought to
establish his own position and use the royal resources for his own ambi-
tions. Nevertheless, France was steered through a very difficult time in
Charles VI’s early years, which included popular revolt, English invasion
and the virtual secession of Flanders. Charles came of age in 1388.
What transformed Charles’ reign and gave his uncles a quite new
significance, was the sudden onset of mental illness that rendered the
king incapable of ruling. The political results were disastrous. In the
summer of 1392 Charles, then aged twenty-three, was leading a military
expedition against the duke of Brittany. According to an eye-witness, his
household had already noticed unsettling signs of what was to come:
‘foolish words’ and ‘gestures unbecoming the royal majesty’. But the final
outbreak was far more serious. While the army was on the march, ‘a most
lowly man’ terrified the king by calling out, ‘Don’t go any further, noble
king, for you are soon to be betrayed!’ Then one of the king’s soldiers
accidentally dropped his sword. ‘The king was moved to a sudden fury by
this crash and, as if out of his senses, he brandished his sword and killed
the soldier.’ He then went on a rampage, charging his own followers and

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killing four more of them, while shouting, ‘I am to be handed over to my

enemies!’ Only after an hour, when his sword broke, could he be
restrained and brought back to the nearest town, tied to a cart.97 The
king regained his senses after a few days, but this was only the first of
a series of episodes.
Explanations of his illness varied. After the first dramatic attack,
medical opinion was that the cause was black choler, the bodily humour
that was the root of melancholy, combined with the king’s anger at the
slow progress of his army. Many others said it was a visitation from God,
‘who chastises those he loves’. But the majority opinion, both among the
upper and lower classes, was that it had been inflicted by witches and
sorcerers, who abounded in the kingdom of France.98 The chronicler
Jean Froissart gives a characteristically vivid account of the incident,
stressing, for his part, the fact that the king had overheated, partly
because of the velour jacket he was wearing, and describing how after-
wards the king’s uncles had inquired carefully about what he had last had
to drink.99
Charles reigned for thirty years after this first onset, and his spells of
madness, termed ‘absences’ by the court, alternated with brief lucid
periods. Often, he had the illusion that he was made of glass, and allowed
no one to touch him, and had iron rods sewn into his clothes to protect
him.100 It was clearly necessary to have some sort of regency, even if not
an official one. Louis of Anjou was dead by this time, but Philip of
Burgundy took effective control of the royal government, in alliance
with his brother, John of Berry, and for most of the next decade the
king’s uncles built up their power and their territorial possessions,
siphoned off a high proportion of royal income and made the important
political decisions. But a challenger arose in the person of the king’s
younger brother, Louis of Orleans, who maintained good relations with
his brother, even during his periods of insanity. Relations between Louis
and the duke of Burgundy were especially bitter and competitive, and the
quarrels between their followers continued after Philip’s death and the
succession of his son John as duke of Burgundy, culminating in murder
and civil war (see below, pp. 222–5).
Another king who suffered mental illness was Charles’ grandson,
Henry VI of England. It is sometimes thought that Henry’s madness

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can be traced genetically to Charles, but they had very different forms of
illness. Charles’ manic outbursts and his remarkable fantasies, such as the
belief that he was made of glass, were nothing like the illness that afflicted
Henry, who simply slumped into a stupor, failing to register even the
birth of his only son. Henry, like Charles VI, had powerful and ambitious
uncles who acted as regents during his minority. Until the birth of the
king’s son, the oldest of his uncles was next in line to the throne. This led
to dangerous territory, such as consultation of experts on the question of
when Henry VI would die (see below, pp. 358–9). The uncles of Charles
VI had no such temptation since Charles had many children, born both
before and after his first bout of insanity, although they still knew how to
take advantage of the situation.
The case of Richard II of England and Thomas of Woodstock shows
that the age gap between uncles and nephews need not be great.
Sometimes, indeed, nephews were older than their uncles. When
Henry of Castile, later to be the short-lived Henry I, was born in 1204,
his older sister Berenguela had already given birth to four or five chil-
dren. One of them, Ferdinand, who was born in 1201 or a year or two
before, succeeded Henry on the throne of Castile. So, although there was
a seemingly natural generational transition, with a nephew succeeding
an uncle, the nephew in this case was actually older than his uncle. And
the story of Ferdinand’s grandson, Sancho IV of Castile, also shows that
ambitious uncles did not have to be very old. Sancho was a younger son of
Alfonso X (1252–84). When his older brother Ferdinand de la Cerda
died in 1275, leaving two young sons, the elder only five, the seventeen-
year-old Sancho and his aristocratic supporters asserted his rights as heir
to the kingdom over those of his young nephews and won official recog-
nition when the chief men of the kingdom all did homage to him in
1276.101 Soon thereafter Sancho began issuing documents as ‘oldest son
and heir of the lord king Alfonso’.102
But the rights of the two sons of Ferdinand de la Cerda, Alfonso and
Ferdinand, known as the Infantes de la Cerda, still had their champions.
Alfonso X’s own law code, the Siete Partidas, when discussing succession to
the kingdom, stated that ‘wise and learned men decreed that if the eldest
son should die before he inherited, if he should leave a son or daughter
that he has had of his lawful wife, he or she should have it, and no other’.103

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By this law, which recognized the principle of representation, the older of

the Infantes de la Cerda was clearly heir to the Castilian throne. And the
rights of the young princes were also backed by the noble house of Lara.
Moreover, their mother, Blanche, the widow of Ferdinand de la Cerda, was
the sister of the king of France. The political situation became yet more
complex when Alfonso X and his wife, Yolande or Violante, became
estranged. In 1278, Yolande, who was the sister of the king of Aragon,
fled to her brother’s kingdom, taking with her the Infantes de la Cerda, her
grandsons. Alfonso responded by reiterating Sancho’s status as heir.104
The difficult political relations between the three generations, that of
Alfonso X, his son Sancho and Alfonso’s grandchildren, the Infantes de la
Cerda, were to be a major feature of the history of Castile for the next fifty
years, continuing long after the deaths of Alfonso and Sancho. ‘Because of
this,’ lamented one chronicler, ‘the kingdom suffered much evil and much
damage.’105 Castile was riven with civil war. Alfonso X was deposed by
Sancho and recognized the Infantes de la Cerda as his heirs, but Sancho
nevertheless obtained the throne. Alfonso de la Cerda, growing up in exile,
sought and sometimes obtained help from his relations in Aragon and in
France, and managed on one occasion, after the death of Sancho IV, to
establish himself temporarily in Castile. It was not until 1331 that the aging
claimant finally came to a compromise with Alfonso XI, Sancho’s grandson.
He abandoned his claims to the throne in return for the grant of a huge
lordship within the kingdom, and his noble descendants were prominent in
the later history of Castile. Nevertheless, he remains a classic example of
a nephew dispossessed by an ambitious uncle. It was the descendants of that
uncle, Sancho IV, who were to rule Castile for the rest of the Middle Ages.106

Killing Cousins
Some dynastic systems, such as that of native Ireland, simply assumed
there would be competition between cousins. In his great book Conquest,
Coexistence and Change: Wales 1063–1415, Rees Davies included several
family trees of the Welsh princely dynasties of the eleventh, twelfth and
thirteenth centuries, which not only showed family relationships but also,
through a system of underlining, indicated which family members had
been ‘killed or maimed by other members of the dynasty’.107 Of the

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twenty-three sons, grandsons and great-grandsons of Bleddyn ap Cynfyn

of Powys, seven had this unenviable distinction; of the twenty-seven male
descendants of Owain ap Hywel Dda of Deheubarth in the following five
generations, by a strange coincidence, again seven were killed by other
descendants of Owain; in Gwynedd, from 1137, the death of Gruffudd ap
Cynan, down to the catastrophe of 1282, family rivalry was as vigorous,
but significantly less bloody: only two family members out of twenty-nine
males were killed or maimed, although another nine were imprisoned or
dispossessed by their kinsmen. As Rees Davies pointed out in his book, his
diagrams do not include all male members of the dynasty, so it would be
wrong to use them for rigorously statistical purposes, but they do convey
an impression, and that impression is that members of Welsh princely
dynasties had a one in three or one in four chance of being killed,
maimed or dispossessed by kinsmen.
One of the diagrams is labelled ‘Segmentary Conflict in a Native
Welsh Dynasty’, but to use the anthropological term ‘segmentary’ when
talking of early Wales, or Ireland for that matter, may be misleading. The
expression was devised in the twentieth century to describe the kinship
structures and political workings of some African societies, usually very
small-scale ones. Its borrowing by historians of early Wales and Ireland,
even if worthily motivated by the desire to integrate history and anthro-
pology, risks by implication placing these societies into the common
category of ‘primitive’. But if a defining feature of ‘segmentary conflict’
is the rivalry of cousins for power, then it applies not just to the rural and
economically undeveloped worlds of early Wales and Ireland but also to
the most sophisticated and urban parts of medieval Europe. The king-
dom of Naples, with its networks of towns, high literacy and international
connections, was riven by segmentary conflict of this type in the four-
teenth and fifteenth centuries, as the lineages descending from four of
the sons of Charles II (1285–1309) struggled with each other. They
intermarried, but they also murdered one another, and they did so for
four generations. Likewise, the so-called Wars of the Roses in England are
a perfect example of segmentary conflict: Henry VI was deposed and
killed by his third cousins.
In English history, violent conflicts between first cousins repeatedly
caused civil war, deposition and murder. The long war in the twelfth

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century between King Stephen and his cousin Matilda was so destructive
that it has been called simply ‘The Anarchy’. In the early fourteenth
century the struggle between Edward II and his cousin Thomas of
Lancaster ended in the latter’s judicial murder; interestingly, both par-
ties were later claimed as saints. In 1399 Richard II was deposed, and later
murdered, by his cousin Henry Bolingbroke (Henry IV). They had
played together as children and were knighted by their grandfather,
Edward III, on the same day, but nothing idyllic marked their final
encounter.

France and Burgundy

A particularly long and violent struggle between royal cousins marked
the history of France and Burgundy in the fifteenth century. The greatest
threat to the French monarchy from a junior branch of the royal dynasty
arose when the dukes of Burgundy amassed so much land and power that
they came very close to establishing a new kingdom of their own in the
borderlands between France and Germany. Burgundy has indeed been
called ‘The Unfinished Kingdom’.108 The founder of this line was Philip,
fourth son of John II of France, who was endowed with the duchy as an
apanage in 1363. He married the heir to Flanders and Artois, which he
acquired on the death of his father-in-law, Louis de Male, count of
Flanders, in 1384, along with the county, as distinct from the duchy, of
Burgundy. Because the county of Burgundy was part of the Holy Roman
Empire, not the kingdom of France, Philip now ruled an assemblage of
lands straddling the frontier between the Empire and the kingdom. This
was to be a determining characteristic of the Burgundian state.
Philip and his three successors were major figures in European politics
for over a century. Each successive duke of Burgundy added to the family
lands, by purchase, conquest or inheritance, gradually building up an
almost continuous bloc of territory extending 450 miles (750 kilometres)
from the Jura Mountains to the North Sea. As members of the French royal
house and as peers of France, they were deeply involved in the violent and
sometimes chaotic politics of the Hundred Years War. Their rivalry with
other branches of the dynasty, notably with Louis, Duke of Orleans,
younger brother of King Charles VI, eventually accelerated into civil war

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and two dramatic public murders, of Louis of Orleans in the streets of Paris
in 1407 and John the Fearless, second Duke of Burgundy, in 1419.
The latter was especially spectacular. By the year 1419 John’s oppo-
nents were headed by the Dauphin Charles, and, after negotiations
between the duke and the Dauphin conducted by Tanneguy du Châtel,
one of the Dauphin’s trusted followers, an agreement was made that the
two great Capetian princes should meet on the bridge at Montereau,
where the river Yonne joins the Seine, upstream from Paris. As Duke John
neared the town it was reported to him that the party of the Dauphin had

Figure 8 The murder of John the Fearless, duke of Burgundy, by followers of the Dauphin
on the bridge at Montereau in 1419, a particularly bloody moment in the long struggle
between the two branches of the French royal house.
ART Collection/Alamy.

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erected several strong barriers on the bridge, and some of his men advised
him against proceeding further. Opinions were divided, but eventually the
duke announced in a high clear voice that he would go on and ‘await the
adventure that it pleased God to send him’. Tanneguy du Châtel informed
him the Dauphin was ready, and, with a small group of his nobles, John
advanced onto the bridge. Some of the Dauphin’s men met him at the first
barrier on the bridge, renewed the oaths and promises as to his security
and told him the Dauphin awaited him. He passed the first barrier, then
the second, which was immediately locked behind him. There waiting was
Tanneguy du Châtel, and Duke John slapped him on the shoulder, saying
to his men, ‘here is the one I trust!’ The Dauphin was present, fully armed,
leaning on one of the barriers. The duke knelt before him but received
a cold response. One of the Dauphin’s followers took the kneeling duke by
the arm, supposedly to help his rise, but at this moment Tanneguy du
Châtel approached, said, ‘It is time!’, and struck the duke in the face with
a small axe, slicing off his chin. John grasped for his sword, but Tanneguy
and others gave him repeated blows and he fell dead. A sword was stuck
into his belly to make sure. One of the Burgundian nobles who tried to
resist was killed, the rest made captive. After the killing of his cousin, the
Dauphin, who had been looking on, retired behind the barrier on which
he had been leaning, and was escorted back to his lodgings.109
The immediate result of the murder of John the Fearless was an
alliance between the Burgundians and the English invaders of France.
This was agreed in principle within two months of the assassination and
embodied in a formal treaty in December 1419. For the next sixteen years
Philip the Good, son and heir of the murdered Duke John, cooperated
with the English, although not without tension. The most remarkable
fruit of this Anglo-Burgundian cooperation was the capture of Joan of
Arc in a skirmish before Compiègne in 1430. She was a prisoner of the
Burgundians before being sold to the English, tried and burned. But
eventually Duke Philip came to terms with Charles VII, that is, the
Dauphin who had stood by and watched while his father had been
butchered. In the Treaty of Arras of 1435, Charles VII offered ‘our
cousin, Philip, duke of Burgundy’ his excuses for the murder on the
bridge at Montereau: he had been young and inexperienced at the time
of the murder, it was a wicked deed, and he begged Duke Philip to

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remove from his heart any hatred towards him that he might have on its
account; he would do all he could to arrest the perpetrators, relying on
a list of their names provided by the duke; he would establish religious
foundations for the soul of Duke John, including a Charterhouse at
Montereau itself; as recompense for Duke John’s jewels, plundered at
the time of the murder, he would pay 50,000 écus d’or, representing about
419 pounds or 190 kilogrammes of gold. It was only after all these
provisions that the Treaty went on to talk about the territorial conces-
sions Charles would make to Philip and the common front they would
offer to the English. The Treaty of Arras, an important turning point in
the Hundred Years War, thus opened with detailed provisions regarding
a family murder.110
But the dukes of Burgundy had ambitions wider than that of being the
dominant noble in France. One possibility was for the duke to become
Holy Roman Emperor, with its essential preliminary of election as ‘king
of the Romans’ by the leading figures of Germany. Another was the
creation of a new kingdom. This hovered on the brink of realization in
the middle decades of the fifteenth century. One of the subjects dis-
cussed between representatives of the Holy Roman Empire and Duke
Philip in 1447 was ‘if it pleased him to be a king and take a crown with the
title of one of his lands, such as Frisia, which was a kingdom in ancient
times, or Brabant, which is the most ancient and excellent duchy of all
Christendom’.111 Nothing came of this, but the idea was opened up again
under Philip’s son and successor, the fiery but erratic Charles the Bold.
Charles was well aware that there had once been a kingdom of Burgundy,
which, he thought, France had ‘usurped’.112 It was even reported in 1473,
after a ceremonious and well-publicized meeting at Trier, that a definite
agreement had been made between Charles and the Emperor Frederick
III that all Charles’ lands in the Holy Roman Empire would be incorpo-
rated into a new ‘kingdom of Burgundy’, for which he would do homage
and render military service to the emperor.113 For whatever reason, the
emperor got cold feet and departed secretly from Trier, leaving behind
not only Duke Charles but also an unused crown and sceptre.114
From the time of her birth in February 1457, Mary of Burgundy,
daughter of Charles the Bold, was heir to the Burgundian domains. As
the years passed and it became clear that Charles would not have a son,

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Mary, as the most eligible bride in Christendom, was the subject of many
marriage proposals. Eventually, despite the complications of their earlier
dealings, Duke Charles and the emperor Frederick III agreed that Mary
should marry Frederick’s son Maximilian of Habsburg. The marriage
had not actually taken place when Duke Charles was killed in battle at
Nancy in 1477, but it was celebrated soon thereafter, and so the
Habsburgs staked their claim to the Burgundian inheritance. Although
the French king was able to recover the duchy of Burgundy, most of the
rest of the lands of Charles the Bold eventually came into Habsburg
hands. The endowment of a junior line of the French royal family in
1363 thus led, two hundred years later, to the establishment along the
French frontier of the greatest rivals to the kings of France. But if Charles
the Bold had had a son to succeed him, his lands would probably have
remained under the rule of his family, and perhaps the dukes of
Burgundy might even have obtained the royal title they were so close to
procuring. The Low Countries, rather than being under Habsburg rule,
could have formed part of a new kingdom between France and Germany.
So, the genetic lottery, and luck, again played a central part in European
political history.

Queens, Sons and Lovers

Adulterous Queens
Although ruling female sovereigns were uncommon, queens consort,
that is, wives of kings, were present in almost all kingdoms most of the
time. Such queens not only had the task of giving birth to a son but were
also centres of power: they had their own landed estate and treasure, they
had a household, followers and servants, they were patrons of the Church
and perhaps of writers and craftsmen. But they also had enemies, and
because the queen’s chief role was sexual, to conceive and bear a son, her
enemies might well choose to undermine her by a sexual charge, an
accusation of adultery.115 An adulterous queen threatened both the
king’s honour and the legitimacy of his descent. Such accusations were
very serious and, although not common, there were a sufficient number
of cases, and they attracted sufficient attention as public sexual scandals,

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that they also became a subject in fictional literature.116 The love trian-
gles of Arthur/Guinevere/Lancelot and Mark/Isolde/Tristan, which
centre on adulterous queens, are among the most familiar stories to
have come down from the Middle Ages. Perhaps significantly, however,
these famous literary cases involve queens who had not borne children,
and they thus highlight fidelity, honour and trust between men rather
than the legitimacy of the bloodline.
A notorious historical case involved the empress Judith, second wife
of the emperor Louis the Pious. When Louis married her, in 819, he was
over forty and already had three sons by his first wife. It is not known
how old Judith was, but she must have been younger, perhaps much
younger, and was renowned as being ‘really pretty (pulchra valde)’.117 In
823 she gave birth to a son, Charles, and then dedicated herself to
ensuring that he would get his share of Louis’ empire, in the face of
understandable resentment from Louis’ older children, her stepsons
(see above, pp. 195–6). A further source of tension at Louis’ court was
the dominant role of the chamberlain, Bernard, count of Septimania
(Septimania is southern France between the Rhone and the Pyrenees).
Resentment against him, and hostility to Judith’s ambitions for her son,
could be neatly combined in an accusation that Bernard and Judith
were engaged in an adulterous affair. Their enemies went to one of
Louis’ sons, complaining about Bernard’s arrogance, ‘and also assert-
ing, what is horrible to say, that he had defiled the father’s marriage
bed’. The word used of Bernard here is incestator, which can simply
mean ‘defiler’ but also more specifically ‘one who engages in incest’,
a charge based on the fact that Bernard was Louis’ cousin and godson.
The emperor’s lack of response to this shameful behaviour was attrib-
uted to witchcraft: ‘moreover, the father was so deceived by certain
enchantments that not only could he not avenge this but was not even
able to notice it’.118 A shifting alliance of Bernard and Judith’s enemies,
including Louis’ older sons, was powerful enough to have Judith placed
in a nunnery and make Bernard flee to Spain. But the situation was
volatile, and both of them were eventually allowed to clear themselves
by swearing an oath to their innocence. In the end, Judith was successful
in her backing of her son Charles, who is known as Charles the Bald and
sometimes regarded as the ‘first king of France’. One of the things that

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he did early in his reign was to have Bernard of Septimania executed,

although not on a charge of adultery or incest.
Accusations of adulterous relations between queens and bishops were
not uncommon, possibly because bishops would have less restricted
access to royal women, as advisers or confessors, and this would give
plausibility to accusations. In 887 Richardis, wife of the Frankish ruler
Charles the Fat, was accused of adultery with Liutward, bishop of Vercelli,
‘who was active in the palace, living intimately with her and the emperor’,
but she was able to refute the charge decisively.119 A century later, Emma,
wife of Lothar, king of the West Franks, was accused by her brother-in-
law, Lothar’s brother Charles, of adultery with Bishop Adalbero of Laon.
Since the issue was public knowledge, a council of bishops was convened
to discuss it. Intriguingly, the chronicle describing these events has the
section containing their judgment cut away.120 We have a sad letter of
Emma to her mother, complaining of the way her friends have turned
against her and how ‘they have made up very wicked things against the
bishop of Laon, to my shame and the shame of my whole lineage’.121 The
‘queen and the bishop’ story became a topos that generated legends,
such as that concerning Queen Emma, mother of the English king,
Edward the Confessor, who was supposedly accused of sexual relations
with the bishop of Winchester but cleared herself through trial by ordeal,
walking barefoot on red-hot ploughshares.122
The case of the empress Euphrosyne, wife of the Byzantine emperor
Alexius III (1195–1203), is strange and complicated.123 She was
a powerful woman, deeply involved in the patronage system, which she
manipulated through her minister, Constantine Mesopotamites. Others,
including her own son-in-law and brother, felt excluded and plotted
revenge. They went to the emperor Alexius and, proclaiming that their
loyalty to him outweighed even the bonds of kinship, accused
Euphrosyne of adultery. They pointedly combined their picture of her
foul deeds in the marriage bed with the suggestion that she was probably
preparing her lover to be the next emperor. Alexius was convinced and
sent one of his guards off to kill the supposed lover, an otherwise uni-
dentified Vatatzes. Vatatzes’ head was sent to the emperor who vented his
feelings by kicking it and reviling it. Euphrosyne appealed to have
a proper trial, so that she could answer these charges, but Alexius

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refused, tortured her female servants and interrogated the eunuchs in

order to get the information he wanted, and then banished the empress
from the palace, sending her to a convent dressed in humble clothes and
with two foreign maids who spoke poor Greek.
The picture to this point is fairly clear, with political factions of
a purely self-interested kind struggling for advantage and using the
particular vulnerability of powerful female figures, their sexual reputa-
tion, as a tool. It is perhaps unusual that it was Euphrosyne’s own relatives
who brought the charge of adultery. The chronicler who tells this story,
Niketas Choniates, explains that the accusers had not expected such
a dramatic reaction from the emperor and had only wanted to diminish
the empress’ influence, not have her expelled. They were also conscious
of the shame they had brought on their own family and of the hostility of
the populace at what they had done. Hence they encouraged Alexius to
reinstate Euphrosyne and, six months after she had been sent out of the
palace, she was back, regained the emperor’s affections and was as power-
ful as ever. It seems that the twists and turns of events in this case may be
best explained by the character of the personalities involved: Alexius’
impulsiveness and Euphrosyne’s survival skills. Both were to be swept
from power when the Fourth Crusade burst upon Constantinople in
1203–4.
One of the most dramatic cases involving the charge of adultery
against royal women marked the final days of Philip IV of France. In
1314, which was to be the last year of his life, his dynasty faced a major
scandal involving charges of sexual misconduct against not one, but
three, royal brides.124 Margaret, wife of the king’s oldest son, Louis,
and Blanche, wife of his youngest son, Charles, were accused of adultery
with two of their household knights. Moreover, Joan, Blanche’s sister,
who was the wife of the king’s middle son, Philip, was also under suspi-
cion of connivance in these affairs. The three young brides found them-
selves part of an ominous drama: ‘all three were apprehended and
conducted in carriages covered in black to be held in custody in
strongholds’.125 Joan insisted on her innocence and was eventually
cleared in the Parlement of Paris, the chief law-court, and reconciled to
her husband, but the other two were imprisoned for life and the two
household knights suffered a gruesome execution. It is possible that

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doubts about the paternity of Joanna, daughter of Louis and Margaret,

played some part in excluding her from the succession after Louis’ death
(see above, p. 146). Margaret died in prison and Louis remarried, while
the marriage of Blanche and Charles was nullified by the pope in 1322,
enabling Charles to make two more marriages in the, unfulfilled, hope of
producing a surviving son. Between them, the three sons of Philip IV had
six marriages but none produced sons who survived childhood. Philip
was also the king responsible for the destruction of the Templars and that
process shows how ready the king was to believe the most ornate and
improbable charges, including those concerned with sexual misbeha-
viour. The persecution of the Templars culminated in the burning alive
of the Grand Master of the Order, Jacques de Molay, on 18 March 1314,
at the king’s orders. On 19 April 1314 the two knights accused of sleeping
with the king’s daughters-in-law were tortured and executed. In the last
springtime of his life Philip was determined to destroy the perverse
wickedness he saw all around him.
Although no public trial was involved, accusations of adultery circu-
lated against Margaret of Anjou, the queen of Henry VI of England.126
Their purpose was clearly to suggest that her son Edward, Prince of
Wales, was not actually Henry’s and hence had no true claim to the
succession. The beneficiary in that case would be Richard of York and
these stories of adultery came from the Yorkist camp. They were given
more plausibility by the fact that Margaret and Henry had been married
for eight years before Edward was born and Henry, who was mentally ill,
had not at first responded to him at all. In 1460 the earl of Warwick
reportedly said, ‘our king is senseless and, disturbed in his mind, he does
not rule but is ruled, power being in the hands of his wife and those who
defile the king’s bed’.127 Here the charge is clearly that the queen is
sleeping with other men. After the Yorkist victory at the Battle of
Northampton in July that year, when the young Prince of Wales was
seven, news spread as far as Italy that the Yorkist lords were planning to
make a son of the duke of York king and ‘pass over the king’s son, as they
are beginning already to say that he is not the king’s son’.128 But the
earliest mention of doubt about the prince’s parentage, from 1456, is of
a different charge. In that year an apprentice was hanged, drawn and
quartered because ‘he made writings saying that Prince Edward was not

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the queen’s son’.129 Around that same time, a chronicler reports, ‘the
queen was defamed and slandered that he that was called Prince was not
her son but a bastard gotten in adultery’.130 Taken literally, both these
cases imply that the rumour was that Edward was not Margaret’s son,
rather than not being Henry’s. Perhaps they should be read as meaning
that he was not Margaret and Henry’s son. Margaret fought ferociously
for her son’s rights but could not prevent his killing at the hands of the
Yorkists when aged seventeen.
Of course, it is entirely possible that some charges of adultery were
true, but it is also clear that the issue involved an explosive combination
of male honour and the legitimacy of the blood-line, both of them
threatened by such accusations.

Sons and Lovers

The fate of royal widows varied considerably. Some married their dead
husband’s successor (see above, pp. 34–43). Sometimes foreign queens
went back to their homeland, as happened in the case of Matilda, daugh-
ter of Henry I of England and wife of Henry V of Germany, who returned
to her father’s lands after the death of her husband in 1125. Their
marriage was childless, but there are cases of foreign royal widows aban-
doning both their adopted countries and their natural children.
A striking example is Isabella of Angoulême, wife of King John of
England, who left England in 1217, the year after John’s death, to return
to Angoulême, where she remarried. Her new husband was the son of the
man she had been engaged to before John swept her away. Her children
by John, including the nine-year-old Henry III, were left behind. She and
Henry did not meet again until 1230. Despite this desertion, Henry
proved to be generous to Isabella’s children by her second marriage,
and his patronage of them in the 1240s and 1250s was one of the causes of
the baronial rebellion against him. Aymer de Valence, a son of one
of these half-brothers of the king, played an important part in the reigns
of Edward I and Edward II. This royal widow thus left a mark on English
politics for a hundred years, something that cannot be said of her
predecessor as queen, Berengaria of Navarre, who never visited
England at all. More significant than such cases were the widowed queens

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who remained in the kingdom, and here one crucial issue was whether
they were the mother of the new king or not. Queen mothers were to
be found in every kingdom and every century and often exercised
considerable power, especially if their son, the new king, was young,
for a respected queen mother could well be seen as a possible regent
for a child king. Blanche of Castile, regent for the young Louis IX, is
a notable example (see above, p. 117).
Kings were often resentful if their widowed mothers remarried. When
Eadgifu, mother of Louis IV of France, remarried after twenty-two years
of widowhood, Louis was so angry that he deprived her of her property,
giving some of it to his own wife. Perhaps his anger is partly explained by
her choice of a new husband, Count Heribert, son of the man who had
driven Louis from the kingdom as a child.131 A later king of France,
Philip I, reacted in a similar way to his mother’s remarriage. The mar-
riage of Anna of Kiev, widow of Henry I, to Raoul, count of Crépy and
Valois, took place in 1062, and was reported in a letter from the arch-
bishop of Rheims to the pope: ‘Our queen married count Raoul, which
grieved our king exceedingly.’132 A widowed queen’s remarriage was
a major event and could have political consequences. Catherine, widow
of Henry V of England, was forbidden by an Act of Parliament of 1427/8
to remarry without royal consent on pain of forfeiture of all her lands.133
In ruling dynasties, as in other families, a son’s relations with his father
might be difficult. Relations with a stepfather had yet more potential for
conflict. But what of relations with a mother’s lover? On more than one
occasion young dynasts did encounter the situation where their powerful
mothers, ruling as queens or regents, took one of their own nobles as
a lover. Urraca, queen regnant of Castile, is an example (on her, see
pp. 131–5 above). She had a son, Alfonso, by her first husband and, after
the death of that husband and Urraca’s succession to the throne, she got
married again, to Alfonso of Aragon. An opposition had formed around
the figure of her son, which led to warfare between Urraca and Alfonso of
Aragon, on one side, and the young Alfonso’s supporters, on the other:
a mother and a stepfather at war with the mother’s son. After separation
from her Aragonese husband, Urraca took a noble lover, Peter González
of Lara, and had two children by him. Peter appears in sixty-six of her
charters (44 per cent of the total 149 for her reign). In the first year of

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her reign he is called simply ‘the queen’s squire’, but by the last
years he has become ‘the honourable count, lord Peter de Lara’.134
After her death and the accession of Urraca’s son, Alfonso, Peter
rebelled and was exiled, seeking the protection of Urraca’s previous
husband, Alfonso of Aragon, and was soon thereafter killed in
a duel.135
This tale is curiously duplicated by that of Urraca’s illegitimate half-
sister, Teresa of Portugal. She too had a son, Alfonso, by a first marriage
but found herself at war with him after her husband’s death. She, too,
had a noble lover, Ferdinand Perez of Traba, by whom she had two
daughters. Between 1121 and 1128 Ferdinand Perez was virtual ruler of
Portugal. Even twenty years later a flattering poet could write of him, ‘if
one were to see him, one would judge him already a king’.136 This did not
stop the austere saint Theotonius, prior of the Holy Cross, Coimbra, from
publicly rebuking the couple: ‘one day, while he was preaching in the
church of Viseu, the queen and count Ferdinand, who was living with her
but not her lawful husband, quickly left the church blushing with
shame’.137 They faced opposition of a different kind from Teresa’s son,
Alfonso, who defeated his mother and Count Ferdinand in the Battle of
Guimarães or São Mamede in 1128. Like Peter González of Lara,
Ferdinand went into exile, but was ultimately reconciled to his lover’s
son.138
Another young ruler who had to deal with his mother’s lover was
Wenceslas II of Bohemia (see p. 119). He was not yet seven years of age
when his father Premysl Otakar II was killed fighting the Austrians in
1278. Rudolf, king of the Romans (Holy Roman Emperor elect), entered
Bohemia and appointed the margrave of Brandenburg to govern it, and
the young Wenceslas was taken off to Brandenburg, where, a sympathetic
chronicler records, he faced poverty and want: ‘He often lacked food . . .
he spent several years there in worn-out clothes, . . . and, denied linen
clothing, he had to be content with just woollen garments. He frequently
appeared with shoes that were falling to pieces, because he had not
a penny to give to have them mended.’139 Finally, in 1282, Wenceslas
returned to Bohemia. In the intervening four years the situation in his
kingdom had become anarchic, and the country also suffered famine.
‘With how great a sting of agitation’, asks the chronicler, ‘do you think

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the king’s heart was pierced, who found his kingdom completely
desolate?’140
He also found that his mother, Cunigunda, widow of Premysl Otakar,
had taken a lover, Zawisch von Falkenstein, member of a powerful
Bohemian noble family who had opposed Premysl Otakar.141 The
chronicler can only explain this distasteful fact by magic:

Because a woman’s mind changes easily, the queen, as they say, deluded by
certain tricks of his magic art, loved him warmly and made efforts to please
him . . . Zawisch, seeing that he had found favour in the eyes of the queen,
desired more, and stirred up the queen’s heart to love him, deceiving her
with certain stratagems of black magic. So the devil, as a deceitful best man,
took care that illicit intercourse should be consummated between the
queen and Zawisch.142

The queen gave birth to a son by Zawisch: ‘Thus Zawisch prostituted the
pure Cunigunda and stained the bed of the dead king of the
Bohemians.’143
Cunigunda was, perhaps understandably, apprehensive that her son
might be angry, but Wenceslas was more pleased to see her than cross
with what she had been doing: ‘The king ordered his mother Cunigunda
to be cheerful, and thus the boy rejoiced in his mother, he who had
previously lived suffering, without a father, in foreign lands.’144 He was
only eleven. Zawisch was also reconciled with the king. He wasted no time
in securing control of the royal court, dismissing the current officials and
replacing them with his own men, restricting access to Wenceslas and
encouraging the young king to indulge in ‘childish games’, so that ‘while
he played’ he would have a free hand in running the state.145 Zawisch
now married Cunigunda, in May 1285, but she did not long survive
this second wedding, dying the following September.
Zawisch’s ambitions were still high and he now sought and won the
hand of the king of Hungary’s sister. When she bore a child, he diplo-
matically asked both the king of Hungary, his brother-in law, and King
Wenceslas, his stepson, to be godparents, and to meet him on the borders
of the two kingdoms. Wenceslas’ friends feared a trap, designed to get the
king away from the crowds of Prague to a remote spot where Zawisch
could kill him. Wenceslas devised a counter-plan, asking Zawisch to come

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to Prague to escort him to the baptism and then seizing him, recovering
from him the royal treasure and regalia that he had in his possession and
finally, in 1290, executing him before the walls of the castle of Hluboká
(Frauenberg), which Zawisch’s brother was refusing to surrender. For
twelve years, from the age of seven to the age of nineteen, Wenceslas had
lived precariously and in the shadows of others. His mother’s lover had
ruled in his place and had acquired royal estates and royal treasure. Now,
at last, his loyal chronicler proclaimed, ‘You can live peacefully, young
king.’146
A similar situation occurred in England a generation or two later, but
with a more chilling ingredient. The young Edward III, like Wenceslas II,
faced a regime ruled by his widowed mother and her lover, but in this
case they had been responsible for his father’s deposition and death.147
The father, Edward II, had a fondness for bright young men and
indulged them by granting them lands and titles, freezing out the old
aristocracy.148 His French queen, Isabella, finally left him and resided in
France, where she encountered Roger Mortimer, a rebel baron, now
living in exile after escaping from the Tower of London. They became
lovers by March 1326 and plotted their return to England and the over-
throw of Edward II. In September 1326 they landed in England with
forces made up of Edward’s enemies and mercenaries and very quickly
brought down his regime and captured the king himself.
Edward II was deposed in January 1327 and his fourteen-year-old son
crowned as Edward III. His mother Isabella and her lover Roger
Mortimer governed England for the next four years, despite having no
official position. Mortimer used his power to destroy his enemies, build
up enormous wealth and even have an entirely new title, earl of March,
invented for him. At some point, most people believe, he ordered the
murder of the deposed king. Naturally, Mortimer created many enemies,
some of whom were willing to support the young Edward III in a bid to
free himself from the domination of his mother’s lover. In October 1330,
the seventeen-year-old king and a band of supporters entered
Nottingham castle, where Isabella and Mortimer were sleeping, through
a secret underground tunnel. Hearing them approaching the bedcham-
ber, Isabella called out, ‘Good son, good son, have mercy on noble
Mortimer!’149 But Edward showed no mercy. Mortimer was taken to the

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Tower of London, the same place where he had earlier been imprisoned
by Edward II, and, within a few weeks, was hanged like a common
criminal. Isabella was retired to a distant castle where she lived on for
almost twenty-eight years.
Wenceslas II and Edward III had experienced similar unsettling situa-
tions, having the title of king but seeing their mother’s lover actually rule.
In Edward’s case, in addition, the relationship between his mother and
Mortimer was adulterous and had led to his father’s murder. Wenceslas,
on the other hand, had endured deprivation and hardship and was much
younger than Edward, only seven, when his trouble began. In their late
teens both kings had asserted themselves, capturing and killing their
mother’s lover, in Edward’s case seizing him in his mother’s bed. There
is no question that Zawisch and Mortimer were powerful nobles who
represented a political threat to the young kings, but it is hard not to
imagine that there were complex sexual feelings at work when these
teenage boys killed their mother’s lovers in 1290 and 1330.

Stepmothers
In the pre-industrial world, stepmothers were common, because people
died young, and women were especially likely to die in childbirth, leaving
youngish husbands who would remarry. In the modern industrial world,
stepmothers are common because of the prevalence of divorce. Both
situations create a family with particular dynamics. One strong and
recurrent conception of the stepmother that emerges from many med-
ieval sources is of a hostile and jealous figure, who hates her stepchildren
and tries to influence her husband against them. For instance, Gregory of
Tours tells the story of King Sigismund of Burgundy (516–24), who
married a daughter of the Ostrogothic king Theodoric and had a son
by her, Sigeric. After her death, Sigismund married again:

he took another wife, who began fiercely to malign and slander his son,
as is the way with stepmothers. Whence it happened that, one feast day,
when the boy recognized his mother’s clothes on her, disturbed by
bitterness, he said to her, ‘For you were not worthy to have these clothes
cover your back, which are known to have belonged to your mistress, my
mother.’150

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This stepmother contrived to stir up Sigismund against Sigeric and he

had his son killed. The account simply assumes that stepmothers will
resent their stepsons. It also provides a credible motive for the son’s
outburst, seeing this woman dressed in his dead mother’s clothes, an
unforgivable appropriation of her intimate femininity. A son who had
lost his mother would, perhaps understandably, have complicated feel-
ings about his father’s new young wife. The sympathetic canoness,
Hroswitha of Gandersheim, explained the dissatisfaction of Liudolf, old-
est son of Otto I, on seeing his father remarry and the new wife assuming
a central place at court: ‘from the buried depths of the troubled young
man, it brings sighs of the heart for the lost loving of his own dear
mother’.151 Liudolf went on to rebel against his father, and died young.
Philip I of France was notorious for setting aside his wife, mother of his
son Louis, and taking up with Bertrada of Montfort, wife of the count of
Anjou. By her he had two sons, Philip and Florus, and rumours circulated
that Bertrada was determined that Philip, rather than her stepson Louis,
should succeed to the throne.152 Bishop Ivo of Chartres justified the very
hasty coronation of Louis in 1108, after his father’s death, by the fact that
‘there were certain disturbers of the kingdom’ plotting ‘to transfer the
kingdom to another person’.153 The Norman chronicler Orderic Vitalis
gives a colourful, perhaps partly imaginary, picture of Bertrada of
Montfort as a wicked stepmother. Orderic disapproved of the relation-
ship between King Philip and Bertrada, which he regarded, not unrea-
sonably, as adulterous, calling Bertrada a pelex, the less polite word for
‘mistress’, and stressing her ambitions for her own sons: ‘She greatly
desired his [Louis’] destruction and made many attempts, with the
help of her companions in evil, to ensure that she would glory in the
ruling power and her sons, Philip and Florus, would be securely
enthroned in the royal seat if he should die.’ Orderic tells the story of
how, when Louis visited the court of Henry I of England, Bertrada sent
a secret envoy to Henry with a letter supposedly from King Philip, asking
him to seize Louis and lock him up for life. The plot failed, however, and,
when Louis heard of it, he wished to kill his stepmother. She decided to
strike before him and employed three sorcerers to kill him through
magic. When the plot was discovered and disrupted, Bertrada turned to
poisoners, who were able to bring Louis to the point of death. He was

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saved at the last minute, not by French doctors, but by ‘a hairy man from
Barbary’, who ‘had lived a long time among the heathen and had learned
the deep and subtle secrets of nature from his teachers’. Louis recovered
but was always paler than before. Soon after his succession his stepmother
retired to a monastery.154
Stepdaughters could have feelings just as complex as stepsons. Maria
porphyrogenita, daughter of the Byzantine emperor Manuel Comnenus
by his first wife, was regarded as rightful heir to the empire until the birth
of a son to Manuel by his second wife, Maria of Antioch. This might have
been grounds enough for resentment on the part of Maria porphyrogen-
ita. The situation became more complicated, however, after Manuel’s
death in 1180 and the succession of his young son, Alexius II, with Maria
of Antioch, his mother, as regent. Although the widowed empress
took the veil and adopted the name in religion of Xene (‘the foreign
woman’), she nevertheless took as her lover Manuel’s nephew, the proto-
sebastos Alexius Comnenus. The emotions of Maria porphyrogenita are
described by the historian Niketas Choniates: ‘She almost choked at the
thought of the protosebastos unholily exploring her father’s bed; besides,
she welcomed rash deeds, was like a man in spirit and exceedingly jealous
of her stepmother by nature.’155 Here there is a remarkable conjunction
of two apparently contradictory emotions: outrage at another man being
in her father’s bed, but also hatred of the woman her father had been in
that bed with. Young kings like Wenceslas II and Edward III had to deal
with their mother’s lover, princes like Sigeric of Burgundy and the future
Louis VI faced antagonism from stepmothers, but Maria porphyrogenita
confronted a stepmother who had introduced a lover into her father’s
bed.
Maria porphyrogenita now gave her support to a cousin, Andronicus
Comnenus, in opposition to Maria of Antioch, and plotted to overthrow
her, but, after the failure of her coup in 1181, she had to take refuge in
Hagia Sophia, saying that she was in flight from her angry stepmother
and violent lover, who, she said, ‘had sullied the family’.156 Street fighting
between her faction and that of the empress followed, eventually settled
by a truce and amnesty. Meanwhile Andronicus Comnenus was closing in
and eventually all other participants fell victim to him. The protosebastos
Alexius Comnenus was blinded, Maria porphyrogenita and her husband

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supposedly poisoned, the empress Maria of Antioch strangled after

Andronicus had secured her condemnation by her own son, the young
emperor Alexius, who signed the decree ‘as though with a drop of his
mother’s blood’.157 Finally Alexius himself was strangled, decapitated
and his body thrown into the sea. Andronicus had ruthlessly cleared
the field for himself but his first steps were made easier by the clash of
stepmother and stepdaughter in Constantinople.
These events, like the alleged adultery of the daughters-in-law of
Philip IV of France or the tense relations between Wenceslas II and his
mother’s lover, Zawisch von Falkenstein, underline how impossible it is
to separate the political and the sexual in the lives of members of ruling
dynasties. For great men and great women, taking a lover was far from
being a private matter. It not only involved them with the family of their
lover, with possible consequences for the patterns of power, but also
threw a stone into the dark waters of the emotions of their own relatives.
Sons and daughters had strong feelings about the sexual behaviour of
their widowed mothers or stepmothers and all around were powerful and
competitive courtiers and lords eager to use those feelings to gain an
advantage for their own position, while an adulterous queen or simply
the charge of adultery would unsettle court life and perhaps provide her
enemies with the chance to advance their own faction or undermine that
of their opponents. What happened in bed had political consequences.

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 CHAPTER 7

Royal Mortality

Death

V ery many members of ruling dynasties, like other

people in the Middle Ages, died before puberty. A study of the
top ranks of the nobility in late medieval England, whose mortality would
be the same as or similar to that of royal families, shows that around
a third of children died before they were five. Those who survived, who
are the ones we know something about, might live a fair bit longer. Male
members of this group who survived to twenty might expect to live
another twenty years, while females could anticipate another thirty, the
difference being largely explained by the violent deaths of males through
execution or in battle.1 The average age at death of the Plantagenet kings
was forty-five. The longest survivor, Edward I, died at the age of sixty-
eight. Statistics for German rulers are astonishingly similar. The average
age at death of the kings of Germany in the period 911–1273 was about
forty-six. Frederick Barbarossa was the oldest, probably sixty-eight, like
Edward I of England. The rulers of Castile from 1157–1504 were slightly
less long-lived, dying, on average, at forty, with Alfonso X, ‘the Wise’,
being the veteran, at age sixty-three.2 So these monarchies present
a generally similar pattern, with average age at death in the forties and
the longest-lived monarchs dying in their sixties.
A normal life, terminated by a ‘natural’ death, through illness, need thus
not be very long. Many lives, however, came to a violent and sudden end.
Sometimes this was through accidents. Most members of ruling dynasties
lived active, outdoor lives and faced the risks that are unavoidable to those on

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horseback. Horses are big, powerful animals and riding has its hazards.
Philip, the crowned son of Louis VI of France, died when his horse fell on
him after stumbling on a pig in the streets of Paris.3 In 882 Louis III, king of
the West Franks, met his death after an accident he suffered while chasing
a girl. She fled to her father’s house and Louis ‘jokingly’ pursued her on
horseback. He hit the door-frame, however, and injured himself so seriously
that he died soon afterwards.4 When John I of Castile visited Alcalá de
Henares in 1390 he was tempted to give his horse its head on a clear open
field:

the king rode on a Castilian roan horse. He went out of the town through
the Burgos Gate and, in a fallow field, the king gave the spurs to the horse
he was riding and, in the middle of the gallop, it stumbled and fell with the
king, in such a way that he broke every bone in his body.5

Mary of Burgundy, who ruled the great Burgundian domains in her own
right from 1477 to 1482, and was the wife of Maximilian of Habsburg, son
of the Holy Roman Emperor (later to be Emperor himself), ‘rode a fiery
little horse’, but while she was out riding in the early spring of 1482 this
creature threw her and she hit her head upon a large piece of wood,
dying a few days later. News was brought to Louis XI of France, enemy of
the house of Burgundy, ‘who had great joy of them’. He immediately
began planning to undermine Burgundian power.6 Such was the link
between a fall in the woods and the high politics of medieval Europe.
The dangers of riding were heightened during the hunt. In
November 1143, Fulk, king of Jerusalem, was accompanying his wife on an
excursion outside the city of Acre when their entourage startled a hare in
their path.

The king, unfortunately, snatched up his lance and urged his horse forward to
that spot and drove it into a swift gallop in order to pursue the hare. Speeding
heedlessly forward, the horse fell headlong to the ground, threw the king and,
as he lay there, stunned by the pain of the fall, the saddle crushed his head, so
that his brains came out both through his ears and his nose.7

He lived on for three days but did not regain consciousness. His body was
taken for burial to the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem and his
widow and teenage son took up the reins of government.

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In this case, Fulk had simply seized an unexpected opportunity for

hare-coursing, but planned hunts were also very hazardous and could
result in fatal accidents. Since the hunt was a major activity of the
European ruling class throughout the Middle Ages (and beyond),
there are examples from all times and places, some of them with impor-
tant political consequences. Aistulf, king of the Lombards, was killed in
756 while hunting in the woods when his horse threw him against a tree.8
In 884 the West Frankish king Carloman also died from a hunting acci-
dent: ‘he is said to have been killed by being gored by a boar during
a hunt, but in fact he died after being accidentally wounded by one of his
followers in that hunt’.9 In the haste and excitement of the hunt, with the
limited visibility of forest terrain, such accidents were not surprising.
William Rufus, second of the Norman kings of England, son of William
the Conqueror, also died when one of his companions shot him acciden-
tally while on a hunt in the New Forest. One of Rufus’ nephews also died
in the New Forest, either colliding with a tree while galloping after an
animal or, like Rufus, shot accidentally by a companion, and one of
Rufus’ brothers also died hunting there. The New Forest had been
created by William the Conqueror as a royal hunting reserve and
required the eviction of most of its inhabitants and the closure of many
churches, so it is not surprising that monastic chroniclers saw the deaths
of these members of the Conqueror’s family as divine judgment.10
Whether this was the case or not, William Rufus’ unexpected death
provided his younger brother with the opportunity to seize the Crown
and become Henry I of England. Another royal casualty of an accident on
the hunt was Valdemar, son and heir of Valdemar II of Denmark, and co-
king, who was shot in the foot while hunting at Røsnæs, near Kalundborg,
in 1231 and died from the wound, presumably from infection.11
The combination of fast riding and wild beasts that the hunt might
involve often proved fatal. Three Byzantine emperors died in hunting
accidents, either falling from their horse or from the attack of the animals
they were hunting.12 Two of the last three Carolingian rulers of France,
Louis IV in 954 and Louis V in 987, died after hunting accidents, the former
falling from his horse while pursuing a wolf.13 This latter incident marked
the end of the last Carolingian king. A rather more unusual beast turned up
in 1220 when the disaffected Leonese prince Sancho, a potential claimant

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to the throne, who was on his way to join the Spanish Muslims but had set up
a base in an abandoned castle in order to plunder the neighbouring lands,
was killed by a bear while hunting in the wilderness.14
Riding accidents and hunting accidents thus harvested a crop of
rulers. Another permanent threat was human physical violence in this
complex, brutal world. It is easy enough when reading medieval chroni-
cles or modern summaries of the political histories of medieval kingdoms
to be struck by the high level of violence in political life. Obviously,
modern times also provide plenty of examples of political violence, but
it is remarkable how often medieval rulers died violent deaths and how
common usurpation was. But this violence was not uniform, of a similar
intensity in all times and places, and it is worthwhile trying to map out the
more and the less violent regimes and societies.
A statistical study of 1,500 European rulers between 600 and 1800 calcu-
lated that about 6 per cent died in battle and more than 14 per cent were
murdered. It also concluded that the rates of both battle deaths and murders
declined markedly over the course of the Middle Ages: battle deaths were
common in the period 600–1100, less frequent in the twelfth and thirteenth
centuries and insignificant after 1300, while murders of kings and queens
were less frequent after 1400 than before.15 Since these statistics are drawn
from a large number of monarchies, including the Ottoman empire and
Muslim Spain, and extend to the end of the eighteenth century, the result-
ing thesis, of a long-term decline in political violence, cannot simply be
reapplied to Latin Christendom and Byzantium in the period 500–1500,
the world of this book. It is probably more fruitful to look at geographical
and chronological variation within that world.
The average length of the reign of medieval monarchs varied from
country to country and period to period. This is unlikely to reflect
different demographic regimes, such as major changes in overall life
expectancy or the impact of new diseases, but rather the level of instabil-
ity and violence in the political system. For instance, if we compare the
average length of reign of the Byzantine emperors with that of the kings
of France after 987, the date of the accession of the first Capetian, it is
striking that the former, at twelve years, is exactly half that of the kings of
France.16 This is obviously connected with the fact that more than a third
of Byzantine emperors came to power through usurpation, while the

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French throne descended in an unbroken line of family succession.

A calculation has been made that of the eighty-eight Byzantine emperors
from Constantine the Great, who founded Constantinople in 324, to
Constantine XII, who died defending it in 1453, only thirty-seven died
natural deaths in office. That is 42 per cent. Of the rest, three died in
hunting accidents and five in battle, but forty-five were either killed,
mutilated or sent to monasteries by their supplanters. Blinding was the
most commonly inflicted form of mutilation, sometimes done with such
gusto that it led to death, as in the case of Constantine VI, blinded on his
mother’s command in 797, and Romanos IV Diogenes in 1072.17
When we compare Byzantium and France, we are in fact comparing, on
the one hand, an empire which continued the violent succession practices of
imperial Rome, with, on the other hand, the most smoothly functioning
dynastic system in western Europe. One of the things that struck contem-
porary observers of the Capetian dynasty was this peaceful transmission of
power from generation to generation. ‘They have persisted faithfully in the
faith of Christ’, wrote Ralph de Diceto, dean of St Paul’s, London, in a riot of
alliteration, ‘and have experienced the most faithful faith of their subjects, so
that, raised to the royal crown through the due favour of the Gauls, they have
completed the course of life, not with the sword, not by poison, but by the
common fate of all.’18 Gerald of Wales echoed this praise of the Capetians:

these, always following their father’s reign in hereditary sequence and by

natural right . . . when they have at last run through the course of temporal
life, dying a good death and receiving eternal reward in heaven for such
pious and just rule, hand on their realms happily to their sons and heirs.19

The calm waters of Capetian rule were occasionally troubled by disputes

involving members of the family. The first three generations, in particu-
lar, saw kings in conflict with sons and brothers, but after the middle of
the eleventh century such dissension was rare. It was reported that
Bertrada of Montfort, stepmother of Louis VI, hoped to replace Louis
with her son by Philip I, also called Philip;20 there was apparently an
attempted coup by Robert of Dreux, brother of Louis VII, in 1149, while
the king was still in the East during the Second Crusade;21 and, in the
early years of the young Louis IX, aristocratic rebels included Philip

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Hurepel, son of Philip Augustus, and Peter Mauclerc, a great-grandson of

Louis VI. But these challenges are separated by fifty or eighty years and
seem to have been brushed off without much trouble. Significantly, in
none of these cases does physical violence seem to have been envisaged
against the king. In fact, no French king suffered a violent death at the
hands of assailants between the death of Robert I in battle in 923 and the
assassination of Henry III in 1589, a record that has no parallel in
medieval Europe.
Kings were expected to be war-leaders and so death in battle against
foreign foes was sometimes their fate. These foreign foes might not be
so far away. The competing Anglo-Saxon kingdoms of the seventh
century were often engaged in warfare with each other and Bede, the
main source for the period, reports the deaths of twelve kings fighting
against their English neighbours, as well as the defeat and death of
Ecgfrith of Northumbria during his invasion of the land of the Picts.
Warfare between the Irish kingdoms was likewise constant and death in
battle a common fate of Irish kings. Elsewhere, there might be a clearer
cultural division between enemies. The Byzantines conceived of their
world as surrounded by barbarians who needed to be resisted and this
warfare was endless and sometimes disastrous: the emperor Nicephorus
I was killed fighting the Bulgars in 811 and his skull made into a drinking
cup by the victors,22 while in 1453 Constantine XII, the last emperor,
died fighting the Turks in the imperial city of Constantinople itself.
It was not only foreign enemies who were to be feared. Probably as
much effort was expended in fighting internal rivals as external foes and
some civil wars were long and bloody. Several rulers of the western
empire (‘Holy Roman Emperors’) or claimants to that title died in battle
against German rivals or rebels. Rudolf of Rheinfelden, elected king in
opposition to Henry IV, met him in battle in 1080 and, although Rudolf’s
side won the battle, he died after having his right hand cut off, a ‘most
worthy punishment for his perjury’, according to Henry’s supporters.23
William of Holland, another ‘anti-king’, died fighting against the lightly
armed and always independent Frisians in the winter of 1256, when his
heavy armoured war-horse fell through the ice of a frozen marsh, and the
Frisians stuck him full of javelins.24 In 1298 Adolf of Nassau was killed

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fighting against Albert of Habsburg, whom the electors had chosen in his
place after deposing him.
Some battle deaths marked a dynastic revolution: the replacement
of native Anglo-Saxon kings by the Norman dynasty after Hastings in
1066; the overthrow of the Hohenstaufen by the Angevin dynasty in
Sicily after Benevento in 1266; the end of the Plantagenets and arrival
of the Tudors after Bosworth in 1485. Others did not end dynasties but
nevertheless marked permanent political reorientations. After Peter II
of Aragon was killed at Muret in 1213, his assemblage of southern
French territories and overlordships largely disintegrated and southern
France orientated itself towards northern France, not towards
Catalonia. The death of Premysl Otakar II of Bohemia at the
Marchfeld (also known as the Battle of Dürnkrüt) in 1278 led to the
disintegration of his central European empire and opened opportu-
nities for the family of his victorious opponent, Rudolf of Habsburg,
father of the Albert just mentioned.
Battles were rare; murder and assassination less so. In some regimes
they were constant features. Between 531 and 555 four Visigothic kings of
Spain were killed by their own subjects. Bishop Gregory of Tours
expressed his distaste for this way of dispensing with rulers: ‘The Goths
have this detestable custom, that, if one of their kings does not please
them, they fall upon him with the sword, and make someone king who is
agreeable to them.’25 It needed the harsh rule of Leovigild (568–86) to
end this situation, and Gregory describes him ‘killing all those who had
been accustomed to kill kings, not leaving alive anyone who pisses against
a wall’ (that is, any male).26 But, after the reigns of Leovigild and his son
Reccared, dynastic stability was again disrupted and most subsequent
Visigothic kings were killed or deposed.
Scandinavia also had a reputation for the killing of kings. The English
chronicler William of Newburgh, writing in the 1190s, thought that it was
pretty much a law that Norwegian kings came to a violent end:

for the last hundred years, or more, although many kings have succeeded
there, not one of them has ended his life either from old age or disease,
but all have died from cold iron, leaving the title of the kingdom to their
killers, as if to legitimate successors.27

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But this was changing even as William wrote. The last violent death of
a recognized Norwegian king was that of Magnus Erlingsson in 1184, who
drowned during a battle in the Sognefjord. Only six kings before that
time had died a peaceful death, so 1184 marks a turning point.28 It was
a change in levels of violence that came to the other Scandinavian king-
doms, for the murder of Erik Klipping of Denmark in 1286 was the very
last case of the murder of a Scandinavian king, with the one exception of
Gustaf III of Sweden, who was shot at a masked ball in 1792.29 The
example of Denmark also shows that periods of violence could be short
and intermittent. Of the thirty-two kings who ruled Denmark in the
period 1000–1500, eight died violent deaths, but half of these (i.e. the
deaths which occurred in 1134 and 1137, and the two in 1157) were in
a period of civil war in the middle of the twelfth century; otherwise, there
was one case in the eleventh century and three in the thirteenth, includ-
ing Erik Klipping’s murder. While it is true that a quarter of Denmark’s
kings in this period died violent deaths, the violence was not a uniform
feature of Danish dynastic life.
But the pattern of declining violence is certainly not universal.
Dynasties which proliferated into various separate lines had a particular
tendency to bloody rivalry. When Charlemagne drew up plans for the
future of his empire in 806, he included a provision protecting his
present and future grandsons. None of his sons, he ordered, should
kill, mutilate, blind or forcibly tonsure any of the grandsons, without
a just trial.30 This provision reveals what he thought were likely events,
which needed to be guarded against, namely, violence within the dynasty.
This was a striking feature of Irish royal dynasties. For instance, ‘between
1274 and 1315 there were no less than thirteen kings of Connacht, of
whom nine were killed by their own brothers or cousins and two were
deposed’.31
The history of the Angevin dynasty of the later Middle Ages, which
ruled both Naples and Hungary, is also marked by recurrent murders as
the different branches of the family struggled with each other. Notably,
the victims included royal women as well as royal men. Andrew of
Hungary, the teenage husband, and cousin, of Joanna I of Naples, was
murdered in mysterious circumstances in 1345, and Andrew’s older
brother, Louis, king of Hungary, suspected Joanna’s involvement and

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undertook repeated military expeditions to Naples. In 1348, Joanna fled

the kingdom, while Louis captured and beheaded Charles of Durazzo,
Joanna’s brother-in-law and cousin. Eventually Louis withdrew and
Joanna was restored. Louis of Hungary now encouraged the ambitions
of Charles of Durazzo’s nephew, also Charles of Durazzo, who, in 1381,
deposed Joanna I, took the throne of Naples, and, the following year, had
Joanna murdered. After the death of Louis of Hungary in 1382, his
daughter Mary was proclaimed his successor, under the regency of
Elizabeth, her mother, but Charles of Durazzo was determined to assert
his claim and invaded Hungary. He deposed Mary and became king of
Hungary as well as Naples in December 1385, but was murdered after
a few months, at the instigation of Elizabeth. It was not long before
Elizabeth herself fell into the hands of her opponents, who had her
strangled in 1387. This complex and brutal sequence of events shows
competition between different branches of the family reaching a very
high level of violence and enduring over generations. There is nothing
primitive or backward about the societies in which this savage family
drama was played out and it is clearly not part of a story of declining
violence.
It is possible to establish the chronological patterns of dynastic vio-
lence in individual kingdoms. If we take as an example the twenty-five
kings of Scots who died between 1000 and 1500, we find that eight
suffered a violent death at the hands of enemies, to which we can add
the case of Donald III (Domnall Bán), who was either deposed and
blinded or actually killed in 1097. Of those nine cases, seven are found
in the eleventh century and two in the fifteenth. Between 1097, the
deposition of Donald III, and the murder of James I in 1437, a period
of 340 years, no Scottish king was killed by enemies, although one died in
an accident and another, John Balliol, was deposed. It is certainly not the
case that Scottish history in the twelfth, thirteenth and fourteenth cen-
turies was tranquil and untroubled, but the killing of kings was not part of
ordinary political life. In the eleventh century, in contrast, it was the rule:
only one of the eight kings who died in that period died a natural death.
This was Malcolm II, whose reign was an unusually long one of twenty-
nine years. His reign began with Malcolm defeating and killing a cousin,
and he was still finding it necessary to kill kinsmen in his last years, so this

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was not an oasis of peace in a bloody century. At the other end of the
period we are discussing, the fifteenth century, two of the four regal
deaths were murders by native opponents. In addition, James II was
blown up by one of his own cannons while besieging Roxburgh. There
thus seems to be a move away from the most extreme form of dynastic
violence after 1100 but a return to it in the fifteenth century. If we
consider the Plantagenet dynasty of England, a clear chronological pat-
tern emerges, which we can set by the side of the Scottish figure. In the
medieval period, excluding those who died as babies, there were fifty-
eight male descendants of Count Geoffrey of Anjou, from whom the
Plantagenets descended. Of these, twenty-three died through violence,
sixteen of them (almost three-quarters) in the fifteenth century, the last
century of Plantagenet rule. This century clearly belongs to what the
great medievalist Maitland called ‘the ages of blood’, after an earlier
period when the upper classes had been relatively less bloodthirsty in
their feuds.32 A return to high levels of violence in the fifteenth century is
thus discernible in both Scotland and England.
An ancient Greek saying was, ‘He is a fool who kills the father and spares
the sons’,33 and the unfortunate children of deposed rulers might well be
finished off along with them, a natural precaution to prevent future trouble.
This is what happened to the young sons of the emperor Maurice when he
was deposed and beheaded in 602.34 When Justinian II was murdered in
711, his six-year-old son Tiberius was also hunted down and killed.35 The
same savage efficiency was exhibited by the Merovingians. After the
Frankish king Theuderic II defeated his half-brother Theudebert II in
612, ‘his little son, called Meroveus, was, at Theuderic’s command, seized
by the foot and dashed against a rock; his brains burst forth from his head
and he gave up the spirit’.36
There were ways of neutralizing one’s enemies short of murder.
Byzantine usurpers sometimes sought to insure their future by castrating
the sons of those they displaced. If dynastic continuity depended on
‘propagation of blood’, then castration was one effective way of ensuring
that no propagation took place. To castrate one’s enemies meant that
their line was at an end and that no sons would grow up as their avengers.
The oldest son of Michael I Rangabe (811–13) was castrated at the age of
twenty after his father’s deposition, while, after the murder of Leo V in

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820, his four sons were exiled and castrated.37 Michael V (1041–2) had
the evil reputation of having castrated all his own relatives, presumably to
safeguard his position.38 Blinding of rivals was also a very common
practice in Byzantium. In 792 Constantine VI blinded his uncle
Nicephorus, who was a contender for the throne, as well as cutting out
the tongues of his other four uncles.39 The Carolingians, too, frequently
used blinding as a way of removing opponents without actually killing
them. Louis the Pious had his nephew, Bernard, king of Italy, blinded in
818 after he had conspired against him. Louis’ son Charles the Bald had
his own son, Carloman, blinded after rebellion. Charles the Fat blinded
his cousin Hugh, the illegitimate son of Lothar II, in 885 after
a conspiracy against him.40 The practice continued after the collapse of
the Carolingian empire. Louis, king of Provence and later emperor,
whose mother was a Carolingian, was blinded by Berengar, his rival for
the kingdom of Italy, in 905. Berengar justified his action by saying that
Louis had earlier sworn an oath not to come to Italy again.41
A contemporary poet gives a vivid picture of Berengar’s men approach-
ing the walls of Verona, where Louis had taken refuge in a church:

They were admitted straightaway and entered the church where the
wretched Louis was, and swiftly seized him, bound him and deprived
him of his fair eyes. For he was sitting in the nave, perhaps thinking
himself safe, and that is why he lost the kindly gifts of light, and was to be
besieged by shadow even at daybreak.42

Blinding of rivals, within or outside the dynasty, was also a common

feature of dynastic life in Ireland. The Annals of Ulster report fifteen
cases in the eleventh century alone.43 The practice continued into the
late Middle Ages. In 1444, the Annals record, ‘Mathgamain Ua Brian was
blinded and deposed this year by his own brother, namely, Toirdelbach
Ua Brian, and Toirdelbach himself was made king over Thomond.’44 In
the Welsh princely houses the practice of castrating enemies and rivals
was common. In one case, the motives, although perhaps obvious anyway,
are spelled out: ‘Hywel ap Iorweth of Caerleon seized Owain Pen-carn,
his uncle. And, after gouging his eyes out of his head, he had him
castrated lest he should beget issue who might rule thereafter over
Caerleon.’45 Castrating your uncle meant you did not have to deal with

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cousins. It has, however, been plausibly argued that Welsh dynastic

politics underwent a change in the last century of Welsh independence
and that after 1200 ‘political bloodshed was rare’.46 Indeed, the last case
of castration recorded in the main Welsh chronicle, the Brut y Tywysogyon,
is in 1175, the last case of blinding in 1193.47
After the Holy Roman Emperor Henry VI conquered the kingdom of
Sicily in 1194, he ensured that the previous ruler would never pose
a threat by blinding and castrating the child-king William III, son of
Tancred.48 Duke Almos of Hungary and his son Bela were blinded by
Almos’ brother, King Koloman of Hungary, c. 1113, on account of
Almos’ rebellion. Koloman also ordered Bela to be castrated, but the
man instructed to do this, ‘fearing God and the sterility of the kingdom’,
castrated a puppy instead and brought its testicles to the king. Koloman’s
son, King Stephen II (1116–31), kept Bela in custody but designated him
as his successor and arranged his marriage with the Serbian princess
Ilona. Bela ‘the Blind’ ruled 1131–41 and was the ancestor of the later
kings of Hungary. Queen Ilona reportedly had sixty-eight nobles exe-
cuted for their involvement in her husband’s blinding.49

Burial
Mausolea
It is in the nature of the evidence that we know more about the deaths
than the births of members of ruling dynasties. Memorialization of the
dead was one of the main activities of the medieval Church, and was one
of the reasons that lay people, including rulers, were willing to invest in it,
donating vast amounts of property in return for burial sites, commem-
oration and intercessory prayer. Kings gave a lot of thought to where they
wanted to be buried and might have their tombs constructed during their
lifetime. The place of burial would often be specified in their wills and
sometimes long journeys were undertaken with the corpse to fulfil the
king’s wish about his last resting place. Medieval genealogies and family
trees (discussed below, pp. 326–39) sometimes identified rulers by their
places of death or burial. A genealogy of the Dauphins of Vienne from
the twelfth to the fourteenth century gives very little biographical

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information but invariably names their wives and the churches in which
the Dauphins were buried.50 In some texts of this type the circumstances
of death might be mentioned if they were unusual. One family tree noted
that the West Frankish king Carloman (879–84) was ‘killed while hunt-
ing’ and another labels the unfortunate Philip, the son of Louis VI,
crowned in his father’s lifetime, whose horse fell on him after stumbling
on a pig in the streets of Paris, ‘killed by a pig’.51
Some rulers wished to be buried in churches that they themselves had
founded. This was true of the Norman kings of England: William I was
buried in Caen, Henry I in Reading, and Stephen in Faversham, in each
case in abbeys of their own foundation. The Angevin kings, Henry II and
Richard I, were buried in Fontevrault, not a church of their founding but
one they had patronised, and John was buried in Worcester Cathedral at
his own request. Of the kings of England 1066–1216, only one, William
Rufus, who died in a hunting accident in the New Forest and was buried
in Winchester Cathedral, the nearest great church, had no say in his
choice of burial site. Similarly, the Byzantine emperors of this period also
were often buried in monasteries they had founded in Constantinople:
Romanos III Argyros (d. 1034) in St Mary Peribleptos; Constantine IX
Monomachos (d. 1055) in St George Mangana; Alexius I Comnenus
(d. 1118) in Christos Philanthropos; John II Comnenus (d. 1143) in
the Pantokrator monastery.
In contemporary France, Louis VII was buried in the Cistercian abbey
of Barbeau in 1180. The French chronicler Rigord, reporting this fact,
stresses that Louis was the founder of this monastery and also envisages
the main purpose of such patronage:

His body was buried with glory in the church of Notre-Dame-de-Barbeau,

which he himself founded, where, to the honour of Our Lord Jesus Christ
and of the blessed Virgin Mary, mother of God, and of all the saints, divine
services are celebrated day and night by holy and religious men for his soul
and the souls of all his predecessors and for the state of the kingdom of the
French.52

What was desired was a stream of intercessory prayer, for the dead king,
his predecessors and the kingdom, going on for ever until the end of this
world. By being the founder, a king might hope that the monks would

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remember him all the more. Whether or not they founded a burial
church, kings frequently specified where they wished to be buried. In
1180, when Ferdinand II of Leon confirmed the property and privileges
of the cathedral church of Santiago, he also promised them ‘my burial
and that of my successors’.53 He was indeed buried there, as was his son,
Alfonso IX. These specifications could be complex. When Charles II,
king of Sicily, made his will in 1308, he asked to be buried in the church
of Notre-Dame-de-Nazareth in Aix-en-Provence, the kings of Sicily being
also counts of Provence at this time. However, he added, if he died in his
Italian kingdom he should be buried in the Dominican church at Naples
but, within two years, should be transported to Aix (as he was).54
Some dynasties developed mausolea, customary burial sites for the
family. Churches were used for this as soon as rulers converted to
Christianity. The Church of the Holy Apostles in Constantinople, origin-
ally founded by the emperor Constantine I or his son Constantius II,
served as a mausoleum for Byzantine emperors from the fourth to the
eleventh century. Eventually it housed forty-eight tombs containing the
remains of emperors or members of the imperial family.55 It is possible
that this imperial mausoleum was a model for Clovis (d. 511), first
Christian king of the Franks, when he built a church of the Holy
Apostles in Paris as his own burial church.56 Æthelbert, king of Kent
(d. 616), the first Anglo-Saxon king to accept Christianity, founded
a burial church for himself in his chief city of Canterbury, in a chapel
attached to the monastery of St Peter and St Paul (later called St
Augustine’s). Subsequent kings of his dynasty were buried in
Canterbury for generations, in the church of St Mary within the precincts
of the monastery.57
In later centuries, the royal abbey of St-Denis came to fulfil the func-
tion of a mausoleum for the French kings. Of the twenty-three Capetian
kings who ruled between the reign of Hugh Capet (987–96) and the end
of the Middle Ages, twenty were buried there.58 Exceptions were so rare
that they provoked comment. Abbot Suger of St-Denis, for example,
described how Philip I, who died in 1108 and was buried at the abbey
of Fleury, ‘had resolved to absent himself from the burial place of his
royal forefathers, which is regarded as being the church of St-Denis as if
by natural right’.59 The Norman chronicler Orderic Vitalis gives Philip

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a deathbed speech in which he says ‘I know the burial place of the kings
of the French is at St-Denis but because I feel that I am a great sinner, I do
not dare to be buried alongside such a great martyr’ (Denis was reputed
to be an early bishop of Paris who had been martyred at Montmartre,
‘martyrs’ hill’).60 The Capetians, especially the early ones, are famous for
their narrow horizons, spending most of their lives in the royal demesne
lands around Laon, Paris and Orleans, and their burial choices reflect
this local rootedness.
The pattern of burials of the German rulers was very different. The
burial places of the Hohenstaufen kings of Germany, who ruled from
1138 to 1254, show their wide vistas, but also their lack of an enduring
territorial base, even one of the modest size of the Ile-de-France. Only two
were actually buried in Germany, at Bamberg and Speyer, while the
dynasty’s acquisition of the throne of Sicily in 1194 led to four of the
Hohenstaufen kings having their tombs in Italy, two at Palermo, one at
Messina and one at Cosenza in Calabria, while the death on crusade of
Frederick Barbarossa explains why his bones came to rest in Tyre.61 The
closest Germany came to a royal mausoleum was Speyer. Eight of the
twenty-four kings who ruled in the period 911–1308 were entombed
there.62 But even if this figure represents a third of the monarchs of
this period, there were substantial breaks in the continuity of the tradi-
tion. Only the Salian dynasty, which ruled for a century from 1024–1125,
buried all its members there, often undertaking long journeys with the
body of the dead king to ensure it rested in Speyer Cathedral, which the
family had built in the midst of their ancestral estates just for that
purpose. But after the death of the last Salian ruler in 1125, there was
only one royal interment there in the next 166 years.63 It was no St.-Denis.
This contrast in the patterns of the burial sites of the Capetians and the
German kings, the concentration of the former, the wide dispersal of the
latter, is a contrast between a narrow range with deep roots versus wide
imperial horizons.
The royal tombs in St.-Denis became a tourist attraction and, like all
such sites, generated guidebooks. Writing in the 1190s, the monk and
chronicler Rigord produced a ‘handbook (opus manuale)’ which listed all
the kings, gave brief details about them and informed the reader ‘where
each of them has his tomb’.64 The same purpose informed William de

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Nangis, archivist of St.-Denis, a century later. He explained his object in

translating his own brief account of the kings of France into the
vernacular:

Because many people, and high and noble men too, who often come to the
church of my lord St Denis of France, where some of the valiant kings of
France lie buried, wish to understand and know the birth and descent of
their most high lineage, and the wonderful deeds of these kings of France,
which are recounted and spread abroad through many lands, I, brother
William de Nangis, monk of this church of St.-Denis, at the request of good
people, have made a translation from Latin into French so that those who
do not understand Latin can know and understand whence such noble
and blessed people descended and first came from.65

Noble visitors to St-Denis could thus have a handbook in French to help

make sense of their tour of the abbey.
Across the Channel, it eventually became a common, though by no
means universal, custom for English kings to be buried in Westminster
Abbey. Edward the Confessor, last of the Wessex line, who was respon-
sible for rebuilding the abbey church, was buried there in 1066, but it was
more than two centuries before the next royal interment, that of Henry
III, who died in 1272. Henry revered Edward the Confessor and had
himself rebuilt the church. After Henry’s death, four more medieval
English kings were buried there: Edward I, Edward III, Richard II (after
initial burial elsewhere) and Henry V. Westminster’s role as a burial
church was therefore far more intermittent than its acknowledged status
as the place for coronation. There continued to be a variety of burial sites
in the later Middle Ages: Edward II at Gloucester, Henry IV at
Canterbury, Henry VI and Edward IV at Windsor (the former case
a reinterment), Richard III at Leicester, close to the site of his death in
battle.
Westminster and St.-Denis have some obvious similarities: both were
great abbeys which played a central role in royal rituals, coronation and
burial in the first case, guardianship of the royal insignia, though not
coronation, and burial in the second, both were situated not in, but close
to, the chief city of the kingdom, both produced generations of monastic
chroniclers. Yet there were also important differences, notably the fact

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that royal government in England came to be centred in Westminster,

adjacent to the abbey, while in France the royal palace and the central
offices of the royal government were located in the capital city itself, in
Paris not in St-Denis. Westminster was thus as much a capital as the city of
London, or more so. Even today one speaks of the ‘Cities of London and
Westminster’, two distinct ‘cities’. Relations between Crown and abbey in
St-Denis were not so continuous or so intense at the governmental rather
than ritual level.66
Continuity of royal burial site is linked to the question of whether
a kingdom had a capital. Although smaller than some other European
kingdoms, Bohemia was marked out by the fact that it clearly had one.67
Prague was not only the essential inauguration site but also the heart of
the country, ‘mistress of all Bohemia’, in the phrase of Cosmas, first
chronicler of the Bohemians.68 Prague’s central location, symbolic
importance and economic preponderance mean that it can be called
a capital without danger of the anachronism that might attach to
a description of even London or Paris by that term. Indeed, when
a thirteenth-century Bohemian chronicler called Prague castle ‘the seat
of the king of the Bohemians and of the whole kingdom’, the phrase ‘seat
of the whole kingdom’ is a perfect medieval counterpart to the modern
‘capital city’.69 It is perhaps only in the central cities of the Russian
principalities that we find a close parallel to Prague at this time. Hence
it is no surprise that, of the eighteen kings and dukes of Bohemia from
the Premyslid dynasty whose burial places are definitely known, eight
were buried in St Vitus’ Cathedral in Prague (including one reinter-
ment), while three others were buried elsewhere in Prague and another
in Vysehrad, the fortress on the opposite bank of the river from the
cathedral a mile or two upstream. This makes a total of twelve of the
eighteen, that is, two-thirds. In addition, of those whose burial site is not
known definitely, there are grounds for thinking at least another three
were buried in Prague or Vysehrad.70 The contrast with Germany, which
had no capital and whose kings were buried in many different and far-
flung places, is clear.
Actual changes in the size and shape of the kingdom might also have
an impact on the choice of burial site. In 1199 Alfonso VIII of Castile and
his wife Queen Eleanor formally granted the monastery of Las Huelgas,

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‘which we have founded near the city of Burgos and endowed with our
own property’, to the Cistercian Order. ‘Moreover’, they declared, ‘we
promise that we and our children who wish to abide by our counsel and
command should be buried in the monastery.’71 Alfonso, Eleanor and
their young son Henry I (1214–17) were buried in Las Huelgas.
Subsequently, however, as the kings of Castile expanded their frontiers
spectacularly at the expense of the Muslim rulers to the south, Burgos
became less central and new cities from the conquered regions were
chosen for royal burials: between 1252 and 1350, Seville and Cordoba
were selected for four royal burials out of the five that occurred.
When a new royal burial church replaced an old one there might be
significant cultural implications. The dynasty that was eventually to pro-
duce the kings of Scots had its roots in Ireland and had spread from there
to the northwestern seaboard of Britain. The most important monastery
in the region was Iona, founded in 563 by St Columba on a small
Hebridean island, and later king-lists claim that this was the traditional
burial place of the kings of the dynasty of Kenneth Macalpine (d. 858)
down to the time of Donald III (Domnall Bán), who died in 1097 or
1099.72 The shift at that time to interment in the Benedictine abbey of
Dunfermline, founded by Queen Margaret, who was of English descent,
can be seen as marking a reorientation of the Scottish dynasty. Margaret
herself, her husband Malcolm Canmore, and three of their sons who
succeeded as kings of Scots were buried in Dunfermline. They continued
their role as defenders of Scotland even after death, for in 1263, 170 years
after the death of Margaret and Malcolm, they were seen, along with their
three sons, coming out of the church of Dunfermline in order to fight
a Norwegian army that had invaded the kingdom.73 A total of eight kings
of Scots were eventually buried in Dunfermline, the last of them, Robert
Bruce (d. 1329), being a descendant of a Norman family invited to
Scotland by one of Queen Margaret’s sons. The shift of the royal burial
church from Iona a hundred miles eastwards to Dunfermline had been
part of a wider change in Scotland, away from its Gaelic roots and towards
England and Europe.
The practice of the kings of Portugal also shows that different
churches might be preferred as burial churches in different
periods.74 The first two kings of Portugal, Alfonso I (d. 1185) and

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Sancho I (d. 1211), were buried in the priory of the Holy Cross in
Coimbra, the most important Portuguese city at this time. The mon-
astery had been founded with Alfonso’s support and so had clear links
with the new dynasty. The next king, Alfonso II (d. 1223), although he
showed favour to the priory in Coimbra, desired to be buried in the
monastery of Alcobaça, a Cistercian house halfway between Coimbra
and Lisbon. Alfonso’s successor, Sancho II of Portugal, was deposed
and driven into exile in Castile by his brother Alfonso III, and,
although Sancho stated in his will that he wished his body to be
returned to Portugal for burial in Alcobaça, Alfonso was not willing
to give him this legitimizing treatment and Sancho’s remains still lie in
Toledo Cathedral.
Alfonso III himself was buried in Alcobaça. His successor, however,
King Denis (d. 1325), chose to be buried in St Denis of Odivelas, a short
distance north of Lisbon. This was an unusual step in three ways: Odivelas
was a nunnery, not a monastery of men; Denis’ wife was not buried in the
same church, unlike the other queens of Portugal; and the dedication to
St Denis is unique in Portugal. An earlier version of Denis’ will chose
Alcobaça as his place of burial, so he had clearly made a considered
change of opinion. He had founded the convent of St Denis and pre-
sumably had a say in choosing the dedication to a saint with his own,
unusual, name. The next three kings of Portugal, Alfonso IV (d. 1357),
Peter I (d. 1367) and Ferdinand I (d. 1383), were buried in Lisbon
Cathedral, Alcobaça and the Franciscan church at Santarém respectively,
so without a definite pattern. However, after the succession crisis of
1383–5, which ended with the accession of the illegitimate John I, an
entirely new royal mausoleum was created. This was the monastery of
Batalha (Santa Maria da Vitória), which was founded as a thanksgiving
after the Battle of Aljubarrota, John I’s victory over the Castilians in 1385
that confirmed him as king of Portugal. Late in his reign he founded
a funerary chapel there. He and his wife, Philippa, share a joint tomb in
Batalha with carefully carved effigies. John’s successor, Edward (Duarte)
(d. 1438), and his successor, Alfonso V (d. 1481), and his successor, John
II (d. 1495), are also buried there, along with the four younger sons of
John and Philippa with their wives. Batalha is a dynastic mausoleum in
the fullest sense, providing a last resting place for wives and cadets of the

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royal family as well as kings, and commemorating in its very name the
triumph of the old Portuguese royal lineage when faced with the threat of
incorporation into Castile.
In Denmark, the Benedictine abbey of Ringsted, in the centre of the
island of Zealand, was a royal burial site for many generations. A late
medieval account, similar to the guide book to St-Denis, lists the royal
burials there, the date and place of death, the length of reign of the kings,
the family relationships and the location of the tomb. The first member
of the ruling family to be buried in Ringsted was Canute Laward, duke of
Schleswig, who was murdered in 1131. His son, Valdemar I, was able to
secure his canonization, and the official translation of Canute’s remains
to the altar in 1170 marked the beginning of the church’s dominant
position as a royal mausoleum. The late medieval catalogue lists twenty
royal burials, including six ruling kings of Denmark, from Valdemar I (d.
1182) to Erik VI (d. 1319), as well as queens, royal princes and the exiled
king of Sweden, Birger Magnusson, whose wife’s burial in 1341 is the
latest recorded.75 The first half of the fourteenth century saw Danish
royal burials shift from Benedictine Ringsted to the Cistercian abbey of
Sorø, also on Zealand. Interments took place here of kings who died in
1322, 1375 and 1387. Margaret, the effective ruler of Denmark, Norway
and Sweden (d. 1412), was first buried at Sorø also, but in 1413 the
bishop of Roskilde had her body transferred to the cathedral of
Roskilde, despite the objections of the Cistercians of Sorø. Thereafter
Roskilde became the usual burial place for Danish royalty, today claiming
thirty-nine royal tombs.
It is hard to generalize about the history of dynastic mausolea. Even if
they were established, as in the case of the Scottish kings at Iona (prob-
ably) and Dunfermline (definitely), they might not endure. The eleven
kings of Scots who died between 1200 and 1500 were buried in nine
different places, belonging to six different religious Orders. Only two
were buried in churches of their own foundation. Nevertheless, looking
across the wide range of evidence, it appears that kings preferred burial
in monasteries to burial in secular churches, with exceptions such as the
Premyslids in Prague and the Danish royal house from the fifteenth
century; that there were some well-established Benedictine houses
that had a long if not absolutely continuous history as burial churches,

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St-Denis pre-eminently but also Westminster and Ringsted; and that the
Cistercian Order was favoured in many places from the twelfth century
onwards: Sorø in Denmark, Alcobaça in Portugal, Las Huelgas in
Castile, Santes Creus and Poblet in Aragon, plus Royaumont for
uncrowned Capetians in France. Of the thirteen kings of Aragon who
ruled between the union of Aragon and Barcelona in the twelfth century
and the end of the Middle Ages, eight are buried in Poblet, including
every king after 1387. Peter IV, who died in that year, not only under-
took a major rearrangement of the tombs in Poblet but made it
a requirement that all future kings should promise to be buried
there.76 Occasionally burial church and coronation church coincided,
at least on many occasions: this is true of Westminster in England and
Székesfehérvár (Alba Regia) in Hungary. Burial of kings in Franciscan
or Dominican churches was rare, the Dominican La Batalha in late
medieval Portugal being an exception.
Even if continuity of burial church was maintained, as in France, there
might be changes over time within the church. At St.-Denis, careful
thought was given to the arrangement of the tombs. In 1263–4, under
Louis IX, a new layout was introduced, with a clear rationale:

At St.-Denis in France a simultaneous and joint relocation of the kings of

the French buried in various places in that monastery was undertaken by
the holy king Louis and Matthew, abbot of that monastery. Both the kings
and the queens of the family descending from Charlemagne were placed
together on the right side of the monastery, raised two and a half feet
above the ground, with carved images, and the others, stemming from the
family of king Hugh Capet, were placed on the left.77

Here, the recognized distinction between the ‘second family’ and the
‘third family’ of kings of France (see below, pp. 285–6) was being given
striking visual form. At the same time as the tombs were rearranged, they
were given statues of those within. Hence many of the Merovingian and
Carolingian rulers in St.-Denis are depicted in the courtly costume of the
mid thirteenth century.
St Louis certainly had strong views about royal burials. He thought
only kings should be buried at St.-Denis and other members of the royal
family should go to Royaumont, the Cistercian abbey founded by his

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mother, Blanche, in memory of his father. Louis had supposedly helped

the monks build the walls of the abbey, carrying stones himself. As he lay
dying outside the walls of Tunis on his second and ill-fated crusade, Louis
was informed that his son, John Tristan, who was also in the army, had
died: ‘The king chose his burial at St.-Denis and the burial of his son in
the church of Royaumont, because he was not willing that he should be
buried in the church of St.-Denis, where only kings were buried.’78 In
Louis’ view, there was a burial church for kings and another for members
of the royal family, although this distinction was certainly not observed in
practice.

Reinterment
Bodies did not always stay in the place where they were first buried. As
soon as Leo VI became Byzantine emperor in 886, he had the body of
Michael III exhumed from its tomb in Chrysopolis, on the Asian shore
opposite Constantinople, had it dressed in imperial robes and reburied
in honour in a marble sarcophagus in the Church of the Holy Apostles in
Constantinople, the traditional burial place of the East Roman and early
Byzantine emperors.79 Michael had been assassinated in 867 by Leo’s
father Basil I, although there were rumours that Leo was actually
Michael’s son, not Basil’s.80 For those who believe that Leo was
Michael’s son, and that Leo knew this, his act was one of filial piety. For
others, ‘Leo was seeking to atone for the crime of his dynasty’, that is, the
usurpation and murder perpetrated by his father.81 Exactly the same
interpretation has been placed on the action of Henry V of England
when he reinterred the body of Richard II in 1414. Richard had been
deposed by Henry’s father, Henry IV, in 1399 and murdered the
following year. The dead king’s body was not buried in the royal mauso-
leum at Westminster Abbey in 1400, despite his having prepared a tomb
there for himself. The relocation of Richard’s remains to the abbey in
1413 marked a greater sense of security on the part of the new regime,
unafraid to acknowledge the royalty of their deposed victim, but also
perhaps Henry V’s ‘desire to atone for his father’s usurpation’.82
Reinterments could thus symbolize reconciliation, even if of
a posthumous kind. A striking example is the transfer of the body of

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Maria, widow of Alfonso XI of Castile, from its original resting place at

Evora in Portugal to the royal chapel in Seville, to lie by the side of King
Alfonso. This ceremony was initiated by her son, Peter I of Castile, but the
reason Maria died in Portugal rather than in Castile was that she had fled
there from Peter during the political and military struggles of the early
years of his reign after he had had four of her supporters killed before
her eyes. Nevertheless, in 1357 Peter sent the archbishop of Seville, other
prelates and a chief officer of his household to collect his mother’s body,
received it in Seville surrounded by clergy and nobles, and celebrated
a funeral service with great honour before interring the body next to
Alfonso, her husband.83 Peter’s sense of dynastic fitness outweighed any
memory of antagonism; what his mother would have thought we do not
know.
Sometimes reinterments brought the dead ruler to the place of burial
he had requested during his lifetime. The Frankish king Charles the Bald
explicitly requested that his body be interred in the abbey of St.-Denis
outside Paris; this was clear from at least 862, fifteen years before his
death.84 After he died in Italy in 877, his followers carried his body back
to France but were overwhelmed by the stench of the corpse and interred
it at the monastery of Nantua, west of Lake Geneva. A few years later,
however, his bones were disinterred and taken 300 miles north for
honourable burial in St.-Denis.85 St Denis had been the king’s particular
patron and protector in life, and he now rested near the saint in death.
The emperor Henry V’s reinterment of his father, Henry IV, at Speyer
in 1111 is an example both of a posthumous reconciliation and of the
fulfilment of the dead king’s wishes about his burial place. The younger
Henry had fled his father’s court and rebelled in December 1104, gain-
ing a considerable body of supporters among the German nobles. A year
later he captured his father and, on 31 December 1105, forced him to
abdicate. Nevertheless, the older Henry escaped and war continued
between father and son, until the death of the old emperor on
7 August 1106 in Liège. Amongst his last requests was the plea ‘to bury
him alongside his ancestors in Speyer’.86 Henry IV was well aware of the
connection between the church of Speyer and his own dynasty. ‘We
especially revere the church of Speyer’, he had written, ‘which was
gloriously constructed by our ancestors, the august emperor Conrad,

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that is, our grandfather, and the august emperor Henry, that is, our
father, and by us.’87 Henry thus wished to rest alongside his grandfather
Conrad II and his father Henry III. However, the path of the dead
emperor’s body to final inhumation in Speyer Cathedral was not
a simple one. The main problem was that Henry had died excommuni-
cate because of his quarrel with the papacy and burial in consecrated
ground was denied to excommunicates. So, although the loyal bishop of
Liège buried Henry’s body in his cathedral, it was dug up and placed on
unconsecrated ground on an island in the Meuse. Even when Henry
V agreed to have his father’s coffin transported to Speyer, the bishop
there refused to let it remain in the cathedral and it was placed in an
adjacent unconsecrated chapel, where the inhabitants, conscious of the
emperor’s devotion to Speyer, frequently visited it. Only after five years,
and very complicated dealings with the pope, was permission granted for
the emperor to be buried in the cathedral. On 7 August 1111, in the
presence of an assembly of bishops, abbots and nobles, Henry
V celebrated a ‘most magnificent anniversary’ for the father he had
deposed, and Henry IV was finally ‘buried in the church alongside his
ancestors’.88
A reinterment with a powerful, if complex, political message, was that
of Sancho III ‘the Great’ of Navarre. He died in 1035 and was succeeded
by his three sons, each of whom took a portion of the kingdom, Navarre
going to García, Aragon to Ramiro and Castile to Ferdinand. Sancho was
buried at San Salvador de Oña in Castile. Two years after his death,
Ferdinand of Castile, who was married to Sancha, a sister of Vermudo
III, the king of Leon, defeated and killed his brother-in-law and became
king of Leon. It was supposedly at the suggestion of his wife that
Ferdinand transferred the remains of his father from Oña to Leon ‘and
buried him with the other kings of Leon’.89 Ferdinand’s powerful father
now lay in the same resting place as the earlier kings of Leon, including
the last one, whom Ferdinand had killed. Ferdinand was claiming
a position as both king of Leon and inheritor of his father’s traditions,
perhaps with an eye on his brothers, García of Navarre and Ramiro of
Aragon.90 The royal pantheon attached to the church of San Isidoro at
Leon to which Sancho III’s body was brought became an important
mausoleum of both the Leonese and Castilian rulers. An account of the

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tombs there in the sixteenth century lists thirty-three, including

Vermudo III, his father, Alfonso V, and his grandfather, Vermudo II;
Sancho III of Navarre; Ferdinand I and his wife Sancha; their son, García
of Galicia; Queen Urraca, their granddaughter; and many queen con-
sorts and royal children.91
Not all reinterments involved removal of bodies from one church to
another. It was also not uncommon for bodies to be moved around within
a church, as in the rather dramatic case of St.-Denis, just mentioned.
Such reinterments often involved transfer to a more honourable posi-
tion, meaning, in Christian churches, a place closer to the high altar and
the east end of the church. For example, in 1286 Sancho IV of Castile
moved his distant ancestor, Alfonso VI (d. 1109), whose body lay in the
abbey of Sahagún in Leon ‘at the foot of the church’, implying it was in an
entrance area at the west end of the building (a narthex or porticus), to
‘the chapel before the high altar’, where it was placed ‘in a green monu-
ment’, between two of Alfonso’s, many, wives who had also been moved
there. The motive is not clear, apart from general respect, but the
chronicler describing the relocation calls Alfonso ‘the king who won
Toledo’, so perhaps it was Alfonso’s reputation as the king who had
conquered Toledo, capital of Spain in the Visigothic period, from the
Muslims in 1085 that earned him this special treatment. His descendant
thought it worth making the effort for this honourable gesture 177 years
after Alfonso’s death.92

Tombs
Royal tombs were usually made of expensive materials, such as marble
and alabaster. The most exclusive material was porphyry, a hard, purple-
red rock from the deserts of Egypt that the Roman emperors had
employed for grand monuments. It was expensive and rare. The tombs
of the eastern Roman emperors of the fourth and first half of the fifth
century in the Church of the Holy Apostles in Constantinople were of
porphyry, but not those of later emperors.93 Most examples of porphyry
in the medieval west were taken from ancient Roman sites to be reused.
Sometimes tubs from bathhouses, after being given suitable lids, were
employed as tombs. There is a porphyry tub in Ravenna that might have

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been used for the tomb of Theodoric, king of Ostrogothic Italy (d. 526);
this, at least, was local belief by the ninth century.94 It is possible that the
late Roman bath in porphyry now in the Louvre was acquired by Charles
the Bald (d. 877) to serve as his tomb in St-Denis.95 Among the most
spectacular royal porphyry tombs from the Middle Ages are those of the
emperors Henry VI and Frederick II in the cathedral at Palermo.96 These
are big, the former measuring 2.37 by 1.03 metres (7 feet 9 inches by 3
feet 5 inches), and each stands enclosed in a canopy supported by
columns, the whole structure being about 3.7 metres (over 12 feet)
high. The tombs were not ancient survivals but were made in the reign
of Frederick’s predecessor, Roger II of Sicily (d. 1154), perhaps from
porphyry obtained from ancient structures in Rome, and were originally
intended for that king himself, although not in fact used for his burial.97
Frederick II specified in 1215 that these empty tombs should be brought
to Palermo Cathedral, where his father Henry VI already lay.98 Henry VI
and Frederick II were, in their own eyes, Roman emperors, and their
actual domains reached from Sicily to the Baltic, so these huge sarco-
phagi of imperial stone reflect very well their own conception of their
position in the world. Quite exceptionally for the Iberian peninsula,
Peter III of Aragon (d. 1285) was buried in a porphyry ‘tub’ (alveus)
sarcophagus in the Cistercian church of Santes Creus. This may have
come from a fourth-century imperial mausoleum in Centcelles nearby,
although it has also been suggested that it was imported from Sicily.99 Its
construction was due to Peter’s son, James II, and James’ interest in
porphyry is also shown by his unfulfilled request for porphyry from
Greece for the tomb of his wife, Blanche.100
Kings were sometimes buried with the crowns, sceptres and orbs that
had marked their sovereignty in life, or with the swords and spurs that
reflected their warrior and knightly status.101 This custom was, however,
far from universal, and many rulers followed the austere practice that had
come with Christianity, when grave goods were abandoned and even
great men went to the next life without their horses, slaves, weapons
and treasure. What Christian kings might have, which their pagan pre-
decessors in the barbarian world usually did not, was a record written on
or in the tomb, identifying them and sometimes doing much more. Royal
tombs were by no means always marked out with words to identify them

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Figure 9 The tomb of the Holy Roman Emperor, Frederick II (d. 1250), in the cathedral at
Palermo, which emphasizes his imperial status both by its size and by its precious material,
porphyry.
Realy Easy Star/Toni Spagone/Alamy.

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 ROYAL MORTALITY

or epitaphs to glorify those who lay there, and the Danish royal tombs at
Ringsted, for example, are simple marble slabs without inscriptions. But
some of these anonymous tombs carried a message within. The practice of
placing sheets of lead, or other materials, within the tomb, inscribed with
the name and sometimes an account of the activities of the dead ruler,
became more common from the eleventh century onwards.102 It implies
either that the people (sons or clerics?) who placed these plaques within
the tomb expected that the tombs would at some point be opened or,
alternatively, that they were a message for the Last Judgment. A similar
practice of internal, identifying labels was used for the relics of the saints.
In the tomb of Valdemar I of Denmark (d. 1182), which was opened in
1855, a lead plaque was found, telling of his deeds: ‘Here lies Valdemar I,
conqueror and dominator of the Slavs, liberator of his country, preserver
of the peace. He was the son of St Canute and he conquered the men of
Rügen and was the first to convert them to the faith of Christ.’ Valdemar
was the son of the canonized duke Canute Laward and had overthrown the
last stronghold of West Slav paganism on the island of Rügen in 1168. The
plaque also praises him for rebuilding in brick the Danewerk (Danevirke),
‘the wall that defends the whole kingdom’.103 Since Valdemar is called
‘Valdemar I’, the plaque must date from after 1202, when his son became
king as Valdemar II, and hence it must have been inserted after the tomb
had been opened. It is thus retrospective in a stronger sense than usual for
epitaphs, and its audience was certainly not the living but either future
generations or perhaps God and his angels.
Unusually, the Byzantine emperor Basil II (d. 1025) composed his
own epitaph. He was a famously successful general and he chose to be
buried, not in the Church of the Holy Apostles, but in a church just
outside the walls of Constantinople, in the area where troops mustered
for campaigns. In his epitaph he asked passers-by to pray for him, in
return for his campaigning.104 The tone of epitaphs was not exclusively
glorification. William the Conqueror’s tomb in the church he had
founded, St Stephen’s, Caen, carried an epitaph in gold, which did
indeed praise his bold conquests and wide domains but also pointed
out the contrast with what he was physically now, after death: ‘The great
king William lies in this small urn and this little house is enough for
a great lord.’105

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A new practice grew up: images of the dead rulers on their tombs. The
ancient world, both Greek and Roman, had been full of such human
figures, often life-size or larger, in stone or marble, but the Middle Ages
came to the tradition slowly and hesitantly. An early example is the
bronze plaque with his life-size figure in relief on the tomb of Rudolf of
Rheinfelden in Merseburg Cathedral. Rudolf was, in the eyes of the
supporters of the emperor Henry IV, an ‘anti-king’, raised up by
German rebels with the backing of the Church party, eventually includ-
ing the intransigent reformer Pope Gregory VII. He was crowned in 1077
but killed in battle against Henry’s supporters in 1080 (see above, p. 245).
He was buried soon afterwards under the gilded bronze plaque, 1.96 by
0.68 metres (6 feet 5 inches by 2 feet 2 inches), which bears his image,
with crown, orb and sceptre. The inscription on the plaque describes him
as ‘the sacred victim of war’ and asserts ‘he died for the Church’.106 It is
not clear whether this unabashedly propagandistic tomb explains the fact
that the German emperors, in reaction, did not put images on their

Figure 10 The image of the ‘anti-

king’ Rudolf of Rheinfelden (d. 1080)
in Merseburg Cathedral, one of
the earliest royal tomb effigies. The
inscription claims ‘he died for the
Church’.
Ullstein bild/Getty Images.

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 ROYAL MORTALITY

graves until the fifteenth century, but certainly Rudolf’s tomb-image is

exceptional.107
Elsewhere the practice blossomed in the late twelfth and thirteenth
centuries and became relatively common. There are more than eighty
surviving recumbent effigies (gisants) on royal tombs from medieval
Europe, some of these representing kings of earlier centuries rather
than contemporaries.108 After Louis VII was buried at Barbeau, by the
Seine above Paris, in 1180, his tomb was erected by his widow Adela of
Champagne, who herself died in 1206. The tomb was described as
‘constructed of stones, gold and silver with wonderful workmanship,
decorated most elaborately with bronze and jewels’.109 Above the tomb
was a recumbent image of the king in high relief, depicted in a long
mantle, crowned and holding a sceptre.110 The recumbent statues of
Ferdinand II of Leon (d. 1188) and his ancestor Raymond of
Burgundy in Santiago, which were created in the period 1200–15, are
the earliest royal tomb effigies in the Iberian peninsula.111 The images
of Henry II of England, his son Richard I and his wife Eleanor of
Aquitaine on their tombs in Fontevrault are from about the same
period. The elaborate tombs of late medieval rulers, with their rich
materials, canopies, enclosing metalwork and delicate carvings, had
many similarities with the shrines of the saints, and they may have been
influenced by them in their design. Some royal tombs were in fact
shrines, those of the saint-kings, such as Edward the Confessor in
Westminster Abbey.
A striking innovation of the last centuries of the Middle Ages was the
joint tombs of kings and queens with their effigies side by side. Prior to
that period it had not been uncommon for rulers and their wives to be
buried in the same church. Of the fifteen Merovingian queens about
whose interment there is information, five were buried at St.-Germain-
des-Prés in Paris, in each case alongside their husband.112 Carolingian
and early Capetian queens were less frequently buried with their hus-
bands, and the custom of both king and queen of France being interred
in St-Denis developed only slowly, with isolated individual cases in the
ninth, eleventh and twelfth centuries and two in the late thirteenth, but
was virtually unbroken from the time of Charles IV (d. 1328). Almost all
Portuguese queens were buried in the same church as their husbands. Of

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Figure 11 Tomb effigies of Henry II of England (d. 1189) and his wife Eleanor of Aquitaine
(d. 1204) in Fontevrault Abbey. Their son Richard I was also interred here under an effigy. In
choice of burial place, the family’s roots in Anjou outweighed their English royal title.
Dorling Kindersley Ltd/Alamy.

the Norman and Plantagenet kings of England, sixteen were married and
exactly half of these were buried in the same church as their queen or one
of their queens, and the tendency became more pronounced over time,
with six of the eight instances being fourteenth- or fifteenth-century.
The joint tombs with effigies of kings and queens went beyond this
simple pattern of burial in the same church to a shared space and style.
The tomb of James II of Aragon (d. 1327) and his wife Blanche of Anjou
(d. 1310) in Santes Creus, which is perhaps the earliest joint royal tomb,
was conceived and constructed as a unit. As mentioned above, James
tried, although unsuccessfully, to obtain some porphyry for this tomb, so
was seeking the very best material. James’ grandson, Peter IV, ‘the
Ceremonious’, of Aragon (d. 1387), determined to be buried in Poblet,
where two of his predecessors lay, and undertook a long, complex and
expensive project of construction and reorganization, which resulted in
a distinctive necropolis: alabaster effigies of uniform style for him and his
predecessors with tombs placed, not on the floor of the church, but
above arches in the transept, and not flat but at an angle, so they were

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visible to those walking below.113 Peter is there with his three (successive)
wives, and several of his successors, who were all buried in Poblet, lie
alongside their wives.
There are two Portuguese examples of royal joint tombs with effigies.
At Alcobaça Peter I (d. 1367) and Ines de Castro (d. 1355) lie side by side.
The tombs were constructed at Peter’s command in the years 1358–63
and Ines’ body transferred there from her original resting place (see
above, p. 164). The other example is the joint tomb of John I (d. 1433)
and Philippa of Lancaster (d. 1415) at Batalha, constructed in the years
1426–34. In both these instances the initiative for the arrangement came
from the king and in the case of Peter and Ines it was definitely a sign of
special devotion and affection. The same seems to be true of the first
royal tomb of this type in England, that of Richard II (d. 1400) and Anne
of Bohemia (d. 1394) in Westminster Abbey. This is a fairly substantial
monument, 3.84 metres long, 2.10 metres wide and 1.90 metres high (12
feet 7 inches by 6 feet 11 inches by 6 feet 3 inches). Richard had this
constructed in the late 1390s and it reflects the well-attested depth of his
affection for Anne. Richard’s usurper and murderer Henry IV (d. 1413)
and his second wife Joanna of Navarre (d. 1437) also have a joint tomb, in
Canterbury Cathedral. This was commissioned by Joanna and erected
around 1425, with her effigy being added after her death. The images of
Richard and Anne are gilded copper, those of Henry and Joanna
alabaster.
The contract between Richard II and the London coppersmiths
employed to make the effigies in Westminster Abbey survives. The figures
were to be ‘of gilt copper and brass, crowned, with their right hands
entwined, and holding sceptres in their left hands’; the decoration is
carefully described, including the appropriate heraldry for each spouse;
and the coppersmiths are to complete the work within two years and
receive £400 (in fact they were paid an extra £300 for the gilding).114 The
instruction that the royal couple are to be holding hands can hardly be
anything other than a reflection of Richard’s feelings for Anne. The only
medieval royal double grave in Germany is that of Rupert of the
Palatinate (d. 1410) and his wife Elizabeth (d. 1411) in Heidelberg;
although a spectacular one was commissioned in 1499 for the emperor
Henry II and the empress Cunigunda in Bamberg, it was not completed

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Figure 12 The tomb of Richard II of England (d. 1400) and his wife Anne of Bohemia
(d. 1394) in Westminster Abbey. Richard commanded that they should be shown holding
hands.
Courtesy of Westminster Abbey.

until 1513. Rupert was Elector Palatine before his contested election as
king in 1400 and Heidelberg was the burial church of the electors, so his
choice of burial place was in a family rather than in an imperial tradition.
Joint royal tombs are thus very rare and can, in some cases at least, be
interpreted as expressions of marital love.

Body Part Burial

Bodies were not always buried whole. If the corpse was to be transported
a long distance, it might well be disembowelled to prevent the stench of
the decomposing intestines becoming unbearable. These would then
need to be deposited somewhere. The more extreme custom also arose
of boiling all the flesh off the bones, then burying these soft remains
before transporting the bones to a distant destination. Thus, when
Conrad-Otto, duke of Bohemia, died in southern Italy in 1191, where
he had gone as part of the invading army of the emperor Henry VI, ‘his
flesh was deposited in Monte Cassino but his bones were brought to

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Figure 13 The tomb of Peter I of Portugal (d. 1367) at Alcobaça; he claimed to have
married Ines de Castro, mother of four of his children, and had her body transferred to the
royal mausoleum of Alcobaça, where he eventually came to rest by her side.
DEA/G. DAGLI ORTI/De Agostini/Getty Images.

Prague’.115 Separate burials of flesh and bones were, like disembowel-

ling, primarily practical and hygienic measures. The importance
attached to separate burial of the heart was more a matter of symbolism
and sentiment. As the heart was increasingly identified as the home of
love, both by theologians and romantic poets, choosing a separate loca-
tion for its burial was a way of expressing devotion and attachment to
a particular place.116
The way that the distribution of body parts could reflect dynastic
sentiment is shown in three cases from the late twelfth and thirteenth
centuries: Richard I ‘the Lionheart’ of England, Louis IX (St Louis) of
France and Louis’ brother, Charles of Anjou, king of Sicily. When
Richard lay dying after being shot by a crossbow bolt during the siege
of a southern French castle in April 1199, he commanded that ‘his brain
and blood and intestines should be buried at Charroux, his heart at

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Figure 14 The tomb of Ines de Castro (d. 1355) at Alcobaça.

DEA/G. DAGLI ORTI/De Agostini/Getty Images.

Rouen, and his body at Fontevrault, at his father’s feet’.117 Charroux is

about forty-five miles from where Richard died, Fontevrault another
seventy miles or so to the north. St Louis died on crusade in Tunis in
1270. His flesh was boiled off his bones and, along with his intestines, was
taken by his brother, Charles of Anjou, king of Sicily, to be interred in the
cathedral of Monreale outside Palermo; his bones were taken back to
St-Denis.118 Fifteen years later, in 1285, Charles of Anjou himself died, in
the town of Foggia in Apulia. This is where his intestines were buried; his
bones were buried in the cathedral at Naples, the chief city of his king-
dom; his heart eventually came to the Dominican church in Paris.119
In each of these cases, family connections were significant. Richard I’s
bones were buried alongside his father, Henry II, in the church where his
mother, too, was later to be buried; his heart was placed in the chief city of
his duchy of Normandy. Although Richard had been king of England, no
part of him came to England. He came to rest, although in parts, as he

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was when alive, a member of a great French dynasty. St Louis, too, went
home to the dynastic mausoleum of the Capetian dynasty at St-Denis
outside Paris. But he was both king of his kingdom and a member of his
dynasty in a way that Richard was not. The Capetians had managed to
identify themselves with their realm, and their dynastic mausoleum was
just outside what was, or was to become, the capital of France. This kind
of identification of dynasty and kingdom was something that the English
kings were to develop only during the thirteenth century and subse-
quently. St Louis’ brother, Charles of Anjou, had managed to acquire,
by conquest and by papal grant, the kingdom of Sicily, and attaining the
soft parts of St Louis for the cathedral of Monreale brought a powerful
dynastic token into his new kingdom: physical parts of his brother, the
most renowned king in Christian Europe, now lay in the heart of Charles’
realm. When Charles himself died, none of his remains could be buried
in Monreale, or in Palermo, since the island of Sicily had rebelled (the so-
called ‘Sicilian Vespers’) and was now outwith his control, but his body
was transported about eighty miles across the Apennines to be buried in
his chief mainland city, Naples, and an important part of him, his heart,
eventually returned to France, to the chief capital of his birth-dynasty,
Paris, where it rested a few miles from St Louis’ tomb. Rulers did not
forget which dynasty they stemmed from, wherever they ruled and wher-
ever they might die.
It was generally recognized that one motive for multiple burial was the
desire to multiply the prayers and offerings made for the dead: three
churches were better than one. But there was something beyond this
simple motive in requesting that your heart be taken to Jerusalem. From
the twelfth century, all kings paid at least lip service to the idea that one of
their most important duties was to go on crusade, and if they had failed to
do this in their lifetime, which was true of most rulers, they could send
this very significant part of their body after their death. In his will Alfonso
X of Castile (d. 1284) asked that his entrails be interred in Santa María la
Real in Murcia, and his body either there or in Seville Cathedral, where
his parents were buried. He continues, ‘we also command that, after we
die, they should take out our heart and should take it to the Holy Land
beyond the sea (Ultramar) and bury it in Jerusalem, in Mount Calvary,

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where some of our ancestors lie’.120 In the end, however, this wish was not
fulfilled and his heart was buried in Murcia also.
Robert I of Scotland, first of the Bruce dynasty, died on 7 June 1329.
His last wishes were reported in a deathbed speech as follows:

When I was in prosperity, my heart was fixed firmly on being saved of my

sins by struggle against God’s enemies, and since he now takes me to him,
so that the body may no wise fulfil what the heart devised, I would that the
heart that conceived that intention was sent thither. Therefore I pray every
one of you to choose from among you one who is honourable, wise and
brave, and a noble knight in the field, to bear my heart against God’s
enemies, when soul and body are separated, for I wish it to be brought
there honourably, since God does not will that I should have power to go
thither.121

Another account is briefer but more specific: ‘he left his heart to be sent
to Jerusalem and buried at the Lord’s Sepulchre’.122
The noble knight chosen for the task was Sir James Douglas, one of
Bruce’s most loyal supporters. On 1 September 1329 Douglas was
granted a letter of protection from Edward III of England when he was
‘about to set out for the Holy Land with the heart of the late Robert, king
of Scotland’, and on the same day the English king also wrote to Alfonso
XI of Castile, asking him to protect Douglas if his journey to the Holy
Land took him through his domains, so a circuitous route to Palestine
was already envisaged.123 On 25 August 1330 James Douglas was killed
fighting Muslims in Spain. One account has him throwing the casket with
Bruce’s heart deep among the enemy and then hacking his way to it. His
followers recovered his body, along with the heart of King Robert, and,
after disembowelling Douglas, separating his flesh from the bones, and
burying the soft tissue in Spain, they took his bones, along with the royal
heart, back to Scotland. Bruce’s heart was buried in Melrose Abbey after
its long journey, and, like Alfonso’s heart, never reached Jerusalem. The
Douglas family were granted the right to bear the king’s heart for ever, on
their coat-of-arms.124
After the pope had pronounced against the practice of multiple burial
in 1299, deeming it a horrible custom, the conscientious would have to
seek special permission to be allowed to continue it. In 1323 Isabella of

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France, queen of Edward II of England, obtained papal permission to

have her body divided and buried in three churches of her choice;
twenty-two years later, in 1345, after she had secured the deposition
and murder of her husband and had seen her lover captured and
executed by her son and then spent fifteen years in retirement from
politics, she decided to have that permission renewed, which it was.125
Successive kings of France requested the same privilege, until, in 1351,
the pope granted the right to all future kings and queens of France to
have their bodies ‘cut up, cooked, or divided in any other way, and
buried in one or various churches or places, as your devotion persuades
you’.126 Multiple burial continued, like many other things, despite
papal disapproval.
Monuments might be erected for each burial, entrails, heart and
body. After the death of Eleanor of Castile, queen of Edward I of
England, in 1290, her entrails were buried in Lincoln Cathedral, her
heart in the Dominican church in London and her body in
Westminster Abbey. Both the tombs at Lincoln and Westminster had
recumbent effigies, the latter of which survives (the present effigy in
Lincoln is a modern replica), a work of art in gilt bronze, while some
details are recorded of the heart tomb in the Dominican church:
payments are recorded for the making of small images, painting,
ironwork and stonework there.127 At the abbey of Maubuisson, north-
west of Paris, the entrails tombs of Charles IV of France (d. 1328) and
his wife, Joan of Evreux (d. 1371), are surmounted by their effigies
in marble, each clutching their entrails to their chest. The statues
were made in 1370–2, so more than forty years after Charles’ death.
Joan had clearly planned to rejoin her husband, both at St-Denis,
where their bodies were buried, and at Maubuisson, where their
entrails lay.

Damnatio Memoriae
If rulers wanted to be remembered, especially in prayer, then their
enemies wanted to wipe out their memory. In ancient Egypt and
imperial Rome this process, conventionally termed damnatio memoriae
(‘condemnation of memory or remembrance’), might involve the

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Figure 15 The entrails tombs of Charles IV of France (d. 1328) and his wife Joan of Evreux
(d. 1371) at Maubuisson, showing them clutching their entrails to their chests. These
effigies were made more than forty years after Charles’ death.
© RMN-Grand Palais (musée du Louvre) / Hervé Lewandowski.

destruction or relabelling of statues and erasure of inscriptions.

Public statuary was less significant in the medieval world, but post-
humous revenge could be taken on the body.128 One way was simply to
deny proper burial, as in the case of the tyrannical Byzantine emperor

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Phocas, who was burned in 610 and his ashes thrown into a common
grave.129 If they had been buried, you could dig them up. After the
veneration of icons was restored in the Byzantine empire in 843, the
body of the iconoclast emperor Constantine V (741–75) was exhumed,
beaten and burned by authority of Michael III or the regent Theodora.130
How much of Constantine was left after seventy years is not clear.
In the case of Constantine, the motive for the exhumation was reli-
gious hatred, but other actions of this type were more purely dynastic,
aimed at political rivals whose legitimacy was not recognized. One con-
temporary chronicler says that, in 1014, after Sven, king of Denmark, who
had just conquered England, died and was buried in the north of
England, his rival Æthelred returned to power and planned to disinter
and destroy his enemy’s corpse. However, an Englishwoman, whose
motives are not reported, forestalled him and had Sven’s body trans-
ported to Scandinavia.131 Sven’s grandson Harthacnut was more success-
ful in his plans. He and his half-brother Harold Harefoot had disputed
the succession to England after the death of their father Canute in 1035,
but Harthacnut had stayed in Denmark, so Harold had been able to
establish himself as king. After Harold’s death in 1040, Harthacnut finally
came to England, was acknowledged as king and ‘had the dead Harold
dug up and cast into a marsh’.132
After conquering the kingdom of Sicily in 1194, the emperor Henry VI
dug up the bodies of King Tancred and his son Roger, whom he regarded
as usurpers, and removed all their royal insignia.133 Henry’s grandson,
Manfred, king of Sicily, faced the same posthumous disturbance.
Manfred was killed in battle at Benevento in 1266, defending his king-
dom against the invading forces of Charles of Anjou. Some of Charles’
barons, on seeing Manfred’s blood-stained corpse, begged Charles to
give his dead enemy an honourable burial. Charles said he would have
done so if Manfred had not died excommunicate, but he had him buried
at the foot of the Benevento bridge and every one of his soldiers placed
a stone upon the spot, creating a mighty cairn. Subsequently, however, at
the pope’s command, the bishop of Cosenza removed Manfred’s remains
and took them to the banks of the river Garigliano, which marked the
boundary of the kingdom of Sicily, and buried them there. ‘Now the rain
washes them and the wind tosses them, outside the kingdom’, as Manfred

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himself explains to Dante, meeting him in purgatory.134 Henry VI wanted

to deny the regality of Tancred and his son, while Charles of Anjou seems
to have thought that the chivalrous impulses of his barons, to bury a dead
enemy honourably, deserved consideration, but were, upon reflection,
outweighed by the harder line of canon law. The popes were notoriously
vicious in their pursuit of the Hohenstaufen dynasty, to which Manfred
belonged, and this spite did not stop with the death of their enemy.

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A SENSE OF DYNASTY
 CHAPTER 8

Names and Numbering

Terminology

D ynasties, like centuries, give historians a handy

tool for labelling large chunks of time and place. If we have
a wall map with the title ‘Europa zur Zeit der Staufer’ (‘Europe in the Age
of the Staufer or Hohenstaufen’), we have a rough idea of what to expect:
a map of Europe in the period 1150–1250. Or if we find a book titled
Tudor England (there are more than twenty) we should know when and
where we are. Some of these dynastic terms assume overtones of meaning
well beyond mere time and place, as is also the case with adjectives
derived from individual rulers. ‘Victorian’ is a good example of this,
a word, incidentally, first used in 1839! So we have these useful labels:
The Carolingian World, Spain under the Bourbons, and so forth. But are
these terms simply retrospective classifications adopted for convenience
by modern historians, teachers and publishers, or are they something
that would have had significance for contemporaries? Did members of
medieval dynasties think of themselves in this way? Was there something
that could be called a sense of dynasty?
The label ‘Plantagenet’, for example, is a convenient term for the rulers
of England between the twelfth and fifteenth centuries, and can be used as
an adjective in many ways (Plantagenet coins, Plantagenet queens,
Plantagenet England) but the name was not employed by any members of
the family between its first user Geoffrey of Anjou, who died in 1151, and
possibly his second son, another Geoffrey, who died in 1158,1 and Richard,
duke of York, who started using it around 1448 as part of his campaign for

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the throne.2 In the intervening 290 years no one called themselves

‘Plantagenet’, so in this case the name had no role in creating family identity
or a sense of dynasty.
If we want to explore medieval conceptions of dynasty, we can begin with
the terminology. The word ‘dynasty’ itself, meaning a line of rulers, was
coined by Manetho, an Egyptian priest writing in Greek around 300 BC:
δυναστεία, derived from δυναστής, ‘ruler’.3 His division of the pharaohs into
thirty dynasties is still the backbone of ancient Egyptian chronology,
although the dynasties he lists are not always composed of members of the
same family. In Latin form the word was used by St Jerome in his chron-
ologies and thus came to the medieval west, but it is fairly rare there. In the
Latin west, dinastia can sometimes mean simply ‘power’, but more usually
refers specifically to the ancient ruling houses of Egypt, just as in the original
coinage. Gregory of Tours, writing in the late sixth century, says that at the
time of Abraham, ‘among the Egyptians it was the time of the sixteenth
ruling power (potestas), which they call dynasty in their language’.4 The
writers of universal histories, from the Carolingian period onwards, often
used the term when writing about Egypt. There is occasional confusion, as in
the case of Fredegar’s chronicle, which takes dinastia to be the name of an
Egyptian king,5 but for the most part there is a clear but limited usage. Some
authors attempted a definition or paraphrase of the term. Gervase of
Tilbury, writing around 1200 and dealing with early Egyptian history, says
‘Dynasties changed through different lines of kings (per diversa regum genera)
down to Cambyses.’6 Genus regum, ‘a line of kings’ or ‘a family of kings’, is
a good definition of dynasty. Later in the thirteenth century Rodrigo
Jiménez de Rada also gave a succinct definition: ‘Dynasty is defined as ruling
power remaining in some family (domus).’7 Domus, originally and often
meaning ‘house’ or ‘household’, also assumed the meaning ‘family’, espe-
cially with reference to important or ruling families. Thus, Pope Nicholas III,
elected in 1277, is described as ‘natione Romanus, de domo Ursinorum’, that is,
a Roman by birth and a member of the Orsini family, or the house of Orsini.8
A Spanish chronicler in the late fourteenth century calls the French ruling
family ‘the house of France (la casa de Francia)’; a Portuguese historian of the
following generation identifies the rulers of England as ‘the house of
England (casa de Imgraterra)’.9 ‘House of’ is still standard form for dynastic
genealogies.10

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Contemporaries did not apply the word ‘dynasty’ to the ruling families
of medieval Europe. But, as we have just seen in the case of genus regum,
‘line of kings’, and domus, ‘house’, there were plenty of synonyms available.
Others in Latin included prolis, prosapia, familia (which does not always
mean household), genealogia, generatio, stirps. And similar terms arose in the
vernaculars: ‘maison’ and ‘house’ and ‘Haus’ underwent a similar exten-
sion of sense as Latin domus, so that by the fifteenth century German
language sources can speak of ‘the house of Austria’.11 In his account of
his own life, written in Catalan, James I of Aragon refers to his family as ‘our
lineage (liynatge)’, a term used more than fifty times in the work for his and
other powerful kindreds.12 It was thus entirely possible to make statements
referring to what we might call dynasties. Henry I of England, for example,
was, according to one contemporary source, ‘known to be the seventh of
this dynasty (prosapia) from Rollo’ (the Viking who settled in Normandy) –
this is quite accurate – and the pope could flatter St Louis by referring to
‘your most Christian house (domus)’.13 Margaret of Burgundy, sister of
Edward IV and Richard III, writing in 1495, referred to the Wars of the
Roses as ‘the discords and dissensions that were once so great between the
houses of York and Lancaster’.14

Names of Dynasties
In some societies dynastic names have been important. The dynasties of
imperial China had names, which were chosen consciously and were used
officially when dating events. China had a ‘historiography office’ set up
by the Tang emperors and there were official compositions such as the
New History of the Tang of 1060.15 Medieval Europe was different. We have
already observed that the Plantagenets did not call themselves
Plantagenets. Nor did their great rivals, the Capetian kings of France,
identify themselves as such, although they knew they were descended
from Hugh Capet, who ruled from 987 to 996, and so did the revolution-
aries of the late eighteenth century, who tried and executed Louis XVI
under the name ‘Citizen Capet’. Looking back from later centuries,
French chroniclers recognized the year 987 as a moment of dynastic
change but did not give the new dynasty a family name, instead identify-
ing it by simply numbering it. Around the middle of the eleventh century,

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a writer in Aquitaine described the way Hugh Capet had ousted the last
Carolingians and concluded, ‘thus, as the second line of the kings of the
Franks failed, the kingdom was transferred to the third line’ (linea is the
word used).16 Likewise, for a writer of the twelfth century, Hugh Capet
and his descendants were ‘the third family (familia) of kings of France’.17
In this view, the Merovingians were the first, the Carolingians the second
and the family of Hugh Capet the third dynasty. The Grandes chroniques de
France, the great compendium of French history first assembled in the
thirteenth century and written in French not Latin, explains that
the work is divided into three chief sections, ‘because three families
(generacions) have been kings of France’, identifying them as the family
of Meroveus, of Pippin and of Hugh Capet.18 And this schema was con-
tinued into the eighteenth century, when the editors of the ordinances of
the Capetian kings, who began publishing in 1723, titled their work
Ordonnances des rois de France de la troisième race, ‘Ordinances of the Kings
of France of the Third Race’. Race, ‘race’, is not a medieval word but, by this
time, was being used as a term for a lineage or descent group. It was a word
borrowed from horse breeding, is probably cognate with the modern
French for a breeding stud (haras), and gave no hint of its ominous future.

Surnames
When Richard, duke of York, adopted the style ‘Richard Plantagenet’ or
when the French revolutionaries tried Louis XVI as ‘Citizen Capet’, they
were treating ‘Plantagenet’ and ‘Capet’ as if they were hereditary sur-
names, which was certainly not how they were used for most of the
Middle Ages. There are of course royal dynasties that take their name
from the surname of their ancestor. In English and Scottish history
Tudor and Stuart are well-known examples, in each case the name of
an aristocratic lineage that had risen to kingship. But, in general, ruling
dynasties do not need surnames: ‘Henry, king of the English’ is
a perfectly adequate identifier. And the very custom of having surnames
was a latecomer to European naming practice. In most parts of Europe
surnames are unheard of before the eleventh century and do not
become general until the fourteenth, although they were certainly
spreading in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. Indeed, by the

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1220s they were so common that there is an English royal messenger at

that time known as ‘Reynold Sanz-surnun’, one of the best surnames
ever recorded.19
It seems, curiously enough, that the first ruling classes to develop
hereditary surnames were those of Byzantium and Ireland, two parts of
Christian Europe about as distant as it is possible to be, geographically,
socially and culturally. And in these two parts of Christendom, exception-
ally, royal dynasties did come to identify themselves by surname. In the
case of Byzantium, the tenth century seems to be the crucial period when
family names amongst the high-born become common and hereditary.20
In the ninth century even the greatest were usually identified by just
a single name, sometimes with the addition of their office, but over the
course of time, an additional designation became usual. An early exam-
ple is Argyros, meaning ‘silver’; Leo Argyros, active in the mid-ninth
century, is reported as the first to take this name.21 One trend was the
increasing use of patronymics and other forms of individual identifier,
but eventually it was the hereditary surname that came to designate the
aristocratic lineage. The plural form, such as Martinakioi, was a name for
the group, the singular, as in Theophano Martinakia, for the individual.
And when members of such families attained the imperial throne, as they
did from the eleventh century, they kept these surnames. In this period,
imperial surnames appear on coins for the first time.22 The wife of
Alexius Comnenus proudly displayed her surname in the wording on
her seal: ‘Irene Doukaina, empress’.23 The great Byzantinist Alexander
Kazhdan pointed out that Byzantinists give the imperial dynasties down
to the eleventh century geographical labels – Isaurian, Amorian,
Macedonian – but that thereafter they are known by family names –
Doukai, Comnenians, Angeloi, and so forth.24 The former are modern
constructs, the latter contemporary usage. No one can doubt that family
loyalties and family identity mattered before the tenth century, but the
group label is a new badge of shared distinctiveness. In Byzantium know-
ing someone’s surname meant knowing a lot about them.
In Ireland, too, the tenth century was a crucial formative period for
hereditary surnames.25 These almost all designated a grandfather, either
in the form mac meic (‘son of the son of’), abbreviated to Mac, or in the
direct form ua (‘grandson of’), later written O, thus creating the familiar

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Irish dynasties with names in Mac and O: the O’Rourkes of Breifne

descend from Ruairc who died in 893, the O’Connors of Connacht
from Conchobar, the king who died in 973. These names are the
names of dynasties, indicating membership of a family with claims to
rulership and enduring over many generations. The difference between
usage in this matter in Ireland and in other parts of western Europe can
be seen at a glance if one looks at the indexes of modern editions of the
Irish annals and those of chronicles from England or France or Germany,
the former listing all the kings of a kindred under the family name, the
latter giving them separate entries under their forenames.
Collective names for aristocratic kindreds did exist elsewhere. In areas
of Germanic speech, there is evidence for contemporary terms for
families formed by an ancestral name plus -ing. The kings of Kent in
the sixth, seventh and eighth centuries were descended from a ruler
named Oisc and were hence called the Oisingas.26 The early medieval
dukes of Bavaria were recognized as Agilolfings.27 Archbishop Unwan of
Hamburg-Bremen (1013–29) is described as ‘sprung from the illustrious
kindred of the Inmedingi’. Inmed or Immed is recorded as a noble Saxon
name.28 The practice can be found in Italy, which had German aristo-
cratic settlers in the early Middle Ages. For instance, a noble kin-group in
the region of Lucca in north-west Italy took their name from one of their
members, Soffredo, and crop up in a local chronicle as ‘those of the
house of the Soffredings (de domo Soffredingorum)’ or ‘the Soffreding
house (de domo Soffredinga)’.29 The suffix -ing could also function as part
of a patronymic. William of Malmesbury observes that the Merovingian
kings (Merovingi) took their name from their ancestor Meroveus, and
adds, ‘In this same way, too, the sons of the kings of the English took
patronymics from their fathers, so that the son of Edgar would be called
Edgaring and the son of Edmund Edmunding’, noting the common
Germanic ancestry of the Franks and the English.30
Learned authors could also use the fancy Greek suffix -ides to indicate
parentage or descent. Thus, Louis the Stammerer, son of Charles the
Bald, was ‘Karolides Ludovicus’, and Robert II of France, son of Hugh
Capet, ‘Hugonides Rotbertus’.31 And this manner of speaking could be
generalized: one thirteenth-century text describes the kings whom
we call Capetians as ‘the Hugonid kings (Hugonidarum regum)’.32 In

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late-thirteenth-century Frisia a feud arose between two families. A leading

figure on one side was called Ebbo Menalda. The learned chronicler
describing this series of events terms his side both the Menaldingi and the
Ebbonides.33 The former is the ancient Germanic suffix for groups of
people, the latter a borrowing from ancient Greek practice.
In the eleventh and twelfth centuries, aristocratic families in some
countries began to adopt the names of their newly built castles as sur-
names. There is a good explicit example of this practice in the chronicle
of Conrad of Scheyern, a local Bavarian chronicle written in the early
thirteenth century, which gives details of the aristocratic families in the
region around Munich. Introducing Scheyern itself, Conrad says, ‘let us
say something briefly about that castle and about the nobles who derived
their name from it, and still have it’. One share in the castle was held by
‘the nobles who were subsequently named after the castle of Dachau’,
another by ‘the counts of Grub, who were afterwards named after the
castle of Valley’.34 So three aristocratic lineages are here forming, identi-
fied by the castles they possess. These lineages were ‘of’ somewhere,
hence the common association in Germany and France of the name
elements ‘von’ and ‘de’ with aristocracy. The Habsburgs are perhaps
the most notable family to take their name from a castle, in this case
Habichtsburg, ‘Hawk Castle’, in modern Switzerland, where the family are
attested from the eleventh century. When they attained royal power, as
they did intermittently from 1273 and permanently from 1438, they
retained their surname. In general, however, with the exceptions already
mentioned, the royal and imperial dynasties of the Middle Ages did not
identify themselves through a surname or any general collective
appellation.

Naming Patterns within Dynasties

Although rulers rarely expressed a sense of dynasty through a surname,
they almost always did so through forenames. While surnames are
a development of the Middle Ages, and were not common until their
last centuries, forenames (first names, Christian names) were universal.
They are individual identifiers but can also mark a family identity.
Indeed, one of the most common and most public ways that a sense of

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family can be expressed is in the choice of such names, and even today it
is a subject of interest and importance not only for new parents but also
for grandparents and aunts and uncles, who can be flattered or offended
by the names chosen. In some times and places there are norms and
expectations that a child will be named after a particular relative, a first
son after a grandfather, for example, while the importance of maternal
kin can be recognized by the introduction of new names from their side
of the family. All these things mattered as much, if not more, to rulers.
A debate over the choice of a royal name for the baby Ladislas
Posthumus of Hungary at his baptism in 1440 is described by his nurse:

he was named King Ladislas, which annoyed some who thought that they
should have called him King Peter, because that was the name he had
brought with him [meaning that the date of Ladislas’ baptism,
22 February, was the feast of Saint Peter’s Chair]. Some thought that
they should have named him King Albert in accordance with the will of
his father, who was truly a pious king. But my gracious lady [Elizabeth the
mother] had made a vow to God and to the holy king, saint Ladislas.35

Here there are three quite distinct grounds advanced for choice of
name: Ladislas, a traditional royal name in Hungary, the name of
a saint-king and the subject of a vow by the mother; Peter, the saint on
whose day the baptism took place; and Albert, name of the father and
chosen in his will.
The custom of rulers and other members of the ruling class having
streams of forenames begins only in the seventeenth century. Today, in
some countries, these long sequences, sometimes topped off with dou-
ble-barrelled surnames, are an almost certain indicator of class. The
modern British royal family is quite moderate in this respect: the names
of the children of Queen Elizabeth are Charles Philip Arthur George,
Anne Elizabeth Alice Louise, Andrew Albert Christian Edward and
Edward Antony Richard Louis, in each case four names. They certainly
cannot compare with Albert II, the king of the Belgians who abdicated in
2013, who was christened Albert Félix Humbert Théodore Christian
Eugène Marie (and his life was complicated further by having to have
his names in French, Dutch and German forms). Medieval rulers were
content with less, but their choices were still full of meaning.

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Leitnamen
Recurrent names often characterized a family or expressed its connec-
tions. The Germans, as always, have a word for this: Leitnamen, ‘leading
names’.36 And some of these names seem to have been so distinctive of
a particular aristocratic kindred that when an individual with the name
turns up in the early Middle Ages with no other context, many of those
working on the period are willing to bet that he (or more rarely she) was
a member of that kindred. Modern scholars of the early Middle Ages have
even created collective terms for such kin-groups by adding a suffix to the
leading name. So, from the clan that used the name Ekkehard we have
the Ekkehardiner, from the one that preferred Poppo we have the
Popponen, and for the one that was fated to favour Boso, the
Bosoniden or Bosonids.37
These terms are convenient modern labels for historians. But there is
evidence from the medieval period itself that contemporaries were aware
of these Leitnamen, and especially of the way that they embodied not
merely blood relationship but also claims to authority and territory. For
example, one chronicler explained the naming pattern of the counts of
Flanders, who mustered nine counts named Baldwin between the ninth
and the thirteenth centuries, in the following way:

In the county of Baldwin and his family it was a custom observed for many
years and regarded as a perpetual law that one of the sons who pleased the
father most should receive the father’s name and obtain the rule of the
whole of Flanders alone by hereditary succession.38

In this picture, it is unclear at what point the father made the decision as to
which son pleased him most: at birth? after several boys had been born?
when they were teenagers? It is likely, of course, that the chronicle account
is simply a reflection of the choice of a recurrent name for the eldest son.
The name William was so much identified with the counts of Poitou that
two members of the dynasty who did not bear the name assumed it when
they happened to succeed to the title unexpectedly: Peter (William VII,
1039–58) and Guy-Geoffrey (William VIII, 1058–86).39 And rulers were so
concerned to perpetuate certain names that they might re-use them for
subsequent children after the death of an earlier bearer: Charles VI of

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France (1380–1422) had three sons called Charles, Charles VIII (1483–98)
had two.
The association of a name with rule of a particular territory is brought
out vividly in the case of the son of Petronilla, queen of Aragon
(mentioned above, p. 57). Petronilla was betrothed to Raymond
Berengar of Barcelona in 1137, laying the foundations for a new compo-
site state. They had several children and the oldest surviving son was
clearly seen as their heir, even though it appears father and mother could
not agree on his name, for he appears both as Raymond and as Alfonso,
the former in contexts associated with his father, the latter with his
mother. In his will of 1162, Raymond Berengar the father bequeathed
his realms of Aragon and Barcelona to ‘his oldest son, Raymond’, while
two years later Petronilla abdicated in favour of ‘my beloved son
Alfonso . . . who is called Raymond in my husband’s will’.40 Alfonso was
a royal name in Aragon, Raymond a recurrent name in the line of the
counts of Barcelona. Your name was a claim.41
These Leitnamen could even be used as a shorthand for the dynasty
itself. In Canto 20 of the Purgatorio, Dante encounters Hugh Capet, first
king of the Capetian dynasty, but the poet does not use the name
‘Capetian’, identifying the French ruling family instead as ‘the Philips
and Louis’ by whom France is ruled in recent times’.42 This is literally
exact, since for 256 years, from 1060 to 1316, every king of France was
indeed called Philip or Louis. A pictorial family tree of the Carolingians
which circulated in Germany in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries was
labelled with a verse: ‘While this family held the reins of the Frankish
kingdom, it gave to Rome sceptre-bearing Charleses and Louis’.’43 This
too is accurate, for it is the case that in the eighth and ninth centuries
every person called Charles or Louis was a member of the Carolingian
family, while of the male-line descendants of Charlemagne in the ninth
and tenth centuries, twelve were called Louis and ten Charles.44 The
monk Notker, writing for the emperor Charles the Fat, and expressing
his hope that the emperor might have a legitimate son, pictured ‘a little
Louis or Charles (Ludowiculum vel Carolastrum)’.45 The emperor
Frederick Barbarossa’s uncle, Otto of Freising, calls the two great families
of twelfth-century Germany, now known as the Staufer or Hohenstaufen
and the Welfs, ‘the Henries of Waiblingen and the Welfs of Altdorf’, thus

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using both a Leitname and a family castle to identify them.46 Barbarossa

himself was supposedly proud of his descent from ‘the royal stock of the
Waiblingen, who had descended from two royal families, that is,
the Clovises and the Charleses’, meaning the Merovingians and the
Carolingians.47
Alongside the recurrent Leitname is the recurrent name part.
Germanic aristocratic names were usually made up of two elements
which each had a meaning in everyday speech. For instance, the
Merovingian royal name Theudebert, borne by two kings of the dynasty,
is composed of theod meaning ‘people’ and bert meaning ‘bright’.
Because of this, variations could be played with, to express family
relationships. Æthelwulf, king of Wessex (839–58), named his first
four sons Æthelstan, Æthelbald, Æthelbert and Æthelred, before
running out of imagination and calling the youngest one Alfred. Æthel
means ‘noble’, like modern German Adel, while the second elements
mean ‘wolf’, ‘stone’, ‘bold’ and ‘counsel’ respectively (Alfred means
‘elf-counsel’). In this way, a common distinctive naming feature of the
family (the first element Æthel) could be combined with individual
naming. Since these elements had separate meaning, there was even
room for punning: the unfortunate Æthelred the Unready, Æthelwulf’s
distant descendant, was given his nickname because he was Æthelred
Unræd – ‘noble-counsel bad-counsel’.48 And the elements could be
imaginatively inverted, as in the case of the aristocratic Frankish broth-
ers Nithard and Hartnid.49

Contemporary Confusion over Homonyms

It is not only modern students and scholars who are sometimes over-
whelmed by the repetition of names in the ruling families of the past.
Conrad of Scheyern, mentioned above (p. 289), became a little testy
when trying to disentangle the family history of the noble house of
Scheyern. The recurrence of a limited number of names made it hard
to identify individuals in the past. In the end he concludes

let us now turn our pen to the nobles of our time, for it seems difficult and
unnecessary to write down the deeds of each individual, for, as we have
said, not two or three of them, but many, were called nobles of Scheyern,

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who almost all, except a few, bore two names, namely Otto and
Ekkehard.50

The chronicler Richer of Saint-Rémi, writing in the 990s, expressed

a similar awareness of the dangers of confusion when dealing with
these recurrent dynastic forenames. He knew that anyone reading
Carolingian history would be struck by ‘frequent mentions of a Charles
or a Louis’ (this is still a problem today) and recognized that error could
result if ‘the order of events was not given careful consideration’. But, by
paying close attention to chronology, he says, ‘the careful reader will
distinguish the different kings with the same names’.51 The monastic
historian Aimoin of Fleury, writing his History of the Franks around the year
1000, was also conscious of this problem:

The genealogies of the kings, which were truly jumbled up because of the
similar names, I have distinguished, as far as I have been able, and
differentiated each one either by giving the name of his father or by the
labels ‘senior’ and ‘junior’.52

One way of distinguishing rulers with the same name was to give them
a nickname.53 In his list of French kings, the chronicler Rigord, writing in
1186, often does not distinguish homonyms, but occasionally adds
a nickname: Charlemagne is Charlemagne, i.e. ‘Charles the Great’; his
son is ‘Louis the Pious’; his son ‘Charles the Bald’. All these terms are still
in use by modern historians. Likewise, the king who died in 929 is
‘Charles the Simple’. Rigord reserves the name Hugh Capet for the
father of the king who ascended the throne in 987, not the king himself;
he was by no means alone in this.54 Among the kings of Rigord’s own
century, we find ‘Louis the Fat’ (Louis VI), ‘Louis the Pious’ (Louis VII)
and ‘Philip Augustus’ (Philip II), the first and third of these names still
being standard but the middle one quite unknown in modern historical
writing, which reserves it for the ninth-century Carolingian emperor.55
Most of these nicknames were given years or even centuries after
the deaths of the monarchs they became attached to. They are retro-
spective tools of chroniclers and other writers, not contemporary, official
designations, although they might eventually creep into formal royal
documents: Louis the Fat (Louis VI), for example, appears as such in

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the registers of his grandson Philip Augustus.56 Unusually, the West

Frankish king Louis the Stammerer (877–9) was called that by
a contemporary chronicler.57 Undoubtedly retrospective is the nickname
of the Irish king Niall mac Aéda, known as Niall Caille (‘of the Callan’)
because he drowned in the river Callan.58

The Term Carolingian

A good example of the way a leading name could become something
like a collective label is provided by the dynasty that modern histor-
ians call Carolingian.59 There is scarcely a medieval ruler who left
a deeper imprint on memory than Charlemagne, a king of the
Franks from 768 and emperor from 800. His death in 814 could be
used as a marker in time, as in the case of the chronicler Fulcher of
Chartres, reporting the capture of Jerusalem by the crusaders in
1099: ‘It was 15 July, 285 years after the death of Charlemagne.’60
It is remarkable that, almost three centuries after Charlemagne’s
death, it could be referred to in this way, and referred to accurately,
as a recognizable indicator of place in time. And Charlemagne also
made it to the stars. The constellation of Ursa Major had been called
‘The Wagon’ by ancient Akkadians and Greeks, but to the English it
became more specifically ‘Charles’ Wagon’ or ‘Charlemagne’s Wagon’
as tribute to the famous emperor.61
His name, Charles, has an unusual history. Charles Martel, his grand-
father, is the first person to bear the name Charles (Karl). He was
illegitimate and the sources mention that his father chose this name for
him. It is a single syllable, which is unusual for early high-status names,
and it has an ordinary language meaning of ‘man’, or perhaps more
specifically, ‘free peasant man’.62 Whether Charles Martel’s father was
being kind and prophesying that this son would be ‘a real man’, or
whether there was a sardonic tone in giving him this flat and definitely
unaristocratic sounding name, we do not know. In some later legends the
illegitimacy of Charles Martel was attributed to his grandson and in the
imaginative literature of the thirteenth century the story was told that
Charlemagne was called Charles because he had been conceived on
a cart (char).63

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The military success and political power of Charles Martel meant the
new name was now acceptably aristocratic and could be given to Charles’
grandson, the future Charlemagne, who carried it to even higher levels of
fame and glory. It was then borne by two of his ninth-century descendants
who ruled as emperors, Charles the Bald and Charles the Fat. It thus
became associated with the most powerful dynasty in western Europe.
The Vision of Charles the Fat (discussed below, pp. 347–9) depicts
Carolingians themselves referring simply to ‘our royal family’, ‘our
stock’, ‘our family’ (genus nostrum regale, nostra propago, nostra genealogia),
but those who were not members of the family would need some other
way of referring to it. One way was to call them the second line or second
family (after the Merovingians) (see above, pp. 285–6), but the name
Charles was also developed for this purpose. In the middle of the tenth
century the chronicler Widukind refers to Louis the Child, who ruled the
East Franks 900–11, as ‘the last of the Charleses ruling the East Franks’.64
Since Louis’ name was not Charles, Widukind is clearly using ‘the
Charleses’, in the plural, as a label for the dynasty of which he was
a member. This is a usage found also in later German chroniclers, some-
times with an added term, such as ‘the stock of the Charleses’ or ‘the
ancient and glorious blood of the Charleses’.65 Two other terms also
developed based on the name Charles (Karolus in Latin): Karlenses and
Karolingi. These are used both as the equivalent of the modern
term ‘Carolingian’, as in ‘the royal stock of the Karlenses’, or ‘the kingship
of the Karolingi began with Pippin’, and also as designations for the
West Franks or French as a people, as in ‘the king of the Karlenses’ (for
non-Carolingian as well as Carolingian kings) or ‘his high-born parents,
Lotharingian and Karlenses’.66 The name Charles itself began to assume
grand and elaborate associations and by the thirteenth century there was
even a prophecy that ‘from the Karlingi, that is, the stock of King Charles
and of the house of the kings of France, an emperor will be raised up,
Charles by name, who will be ruler and monarch of the whole of Europe
and he will reform the Church and the empire, but after him no other
will reign’.67 The most striking development of Charles’ name was its
adoption as the ordinary word for ‘king’ in the Slavic and Baltic
languages, as well as in Rumanian and Turkish, a parallel to the way the

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personal name ‘Caesar’ became ‘Tsar’. In this way a name of obscure and
possibly derogatory nature became a word for ‘sovereign’.

New Names in Dynasties

New names were introduced into dynasties in various ways.68 Maternal
kin, especially if of high status, could be honoured by giving names from
their side of the family. A good example is the way the name Duarte
(Edward) entered the Portuguese royal dynasty, and subsequently the
Portuguese world, through the wife of John I, who was herself the grand-
daughter of Edward III of England. Valdemar I of Denmark (1157–82)
was named after his maternal great-grandfather, Vladimir of Kiev, thus
bringing this Russian name into the Danish royal dynasty. Naming after
a maternal grandfather is explicitly noted in the case of Godila,
a noblewoman who married Liuthar, margrave of the Saxon Nordmark
(985–1003), and ‘bore him a first born son, calling him by the name of
her father, Werner’.69 And, although the patriarchal nature of medieval
society, and of genealogical conventions, obscures it, there were also
recurrent names in mother–daughter lines, which by the nature of
things would not be seen as recurring in the same paternal family.
For instance, between Matilda, wife of Henry I of Germany (919–36),
and her great-great-granddaughter Matilda of Swabia, who died in the
early 1030s, there were five generations of women alternately named
Matilda or Gerberga, a pattern so well established that it could even be
used as a guideline by contemporaries when conducting genealogical
research.70
Marriage was the most common path whereby unfamiliar names
might be added to the family roll-call but there were others. Youngest
sons of large families were sometimes given unusual names that were not
part of family tradition. One chronicler, when listing the five sons of the
emperor Frederick Barbarossa, gives them all landed titles except for
the last: ‘Philip the clerk’.71 Philip was not a name that had been borne in
the family before and it may well have been chosen because the youngest
son was destined to be an ecclesiastic rather than a great lay noble,
although events were to turn out differently and Philip had to re-enter
the laity and eventually became king.

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If, as in Philip’s case, a youngest son unexpectedly succeeded to

power, his name might then become entrenched. A classic example of
both methods of transmission, through marriage and through novel
names for younger sons, is provided by the Scottish royal house under
Malcolm III (1057/8–93) and his queen Margaret. Margaret was
a descendant of the old royal house of Wessex and her first four sons
received the assertively Anglo-Saxon names Edward, Edgar, Edmund,
Æthelred, names of tenth- and eleventh-century kings of England.
Malcolm, the father, does not seem have asserted the claims of his
own, Gaelic, naming tradition. Then, after these four sons with English
names, perhaps feeling that duty to Margaret’s ancestors had been satis-
fied, Margaret and Malcolm chose unprecedented names for their last
two sons, Alexander and David. Neither choice can be explained with
certainty. Completely unknown in Scotland before the late eleventh
century, Alexander might be a reference to the ancient hero or to the
pope at the time of the marriage of Malcolm and Margaret (Alexander II,
1061–73), while David might look to either the biblical king or the Welsh
saint. In the event, both sons succeeded to the throne and their names
entered the repertoire of royal and aristocratic nomenclature. Two sub-
sequent Alexanders ruled Scotland (Alexander II, 1214–49; Alexander
III, 1249–86) and one subsequent David (David II, 1329–71), while
younger sons of the dynasty also often bore the name. Today ‘Sandy’,
the short form for Alexander, is a stereotypical indication of Scottishness.
Also, ancient royal names might be revived. Edward I, son of Henry III,
was the first Edward in the English royal house since the Norman
Conquest, almost two centuries earlier. The choice is explained by the
devotion that Henry III had towards Edward the Confessor, who was not
only the last king of the Wessex line but also a canonized saint. Through
Edward I, this Anglo-Saxon name was revived and naturalized; it is the
most common name of English kings. Less influential was the unusual
choice of the name Dagobert for a son of Louis VIII of France, born in
1222, the year before Louis succeeded to the throne. Dagobert was
a royal name under the Merovingian kings, who had ruled the Franks
until 751, but it was unknown among later dynasties until this son of Louis
VIII. Dagobert I, who died in 638 or 639, was claimed as the founder of
the abbey of St-Denis, which was the burial place of the Capetian kings of

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France and also the home of the community of monks who wrote their
history, so he had particular significance for the ruling dynasty. But this
Capetian Dagobert died at the age of nine or ten and was buried in the
abbey of Royaumont, which his mother, Queen Blanche, had founded,
and the name never did revive. Moreover, it seems as if the young prince
actually bore two names, one of them more familiar in the family:
‘Dagobert, that is Philip’.72

Name Change
Cases of name change have already been mentioned, when women
moved to foreign courts and adopted new names more familiar there
(p. 28), or the counts of Poitou who took the traditional comital name of
William (p. 291), but there are other examples that show the way that
certain names were associated with certain dynasties and roles. For exam-
ple, in 781 Charlemagne’s third son Carloman, at that time four years
old, was given the name Pippin, even though he had an older half-
brother of the same name. Giving him this important family name,
which was the name of Charlemagne’s own father, was marking him for
royal status and he was simultaneously anointed king of Italy.73 The older
Pippin is described as ‘deformed by a hunch on the back’ and this may
have been a reason for his exclusion.74 He rebelled in 792, was defeated
and sent to a monastery. Having his name taken by a younger half-
brother must have rankled. A different kind of substitution between
brothers occurred among the sons of the emperor Frederick
Barbarossa. His firstborn, called Frederick after his father, born in
1164, was created duke of Swabia when a baby, but died at the age of
five. A younger brother, Conrad, was now made duke of Swabia and also
adopted the name Frederick. He had stepped into his brother’s shoes in
the fullest possible sense of the phrase.75 Every duke of Swabia since
1079, almost a century, had been called Frederick, and the name and the
title were now approaching synonyms, a process fully realized in the case
of Dolphinus and Dauphin (above, p. 208).
A name change that involved no substitution of siblings but rather
a reorientation of dynastic ambition is found in the case of the celebrated
Holy Roman Emperor Charles IV. This son of King John of Bohemia,

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born in Prague in 1316, was baptized Wenceslas, which was the name of
Bohemia’s most famous saint and also the name of the child’s grand-
father and deceased uncle, the last two rulers of Bohemia from the
ancient Premyslid line. The name could not have been more royal and
Bohemian. However, King John was in origin a great noble from
Luxemburg, which lay on the western edge of the Holy Roman Empire
and where both French and German were spoken. In 1323 he sent the
young Wenceslas to the court of the French king, Charles IV. Writing
years later, Wenceslas recalled the king with affection:

my father sent me to the king of France when I was in the seventh year of my
boyhood and the king of France had me confirmed by a bishop and he gave
me his own name, that is, Charles, and he gave me as a wife the daughter of
his uncle Charles, who was named Margaret but known as Blanche.76

Charles was not only the name of the young prince’s French patron but
also that of the most famous ruler of the Middle Ages, the founder of the
Western Empire. Although he grew up to be a king of Bohemia who left
a great mark on Prague, evidenced in the Charles University and the
Charles Bridge, Charles’ new name was a prognostic of his imperial
destiny. After his election as king of the Romans (emperor-elect) in
1346, the pope, confirming the election, expressed the opinion that
Charles would be a devout ruler:

that he is to be so Catholic, so devout, so generous to the Church, is due

not only to his ancestry, since it is known that he descends from holy
parents who did such things, but also is due to his name, for he is called
Charles. Who was more devout and generous to the Church than
Charlemagne?77

Despite all this, Charles was determined to call his own firstborn son
Wenceslas and, after the death of this child, the next son was given the
same name.78 He grew up to succeed his father both as king of Bohemia
and king of the Romans, a unique case of father–son succession to the
empire in this period. While Charles IV’s father had wanted to change his
son’s name from one with purely Bohemian resonance to one with
imperial echoes, Charles himself thought the traditional Bohemian
name could be widened to embrace new horizons.

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On his accession in 1390, John, oldest son of Robert II of Scotland,

‘with the assent of the estates’, took the name Robert and ruled as Robert
III.79 In the earliest source no reason is given either for the change of
name or for the requirement for parliamentary assent, but in the early
sixteenth century the Scottish historian and theologian John Mair
advanced a theory about it: ‘I suppose they changed the name because
they suspected that kings called John would be unlucky, since they saw
the French John captured by the English a few days before.’80 The
‘French John’ is John II of France, captured in the Battle of Poitiers in
1356, so a little more than ‘a few days before’! Mair’s view was repeated by
later writers but becomes no more convincing through repetition.81
Perhaps it is obvious that someone would want the fine name of Robert.

Numbering of Monarchs
Confusion between rulers with the same name might also be avoided by
giving them numbers, and this was not only retrospective and unofficial,
like most nicknames, but could also be contemporary and official. We are
all familiar with the practice of giving monarchs a number: Henry VIII,
Louis XIV, Napoleon III. This practice is not neutral. To obtain an idea of
how sensitive an issue the numbering of monarchs can be, all one has to
do is read the accounts of the ‘pillar box war’ of 1953, when some Scots
objected to the royal logo ‘EIIR’ on post boxes introduced after the
accession of Queen Elizabeth, since she was the first, not the second,
Elizabeth to rule Scotland. Some of these offensive pillar boxes were
blown up, and the decision was soon made to remove the logo and
replace it with the royal crown of Scotland, which is what you see on
Scottish post boxes today.
So clearly these numbers are not simply a device for torturing school
children, but represent a claim, an assertion of a place in a legitimate
sequence. The most curious example of this is the case of Pope Benedict
XIII, both of them. The first Benedict XIII was elected in 1394 during the
Great Schism. His pre-papal name was Peter de Luna and he is often
known colloquially as Papa Luna. Despite being deposed not once but
twice by councils called to end the Schism, he insistently refused to accept
his deposition and died in his home town of Peñiscola in Valencia in

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1423. The second Benedict XIII was elected in 1724. At least that was
what he eventually became. At first, perhaps being insufficiently
informed of the deficiencies of his medieval predecessor, he styled him-
self Benedict XIV. Once the mistake was pointed out, however, the status
of Papa Luna as an anti-pope meant that he did not count (literally), so
the eighteenth-century pope went from being Benedict XIV to being
Benedict XIII. The fact that his next successor but one was also Benedict,
originally and always Benedict XIV, does not ease the confusion. This
proliferation of Benedicts is not merely a quirky comedy but underlines
the way that numbering implies legitimacy. There can only be one right-
ful pope at a time, and the early eighteenth-century Benedict, by revert-
ing from the title Benedict XIV to Benedict XIII, was making a statement
about the true line and dismissing the claims of the Spanish pretender
three hundred years earlier.
Unlike the numbering of crusades, which is modern, retrospective,
and primarily for scholarly and pedagogic purposes,82 numbering of
monarchs was a medieval practice. It seems to be the case that it origi-
nated with the papacy, but not in its earliest days. Under the Roman
empire, there were scarcely any popes with the same name, and this
situation did not change substantially until the seventh century.83 Early
popes were thus known simply by their name and title. When names did
begin to recur, the later pope was often given the soubriquet ‘the
Younger (iunior)’ to distinguish him, as in the case of Leo II and
Benedict II in the 680s.84 But when two popes with the same name
reigned close in time, confusion might arise. In the case of the popes
whom we call Gregory II (715–31), and his immediate successor Gregory
III (731–41), the difficulty is reflected in the cumbrous circumlocutions
found in the contemporary Life of St Boniface. There the earlier of these
Gregories is referred to as ‘Gregory, second after the first, and prior to
the most recent one, who is called “the Younger” in the common lan-
guage of the Romans’, and later, when this ‘Gregory II’ dies, he is
succeeded by ‘Gregory the Younger’, whom the author also calls
‘Gregory the Younger the second’, and finally there is reference to
both ‘Gregory the Younger, the second after the first’, and his successor,
‘Gregory the Younger to the second, the third from the first’.85 This must
all have made a simple sequential numbering system seem an attractive

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alternative, and, beginning from this very period, such a numbering

system is found, in inscriptions, in synodal acts and eventually in docu-
ments. It does not occur in the intitulatio, the pope’s name and title at the
beginning of the document, but in the dating clauses toward the end,
and later can be found on papal seals and inside the rota, the double
circle and cross introduced into papal documents in the eleventh
century.86
The numbering of rulers then passed to the secular world, being taken
up by the western emperors in their documents from the later tenth
century.87 In that case, too, it seems to have been the succession of rulers
with the same name (Otto I, Otto II, Otto III) that stimulated the
practice. A parallel can be found in the documents of the dukes of
Normandy in the early eleventh century, where the occasional use of
numbering resulted from the succession of three Richards (942–96,
996–1026, 1026–7) to ducal authority.88 A full study of the subject over
the course of the Middle Ages would need to look at when and where
numbering of rulers was employed, and in what contexts: charters, coins,
seals, chronicles, etc. Such a study might conceivably be readable. It is
clearly a complex story. While popes, as mentioned, employed numera-
tion in official contexts from the tenth century, many secular rulers did
not take it up until the fourteenth or fifteenth centuries. The practice of
numbering kings in chronicles might precede official use by hundreds of
years. Numbering on coins was a late medieval development. In the
Iberian peninsula, for example, numbering of monarchs on coins is
basically an innovation of the fifteenth century. Although numbering
appears occasionally on the coins and seals of the Portuguese monarchs
from the time of Alfonso III (1248–79), it is only frequent from the time
of Alfonso V (1438–81). In Castile, it begins on the coins of John II
(1406–54), and is more common, on both coins and seals, from the
time of Henry IV (1454–74). In Navarre, the practice begins under the
disputed rule of Charles, prince of Viana, who was titular Charles IV
(1441–61), and in Catalonia it begins in the 1460s.89
Here the focus will be on a couple of distinctive systems of numbering
that highlight the question of where does one start? The first example is
from Germany in 1198. The initial step on the road to becoming Holy
Roman Emperor was election by the German princes as ‘king of the

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Romans’. One of the two rival claimants elected king of the Romans in
the disputed election of 1198 was Philip, duke of Swabia. His style as king
is ‘Philip II (secundus), king of the Romans’.90 But who was Philip I? The
answer is Philip the Arabian, the Roman emperor who ruled from 244 to
249. The passage of 949 years could not erode the idea that the German
duke Philip of Swabia, chosen by a group of German nobles in two
assemblies in Thuringia, which was never part of the Roman empire,
was the heir of the Caesars. That mild ordinal secundus turns out to be
a bold assertion of a pedigree, an entitlement, and a long view of history.
Universal chronicles provided lists of Roman emperors, starting with
Augustus, continuing with the Byzantine emperors and then switching to
the west with Charlemagne. Otto of Freising, great-uncle of Philip II,
numbers the Roman emperors consecutively, from Augustus to his own
time, and notes that there were alternative systems of numbering,
depending on how one treated the obscure imperial claimants of the
late ninth and early tenth century, so that Otto I, crowned in 962, could
be called either the seventy-seventh or the eighty-fourth emperor.91 But,
whatever local uncertainties there might be in the details of the list, there
was a continuous sequence of emperors, and it stretched from Augustus
to the writer’s own time.
Another feature of the system of numbering in the Holy Roman
Empire springs from the fact, just mentioned, that it was customary for
the new ruler to be elected and crowned king in Germany before seeking
to be crowned emperor by the pope. Only under the Habsburgs did
papal coronation cease to be an essential condition for adoption of the
imperial title.92 Since not every German king actually was crowned by the
pope, either because of quarrels between king and pope or for purely
circumstantial reasons, the numbering of kings and emperors in the Holy
Roman Empire was not always identical. For example, the chronicler
Burchard of Ursberg, writing around 1230 and describing the accession
of Frederick Barbarossa’s son Henry as Holy Roman Emperor in 1191
calls him ‘Henry, sixth of this name, or, according to the calculation of
the Romans, fifth, for they do not number the first Henry, father of Otto
I, in the catalogue of emperors’.93 This is meticulous. ‘The first Henry’,
founder of the Ottonian dynasty, was elected king in 919 but was never
crowned emperor, so when his great-grandson Henry became emperor

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in the early eleventh century, he was Henry I as emperor and Henry II as

king. And, of course, even the rulers who were crowned by the pope were
kings until their imperial coronation, so their title changed during the
course of their reign. When, in 1076, Gregory VII deposed Henry IV, as
modern historians call him, he was careful in his terms: ‘I deprive king
Henry, son of the emperor Henry, of the government of the whole of the
kingdom of the Germans and of Italy.’94 Since Henry IV had not yet been
crowned emperor, he was ‘King Henry’, while his father, Henry III, who
had been crowned emperor, was thus ‘the emperor Henry’. Henry IV was
eventually crowned emperor, not by Gregory VII but by a pope of his own
making, an anti-pope in the eyes of the Gregorians. And, of course, the
emperor Henry III was also King Henry IV and the emperor Henry IV was
also King Henry V, which is the numbering used by modern historians.95
Modern historians label these Henries simply by their number as king,
but in their own documents they were scrupulous in numbering them-
selves, so that charters issued by Henry III after his imperial coronation in
1046 are dated in such complex ways as ‘in the seventeenth year of the
reign as king and the ninth year of the reign as emperor of the lord
Henry, the third as king, the second as emperor’.96 The results can be
curious: Conrad, first Hohenstaufen ruler, elected king of the Romans in
1138, appears in his own documents as ‘Conrad II, by grace of God king
of the Romans (Conradus dei gratia Romanorum rex secundus)’ but the
modern edition in which these are printed is titled Charters of Conrad
III! The first German ruler called Conrad (911–18) was king of Germany
(or the East Franks) and nothing else.
Another instructive curiosity of numbering can be found in later
medieval England. The Norman and Plantagenet kings of England
from the conquest of 1066 down to the accession of Edward I in 1272
had names that were different from those of any of the pre-conquest
rulers of Anglo-Saxon England. They were William, Henry, and so forth,
not Æthelred or Egbert. Edward I was the first post-conquest king to have
a name also borne by an Anglo-Saxon king, but since the last Edward
before him, Edward the Confessor, had ruled more than two centuries
earlier there was little danger of confusion in referring to him simply as
‘King Edward’. Edward I was succeeded by his son and namesake Edward
II. A reference to ‘King Edward son of King Edward’ would suffice to

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identify him. It was the fact that he was followed in turn by his son, yet
another namesake, that evidently made those responsible for drawing up
official records think about this issue. ‘King Edward son of King Edward
son of King Edward’ was not impossible, but rather long-winded. In the
Parliament Rolls a different approach was adopted: Edward became
‘King Edward, the third after the conquest (le roi Edward, le tierz apres le
conquest)’.97 This style enshrined a view of the past: the Norman Conquest
of 1066 had been a decisive break, when the clock restarted. The Edwards
who had ruled England before then, Edward the Elder, Edward the
Martyr and Edward the Confessor, were confined to a misty prehistory.
The ‘certain men, wise in the ways of the world’, who supposedly invented
this new style for Edward III, were also subscribing to a view of history.98
This need not have happened. A text from the very early thirteenth
century describes Edward the Confessor as ‘St Edward, king of the
English, the third of this name’, while there are isolated references,
from the year 1307, just after the death of Edward I, as we call him, to
‘the lord of glorious memory, Edward the Fourth, king of the English’
and to ‘the passing of the great king, Edward the Fourth’.99 These
formulations must imply that the speakers counted Edward the Elder,
Edward the Martyr and Edward the Confessor as Edward I, II and III, and
hence did not envisage the thread of English history as having been
snapped in 1066. But, apart from these few exceptions, Edward I did
not in fact become Edward IV, and Edward III did not become Edward
VI. And ‘King Edward, the third after the conquest’ was followed in the
Rolls of Parliament, with no compelling logic, by ‘King Richard,
the second after the conquest’ and ‘King Henry, the fourth after the
conquest’, and so on. Since there were no Richards or Henries in Anglo-
Saxon England, the clarifying suffix was unnecessary but became fixed
form until the time of the Tudors. The way that this system of numbering
involved a choice, adopting one approach rather than another, becomes
clear if one compares it with the system used for the French kings. In that
case, the general practice was to number kings called Louis from Louis
the Pious, son of Charlemagne, who was deemed by later centuries to be
the first king of France called Louis, but, in contrast, there is one set of
genealogical diagrams of the Frankish and French kings, in which
the numbering restarts with the arrival of the Capetian dynasty, so

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that the king we call Louis VI is Louis I and so forth. In this isolated
example, the five Carolingian rulers called Louis were thus consigned to
the same misty past as the Anglo-Saxon Edwards.100
The Holy Roman Empire and late medieval England represent two
opposite ways that the numbering of monarchs could mark out the place
of the dynasty in time. When Philip of Swabia or his advisers adopted the
style ‘Philippus secundus’ they stressed continuity. The political con-
glomerate of the year 1200 that included Germany and north Italy was,
they were saying, the very same thing as the empire of the Caesars. Such
incidents as the abdication of the last western emperor in 476 or the
coronation of Charlemagne in 800 did not disrupt that seamless history,
a history which continued to flow down to the end of the empire in 1806,
although it is significant that the emperor Francis II describes the crown
that he laid down in that year as the crown of the Deutsches Reich: a reality
was being recognized just as it ended.101 The English situation was the
opposite. When Edward III was called Edward III, the conquest of 1066
was being recognized as a determining event, a break in history that was
embraced rather than hidden. William the Conqueror had made efforts
to present himself as the legitimate successor of Edward the Confessor,
last king of the house of Wessex, but his late medieval descendants were
frank about the conquest. Not everyone was happy with this approach
(see below, p. 386).
Even more frank were the kings of Jerusalem, rulers of the crusader
state established in the aftermath of the Christian conquest of Jerusalem
in 1099. The first king, Baldwin I, as he is known in modern history books,
styled himself ‘by grace of God king of the Jerusalemites of Latin
Christendom (Latinitatis)’,102 thus stressing the western and colonial
roots of his realm. Later kings used similar forms, numbering themselves
by their place in the sequence from Baldwin I. Thus, Baldwin’s successor,
Baldwin II, was ‘Baldwin by grace of God second king of the Latins of
Jerusalem’, his successor Fulk was ‘Fulk by grace of God third king of the
Latins of Jerusalem’, and so on. The recurrence of the same personal
name was not relevant, so the king we label ‘Baldwin IV’ is, in his own
documents, ‘the sixth king’, the king we call Amalric II is ‘the ninth king’.
The practice continued down to the time of John of Brienne, ‘through
the grace of God tenth king of the Latins of Jerusalem’. John ruled from

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1210 to 1225.103 Hence the system of enumeration called attention to the

founding of the kingdom by western knights and clerics at a moment in
the heroic past. And similar conceptions can be found in England as early
as the thirteenth century, for, while the idea of counting the kings from
the Norman Conquest may have appeared officially only with Edward III,
it had a history prior to that time. Matthew Paris, the famous artist-
historian of St Albans, working in the middle years of the thirteenth
century, depicted the eight kings since the conquest, labelling William
the Conqueror, ‘William, the first king of England after its conquest’, and
continuing with this style down to Matthew’s contemporary, Henry III,
labelled ‘Henry, eighth king’.104 This is precisely the system employed by
the crusader kings of Jerusalem.
Since the practice of numbering monarchs began at different times and
in different places, it was often necessary for a decision to be made about
what number to start with, that is, how many predecessors with the same
name there had already been. Historians today refer to Charles IV, king of
France (1322–8), and Charles IV, Holy Roman Emperor (1346–78), rulers
of different realms but both with titles implying three Charles before them
(the emperor Charles styled himself Charles IV in official documents;
Charles IV of France was so-called only in contemporary chronicles).105
The royal name Charles had not been borne for some time. The
Carolingian dynasty is known by that name because the members who
made its fortune, Charles Martel and his grandson Charles the Great
(Charlemagne), were called Charles (Carolus in Latin). But this name,
Charles, was only borne by kings descended from Charlemagne for four
generations before it went into abeyance for more than three hundred
years. After the death of Charles the Simple in 929 there were no kings
called Charles until the late thirteenth century. Indeed, one author, writ-
ing in England or Normandy at the very beginning of the twelfth century
explicitly terms Charles the Simple ‘the last of the Charleses’.106 The name
was not completely unknown in the ruling dynasty of France but none who
bore it became king of France. Then, in 1322, a King Charles ascended the
throne of France. But what number was he to take, bearing in mind that
Charlemagne and his immediate successors had ruled an area covering
Europe from the Atlantic to the Elbe and from the North Sea to central
Italy? Could Charlemagne really be regarded as a previous king of France?

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Or, for that matter, a king of Germany? Charlemagne’s world is the world
admirably summed up by the title of Patrick Geary’s book on the period,
Before France and Germany (which appeared in French translation as
Naissance de la France). When the Charles who became king of France in
1322 was known as Charles IV, a view was being expressed about
Carolingian history. Somehow, from the various rulers called Charles in
the ninth and early tenth centuries, ruling disparate and varying terri-
tories, three had been picked out as precursors. Since it is quite certain that
the area of the later kingdom of France had been ruled by four kings called
Charles in the Carolingian period, obviously one of them did not count.107
It appears that Charles the Fat, ruler of France (the kingdom of the West
Franks) 885–7, had, despite his girth, slipped through the net. The
emperor Charles IV, who was originally named Wenceslas but adopted at
confirmation the name of his patron Charles IV of France (above, p. 300),
had to look for imperial predecessors and found three Carolingians from
that earlier period. He was the fourth emperor called Charles, after
Charlemagne, Charles the Bald and Charles the Fat.108 So these two approx-
imate contemporaries of the fourteenth century both bore the title ‘Charles
IV’ but to do so drew on some, but not all, of the same predecessors. The
choice of the French was confirmed and settled for good by Charles
V (1364–80) who did indeed call himself ‘Charles V’, as is witnessed by
writings in his own hand. Subsequent Charleses were numbered accord-
ingly. In the empire, the next Charles was the famous Charles V, opponent
of Luther and ruler also of Spain and its New World territories.
A particularly complicated situation arose in the Iberian peninsula
after the king of Castile whom we know as Alfonso X or Alfonso the Wise
(1252–84) decided to introduce numbering of monarchs in the verna-
cular chronicles that he sponsored.109 The problem came partly from the
plethora of Alfonsos in Iberian history, and more specifically from two
issues: the relationship of the kings of Leon and Castile to those of the
Asturian kingdom that had preceded them, and how to deal with the
period 1157–1230, when Leon and Castile were separate kingdoms, each
for a time ruled by an Alfonso. Alfonso the Wise definitely saw himself in
the line of the kings of Asturias and numbered the earliest Asturian
Alfonso, who ruled 739–57, Alfonso I. He then continued the numbering
through the kings of Asturias and Leon from 739 to 1037, and then

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beyond, ignoring the violent seizure of the throne by a different dynasty

in 1037. The reign of a woman, Urraca, daughter of Alfonso VI, did not
break the sequence, but since Alfonso the Wise included Alfonso the
Battler, king of Aragon and Urraca’s husband for a while, as a legitimate
king of Leon and Castile, he numbered him Alfonso VII, a style modern
historians reserve for Urraca’s son and successor. He also dealt differ-
ently with the period of the divided kingdoms 1157–1230. Modern his-
torians number the king of Castile from 1158 to 1214 Alfonso VIII and his
cousin, king of Leon 1188–1230, Alfonso IX. This is illogical, since one
did not succeed the other and they did not rule the same kingdom.
Alfonso the Wise was more logical. Since he had an extra Alfonso in
Alfonso the Battler, he numbered Urraca’s son and successor Alfonso
VIII, and the two cousins ruling the separated kingdoms Alfonso IX of
Castile and Alfonso IX of Leon. He thus recognized a real disjuncture in
the history of the dynasty, something that modern numbering practices
seek to veil. As so often, a number for a monarch is far from a neutral tool
of chronology.

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 CHAPTER 9

Saints, Images, Heraldry, Family Trees

Dynastic Saints

S o, choice of name and systems of numbering reveal

something of how dynasties conceived of themselves. There are
many other cultural expressions that also manifest a sense of dynasty.
Some families had dynastic saints, either in the sense of a saint especially
associated with the dynasty as its patron, like St Martin and the Frankish
kings, or in the more literal sense of a saint from the dynasty, like the
Bohemian dynasty’s Wenceslas or the Capetians’ St Louis. The rulers of
the Macedonian dynasty, which came to power in Byzantium in 867,
considered themselves under the patronage of St Elijah. In Byzantium,
unlike in the west, many Old Testament figures were treated as saints.
They also tried to promote the sanctity of one of their own members,
Theophano, wife of Leo VI. Although Leo had discarded her, he ‘put as
much effort into getting her sanctified as he put into searching for
substitutes for her’.1
Some royal saints were formally canonized by the pope, in the complex
official process that took its final shape in the twelfth century. These
included the emperor Henry II (d. 1024, canonized 1146), Edward the
Confessor of England (d. 1066, canonized 1161) and Louis IX of France
(d. 1270, canonized 1297). For others, attempts were made to attain cano-
nization but unsuccessfully, although the collection of evidence for the
subject’s miracles shows that there were active cults. Richard II of England
sought the canonization of his great-grandfather, Edward II, in the 1380s
and 1390s, sending the pope a book of Edward’s miracles, which does not
survive, while both Henry VII and Henry VIII of England made repeated

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attempts to have Henry VI (d. 1471) canonized, and there is a surviving

collection of 172 of the dead king’s miracles.2
Prior to the twelfth century, saints were recognized, not by a decision of
the pope, but by having an active cult, with miracles, liturgical commemora-
tion and special treatment of the tomb. Saintly kings of the early Middle Ages
of this kind were not uncommon, numbering some twenty or so, although
some of them are very obscure and can hardly be said to have prominent or
continuous cults. What is striking is how many of them met bloody deaths, in
battle or through murder or execution: Sigismund of Burgundy (d. 524),
Oswald of Northumbria (d. 642), Edmund of East Anglia (d. 869), Wenceslas
of Bohemia (d. 935), Edward the Martyr of England (d. 978), Olaf of Norway
(d. 1030), Canute II (or IV) of Denmark (d. 1086), and others. It is a pattern
sufficiently noticeable to constitute a type, the ‘martyr-king’ of northern and
eastern Europe.3 In later centuries too, the supposedly violent death of
a supposedly blameless royal victim continued to present a prima facie case
for sanctity, as in the case of Edward II and Henry VI of England, just
mentioned.
Saintly queens present an entirely different profile.4 They were not
canonized because of bloody deaths and many of them were recognized as
saints after they had retired to the nunnery, like St Radegund (d. 587),
a Thuringian princess and Frankish queen, or lived out a pious widowhood,
like Matilda (d. 968), wife of Henry I of Germany. There is an exceptional
cluster of saintly royal women in east central Europe in the thirteenth
century: Andrew II of Hungary (1205–35) was the father of a female saint,
the grandfather of three, the father-in-law of another, and the nephew of
a sixth. Many of these women were closely involved with the Franciscan
Order, especially its female branch, the ‘Poor Clares’. Their royal relatives
could enjoy the glory of being related to saints but the saints, or at least those
who wrote about them, might glory in their relationship with royalty. The
first chapter in the Life of St Cunigunda, one of King Andrew’s grand-
daughters, is ‘Concerning her family and the magnificence of her lineage’.5
When he was lobbying for the canonization of Louis of Toulouse
(d. 1297), Robert, king of Naples (1309–43), who was Louis’ younger
brother, could draw on the support of the Franciscans, to which
Order Louis had belonged, and part of their argument was that
Louis had saints on both sides of his family: his father was

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a nephew of St Louis, king of France, his mother a member of the

Hungarian royal family, which had produced St Stephen of Hungary
and other early royal saints, as well as St Elizabeth, the canonized
daughter of Andrew II. There is something not entirely logical about
this point since, of course, the same was true of King Robert as well.
In any case, Louis was canonized in 1317, his head enshrined in
Naples by his brother, and his cult was launched. Simone Martini,
one of the greatest painters of the time, was commissioned to pro-
duce a painting of him, which shows Louis, enthroned and with
angels holding a crown above his head, placing a crown on the
head of the kneeling Robert. Robert had helped make Louis
a saint and Louis in return is vindicating Robert’s kingship.6
Louis and Robert were members of a junior branch of the Capetians,
a dynasty rich in dynastic saints. Their consciousness of this fact was constantly
reinforced. Louis, the young son of Charles VI of France, and Dauphin until
his death at the age of eighteen in 1415, had a painting at the head of his bed
depicting St Louis (Louis IX) and St Louis of Toulouse, who were not only his
namesakes but also two saints from his own dynasty, St Louis being a direct
ancestor, Louis of Toulouse a great-nephew of St Louis.7 The heir to the
throne of France would thus see his holy relatives every night and morning.
When his sister, Mary, entered the convent at the age of four, the religious
house chosen for her was the priory of St.-Louis-de-Poissy, dedicated to her
ancestor and founded by another, St Louis’ grandson, Philip IV.
An especially explicit example of the invocation of dynastic saints can be
found in the Preface to the Life of Waltheof of Melrose by Jocelin of
Furness, which is dedicated to William the Lion, king of Scots (1165–
1214), his son, Alexander (later Alexander II), and William’s brother, Earl
David. Waltheof was related to the Scots royal family, since after his father’s
death his mother had married, as a second husband, David I, William the
Lion’s grandfather. Jocelin says that William and the other dedicatees can
take pride in this relationship: ‘you are granted the privilege of exulting in
the common stock and descent you share’. The saintly heritage of the
Scottish royal family goes far beyond this, however. They are descended
from St Margaret (d. 1093), who, Jocelin claims, herself descended, on her
mother’s side, from the Holy Roman Emperors (he gives no details), while
her father was ‘nephew and legitimate heir of the most holy Edward the

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Figure 16 A dynastic saint. This painting of St Louis of Toulouse (d. 1297) by Simone
Martini, shows him placing a crown on the head of his younger brother, Robert, king of
Sicily (Naples) (1309–43).
Courtesy of Museum Capodimonte.

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Confessor, king of England’. The implication of this descent is radical, since

it ‘would have made you the sceptre-bearers of the kingdom of England by
hereditary right, coming to you by the right and direct line of successive
generations, if the violent plundering of the Normans had, by God’s permis-
sion, not impeded it until the time ordained’. The kings of Scots are,
therefore, the rightful kings of England.
Nor are Waltheof, Margaret and Edward the Confessor the only saintly
relatives:

Not only did the most powerful in that glorious lineage of the English
kings stand out in wealth and glory in the kingdom but also, pleasing God
by their holiness and great justice, they were gloriously renowned for many
kinds of miracles, both in life and after death. For, from the holy king
Æthelwulf, who assessed the whole of England for tithes and dedicated
those tithes to God and the Church, nine saintly kings are numbered, the
later of whom are recognized as having shone forth in the Christian
religion equally or even more admirably. In the tenth, St Edward, the
holiness of all his predecessors flowed together, as it were, and thus from
him, as from a most lucid fountain, the stream of religious life flowed to St
Margaret his great-niece, and from her into her son, King David, your
grandfather, and from him into King Malcolm your brother.8

Here there is a line of saint-kings, starting with Æthelwulf (d. 858), who
introduced tithes, continuing over the generations (it is not clear which
nine kings Jocelin had in mind), increasing in holiness, with their blood
and their sanctity finally flowing, via St Margaret, into the Scottish royal
dynasty, rightful inheritors of the kingdom of England.

Public Images
Another way a sense of dynasty could be expressed was in the public
images, painted and carved, that adorned the walls of the palaces and
castles of kings, and the gateways of cities.9 In the 820s, during the reign
of Louis the Pious, the hall of his palace at Ingelheim near Mainz was
decorated with wall-paintings of images of rulers. Some of these mon-
archs were from ancient history – Cyrus, Alexander and so on – but the
culmination, probably in the apse of the hall, was a series of Christian

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rulers: Constantine, Theodosius the Great, Charles Martel, Pippin and

Charlemagne. This sequence began with the first Christian Roman
emperor and concluded with the most recent. Louis the Pious could
thus look at a gratifying chain of rulers: good Christian rulers, including
his father, grand father and great-grand father. His Merovingian prede-
cessors are invisible.10
But those very Merovingians might, in the course of time, become
valuable predecessors. Once their reality faded, and the Carolingian
usurpation of the throne was no longer a vivid political issue, a line of
distant forerunners, some with peculiar and exotic names, could give
a depth and colour to French royalty. This could be expressed in stone as
well as on parchment. During the reign of Philip IV of France (1285–
1314), a great hall was constructed in the royal palace on the Ile de la Cité
in Paris. It was enormous, 70 by 27 metres (230 by 89 feet), and was
decorated with statues of the kings of France from the legendary
Pharamund down to Philip’s immediate predecessor. These were placed
along the side walls and on the central columns of the room. Under each
was an inscription identifying the king and adding brief information. The
programme required decisions about who was to be included and what
was to be said about them. The portrayal of the Merovingians was very
selective, in an attempt to give the impression of a single line of rulers
succeeding each other, which was far from the historical reality, and the
forcible removal of the dynasty by the Carolingians is described in neutral
terms: ‘Childeric III, brother of Theuderic, reigned nine years and died
without heirs. Pippin, son of Charles Martel, of the lineage of Clothar II,
was elected king.’11 The dynastic revolution of 751 is thus legitimized and
normalized as a peaceful transition to a ruler with hereditary claims.
Likewise, the next change of dynasty, to the Capetians in 987, is
explained by the lack of heirs of the Carolingian Louis V (or Louis IV
as the inscription calls him). In this case there is no attempt to assert
a genealogical link to earlier rulers, simply a reference to the election of
Hugh Capet.12 What the statues did impress on anyone present in the
great hall was the antiquity and continuity of the line of French kings:
forty-one in all, surrounding the diners at banquets, ambassadors at
receptions, courtiers and petitioners, litigants and lawyers, enclosing
them within a small army of ancient French royalty.13

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It may be that knowledge of the statues in Paris had come to Peter IV,
‘the Ceremonious’, of Aragon (1336–87) and was one stimulus to his own
plan to have sculptures of his ancestors created for the Royal Palace of
Barcelona, as is detailed in a document he issued in 1342. In this he
commands payment to be made to ‘our faithful Master Aloy’ for bringing
alabaster to the palace and from it

to make and form nineteen images prepared with all the expedient and
necessary work and as beautiful as he can and knows how to make them, of
which eight will represent images of the eight kings who succeeded one
another as kings of Aragon and counts of Barcelona, down to our own
times, and the others the images of those eleven who were counts of
Barcelona but did not have the royal title.14

Peter had a very clear idea of the past of his dynasty, who were counts of
Barcelona for many generations before they acquired the royal title
through marriage to the queen and heir of Aragon in the twelfth century.
As he sat in his palace in Barcelona, he wanted to be able to look at his
male-line ancestors, eight kings and eleven counts, going back to the
ninth century.
Someone who was definitely familiar with the forty-one dynastic statues
in the palace of the French kings was Charles IV, king of Bohemia and
Holy Roman Emperor (1346–78), who spent his childhood from the age of
seven at the French court. At that time the statues would be new. Perhaps
they were in Charles’ mind when he commissioned, for his grand castle of
Karlštejn (Karlstein), fourteen miles south-west of Prague, a cycle of wall
paintings showing his ancestors.15 These were painted around the years
1356–7 and, although they do not survive, copies were made in a book in
the later sixteenth century, so what they depicted can be known.16
Charles’ genealogical vistas were wide: the series starts with Noah
and his biblically reported descendants down to Nimrod, then moves to
Belus, legendary first king of Assyria, who is identified as the son of
Nimrod, and follows his descendants, including Saturn and Jupiter,
down to Priam, king of Troy. Here we are on solid ground, and the
line of Priam’s descendants, down to the early Frankish kings, is
straightforward. The sequence of historically attested Merovingians
runs from Clovis to Clothar II (d. 629), but at this point the male line

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ceases to be followed, as the Carolingians need to be introduced. This

was done by way of a fictitious daughter of Clothar, called Blithildis,
who married the equally fictitious ancestor of the Carolingians; this
part of the genealogy had been concocted as early as the reign of
Charlemagne himself.17 Their descendants include Arnulf, bishop of
Metz, and his son Ansegisel, both historical characters (the painting
in Karlštejn shows Arnulf dressed as a bishop but the accompanying
text is very clear that Arnulf fathered Ansegisel before he became
a cleric). Ansegisel married Begga, daughter of the mayor of
the palace, Pippin (d. 640). Begga is described as ‘duchess of
Lotharingia and Brabant (ducissa Lothoringiae et Brabanciae)’, which,
since Lotharingia did not exist at this time, is somewhat anachronis-
tic, but points forward to the way the blood line would be traced. The
line continues through the Carolingian descendants of Ansegisel and
Begga, through Charlemagne and Charles the Bald, with some
streamlining, down to a King Louis, who was the father of Charles,
duke of Lotharingia and Brabant. This must be Louis IV (936–54),
father of King Lothar (954–86) and Charles of Lorraine, who was
excluded from the succession by the Capetians in 987. Charles’
daughter, Countess Gerberga, married Lambert, count of Louvain,
and their descendants attained the title of dukes of Lotharingia (in
reality this time) and of Brabant. After many generations, the daugh-
ter of John I, duke of Brabant, married Henry of Luxemburg, who
became the emperor Henry VII and was the grandfather of Charles
IV.
These wall paintings were in the grand hall of Charles’ palace at
Karlštejn and hence visible to visitors, including foreign embassies.
They presented a grand panorama, with biblical, Trojan, Merovingian
and Carolingian ancestors. No attempt was made to disguise descent
through the female line, rather the reverse, since these moments are
marked by images of women, sometimes face-to-face with husbands, as is
also the case with the last image, Charles IV and his first wife, Blanche of
Valois, enthroned, their faces turning towards each other. The forty-
seven generations from Noah, the common ancestor of all humanity, to
Charles IV, Roman emperor, builder of Karlštejn, patron of these paint-
ings, are given concrete visible form.18

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Figure 17 Wall paintings from Karlštejn Castle near Prague, as copied in a sixteenth-
century manuscript, showing the Holy Roman Emperor Charles IV (1346–78) and his
ancestors.
Vienna, Österreichische Nationalbibliothek, MS 8330, p. 126.

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Figure 18 Charles’ wife Blanche (d. 1348), from the same source.
Vienna, Österreichische Nationalbibliothek, MS 8330, page 127.

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An ambitious counterpart to these painted images or statues was

attempted by some Byzantine rulers on a much more restricted physical
space, their coins. The likenesses on coins were the most common
images in medieval society and rulers were well aware of the messages
they might carry. Beginning with Constantine V, some emperors had
images of their predecessors and ancestors on their money, as well as
their own images. A particularly crowded example is the coinage of
Constantine VI and Irene in the years 780–92, which shows, on the
reverse, Constantine’s father, grandfather and great-grandfather, Leo
III (d. 741), Constantine V (d. 775) and Leo IV (d. 780), thus depicting
every ruler of what modern scholarship calls the Isaurian dynasty.19
Earlier coins of this dynasty had also shown emperors of several
generations.20 Byzantine coins showing co-emperors were not uncom-
mon, but these showing dead ancestors were unusual and represented
a strong sense of lineage. They have indeed been called ‘a representa-
tion of the notion of dynasty in all its verticality’.21 Such images on
coins are not common, simply for practical reasons of space, but they
are parallel to the paintings on the palace walls in Ingelheim and
Karlštejn or the life-size statues in Paris and Barcelona: an instant visual
expression of a sense of dynasty.

Heraldry
If surnames were very rarely a form of group identification in the royal
and imperial dynasties of the Middle Ages, there was, in this period when
pictures were as powerful as words, one visual language that developed as
a potent expression of dynasty: heraldry. This new way of displaying
family identity was vivid, visual and public. From the twelfth century,
ruling families adopted hereditary symbols, which they bore on their
shields and banners and which could decorate and identify their books
or their tombs. These symbols were mainly either abstract geometrical
designs, such as chevrons, crosses and diagonal bands, or stylized ani-
mals, notably the lion. Eventually complex rules developed about the
transmission of heraldic arms, so that a trained observer could look at
one of the intricate coats-of-arms of the late medieval or Early Modern
period and deduce the bearer’s family connections. It has been nicely

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Figure 19 A dynasty depicted in miniature. Coins of the Byzantine rulers Constantine VI

and Irene from 780–92 showing Constantine’s father, grandfather and great-grandfather.
© Dumbarton Oaks, Byzantine Collection, Washington, DC.

pointed out that subjects of a late medieval king ‘could read a coat more
easily than they could read a letter’.22 Rulers were early enthusiasts for
heraldic symbols and by the year 1200 the kings of England had their
three lions and the kings of France their fleurs-de-lys. Sometimes the
images they adopted had a direct reference to the realm, as in the case of
the kings of Leon and Castile who bore a shield with images of a lion and
a castle quartered.
Heraldry was well suited to express both general family affiliation and
individual identities. For example, the Angevin dynasty that ruled the king-
dom of Sicily from 1266 descended from Charles of Anjou, younger brother
of St Louis of France. Charles had, from 1246, borne as his arms the gold
fleurs-de-lys on a blue shield of the royal house of France, differentiated by
a red label, a label being a narrow horizontal band at the top of the shield
with pendants, five in this case.23 Such a differentiating feature is known in

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the language of heraldry as a ‘difference’. It would be clear to any heraldi-

cally literate observer that Charles was a member of a junior branch of the
French royal family. His descendants and successors as kings of Sicily,
Charles II and Robert, bore the same coat-of-arms. King Robert’s younger
brothers, Philip of Taranto and John of Durazzo, bore their own differen-
tiated versions of these arms, the former with a silver bend (a diagonal band
from the viewer’s top left to bottom right, superimposed on the other
features of the shield), the latter with a border of alternating silver and
red squares (but without the label).24 The grammar of heraldry could
express a sense of dynasty very well.
It also carried political messages, sometimes controversial ones. In
1325 Henry, earl of Leicester, was charged with changing his own arms
(the royal lions plus a blue bend) to those of his executed brother,
Thomas of Lancaster (the royal lions with a blue label bearing the fleurs-
de-lys of France). Henry replied that these were his father’s arms and his
by hereditary right.25 No legal proceedings in fact took place, but the
incident shows, in the words of one heraldic expert, ‘the political impor-
tance that could be attached to the adoption of a particular coat’.26
Thomas of Lancaster had been an arch-enemy of the king, Edward II,
and a gesture that might suggest identification with him or sympathy for
him was bound to arouse suspicions. Henry of Leicester’s point was in
fact a reasonable one since his father had borne those arms, although the
king’s suspicions were also reasonable: Henry played an important part
in the deposition of Edward II and was rewarded with his dead brother’s
earldom of Lancaster.
More straightforward is the case of Peter, duke of Coimbra, uncle
and former regent of Alfonso V of Portugal, who took up arms against
the king in 1449, and carried into battle a banner with the royal arms
without any difference. It was a clear statement that he was the man who
would be king.27 Eleven years later, when Richard, duke of York,
decided to make his bid for the English Crown, he took exactly the
same decisive step. Previously he had borne the royal arms of England,
the three lions quartered with the lilies of France, differentiated. He
now had banners made for his trumpeters without the differentiation:
‘he gave them banners with the whole arms of England without any
difference’.28

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The fact that, by the time of Richard of York, the royal arms of
England included the lilies of France is explained by another, earlier
deployment of heraldry to make a claim. When, in January 1340, Edward
III of England was proclaimed king of France, basing his claim on descent
through his mother, Isabella, daughter of Philip the Fair, he also adopted
the French arms, quartering the lilies with the lions or leopards of
England. This was a public and visual means of pointing out his descent
and his claims, and the lilies were not finally removed from the English
royal arms until 1801, with the eventual abandonment of the claim. In the
world of heraldry, the Hundred Years War was still being fought in the
age of Napoleon. A contemporary chronicler tells a curious story about
the reaction of the French king, Philip VI, to this move on Edward’s part.
He did not object, he said, to his cousin’s quartering the arms of France
and England, but he thought that the lilies of France should be in the first
quarter, not the leopards of England, since that arrangement ‘gives
greater honour to the tiny island of England than to the great kingdom
of France’.29 In fact, Edward did not put the English arms in the first
quarter but the French lilies, which is where they remained until the
reordering of the royal arms necessitated by the Act of Union with
Scotland in 1707.
The ruling classes took their coats-of-arms to the grave with them. They
could exhibit their own arms, and also those of important relatives, on their
tombs. An extreme example is the tomb of Philippa of Hainault, wife of
Edward III of England, who died in 1369, which displays thirty-two coats-of-
arms, drawn from Philippa’s wide extended kin, not only those as close as
father and mother, husband and children, but also brothers-in-law and
sisters-in-law, a daughter-in-law, cousins, and even, it seems, a fiancé of
a deceased daughter.30 Philippa’s place in the web of international royal
and lordly families is here advertised in the special language of the upper
class. And that function of heraldry, as a language, is revealed sharply by the
fact that a tomb in the Franciscan church at Assisi has been identified from
its heraldry alone, even though it bears no inscription, as that prepared for
John of Brienne (d. 1237), titular king of Jerusalem and Latin emperor of
Constantinople.31
The coat-of-arms of Margaret of Denmark, queen of James III of
Scotland (1460–88), as shown on the Trinity Altarpiece by the Flemish

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master Hugo van der Goes, illustrates the way that layers of dynastic
identity had been built up and enshrined in heraldry by the later
Middle Ages. Margaret’s arms impale those of her husband, i.e. they
place them on the (viewer’s) left side; these are the traditional arms of
Scotland, a red lion rampant, with blue tongue and claws, on a gold
background, surrounded by a flowery red border.32 On the other side are
Margaret’s arms, a complex pattern of four quarterings separated by
a cross, with a small quartered shield superimposed upon it, and an
even smaller shield superimposed on that. She was the daughter of
Christian I of Denmark and, at this time, he ruled, or claimed the right
to rule, all three of the Scandinavian kingdoms (they had a common
ruler for many periods in the years 1388–1523). The four quarters show
the arms of the kingdoms of Sweden (three gold crowns on a blue field),
Denmark (three crowned blue lions guardant, on a gold field scattered
with red hearts), Norway (a gold lion rampant with an axe on a red field),
as well as the golden wyvern on a blue field representing lordship over the
Wends, that is, Baltic Slavs.33 The superimposed smaller shield quarters
the arms presumed to be those of Holstein (two crossed gold batons
intertwined in a twisted wreath on a red field) in the first and fourth
quarters with those of Schleswig (two blue lions guardant on a gold field)
in the second and third. King Christian was also duke of Schleswig and
count, later duke, of Holstein, through inheritance from his mother’s
family.34 Finally, the small shield superimposed on the superimposed
shield bears the arms of Oldenburg (two red bars on a gold field).35
Christian had been count of Oldenburg before being elected to the
vacant throne of Denmark. This small piece of painting thus condenses
generations of dynastic information.36
This new way of expressing a sense of dynasty was projected into the
past, for heraldry became such an established part of upper-class life that
it was assumed that it had always been so, and coats-of-arms were devised
for rulers of the distant, and pre-heraldic past, and even for Christ and
the Trinity.37 Edward the Confessor got his coat-of-arms, which Richard
II of England, an ardent devotee, impaled with his own arms, as shown on
the Wilton Diptych.38 Charlemagne too acquired a coat-of-arms. But
what arms was he to take? Did he belong to France or Germany? The
heralds of the later Middle Ages were even-handed, in depicting

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Charlemagne with an, entirely imaginary, coat-of-arms in which the

French fleurs-de-lys were impaled with the imperial eagle of Germany.39

Family Trees
There are many manifestations of dynastic consciousness, but there is
one particular form that is so familiar to us that we might forget to
think about it, that is, the diagrammatic family tree.40 This is a standard
way of conveying information about family relationships and has cer-
tain conventions, which vary slightly from country to country, but are,
in general, clear: the passage of time proceeds from the top of the page
downwards, so successive generations are below each other; the link
between siblings is a horizontal line, and siblings are placed along it in
birth order from left to right, unless there is a good reason for not
doing so; a vertical line links parents to their children; illegitimate
descent may be signalled by a broken rather than a solid line; marriage
is indicated by some symbol of bond or copula, often an ‘equals’ sign,
although the German system prefers the sideways eight or infinity sign,
perhaps over optimistically.
The language of family relationship is strongly characterized both by the
imagery of plants growing and thriving – root, seed, stock and so on – and by
the language of generation – offspring, progeny, descendants. The graphic
family tree combines these two things very well, the vegetable imagery and
the terminology of descent, since it is a tree and each level descends from
the level before. The tree has indeed often been used, and is still often used,
as the paradigm for a diagram. It should be mentioned, however, that most
graphic family trees are inverted trees, in the sense that the branches grow
downwards. The opposite is obviously also possible, starting the tree at the
bottom and having it spread upwards, as is the case with most medieval
depictions of the Tree of Jesse, which showed Christ’s descent (or ascent!)
from Jesse, father of King David, and there are examples of medieval
draughtsmen preferring this approach in secular trees too. For instance,
there is a widely copied family tree of the Carolingian dynasty which occurs
almost invariably in the standard top-down form, but one example, from the
Cistercian monastery of Heilsbronn in Franconia, has inverted it, so the
name of Arnulf of Metz, the ancestor of the dynasty, is in a medallion at the

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bottom of the page, and the last Carolingians are at the top of the page.41
The result is it looks much more like a tree! British Library manuscript
Harley 7353, a fifteenth-century roll vindicating the right of Edward IV of
England during the Wars of the Roses, has a family tree just like a Tree of
Jesse, depicting a reclining Peter I of Castile and Henry III of England at the
bottom, with curling arboreal lines emerging from the loins, the lines
dotted with their numerous descendants emerging from what look like
acorn cups.
Prior to graphic family trees of this type, there had been genealogies in
prose from ancient times. Medieval Europe was perfectly familiar with
these: the Old Testament is full of them, some running on for many verses,
while the very first words of the New Testament are ‘The Book of the
Generation of Jesus Christ (Liber generationis Iesu Christi)’. And medieval
societies produced genealogies of their own dynasties.42 A short genealogy
of Charlemagne, which was produced during his lifetime, has been called
‘the first genealogy of a ruler in the Christian Middle Ages’,43 but this
seems to ignore the vast amount of genealogical material from medieval
Ireland. Although these Irish genealogies survive only in manuscripts from
the twelfth century and later, there is scholarly agreement that the texts
must have originated much earlier, and they are very extensive; the pre-
twelfth-century material contains about 20,000 names.44 It is clear that they
had a practical function, including use in disputes, since an Irish legal
treatise of possibly eleventh-century date lists some of the qualities of a bad
judge: ‘to be ignorant, without inspecting historical records or synchron-
ism or genealogies of the family of father and grandfather or family trees of
kings and overkings and bishops and masters and abbots’.45 The implica-
tion is that a good judge will inspect genealogies, including royal
genealogies.
But a prose genealogy and a graphic family tree are different ways of
presenting information. Only the latter can show everything at a glance.
The problems of presenting multiple lines of descent in a prose geneal-
ogy are apparent even in a text as clear as the so-called ‘Genealogies of
Foigny’.46 This dates to the 1160s and gives the descent of several aristo-
cratic families of northern France from the ninth century to its own time.
Because it is in continuous prose, it has to follow one line of descent, then
go back to take up the other lines: ‘King Hugh the Pious was the father of

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King Robert and a daughter named Hadwig, countess of Hainault’; the

text then follows the descendants of King Robert before going back to
Robert’s sister: ‘Hadwig, countess of Hainault, King Robert’s sister, gave
birth to Beatrice’; the text then talks about Beatrice’s family before going
back to King Robert’s daughter Adela and her male descendants; then it
turns to the daughters: ‘the first of the daughters of this Adela . . .
the second daughter of this first Adela’ (there was another in the family).
Other markers follow: ‘now let us return to Hugh the Great’ (son of
Henry I of France), ‘now to the account of those we left out, that is, the
(other) children of Hadwig, countess of Hainault’.47 The author does his
best, but this is hard work. Turning from this text to the article of 1978 by
Bernard Guenée in which this information is presented in conventional
graphic form, as a family tree in the modern sense, we can suddenly see
the wood because of the tree. The invention of this kind of diagram
marked the birth of a great tool of clarification.
The idea of presenting genealogical information in graphic form
evolved only slowly. Nor was the tree the only such form available, and
there are genealogies that use other pictorial devices, for example, the
human body, with the succession of figures forming the torso but a human
head, arms and feet,48 or a building. One elaborate Carolingian geneal-
ogy, from the twelfth century, consists of a turreted building with windows
from which the members of the family look out, the main line staring out
from windows with open shutters in the central line of the building, the
relatives from the collateral branches visible through windows without
shutters to the right and the left of them.49 It was the tree, loosely defined,
however, that became the common way of representing a dynasty as
extended through time.
While there were precedents, in the form of diagrams to illustrate
kinship terms and pictorial genealogies of Christ, especially in manuscripts
of Beatus of Liébana,50 the first family trees representing contemporary
dynasties seem to have been drawn for various particular purposes in the
tenth and eleventh centuries. Perhaps the very earliest is a late-tenth-
century diagram from the important monastery of Saint-Gallen, showing
a few generations of the Carolingian dynasty, with brief notes about them
and their dealings with the monastery.51 Religious houses were always
interested in their founders and benefactors.

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Figure 20 An experiment in family tree design. A twelfth-century depiction of the

Carolingian dynasty in the form of a turreted building with family members in the windows.
Berlin, Staatsbibliothek, MS lat. fol. 295, fol. 80v.

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Another motive for drawing up family trees was to check how close the
family relationship was between a prospective bride and groom. In this
period, the Church underlined and insisted upon a very strict rule about
choice of marriage partner (see above, pp. 43–5): you could not marry
your first cousin, second cousin, third cousin, fourth cousin, fifth cousin
or sixth cousin, an astonishingly wide definition of prohibited degrees. In
the end, in 1215, the Church itself had to relax these strict rules, but prior
to that date conscientious lay people needed to observe them. The first
difficulty was knowing who your sixth cousins were, and one result of the
Church’s strict rules was to stimulate genealogical investigation. In the
case of possible consanguinity, relatives were encouraged to produce
pedigrees. Papal advice in such cases was that ‘each person should take
pains to know his or her genealogy, both by witnesses and charters and by
the relation of their elders’.52 The great canonist Ivo of Chartres, when
protesting against the planned marriage of one of the illegitimate daugh-
ters of Henry I of England with a nobleman in his own diocese of
Chartres, explained to the king, ‘I have in my hands a written genealogy
which noblemen of the same lineage caused to be written’, and then gives
the king the details that, in Ivo’s opinion, made this projected union
incestuous.53 When the emperor Frederick Barbarossa sought the annul-
ment of his marriage to Adela of Vohburg in 1153, a genealogy was drawn
up to show how they were related. It demonstrated that Adela’s great-
great-great-grandmother was the sister of Frederick’s great-great-
grandfather, and hence their marriage was within the prohibited
degrees.54
The move from written genealogies of this type to the graphic repre-
sentation of family trees is a natural one in such a world and, from the late
tenth century, references to them and actual surviving diagrams increase
in number. Those opposed to the marriage of the emperor Henry III and
Agnes of Poitou in 1043 brought Henry a figura, a diagram, with the
names of his ancestors to make their point.55 This original chart of 1043
does not survive but it formed the basis of later graphic and pictorial
family trees of German rulers used in chronicles of the twelfth and
thirteenth centuries, and hence far removed from its original
purpose.56 The detailed family trees of the north French dukes and
counts that were drawn up in the abbey of St.-Aubin in Angers in the

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1070s may well have been designed to show that a proposed marriage
would be uncanonical.57
A different purpose seems to have inspired another early graphic
family tree, which has survived. It shows the descent of the emperor
Henry II (1002–24) and his wife Cunigunda. Comprising a single sheet,
20.3 by 17 cm (8 by 6.7 inches), and now detached from the book in
which it was first written, this chart is likely to have been produced in
Bamberg around the year 1015.58 The names, and occasionally the
images, of individuals are placed within circles, and linked by lines
showing descent. The topmost figure is St Arnulf, the seventh-century
bishop of Metz who was the forefather of the Carolingian dynasty, and
the chart then traces a simple father–son line from him to Louis the
Pious, Charlemagne’s son and successor. Then it branches into the
three offshoots represented by the three sons of Louis the Pious and
their descendants, ruling the kingdom of the West Franks, the kingdom
of the East Franks and the Middle Kingdom with Italy, as any
Carolingian genealogy in a modern textbook would do. For the East
Frankish kingdom, it is entirely accurate, ending with Louis (the Child),
whose circle is annotated ‘after whom no one of this family possessed
the royal throne any more’,59 while the West Frankish and Middle
Kingdom branches contain more inaccuracies. One purpose of the
chart is made clear by the way it traces the Carolingian descent of the
empress Cunigunda, showing only the essential links between her and
the West Frankish king Louis, son of Charles the Bald, not any collat-
erals or even husbands: the line goes from Louis to his daughter
Ermintrude to her daughter Cunigunda to her son Count Siegfried to
his daughter Cunigunda the empress. This is all apparently entirely
accurate. The family tree that shows the descent of her husband,
Emperor Henry II, is given far less space, squeezed into the lower right-
hand corner of the page and limited to just a few generations. One
message of this figure is the simple one: Cunigunda has Carolingian
blood. Whether it was based on earlier versions, perhaps with a different
purpose, is a question that has been debated, but in its existing form it
was obviously produced by those who revered the Carolingians and
wished to enhance Cunigunda’s prestige and standing by stressing her
link with them.

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Graphic family trees were thus created for more than one reason.
Alongside the monastic houses preserving the memory of their patrons,
and the conscientious or the meddlesome checking on the legitimacy of
a proposed marriage, there was also the powerful force of dynastic pride.
Family trees were indeed a natural product of the dynastic world, as is
indicated by their independent invention under the Muslim dynasties of
Asia in the thirteenth century.60 The earliest of these are found in the
Shajara-yi ansaˉb (‘Tree of Genealogies’) of Fakhr-i Mudabbir, who was
active in the courts of the Islamic sultans in north India in the early part
of the century. This contains 139 genealogical trees, as well as some
reflections by the author on their form. He accepts both descending
and ascending ‘trees’. The technique was developed by Rashıˉd al-Dıˉn,
vizier of the Ilkhan rulers of Persia (d. 1318), whose historical works
contain numerous family trees, with the males in small squares and the
females in circles. The form then proliferated in the Islamic world during
the later Middle Ages and Early Modern times. Clearly, any society where
rule is based on the claims of family would find the graphic genealogy an
attractive tool.
The first graphic family trees in the west were written into books. If the
line of descent was long, then it would have to continue from one page to
the next, and could then go on indefinitely, but at the expense of no
longer being graspable at a glance. This limitation was clearly felt by the
designer or draughtsman of the family trees found in the so-called ‘Golden
Book of Prüm’.61 These genealogical charts of the Carolingians and
Ottonians were drawn up in that Rhineland abbey in the second half of
the eleventh century, but, instead of being copied into the book, they were
drawn on a large sheet of parchment twice the height of the book and two
folios wide and then bound into it. The result is an insert that can be
unfolded to give a much wider field for the two trees. The same urge for
greater pictorial or graphic space lay behind the development of the
genealogical roll in the thirteenth century. Among the earliest genealogies
in the roll format were copies of Peter of Poitiers’ Compendium of History in
the Form of a Genealogy of Christ (Compendium historiae in genealogia Christi).
This had been devised as a teaching tool in the Schools of Paris, where
Peter was chancellor. The chronicler who recorded his death in 1205
thought it worth reporting that he ‘considered the need of poor clerks

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and devised the plan of having trees of the histories of the Old Testament
painted on parchment sheets’.62 These were presumably put up in teach-
ing rooms and meant the poor clerks could follow the lectures without
needing to have books. The Compendium, which covers the New Testament
as well as the Old, survives in many copies, some in book form, some in
rolls. These rolls might be 3.5 metres or more in length (well over 11 feet)
and contained tables, pictures and text, but their overarching unity was
provided by the genealogical tree.63 Once such a format had been devised,
it could be adapted for secular and contemporary purposes.
Dozens of these secular genealogical rolls were produced in England,
showing the succession of the kings from Anglo-Saxon times.64 They were
perhaps particularly popular there since English royal records, unusually,
tended to be in the form of rolls rather than books.65 They often have well
over a hundred pictures of kings, starting usually with Egbert (802–39) and
going down to the reigning monarch at the time of composition.66 An
example that has been published is the so-called Chaworth Roll.67 This is
6.5 metres (21 feet) long and 24.5 cm (9.6 inches) wide, starts with Egbert
and, when originally produced in the 1320s, came down to Edward II, but
was later extended to Henry IV. The kings and their children are depicted
inside medallions which are linked with thick green lines; alongside and
around the medallions there is text in Anglo-Norman, the language of the
upper class in England at this time, explaining briefly who these figures
were and what they did, with the emphasis on family ties: ‘This Thomas was
earl of Lancaster and of Leicester and seneschal of England. And also he
was earl of Derby and, through the countess Alice, his wife, he was earl of
Lincoln and of Salisbury.’68 The only female figures on the roll are the
daughters of kings, with one exception, Matilda, wife of Henry I, who
brought the blood of the old Anglo-Saxon royal dynasty back into the
ruling family. This is stressed in the text, but in general there is little
attempt to disguise breaks in dynastic continuity. The conquests by the
Danish and Norman kings are marked by a hiatus in the scheme of
connecting lines. Yet the overall visual effect provided by the central line,
with its uniform iconography and colour, is of continuity. The succession
of kings gives unity to English history; the inclusion in the roll of the
children of those kings, most of whom did not succeed to the throne,
makes it also a family history.

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The very complex relationship between writing the history of

a kingdom and writing the history of its ruling dynasties is brought out
by looking at various attempts to combine the graphic family tree with
historical text that were made in thirteenth- and fourteenth-century
France. Giles of Paris, who wrote a long poem about Charlemagne, the
Karolinus, which he presented to Prince Louis of France (later Louis VIII)
in 1200, subsequently added some supplementary material to a copy of
the text, and this includes a five-page genealogical diagram of the kings
of France, with reasonably extensive narrative accounts fitted around it.69
This works quite well for the early kings, since there is only one line of
descent from the legendary Pharamund to Clovis, so there is a wide,
equal margin on either side of the diagram to provide room for the
text, but things become complex when Giles has to show several con-
temporary Merovingian kings of the same generation, especially as he
adds the ancestors of the Carolingians also. As a consequence, text
becomes cramped and has to be squeezed in where there is room. Giles
was aware that the reader might appreciate some guidance through this
complex material, so he devised a system of colour coding:

In order to have greater clarity about the people described in the following
pages, I state alongside in this place that I put the kings of France, whom
I am specially writing about, in red letters, so that they can be perceived to
be set off from the others. The queens, their wives, through lines of red ink
within. We pick out other kings, or those who descended from royal stock
but were not kings, through simple ink lines. Moreover, we distinguish
those who were both kings and emperors, as being more worthy, through
a double colour, reddish gold and vermilion. Those who were only
emperors and not kings of France, we mark out with reddish gold letters.
We mark out the good kings of France through lines of vermilion coloured
reddish gold, but do this separately.70

This was a great age of innovation for indexes, tables, keys, alphabetiza-
tion and other finding devices, and Giles’ scheme is a good example of
this search for graphic order.71
A slightly different approach to this problem of combining text and
diagram was taken by William de Nangis, the archivist of the abbey of
Saint-Denis during the second half of the thirteenth century. He

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composed, among other works, a short history of the kings of France ‘in
the form of a kind of tree’.72 This ‘tree’ consists of a crudely drawn
double line, running down the margin of his text, with the names of
the kings, and sometimes some of their children, in circles on it. This
gives him plenty of space for text in the body of the page, but, like Giles of
Paris, William de Nangis had the problem of the Merovingian kings who
ruled simultaneously. Since he gives each of them his own column, the
page is sometimes divided into as many as five narrow columns, which
makes reading the text difficult, since there may be only one or two words
per line in each column (e.g. ‘Hic instinctu ma/tris sue interfecit/
Sigimondum regem/Burgundionum/filium Gundebaldi/regis cum
uxore/et liberis’).73
One of the most successful graphic representations of dynastic his-
tory was that produced by Bernard Gui in the early fourteenth century.
Bernard Gui, the southern French Dominican who died in 1331, is now
best known as an inquisitor. His inquisitors’ handbook offers
a fascinating, if sometimes chilling, insight into the methods and men-
talities of those professionals charged with hunting down and destroy-
ing heresy, and he made a memorable fictional appearance in this role
in Umberto Eco’s novel The Name of the Rose and also in the subsequent
film. But he wrote much else besides the handbook, including large
amounts of historical writing. In works such as The Kings of the French
(Reges Francorum) or The Tree of the Lineage of the Kings of the French (Arbor
genealogiae regum Francorum) he sets out a long-term picture of French
dynastic history.74 The two works are closely related, although they look
very different on the page, since the latter is organized around
a pictorial device, the tree, which extends from top to bottom at the
centre of each page. This tree is not quite the same as the modern
genealogical diagram called a ‘family tree’ since, although it shows
biological descent, it does so only for those kings ‘descending in the
right line of the tree (in recta linea arboris descendendo)’ or ‘in the right
line of the tree of royal lineage (in recta linea arboris genealogie regalis)’.
Recta can mean ‘straight’, ‘direct’, ‘correct’, ‘just’ and ‘lawful’. Other
figures are shown by lines and pictures linked to those on the main
trunk of the tree but not on it. This means that Gui has to pick out
a ‘main line’ of descent, which is in almost every case that of father–son

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transmission. These kings of ‘the right line’ are numbered successively

from the legendary Pharamund, the first king, down to Philip of Valois,
the thirty-eighth king, who was reigning at the time Gui completed his
final version of these works.

Figure 21 Bernard Gui’s The Tree of the Lineage of the Kings of the French, an ambitious
attempt to show biological descent and royal succession over more than thirty generations.
Cambridge, Corpus Christi College, MS 45 34r.

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 SAINTS, IMAGES, HERALDRY, FAMILY TREES

This concept of a ‘right line (recta linea)’ means that Bernard Gui’s
tree is only partly a family tree of the modern kind, since it is concerned
with succession as much as with descent.75 Like the royal genealogical
rolls of late medieval England, it is a ‘combination of a royal genealogy
and a regnal list’.76 And the concept of the ‘right line’ as used by French
chroniclers certainly implied direct biological descent, but had overtones
of legitimacy too. A chronicler writing at Tours in the 1220s commented
on Hugh Capet’s usurpation of 987 that, although Hugh was descended
from Charlemagne, ‘this Hugh did not stem from the lineage of
Charlemagne and the kings of France in the right line of descent’ and
described Hugh’s rival, the last Carolingian claimant, as ‘duke Charles,
brother of Lothar, king of the French, who had descended from the
lineage of kings in the right line’.77 Here recta linea seems to be defined as
unbroken male descent. The next major dynastic dislocation in France
after that of 987 occurred in 1328, when Philip of Valois, a cousin of the
previous king, succeeded. A contemporary chronicler wrote: ‘Whence it
seems clear that the right line of the kings of France failed and was
transferred to the collateral line in him.’78 Philip was descended from
Hugh Capet in an unbroken male line, so here the phrase recta linea
seems to mean direct descent from the previous king. The contemporary
French translation of this passage has ‘la droite ligne’ and ‘ligne
transversale’.79
Bernard Gui gives marginal comments alongside the pictures of kings.
He says, for example, that it was Pharamund, the first king, who decreed
that the Franks should have long hair, to distinguish them from the
natives of Gaul, who had short hair as a sign of their servitude to the
Romans, and it was only in the time of Peter Lombard, bishop of Paris in
the twelfth century, that this practice was given up.80 Gui also explains
that Hugh Capet was called Hugh Capet ‘because when he was a boy he
used to snatch off other boys’ caps for a lark’.81 But these snippets are not
Gui’s main purpose, which is to produce a right line (recta linea) embra-
cing history from Pharamund to his own day. In the case of the Capetian
kings this does not lead to many oddities, although Gui omits Hugh
Capet, the first Capetian king, from both the tree and the numbered
sequence since he regards him as a usurper, and he has no choice but to
acknowledge the transmission of the crown to brothers in 1317 and 1322

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and to a cousin in 1328, since he would otherwise have no ‘right line’ to

trace. Most Capetians, however, followed their father on the throne. The
situation regarding the two earlier lineages, the Merovingian and
Carolingian, is more complicated. Gui knew that the Frankish realm
was often divided between brothers and cousins in the Merovingian
period, so that several kings would be ruling at the same time. He
mentions these rival concurrent rulers, but still adheres to the strict
concept of a ‘right line’, which he creates by tracing a succession of
kings who were each descended from a predecessor. In this way, he carves
out fourteen kings, from the legendary Pharamund to Theuderic IV, who
died in 737, who represent a continuous male line of descent over four-
teen generations. He has to ignore a lot to get this result, including the
actual last Merovingian, the cousin of Theuderic IV, Childeric III, who
was deposed in 751, but he gets his ‘right line’. Those who designed the
statues of the French kings in the royal palace in Paris (see above, p. 316),
which were completed at precisely the time that Gui produced the first
version of the Tree of the Lineage of the Kings of the French, also had to
undertake a drastic pruning of the Merovingians to obtain a single line
of kings, although they retained twenty-one rather than Gui’s fourteen.
For the Carolingians, the results are not quite so arbitrary, but they
still have peculiarities. The line from Pippin, first Carolingian king, down
to his great-great-grandson, Louis the Stammerer, which covers the years
751 to 879, and that of the last three Carolingian rulers of France, from
936 to 987, are both cases of father–son descent. The complexity arises in
the period between these two lines, when there were not only several non-
Carolingian kings, whom Gui discusses but does not include in the ‘right
line’, but also transmission of power between brothers within the
Carolingian dynasty. Gui himself expresses confusion at this point. He
wonders why Carloman, son of Louis the Stammerer, should be included
in the ‘right line’ when he left no sons to succeed him, and the throne
eventually came to his younger half-brother, Charles the Simple:

I do not know, nor have I been able to find out, the cause for this Carloman
being depicted in the right line of the tree, since the succession of the royal
stock was not continued through him, unless perhaps because Charles the
Simple, a legitimate son but a little boy, was not reigning at that time.82

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Clearly, Gui was working with an earlier prototype, since he disclaims

knowledge of why Carloman was ‘in the right line of the tree’. Indeed, the
error of making Carloman the father of Charles the Simple, and hence
part of ‘the right line’, goes back as far as Richer, writing in the 990s.83
Some thirteenth-century graphic genealogies, such as those of Giles of
Paris and the so-called Récit d’un ménestrel d’Alphonse de Poitiers, place
Carloman in the direct line in their diagrams.84 Likewise, the Grandes
chroniques de France, following the Continuation of Aimoin of Fleury,
postulate a non-existent ‘Louis Fainéant’ as the son and successor of
Carloman, succeeded in turn by his son, Charles the Simple. Carloman
in fact left no son, and Charles the Simple was his half-brother.85 Gui was
trying his best to deal with discordant sources.
But he succeeded more than he failed in producing a continuous
history, in which the three ‘genealogiae’, the first, second and third, which
we call Merovingian, Carolingian and Capetian, provide the guiding
thread, and which can indeed be linked when marriage brings the
blood of a former dynasty to the new one. A link of this kind is the
Carolingians’ supposed descent from an entirely legendary Blithildis or
Blitilda, daughter of Clothar II (d. 629).86 Another famous instance is the
marriage of Philip Augustus to a woman of Carolingian descent, thus
effecting the ‘return to the stock (reditus ad stirpem)’ of Charlemagne (see
below, p. 350). Bernard Gui’s graphic scheme was innovative but his
purposes were traditional. Manetho, the Egyptian priest who invented
the word ‘dynasty’ 1,600 years before Bernard Gui wrote, would have
understood what he was doing: creating a history centred on, and struc-
tured by, a sense of dynasty.

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 CHAPTER 10

Responses to Dynastic Uncertainty: Prophecy

and Astrology

I n 1490 or thereabouts henry vii of england acquired

a large book (17 by 12 inches or 440 by 300 mm) of 291 folios,
carefully written and illustrated.1 It contained astronomical tables,
a catalogue of stars with striking illustrations of the constellations
(Draco, the dragon, is red, as was Henry VII’s badge, and stands on
a background of white and green, the Tudor colours), a lengthy astro-
logical treatise, a treatise on geomancy, which was a technique for divina-
tion, the prophecies of Merlin, the political prophecies ascribed to John
of Bridlington and others and the visions of St Birgitta of Sweden relating
to the kingdoms of England and France. It is probable that Henry had
commissioned this volume. It is a good example of the various ways
people sought to find out about the future. Henry, who had won the
throne by defeating and killing Richard III only five years before the book
was made and had since then faced several serious challenges to his rule,
knew very well about the uncertainties of political life and would value
such a compendium as a guide to the future.
One of the deepest problems of a dynastic system is that one did not
know what was going to happen next. There are some structural features
that allow us to categorize dynasties and their dynamics and make some
generalizations about them: age at marriage, average fertility, life expec-
tancy, rules and customs regarding succession, etc. But the most funda-
mental feature of dynastic rule was unpredictability. At any moment, an
unexpected death could turn the political world upside down. And
whether a child was male or female, not something in this period that
could be known until the birth itself, might shape the history of a state for
generations. Sometimes a sudden descent into mental illness could

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unbalance the whole political world, like the paranoid mania that first
seized Charles VI of France in 1392 or the catatonia that came upon Henry
VI of England in the summer of 1453. In this insecure world, people
sought out methods to diminish uncertainty and to have guidance for
the future. The scientifically minded turned to the precise, technical
forecasts of astrology, while others were fascinated by the more ambiguous
glimpses of the future to be found in prophecy and vision.

Astrology
The idea that human life is influenced by the heavenly bodies can be
traced back as far as the earliest historical records. Indeed, in the case of
the sun and the moon, it is self-evident. For Europe, the important
tradition in the interpretation of celestial influences was Babylonian,
which was then taken up by the Greeks and Romans. Medieval astrology
was raised on these foundations. The failure of attempts to christianize
the heavens, by replacing the names of the zodiac with those of the
biblical patriarchs or the old names of the stars with those of Christian
saints, shows how deeply rooted the earlier traditions were.2 If human life
was shaped to some extent by the stars, then it made sense to study the
stars to see what their influence was, to predict outcomes and perhaps
guard against them. Horoscopes could be calculated for the moment of
a person’s birth or advice sought for the best time to undertake an
activity. There was always a strand of Christian thinking opposed to the
activity of the astrologers, especially if it showed any hint of the determi-
nistic belief that humans were governed inescapably by the heavenly
bodies, but there was also always a powerful countercurrent of those
who thought that astrology and Christianity could be combined.3
The tradition of learned astrology grew faint in the Latin west in the
early Middle Ages, but in the Greek east, with its continued access to the
important Greek texts, there was more continuity with the ancient world.
The vicissitudes of dynastic politics were among the most important subjects
dealt with by astrology. The first question asked of a new astrologer arriving
in Constantinople was when would the emperor die.4 A seventh-century
chronicle (surviving now only in an Ethiopian translation) tells how astrol-
ogers warned of a plot against the emperor Maurice (582–602):

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a prefect who knew astrology came forward, and likewise another person
named Leon, the logothete, and, observing a star which had appeared in
the heaven, they said that this star which had appeared portended the
assassination of the emperor. And they went and made this announcement
to the empress Constantina and said unto her: ‘Learn what thou shouldst
do and take measures that thou and thy children may escape destruction;
for this star which has appeared is a presage of a revolt against the
emperor.’5

Astrologers gave advice on military matters, although not always success-

fully. In the late eighth century the ‘pseudoprophet and astrologer’
Pankratios was killed in a battle between the Byzantines and Bulgars,
a battle which he had predicted the emperor would win.6
The Byzantine emperor Manuel Comnenus (1143–80) firmly believed
that human life was influenced by the movements of the heavenly bodies,
as he argued in a defence of astrology that he composed.7 He even
postponed military operations if the astrological conditions were unfa-
vourable. On one occasion he recalled a naval expedition because of
a mistake made in drawing up the astrological calculations about its
success. He had an astrologer attend at the birth of his son and when,
late in his reign, astrologers predicted violent storms, he prepared caves
as refuges and had all the glass removed from the imperial buildings.8
Byzantine rulers continued to take an interest in the political and military
uses of astrology down to the last century of the state, when, during his
rebellion against his father John V in the 1370s, Andronicus IV obtained
horoscopes for important events, such as his attack on Constantinople in
1376.9
The evidence for learned astrology in Latin Christendom is slight in
the early Middle Ages but the influx of Arab astrological texts in Latin
translation into Latin Christendom that marked the eleventh, twelfth
and thirteenth centuries transformed the situation. Areas of contact
between the Christian and Islamic worlds, such as Sicily and Spain,
were important in this passage of knowledge. A contemporary illustration
of the deathbed of William II of Sicily in 1189 shows him attended by an
Arab astrologer, taking readings of the stars.10 The impact that Arabic
science had is echoed even today not only by our use of ‘Arabic numerals’

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but also by Arabic names of stars like Aldebaran and Betelgeuse – it

proved easier to accept Arabic names for the stars than to rebaptize
them with Christian ones. The newly translated astrological texts were
taught in universities and studied in courts and formed the basis for the
widespread practice of astrology for a variety of purposes.
As in Byzantium, ruling dynasties in the west were very interested in
the prospect of predicting the future.11 Dynastic politics were so unpre-
dictable and the stakes so high that a court astrologer was as common as
a court doctor, and might indeed be the same man. A particularly cele-
brated court astrologer was Michael Scot, who was in the entourage of the
emperor Frederick II in Italy. He was, as his name suggests, a Scot. Before
joining Frederick’s court he had worked in Toledo, the great centre of
translation from Arabic into Latin, where, in 1217, he completed
a translation of the most important astronomical work of Nur ad-Din al-
Bitruji, a Spanish Muslim of the previous generation. Subsequently he
moved to Italy and enjoyed the patronage of successive popes before
entering the emperor’s service in 1227 or 1228. He wrote an introduction
to astrology, at the emperor’s request, in which he was careful to avoid
the charge of determinism, by stressing that ‘the heavenly bodies are not
the causes of what there is but only signs, just as the hoop hanging outside
the tavern is not wine but the sign of wine’.12 This by no means dimin-
ished the value of astrology: ‘Know that from these two things, namely the
twelve signs of the zodiac and the seven planets below the firmament,
much can be known about the good and bad fortune of future times and
of persons, from their birth to their end.’13 He and Frederick had erudite
discussions about subjects as diverse as how many heavens there are and
why the sea is salt.14 But some of the emperor’s enquiries had a more
immediate and practical application. As Frederick entered a long and
bitter war with the cities of northern Italy, Michael predicted that the
stars foretold his victory:

Thus it is, if the heavens do not lie and the stars have not gone mad and
if the earth follows the heavenly bodies with their eternal motion, that
the great wisdom of this ruler will bring to nothing the seditious wills
and crush the rebel peoples and impose the unbreakable bridle of
laws.15

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Michael had a high reputation in his own time as ‘observer of the stars,
seer, prophet, another Apollo’.16
In the generation after Frederick II there was also a king renowned for
his interest in astrology. This was Alfonso X of Castile (1252–84), whose
court was a centre of translations from Arabic into Castilian, including
astrological works, such as the The Complete Book on the Judgments of the Stars
of the eleventh-century North African astrologer ‘Aly Aben Ragel’ (Abuˉ
l-Hasan ‘Alıˉ ibn Abıˉ l-Rijaˉ l). One section of this is devoted to questions
˙
concerning the length of a king’s reign and the time of his death.17 In the
following century, payments for ‘the emperor’s astrologer’ are recorded
in the reign of the Holy Roman Emperor Louis the Bavarian (1314–47),
while the famous writer Christine de Pisan, herself the daughter of an
astrologer, praised Charles V of France as an ‘astrologer king . . . very
expert and wise in this science of astrology’.18 Charles’ library did indeed
contain seventy-five books of astrology, 8 per cent of the total 914
volumes.19
Actual horoscopes survive for many medieval rulers. There is one for
Constantine Porphyrogenitus, Byzantine emperor 913–59, who was born
on 3 September 905. This horoscope was almost certainly calculated soon
after his birth since its predictions are generally wrong.20 There are
extant examples for every English king born between 1284 and 1470.21
The French royal court was also deeply interested in what the stars had to
say. In 1187 Philip Augustus of France had his court astrologer and
physician, Roger de Furnival, cast a horoscope for the king’s new-born
son, Louis (later Louis VIII).22 Horoscopes survive for Louis X, Charles V,
Charles VI, Louis XI and Charles VIII.23 When Charles VII of France was
seriously ill in the winter of 1457–8, his estranged son, the Dauphin
Louis, consulted astrologers as to whether he would recover, and
received the comforting, but false, answer that the king would not.24
Charles VII himself had a reputation for consulting astrologers. In
a book addressed to his grandson, Charles VIII, the author praises ‘all
your predecessors, very Christian kings, who loved and cherished and
held dear this science of astrology more than any other of the liberal arts’,
naming specifically Charlemagne, as supposed founder of the University
of Paris, Charles V, who founded a college for the subject and donated
books, globes and astrolabes, and ‘Charles VII, your grandfather, who

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always had around him the most expert astrologers he could find’.25
There are surviving astrological dossiers for the years 1407–8 and 1437
concerning the political situation in France.26 The French astrologer
Germain de Thibouville is said to have predicted the deaths of Charles
VI and Henry V in 1422 correctly.27
The Holy Roman Emperor Frederick III (1440–93) had a reputation
for taking astrology seriously. During a journey to meet the powerful
Charles the Bold, duke of Burgundy, the German princes urged him to
hasten, but the emperor rode slowly on the advice of his astronomer.
Frederick consulted astronomers on what would befall his son,
Maximilian, and was even sufficiently skilled to make some prognostica-
tions himself. He had a horoscope drawn up for his bride, Eleanor of
Portugal, which specified the ideal time for their union and, it has been
suggested, this might explain his well-attested delay in consummating
their marriage after it had taken place in 1452.28
Frederick’s contemporary and rival, Matthias Corvinus of Hungary
(1458–90), also regarded astrology as a vital guide in the precarious
business of political life. There were numerous astrological texts in his
famous library and he put great faith in the advice of his astrologer,
Martin Bylica. Bylica, who was Polish, studied at the universities of
Cracow and Bologna, both of which had a professorial chair in astrology,
and was then court astrologer to Cardinal Rodrigo Borgia (later to be
Pope Alexander VI) before being recruited to the chair of astrology at the
new Hungarian university of Bratislava. He cast the horoscope for the
opening of the university on 5 June 1467. The following year he sent to
Matthias Corvinus a detailed interpretation of the meaning of a comet
that had just appeared and, after the virtual collapse of the university of
Bratislava in 1471, he moved permanently to the royal court, giving
astrological advice on the king’s military undertakings and casting horo-
scopes for members of his family, as well as one for the emperor
Frederick III, which gave the astrological explanation of why Frederick
was a military failure. Bylica’s last task for Matthias Corvinus was to give
the astrological explanation for his death.29
Astrologers could give retrospective validation as well as prospective
advice, for kings were happy to hear that their successes had been written
in the stars. The astrologer William Parron wrote in his book on the

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influence of the stars, which was dedicated to Henry VII, that Henry’s
victory at Bosworth in 1485 had been determined by the stars. Parron was
at this time receiving payments from the king’s privy purse.30 Astrologers
also stressed how dangerous it was to ignore their advice. The story was
told that, on the morning of his fatal battle with the Swiss, Charles the
Bold, duke of Burgundy, was warned by his astrologer that he should not
attack them and that if he did, ‘unless God turned aside the heavenly
influences’, it would go badly for him. Charles boasted that ‘the fury of
his sword would conquer the course of heaven’, went into battle and,
concludes the story, ‘things turned out for him as we know’.31 His naked
body was found some days after the battle.
Those opposed to astrology were irritated that the court found the
subject so fascinating. ‘Many rulers and great men, agitated by a harmful
inquisitiveness, attempt by vain methods to find out hidden things and
investigate the future’, wrote Nicholas Oresme in his treatise against
astronomers of the 1360s.32 These critics told stories of the fatal errors
into which such ‘vain methods’ might lead.

They say that, when King James of Majorca wished to depart from Avignon,
he had all the astrologers of the papal court summoned, to choose
the hour of his departure, and he departed at the hour that had been
selected and chosen by the unanimous agreement of all the astrologers,
and, nevertheless, on that journey he lost his life and his kingdom too.33

This refers to James III of Majorca, who was attempting, with papal help,
to regain his throne, from which he had been ejected, but was defeated
and killed in the Battle of Lluchmajor in 1349.
Even when predictions appeared to have been proven false, however,
there were ways for astrologers to salvage the reputation of their science.
A celebrated astrologer predicted that the Byzantine rebel Alexius
Branas would enter the city of Constantinople in 1187, but in fact he
was killed by a sortie of loyal troops. Another astrologer pointed out,
however, that Branas’ head had been paraded through the streets of the
city and hence the prediction was accurate.34 And a common type of story
concerned those who had misunderstood a prediction because of ambi-
guity of meaning. The duke of Suffolk was warned by an astrologer ‘to
beware of the tower’, and had thus been relieved in 1450 when he was

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released after a term of imprisonment in the Tower of London, but,

making his way overseas, he was killed on a ship called Nicholas of the
Tower.35 The astronomer who gave this advice to the duke was himself
eventually to be a victim of his dangerous art. In 1477 he was accused of
drawing up the horoscopes of the king, Edward IV, and his son, the
Prince of Wales, and calculating their deaths, for which he was hanged.36

Prophecy
For its practitioners and those who believed them, astrology was
a science. A different source of knowledge of the future was provided
by dreams, visions and prophecies. These did not rest on the mathema-
tical and empirical rules of science but on occult powers, individual
experience or charisma. The prophecies might come from the mouth
of living wise men or women or they might be found in the writings of
ancient seers. Whether prophetic knowledge came in dream or vision or
in ancient books, it frequently concerned itself with the fate of rulers and
dynasties.37
An important example of a text reporting such a dynastic visionary
experience is the Vision of Charles the Fat.38 Charles the Fat was the son of
Louis the German and the great-grandson of Charlemagne and the last
Frankish ruler to govern the whole empire. In this account, which is in
the first person, Charles reports how he was ‘snatched away in spirit’ after
going to his bed one Sunday night. Lifted up by a gleaming white figure,
he is taken to some deep valleys where fiery pools burned, in which he
sees the bishops who had served his father and uncles, that is, the three
sons of Louis the Pious who had fought for their father’s inheritance
throughout the middle decades of the ninth century. The bishops
explain that they are being punished there because of the part they
played in stirring up discord between the three brothers and warn him
that his own bishops who behave in this way will also come to this place.
Escaping the attacks of demons with the assistance of his heavenly guide,
Charles now comes to some fiery mountains, bubbling with molten
metal, where he finds the suffering souls of the nobles and followers of
his father, Louis the German, and of Charles’ own brothers. They suffer
this punishment, they say, because ‘while we lived, we loved to do battle

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and to commit homicide and to plunder, at your side, or at the side of

your father, your brothers or your uncles, out of desire for earthly
things’.39 Those who had fostered the family dissensions and conflicts
of the Carolingian rulers, be they ecclesiastical or lay, are here being
given their punishment after death.
Going on, Charles is guided to a valley, one side of which is dark and fiery
but the other side lovely beyond description. Here, he says, ‘I saw some kings
of my family in great torment’, one of them being his father, Louis the
German, standing up to his thighs in a barrel of boiling water. Louis greets
his son and explains that he spends one day in the boiling water but the next
is transferred to a barrel of cool water, and ‘this is done through the prayers
of St Peter and St Remigius, under whose patronage our royal family has so
far ruled’.40 Thanks to those two saints, he adds, his brother Lothar (who
was emperor 840–55) and Lothar’s son, Louis (who was emperor 855–75),
have already gone from this place of punishment to the joys of paradise.
Charles is now escorted to paradise to meet Lothar and Louis, his uncle and
cousin, who are crowned and in glory. Lothar addresses him:

Charles, my successor, now secure in the empire of the Romans, come to

me. I know that you have passed through the place of punishment where
your father, my brother, is placed in the hot waters prepared for him, but
by God’s mercy he will very soon be freed from those punishments, just as
we have been freed by the merits of St Peter and the prayers of St Remigius,
to whom God gave a great apostolate over the kings and the whole people
of the Franks. Unless he helps and gives aid to the rest of our stock, our
family will presently cease reigning and ruling. Know that the power of the
empire will soon be taken from your hands and afterwards you will live
a very short time.41

After this doleful prediction, Lothar’s son, Louis, turns to Charles and
tells him, ‘Louis, the son of my daughter, should, by hereditary right,
receive the Roman empire, which you have held until now.’42 This young
boy now seemed to appear before them. When Charles the Fat finally
returns to himself after this vision, he recognizes this designation of the
young Louis: ‘Henceforth let everyone, willing or not, know, that the
whole of the Roman empire will come back into his hands according to
God’s design.’43

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The prominent place of St Remigius in this account suggests it may

have been written by someone associated with the church of Rheims,
whose patron Remigius was. The child Louis is the son of Boso and
Ermengard, daughter of the emperor Louis, who was elected king of
Provence in 890, crowned emperor in 901 but blinded by his opponents
in 905. The text is intended to support his claim to the empire by
‘hereditary right’, that is, through his direct descent from earlier emper-
ors, even if through the female line. It was obviously written after the
death of Charles the Fat in 888, but how long after is less certain. Louis
needed support to be accepted as king in 890 but he also needed it to
become emperor in 901 and, even more so, afterwards when facing the
challenge of a rival emperor. A prophetic vision, in which his Carolingian
ancestors and predecessors expressly mark him out as their successor by
hereditary right, argued that imperial power was his destiny.
Prophetic vision was also important for the dynasty that followed the
Carolingians as rulers of France. By the middle of the eleventh century
a prophecy attributed to the early medieval saint Valery was circulating
about the Capetian kings. According to what is probably the earliest
recorded version, Valery appeared in a dream to Hugh Capet, the first
Capetian king, and told him to transfer his, Valery’s, body and that of St
Riquier to their original resting place, and, in return, ‘through our
prayers, you will be made king of France, and afterwards your heirs will
have the government of the whole kingdom, down to the seventh
generation’.44 A slightly later version has the saint promising ‘you will
be king of the French, and your offspring, and your stock will hold the
kingdom until the seventh succession’.45 This prophecy would obviously
be of great interest to the seventh Capetian king, Philip II Augustus, who
came to the throne in 1180. It was, in fact, copied into one of his official
registers.46 During his reign, links between the Capetians and the pre-
vious Carolingian dynasty were pointed out in various ways. Philip himself
had Carolingian blood and was repeatedly called Karolides, ‘descendant
of Charles’, in the poem that William the Breton wrote praising the king’s
deeds.47 Another approach stressed not Philip’s descent but the fact that
his wife, Elizabeth (Isabella) of Hainault, was of Carolingian descent and
that therefore the child of Philip and Elizabeth would be a descendant of
Charlemagne.48 Perhaps those who stressed this were ignorant of Philip’s

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own claim to such ancestry. In any case, the contemporary chronicler,

Andrew of Marchiennes, referring to Philip’s son, Louis (later Louis
VIII), was of the opinion that, ‘If he reigns after his father, it is agreed
that the kingdom will have returned to the line of Charlemagne.’49
Andrew knew the prophecy of St Valery and perhaps this is how he saw
it being fulfilled. Later writers also took up this idea of the reditus ad
stirpem, ‘the return to the stock’ of Charlemagne (see p. 384 below).
A time limit of seven generations was also given to the Norman
dynasty.50 Norman tradition had a strange story, which told how in the
days of Rollo, the first duke of Normandy, as the inhabitants of Rouen were
relaxing on the banks of the Seine one evening, they were amazed to see
a horseman travelling across the water, just as if it were land. When he
reached them, they asked who he was, and he reassured them that he was
a human being. That morning, he said, he had been at Rennes in Brittany,
so he had travelled the 200 miles (320 kilometres) to Rouen in just a day.
When the duke was informed about this, he asked to see the man; the
mysterious traveller said he would meet the duke ‘at the first hour’ next
morning. But when the duke looked for him at that hour, he was informed
the stranger had already gone on his way, and he concluded the man had
lied and was some kind of illusory creature. But some people disagreed:
when the stranger had said ‘at the first hour’, they suggested, he had meant
his ‘first hour’, not the duke’s ‘first hour’. Obviously, for a man who could
travel 200 miles in a day, time went faster. This is a remarkable conception,
bordering on science fiction, or perhaps the theory of relativity.
But what is relevant to dynastic history is the conversation that the
speedy traveller engaged in that night in his lodgings. His host, obviously
presuming that a man who travelled through time at his own pace might
know future things, asked him if Rollo’s dynasty would continue long. He
answered that ‘it would last for a long time and its rule would endure in
full strength down to the seventh generation’.51 But when he was asked
what would happen after that, all he would do was make lines in the ashes
of the fire with a stick, and then, when pressed for an answer, stir up the
ashes and obliterate the lines. This story was written down during the
reign of Henry I, who was king of England from 1100 and duke of
Normandy from 1106. And he was of the seventh generation from
Rollo.52 ‘Who will possess these lands after him’, the earliest version of

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the text comments, ‘the generation that will be at the time will be able to
see’, but it presumed the stirring of the ashes signified either the end of
the duchy or at least serious troubles.53 A later version, copied after
Henry’s death, was more definite about these troubles: ‘We who have
outlived King Henry see these things fulfilled for the most part.’54
The prophecy of St Valery about the Capetians and this strange
Norman tale both concern the succession of dynasties, pointing to one
thing, how many generations a given family might hold on to power.
There were also far more extensive prophetic texts, circulating in large
numbers, that claimed to describe the destinies of kings and kingdoms
over long periods of time. One favourite form was to encode predictions
in animal imagery, the most successful example being the Prophecies of
Merlin in Geoffrey of Monmouth’s History of the Kings of Britain, a work
written in the 1130s by a canon of Oxford. The style of these prophecies is
terse, staccato and cryptic:

The cubs of the ruler will awake and, setting aside the forests, will hunt
within the walls of the cities. They will make no small slaughter of those
who oppose them and they will cut out the tongues of the bulls. They will
load with chains the necks of the roaring ones and renew the days of their
grandfather. Then, from the first to the fourth, from the fourth to the
third, from the third to the second, the thumb will be rolled in oil. The
sixth will cast down the walls of Ireland and change the forests into
a plain.55

Writers of the late twelfth and early thirteenth century saw the phrase
about the cubs as a clear prediction of the rebellion of Henry II’s sons
against him in 1173–4.56
The allusiveness and ambiguity of the prophecy format allowed
continual reinterpretation of the meaning of individual passages.
There is a phrase in the Prophecies of Merlin – ‘the lynx penetrating
everything, who will be intent on the ruin of his own people’57 –
which occurs at a point in the Prophecies that would correspond in time
to the reigns of the sons of Henry II, some sixty years after Geoffrey
published the text. Rather remarkably, the lynx in the Prophecies is
responsible for the termination of the union of Normandy and
England, as actually was the case with King John (1199–1216). An

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early interpreter of the Prophecies, writing in the 1170s, thought the

prophecy about the lynx meant that it was through the lynx that ‘the
domination of the Normans in the island of Britain would come to an
end’.58 Soon afterwards, an alternative explanation was advanced, that
the lynx was Henry the Young King, son of Henry II, who died while in
rebellion against his father.59 After the loss of Normandy by King John,
however, the true interpretation seemed obvious. William the Breton,
the chronicler of John’s conqueror, Philip Augustus of France, was
quite clear that John was the lynx: ‘Truly he is Merlin’s allegorical
lynx, of whom Merlin, speaking of his father, whom he compares to
a lion, says, “From him will come forth a lynx, penetrating all, who will
be intent on the ruin of his own people.”’60
But there was enough leeway in the wording and structure of the
Prophecies to allow other interpretations. For some, the lynx was not
John, but his son, Henry III, although the grounds for the identifica-
tion could vary. The chronicler Matthew Paris, writing during Henry’s
reign, thought the phrase referred to Henry’s heavy taxation and
exactions: ‘Truly a penetrating lynx, since there was not a purse in
England that he did not cut open and shake out the contents.’61
A Dominican chronicler, writing nearly fifty years after the death of
Henry III, had a different interpretation when he came to sum up the
king’s reign: ‘he was physically strong but hasty in his actions, but,
since these had a fortunate and happy final outcome, many people
thought that he was the one indicated as “the lynx penetrating all” by
the prophet Merlin’.62
Merlin’s prophecies were thus a key to unlock the truth of past events
as well as a guide to the future. A particularly arresting example concerns
the death of William Rufus while hunting in the New Forest in 1100,
which was usually described as an accidental shooting by one of his
companions, Walter Tyrrel. However, a close reading of Merlin’s pro-
phecies led some later commentators to a different interpretation: ‘It is
the common and almost universal opinion that Walter did this uninten-
tionally and by accident, but the oracle of Merlin which predicted “to be
killed by the dart of envy” compels us to understand it differently.’63 The
phrase ‘to be killed by the dart of envy’ comes in Merlin’s prophecies at
a point that clearly corresponds to William’s death, and suggests that

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whoever first composed these prophecies, whether Geoffrey of

Monmouth or a source he used, believed that it was murder not accident.
Geoffrey of Monmouth’s History of the Kings of Britain was an enor-
mously successful book throughout the Middle Ages and in many coun-
tries, so the Prophecies of Merlin reached a wide audience. Quite often the
Prophecies circulated separately from the History, there being more than
seventy examples of such texts,64 and they also stimulated other writers to
produce their own imitations.65 An important example of a collection of
prophecies attributed to Merlin but quite separate from Geoffrey of
Monmouth’s is that under the name of ‘Richard of Ireland’. This was in
French but written, sometime in the 1270s, by a Venetian who supported
the pro-Church party, the Guelfs, in the struggles between the Church
and the Holy Roman Emperor. It is a very long work and combines
prophecies of Merlin with narrative sections containing tales of
Arthurian romance. Since there are at least thirteen manuscripts, as
well as two of an Italian translation, and the text was printed in French
in 1498 and in Italian in 1480, there was clearly a demand for this work.66
Such independent Merlin prophecies reached the Iberian peninsula,
where they were cited during the civil war between Peter the Cruel of
Castile and his half-brother Henry of Trastámara in the mid fourteenth
century. According to the historian Pero López de Ayala, who had served
Peter but had then gone over to Henry, a letter was found among Peter’s
documents after his murder, in which a learned Muslim from Granada
had interpreted a prophecy of Merlin at the king’s request. The prophecy
is included in the letter:

In the parts of the West, between the mountains and the sea, will be born
a black bird, a great eater and predator, and he would like to welcome in
him all the honeycombs of the world and to put in his stomach all the gold
of the world; and he will suffer indigestion and he will turn back, and he
will not perish immediately from this disease. His wings will fall and his
feathers will dry in the sun, and he will go door to door and no one will
welcome him, and he will enclose himself in a forest, and he will die there
twice, once to the world and once before God.67

Ayala’s chronicle gives the full content of the supposed interpretation

provided in the Muslim sage’s letter: the black bird is Peter; the eating

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and greed refers to his oppression of his subjects; his wings are the great
nobles of Castile, who will abandon him; and ‘the forest’, the sage has
found out, is the old name of the city of Montiel, the place where Peter
was actually murdered by his half-brother.
There can be little doubt that the letter is an invention, either of Ayala
himself or of someone upon whom the historian relied.68 A wise Muslim
informing Peter the Cruel of the location of his future murder, on the
basis of a prophecy of Merlin that the king has sent him, has to be a story
that circulated among supporters of Peter’s enemy, Henry of Trastámara,
in the years after the murder. Its purpose may be inferred: to justify the
murder and Henry’s usurpation of the Crown by presenting it as a long-
foreseen part of prophetic history, that is, the course of history as
revealed to the seers and wise men and women of a legendary past.
Ancient prophecy was summoned to justify political revolution, or, as
a Castilian knight of the following generation observed, ‘as soon as a new
king comes, they immediately make a new Merlin’.69
Kings were naturally very interested in the question of the succession and
might turn to Merlin for help. Edward IV of England, whose father had
been killed in an attempt to gain the throne, and who had himself seized it
by force, been deposed and exiled and then returned to recover the king-
dom, knew from experience that Fortune had her caprices. A story was told
about him, which, although unlikely to be true, illuminates contemporary
thinking about both the allure and the deceptions of political prophecy:

Now he decided to look into the prophecies of Merlin to find out what
would happen to his descendants, which is a superstition that has reigned
in England since the time of King Arthur. Seeing these prophecies, by the
interpretation made of them to him (for they are like the oracles of Apollo,
since they can always be understood in two ways), it was found that one of
his brothers, whose name began with the letter G, would take the crown
out of the hands of his children.70

Inspired by this news, the king ordered the killing of his brother George,
duke of Clarence, famously drowned in a barrel of malmsey wine. Now
falsely secure, Edward should have thought more carefully: his brother
Richard (later Richard III) was duke of Gloucester, and Gloucester
begins with a G.

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Throughout the later centuries of the Middle Ages, the events of

dynastic history were constantly being seen through the lens of Merlin’s
prophecies. Gerald of Wales’ account of the Anglo-Norman invasion of
Ireland, originally composed in 1189, was called The Prophetic History,
since Gerald presented the events as the fulfilment of prophecies of
Merlin (or Merlins, since he thought there were two seers of that
name).71 The death of Simon de Montfort the elder, killed in 1218 by
a stone thrown by the besieged inhabitants of Toulouse, was prophesied
by Merlin, ‘that good diviner’.72 The Italian Franciscan, Salimbene,
included in his chronicle prophecies of Merlin about the emperors
Frederick I and Frederick II, verses of Merlin ‘in which predictions
about the cities of Lombardy, Tuscany, the Romagna and the Marche
are fully and truthfully contained’, as well as a long account of a debate
about prophecy between a learned Franciscan and a learned Dominican,
in which Merlin figures prominently as a disputed example.73
There were other prophets and other styles of prophecy. Sometimes
prophecies were not ascribed to sages of the past but to living contem-
poraries, such as Abbot Joachim of Fiore, St Birgitta and the Scottish
Thomas Rymer, ‘that rural seer’, who was credited with predicting the
death of Alexander III, king of Scots, in 1286.74 And an alternative to
animal symbolism employed the letters of the alphabet as a cryptic key. In
the twelfth century, for example, there was a prediction that the
Comnenian family would rule the Byzantine empire in a succession of
emperors indicated by the word AIMA (αἷμα), ‘blood’. The first
Comnenian emperor was Alexius, the second John (J=I), the third
Manuel, so Manuel consciously chose for his son a name beginning
with A, Alexius. Later in the century the tyrannous emperor
Andronicus Comnenus was told that his successor’s name would begin
with an I (iota), so he looked out for a rival called Isaac, but identified the
wrong one.75 An Italian prophetic text of the thirteenth century reads,

The first F., in his hair a lamb, in his pelt a lion, will be a destroyer of towns.
In pursuit of a just purpose, he will find his end between the raven and the
crow. He will live on in H., who will perish in the gates of Melatium. But
the second F., of unexpected and marvellous birth, will be a lamb to be
torn to pieces among the goats, but not overwhelmed by them.76

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This is an only thinly disguised history of the emperor Frederick I, who

died on crusade, his son, Henry VI, who died in Sicily (Melatium is
perhaps Milazzo, on the north-east coast of Sicily), and his son,
Frederick II, whose wars dominated the history of Italy in the second
quarter of the thirteenth century.
Like this one, many of the prophecies found in the texts of the Middle
Ages are clearly written after the events they claim to be foretelling and
simply create a cryptic disguise for known historical happenings. When
Geoffrey of Monmouth, writing his Prophecies of Merlin in the 1130s, tells
how Merlin predicted an invasion of Britain by ‘a people dressed in wood
and in iron coats’, then the rule of two dragons, one of whom will be
killed, then the reign of the Lion of Justice, and how then ‘the lion’s cubs
will be turned into fish of the sea’, the actual historical references are
clear: the Norman Conquest of 1066, the reigns of William I and William
II Rufus, the accession of Henry I and the death of his son William in the
wreck of the White Ship in 1120.77 This is prophecy only in the sense that
Miss Pole in Mrs Gaskell’s novel Cranford practised it: ‘Miss Pole herself,
who we looked upon as a kind of prophetess, from the knack she had of
foreseeing things before they came to pass – although she did not like to
disturb her friends by telling them her foreknowledge’ (Chapter 12).
Some prophecies, however, turned out to have an unexpectedly pro-
phetic nature. One such is the prophecy of the green tree. Its original
form was an utterance ascribed to Edward the Confessor on his deathbed
in 1066. He claimed to have been visited by two long-dead monks, who
had told him that after his death, because of the wickedness of the
English nobles and clergy, God would deliver the kingdom into the
hands of the enemy and it would be devasted by fire and the sword.
When Edward asked these spiritual visitors how long England would
endure these tribulations, they replied,

If a green tree should be cut in two in the middle and the part that has
been cut off carried away the distance of three iugera [approximately 213
metres or 699 feet] from the trunk, when it rejoins the trunk by itself,
without the help of human hands or any prop, and it begins again to grow
green shoots and bear fruit from the original love in its coalescing sap, it is
only then the end of such evils can be hoped for.78

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This was written very soon after the Norman Conquest of 1066 and seems
to suggest that it is an impossibility for the sufferings to come to an end.
That was certainly how the passage was interpreted by writers of the
following generations. In 1125 the historian William of Malmesbury,
himself half English and half Norman, wrote that ‘we experience the
truth of this prophecy because England has become the dwelling place of
outsiders and is under the domination of foreigners . . . nor is there any
hope of an end to this misery’.79 In the following decade, another writer,
Osbert of Clare, also interpreted the prophecy as indicating the impos-
sibility of any improvement in the lot of the English people: ‘For nowa-
days we see no king or earl or bishop coming from that people, any more
than a felled tree rejoining its trunk and producing leaves and fruit.’80
The next writer to address this issue, however, advanced a completely
different interpretation. Aelred of Rievaulx, composing his Life of
Edward the Confessor around 1163, was writing in the reign of Henry
II. Henry was the son of Matilda, the daughter of Henry I and Queen
Matilda, and Queen Matilda was herself of the old royal line of the Anglo-
Saxon kings. Hence Henry II had the blood of both the Norman and the
Anglo-Saxon kings. Aelred writes that ‘it is the special glory of our Henry
to trace his physical descent from his [Edward’s] holy kindred’.81 He
gives his interpretation of the prophecy: the tree is England; it was
divided when the kingdom was taken from the old royal stock; the
three iugera represent the three kings who had no connection with the
old line, Harold, William I and William II; Henry I, by marrying Matilda,
‘united the seed of the kings of the Normans and English’; the tree
flourished when their daughter Matilda was born and came to fruit
when Henry ‘joined the two people like a keystone’. ‘Now,’ he adds,
‘England certainly has a king of English descent, and it has bishops and
abbots of the same race, and it has nobles and fine knights born from
a mingling of the seed of each, bringing honour to one and consolation
to the other.’82 So the prophecy of the green tree had finally come true.
The dynastic reunion represented by the accession of Henry II in 1154
has some similarities with the reditus ad stirpem, the return of Carolingian
blood in the person of Louis VIII of France, as discussed above (p. 350,
see also p. 384 below). In both cases, apparent ruptures in dynastic
history were being made good.

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The atmosphere of dreams and prophecy that was woven through

dynastic life comes out in a story about Peter I of Portugal (1357–67). The
king had two illegitimate sons named John, by two different women. He
had been foretold (it is not said by whom) that his son John would bring
great glory to the kingdom of Portugal. Peter naturally wondered which
John would do this, and had a preference that it be the elder. He was
convinced that it would, in fact, be the younger after having a dream in
which he saw all Portugal burning, and then his younger son John
appeared with a stick and extinguished the flames. He consulted experts
in dream interpretation who confirmed this.83 John did indeed go on to
defeat a Castilian invasion and himself become king of Portugal, encour-
aged by a prophecy given to him by a visionary hermit.84
Foreknowledge of the dynastic future could thus be sought by various
means, through astrology, prophetic visons or books of prophecy. Some of
these methods were dangerous, as Eleanor Cobham found out.85 Eleanor
married Humphrey, duke of Gloucester, uncle of the young and sickly
Henry VI of England, in 1428. She had already been his mistress for some
years, and once he had his first marriage annulled, she was able to become
his wife. After the death of Humphrey’s older brother in 1435, Humphrey
himself was next in line for the throne. If the young, unmarried and
childless Henry VI died, Humphrey would be king and Eleanor queen.
She had the reputation of ‘scheming for a long time to exalt herself to
a higher position in the kingdom of England than she had had’.86
Eleanor was perhaps unwise. She consulted two learned churchmen,
whose learning extended to astrology and magic, to see whether the
young king would live. One of them, Roger Bultybrok (or
Bolingbroke), supposedly made a ‘figure (figura)’ of the king, along
with ‘very many objects, images, vestments, circles and instruments’,
which he created by his magical and necromantic art, under the pretext
of conducting legitimate astronomy.87 His collaborator, Thomas
Southwell, a canon of the royal chapel of St Stephen’s, Westminster,
assisted him by consecrating these objects and Roger’s book of spells, as
well as reciting masses, so that Roger ‘could be safe within the circle and
would be able to summon to him demons and other evil spirits that are in
the air and the earth’.88 Roger’s magical and astrological efforts even-
tually bore fruit:

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he knew well that the king would not live long but would die within a short
time, and thus, through the discovery and dissemination of this matter, the
king’s people would withdraw their hearty love of him, and the king
himself, through knowledge of this discovery and dissemination, namely
that he would die within a short time, would conceive such sadness in his
heart that he would die more quickly because of that sadness and grief.89

Roger thought it very probable that the king would die in late May or
early June of 1441. The events of that summer were in fact very different.
Duke Humphrey had his enemies, as well as his ambitions, and they saw
their chance when they heard that his wife had been dabbling in magic
and getting predictions of the king’s illness or death. In July 1441 Roger,
Thomas and Eleanor were arrested and tried on charges of necromancy.
The charges included not only calculating the time of the king’s death
but also seeking to procure it through magic.90 The dragnet also hauled
in Margery Jourdemayne, the so-called ‘Witch of Eye’, a local wise woman
whom Eleanor had supposedly consulted. Eleanor argued in her defence
that the images and other magical equipment were not to cause the
king’s death but ‘for to have borne a child by her lord, the duke of
Gloucester’ – she could be the mother of kings.91 Roger Bultybrok said
his necromancy had been undertaken at Eleanor’s request and was solely
to know ‘what should befall her and to what estate she should come’,
although he confessed, as he faced execution, that ‘he presumed too far
in his cunning’ (that is, his science).92 Thomas Southwell died in the
Tower of London, Roger was hanged, drawn and quartered, Margery
Jourdemayne was burned alive. Eleanor herself had to do penance,
walking through the streets of London on three occasions, bareheaded
and carrying a large candle. She was divorced from Duke Humphrey and
spent the remaining eleven years of her life a prisoner in remote and
windy castles. She never was the mother of kings.

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 CHAPTER 11

Pretenders and Returners: Dynastic Imposters

in the Middle Ages

I n the spring of 1487, in christ church cathedral (holy

Trinity) in Dublin, the young Edward VI was crowned king of England
and France and lord of Ireland. A parliament was summoned and coins
were struck in his name. Soon after his coronation he sailed for England,
with an army provided by his aunt, Margaret of Burgundy, and his Irish
supporters, notably the earl of Kildare. His purpose was to remove the
usurper, Henry Tudor. But luck was not with him, his army was defeated,
and he was captured. Henry Tudor did not execute him but preferred to
maintain the story that this boy was not, as his supporters claimed,
a prince of the royal house of York, but an English plebeian with the
absurd name of Lambert Simnel.1
In the world of dynasties, which was the world of most of medieval
Europe, a political claim was primarily in the person and the blood, much
more than in election or divine commission. Hence a claim could be
made simply by asserting a certain personal identity, in the form ‘I am X’.
This appears particularly clearly in the case of pretenders and returners,
those men and women who claimed to be, or were claimed to be, either
the children of royal dynasties or long-lost rulers themselves coming back
from obscurity.2 Some stories concentrate simply on the pathos of
a famous ruler living on in humble anonymity: Harold, the last Anglo-
Saxon king, the Holy Roman Emperor Henry V, Edward II of England
and Wladyslaw III of Poland are all recorded, not dying as generally
reported, but as ending their days as obscure hermits. There is obviously
a perennial taste for the mystery of the supposedly dead or the disap-
peared who have actually lived on elsewhere, with a secret life and a new
identity. But more dramatic are the cases where the king returns to claim

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his own. These supposed returning kings show the underlying assump-
tions about political legitimacy in a dynastic system: their claims are in
their blood. And they are also ideal tools to be manipulated by factions
and dissidents.
The stories of kings living on as hermits are simple survival legends,
strange and poignant, but cases of those who try to return, or of those who
claim to be the sons of past rulers, are a distinctive but not infrequent
feature of dynastic politics. Examples can be found in the ancient world
and in modern times, and also throughout the medieval period, all over
Christendom. They include supposed Merovingian kings, Byzantine emper-
ors and Holy Roman emperors. Two famous cases, from the thirteenth and
fourteenth centuries respectively, are the apparent return of Baldwin, count
of Flanders and Latin emperor of Constantinople, and the reappearance of
Woldemar, margrave of Brandenburg, in each case after an absence of
decades.3 There are examples of returning pretenders from Spain and
from Norway. And, at the end of the Middle Ages, the Tudor dynasty of
England, which seized the throne in 1485, faced a series of challenges from
young men claiming to be princes of the previous Yorkist dynasty, chal-
lenges that, as in the case of Lambert Simnel alias Edward VI, came close to
success.
And this raises a problem for our analysis, since, if these young men
had succeeded, then the official story would be, not that they were
pretenders, but that they were dispossessed Yorkists expelling
a usurper. We all know that history is written by the victors, but that is
true especially starkly in the case of pretenders, because, simply by calling
them that, we sign up with the winning side. It is rather like the anti-
popes. Who is it who decides who is a pope and who an anti-pope? The
answer is, the last pope standing. The label ‘anti-pope’ is that applied by
the victorious, and hence official, pope. Nobody starts out with the
intention of becoming an anti-pope or of being labelled a pretender.
So, in any discussion of the subject, we must be aware that the history of
pretenders is the history of failed pretenders.
It is not as if the idea of a ruler returning after many years is beyond
the bounds of possibility, for sometimes rulers really did disappear and
return after decades. One of the most remarkable cases is that of Henry
I of Mecklenburg, who left his north German principality to go on

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pilgrimage to the Holy Land in 1271 and only returned home to his wife
and land in 1298. Kidnapped in the Holy Land by Muslims, he was held in
captivity in Cairo for decades. News of this came to his wife Anastasia in
1275 and she made serious but ill-fated efforts to ransom her husband.
In the following decades Henry’s son exercised authority in Mecklenburg
and he slipped into the habit of referring to his father as ‘of blessed
memory’. Two imposters claiming to be Henry also turned up but were
unmasked and executed. Finally the Mamluk Sultan of Egypt released
Henry, along with his loyal squire, who had accompanied him all those
years, and the pair eventually reached Mecklenburg again in the summer
of 1298, twenty-seven years after their departure. Henry’s wife and, with
whatever emotions, his son met him. With a story as strange as this, it is
less surprising that tales of returning rulers were so often found
credible.4
There is no single set of circumstances that gives rise to stories of
survivors and returners, but there are some recurrent patterns. One
situation that might well generate rumours of survival was death in
battle, for in the bloody chaos and carnage of hand-to-hand combat
it was often uncertain who had lived and who had died. Some of
these stories, as mentioned, concerned kings who escaped from dis-
astrous defeats and lived quiet, anonymous lives thereafter: Harold
Godwinson survived the Battle of Hastings and ended his days as
a hermit in Chester;5 Wladyslaw III of Poland had not been killed
by the Ottoman Turks at the Battle of Varna in 1444 and likewise
lived on as a hermit in Spain. There were rumours, too, that Olaf
Tryggvason had not drowned at the great sea-battle of Svolde in
the year 1000. In his Heimskringla, the thirteenth-century author
Snorri Sturluson cites earlier poets on the subject. One of these
was King Olaf’s contemporary, Hallfredr Ottarsson, and Samuel
Laing’s translation of the Heimskringla from 1844 gives an appealing
rhyming English version of what he wrote:

Does Olaf live? or is he dead?

Has he the hungry ravens fed?
I scarcely know what I should say,
For many tell the tale each way.6

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Snorri’s dry comment on this is, ‘But howsoever that be, King Olaf
Tryggvason never thereafter returned to his kingdom in Norway.’7
But more significant in dynastic politics were those pretenders who
did come back to their kingdoms, actually made public their claims to
have survived death in battle and sought to re-establish themselves in
power. In the early 1090s, for example, a man claiming to be a son of the
Byzantine emperor Romanos IV Diogenes (1068–71) turned up. This son
had not died in fighting at Antioch seventeen years earlier, as had been
thought, but had survived. His supposed wife, the sister of the current
emperor, Alexius Comnenus, did not, however, acknowledge him, and
he was captured and sent off to Cherson in the Crimea, the Byzantine
equivalent of Alcatraz at this time. But he did not give up. In Cherson he
was able to enter into dealings with the Cumans, a neighbouring tribe of
steppe nomads, escaped to join them, was acknowledged as emperor by
them and then invaded the empire in 1094. It was only after a long
campaign in the Balkans that he was captured and blinded.8 And it is
important to remember, of course, that if he had been successful, our
accounts of these events would have been quite different, and the trium-
phant report composed by Anna Comnena, Alexius’ daughter, would not
exist. And modern historians would find a place for this son of Romanos
Diogenes in their books.
The case of Alfonso the Battler of Aragon is slightly more complex.
The earliest sources are clear that he survived the bloody defeat of the
Christians in the Battle of Fraga in 1134, but died soon afterwards.9 There
is even a document, issued in that year that is dated ‘after the great and
disastrous slaughter of the Christians at Fraga, in which almost all fell by
the sword, but a very few just managed to escape, without their weapons,
along with the king’.10 But this version of the king’s end did not provide
a very satisfactory narrative: it is neither heroic nor tragic. So, it is under-
standable that, by the thirteenth century, there were different versions of
the king’s fate. The Latin Chronicle of the Kings of Castile, the first part of
which was composed in the 1220s, says ‘he is said to have been killed by
the Moors. But the opinion of others was that he escaped from that
disaster . . . and it was said that after the passage of many years he came
in our own time to Aragon.’11 Rodrigo Jiménez de Rada, archbishop of
Toledo, whose chronicle was completed in 1243, writes that some say he

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was killed at Fraga and his body was ransomed from the Muslims to be
given Christian burial. Others say he survived the encounter and, ‘unable
to bear the confusion of battle, he showed himself to this world as
a pilgrim, changed in likeness and dress’.12 In any case, a man claiming
to be Alfonso turned up some thirty years after the Battle of Fraga and
caused concern to his great-nephew, the king of Aragon at that time.13
The fall of the Hohenstaufen dynasty in the middle decades of the
thirteenth century also brought a particularly rich crop of pretenders.
Manfred, the son of Frederick II and king of Sicily, killed in battle in
1266, and his nephew Conradin, killed two years later after being cap-
tured in battle, both reappeared very soon after their supposed deaths.
The Franciscan chronicler Salimbene relates that after Charles of Anjou
defeated and killed Manfred at the Battle of Benevento, not one, but
several pretenders arose, claiming to be the fallen king. Charles was kept
busy: ‘he killed many such Manfreds in those days’, says Salimbene.14
But there were other situations that formed the background story for
pretenders. Deposition, especially if followed by imprisonment or by
disappearance, was one: Michael VII Ducas, the Byzantine emperor
deposed in 1078, and the late medieval English kings Edward II,
Richard II and Edward V, are in this category. Occasionally one encoun-
ters tales of babies exchanged in the cradle, reminiscent of the famous
‘warming pan baby’ story, which claimed that the son of James II, the last
Catholic king of England, Scotland and Ireland, was not his but had been
slipped into his wife’s bedchamber in a warming pan. Harold Harefoot,
who succeeded Canute in England in 1035, claimed that he was the king’s
son by the English noblewoman Ælfgifu, but his enemies expressed
doubts. The various versions of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle report that
‘Harold said he was Canute’s son by Ælfgifu but it was not at all true’, or
that ‘Some men said that Harold was the son of King Canute by Ælfgifu
but many men thought this quite incredible.’15 A few years after Canute’s
death an adherent of Ælfgifu’s great rival, Queen Emma, wrote that the
likely truth was that the child of a servant girl had been sneaked into the
bedroom of Canute’s concubine (i.e. Ælfgifu) and passed off as hers.16 By
the twelfth century the gossip had become more elaborate, with Harold
and his brother being actually the sons of a cobbler and a priest’s con-
cubine respectively.17

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Apart from babies being smuggled in, there are cases of babies being
smuggled out. In the middle of the fourteenth century a Sienese mer-
chant, Giannino, claimed to be the rightful king of France. He said that
he was actually John I, the baby who had held the royal title from
15–19 November 1316, dying at less than a week old. Giannino claimed
that the baby who had died in 1316 was not the royal prince but another,
substituted for him, and that he, the real royal baby, had been smuggled
out of the palace and come eventually to Italy, where, forty years on, his
story had been revealed to him. Not everyone was convinced. In 1359 the
General Council of the commune of Siena banned Giannino for life from
holding public office because of the claims he was making to royal
blood.18 And the Dante scholar Benvenuto da Imola, writing a little
later, used the case to illustrate a passage in the Divine Comedy where
Dante speaks of the folly of the people of Siena: ‘But what would our poet
have said’, asks Benvenuto, ‘if he had seen, not long ago, Giannino of
Siena, who allowed himself to be persuaded so easily and so foolishly that
he was the king of France?’19
But the most recurrent returner, the Holy Roman Emperor Frederick
II, who died in 1250, had neither been killed in battle nor been deposed,
except in name only. His posthumous career rested instead on the real
Frederick’s charisma and his dramatic life, magnified by the way he had
become the focus of apocalyptic predictions, which was not the case with
most returning rulers.20 Salimbene admitted, when he heard that
Frederick had died, ‘I myself for many days could scarcely believe that
he was dead’; only when the pope himself affirmed it did he believe, but
even then, ‘I shuddered when I heard it and could scarcely believe it.’21
Many people scarcely believed it, and many others did not believe it at all.
Hence there arose a series of false Fredericks, some of them of significant
impact, like the pretender in Sicily in 1261, or another in the Rhineland
in 1284, both of whom required considerable military effort to suppress.
The only occasion on which there was a female pretender of impor-
tance seems to have been in 1300 in Norway, when a woman appeared
claiming to be Margaret, the so-called ‘Maid of Norway’.22 Margaret
was the daughter of Erik Magnusson, king of Norway (1280–99) and,
through her mother (also called Margaret), she was the heir to the
Scottish throne. She had died in 1290 on her way from Norway to her

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new kingdom. She had a plausible claim to be heir of Norway as well as

Scotland, since King Erik had no sons and was succeeded by a brother.
In the marriage treaty between King Erik and Margaret’s mother, it was
indeed stated that ‘if the king of Norway should beget by this Margaret
a daughter or daughters, they will succeed to everything that can come
to them according to Norwegian laws and customs, even to the king-
dom if that is the custom’.23 This left it open whether it was the custom,
of course, but the Margaret who appeared in 1300, a year after King
Erik’s death, would, as his daughter, have been the most credible
challenger to Erik’s newly crowned brother, and she supposedly
claimed to be his ‘lawful heir’.24 It has been suggested that she was
the tool of a group of dissident nobles.25 If so, they seem to have
chosen badly, for the woman who made these claims in 1300 was
already grey-haired, while the real Margaret would have been only
seventeen. This false Margaret was burned alive near Bergen, but
even then continued to trouble the authorities, as she became the
focus of a cult, with pilgrimages and invocation of her as a saint.26
The length of time between the death or disappearance of the ruler
and his apparent re-emergence varied considerably, but was always bio-
logically possible, except in the case of some supposed emperor
Fredericks of the later Middle Ages. The longest gap, apart from these,
is of thirty-eight years, and occurs in the very special case of John I of
France, the one who, according to all accounts, died as a week-old baby in
1316, but by 1354 had supposedly turned up in Italy in the form of
Giannino of Siena. Alfonso the Battler of Aragon and Woldemar of
Brandenburg reappeared twenty-nine years after their apparent deaths,
Baldwin of Flanders twenty years. In fact, the pseudo-Baldwin’s suppor-
ters explained the fact that he seemed to be shorter than the ruler who
had set off long ago on the Fourth Crusade as an effect of age.27 But there
are cases of a much swifter return. In the Byzantine empire Michael VII,
who was deposed in 1078, and Alexius II, who was deposed and killed in
1183, supposedly were active again within a few years, two and six respec-
tively. Conradin of Hohenstaufen was executed in 1268 but in the very
next year some Germans in Italy were hailing a young man as the lost
prince and a putative Richard II of England was winning recognition in
some quarters just two years after the king’s death in 1400.28 The shorter

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the gap between disappearance and return, however, the more acute
were questions of identification and resemblance (a subject discussed
below).
When the pseudo-Frederick II appeared in Germany in 1284, ‘many
people asked, if he was the emperor, why had he lain hidden for such
a long time’.29 This is a natural enquiry. Especially in the case of a return
after many years, the returners had to explain their absence. The missing
years were often accounted for as a period of penitence. Pseudo-Baldwin,
for example, explained that, after he had escaped from captivity among
the Saracens, he had been enjoined seven years penance by the pope for
abandoning the faith in that time. The seven years were now up, which is
why he could return publicly to Flanders.30 The false-Frederick II who
turned up in Sicily in 1261 ‘declared that long ago, after being granted
divine permission through an oracle, he had feigned his death and spent
nine years on pilgrimage in expiation of his sins’.31 The false Woldemar’s
situation was more complex. He had, he said, feigned his death, substi-
tuting another body, and left his principality of Brandenburg, for one
cause alone: his marriage was within the prohibited degrees, and this was
the only way he could obey his conscience and also preserve his wife’s
honour, since she would now be able to remarry.32 In actual fact,
Margrave Woldemar had married a cousin within the prohibited degrees,
and she had indeed remarried after his death, or presumed death.
There were also other ways of explaining disappearance and survival.
The false Margaret, Maid of Norway, said that during her voyage from
Norway to Scotland she had been sold by one of her aristocratic ladies-in-
waiting, and spirited away.33 Perkin Warbeck, claiming to be the younger
of the Princes in the Tower, son of Edward IV of England, explained that
he had been spared and conducted abroad by the assassin sent by his
wicked uncle Richard III, but that he had been made to promise on oath
that he would not reveal his true identity ‘for a certain period of years’.34
Whenever they appeared, these pretenders signified a challenge to
the existing powers. Sometimes they were adopted by dissident factions
within the country, sometimes used by foreign enemies, sometimes both.
A good example of the way foreign enemies could try to use a pretender
or returner is provided by the case of the Byzantine emperor Michael VII
Ducas. In March 1078 Michael was forced to abdicate the imperial throne

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and became a monk. About two years later, however, a figure appeared in
southern Italy claiming to be the former emperor and won powerful
backers in an attempt at restoration. Robert Guiscard, the Norman
warrior who had carved out a conquest principality in the region, was
willing to lead an army across the Adriatic against the Byzantine empire,
with the supposed Michael VII in his train, while Pope Gregory VII
commanded the bishops of Apulia and Calabria to offer absolution of
their sins to those going on the expedition.35
There were doubters:

There were at that time some men with the duke (i.e. Robert Guiscard)
who had served in the palace in the time of the emperor Michael and said
they knew his face and that this man did not resemble him in the least, but
that he had come in the hope of getting some gift from the duke on false
pretences.36

Guiscard was apparently indifferent to whether the man was genuine or not
and was not dissuaded from launching his attack. The supposed Michael
was with him when the Norman leader besieged the important Byzantine
city of Dyrrachium in the summer of 1081. Guiscard’s ploy was not a success.
The inhabitants apparently said they would surrender if they could see the
deposed emperor. Dressed in imperial robes and accompanied by a fanfare,
the claimant was paraded before the walls, but the effect was disastrous.
According to one account, the besieged citizens shouted that ‘they did not
recognize him at all’, while, according to another, even more humiliatingly,
they did identify the figure before them: ‘This man used to bring jugs full of
wine to the table and was one of the lower butlers!’37
Anna Comnena, one of the sources for this story, considered various
theories about who the pretender was and who initiated the plot to put
him forward, some of them seeing the pretender himself as the instiga-
tor, others attributing a far-reaching scheme to Robert Guiscard. Anna
has obvious motives for ridiculing this attempt to give legitimacy to
Guiscard’s invasion, but Guiscard himself seems to have thought it worth-
while, and Gregory VII was convinced enough to give the expedition its
proto-crusading status.
A surviving or returning king could indeed be a useful weapon for
hostile neighbours. The pretender claiming to be the Byzantine emperor

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Alexius II turned up at the court of the Sultan of Iconium, who always

treated him as the genuine emperor and allowed him to recruit troops to
attack the Byzantine cities along his frontier.38 At the beginning of the
fifteenth century Scotland harboured a supposed Richard II of England
and at the end of the century a supposed Richard IV (Perkin Warbeck).39
The former was a continuing challenge to the regime of the usurper
Henry IV and the imposter did not in fact die until 1419, while the latter
presented similar difficulties for the usurper Henry VII. This Richard IV
was treated royally and used as a figurehead for Scottish incursions into
England. In both instances there were links and contacts between the
pretenders in Scotland and opponents of the government within
England. In 1417, during his trial after the defeat of his rising against
Henry V, Sir John Oldcastle refused to recognize the authority of the
court since, he said, his liege lord, King Richard, was still alive in
Scotland.40
A returner or pretender was in many ways a good tool for dissidents
and rebels, since he simultaneously fitted the requirements of a dynastic
system, that is, his claim was framed in genetic terms, and yet he was
actually an absolute outsider, free of ties and obligations to any particular
aristocratic faction or interest. In one sense, he was like a foreign queen,
chosen to avoid the awkwardness of selecting a bride from any group
among the indigenous nobility, but he also asserted that he was native,
natural and had claims of blood. The pretender cannot in actual fact be
a member of any aristocratic family for they are already known; hence the
pretender has to be a ‘nobody’. The advantages of this for the aristocratic
rebels who patronized the pretender included control of their nominal
leader and the possibility of forming alliances of various aristocratic
factions, since the pretender is not in fact a representative of a specific
family. He appears as a new player in the game, even though his claims
are ancestral. Although there are some cases where the returning kings
were associated with revolutionary upheaval, apocalypticism and pro-
phecy, most of these returners were not of this type. They were dynastic
pretenders and claimed their right as such: they presented themselves as
lords denied their hereditary right. What they were demanding was
exactly what the existing emperors, kings or lords had, namely a pre-
eminent place in the social hierarchy justified by rights of blood.

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In many cases, the evidence exists to identify the aristocratic and other
oppositional groups who stood behind the pretender. In 675 a short-lived
puppet king, Clovis, supposedly a Merovingian prince, was put forward by
Ebroin, the mayor of the palace, in his attempt at a political come back
after defeat by rivals. The Life of St Leger, who was one of his opponents,
gives some details of the partisans of this ‘Clovis, whom they had falsely
made king’.41 Likewise, the names of the Flemish nobles who gave their
support to the false Baldwin are recorded, and in many cases we can
deduce the grounds for their opposition to the rule of Countess Joan,
daughter of the real Baldwin. In the case of the false Frederick II of 1261,
the sources name a group of Sicilian dissidents, and in 1284 the support
for the next false Frederick was associated particularly with the
Rhineland towns hostile to the king, Rudolf of Habsburg. For some
time Woldemar of Brandenburg had the backing, not of dissidents, but
of the Holy Roman Emperor himself, Charles IV, an emperor who had
only recently established his power against rivals, rivals who were the most
determined opponents of the pretender.
The role of dissident aristocratic factions in the manufacture of pre-
tenders is revealed particularly clearly in those cases where pretenders
had to be argued into their role by their supposed partisans. Perkin
Warbeck in his confession after capture gave a particularly detailed
account of such pressure, which began when he arrived in Cork in
Ireland in late 1491:

They of the town, because I was arrayed with some cloths of silk of my said
master’s, came unto me and threaped (asserted) upon me that I should be
the duke of Clarence’s son that was before time at Dublin, and, for as much
as I denied it, there was brought unto me the Holy Evangelist (the Gospels)
and the cross by the mayor of the town, which was called John Lewellen,
and there in the presence of him and others I took mine oath as the truth
was that I was not the foresaid duke’s son neither of none of his blood. And
after this came unto me an Englishman whose name was Stephen Poytron,
with one John Atwater, and said to me, in swearing great oaths, that they
knew well I was King Richard’s bastard son, to whom I answered with like
oaths that I was not, and then they advised me not to be afeared but that
I should take it upon me boldly and if I would do so they would aid and

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assist me with all their power against the king of England, and not only
they . . . and so against my will made me learn English and taught me what
I should do and say, and after this they called me duke of York, the second
son of King Edward IV, because King Richard’s bastard son was in the
hands of the king of England.42

The Yorkist plotters here are extremely persistent. First they insist that
Warbeck is the duke of Clarence’s son, that is, Edward, Earl of Warwick,
the last surviving legitimate male of the house of York. He ‘was before time
at Dublin’, as Warbeck’s confession mentions, in 1487, when the pretender
Lambert Simnel had claimed to be the earl and had been crowned in
Dublin as Edward VI. Finding Warbeck obstinate on this point, they
suggest that he is actually the illegitimate son of Richard III (Clarence’s
brother), John of Gloucester or Pontefract. Faced with the awkward pro-
blem that John was a captive of Henry Tudor, they finally decide that he is
the younger of the missing Princes in the Tower, Richard, son of Edward
IV. In a brisk sequence they have thus worked their way through the sons of
all three of the Yorkist brothers, Clarence, Richard III and Edward IV.
Warbeck stresses his initial obduracy and says he eventually collaborated
‘against my will’. Well, he would wouldn’t he? This is from a confession,
although one that did not, in the end, save his neck.
But he is not the only pretender to paint such a picture. The pseudo-
Baldwin of Flanders also had to be persuaded into his role. He was originally
encountered early in 1224 as a pious hermit in the forests near Tournai, at
a time when rumours of Baldwin’s return were already circulating, and more
and more people began to say he was Count Baldwin returned from captiv-
ity: ‘Everywhere he was called “Count” by all, but he did not wish to reply
anything to that, except that he was called “Christian”.’43 He compared
those who said he was the count to the Bretons who awaited the return of
King Arthur. They were not discouraged: ‘But the more he denied it, each of
them said, “You are the count.”’44 Eventually he gave way to this persistent
pressure, was escorted in triumph to Valenciennes, where he was washed,
shaved and dressed like a count (‘comme conte’).
It was important for the opponents of returning pretenders to deny
their claims as vigorously as possible, and one way of doing this was to
demonstrate that the ruler in question really had died. When the false

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Maid of Norway turned up in 1300, those who disbelieved her claims

made much of the evidence for the burial of the real Maid ten years
earlier: her body had been brought back from Orkney, where she had
died, to Bergen, where her father, King Erik, had opened her coffin and
looked on her face, before burying her alongside her mother.45 It might
be thought that producing the body itself would clinch the case, but it did
not always do so. When the deposed King Richard II was buried by the
new regime in March 1400, his body was transported 200 miles to London
before interment, and there ‘he was above ground for two days, to show
him to the people of London so that they would believe for certain that
he was dead’.46 The king’s face was left uncovered so that ‘men might see
and know his person from all other’.47 But seventeen years later, as we
have seen, there were still those who were unconvinced.
Another way of undermining the pretender was to prove his genuine
identity, especially if this could be done by asserting an alternative and
humiliating identity. When the Merovingian king Guntram was facing
the challenge of a man claiming to be the son of Guntram’s father
Clothar I, and hence his own half-brother, he refused even to refer to
the pretender by the noble name he used, Gundovald, and, in an angry
speech, spoke of ‘this stranger, whose father ran a mill, and, to tell the
truth, whose father was a wool-carder’.48 It appears that he was so irate
that he could not even settle on an abusive enough choice of paternal
occupation. Later the same pretender was mocked by his enemies, who
shouted at him, ‘aren’t you the painter who, in the time of King Clothar,
used to go around the churches decorating the walls and arches?’49 At
the other end of the Middle Ages, this demeaning and patronizing
rhetoric was also the response of Henry VII, the first Tudor king, when
he faced the challenge of Perkin Warbeck, who, as we have seen, claimed
to be Richard, duke of York, the younger of the Princes in the Tower.
Henry referred to the young pretender as ‘the childe’, ‘the garçon’ or
‘the feigned lad’.50 Warbeck’s real origins, in the city of Tournai, might
also be mentioned. When the earl of Kildare wrote defending himself
against charges of having supported the pretender, he denied having
given any help to ‘the French lad’.51 And hostile chroniclers always
attribute lowly origins to pretenders: as already mentioned, the false
Michael VII was supposedly a lower-rank butler; Anna Comnena stresses

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the lowly origins of the false son of Romanos Diogenes; according to one
source the pseudo-Alfonso the Battler was a smith, while the false
Conradin was the son of a smith, the false Frederick of 1284 a peasant,
Woldemar a peasant or a miller, and Lambert Simnel the son of an organ-
maker.52
Opponents of the pretenders sometimes also drew on the terms that
Christians had long used to decry pagan idolatry. The chronicler Saba
Malaspina calls the false Frederick II of 1261 a ‘simulachrum’ and an ‘idol
(ydolum)’: disaffected exiles ‘flocked to the simulachrum’; royal forces
were sent ‘to repress that idol and his worshippers’.53 Simulachrum
means image or semblance, and was often, like idol, used to describe
effigies of the pagan gods. In a similar way, Thomas Warde of
Trumpington, the false Richard II, was called by his opponents, not
only a fool and a fake, but also an idol (ydolum) and ‘mawmet’.54 This
last word, which derives from the name of the prophet Muhammad, also
meant ‘pagan idol’.55 So the term usefully conveyed both the idea that
reverence was being paid to a false object and the judgment that a bone-
headed stupidity was involved – Christians from the time of the martyrs
had stressed the foolishness of worshipping lifeless images of wood and
stone. It was also possible to tar the pretender with the brush of heresy.
This was a charge raised against the false Frederick of 1284, which is
perhaps why he was burned rather than executed in some other way. And
when, in 1406, the English Parliament condemned the heretical
Lollards, they included a denunciation of the ‘evil people (mauveys
hommes et femmes)’ who spread the rumour that Richard II was still alive.56

Recognition
Pretenders and their supporters and the existing rulers and their sup-
porters engaged in political and military competition of the usual kind,
the kind familiar between opponents when there was no question of
a pretender, but, because of the special nature of the pretender’s case,
they were also involved in a conflict about questions of identity. Since the
disputing sides were arguing about who someone was, one thing that
these pretenders and returners illuminate is how identity was recognized,
established and tested.

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Pretenders were clad in royal or imperial robes, crowned, had seals, all
the trappings of sovereignty. But while these things might be persuasive,
for, as Polonius points out in Hamlet, ‘the apparel oft proclaims the man’,
there was also the body beneath the clothes, and the kind of truth it
carried. Modern states have often required information about such things
as eye and hair colour, or height, to be specified in identity cards or
passports, obviously as means of checking identity. British passports issued
before 1988 had a space for entering height and for ‘distinguishing marks’.
Such distinguishing marks also excited attention in the stories of several of
these returning rulers. For example, it was reported that the Pseudo-
Baldwin ‘had the same scars on his body that Baldwin had had’.57
Wladyslaw III of Poland, the king who supposedly survived the Battle of
Varna in 1444, was recognized living as a hermit in Spain twenty years later
by the fact that his feet had six toes.58 By a remarkable coincidence, the
corpse of Henry II, duke of Silesia, who was killed in battle against the
Mongols in 1241, had also been recognized by the six toes on his left foot.59
An especially elaborate case concerns the Holy Roman Emperor
Henry V. There was a rumour that Henry had not died in 1125 but had
gone as a penitent into exile, leaving a substitute body to be buried in his
stead. According to one variant of the story, a figure very similar to the
emperor had been received at the abbey of Cluny. One day a German
visitor who had known the monarch came to the abbey and was asked by
the abbot to see if he could identify the man he had taken into his abbey.
The German immediately asserted that he was an imposter, not the
emperor. The supposed emperor, however, was unruffled. He gave the
visitor a slap and said to him:

It is true you have been with me, but you were always a traitor, and
when you were caught in one of your treacheries, although you
escaped, one of my followers pierced your right foot with a spear, and
the wound or scar will still be apparent. Servants, seize this trickster and
you will see!

The scar was indeed found, but the visitor was not finished. ‘My lord’, he
said, ‘who this man is pretending to be, had a right arm so long that he
could completely cover his right knee with it when standing upright.’ The
supposed emperor immediately did this without trouble. For a while,

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comments our source, he was treated with reverence but was eventually
discovered to be an impostor.60
In this curious scene, the two protagonists engage in a kind of duel.
Their weapons are distinguishing marks of a physical kind, either innate
(a long arm) or acquired (a scar). The emperor claims to identify the
German visitor by knowing that he has a scar on his foot, a place that
would not be immediately visible. The visitor counter-attacks by appeal to
a distinctive feature of the real emperor. It is clear from the story that the
supposed emperor is at first sitting, since he has to rise to demonstrate
that his arm is indeed long enough to cover his knee. He seems to be
vindicated, both by knowing of the other’s scar and by his own physiog-
nomy. Unfortunately, we are not told how he was eventually unmasked.
Scars are witnesses, since they are traces of an event in life; they may be
ineradicable; they can be seen and touched. Hence, from the time of
doubting Thomas to that of modern detective fiction, they have been
invoked as proof of identity. But there are other features, other ‘distin-
guishing marks’, that identify a person. One such emerges in the case of
the man claiming to be the son of the Byzantine emperor Romanos
Diogenes, who had found support among the nomadic Cumans. Anna
Comnena says that during his campaign, when the Cumans were besie-
ging Adrianople, the Byzantine general Nicephorus Bryennios, who had
known Romanos’ son, spoke with the pretender from the ramparts.
‘Judging from the man’s voice,’ he concluded, ‘he would not acknowl-
edge him to be Romanos Diogenes’ son.’61 A century later, the pretender
claiming to be the emperor Alexius II was more careful, imitating the
young ruler’s stammer (ψελλισμός), as well as matching his hair colour.62
In his discussion of the Merovingian pretender Gundovald, Marc
Widdowson mentions the parallels with the famous case of Martin
Guerre, a case that its most well-known narrator, Natalie Zemon Davis,
says caused her ‘to reflect upon the significance of identity in the sixteenth
century’.63 Widdowson remarks that the similarities between these cases is
partly because in both sixth-century Gaul and sixteenth-century France
there was a ‘lack of basic technologies for establishing persistence of
identity, like photography’. Likewise, in a pioneering article on imposture,
Henri Platelle linked ‘the problem of the identity of persons’ with the
‘technical deficiences’ of the Middle Ages.64 One cannot doubt that finger

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printing and DNA analysis have provided tools for establishing identity
that the medieval world could not dream of, but what of the simpler issue
of the ability to produce a likeness?
Standard histories of art assert or assume that realistic portraiture
cannot be found in the Middle Ages prior to the late fourteenth or
early fifteenth centuries. This may be debated, but, whether or not
realistic portraits were painted before 1400, it is clear that some people
thought that they could be. The historian William of Malmesbury, for
example, explained that St Anselm could not take the direct route from
Rome to Lyons in 1099 since his enemy, the anti-pope Guibert, had
circulated his picture: ‘it was said that Guibert had sent a painter to
Rome to have his image painted on a panel, so that, in whatever costume
he disguised himself, he could still not hide’.65
When the Muslim traveller Ibn Battuta came to China in 1345 he was
struck by the Chinese ‘mastery of painting’ and noted with interest that ‘if
I visited one of their cities, and then came back to it, I always saw portraits
of me and my companions painted on the walls and on paper in the
bazaars . . . the resemblance was correct in all respects’. This was done at
the command of the government. ‘It is their custom’, Ibn Battuta says,

to paint everyone who comes among them. They go so far in this that if
a foreigner does something that obliges him to flee from them, they
circulate his portrait throughout the country and a search is made for
him. When someone resembling the portrait is found, he is arrested.66

Perhaps William of Malmesbury and Ibn Battuta were deluded, but there
is no doubt they both thought that the wanted poster was part of medieval
experience. Moreover, the portraits of prospective brides that were com-
missioned as part of marriage negotiations (see above, p. 34) suggest
a belief in naturalistic portraiture.
Whether or not we believe that realistic portraiture of this kind was
possible in the Middle Ages, it is certainly true that we are in an age before
the mass production of likenesses. The vast majority of people would never
have seen their ruler. But physical likeness was not the only criterion. In the
absence of scars or extra toes, there were other ways to test the pretender’s
identity. One way was through probing what he knew. Those arguing for the
genuineness of the pretender often pointed to the knowledge he had,

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private or secret, that supported his claimed identity. This issue of secret
knowledge turns up in the account of the pseudo-Alfonso the Battler in the
thirteenth-century chronicle by Rodrigo Jiménez de Rada. When, years after
Alfonso’s supposed death, a figure appeared claiming to be the king,

The testimony of many people of Castile and Aragon asserted that it was
he, people who had had familiar contact with him in those two kingdoms,
and who recalled many secrets, which he remembered he had long ago
shared with them.67

In a similar vein, the false Frederick in Sicily in 1261 not only ‘seemed like
the emperor in everything’ but also ‘had a very good knowledge of many
of the circumstances of the kingdom and the empire and the royal
court’.68 In the case of both pseudo-Baldwin and the false Woldemar,
chroniclers assert that the pretenders established their credentials by
intersigna, a word meaning tokens, credentials or signs known only to
the parties involved.69 These two cases are far apart in time and space and
it is striking that this same term should crop up.
But pretenders could also be caught out, revealed by gaps in their
knowledge. The supposed Baldwin of Flanders was flummoxed when
confronted by his sovereign, Louis VIII of France, who asked him where
he had been married, where he had been knighted and where he had
performed homage to Louis’ father, King Philip. Giving no answers to
these questions, the pretender found his support dissolving.70 He was
eventually captured by the countess of Flanders, daughter of the real
Baldwin, and hanged. One feels that his adherents should have briefed
him more fully.
As already pointed out, a history of pretenders is, almost by definition,
a history of failed pretenders. Many of the returning rulers discussed here
were eventually captured and killed by their enemies. A violent end befell
the Merovingian pretender Gundovald, the earliest such figure in the
Middle Ages, and the Plantagenet pretender Perkin Warbeck, the last.
Several pretenders were hanged, receiving the punishment of commoners,
to rub home the point.71 This is what happened to those claiming to be
Alfonso the Battler, Baldwin of Flanders, and Richard IV of England, i.e.
Perkin Warbeck. Some, like the pseudo-Frederick II of 1284–5, Margaret
the Maid of Norway, and a man claiming to be King Olaf of Denmark in

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1402, were burned to death.72 Others died obscure deaths. But, alongside
this record of defeat, it is worth pointing out the remarkable success of some
pretenders. In 1094 the false son of Romanos Diogenes led an army of
invasion against the Byzantine empire. In 1225 the false Baldwin took
control of much of Flanders and received some international recognition,
including a letter from the government of Henry III of England expressing
delight at his return and a wish that he might renew old alliances against the
king of France.73 The false Frederick II of 1261 and his successor of 1284–5
both presented real political threats to the established powers of Sicily and
the Empire respectively and required armies to put them down. In 1487
Lambert Simnel was crowned king of England in Dublin as Edward VI and
headed an invasion force that fought a major battle in the heart of England,
while Perkin Warbeck, as Richard Plantagenet, was welcomed in Vienna,
Antwerp and Edinburgh, and given a noble Scottish wife.
And even in the case of those who came to a violent end, there were
voices that continued to maintain the genuineness of the pretenders even
after they were swinging from the gallows or smouldering in ashes. The
troubadour Bertran de Born found it useful to believe that the pseudo-
Alfonso the Battler was the real thing, since it gave him a weapon against
his enemy, the contemporary ruler of Aragon, also Alfonso. The poet
accused this later Alfonso of having ‘hanged his predecessor’.74 Likewise,
the countess of Flanders, daughter of Count Baldwin, was accused by many
of ‘parricide’ for executing the pretender of 1225.75
Perhaps the most remarkable fortune was that of the false Woldemar
of Brandenburg, who was accepted as the genuine margrave by the Holy
Roman Emperor, received many of the ancestral lands and, although
eventually dispossessed, died a natural death in 1356 and was buried in
the Saxon town of Dessau honourably, ‘as the margrave (sicut marchio)’.76
Dessau was the chief centre of another branch of the family to which the
margraves belonged. But, of course, as with all these pretenders, the last
note has to be doubt. Looking back on the incident of the pseudo-
Baldwin decades later, a German chronicler remarked, ‘The Flemings
dispute whether he was count Baldwin or not, and the case is still sub
judice.’77 And, as a contemporary of the false Woldemar commented, ‘the
story of this Woldemar was truly amazing and there are various opinions
about him to this day’.78

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New Families and New Kingdoms

A tenth-century judge in iran recorded a dispute

between two Arabs about which of them had the better pedigree;
the clinching line was apparently ‘My family line (nasab) begins with me;
yours ends with you.’1 It was better to be the vigorous founder of a dynasty
than the effete twilight heir of one. New men could come in, new
dynasties be founded. Since, as both Darwinians and creationists agree,
humankind is of common descent, there are no ‘new’ families in a literal
biological sense. But dynasties are not simple biological units. They are
structures of power, self-identifying groups of relatives seeking to extend
their dominance through time, and they have their history, their rise and
fall.
This same tenth-century judge who recorded the anecdote about the
two Arabs also told the story of a king who had seized power by force.
Once he had established himself and won a high reputation for govern-
ing well, he summoned an assembly of wise men and asked them to tell
him frankly if there were any faults or defects in his government, promis-
ing not to harm them whatever they said. They could only find fault with
one thing, that this new ruler was not of royal blood.

What, he asked, was the case with the king who preceded me? He was a king’s
son, they replied. And with his father? They said the same. He repeated the
question till he had enumerated ten ancestors or more, receiving in each case
the same answer, till he got to the last, of whom they said he was a conqueror.
I then, am that last, and if my days be good, the sovereignty will remain with
my children after me, and their descendants will have royal blood as good as
that which my predecessor had.2

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The point is quite clear. Ancient royalty is simply conquest that has
endured.
This undeferential conception of kingship can also be found in the
medieval west, sometimes expressed with pungency, as in the words of
Gregory VII, the radical pope of the eleventh century:

Who does not know that kings and dukes had their origin in men who
disregarded God and, with blind desire and intolerable presumption,
strove to dominate their equals, that is, other men, through pride,
plunder, perfidy, homicides and every kind of crime, under the
inspiration of the lord of this world, the devil?3

Not all new men were quite as dramatically bad as that, but they usually
required force, and often perfidy, to remove established rulers and
implant their own dynasty. Then, of course, if they endured, they would
be ancient royalty.
Early Germanic kings were members of families that claimed divine
descent, like the Amal dynasty of the Ostrogoths or the Anglo-Saxon
kings who traced their ancestry back to Woden, but when these divine
dynasties died out, they were replaced by families whose earthly origins
were no secret. The most well known and most successful usurpers of the
medieval period were the Carolingians and Capetians but other impor-
tant royal dynasties came to power by military might and the displace-
ment of predecessors, like the Normans in England and the Angevins in
Sicily, both of these with papal approval. In contrast, there were no
significant new dynasties in Ireland because the pool of potential kings
in the dynasty was always so large. Hence the Irish dynasties of the earlier
Middle Ages endured, in many cases down to the seventeenth century.
Not all new dynasties were established by usurpation. The Ottonians,
who ruled Germany from 919, and subsequently attained Italy and
revived the imperial title, before dying out in the male line in 1024,
came to the throne by election when the succession was an open ques-
tion, although they sometimes had to fight to get everyone to acknowl-
edge their sovereignty. When, in 919, Henry, duke of Saxony, was elected
king of Germany, his descent was well known, as a member of
a prominent aristocratic family, and he had a chance to found a new
ruling dynasty, which he did. In 1066 the same situation arose in

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England, when Harold, one of the wealthiest earls, became king on the
death of Edward the Confessor without children, but Harold, unlike
Henry, was not able to found a new dynasty since he had the bad luck
to face competition from Duke William and his Normans, a ruthless and
successful war-leader with a determined and equally ruthless army
behind him. The situations in Germany in 919 and England in 1066
were otherwise similar, with leading aristocrats taking the throne when
the succession was unclear. It was the whirl of events that determined that
Henry’s Saxon dynasty would last 105 years and Harold’s 280 days.
There are occasions when contemporaries were aware of the incep-
tion of a new dynasty. When Romanos III succeeded Constantine VIII on
the Byzantine throne in 1028, the chronicler Michael Psellos reports that
the new ruler supposedly believed that ‘his reign was the beginning of
a new period’, since ‘the imperial dynasty (βασίλειον γένος)’ that des-
cended from Basil the Macedonian had ended with Constantine.
Romanos looked forward to ‘a future line (γενεά)’.4 In fact he died
childless after six years, but Psellos’ terminology shows that there is no
anachronism in our speaking of a Macedonian dynasty, since that is how
Romanos III himself pictured his predecessors.

Foundation Legends and Founding Figures

Some dynasties had their own foundation legends and founding figures.
This is true of the Piasts of Poland and Premyslids of Bohemia (both of
these dynastic designations are modern), in each case involving descent
from a ploughman. The stories of these Polish and Bohemian founders
were written down at almost exactly the same time, around 1120, and they
place the founding figures many generations in the past, nine and fifteen
respectively. In the Polish story, two mysterious and possibly angelic
figures are turned away from the ruling duke’s banquet but are given
hospitality by a poor ploughman who lives outside the fortress. They
ensure that the food and drink does not run out and they perform the
symbolic rite of giving the first haircut to the ploughman’s son, Siemowit.
Siemowit grows up, increasing in strength and virtue ‘until the King of
Kings and Duke of Dukes ordained him duke of Poland with common
assent’.5 The Bohemian story is rather stranger. It is set in a time when

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Bohemia was ruled by a prophetess, Libuše. The Bohemians, however,

express a desire to have a duke. Libuše describes to them what they are
asking for, the freedom they are surrendering, the servitude they seem
voluntarily to be imposing on themselves: ‘it is easy to appoint a duke but
difficult to remove him once appointed’.6 Nevertheless, she agrees to
accept their decision and says she will reveal to them their new duke, who
will also become her husband. She tells them where they will find the
ploughman Premysl working and prophesizes that his descendants will
rule the land for ever. He is fetched and marries Libuše. His humble cork
shoes are preserved in the ducal chapel as a reminder to the Premyslids
from whence they came. Both these legends trace the ruling dynasty well
beyond any historically attested period into a misty past and give it some
kind of validation, through supernatural or prophetic endorsement. The
choice of a new ruler from among the rural labouring class might also
have an echo of David being taken from his shepherding duties to
become king of Israel.
Where an account of a dynasty chooses to start is a highly charged
issue. In 1180 Adam of Dryburgh, a Premonstratensian canon from the
abbey of Dryburgh in the Scottish borders, composed a work entitled The
Triple Tabernacle. It is a work of elaborate symbolism, taking as its starting
point the tabernacle of the Old Testament, that is, the sacred tent con-
taining the Ark of the Covenant, which was the centre of the Israelite cult
before the building of the Temple. Adam encourages his readers to
picture the tabernacle in their mind’s eye and he also furnishes it, in
his imagination, with a series of pictures: ‘depingo’, ‘I paint’, is the verb he
uses of this word-painting. What is of relevance to dynastic history is the
series of images of rulers that Adam summons up for his readers.
Converting his imagined tabernacle into a kind of portrait gallery,
Adam first depicts the Roman emperors. He starts with Constantine,
then continues with images of the other Christian emperors, omitting
Julian the Apostate, down to Constantine VI and Irene, who were reign-
ing in Byzantium at the end of the eighth century when Charlemagne was
crowned emperor in the west. He then backtracks to Clovis, first
Christian king of the Franks, and continues to evoke images of the
kings of the French down to his own time. Next, he deals with the kings
of the English, starting from Alfred (871–99) and coming down to Henry

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the Young King, the son of Henry II crowned in 1170, whom Adam styles
‘Henry III’. After that he moves on to the kings of Scots, starting with
Malcolm Canmore in the later eleventh century. After a long account of
the English and Scots kings, mostly borrowed from an earlier writer,
Aelred of Rievaulx, he gives a list of the names of all the rulers who
should be depicted in this house of the mind – the emperors from
Constantine to Frederick Barbarossa, the kings of the French, the
English and the Scots – and adds the concession that people in other
regions reading his work could replace the kings of the English and the
Scots with pictures of their own rulers.7
Three things could be pointed out about Adam’s selection of ruler-
images. First, he thinks that conversion marks a new start in history. He
knows Constantine was not the first Roman emperor, nor Clovis the first
king of the Franks, but his imaginary tabernacle starts the history of the
empire and the history of the Franks with their conversions. Second, he
chooses certain rulers as founding fathers, even if they are not the first of
their dynasty. Alfred was not the first king of his line, nor Malcolm
Canmore of his, but they are chosen to mark the point where the author
sees that a continuous regnal tradition begins. Adam had precedents in
conceptualizing English history in this way, since from at least the 1120s
chronicles wrote of Alfred as ‘the first of all kings to obtain the sole
monarchy of the whole of England’.8 And subsequent historians down
to the present day have often chosen to start the history of England with
Alfred and that of Scotland with Malcolm Canmore. Third, for this
Anglo-Scottish writer, the emperors and the kings of the French were
the essential core of the Christian community, to which lesser national
traditions might be added as circumstance suggested: you could drop the
kings of the English and the Scots if you lived elsewhere, but not the
emperors or the kings of the French. Adam thus has strong views both on
where dynastic histories should begin and on what is central and what
peripheral.
Tellingly, when Adam writes about Edgar, the tenth-century king of
England, whom he regards as ‘shining like the morning star and like
a full moon in his days’, he adds ‘he is no less memorable to the English
than Cyrus is to the Persians, Charles (Charlemagne) to the French or
Romulus to the Romans’.9 This concept, that every people had its ancient

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hero-king, and this very phrasing, have a very long history and underwent
noteworthy variations. The Melrose Chronicle, for example, expanded in
a similar vein: ‘Edgar, the peaceable king, was no less memorable to the
English than Romulus to the Romans, Cyrus to the Persians, Alexander to
the Macedonians, Charles the Great to the French, Arthur to the
Britons.’10 The phrase can be traced back to the ancient historian
Justinus, who used it of the Parthian ruler Arsaces: ‘Arsaces, who acquired
and established the kingdom securely, is no less memorable to the
Parthians than Cyrus to the Persians or Romulus to the Romans or
Alexander to the Macedonians.’11 Where we start a story partly deter-
mines what kind of story we tell, and these heroic figures represent one
way of starting it. Medieval dynasties were eager to associate themselves
with them, whatever the historical realities. Perhaps the most remarkable
case is the adoption of Arthur, hero of the Britons and Welsh, by the
Plantagenet kings of England, who had no connection with the ancient
king at all, but embraced him as a central figure of court ceremony and
court literature in the late Middle Ages. Edward I visited the supposed
tomb of Arthur and Guinevere at Glastonbury and had his own Round
Table made, which is still visible in Winchester Castle.12

Healing the Dynastic Rent

If kings, and the authors who wrote about them, might picture
a founding figure at the head of the stream in which they swam, they
might also be aware of uncomfortable gaps and breaks in transmission.
The first Capetians knew that they did not descend in a direct male line
from the Carolingians, the Norman kings claimed to be the lawful
successors of Edward the Confessor but could not trace descent from
that childless monarch. One way this rent in dynastic continuity could be
healed was by the blood of a former dynasty being united with the current
one through marriage. Such cases occur on more than occasion. A well
studied example is the so-called reditus regni ad stirpem Karoli Magni, the
‘return of the kingdom to the stock of Charlemagne’, when the marriage
of Philip Augustus brought Carolingian blood into the Capetian family
(see above, p. 350). The reditus is illustrated in a fifteenth-century French
history, which shows Charlemagne embracing Louis IX.13 It was also the

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case that Philip already had Carolingian blood and this was pointed out
by no less a figure than Pope Innocent III in a letter to the bishops of
France, which mentions in passing Philip’s Carolingian ancestry. Since
this letter was incorporated into the Decretals of 1234, the standard
canon law collection of the later Middle Ages, it is a claim that would
be widely known, and was cited from this source (‘as we read in the
canons’).14 Other monarchs took pride in Carolingian ancestry. When
the first German ruler of the Salian line, Conrad II, became king in 1024,
contemporaries remarked upon the fact that his wife, Gisela, was of
Carolingian descent.15 This obviously meant that when the son of
Conrad and Gisela, Henry III, succeeded in 1039, he too was
of Carolingian descent. The great German chronicler Otto of Freising,
writing a century later, made a point of this in his History: ‘In him the
imperial dignity, which for a long time past had been exiled from the
seed of Charles, was brought back to the noble and ancient shoot of
Charles.’16 So it was worth claiming to be of the stock or seed of Charles.
But the stock or seed of Charles was itself in need of tying to earlier rulers,
and this had been done early, in the time of Charlemagne himself, by the
creation of a fictitious ‘Blithildis’, a Merovingian princess who had mar-
ried the ancestor of the Carolingians.17 She is described as the daughter
of King Clothar but later writers vacillate about which Clothar this was:
Clothar I (d. 561) or Clothar II (d. 629). In the long run it did not matter,
for she fulfilled her function either way, for ‘the royal lineage was
repaired in this way through the female line’.18
The marriage of Henry I of England, son of William the Conqueror,
and Edith (renamed Matilda), a descendant of the old Wessex line, in
1100 united the blood of conqueror and conquered. The Anglo-Saxon
Chronicle stresses her descent, calling her ‘Matilda, daughter of King
Malcolm of Scotland and the good queen Margaret, kinswoman of King
Edward and of the right royal lineage of England’.19 The prophecy of the
green tree, already in circulation (see above, pp. 356–7), describing
a seemingly impossible event, the reunion of a severed tree to its
stump, was reinterpreted and applied to this mingling of the blood of
the old and the new dynasty. When Henry II, grandson of Henry I and
Matilda, became king in 1154, it was a cause for celebration of the union
of the two seeds. This view became a standard feature of later English

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chroniclers, including those writing in the vernacular: ‘Then this tree

first struck again to its kind [or stock] once more.’20
A way of indicating a bond between one’s own dynasty and the one
that had preceded it was by adopting the names of that earlier family. The
Carolingians and the Merovingians had quite distinct naming patterns
up to the time of the dispossession of the latter by the former in 751. In
that year Pippin (who had a distinctively Carolingian name) dethroned
Childeric III (who had a distinctively Merovingian name). But,
a generation later, Pippin’s son Charlemagne gave his newly born twin
boys the Merovingian names Chlodwig (Ludwig) and Clothar (Lothar).
He was supposedly inspired ‘by love of the kings of ancient times’ in
choosing these names.21 Lothar soon died but his brother grew up to be
known to historians as Louis the Pious. It is only the conventions of
modern spelling that hide the fact that all the many kings called Louis
and Ludwig look back to the Merovingians and to the founder of the
Frankish empire, the first Chlodwig, known in French and English as
Clovis.
When Henry III of England called his firstborn son ‘Edward’ in 1239,
he did so out of respect for Edward the Confessor, who was both a saint
and the last king of the house of Wessex (see p. 298). The old royal name
thus came back, indeed going on to be the most common name of an
English (subsequently British) king. The sumptuous shrine of Edward
the Confessor in Westminster Abbey, coronation church of the kings of
England, symbolized a view of English royalty in which the Anglo-Saxon
kings played a full part. But this stress on continuity was not the only view
and it sometimes had to be defended. When, under Edward III, as we
call him, the kings of England adopted the practice of numbering them-
selves from the Norman Conquest (see pp. 305–6), critical voices were
raised:

This Edward had himself called Edward ‘the third after the Conquest’, that
is to say after William the Bastard, in his letters and charters, and in the
opinion of several people this was not at all to his or his ancestors’ honour,
since conquest by force never gives right; but it would be more fitting if he
had had a right going back to before the Conquest, for otherwise he and all
his successors would have been possessors in bad faith and intruders.22

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Figure 22 An English royal genealogical roll to which, around 1340, an addition has been
made criticizing Edward III’s adoption of the style ‘third since the conquest’.
BL, MS Royal 14 B VI, © The British Library.

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The marriage of Henry I and Matilda and the adoption of the name
and the cult of Edward the Confessor by Henry III represented two ways
of establishing dynastic continuity, but the addition of a number ‘since
the conquest’ to the royal style disregarded it completely. Seizing the
throne by force was rarely celebrated in so many words. The successful
contender would usually produce a justification, and the ousted dynasties
might not go quietly.

Excluded Dynasts
The Capetian accession of 987 in France and the Norman Conquest of
England in 1066 both took place when there were living members of the
previous dynasty, Charles of Lorraine and Edgar Atheling, both of whom
were actually acknowledged as king in the crisis year by sections of the
ruling class. In both cases, force determined the issue. These representa-
tives of the old dynasty, Charles and Edgar, had to work out a way of
dealing with the new dispensation.
Charles of Lorraine was a younger son of Louis IV (‘d’Outremer’),
king of France. He was born in 953, one of twins. His twin brother died
after a short while, but the baby Charles, who possessed ‘natural strength
and power’, survived.23 On his father’s death the following year, Charles’
older brother Lothar became king at the age of thirteen. In order to
secure his accession, his mother, Queen Gerberga, needed the support of
the most powerful noble in the kingdom, Hugh ‘the Great’. Hugh’s uncle
and father had both been kings of the West Franks, in opposition to Louis
IV’s father, and he himself was of Carolingian descent on his mother’s
side. The price for his support was high. As a contemporary chronicler
put it, ‘the boy Lothar, the son of Louis, was consecrated king at St.-Remi,
with the support of duke Hugh, archbishop Bruno, and the other bishops
and chief men of France, Burgundy and Aquitaine. Burgundy and
Aquitaine were given by him to Hugh.’24
The archbishop Bruno mentioned here was Gerberga’s brother, the
archbishop of Cologne, and her other brother was Otto I, king of the East
Franks. In the mid-tenth century it was not clear that ‘France’ and
‘Germany’ were two distinct and permanently separated kingdoms,
and, after the death of Hugh the Great in 956, Archbishop Bruno played

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an important part in running young Lothar’s kingdom. For example, he

probably arranged the king’s marriage to Emma, stepdaughter of Otto I,
at a great meeting in his episcopal city in 965, a meeting attended by
Gerberga, King Lothar, his brother Charles, Otto I and other members of
the East Frankish royal house.25 Bruno actually died in France, at
Rheims, later in that same year.
Charles grew up serving his brother but without a lordship of his own.
In his early twenties, however, he tried to establish himself in Lotharingia
(part of the kingdom of the East Franks), where he had family ties: his
mother Gerberga had been married to the duke of Lotharingia before
marrying Louis IV. He joined an expedition of 976 launched by some
exiled Lotharingian nobles which led to a pitched battle at Mons. But it
seems to have been around this time that relations between Charles and
his brother, King Lothar, became hostile. Charles accused his sister-in-
law Emma, Lothar’s wife, of adultery with Bishop Adalbero of Laon (see
above, p. 228). The charge was apparently deemed baseless and Charles
was forced into exile. Charles later complained of ‘having been expelled
from the kingdom by his brother’ and ‘considered that he had been
expelled by his brother at the instigation of queen Emma’.26
This estrangement of the brothers coincided with a new hostility
between the kingdom of the West Franks and the kingdom of the East
Franks, under its young ruler, Otto II, who was cousin of King Lothar and
Charles. In 977 Otto II made Charles duke of Lower Lotharingia, an act
explicitly aimed at his brother: ‘duke Charles, brother of King Lothar,
whom the emperor Otto had placed in charge of Lower Lotharingia
under him so that he could resist his brother’s actions more
forcefully’.27 In the following years there was open warfare between the
two kingdoms, Lothar occupying Charlemagne’s old capital of Aachen
and Otto ravaging the outskirts of Paris. Peace was concluded in 980 but
hostilities later flared up again.
Charles could well have continued in his somewhat anomalous state,
brother of the king of the West Franks, great duke in the kingdom of the
East Franks, and there are indications that he was reconciled to Lothar,
but events in 986–7 changed the situation completely: Lothar died at the
age of forty-four, and was succeeded by his son, Louis V, but the new king
died in a hunting accident the following year. Instead of Charles, Duke

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Hugh, son of Hugh the Great, known as Hugh Capet, was elected and
crowned king in the summer of 987 and moved quickly to have his son
Robert crowned joint king. Hugh had the support of Adalbero, arch-
bishop of Reims, who supposedly argued that ‘a kingdom is not acquired
by hereditary right’.28
Charles was not willing to accept this situation, although he now had
the disadvantage of confronting a crowned and anointed king. The
struggle that followed was marked by some dramatic moments of
betrayal. The first was Charles’ capture of Laon with the assistance of
some of the town’s inhabitants who were hostile to its bishop. Charles’
troops arrived outside the city at nightfall and entered it pretending to be
townsmen. Charles’ men and their allies within the town then took
possession of it, also capturing Bishop Adalbero and Queen Emma, the
couple Charles had accused of adultery a decade earlier. Hugh Capet
made more than one attempt to recapture Laon but its hilltop position
made attack very hard.
The next piece of treachery concerned Arnulf, illegitimate son of
King Lothar and thus Charles’ nephew. He was a cleric and he promised
to abandon Charles’ party and find a way to return Laon to Hugh, if
Hugh granted him the archbishopric of Rheims, now vacant. This Hugh
agreed to, and Arnulf swore obedience to him. Arnulf lamented the
dilemma he confronted: ‘On one side, we are impelled by the faith we
have promised to the kings of the Franks, on the other, we are driven by
the power of Duke Charles, who is determined to recover the kingdom
for himself, either to change lords or become an exile.’29 Arnulf decided
the best way to resolve this dilemma was for him to hand over Rheims to
Charles but to play-act resistance, ‘so that the royal power would be
weakened, his uncle’s ability to rule would increase but he himself
would not appear a deserter’.30 With Laon and Rheims in his hands,
Charles had established himself in the heart of the French royal domains.
The final act of treachery was undertaken by Bishop Adalbero of
Laon, who had escaped from captivity in Laon. He contacted Arnulf
and promised that he would secure Arnulf’s reconciliation with Hugh
Capet if he would reciprocate by reconciling him with Charles and
obtaining restitution of his bishopric. Arnulf went to Charles, secured
his agreement and arranged a meeting with Adalbero where the three of

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them swore oaths of mutual support. Meanwhile Adalbero kept King

Hugh informed and arranged for him to make a show of accepting
Arnulf’s allegiance. Adalbero now returned to Laon and swore an oath
of allegiance to Charles. That night they drank toasts to each other.
Later, however, Adalbero removed their weapons from the side of the
beds where Charles and Arnulf were sleeping, summoned his own men
and seized them. Hugh Capet was informed, came quickly and impri-
soned Charles, his wife, his two daughters and one of his sons, along with
Arnulf, who was soon deposed from his archbishopric.
This was the end of Charles’ attempt to reverse the accession of the
Capetians. He had come quite close to success and there were some who
called him king. In Catalonia, for example, which was at this time part of
the kingdom of France, documents were sometimes dated by Charles’
reign, such as a charter of 19 April 990, ‘in the third year of the reign of
King Charles, brother of Lothar’. Dating of this type continued occasion-
ally until 992, ‘the fifth year of the reign of King Charles’.31 By this time in
his ghost-reign Charles may already have died in captivity. Otto, Charles’
son, was not captured with him and succeeded him as duke of Lower
Lotharingia, dying, without children, in the early years of the eleventh
century. Charles stressed his hereditary right to the kingship of the West
Franks. As one of his spokesmen put it in 990, ‘By what right is the
legitimate heir disinherited, by what right is he deprived of the
kingdom?’32 Writing some decades later, an author at Sens summed up
the significance of Hugh Capet’s coronation: ‘Here ended the kingship
of Charlemagne.’33 Charles of Lorraine went down fighting for his
dynastic rights.34
Edgar Atheling (meaning ‘prince’) also had to decide whether to
submit to a new dynasty or hold out for his birth-right. He had
a remarkably varied and unpredictable life. Born in the 1050s, to the exiled
son of King Edmund Ironside, and spending his early years in Hungary or
Germany, Edgar came to England with his parents and sisters in 1057.
Edgar’s father died very soon after arrival, but the young Edgar and his
family were taken under the protection of the king, his great-uncle,
Edward the Confessor. In January 1066, after Edward’s death, the teenage
Edgar Atheling was passed over for the succession, perhaps because of his
youth, and certainly because he lacked a power-base in England in any way

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comparable with that of Earl Harold Godwinson, who did become king.
After Harold’s death in October 1066 in battle against the invading army of
William, duke of Normandy, Edgar was considered a serious candidate for
the throne in opposition to William and had the backing of Archbishop
Ealdred of York, but support was insufficient and in December 1066 both
Edgar and Ealdred submitted to William.
According to a Norman source, William was good to Edgar: ‘he
enriched him with wide lands and held him as one of his dearest friends,
because he was of the family of King Edward’.35 William also made sure,
however, that on his first visit back to Normandy after his coronation as
king of England, he took Edgar with him. Whether he was a hostage or
simply a dear friend is not clear. In 1068, however, Edgar and his family
fled to Scotland, where they were received by Malcolm III, who married
Edgar’s sister, Margaret. In 1069–70 Edgar raided northern England in
support of the great rebellion against William. In 1074 the king of France
offered Edgar a base in France to harry William’s Norman lands but this
did not work out well, and Edgar eventually submitted to William again
and was again well treated. His landholdings in England are listed in the
Domesday Book of 1086.36 In that same year, Edgar led 200 knights on an
expedition to Apulia, another Norman conquest state, though what they
did there is not known.37
After William the Conqueror’s death in 1087, Edgar became very close
to Robert, William’s son and successor as duke of Normandy. He report-
edly ‘loved the duke, who was his own age, like a foster-brother’.38 In 1091
William Rufus, who had succeeded his father as king of England, invaded
his brother’s duchy of Normandy and, when peace was made between
them, one of its terms was that Edgar Atheling should be deprived of his
Norman lands and expelled from the duchy.39 Edgar sought refuge with
his sister, Queen Margaret, in Scotland, but his exile did not last long.
Later in 1091 William Rufus and his brother Robert, now allies, invaded
Scotland and, at Robert’s suggestion, Edgar was employed to negotiate
terms between the kings of England and Scotland. Edgar was then
reconciled with William Rufus and returned to Normandy with Robert.
He continued to be active on both sides of the English Channel and in
the autumn of 1097 he led an army from England into Scotland to depose
the incumbent king, Donald, and put his nephew and namesake Edgar

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on the throne. Edgar Atheling also participated in the crusade, fighting

in the Holy Land and returning through Byzantium and Germany.40
After the death of William Rufus in 1100, Edgar continued his loyalty to
Robert of Normandy in his struggles with the youngest brother, Henry I,
and was captured fighting for Robert against Henry in the decisive Battle
of Tinchebray in 1106, although he was soon released.
Writing in 1125, when Edgar must have been in his seventies, William
of Malmesbury strikes an elegiac note: ‘after being spun around by the
varied sport of fortune, he now wastes away his grey hairs deep in the
country, secluded and silent’.41 Fortune’s sport had taken him from
central Europe to England to Normandy to Scotland to Italy to the
Holy Land to Byzantium, and he had fought against the Normans and
for them, his sister had become a queen but he had never become a king.
Whenever new men arrived in the dynastic world, it was at the expense of
old men. Charles of Lorraine and Edgar Atheling are classic examples,
coming to terms with a new regime that denied them something that, in
the words of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle speaking of Edgar, ‘was fully his
by right of birth’.42 The dynastic world was a fiercely competitive arena,
with winners and losers, and required constant effort even to stay in the
same place. Hugh Capet gave his name to the most long-lived dynasty in
European history and William the Conqueror earned his nickname; they
did so at the expense of ancient dynasties.

New Kingdoms
The most dramatic way a new dynasty could establish itself was by creating
a new kingdom. In the year 1000, if one excludes the numerous small
kingdoms of the Celtic world, there were eleven kingdoms in Latin
Christian Europe.43 Over the course of the next five hundred years this
figure increased, sometimes by fissure, as when Castile split off from
Leon, although the two kingdoms were permanently reunited in 1230,
sometimes by the simple elevation of a ducal title into a royal one, as in
the case of Poland and Bohemia, but also by conquest: Sicily, Jerusalem,
Cyprus, Majorca. The kingdoms of Aragon and Portugal were the result
of both fissure and conquest, first separating from their parent kingdoms
of, respectively, Navarre and Leon, then expanding through warfare.

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Fierce and fortunate families could take advantage of this multiplication

of kingdoms: the descendants of Tancred de Hauteville, a Norman
knight, ruled in magnificence in their royal capital of Palermo; the
Lusignan family, named after their castle of Lusignan in Poitou, were
kings, and on one occasion, a queen, of Cyprus for 277 years (1197–
1474); the royal title of Jerusalem passed through the hands of several
French aristocratic dynasties and those of the Hohenstaufen dynasty,
before the Lusignans acquired it too.
Some of these new kingdoms were formally constituted by the papacy.
In 1179 the pope granted to Alfonso of Portugal ‘the kingdom of
Portugal and the whole honour and dignity that pertain to kings’.44
Alfonso had already been calling himself ‘king’ for forty years, but
obviously thought ratification of his title by the papacy worth having.
The most remarkable and enduring of these new papal kingships was
Sicily. Famously, Metternich insisted that Italy was just a geographical
term, that is, not a political one, and for 1,300 years, from the time of the
Lombard invasion of 568 to the unification of 1870, the peninsula was
indeed split into competing political units. Around the year 1000, the
north comprised the kingdom of Italy, previously Lombard, subsequently
Carolingian, now under the western (Holy Roman) Emperor, although
sometimes disputed by local dynasties; the central region of Italy con-
tained the papal domains, including Rome, and the duchy of Spoleto,
which sometimes acknowledged the superiority of the western emperor;
the south was divided between several Lombard duchies and principali-
ties and the Byzantine empire, which controlled most of Apulia and
Calabria; the island of Sicily was Muslim; important trading cities like
Venice, Naples and Amalfi were independent or semi-independent.
In the early eleventh century warriors from northern France,
Normans, arrived into this fragmented world, as pilgrims or mercenaries
or both. In 1030 they established their first permanent base at Aversa, just
north of Naples. The most famous of these northern warriors were the
sons of Tancred de Hauteville, from whom the kings of Sicily descended.
Tancred, who held a modest estate in the Cotentin peninsula in
Normandy, had faced the problem of having twelve sons by sending the
older ones out into the world to earn their living by fighting. Two of
them, Robert Guiscard, who arrived in Italy around 1046/7, and Roger,

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who came a decade later, were able to create lordships for themselves in
southern Italy. The Normans fought everybody, Lombards, Byzantines
and Muslims, slowly establishing their own territories in the region. In
1059 the pope recognized realities and created Robert Guiscard duke of
Apulia and Calabria, to be held as a papal fief, and also, with
a breathtaking assurance, made him future duke of Sicily. In fact, the
conquest of the island of Sicily took thirty years, from 1061 to 1091.
Guiscard’s brother Roger became count of Sicily. By the end of the
eleventh century, the political geography of southern Italy had thus
been transformed, with Norman lords ruling most of the region,
although not as one united state, and both Byzantine and Muslim sover-
eignty had been brought to an end.
The unification of the Norman territories took place in the late 1120s.
Robert Guiscard’s grandson, William, duke of Apulia and Calabria, died
childless in 1127. His inheritance was claimed by his cousin, Roger II,
count of Sicily, and, after some difficulties, he obtained it. Sicily, Apulia
and Calabria were now under one ruler, and in 1130 the Norman Prince
of Capua also submitted to him. The next step was to turn this assemblage
of conquest territories into a kingdom. On 27 September 1130 Anacletus
II (condemned by his opponents as an antipope) granted the royal title
to Count Roger of Sicily, and, after Anacletus’ death in 1138, Roger
ensured that he obtained a confirmation of his new status from the
victorious pope, Innocent II.45 Roger II reigned until his death in 1154,
the first king of a state that lasted until 1860. The long-term conse-
quences of the establishment of the new kingdom were religious and
cultural as well as political. A region that had been Latin Christian, Greek
Christian and Muslim eventually became overwhelmingly Catholic,
a world where Greek, Arabic and variants of Romance were spoken
eventually became overwhelmingly Italian-speaking. It is a classic exam-
ple of the conquest states being created on the frontiers of Latin
Christendom in this period and the family of Tancred de Hauteville
a perfect illustration of how determination and military vigour could
create a new ruling dynasty.
The Norman conquerors in southern Italy could advance two justifi-
cations for their new kingdom: it had been established, in part, by the
conquest and subjugation of non-Christians, and it had been authorized

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by the pope. Likewise, the campaigns that led to the creation of the
kingdom of Jerusalem, as well as the expansionary wars of the Iberian
kingdoms, were justified as holy wars, and participants in them received
special privileges from the pope. Here the dynastic interests of aggressive
families and the aims of the high medieval Church coincided.

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 CHAPTER 13

Dynasties and the Non-Dynastic World

D ynasties were the chief political form in medieval

Europe but not the only one. Other systems, based on other
principles, existed, and the dynastic rulers encountered them every day
and had to take them into account. These included the Church, the
town, the rare but sometimes powerful republics, not to mention the
ruler’s subjects, who might organize themselves into collective assemblies
or imagine they formed a nation, a nation in some way not identical to
the ruler’s kingdom.

Elective Monarchy
Election, the selection of a candidate to rule, from a potential field, by
authorized electors, was not unknown in the Middle Ages, but was rare.
The most important examples of explicit and continuous elective con-
stitutions are provided by the papacy and the republic of Venice. In both
cases an increasingly clearly defined body of men chose a ruler for life,
and hereditary succession was never established, despite the possibility of
the Orseoli family becoming hereditary doges of Venice in the early
eleventh century. Some popes were relatives of other popes (never sons
of course) but no family ever came to dominate for long. The sequence of
doges runs from a traditional real starting date of 811 to 1797, the
sequence of popes from the first century AD to the present (there is
a fuller discussion of the Venetian Republic at pp. 414–16, below).
Some kingdoms were elective, but, even when the principle of elective
kingship was asserted, the reality might be different. During the negotia-
tions leading up to the marriage of Erik, king of Denmark, Norway and

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Sweden, and Philippa, daughter of Henry IV of England, in 1406, English

envoys wrote a report for the English government on the succession
practices of the three Scandinavian kingdoms:

the kingdom of Denmark is transmitted by free election, but nevertheless

those there are accustomed always to elect those who are nearest of the
royal blood, and if there are several children they are accustomed at all
events to elect the one of them who seems to the electors most suitable and
capable . . . the kingdom of Sweden is transmitted by election and not by
succession and yet they are accustomed to elect the nearest of the royal
blood or one of the children, just as was said of the kingdom of Denmark,
but the kingdom of Norway is transmitted by succession and not by
election.1

The theoretical distinction between elective Denmark and Sweden and

non-elective Norway might therefore produce no real difference in the
patterns of dynastic inheritance. Indeed, for three centuries, from the
reign of Sven Estrithson (1047–74/6) down to 1375, all Danish kings, bar
one, were male-line descendants of Sven.2
The most notable example of elective kingship in medieval Europe
was the Empire, traditionally known as the Holy Roman Empire. This
traces its origins to Christmas day 800, when Charlemagne, king of the
Franks and the Lombards, was crowned emperor in Rome. The theory
was that this was a continuation of the ancient Roman empire and its
pretensions were enormous. Charlemagne’s grandson, the emperor
Charles the Bald, supposedly saw himself as ‘emperor and Augustus of
all kings this side of the sea’.3 The territorial extent of the Empire varied
considerably over the centuries, but, from the mid-tenth century, con-
sisted basically of Germany and north Italy.
The elective nature of the Empire was made especially clear in the
period after 1254, when the sequence of emperors from the
Hohenstaufen dynasty, which had possessed the imperial throne virtually
uninterrupted for a century, came to an end. Between 1254 and 1438 the
German throne was held or claimed by members of seven different
dynasties, and only once in those centuries did the throne pass from
father to son. This was in 1376 when the powerful Charles IV secured the
election of his son Wenceslas (Wenzel) during his lifetime. Otherwise,

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the elective nature of the Empire was illustrated vividly by the succession
of a member of a different dynasty on the death of each emperor. After
1438 the situation changed and the Habsburgs managed to hold on to
the Empire continuously, although keeping up the appearances of
election.
The death of German rulers without clear male heirs in 911, 1024,
1125, 1137 and 1254 was, in every case, followed by an election, not by
any prearranged succession, and biological chance thus contributed to
the survival of elective kingship. The principle was stated unequivocally
by Otto of Freising, uncle of the emperor Frederick Barbarossa. If, for
Margaret of Burgundy (above, p. 5), royal succession should be
determined by ‘propagation of blood’, Otto thought exactly the oppo-
site: ‘this is the crowning glory of the law of the Roman Empire, which
it claims for itself as a special privilege, not to descend through propa-
gation of blood but to have kings created by the election of the
princes’.4
Because it was an established rule that the Holy Roman Emperor
could only become emperor after coronation by the pope, and this
might be delayed, and sometimes never happen, the election of the
German ruler was seen as the first part of a two-stage process. After
election and coronation in Aachen, the king bore the title ‘king of the
Romans’, and this remained his title until imperial coronation. The king
of Germany was thus king of the Romans. As the English chronicler
Matthew Paris put it, ‘the kingship of Germany is called the kingship of
the Romans, because it is like a pledge for the acquisition of the Empire
of the Romans’.5 But coronation as emperor depended on circum-
stances, especially the willingness of the pope to cooperate and the
confidence of the king of the Romans to leave Germany. In
a remarkable period in the thirteenth century and early fourteenth
century, there was actually a 92-year hiatus (1220–1312) in which no
imperial coronation took place.
Despite this, there were, nevertheless, periods when the Empire
looked very much like a hereditary monarchy, in practice if not in theory.
German rulers were succeeded by their sons on three successive occa-
sions in the tenth century, and on three successive occasions in the
eleventh and early twelfth centuries. Ruling kings sought to ensure the

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succession of their sons, even very young ones, by securing oaths of

allegiance to them or having them crowned in their father’s lifetime.
But the idea that the crown was dependent on election by the chief
nobles and bishops (the ‘princes’) was resilient, and could be stated
explicitly during moments of crisis or uncertainty.
An example occurred during the reign of Henry IV (1056–1105).
Henry had succeeded his father, Henry III, who had succeeded his
father, Conrad II, so he represented the third generation in the direct
line, establishing a tradition of transmission of power from father to son.
Henry stirred up a great deal of opposition amongst his own nobles, as
well as from the papacy, and, in 1077, at a meeting in Forchheim,
between Bamberg and Nuremberg, the rebel nobles opposed to him
not only chose a king to replace him, but also determined to end the
hereditary tendency for good:

There it was approved, and confirmed by the authority of the Roman

pontiff, that royal power should not come to anyone through
inheritance, as was previously the custom, but the son of the king, even if
he were truly worthy, should become king through free election rather
than through line of descent; however, if the king’s son should not be
worthy, or if the people did not want him, the people should have the
power to make king whomsoever they wanted.6

This endorsement of the elective principle was not immediately effec-

tive, since, although the dissidents elected an anti-king, Rudolf of
Rheinfelden, and chose another after Rudolf’s death, Henry IV
reigned for more than a quarter of a century after the meeting at
Forcheim and was succeeded by his son Henry V (although hardly
voluntarily, since the younger Henry deposed him). It was only with
the death of Henry V without children in 1125 that the great nobles of
Germany could insist on a free election. Thereafter, no son succeeded
a father until 1190, when Henry VI came to the throne of his father,
Frederick Barbarossa.
Henry VI, as the son of the previous ruler, looked around him and saw
that hereditary succession to royal power was the common practice in
Latin Europe. He determined to bring the Empire into line. In the spring
of 1196 Henry presided over an assembly at Würzburg, where

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he wished to ratify with his chief men a new and unheard-of decree
concerning the Roman kingdom, namely, that in the Roman kingdom,
just as in France and other kingdoms, kings should succeed by hereditary
right; the chief men who were there consented to this and confirmed it
with their seals.7

This agreement, however, did not endure. Henry was a terrifying man –
‘most savage to rebels, invincible to enemies, stern to the insolent,
merciless to traitors’8 – and many of the German nobles gave their
consent when in his presence, but a core of opposition formed.
Eventually this attempt of Henry VI to secure ‘the end of election and
the beginning of hereditary office’9 was defeated. However, although the
plan was abandoned, Henry did succeed in having his infant son (later
Frederick II) proclaimed king by the princes at an assembly in Frankfurt
late in 1196.10
Understandably, the popes championed the elective principle.
Innocent III, defending the election of the Welf Otto IV rather than
a member of the Hohenstaufen dynasty, Henry’s brother, as a successor
to Henry VI, wrote:

We stand for the liberty of the princes, because we completely refuse any
favour to whoever attempts to claim the Empire for himself by right of
succession. For it would seem that the Empire was not conferred through
election by the princes but obtained by succession of blood if, just as a son
once succeeded a father, so now a brother were to succeed a brother or
a son a father directly.11

Popes did not claim the right to choose the emperor-elect but the right to
approve or disapprove the choice of the German princes, especially in
the case of a disputed election, as in this case, and they always had the
ultimate veto on whether to crown the candidate as emperor, rather than
king of the Romans, the title he held until imperial coronation.
The Empire thus continued to be elective. The composition of the
electoral body was only gradually formalized. The number of seven
(the archbishops of Cologne, Mainz and Trier, the king of Bohemia,
the margrave of Brandenburg, the duke of Saxony and the count palatine
of the Rhine) appears for the first time in the thirteenth century, and was

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recognized in the Golden Bull of 1356, the fullest and most explicit
legislation on the subject. This was intended, in the words of Charles
IV, who issued it, ‘to foster unity among the electors and encourage
a unanimous election’.12 There was now a clear category of ‘prince
elector (princeps elector)’, separate from the other princes of the Empire.
The electoral title continued to be highly valued down to the end of the
Empire in 1806 and was extended only rarely to new recipients (Bavaria
in 1623, Hanover in 1692).
The Empire had its enthusiastic champions, the most famous of them
being Dante, whose Monarchia was written in the first quarter of the
fourteenth century. The term monarchia, according to Dante, ‘which
they call the empire’, means ‘sole rule over everything that is in time’,
that is, universal temporal government.13 There is indeed a translation of
the work titled ‘On World-Government’.14 Dante regards universal peace
as the greatest good, and argues that ‘for the well-being of the world it is
necessary for there to be a monarchy or empire’.15 It was God’s provi-
dence that created the Roman empire, and it is not accidental that the
Son of God came to earth in the reign of Augustus, ‘when there was
a perfect monarchy and everywhere the world was quiet’.16 The Roman
empire does not depend for its authority on the pope or the Church, and
the Roman emperor is ‘rightly the monarch of the world’.17 This exalted
conception of universal monarchy found concrete embodiment, in
Dante’s eyes, in Henry VII, the first king of the Romans or Holy Roman
Emperor to set foot in Italy for more than fifty years, whom Dante
regarded as ‘another Moses, who will snatch his people away from the
oppression of the Egyptians and lead them to a land flowing with milk
and honey’.18 He urged Italy to rejoice ‘because your bridegroom, the
comfort of the world and the glory of your people, the most merciful
Henry, divine Augustus Caesar, hastens to the wedding’.19 Henry’s early
death ended these dreams, but Dante reserved a place in Paradise for
‘lofty Henry, who will come to set Italy straight before she is prepared for
it’.20
But early fourteenth-century Italy also heard voices arguing that the
Empire was an anachronism. Robert the Wise, king of Naples, issued
a manifesto addressed to the pope declaring that all political arrange-
ments were subject to change and that the Empire had been created by

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force and violence and should not be regarded as an enduring part of the
landscape. It had once had dominion over almost all the world but now it
was ‘diminished, mutilated, lacerated and occupied by many different
rulers’ and ‘reduced to the tiniest number of subject territories’. Its rulers
had been no friends either to the Church or to Italy and were now usually
Germans, ‘a coarse, wild race, that adheres to barbaric savagery more
than to the Christian faith’. King Robert suggested that the pope give
serious consideration to ‘what good or benefit come to the world’ from
appointing an Emperor, and his underlying theme was that the emperor
Henry VII, who had just died, in the summer of 1313, need not be
replaced.21 Henry had invaded Robert’s kingdom of Naples, which
might well explain some of his judgments, but people who have been
invaded often have a point of view.
Some historians, and others, consider that Germany took a ‘special
path (Sonderweg)’, different from other European, or west European,
countries, especially in the way that it did not develop powerful central
institutions in the late medieval or Early Modern period. One explana-
tion for this might be the elective nature of the German monarchy, which
hindered dynastic consolidation, although it has also been argued that
elective monarchy had advantages as well as disadvantages.22 Be that as it
may, it stood out in a world of hereditary dynasties.

Dynasties and the Church

The tension between the Christian message and dynastic thinking was
expressed quite sharply by Jesus himself: ‘If any man come to me, and
hate not his father, and mother, and wife, and children, and brethren,
and sisters, yea, and his own life also, he cannot be my disciple’ (Luke 14:
26). Such an uncompromising rejection of ordinary family feeling would
seem to rule out any chance of Christians thinking or acting dynastically.
Yet, as time went by, and the Church established itself as a dominant and
propertied establishment, there came to be many ways whereby the
Church could serve dynasticism and dynasticism serve the Church.
In one sense, the Church of the later medieval period was less dynastic
and more like a modern state than any of the kingdoms of Europe. It had
a complex, far-reaching and well-articulated organization, with legislative,

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executive and judicial parts and supposedly meritocratic criteria for

appointment to office. It was highly bureaucratic, with use of the written
word and record-keeping more extensive and sophisticated than any of the
contemporary dynastic systems. The thing it lacked was physical force,
although this could be summoned up, and to some degree directed, by
alliances with secular powers. Dynastic kingdoms, run as family affairs,
always interacted with this international institution, based as it was on
transcendental and supernatural claims. One of the more obvious ways
in which this happened was the practice of ruling families putting children
into the Church, especially at its highest, richest and most powerful levels.
They were thereby ensured an aristocratic way of life without placing
a strain on family resources.

Royal Abbesses and Nuns

In particular, the Church offered a respectable station in life for royal
women who were not destined for marriage, or who had survived it. In
the first century of English Christianity, as recorded by Bede, there are
many examples of royal abbesses, such as Etheldreda, daughter of the
king of East Anglia and wife of the king of Northumbria, who became
abbess of Ely, or Ebba, the half-sister of the Northumbrian kings Oswald
and Oswiu, who was abbess of the double monastery (i.e. for men and
women) of Coldingham.23 The daughters of Carolingian kings fre-
quently entered nunneries, sometimes as widows. There are some four-
teen cases in the first century of the dynasty.24 When Theodrada,
daughter of Charlemagne, entered a nunnery after her father’s death,
she received a congratulatory letter from the Irish monk Dungal, praising
her for her desire ‘to spurn secular dress and put on the holy veil of
Christ, to despise changing and perishable things and seek constant and
eternal things, to renounce the devil and the world and its pomp and
works and follow Christ’. He concludes with a little complimentary verse:
‘This letter greets you, Theodrada, born of imperial seed, adorned with
good manners and with beauty.’25 There need be no doubt about
Theodrada’s religious motives, but there is also no question that to be
the abbess of a wealthy religious house, as she was, gave her security,
authority and a status matching her royal birth.

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The royal nunnery of Shaftesbury was founded by Alfred the Great of

Wessex, probably in the 880s, and he appointed his daughter Æthelgeofu
as abbess, with ‘many noble nuns’ under her rule and large endowments
of land and wealth.26 It became the resting place of royal saints from the
house of Wessex, Queen Ælfgifu in 944 and Edward the Martyr in 979,
both of them performing miracles at their tombs.27 At the time of the
Domesday Survey of 1086 Shaftesbury was by far the richest nunnery in
England. An illegitimate half-sister of Henry II was abbess from the 1170s
or 1180s to 1216.28 More than three centuries after its foundation, the
nunnery was still providing a comfortable and secure position for women
associated with the royal family.
The Saxon convent of Quedlinburg, which was founded to commem-
orate the first German king to come from Saxony, Henry I (d. 936), who
was buried there, had royal abbesses, all of them daughters of kings and
emperors, continuously for 130 years (966–1096). It thus maintained this
royal tradition despite the change of dynasty, from Ottonian to Salian, in
1024. Nunneries could offer a secure life for both royal widows and young
princesses. Eleanor of Provence, high-born queen of Henry III of
England, and immensely wealthy, became a nun at Amesbury in 1286,
after fourteen years of widowhood, and died and was buried there in
1291. Her granddaughter Mary was also a nun there, entering the con-
vent at the age of seven. Mary’s life was not strongly circumscribed by
taking the veil. She had a grant of £100 per year from the royal treasury,
later increased to £200, was frequently at court or on extensive pil-
grimages, and built up considerable gambling debts.29
The new mendicant Orders of the thirteenth century also provided
safe and suitable surroundings for royal women, for, although penniless
wandering was prescribed for male friars, the female branches were
enclosed and stable, like the existing nunneries. In central Europe
a remarkable group of royal women supported or became ‘Poor
Clares’, that is, members of the female branch of the Franciscans, and
also won a reputation as saints.30 The ruling dynasties of Bohemia,
Poland and Hungary were interrelated by complex webs of marriage, as
the lives of these women show. Agnes (d. 1282), a daughter of Premysl
Otakar I of Bohemia, corresponded with Clare of Assisi, the founder of
the Poor Clares, and herself founded a convent of the Order in Prague in

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1234, which she entered. Her sister Anne (d. 1265) married Henry II of
Silesia and bore him ten children. After Henry was killed in battle against
the Mongols in 1241, Anne remained in Silesia and founded a convent of
Poor Clares in Wroclaw in 1257, where she retired and was buried.
Salome (d. 1268), daughter of the ruler of Cracow, married Coloman,
brother of Bela IV of Hungary, but insisted on a chaste marriage, and
after Coloman’s death she returned to Cracow, where her brother,
Boleslaw V, founded a convent of Poor Clares for her. Two daughters
of Bela IV, Cunigunda (d. 1292) and Yolande (d. 1298), married Polish
princes. Cunigunda married Boleslaw V but, like her sister-in-law Salome,
insisted on a chaste marriage. She founded a convent of Poor Clares
during her widowhood and joined the Order. Yolande married Boleslaw
the Pious, a cousin of Boleslaw V, founded a convent of Poor Clares at
Gniezno after his death and entered the Order.
All five of these women had a saintly reputation, although that of
Yolande is late, and either entered the Order of Poor Clares or founded
houses of the Order. They had the support of powerful and wealthy
fathers and brothers. The chaste marriages were clearly ‘undynastic’ in
the sense of ending the possibility of sons inheriting from their fathers,
and indeed Boleslaw V was succeeded by a cousin, and Coloman left no
children, although it may be that the story of chaste marriage sprang
from the childlessness of these two rulers rather than explaining it.
Nevertheless, the dense network of intermarriage, blood relationships
and saintly emulation involved in the story of these five royal and saintly
ladies can justify the label ‘Dynastic Cults’.31

Younger Sons and the Church

Placing younger sons in the Church, which could provide them with
a comfortable life and a high status, at the cost of at least theoretical
celibacy, was a policy pursued by many aristocratic families but, perhaps
surprisingly, not very much by royalty. Charles the Bald, ‘alone among
ruling Carolingians’,32 placed two of his four legitimate sons in the
Church: Carloman (d. 876), abbot of St.-Médard, Soissons, who was
blinded after a supposed conspiracy in 873,33 and Lothar (d. 865),
abbot of St.-Germain, Auxerre.

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In some ways, this lack of younger sons going into the Church is
unexpected, for it could be very useful for a king to have a son or brother
in the ecclesiastical hierarchy, as is illustrated by the career of Bruno,
archbishop of Cologne, who was a son of Henry I of Germany (919–36)
and a younger brother of Otto I (936–73). He was given the best clerical
education, served as Otto’s chancellor and then, in 953, at the age of
twenty-eight, was appointed archbishop of Cologne. Cologne was one
of the most important cities in Lotharingia, the westernmost duchy of
Germany and one with a tradition of separatism. Bruno’s biographer,
writing for his successor, depicts Lotharingia as a wild place: ‘there the
nobles are accustomed to violence and plunder, the populace is eager for
rebellion, and everyone, intent on civil strife, desires to enrich himself
from the misery of others’.34 At the very time of his appointment, Bruno
found a major rebellion in progress, one of the participants being the
duke of Lotharingia. Otto decided the best policy was to make his brother
‘the guardian, overseer and, so to speak, archduke of the West’.35 For
twelve years (953–65) Bruno served not only as the archbishop of an
ancient and important city but also held a central political position in his
brother’s regime, securing Lotharingia, often by armed force, against
rebellious aristocrats. He also played a major role in the neighbouring
kingdom of the West Franks during the minority of its ruler, King Lothar,
who was Bruno’s nephew, and probably was responsible for arranging
Lothar’s marriage to Otto I’s stepdaughter during an assembly held in
Cologne (see above, p. 389). On more than one occasion he led an army
into France to support Lothar against his enemies and rivals. During
Otto’s Italian expedition of 961–5, Bruno, and William, archbishop of
Mainz, Otto’s illegitimate son, acted as regents. So, for twelve years Otto
I had a loyal brother guarding his left flank, and a brother, moreover,
who would not have his own family interests to compete with Otto’s.36
The combination of ‘priestly devotion and royal courage’ that Otto
supposedly praised in his brother could be a powerful dynastic
instrument.37
Like the Carolingians, the Capetians, too, rarely placed younger sons
in the Church, although Louis VI was an exception. Henry, one of Louis’
younger sons, was tonsured when young, made abbot of numerous royal
abbeys, then dramatically converted to the Cistercian Order in 1145. But

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he did not refuse election as bishop of Beauvais in 1149 and archbishop of

Rheims in 1162, where he served until his death in 1175. He was an active
bishop, defending the rights and property of his see, pursuing a policy of
economic development and backing Pope Alexander III during the long
papal schism of 1159–78. So, for much of the reign of Louis VII, a major
prelate of the northern French Church was the king’s brother. Another
son of Louis VI, Philip, became archdeacon of Paris. No other Capetian
kings, however, appear to have placed sons in the Church in this way.38
There are some isolated examples of Byzantine emperors appoint-
ing sons or brothers as patriarchs of Constantinople. Stephen, the
third son of Basil I, became patriarch aged nineteen in 886,
appointed by his brother, Leo VI; he died in 893. At Christmas 923,
the emperor Romanos I Lekapenos, as well as having his two older
sons crowned co-emperors, had his third son Theophylact tonsured as
a cleric, although the boy was only ten years old; he had been
castrated as a child. At the age of twenty, Theophylact became patri-
arch and held the office from 933 to 956. The patriarch Ignatius
(formerly Niketas) (847–58, 867–77) was the son of the emperor
Michael Rangabe but, far from being appointed through family influ-
ence, had been castrated and made a monk aged fourteen at the time
of his father’s deposition in 813. He had subsequently risen through
the ecclesiastical hierarchy. In general, however, the function of the
Church in the Byzantine dynastic system was not to provide an alter-
native path for younger sons but rather to be the destination of
deposed emperors and their families, often combined with blinding.
In the west, there are several cases of illegitimate sons of kings becom-
ing bishops or abbots, for instance, Rorico, bishop of Laon (949–76), son
of Charles the Simple, king of the West Franks; William, archbishop of
Mainz (954–68), son of Otto I of Germany; and Arnulf, an illegitimate
son of King Lothar of France (954–86), who became a canon and then
archbishop of Rheims (988–91, 999–1021). Of all the kings of England
between 1066 and 1485, only two placed a son in the Church and, in each
case, it was an illegitimate son: Gervase, abbot of Westminster, son of
King Stephen, and Geoffrey, archbishop of York, son of Henry II. The
standard practice in England was to endow younger sons with earldoms
or, after 1337, dukedoms.

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There were occasions when sons who had been placed in the Church
had to be recalled on family grounds. Philip of Swabia, youngest son of
the emperor Frederick Barbarossa, was given a clerical education and
promoted to ecclesiastical offices while still only eleven or twelve. In 1191,
at the age of fourteen, he was elected bishop of Würzburg. However, in
1192 or 1193, plans changed and he began a secular career, accompany-
ing his brother, Henry VI, in Germany and Sicily, which Henry con-
quered in 1194, and being invested by him as duke of Tuscany in 1195.
The clerical career was put irreversibly behind him when Philip married
a Byzantine princess in 1197. The motives for the switch from clerical to
lay in 1192 or 1193 are not made explicit but it is probably relevant that,
although Frederick Barbarossa left five surviving sons on his death in
1190, none of them had sons before 1194 (and that son proved, in the
event, to be the only one). So it may be that recalling Philip to lay estate
was an attempt to increase the chances of male offspring in the dynasty.
In fact, Philip himself only had daughters, but he proved a champion of
his young nephew, Henry VI’s son Frederick II, and was himself elected
German king after Henry’s death.
More spectacular was the case of Ramiro II of Aragon, often referred
to as Ramiro el Monje, ‘Ramiro the Monk’, brother of Alfonso the
Battler, king of Aragon (see p. 63). He was raised in a Benedictine
monastery and served as abbot of two Spanish religious houses, as well
as being elected but never consecrated as bishop of several sees. His
brother died childless in 1134 and Ramiro was elected king by an assem-
bly of Aragonese nobles. In quick succession, he married, fathered
a child, Petronilla, who was then engaged to the powerful neighbouring
ruler, Raymond Berengar of Barcelona, and, having fulfilled his dynastic
duty, he retired to his monastery in 1137, leaving Raymond Berengar as
de facto ruler of Aragon.
Sometimes the ruler’s decision to place a child or a brother into the
Church was viewed as a kind of sacrifice, in the sense both of an
offering to God and of a loss for some greater good, which of course
is what makes the offering of value to God. The chronicler Thietmar of
Merseburg writes of the empress Theophanu, wife of Otto II, that ‘from
the fruit of her womb she offered as a tithe to God two daughters, one,
Adelheid by name, to Quedlinburg, the other, who was called Sophia,

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to Gandersheim’.39 Both these princesses became abbesses and lived

into their sixties, but Thietmar’s words suggest that offering them to
the monastic life still represented some kind of sacrifice on the part of
their mother: they were ‘tithes’. The same idea of an offering to God is
found in the case of Margaret (d. 1270), daughter of Bela IV of
Hungary, who was promised to the Church before she was born. Her
mother was pregnant with her during the Mongol invasions of Hungary
in 1241–2 and she and her husband the king ‘took a vow that, if
a daughter were to be born, they would make her a nun, for the
liberation of the mother and the country, as a kind of expiatory
offering’.40 Margaret entered a Dominican house at the age of three.
A yet more explicit invocation of sacrifice is found in Leo VI’s funeral
oration for his father, the Byzantine emperor Basil I, which says that
Basil’s offering his son Stephen to the Church was like Abraham offer-
ing Isaac, except superior, since Abraham was acting on God’s com-
mand but Basil’s decision was his own initiative!41 This Stephen was
patriarch of Constantinople 886–93.

Dynasties and the Internationalism of the Church

The Church had an international hierarchy of its own which did not always
correspond to the boundaries of kingdoms, and this overlap of ecclesias-
tical and political units often resulted in friction or required readjust-
ments. Within Britain, the two English archbishoprics, Canterbury and
York, both claimed that their authority extended beyond the kingdom of
England, Canterbury claiming a primacy over the whole island, York
insisting that the Scottish Church was subject to it. Canterbury’s main
success was in establishing its authority over the Church in Wales, where
the eventual ecclesiastical geography was four bishoprics immediately
subject to Canterbury, despite spasmodic attempts to secure an indepen-
dent Welsh archbishopric. Canterbury’s victory was a direct consequence
of the Anglo-Norman conquest and settlement of most of Wales in the
twelfth and thirteenth centuries. In Scotland, neither Canterbury nor York
was able to make much headway because of the opposition of the Scottish
royal dynasty, although attempts to establish a Scottish archbishopric in
the twelfth century were also unsuccessful. In a highly unusual

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arrangement, in 1192 the Scottish Church was placed directly under the
papacy but without any archbishop: ‘the Scottish Church ought to be
subject to the apostolic see, whose special daughter she is, without any
intermediary’.42
Ecclesiastical boundaries that cut across political ones were common
in the Iberian peninsula. There, many bishoprics were established in
places conquered from the Muslims, some on the basis of memories or
records of the bishoprics of pre-Muslim times, but the hierarchy of
archbishoprics was largely new. After Santiago de Compostella was raised
to archiepiscopal status in 1120, it was eventually assigned the bishoprics
of Zamora, Salamanca, Avila, Ciudad Rodrigo, Plasencia, Badajoz, Coria,
Lamego, Idanha (Guarda), Lisbon and Evora. Of these eleven sees, five
were in the kingdom of Leon, four in the kingdom of Portugal and two in
the kingdom of Castile, which had separate rulers from Leon 1157–1230.
Hence the bishop of Lisbon, an important city of the kings of Portugal,
was ecclesiastically subordinate to an archbishopric in the neighbouring,
and sometimes hostile, kingdom of Leon-Castile. Lisbon did not become
an independent archbishopric until 1393, when Evora, Lamego, Guarda
and Silves, the last taken from the archbishopric of Seville, were placed
under it. It was now an entirely Portuguese archbishopric. Such tangled
histories could be told of many Iberian dioceses. On two occasions
younger sons of the kings of Aragon became archbishops of Toledo,
the most important see in Castile, a situation hard to imagine in other
countries, and a consequence of the lack of correspondence between
ecclesiastical and political boundaries.43
Like the Church, from which they sprang, the crusading Orders, such
as the Templars, Hospitallers (Knights of St John) and Teutonic Knights,
were international and run by a hierarchy that was, in principle, celibate
and non-dynastic, in the sense that office was by appointment rather than
inheritance. From small beginnings in the early twelfth century, the
Orders grew into institutions of enormous wealth and power, and always
had to be considered by the dynasties of Christian Europe. They often
played a major role in the politics of kingdoms and sometimes ruled
states of their own: the Teutonic Knights established the largest, in
Prussia and Livonia, while the Hospitallers conquered the island of
Rhodes in 1306–10 and made it their headquarters, which it remained

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until 1522. In the crusading states of the eastern Mediterranean and in

the Iberian peninsula, the armies of Christian kings were frequently
supplemented by the forces of the Orders, although Alfonso the
Battler’s desire to leave his kingdom of Aragon to the military Orders
was not fulfilled (see pp. 63–4 above).
The most dramatic clash between a dynasty and the Orders was Philip
the Fair’s destruction of the Templars in 1307–12. Events began with the
king’s officials arresting all the Templars in France, confiscating the
Order’s property and charging its members with heresy and sexual
offences. The use of torture, or the threat of it, ensured that the prisoners
confessed, however odd the charges might be – spitting on the cross,
denying Christ, obscene kissing, even idol worship – but the king found
that the pope, Clement V, was not inclined to be cooperative, and needed
considerable pressure to go along with the prosecution. But Philip the
Fair was a ruthless man and hastened the pace by a mass burning of
Templars outside Paris in May 1310. Clement eventually yielded to pres-
sure and suppressed the Order at the Council of Vienne in 1312. The bull
suppressing the Order is dated 22 March 1312. King Philip, his brothers
and sons, ‘surrounded by a seemly and powerful retinue of many skilled
nobles and great men’, had arrived in Vienne on 20 March.44 The
property of the Templars was transferred to the Hospitallers, who had
to agree to make a huge payment to the king. The royal house of France
had destroyed an international religious Order.
The complex interplay between dynastic ambitions and the politics of
the Church can be seen during the period of the Great Schism. The
existence of two rival popes was not in itself unusual. The earliest case
seems to have been in 217–35, and in the twelfth century there were rival
popes in 1100–01, 1105–11, 1118–21, 1124, 1130–8, 1159–78 and 1179–80,
so for forty-five years, almost half the century. What distinguished the so-
called Great Schism of 1378–1417 was the entrenchment of two rival lines
of popes in two important centres, Avignon and Rome, for almost forty
years. The kings of Latin Europe had to take sides and their choices were
often dictated as much by the choices of their dynastic rivals as by their own
convictions. France tended to back the Avignon popes, which encouraged
France’s enemy, England, to back the Roman popes. This naturally led
Scotland, France’s ally and England’s enemy, to back the Avignon popes.

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The alignment of ecclesiastical and political loyalties was particularly clear

in the Iberian peninsula during the crisis following the death of Ferdinand
I of Portugal without sons in 1383. The Castilian king, John I, claimed the
throne in the right of his wife, Ferdinand’s daughter, but faced opposition
within Portugal from various parties, not all of them allies. Castile recog-
nized the Avignon pope, Portugal the Roman pope; this created
a particular dilemma for clergy in the diocese of Tuy, which was partly in
one kingdom, partly in the other. Naturally, the Avignon pope backed
Castile and the Roman pope Portugal. The eventual victor in the struggle
of 1383–5 was John of Avis, illegitimate half-brother of Ferdinand I of
Portugal (see above, pp. 171–2).
When the Roman pope Boniface IX issued bulls legitimizing John of
Avis, recognizing him as king and granting him dispensations for his
earlier vows of poverty, chastity and obedience, he also gave a brief account
of the Roman pope’s view of the crisis of 1383–5: ‘John, son of Henry [this
is John I of Castile], of damned memory, at that time the occupier of the
kingdoms of Castile and Leon, was attempting to devastate and take
possession of the kingdoms of Portugal and the Algarve’; moreover, John
had adhered to ‘that son of perdition, Robert, once cardinal-priest of the
basilica of the twelve apostles, then and now an antipope, who presumed
and now presumes by sacrilegious audacity to call himself Clement VII’.45
The succession crisis in Portugal had thus been given a sharper edge by the
clash of popes. John I of Castile was not even given the dignity of the
kingship of Castile, he is merely ‘John, son of Henry’, and also a ‘son of
perdition’, while Clement VII, first of the Avignon popes of the Great
Schism, is belittled by use of his given name. When John of Avis was looking
for allies, England, with its hostility to Castile, was a natural choice, made
easier, or perhaps even made possible, by the common adherence of
Portugal and England to the Roman popes. Just like the Protestant
Reformation, the Great Schism produced two hostile religious camps in
Christendom and dynasties had to choose a side.

Republics
Most of medieval Europe was ruled by dynasties, but there were one or
two areas where different forms of political organization survived or

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developed. Iceland and Venice are two, very different, examples of

political societies completely independent of kings. The former was an
empty land settled by Scandinavian, mainly Norwegian, farmers and
fighters in the period 870–930. Many of them had left home in order to
escape the authority of the Norwegian kings and had no desire either to
submit to the rulers of their country of origin or to replicate royal
government in their new land. The result was extremely unusual,
a republic with sophisticated consultative and legal procedures but no
king, aristocracy or powerful bishops. Outsiders were amazed at the way
Icelanders organized their own affairs. One German cleric noted, with
wonder and some admiration, ‘they have no king, only law’.46 But others
were dismayed at their effrontery in completely disregarding the dynastic
principle. After Cardinal William of Sabina had officiated at the corona-
tion of King Haakon Haakonsson in 1247, the first coronation of
a Norwegian king, he also supported Haakon’s claim to rule over
Iceland, ‘for he called it unfair that that land should not be subject to
some king like all others in the world’.47 For the cardinal, rule by kings
was the norm, the Icelandic republic an aberration. In fact, it was not
until 1262–4 that the Icelanders formally submitted to the king of Norway
(Haakon died in the middle of the process, in 1263). Henceforth Iceland
had a king ‘like all others in the world’. The Icelandic Commonwealth, or
Free State, as it is sometimes called, lasted well over three centuries, and
produced a body of literature in the vernacular that is among the greatest
ever created in the Middle Ages, and one that throws a vivid light on the
violent but self-regulating and non-dynastic world of this remarkable
medieval republic.
Venice too provides an example of a medieval republic, but one about
as different from Iceland as it is possible to be. Iceland was poor, remote,
lacked towns and played a minimal part in European politics. Venice was
one of the richest trading cities of medieval Europe, with a central role in
Italian politics as well as a maritime empire in the Adriatic and
Mediterranean. The origins of the city are to be sought during the
invasions that marked the fall of the Western Roman Empire, and it was
for a long time technically part of the Eastern Roman (or Byzantine)
Empire. For example, when the Franks began to encroach on north-east
Italy in the late eighth and early ninth century, Byzantine war fleets were

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sent to Venetian waters to assert the emperor’s authority and in 810

Byzantine envoys came to Aachen, where Charlemagne acknowledged
that Venice belonged to their emperor, not to the Franks.48 The local
representative of Byzantine power was known by the imperial title dux
(‘duke’), a term that eventually became worn down to the Venetian word
doge.
Gradually Venice became detached from the Byzantine empire. This
took a long time and did not usually involve clear-cut steps. Donald Nicol,
in his influential book Byzantium and Venice, titled the first four chapters
‘Venice: the Byzantine province’, ‘Venice: the Byzantine protectorate’,
‘Venice: the ally of Byzantium’ and ‘Venice: the partner of Byzantium’,
indicating the subtle change in the nature of the relationship between
the Adriatic trading city and the imperial power. The documents record-
ing the Venetians’ trading privileges in Constantinople begin to read less
like the grants of a sovereign than treaties between independent powers.
One, issued by the co-emperors Basil II and Constantine VIII in 992, calls
the Venetians ‘outsiders’ or ‘foreigners’ (extranei) and says how they have
‘made a request to our empire’ for preferential treatment; the emperors
grant this but also specify that Venice must render military aid in certain
circumstances.49
Eventually Venice became not a province or protectorate of
Byzantium but its enemy and conqueror, picking up numerous territor-
ial acquisitions after the fall of Constantinople to Venetian and crusad-
ing forces in 1204. At the same time its own internal government
developed. A tendency for the office of doge to become hereditary
was checked. The office of doge was for life, but was attained through
a complex process of election, not by dynastic right, in this respect
resembling the papacy. A system of executive councils gave a large
share of control to the richest and most powerful citizens of Venice,
limiting the doge’s authority. The end result was a secular republic, with
an elected head, centred in a populous trading city and also controlling
a maritime empire extending hundreds of miles into the eastern
Mediterranean. In the fifteenth century Venice took over Cyprus,
which had been ruled by a French dynasty for 292 years, an urban
republic thus defeating a dynasty and bringing to an end a dynastic
state. The title ‘most serene’ was commonly used for emperors and

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other rulers in medieval Europe; it is fitting that Venice is known as ‘the

most serene republic’ – La Serenissima. It lasted until 1797.

Dynasties and Cities

Iceland and Venice were very unusual. But if sovereign republics were
rare, there were many places in medieval Europe that obtained more
limited forms of self-government, notably the towns. Wherever cities were
populous, wealthy and self-confident, and in medieval Europe this meant
primarily northern Italy and Flanders, they might find themselves in
conflict with their supposed rulers. The Holy Roman Emperors battered
the walls of Milan, but Milan battered back. The great cities of Flanders
fought their sovereigns, that is, the counts of Flanders and their succes-
sors, the dukes of Burgundy, in a mortal contest that lasted centuries. In
these two most highly urbanized parts of medieval Europe the cities
struggled to free themselves from the world of dynasty. In northern
Italy many of them were extremely successful in this effort and attained
actual practical independence almost as great as that of Venice, although
they were always theoretically subject to the Holy Roman Empire and
many succumbed to local dynasties of their own in the later Middle Ages,
the classic example being Florence, where the Medici family went from
being ordinary citizens in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries to
being de facto rulers of the city throughout most of the fifteenth century,
finally acquiring title, as dukes of Florence, in 1532.
One of the most long-lasting and disruptive conflicts between towns
seeking autonomy and dynastic rulers was that between the towns of
northern Italy and the Holy Roman Emperors who claimed to be their
rulers. It was Charlemagne’s conquest of the kingdom of the Lombards
that first brought northern Italy under the authority of Frankish rulers
based north of the Alps. Charlemagne’s empire broke up in the time of
his grandsons, but his claim to imperial authority, to being, in fact, the
successor to the Roman emperors of antiquity, was eventually inherited
by the Ottonian kings of Germany. Otto I re-established the link across
the Alps by conquering northern Italy and, in 962, being crowned
emperor in Rome. Thereafter German kings always aimed at controlling
Italy and receiving the imperial title, although they were not always

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successful in doing so. Between 951, when Otto I first campaigned in

Italy, and 1212, the accession of Frederick II, who was normally based in
the peninsula, German kings led expeditions over the Alps on thirty-two
occasions. Their purpose was always to secure recognition of their
authority and often to defeat dangerous rivals. Sometimes this required
long periods south of the Alps. Frederick Barbarossa (1152–90), for
example, spent over one-third of his reign in Italy. The ‘Italian expedi-
tion (expeditio Italica)’ of the German kings was one of the most consider-
able military undertakings of the Middle Ages and might require up to
two years of planning.50
As the north Italian cities grew in size, wealth and power in the
eleventh and twelfth centuries, they not only developed new forms of self-
government and imposed curbs on their local bishops and nobles but
also often found themselves in opposition to their nominal rulers, the
emperors. From the point of view of the emperors, Italy was part of their
empire and, when they went there, they did so because Italy was theirs,
but from the point of view of the north Italian cities, these unwelcome
expeditions of German armies crossing the Alps might look more like
invasions. In the reigns of both Frederick Barbarossa and his grandson,
Frederick II (1212–50), the north Italian cities grouped themselves into
a confederacy, the Lombard League, to resist imperial authority. Milan
was one of the chief cities of the League, and hence a chief target of both
Frederick Barbarossa and Frederick II. The great north Italian city had an
anti-royalist reputation: ‘this city is said to have been hostile to kings from
of old’.51 After a lengthy siege, Barbarossa conquered the city in 1162 and
ordered it destroyed. There is a moving account of the evacuation of the
inhabitants:

Who is there who could keep back tears on seeing the lamentation and the
sorrow and the mourning of the men and the women and especially of the
sick, the pregnant and the children, going out and leaving their own
homes?52

But the Milanese survived, revived, and eventually led their allies to
a decisive victory over Barbarossa at the Battle of Legnano in 1176.
The struggle between the emperors and their north Italian opponents
was a complicated one. First, by no means all the cities fought on one

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side. The smaller cities around Milan, for example, who felt the pressure
of their large and threatening neighbour, were quite happy to join the
emperor in attacking her. Second, the struggle between emperor and
cities was always entangled with that between emperor and pope. Pope
Alexander III was an ally of the Lombard League, which built a city
named in his honour, Alessandria,53 while Barbarossa maintained
a rival line of popes for eighteen years. A third complication arose from
an important dynastic marriage, between Barbarossa’s son Henry and
Constance, heir to the kingdom of Sicily. Although Henry had to fight for
his right to succeed to Sicily, he did so successfully, and was from 1194
both Holy Roman Emperor and king of Sicily, a dual role eventually also
held by his son Frederick II. The geopolitical consequences were enor-
mous, since the pope and the Lombard League now confronted a power
that claimed, and to some degree exerted, authority in Italy from the Alps
to the Mediterranean.
These wars were not wars between dynasties but wars between
a dynasty, on the one hand, the Hohenstaufen family of Barbarossa and
Frederick II, and, on the other, an alliance of cities and popes. The
conflict reached a height of intensity in the middle decades of the
thirteenth century. Italy was polarized into supporters of the emperor,
Ghibellines as they came to be called, and supporters of ‘the Church’,
known as Guelfs.54 For well over a century, political loyalties and alliances
in Italy revolved around one’s attitude to a particular imperial dynasty.
Pope Innocent IV deposed Frederick II and aimed at excluding his
dynasty from power: ‘let it not be that the sceptre of rule over the
Christian people should remain with him any longer, nor let it be
transferred to any of his brood of vipers’.55 The popes were eventually
successful in their avowed aim of wiping out the dynasty completely, but,
ironically, the only way they could do so was by calling on another
dynasty, the Angevins, a branch of the Capetians, who established them-
selves as rulers of Sicily by defeating and killing the last of the
Hohenstaufen. Meanwhile many of the north Italian cities developed
into something like republican city-states.
There are many other examples of conflict between dynasties and the
towns they claimed to rule, perhaps most notably that between the dukes
of Burgundy and their towns, especially Ghent, which was not

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infrequently at war with its duke, but the case of Italy in the twelfth and
thirteenth centuries is a clear enough example to illustrate the nature of
these clashes. The wealth generated by trade and commerce, their popu-
lousness and their fortifications made the towns very desirable objects for
kings and other dynastic rulers, but also gave them the possibility of
resisting those rulers. Often kings and the ruling classes of the cities
could ally. If the towns were willing to pay enough in taxes, then kings
were willing to give them limited self-government. This might be parti-
cularly true of regions with small or middle-sized towns, like England or
France (excluding Flanders). But the larger and wealthier cities, like
Milan, Florence or Ghent, had the resources to resist their lords, even if
not always with ultimate success. The Holy Roman Emperors, the dukes
of Burgundy, and other dynasts sitting on such urban goldmines would
understandably try to maintain their authority and the profits that flowed
from them, and could often call on considerable military resources from
their aristocratic followers. Hence, on occasion, the whiff of class war in
these conflicts, as German dukes, counts and knights descended on the
trading cities of Italy, or the knightly retainers of the dukes of Burgundy
faced the urban militias of Flanders. One of the most spectacular clashes
of this kind occurred in 1302, when French knights confronted the
infantry of the Flemish towns at Courtrai and suffered a bloody defeat:

And thus, in the face of the weavers, the fullers and the common Flemish
footsoldiers, the skill of battle and the flower of knighthood came crashing
down, with all the strength of their most magnificent steeds and warhorses,
and the beauty and power of this most mighty army was turned into
a dungheap and the glory of the French was made shit and worms.56

The note of class conflict is unmistakable.

Dynasty and the Kingdom

As the case of Flanders shows, royal dynasties often faced, and might have
to fight, the non-dynastic world within the kingdoms they ruled. Though
the identification of dynasty and kingdom could be achieved, it might
turn instead into antagonism. This emerged especially in cases of dynas-
ties ruling multiple kingdoms, for one consequence of the transmission

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of power through the dynastic system was the possibility of building up

great territorial conglomerates through careful choices of bride. The most
famous example in European history is provided by the Habsburgs, who
went from being middle-ranking German counts in the twelfth century to
rulers of the world’s greatest empire in the sixteenth, almost entirely, as far
as their European territories are concerned, by marriage and succession.
One branch then continued its dominance of the Danubian region down
to the First World War. Their dizzying list of titles underlines the way that
their territory had been built up piecemeal. In the Peace of Westphalia of
1648, for example, Ferdinand III appears as

Ferdinand III, elected Emperor of the Romans, forever august, king of

Germany, Hungary, Bohemia, Dalmatia, Croatia, Slavonia, archduke of
Austria, duke of Burgundy, Brabant, Styria, Carinthia, Carniola, margrave
of Moravia, duke of Luxemburg, Upper and Lower Silesia, Württemberg
and Teck, prince of Swabia, count of Habsburg, Tyrol, Kiburg and Gorizia,
margrave of the Holy Roman Empire, Burgau, Upper and Lower Lausitz,
lord of the Mark of Slavonia, Pordenone and Salins.57

Of modern European states, Spain and Great Britain both ultimately

originated from dynastic marriages, and the same is true of important
medieval political units that no longer exist, like Poland–Lithuania or the
semi-regal Burgundian lands of the late Middle Ages. Modern commen-
tators sometimes write as if the formation of some of these composite
states was natural, while others, for example Austria–Hungary, are dis-
missed as archaic and unnatural, but they were all natural products of the
dynastic system.
Because dynasties pursued power, prestige and territory for them-
selves, not for a ‘state’ or ‘nation’, their lands often transcended political
boundaries. The counts of Flanders, for example, held lands both in the
kingdom of France and in the Holy Roman Empire (‘Imperial
Flanders’). Hence, when Baldwin of Hainault succeeded to the county
of Flanders in 1191, he had to do homage and swear fidelity to the king of
France, which he did on 1 March 1192, and promise him the inheritance
payment known as ‘relief’, and then the following month travel to
Germany to do homage to the emperor.58 The counts of Flanders saw
no contradictions in this situation and they had no interest at all in

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tidying it up. Both their lands and the scope of their political ambitions
were greater because they were vassals of both the king of France and the
emperor.
A more complex situation was created when a king of one country
held lands in another kingdom. The most intractable case of this type
concerned the lands of the king of England in France. In 1066 the duke
of Normandy, who recognized the suzerainty of the king of France,
became king of England, and for the next 500 years, until the English
loss of Calais in 1558, every English king held lands in France. These
lands were not annexed to the kingdom of England, but, for most of the
period, recognized as territories held from the king of France as superior
lord. Only after Edward III claimed the French throne in 1340 did the
quarrel assume a different constitutional form. Before then, the title of
the kings of England always reflected this dual nature, monarch in one
kingdom, great lord in another, even if their territories in France varied
over time: William the Conqueror was ‘king of the English and duke of
the Normans’, Henry II was ‘king of the English and duke of the
Normans and of the men of Aquitaine and count of the Angevins’,
Henry III, who acknowledged the loss of Normandy, was ‘king of
England, lord of Ireland and duke of Aquitaine’. The acknowledged
superiority of the king of France regarding these lands meant that he
could insist on homage from the king of England or could summon him
to his court in the case of disputes over territories. Most controversially,
the French king could claim appellate jurisdiction in cases involving the
inhabitants of the king of England’s French lands. In extreme situations,
he could declare those lands forfeit, as happened, for instance, in 1202
and in 1294, on both occasions leading to years of war between the two
kings. The Norman and Plantagenet kings of England were just as tena-
cious of their dynastic inheritance in France as they were of their king-
dom of England.
Such situations were not uncommon elsewhere. The kings of Scots
held lands in the kingdom of England and performed homage and swore
fealty for them. The king of England claimed that the king of Scots owed
homage for the kingdom of Scotland too, but was rarely able to insist on
that. In 1278, for instance, Alexander III of Scotland came to
Westminster and spoke before an assembly of Edward I and his chief

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men: ‘I Alexander, king of Scotland, become the liegeman of the lord

Edward, king of England, against all people.’ Edward accepted this
homage, ‘reserving the right and claim of the king of England and his
heirs for the homage of the king of Scotland and his heirs for the king-
dom of Scotland, when they wish to discuss it.’ The king of Scots then
swore fealty to Edward, although he was allowed to swear through his
representative Robert Bruce (father of the later King Robert), promising
faithful service ‘due from the lands and holdings that I hold from the
king of England’.59 The disputed issue, the independence or subordina-
tion of Scotland, was thus quite clear, but so too was the undisputed issue:
the king of Scots was the liegeman of the king of England for his lands in
England, just as the king of England was the liegeman of the king of
France for his lands in France. Twenty-three years later, when the issue
was being decided not by assemblies but by battle, the Scots claimed that
‘the kingdom of Scotland was always completely free in relation to the
king of England, since by general law an equal cannot command an equal
and a king should not be subject to a king or a kingdom to a kingdom’
and ‘by general law no kingdom ought to be subject to another in any
way’, but this was an argument raised in the midst of war and hardly
describes the complexities of dynastic relations in medieval Europe.60
Dynastic ambitions that transcended the frontiers of kingdoms also
characterized the expansion of the house of Barcelona in the central
Middle Ages. Technically part of the kingdom of France, the county of
Barcelona was governed by a line of vigorous expansionist rulers in the
eleventh and twelfth centuries. They expanded by conquest, notably at
the cost of the neighbouring Muslim states, by marriage to female heirs
and by becoming overlords of counts and other lords on both sides of the
Pyrenees. These overlordships included, at various times, those of
Carcassonne, Béziers, Narbonne and Montpellier, with their important
cities, as well as the Pyrenean counties from Béarn to Roussillon. These
areas were all under the nominal suzerainty of the distant kings of
France, based 400 miles to the north, but in culture and language they
had much in common with the Catalan lands of the counts of Barcelona.
Through marriage to a female heir in 1112, the counts of Barcelona
acquired most of Provence. This was not part of France at this time, but
part of the Holy Roman Empire. Another marriage agreement with great

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consequences took place in 1137, when the count was betrothed to the
female heir to the kingdom of Aragon, bringing to the dynasty the royal
title and a territory quite outside any even theoretical French jurisdic-
tion. A further symbolic step took place in 1180, when Catalan docu-
ments ceased using the regnal year of French kings in their dating
formulae.61 By 1200, the count-kings ruled, either directly or as over-
lords, an assemblage of lands that stretched from Zaragoza in the valley of
the Ebro and Tortosa in southern Catalonia near the Mediterranean
coast, through the southern lands of the kingdom of France and as far
as Nice in Provence, in the Holy Roman Empire.
It is not impossible to imagine that these lands would form the core of
a new state, Occitan in language, ruled by the count-kings and cutting off
the kingdom of France from the Mediterranean. That this did not
happen is partly due to the Albigensian Crusade (1209–29), which
brought armies of northern French knights down into the south, blessed
by the pope, to root out the heresy which the Church identified as
a major problem there. One way they tried to do this was by sacking cities
and dispossessing local lords. Peter II of Aragon inevitably became
involved, not because his orthodox credentials were doubted (he was
one of the leaders of the Christian army at the great victory of Las Navas
in 1212) but because he was the suzerain of several of the southern
French lords whom the crusaders had expelled from their lands. At the
Battle of Muret in September 1213 Peter and his allies faced the crusa-
ders under the command of the French noble Simon de Montfort, whose
son and namesake was later famous in English history. The crusaders
were victorious and Peter was killed in the battle, just fourteen months
after he helped win the Battle of Las Navas against the Muslims. Dynastic
power was great but there were other forces at work in medieval politics
and the Church Militant was one of the most powerful of them. Peter’s
son and successor, James I, was just five years old at the time of Muret, but
he went on to agree the Treaty of Corbeil in 1258, by which the king of
France renounced all claims to the county of Barcelona and its surround-
ing territories, while James gave up his claims to overlordship in the south
of France, with the exception of Montpellier, where he had been born.62
In the later Middle Ages the kings of Aragon continued to look for
opportunities for expansion, and found many, so that they eventually had

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something like a Mediterranean empire, but the Treaty of Corbeil

marked a sharp delimitation of their sphere of influence. The bound-
aries of dynastic power and the boundaries of the kingdom were being
aligned. Barcelona, long an independent political unit, was now not even
notionally part of the kingdom of France. Conversely, the king of Aragon
no longer had any formal suzerainty over the lords of southern France,
with the exception of Montpellier. This agreement did not create the
modern boundary of France and Spain, since Roussillon, on the north-
ern or ‘French’ side of the Pyrenees, did not come to the kingdom of
France until 1659, but it was a clear attempt to make the territory ruled by
a dynasty and the territory of the kingdom identical.
Dynastic lands that extended beyond the boundaries of a single king-
dom could create divided loyalties. The kings of England who were also
dukes of Normandy in the years 1066–1204 ruled over a cross-Channel
territory with a cross-Channel aristocracy. The great aristocrats with lord-
ships in Normandy and in England had as little interest as their rulers in
giving any weight to the fact that their lands were in two kingdoms. The
kings of France obviously thought differently, and the conquest of
Normandy by the French king in 1204 made it untenable for the Anglo-
Norman aristocracy to continue to hold lands on both sides of the
Channel (with a few exceptions). In 1244 Louis IX of France issued an
ultimatum to his subjects who held lands in England: ‘since nobody can
serve two lords properly, you must adhere fully and inseparably either to
me or to the king of England’.63 Some then chose to abandon their
English lands, some to give up their French lands. Henry III of England
responded by ordering the seizure of all lands in England held by sub-
jects of the French king.64 A similar fissure occurred after the outbreak of
interminable warfare between England and Scotland in 1295 ended the
two peaceful centuries when great nobles could happily hold lands in
both kingdoms. As national antagonisms deepened in the later Middle
Ages, the international networks of religious houses were also sometimes
disrupted. In England ‘alien priories’, that is, smaller religious houses in
England that were dependencies of abbeys in France, were repeatedly
confiscated during war between the two countries, and by the early
fifteenth century almost all had either been converted into independent

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English houses or granted to native monasteries or colleges. The same

ruptures affected ties between English and Scottish monasteries.
In addition to creating territories that comprised lands in more than
one kingdom, dynastic transmission might bring in foreign rulers. If the
throne passed to or through women, this could lead to the prospect of
inheritance of the throne by a foreign husband or son. A famous example
is the claim of Edward III of England to the throne of France, a claim
transmitted through his mother, the French princess Isabella. A French
writer expressed, in hypothetical terms, his view of foreign rulers coming
to the French throne in such a way:

Say, for example, that the king of France had an elder daughter and a son
who was younger; this daughter was married to a son of the king of
Hungary, and a son is born from that marriage; who would in reason
love the people and the kingdom of France better, the younger son of
the king, or the son of this older daughter? Without a doubt, the son of the
king.65

Edward III’s English subjects also had their reservations about having
a ruler who was both king of England and king of France, and when he
made his claim to the French throne he had to reassure them that ‘the
kingdom of England would in no way be subject to the kingdom of
France’.66
Medieval aristocracies were extremely wary and distrustful about the
prospect of their kingdom coming into the hands of a foreign ruler
through marriage. When a marriage was negotiated between the heir
to the kingdom of England and the heir to the kingdom of Scotland in
1290, the Scots lords secured explicit promises that ‘the rights, laws,
liberties and customs of the kingdom of Scotland . . . shall be observed,
whole and inviolable, for all time’ and that ‘the kingdom of Scotland shall
remain separate and delimited from the kingdom of England, free in
itself and without any subjection’; other commitments were precise,
including provisions that no one would be summoned outside the king-
dom for any crime committed within it and that the new royal seal of
Scotland would be of exactly the same design as the old one.67 The Scots
thus accepted the prospect of a foreign ruler, but only with safeguards.

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 PART II: A SENSE OF DYNASTY

Similar documents spelling out the limits of personal union or pre-

serving the position of native nobles can be found elsewhere when
a foreign king seemed likely. In 1310, when John, count of Luxemburg,
was attempting to win the crown of Bohemia, as husband of the sister of
the last king of the native Premyslid dynasty, he made a series of promises
designed to win the support of the Bohemian nobility. The nobles would
not have to undertake military service beyond the frontiers of Bohemia
and Moravia, unless they agreed and were paid to do so; the general tax
called berna would be levied only for the king’s coronation and the
marriage of his daughters; the right of daughters to inherit estates in
the absence of sons was recognized. Then follow clauses designed to
prevent John bringing in and endowing his foreign followers:

we will not appoint any foreigner as captain, burgrave or castellan in our

castles, or as fief-holder or official in Bohemia or Moravia, or in our court,
nor will we give, either in perpetuity or for a term, any estates, possessions,
castles or offices to foreigners, nor allow them to inherit them in the
kingdom of Bohemia in any way.68

John was crowned king of Bohemia soon after issuing this document and
his male-line descendants bore the title down to 1437.
Rather similar terms were agreed by Louis the Great, king of Hungary,
in 1355, when he wished to win the assent of the Polish nobility to his
succession to the Polish throne after the death of its current incumbent;
Louis was a grandson of the previous Polish king through his mother. He
promised the Polish nobles that, if they accepted him as heir to their
kingdom, he would impose no extraordinary taxation, as the current
king and his father had done, he would not demand hospitality for his
court when travelling, or, if this was unavoidable, he would pay for any-
thing consumed, and that if a military expedition went beyond the
borders of Poland, he would reimburse those who accompanied him.69
Resentment against foreign kings was expressed very explicitly by
a Swedish cleric in the following century, after the death of King
Christopher of Sweden, Norway and Denmark in 1448. Although
Christopher was distantly descended from earlier Scandinavian mon-
archs, he was the son of a German prince of the house of Wittelsbach
and had been brought up at the court of the Holy Roman Emperor and

426
 DYNASTIES AND THE NON-DYNASTIC WORLD

he had employed German officials and advisers extensively during his

reign. After his death, the Swedes chose a native nobleman, Charles
Knutsson, as their king. An ecclesiastic at the cathedral of Strängnäs
picked up his pen to record his feelings about this: ‘It is not possible to
measure how much damage the kingdom and Sweden and its inhabitants
have suffered from a foreign king and the lordship and rule of foreigners.
God preserve us, so that never shall foreign rulers be lords over us
Swedes!’70
Native aristocracies thus sought ways to avoid their kingdoms being
swallowed up in dynastic empires. Others, too, might have an interest in
ensuring that the accidents of birth, marriage and death did not produce
dangerous mega-states. A case of this type that was to dominate European
politics for a century occurred in 1194, when, through inheritance
backed by conquest, the emperor Henry VI acquired the kingdom of
Sicily. From the point of view of the papacy, this produced a kind of
threatening sandwich, with the Holy Roman Empire to the north of the
papal lands and the kingdom of Sicily to the south in the same hands.
Papal policy was thereafter governed by the need to keep these two
realms separate, a goal made somewhat easier by the elective nature of
the Empire. But the price of this policy was eternal vigilance. In 1209, for
instance, Pope Innocent III was willing to crown Otto IV emperor in
Rome, but then found that Otto planned to recreate the union of the
Empire and Sicily, invading the kingdom and seeking to replace its young
ruler, Frederick II, son of the emperor Henry VI. Innocent then switched
his support to Frederick. In 1216 Frederick formally promised that, when
he became emperor, he would hand over Sicily to his son Henry, ‘lest it
be thought there was any kind of union of kingdom and Empire’.71
The Hohenstaufen cause was inherited by the royal house of Aragon
and when Pope Martin IV deprived Peter III of Aragon of his kingdom in
1283 and offered it to a son of the king of France, he specified that this
son ‘should not be the one who is to succeed him in the kingdom of
France’ and went on to make complex provisions aimed at avoiding any
personal union of the two kingdoms, and, extending the prohibition
further, ruled that Aragon ‘should never at any time be united in the
same person with the kingdoms of France or Castile or Leon or
England’.72 The combination of Sicily and the Empire in the hands of

427
 PART II: A SENSE OF DYNASTY

one ruler had been trouble enough, and all nightmare unions of this type
were henceforth to be banned.
Relations between kings and those they ruled were shaped by their
subjects’ conceptions of the community or territory to which they
belonged. The kings of medieval Europe did not always bother to specify
what they were kings of. The title ‘king’ might serve quite well on its own.
For example, the kings of Burgundy in the period of the independent
kingdom (888–1032) normally appear in their documents in this simple
form: ‘Rudolf, by God’s favour, king’.73 But kings often did add a genitive
noun to their title, and it is significant what that noun was. Were they
kings of peoples, kingdoms, lands? There is a general tendency for royal
titles to become territorial as the Middle Ages progress, earlier kings
being kings of peoples, later ones kings of countries, although this was
not a universal trend.74 English kings were ‘kings of the English’ in their
documents before the reign of John (1199–1216) but ‘kings of England’
from that time. In some cases the multiple titles of rulers indicate
a recognition that their lands were a congeries of territories. The later
charters of Ferdinand III (d. 1252), for example, give his title as ‘by the
grace of God, king of Castile, of Toledo, of Leon, of Galicia, of Seville, of
Cordoba, of Murcia and of Jaén’.75 The title makes no attempt to impose
a unity on the lands he ruled as king. In contrast, the king of the French
was usually just ‘the king of the French (rex Francorum)’. An instructive
exception is the way that Louis VII had become ‘king of the French and
duke of the Aquitanians (rex Francorum et dux Aquitanorum)’ on marriage
to Eleanor of Aquitaine, heir to the duchy. The implication of this title
was that being king of the French did not make you ruler of Aquitaine.
Later kings recognized that this point of view was unacceptable. When
Louis’ son, Philip Augustus, swallowed up Normandy in 1204, he did not
become ‘king of the French and duke of the Normans’. Philip and his
successors regarded the title of ‘king of the French’ as encompassing the
whole kingdom; they did not need special titles for different parts of it.76
The dynasty was stressing the identity of the rulers, the kingdom and the
inhabitants of the kingdom, what has been called ‘regnal solidarity’.77

428
 Conclusion

S o why did the dynastic system of political power

come to an end? The first answer is that it didn’t completely.
Apart from the few remaining countries where hereditary monarchs
still exercise real political power, there have also been some modern
dictatorships where sons have been groomed to step into their father’s
shoes, as in the case of North Korea, and even in democracies there have
been political dynasties producing recurrent presidents. Nevertheless,
direct transmission of ruling power through inheritance has virtually
disappeared. Office has been distinguished from property, the latter
being quite legitimately transmitted on family lines, while the former
cannot be. And this distinction was made during the period of the
dynastic system. A French lawyer writing in 1419 puts it very clearly:
‘The lordship that the king has in the kingdom is of a different kind
from the lordship of property that is transmitted through family
inheritance.’1 So the monarch does not own the realm in the same way
that a householder owns a house. Once this wedge had been inserted,
there was plenty of learned theory to back the idea that kingship was an
office not a piece of family property, and kings could be criticized for not
fulfilling the duties of their office. The Church sometimes stressed the
idea that kings had to be ‘suitable’, a usefully indeterminate quality that
aggressive popes like Gregory VII (1073–85) actually did use to justify
deposition and replacement of kings.2 Legal experts spoke of the king
being ‘under the law’.
The idea that kingship was an office with duties as well as rights was
embodied in the promises given at coronation. Before he could be

429
 CONCLUSION

anointed or crowned in 1189, Richard I of England had to swear on the

gospels and on holy relics,

that, all the days of his life, he would exhibit peace and honour and
reverence towards God and Holy Church and her ordained clergy . . .
that he would exercise rightful justice and equity among the people
entrusted to him . . . that he would abolish bad laws and wicked customs
if any had been introduced into his kingdom, and establish good laws and
observe them without any deceit or bad intention.3

Similar sworn undertakings formed part of the coronation service in

other countries.
In those kingdoms where the kingship was theoretically elective, it
became the practice for newly chosen rulers to issue what have been
called ‘election charters’ or ‘coronation charters’, with a series of provi-
sions about how they would rule. In Scandinavia, the first such charter
was issued by Erik V Klipping of Denmark in 1282 and subsequently
became a standard feature of Danish political life, while the practice
was adopted in Sweden in 1371 and Norway in 1449.4 That issued by
Christopher II of Denmark in 1320, amongst other things, abolished
recently imposed taxes, specified that the king could only make war
with the consent of the great men and prohibited him from employing
Germans as officials or counsellors. All these oaths and undertakings
suggest that the concept of monarchy as the inherited property of the
ruler, with which he could do what he liked, was not the only one.
Kingship could also be seen as entailing reciprocal obligations, answer-
able office and binding promises. In a charter of 1367, the king of France
gave a long and detailed list of the privileges of the Dauphiné and then
ruled that the inhabitants could refuse to do homage to a new Dauphin
unless he first swore to uphold them.5 If there was a contract of such kind
between ruler and ruled, the question might arise of what to do if the
ruler broke it.
If one believes that there are ‘peoples’, ‘nations’ or ‘communities’,
then it is possible to claim that these entities have interests of their own,
separate from and perhaps opposed to those of the rulers. A good
example comes from Scotland in the early fourteenth century, a time
when Robert Bruce was fighting to establish himself as king of an

430
 CONCLUSION

independent Scotland in the face of determined English efforts to sub-

due the kingdom. In the Declaration of Arbroath of 1320, the leaders of
the Scots praised Robert Bruce for the way he had led the fight for
Scotland’s independence, but added,

But if he should give up what he has begun, seeking to subject us or our

kingdom to the king of the English or the English, we would immediately
strive to expel him as our enemy and a subverter of his right and ours, and
we would make someone else our king.6

Their loyalty, they were saying, was to their kingdom first, to the
dynasty second.
In several ways, the relationship of the dynasty to the kingdom and its
inhabitants, perhaps conceived collectively as a nation, could become
difficult. National feeling could be harnessed by dynasties to reinforce
their power and authority but it could also fuel opposition to them.
A good example of the former case is England, where, from as early as
the tenth century, ‘king, people and country formed the unity that was
England and the English people’.7 In the thirteenth century England
also provides a good example of the latter, as the opponents of Henry III
were partly inspired by a hostility to his foreign relatives and favourites,
and reportedly demanded of the king ‘that all foreigners should be
expelled from England and it should be governed by natives’.8
Royal families or families aspiring to royalty had to fight hard to
convince the inhabitants of the kingdom of the unity of ‘king, people
and country’. Dynasties looked out for their family interests, not for those
of a nation or people, insofar as these can be said to have ‘interests’.
Dynasties came from somewhere. Ruling families might well have
a regional power base. The Ottonians were a Saxon dynasty and had to
struggle to win recognition in Bavaria and Lotharingia. The Capetians
were for a long time limited to the Ile-de-France and its adjacent terri-
tories. When Philip Augustus came to Tournai in 1187, the local chroni-
cler pointed out that ‘it was unheard of that any of his predecessors had
ever come there’.9 The successful dynasties, as the Capetians eventually
became, were the ones who convinced a large enough number of impor-
tant people that the community they identified with, kingdom, country
or nation, was actually embodied in the ruling family: ‘for king and

431
 CONCLUSION

country’ not ‘for king or country’. When country and king parted ways,
a new politics was born. As representative assemblies (estates, parlia-
ments) became widespread and regular in the later Middle Ages, the
question might arise, who speaks for the kingdom, the king or the
estates? War between different claimants to the throne was commonplace
in medieval Europe, but war between the king and those who claimed to
represent the country or kingdom was another kind of conflict.
It was rare in the Middle Ages, or indeed in subsequent centuries, for
opposition to the ruler to aim at putting an end to monarchy itself,
although something like this happened in northern Italy and in
Switzerland, but, more recently, European monarchies have frequently
been formally abolished: in England, precociously but temporarily, in
the years 1649–60; in France in 1792–1804, 1848–52, and finally in 1870;
in Portugal in 1910; in Austria–Hungary (including Bohemia) and
Germany after the First World War; in Greece in 1924–35, and defini-
tively in 1973/4; in Spain in 1873–4 and in 1931, although, very unu-
sually, the monarchy was restored in 1975; in Italy in 1946. The modern
trend in Europe has been against dynasty. In 1900 every European state
except France and Switzerland was a monarchy. In 2000 only seven were
left (excluding mini-states) and in all of them the sovereign’s power was
purely ceremonial.
In medieval Europe, however, dynastic politics were the rule not the
exception. It was a time, in the words of the historian of Lambert Simnel,
Matthew Bennet, ‘when the destinies of nations were tied to blood-
lines’.10 This resulted in a curious blend of certainty and uncertainty.
Rudolf Schieffer, discussing the relationships between fathers and sons in
the Carolingian dynasty, pointed out that, in this dynastic world, not only
were marriages, births and deaths ‘political events of the first impor-
tance’, but ‘personal changes at the top level became apparent on the
horizon years or even decades before they happened in fact’.11 This
situation is what explains the combination of the known and the
unknown in the political landscape. Everyone knew that the king would
die; no one was sure when. Ambitious young nobles might be tempted to
support a restless young prince, chafing at the bit to succeed his father,
but what if the father lived for another ten or twenty years? Everyone is
going to be alive one day and dead the next, but we do not know what

432
 CONCLUSION

days they will be. ‘Nothing is more certain than death,’ went the medieval
saying, ‘but nothing is more uncertain than the hour of death.’12 Death
could come at age two, at age twenty, at age forty, even at the age of
a hundred, although there seem to be no examples of rulers dying at that
age. And the same uncertain certainty was true of many other things in
this world of family politics. Even apparently certain situations could
change. Old childless kings were likely to die without sons, but who
knew whether a late marriage to a young bride might alter everything?
Ruling dynasties were not biological units but political ones.
Collateral branches might be excluded or pruned, the offspring of
some sexual unions put on a different legal footing from others, females
given the same rights of inheritance as males or not. Family structures
varied across medieval Europe and over the course of time. Yet dynasties
were political units governed by biological uncertainty in such crucial
matters as the fertility of a bride, the sex of children and sudden death.
‘The destinies of nations were tied to blood-lines’, but blood-lines fail.
Writing in the late 1050s, the intransigent cardinal Humbert of Silva
Candida raged against the rulers of his time, who had dared to interfere
in the business of the Church. He warned them that God can punish in
this world as well as in the next, and, after pointing out as examples the
wars, earthquakes, tempests, diseases and famines that were afflicting
Christians, he added as especially relevant to them, the way that dynas-
ties become extinct:

Moreover, let them consider that, in the land of the French, where kings
succeed though family relationship, which king for a hundred years and
more can be recalled whose descendants ruled even to the fourth
generation? The Ottos, who were worse intruders on the priestly office
than any kings before them, scarcely attained the third generation. And,
after them, the first Henry left no further generation. Anyone who
investigates will be able to find out what has happened in other
kingdoms and principalities.13

Humbert is referring to Otto I, Otto II and Otto III, whose direct line
died out in 1002 and were succeeded by Henry II (titled Henry I as
emperor), who died childless in 1024. And, at the time he was writing,
no French family had held the throne for more than three successive

433
 CONCLUSION

generations without interruption for almost two hundred years. So his

comments on the impermanence of dynasties are literally correct.
In this world biological luck had big consequences. The Norman
Conquest of 1066, when a French-speaking aristocracy seized England
and displaced its native ruling class, with all the political and cultural
consequences that flowed from that, was only conceivable because of the
succession crisis posed by the childlessness of its king. If Edward the
Confessor had had a son, the English language spoken today would be
very different, with far fewer words of French origin, and perhaps still
with those bewildering endings that German has maintained. Much of
this book has been about things that did not happen. Any study of
a dynastic system is always throwing up such counterfactuals: there
could have been a European state consisting of Castile and France;
there could have been a big independent state between France and
Germany; the Scandinavian kingdoms might all be one. In the present
world, as mentioned, several states, such as Spain and the United
Kingdom, are the result of dynastic marriages, of the fifteenth and
sixteenth centuries respectively in these examples. Nationalists some-
times talk as if nations are primordial and perennial, but countries
come and go, and nations with them. There were no Belgians in the
Middle Ages.
Dynastic politics also meant that the place of passions was even more
central than it is in modern democratic polities. Chastellain, the dry-eyed
observer of late medieval power, sees the rivalry of rulers as natural, since
‘rulers are men and their affairs are high and grave, and their nature is
subject to many passions, such as hatred and envy, and their hearts are
truly the habitation of such things because of their glory in ruling’.14
Glory, hatred, envy. Many other things shaped the politics of medieval
Europe – religious beliefs, personalities, class hatred, class pride, love of
liberty, nationalism, xenophobia, economic interests – but, almost every-
where and almost always, a major part in the story was played by dynasti-
cism, that is, the births, marriages and deaths of the rulers and the
dynamics of their families – and their passions.

434
 APPENDIX A

Main Dynasties

The Main Royal and Imperial Dynasties of Latin

Christendom and Byzantium 500–1500
Aragon
The kingdom of Aragon was created in 1035 by Sancho III of
Navarre for his illegitimate son Ramiro. The betrothal of Ramiro’s
great-granddaughter, Petronilla, queen of Aragon, and Raymond
Berengar, count of Barcelona, in 1137 created a composite state
(‘The Crown of Aragon’), which was ruled by their male-line
descendants until 1410; after a two-year interregnum, the crown
then passed into the hands of a junior branch of the Castilian
royal family (see above, pp. 74–6).

Bohemia
The native dynasty, the Premyslids, ruled as dukes or kings down to 1306.
After a period of competition and uncertainty, the house of Luxemburg
then ruled from 1311 to 1437.

Burgundy
There was an early medieval kingdom of the Burgundians, which was
conquered by the Franks in 534; an independent kingdom of Burgundy
888–1032, ruled by the ‘Rudolfinger’ dynasty, subsequently a constituent
part of the Holy Roman Empire; as well as the late medieval lands of the
dukes of Burgundy, who aspired to an independent kingship.

435
 APPENDIX A: MAIN DYNASTIES

Byzantium
Before the eleventh century, few dynasties continued for more than
a generation or two. Exceptions are the Heraclian dynasty, 610–711
(with a hiatus from 695 to 705), and the Macedonian, 867–1056. The
Comnenians reigned from 1081 to 1185 and the Angeloi from 1185 to
1204. After the Byzantines reconquered Constantinople from the
westerners in 1261, the empire was ruled by the Palaeologan dynasty
down to the conquest of Constantinople by the Turks in 1453.

Castile
See Leon-Castile.

Cyprus
The French Lusignan dynasty ruled Cyprus from 1197 to 1489, the last
monarch being Catherine Cornaro, widow of James II of Lusignan.

Denmark
Descendants of Gorm the Old, sometimes called the house of Jelling,
ruled Denmark from the middle of the tenth century until 1042; his
descendants through the female line then reigned from Sven
Estrithson (1047–74/6) until 1375 (with one female-line descendant
1137–46); in the later Middle Ages, the three Scandinavian kingdoms
often had common rulers: Denmark and Norway had a common king
from 1380; Denmark, Norway and Sweden from 1388 (de iure) and 1396
(de facto).

England
In the early Middle Ages Anglo-Saxon England was divided into
numerous kingdoms, a system sometimes called the Heptarchy
(‘Seven Kingdoms’), an idealized and simplified concept that
assumed the kingdoms were East Anglia, Essex, Kent, Sussex, Wessex,
Mercia and Northumbria. All these except Wessex disappeared during
the Viking invasions of the ninth century and the kings of Wessex united

436
 APPENDIX A: MAIN DYNASTIES

England under their rule during the tenth. The Wessex kings ruled
England until 1066, with gaps during the reigns of the Danish kings
from 1013 to 1014 and from 1016 to 1042. The Norman kings reigned
from 1066 to 1154, the Plantagenets from 1154 to 1485, with the
Lancastrian branch reigning from 1399 to 1461 and 1470 to 1471, and
the Yorkist branch 1461–70 and 1471–85. The Tudors reigned from
1485.

France
The kingdom of the West Franks, or France, emerged from the break-up
of the Frankish kingdoms (q.v.) in 888. The last Carolingians ruled to
987, with gaps from 888 to 898 and 922 to 936, the Capetians from 987,
with the Valois branch from 1328.

Frankish Kingdoms
The Frankish kingdoms were ruled by Merovingians from c. 500 to
751 and Carolingians from 751; the Frankish kingdom finally broke
up in 888; thereafter see France and Germany. See also Holy Roman
Empire.

Germany
The kingdom of the East Franks, or Germany, emerged from the break-
up of the Frankish kingdoms (q.v.) in 888. The last Carolingians ruled to
911, the Ottonians 919–1024, the Salians 1024–1125, the Hohenstaufen
1138–1254; thereafter rulers from various dynasties (see p. 398 above)
until 1438, when the Habsburgs established themselves. See also Holy
Roman Empire.

Holy Roman Empire

Charlemagne, king of the Franks, was crowned Roman emperor on
Christmas day 800. Thereafter, for more than a thousand years, this
improbable title was an adjunct of rulers whose power was usually based
north of the Alps. Charlemagne’s direct descendants held it until 899,
then, for a generation, it was contested between various Italian rulers; in

437
 APPENDIX A: MAIN DYNASTIES

962 Otto I, king of the East Franks (Germany) was crowned emperor and
thereafter the title was always linked with rule in Germany.
Geographically, the Empire then consisted of, roughly, Germany and
northern Italy. It was dissolved in 1806. In the period covered by this
book, the title ‘Holy Roman Empire’ was not a contemporary term and is
used here as a convenience.

Hungary
The native Arpad dynasty ruled from the tenth century until 1301 (with
female-line descendants 1038–46); the Angevins 1310–95; the Hungarian
noble Matthias Corvinus ruled from 1458 to 1490.

Ireland
Early medieval Ireland had 100 to 150 kings, of different rank and
standing, from the rí tuaithe, a local king ruling an area of about 200 to
250 square miles, through overkings and provincial kings, to the ard rí or
high king. Provincial dynasties of importance in the central and late
Middle Ages included the O’Briens (Uí Briain) and MacCarthys
(MacCarthaigh) of Munster, the O’Connors (Uí Conchobhair) of
Connacht, the O’Neils (Uí Néill) of Ulster and the MacMurroughs
(Mac Murchada) of Leinster.

Jerusalem
After the Christian conquest of Jerusalem in 1099, the crusaders elected
Godfrey de Bouillon, a son of the count of Boulogne, as ruler but he did
not take the title of king. On his death in 1100, his brother Baldwin
became King Baldwin I and was succeeded by a distant cousin, Baldwin of
Le Bourg, as Baldwin II. Among the descendants of Baldwin II the throne
frequently passed through the female line (1131, 1185, 1186, 1190, 1205,
1212), in most cases with queens regnant whose husbands exercised royal
authority and usually had the title of king. In this way the title came to the
Hohenstaufen dynasty (see Germany) 1225–68. It then passed to the
Lusignan kings of Cyprus, although there were other claimants. After

438
 APPENDIX A: MAIN DYNASTIES

the fall of the kingdom to the Muslims in 1291 it was a purely honorific
title.

Leon-Castile
The kings of Asturias and Leon from 739 to 1037 were all male-line
descendants of Peter, duke of Cantabria (with one exception, Silo,
774–83). Ferdinand of Castile, a younger son of the king of Navarre,
seized the throne in 1037 and, after him, his sons ruled Leon and Castile
until 1109, when the crown passed to his granddaughter Urraca, the first
female sovereign in western Europe. Her descendants by her first
husband, Raymond of Burgundy, ruled Leon and Castile until the
reign of Isabella the Catholic (1474–1504). Leon and Castile were in
the hands of different branches of the family 1157–1230, and an
illegitimate male descendant, Henry of Trastámara, seized the throne
in 1369, so late medieval Castilian monarchs are sometimes classified as
‘the house of Trastámara’.

Lombards
The Lombards, a Germanic people, arrived in Italy in 568 and occupied
large parts of the peninsula. Their kings, based in the north of the
country, came from various different families and no long-lasting
dynasty emerged. In 774 Charlemagne conquered the Lombards and
took the title ‘King of the Franks and the Lombards’.

Majorca
Conquered from the Muslims by the king of Aragon in the thirteenth
century, it was ruled by its own kings, younger members of the Aragonese
royal house, from 1276 to 1285 and 1298 to 1343; otherwise it was ruled
by the kings of Aragon.

Naples
The revolt of 1282, called the Sicilian Vespers, split the kingdom of Sicily
(see Sicily below) into an island half and a mainland half. The capital of

439
 APPENDIX A: MAIN DYNASTIES

the latter was the city of Naples. Here the descendants of Charles I of
Anjou ruled down to 1435, though frequently with rivals, either from
their own dynasty or from the so-called ‘second house of Anjou’
(sometimes, confusingly, called the ‘third house of Anjou’!), which was
descended from Louis of Anjou (d. 1384), younger brother of the king of
France. Louis’ grandson, René, was in effective control of Naples from
1435 to 1442, but the kingdom was then taken by Alfonso, king of Aragon
and Sicily, and, after his death in 1458, was ruled by his descendants as
a separate kingdom.

Navarre
Navarre (known as the kingdom of Pamplona until the twelfth century)
emerged as a kingdom in the ninth century, was ruled by various
branches of a native dynasty from 905 until 1234, then passed by
marriage to the counts of Champagne. In the later Middle Ages
Navarre was unusual in the number of queens-regnant it had (see p.
447). It therefore passed through several dynasties as calculated by male-
line descent. It was in the hands of the Capetian kings of France, either as
consorts or direct rulers from 1284 to 1328, then in the hands of a junior
branch of the Capetians, again as consorts or direct rulers, from 1328 to
1425.

Norway
Information about the early kings of Norway, mainly drawn from the sagas, is
uncertain. After the reign of Harald Hardrada (1046/7–66) most Norwegian
kings either were or claimed to be his descendant, down to 1319. In the later
Middle Ages, the three Scandinavian kingdoms often had common rulers:
Norway had a common king with Sweden from 1319 to 1343 and from 1362
to 1364; Norway and Denmark had a common king from 1380; Norway,
Denmark and Sweden from 1388 (de iure) and 1396 (de facto).

Poland
The native Piast dynasty ruled as dukes or kings down to 1370, with an
interval of rule by the Premyslids of Bohemia 1300–1306, but for much of

440
 APPENDIX A: MAIN DYNASTIES

that period (1138–1295, 1296–1300 and 1306–20) Poland was divided

into independent duchies with no king. Louis the Great of Hungary
ruled as king from 1370 to 1382 and was succeeded in Poland by his
daughter Hedwig ( Jadwiga), who married Jagiello, prince of Lithuania;
he and his descendants, the Jagiellonian dynasty, ruled down to 1572.

Portugal
Portugal emerged as a separate kingdom in the twelfth century. It was
based on the county of the same name, part of the kingdom of Leon-
Castile which Alfonso VI granted to his illegitimate daughter Teresa and
her husband, the immigrant nobleman Henry of Burgundy. After the
deaths of both Alfonso and Henry, Teresa began styling herself queen
(see above, pp. 134–5). Her son Alfonso removed her from power in
1128 and assumed the royal title in 1139. This was formally recognized
by the pope in 1179. All subsequent medieval kings and queens of
Portugal descend from Alfonso I, after 1385 through the illegitimate
John of Avis.

Scotland
The territory of modern Scotland was, in the early medieval period,
divided between the Irish kingdom of Dalriada on the west coast
(‘Scots’ originally meant ‘Irish’), the kingdom or kingdoms of the
Picts in the east and north and the kingdom of Strathclyde in the
south-west. South-east Scotland (Lothian) was Anglo-Saxon, while
Scandinavian settlements were established along the coasts and isles
from the ninth century. The ruling dynasty of Dalriada gradually
brought much of this area under its control. Kenneth Macalpine
(Cináed mac Alpin) (d. 858) is traditionally regarded as first king of
Picts and Scots and his male-line descendants ruled in Scotland until
the eleventh century, when the kingship passed through the female
line. This branch then ruled as kings of Scots continuously from 1057
to 1286. After a regency from 1286–92, John Balliol’s brief reign
(1292–6) and the English conquest, the Bruces reigned from 1306
to 1371, and the Stewarts inherited the throne through marriage in
1371.

441
 APPENDIX A: MAIN DYNASTIES

Sicily
The kingdom was created by Norman conquerors, headed by the sons of
Tancred de Hauteville, who established their authority over the island of
Sicily and much of the south Italian mainland in the eleventh century.
The royal title was conferred in 1130. In 1194, this Norman line was
displaced by Henry VI, the Holy Roman Emperor, who had married
Constance, last legitimate member of the royal family. Henry was
a member of the Hohenstaufen dynasty, descendants of the dukes of
Swabia, which is why Italian historians refer to Hohenstaufen rule in the
kingdom of Sicily as svevo (e.g. ‘lo stato normanno e svevo’). At the
invitation of the papacy, Charles of Anjou conquered the kingdom in
1266, dispossessing the Hohenstaufen. But Charles, the first king of the
Angevin line, lost the island of Sicily itself during the so-called Sicilian
Vespers of 1282 (see Naples, above). From 1282 Sicily was ruled by
members of the royal family of Aragon, sometimes by kings of Aragon
(1282–5, 1291–5), otherwise by a junior branch. Sicily was in permanent
union with Aragon after 1409.

Sweden
The twelfth and early thirteenth centuries were marked by rivalry
between two dynasties, those of Erik and Sverker. From 1250 to 1364
the Folkungs, descendants of the strongman Birger Jarl and his wife,
a member of the Erik dynasty, ruled. In the later Middle Ages, the three
Scandinavian kingdoms often had common rulers: Sweden had
a common king with Norway from 1319 to 1343 and 1362–4; Sweden,
Norway and Denmark from 1388 (de iure) and 1396 (de facto).

Visigothic Kingdom
The Visigoths settled in southern Gaul in 418, then extended into the
Iberian peninsula. Although they lost most of southern Gaul to the
Franks in 507, they ruled their Iberian kingdom down to the time of
the Muslim invasion of 711. They had native kings of various families,
which sometimes held the throne for more than one generation, as in the
periods 418–531 and 567–603.

442
 APPENDIX A: MAIN DYNASTIES

Wales
Wales was divided into several principalities, the most important of
which were Gwynedd in the north, Powys in the centre and
Deheubarth in the south. Anglo-Norman conquest and settlement
from the late eleventh century established Marcher lordships amongst
these native principalities. The last native prince was killed in 1282 and
his domains taken by the English Crown.

443
 APPENDIX B

Minorities

Provisional List of Kings, Emperors and Queens Regnant Coming to

the Throne Younger than 15 in Latin Christendom and Byzantium
500–1500. Ages Given are Often Approximations.
Name Kingdom Accession Age

Athalaric Ostrogoths 526 8

Theudebald Franks 547 parvulus
Childebert II Franks 575 5
Clothar II Franks 584 0
Theudebert II Franks 596 11
Theuderic II Franks 596 10
Sigebert II Franks 613 11
Adaloald Lombards 616 14
Reccared II Visigoths 621 parvulus
Sigebert III Franks 633/4 3
Clovis II Franks 639 6
Constans II Byzantium 641 11
Clothar III Franks 657 8
Childeric II Franks 662 7
Garibald Lombards 671 <8
Clovis III (IV) Franks 690/1 13/14
Liutpert Lombards 700 puerilis aetatis
Osred Northumbria 705 8
Dagobert III Franks 711 11–15
Constantine VI Byzantium 780 9
Michael III Byzantium 842 2
Charles of Provence Provence 855 10
Carloman West Franks 879 12
Louis the Blind Provence 890 9
Louis the Child East Franks 900 6
Constantine VII Byzantium 913 8
García I Sánchez Navarre 925 6
Lothar West Franks 954 13

444
 APPENDIX B: MINORITIES

(cont.)
Name Kingdom Accession Age

Edgar Mercia 957 14

Edward the Martyr England 975 13
Æthelred the Unready England 978 10
Otto III Germany 983 3
Alfonso V Leon 999 5
Vermudo III Leon 1028 11
Henry IV Germany 1056 5
Philip I France 1060 8
Sigurd Magnusson Norway 1103 13/14
Olaf Magnusson Norway 1103 4/5
Sigurd Haraldsson Norway 1136 5
Inge Haraldsson Norway 1136 3
Petronilla Aragon 1137 1
Malcolm IV Scotland 1153 12
Haakon Sigurdsson Norway 1157 10
Alfonso VIII Castile 1158 2
Magnus Erlingsson Norway 1161 5
Alfonso II Aragon 1164 7
Baldwin IV Jerusalem 1174 13
Alexius II Byzantium 1180 11
Baldwin V Jerusalem 1185 7
Frederick II Sicily 1198 2
Ladislas III Hungary 1204 4
James I Aragon 1213 5
Henry I Castile 1214 10
Henry III England 1216 9
Sancho II Portugal 1223 13
Louis IX France 1226 12
Alexander III Scotland 1249 7
Theobald II Navarre 1253 14
John IV Byzantium 1258 7
Erik V Klipping Denmark 1259 10
Joanna I Navarre 1274 1
Wenceslas II Bohemia 1278 6
Erik Magnusson Norway 1280 12
Erik Menved Denmark 1286 12
Birger Magnusson Sweden 1290 10
Ferdinand IV Leon-Castile 1295 9
Alfonso XI Leon-Castile 1312 1
John I France 1316 0
Magnus Eriksson Norway/Sweden 1319 3
Edward III England 1327 14
David II Scotland 1329 5
John V Byzantium 1341 9
Frederick III Sicily 1355 13
Olaf Denmark 1376 6
Richard II England 1377 10

445
 APPENDIX B: MINORITIES

(cont.)
Name Kingdom Accession Age

Maria Sicily 1377 14

Charles VI France 1380 11
Mary Hungary 1382 12
Beatrice Portugal 1383 10
Hedwig Poland 1384 10
Henry III Castile 1390 11
John II Castile 1406 1
James I Scotland 1406 11
Henry VI England 1422 0
Wladyslaw III Poland 1434 10
James II Scotland 1437 6
Alfonso V Portugal 1438 6
Ladislas Postumus Hungary 1440 0
James III Scotland 1460 9
Francis Phoebus Navarre 1479 10
Edward V England 1483 12
Charles VIII France 1483 13
Catherine Navarre 1483 14
James IV Scotland 1488 15 *

* Although James was 15 at accession he is included here since he was treated as a minor.

446
 APPENDIX C

Female Sovereigns

Provisional List of Queens Regnant and Empresses Regnant

in Latin Christendom and Byzantium 500–1500
Irene of Byzantium (797–802)+#
Zoe of Byzantium (1042)+#
Theodora of Byzantium (1042, 1055–6)+#
Urraca of Leon-Castile (1109–26)+#
Teresa of Portugal (1116–28/30)
Melisende of Jerusalem (1131–52/61)
Petronilla of Aragon (1137–64)
Sybilla of Jerusalem (1186–90)
Isabella of Jerusalem (1190–1205)
Constance of Sicily (1194–8)+‡
Maria of Jerusalem (1205–12)
Isabella II (Yolande) of Jerusalem (1212–28)
Joanna I of Navarre (1274–1305)+
Joanna II of Navarre (1328–49)
Joanna I of Naples (1343–81)+‡
Margaret of Denmark (1375), Norway (1380) and Sweden (1389) (d. 1412)
Maria of Sicily (1377/92–1401)+‡
Mary of Hungary (1382–5, 1386–95)+
Beatrice of Portugal (1383–5)+
Hedwig (Jadwiga) of Poland (1384–99)+
Joanna II of Naples (1414–35)+
Blanca of Navarre (1425–41)‡
Charlotte of Cyprus (1458–60)+
Catherine Cornaro of Cyprus (1474–89)+#
Isabella of Castile (1474–1504)‡
Leonor of Navarre (1479)
Catherine of Foix of Navarre (1483–1517)‡

Queens with name+ or image# shown alone on coins; shown jointly ‡.

447
 APPENDIX D: Family Trees

Balliol and Bruce

David I
(1124–53)

Henry
(d. 1152)

Malcolm IV William I David Earl of

(1153–65) (1165–1214) Huntingdon

Alexander II
Margaret Isabella Robert Bruce
(1214–49)

Alexander III
Devorguilla John Balliol ROBERT BRUCE
(1249–86)

Alexander David Margaret Erik II of

JOHN BALLIOL
(d. 1284) (d. 1281) (d. 1283) Norway

Margaret
(d. 1290)
 Claimants to Aragon 1410–12
James II
(1291–1327)

Alfonso IV Peter of
(1327–36) Ribagorza

Peter IV James of Alfonso of

John of Prades*
(1336–87) Urgell Gandia*

John I Martin I John I of

Eleanor Peter of Urgell
(1387–95) (1395–1410) Castile

Louis II of Martin the Henry III of Ferdinand of James of

Yolande
Anjou Young Castile Antequera* Urgell*

Louis III of Frederick de John II of

Anjou Luna (illeg.)* Castile * claimant
 Notes

INTRODUCTION: ROYAL FAMILIES

1. ‘Ad belli studium, ecce pater; circa Dei cultum, ecce mater’: Raoul de Caen, Gesta
Tancredi, p. 615.
2. ‘Plerique colum et pensa sibi mutuo transmittebant innuentes occultius ut ad mulie-
bres operas turpiter demigraret quisquis huius militiae inveniretur immunis’:
Itinerarium peregrinorum, 1. 17, ed. Stubbs, p. 33, ed. Mayer, p. 277 (after Henry II and
Philip Augustus take the cross in January 1188).
3. ‘a fin que la chose publique feust mieux et plus puissamment deffendue par les malles
que par les fumelles’: Taylor, ‘The Salic Law and the Valois Succession to the French
Crown’, p. 363, citing Raoul de Presles’ translation of the City of God in BnF, MS fr
22912–3, fol. 151 (this was composed in 1370–5 and presented to Charles V).
4. Compare the statistics in Lilie, ‘Der Kaiser in der Statistik. Subversive Gedanken zur
angeblichen Allmacht der byzantinischen Kaiser’; he deals with the whole Byzantine
period down to 1453, and counts ninety-four emperors, basing his list on the eighty-
eight in Ostrogorsky, Geschichte des byzantinischen Staates, p. 479, but adding Artabasdos
and counting five emperors twice because they had two periods of rule (see his
comments at p. 214 n. 10).
5. Medieval Slavic Lives of Saints and Princes, tr. Kantor, p. 45 (Slavonic Life of Constantine
(Cyril), c. 9).
6. Aristakès of Lastivert, Récit des malheurs de la nation Arménienne, IX (46), p. 32; I am
grateful to Tim Greenwood for valuable advice on the translations from this text.
7. There is a large bibliography. Important works that also point to further reading
include Simms, From Kings to Warlords: The Changing Political Structure of Gaelic Ireland
in the Later Middle Ages; Jaski, Early Irish Kingship and Succession; Byrne, Irish Kings and
High Kings; Warntjes, ‘Regnal Succession in Early Medieval Ireland’.
8. ‘Suein et Harold a concubina geniti erant, qui, ut mos est barbaris, aequam tunc inter
liberos Chnud sortiti sunt partem hereditatis’: Adam of Bremen, Gesta Hammaburgensis
ecclesiae pontificum, 2. 74, ed. Schmeidler, p. 134.
9. ‘In sola mulierum copula modum nesciunt; quisque secundum facultatem suarum
virium duas aut tres et amplius simul habet; divites et principes absque numero. Nam
et filios ex tali coniunctione genitos habent legitimos’: Adam of Bremen, Gesta
Hammaburgensis ecclesiae pontificum, 4. 21, ed. Schmeidler, p. 251.

450
 NOTES TO PAGES 5–11

10. Bartlett, Gerald of Wales 1146–1223, pp. 38–45 (repr., 39–44).

11. ‘In hoc regno, cujus non populi voto aut electione sed sanguinis propagatione, nec jure
belli, rex dinoscitur constitui’: Memorials of King Henry VII, ed. Gairdner, p. 397.

1 CHOOSING A BRIDE

1. Gautier d’Arras, Eracle, ed. Pratt, line 1267, p. 38, ed. Löseth, line 1275, p. 67.
2. ‘exceptis eis rebus et negociis, sine quibus res publica terrena non subsistit, coniugio
videlicet usuque armorum’: Notker Balbulus, Gesta Karoli magni imperatoris, 2. 10, ed.
Haefele, p. 66.
3. Gregory of Tours, Libri historiarum decem, 4. 26, ed. Krusch and Levison, pp. 157–9.
4. Fredegar, Chronica, 4. 35, ed. Krusch, p. 134, ed. Wallace-Hadrill, p. 22.
5. Fredegar, Chronica, 4. 58, ed. Krusch, p. 150, ed. Wallace-Hadrill, p. 49.
6. Wallace-Hadrill, The Long-Haired Kings, pp. 203–4. See Ewig, ‘Studien zur merowin-
gischen Dynastie’, pp. 38–46; Dailey, Queens, Consorts, Concubines: Gregory of Tours and
Women of the Merovingian Elite, pp. 80–117.
7. ‘uxorem de militari ordine sibi imparem duxerit. Quomodo ergo magnus dux
patietur de suis militibus feminam sumptam reginam fieri sibique dominari?’:
Richer of Saint-Rémi, Historiae, 4 .11, ed. Hoffmann, p. 238. See Van Winter,
‘Uxorem de militari ordine sibi imparem’. Brühl, Deutschland-Frankreich: die
Geburt zweier Völker, pp. 591–3, argues cogently that neither were these words
uttered by Archbishop Adalbero of Rheims, as Richer claims, nor was Charles
actually married to a woman significantly below him in status. This does not affect
the point that Richer believed such a disparaging marriage would have been
a powerful objection against Charles’ candidacy.
8. ‘Equidem multo saluberrimum iudicarim reipublicae, si principum affinitates intra
regni fines continerentur’: Erasmus, Institutio principis christiani, 9. 1, ed. Herding,
p. 208.
9. Martin, A Bride for the Tsar: Bride-Shows and Marriage Politics in Early Modern Russia, p. 4.
10. Ross, Edward IV, pp. 84–103.
11. ὅτι τὲ ἐξ ἀλλοδαπῆς ἐστὶ καὶ συγγενῶν ὄχλος οὐ προσῆν αὐτῇ, δι’ ὧν ὁ βασιλεὺς ὀχλοῖτο:
Anna Comnena, Alexias, 3. 2. 3, ed. Reinsch and Kambylis, p. 91.
12. Hellmann, ‘Die Heiraten der Karolinger’; Konecny, Die Frauen des karolingischen
Königshauses; Kasten, Königssöhne und Königsherrschaft: Untersuchungen zur Teilhabe am
Reich in der Merowinger- und Karolingerzeit, pp. 252–7; Pohl, ‘Why Not to Marry
a Foreign Woman: Stephen III’s Letter to Charlemagne’.
13. MacLean, Kingship and Politics in the Late Ninth Century: Charles the Fat and the End of the
Carolingian Empire, p. 2.
14. The sources call them both count and duke: Thegan, Gesta Hludowici imperatoris, 4, 26,
ed. Tremp, pp. 178, 214; Astronomus, Vita Hludowici imperatoris, 8, 32, ed. Tremp,
pp. 308, 392; Annales regni Francorum, s.a. 819, ed. Kurze, p. 150.
15. ‘Volumus etiam ut, si alicui illorum post decessum nostrum tempus nubendi venerit, ut
cum consilio et consensu senioris fratris uxorem ducat; illud tamen propter discordias

451
 NOTES TO PAGES 12–17

evitandas et occasiones noxias auferendas cavendum decernimus, ut de exteris genti-

bus nullus illorum uxorem accipere praesumat’: Capitularia regum Francorum, 1, ed.
Boretius, no. 136, p. 272 (the ‘Ordinatio Imperii’).
16. Carloman married a daughter of the important Bavarian count and duke Ernst, Louis
the Younger married Liutgard, daughter of the Saxon count Liudolf, Charles the Fat
married Richardis, daughter of the Alsatian count Erchanger.
17. These statements are based on Werner, ‘Die Nachkommen Karls des Grossen’.
18. Barlow, The Godwins: The Rise and Fall of a Noble Dynasty, p. 128.
19. Καὶ περὶ ταύτης τῆς ὑποθέσεως παραγγελία καὶ διάταξις φοβερὰ καὶ ἀπαραποίητος τοῦ
μεγάλου καὶ ἁγίου Κωνσταντίνου ἐναπογέγραπται ἐν τῇ ἱερᾷ τραπέζῃ τῆς καθολικῆς τῶν
Χριστιανῶν ἐκκλησίας τῆς Ἁγίας Σοφίας· τοῦ μηδέποτε βασιλέα Ῥωμαίων συμπενθεριάσαι
μετὰ ἔθνους παρηλλαγμένοις καὶ ξένοις ἔθεσι χρωμένου τῆς Ῥωμαϊκῆς καταστάσεως,
μάλιστα δὲ ἀλλοπίστου καὶ ἀβαπτίστου, εἰ μὴ μετὰ μόνων τῶν Φράγγων: Constantine
Porphyrogenitus, De administrando imperio, 13, ed. Moravcsik, p. 70.
20. ‘Inaudita res est, ut porphyrogeniti porphyrogenita, hoc est in purpura nati filia in
purpura nata, gentibus misceatur’: Liudprand of Cremona, ‘Legatio’, 15, in Liudprandi
opera, ed. Becker, p. 184.
21. Skylitzes, Synopsis historiarum, ed. Thurn, p. 336.
22. ‘Ipso anno Erchanger cum rege pacificatus est, cuius sororem . . . rex tanquam pacis
obsidem in matrimonium accepit’: Annales Alamannici, continuatio Sangallensis tertia, s.a.
913, ed. Pertz, p. 56; ‘ut aiunt, sororis sue filiam Karolus tanquam pacis obsidem
Widekindi filio dedit uxorem’: Vita Godefridi comitis Cappenbergensis prima, ed.
Niemeyer and Ehlers-Kisseler, p. 157; see Althoff, ‘Namengebung und adliges
Selbstverständnis’, p. 134.
23. ‘filia sua Gisla, quae esset vas pacis, pigneratrix federis’: William of Malmesbury, Gesta
regum Anglorum, 2. 112, ed. Mynors et al., p. 170.
24. For a note about the empire (‘Holy Roman Empire’) see Appendix A; for comment on
the significance of the marriage in the eyes of the Hohenstaufen, see Weller, Die
Heiratspolitik des deutschen Hochadels im 12. Jahrhundert, pp. 192–5.
25. ‘Quae cum pulcherrimae essent et ab eo plurimum diligerentur, mirum dictu, quod
nullam earum cuiquam aut suorum aut exterorum nuptum dare voluit, sed omnes
secum usque ad obitum suum in domo sua retinuit, dicens se earum contubernio
carere non posse’: Einhard, Vita Karoli Magni, 19, ed. Holder-Egger, p. 25.
26. Dagron, Emperor and Priest: The Imperial Office in Byzantium, p. 33.
27. John’s marriage to Isabella of Gloucester took place before he was king (or was
expected to be king) and was dissolved in the first year of his reign.
28. Margaret, wife of Harold Hen (1074–80); Bodil, wife of Erik Evergood (1095–1103);
Helwig, wife of Valdemar IV (1340–75). Helwig was the daughter of Duke Erik II of
Schleswig and hence a cousin of the king. See Skovgaard-Petersen, ‘Queenship in
Medieval Denmark’, with list on pp. 40–2.
29. See, for example, the imaginative maps of bride exchange in Spiess, ‘Europa heiratet.
Kommunikation und Kulturtransfer im Kontext europäischer Königsheiraten des
Spätmittelalters’; also the thoughtful comments in Spiess, ‘Unterwegs zu einem

452
 NOTES TO PAGES 17–18

fremden Ehemann: Brautfahrt und Ehe in europäischen Fürstenhäusern des

Spätmittelalters’.
30. Justinian II and Theodora the Khazar, Constantine V and Irene the Khazar, Romanos II
and Eudokia (Berta); see the convenient list of empresses in Garland, Byzantine
Empresses: Women and Power in Byzantium, AD 527–1204, pp. 229–31. It should be
noted that the marriage of Justinian II and Theodora, sister of the Khazar ruler, was
entered into when Justinian was in exile, so is hardly the same as a marriage negotiated
with a ruling emperor.
31. Macrides, ‘Dynastic Marriages’, p. 268 n. 26, lists ten negotiated and three achieved
marriages between Byzantine and western ruling families of the eighth, ninth and tenth
centuries; Schreiner, ‘Die kaiserliche Familie: Ideologie und Praxis im Rahmen der
internationalen Beziehungen in Byzanz’, pp. 763–71, lists fifty-seven actual or projected
foreign marriage projects from the sixth to the twelfth centuries, plus five doubtful cases.
32. Bryennios, Historiae, ed. Gautier, p. 77, says she was the eldest daughter of Samuel, Tsar
of the Bulgarians: πρεσβυτέρᾳ τῶν βασιλέως Βουλγάρων Σαμουὴλ θυγατέρων Αἰκατερίνᾳ.
Samuel was Tsar 997–1014. Skylitzes, Synopsis historiarum, ed. Thurn, p. 492, says she was
the daughter of Ivan (John) Vladislav, Samuel’s nephew, who conducted the last
resistance of the Bulgars to Byzantine conquest in 1015–18: Αἰκατερίναν τὴν θυγατέρα
τοῦ Βλαδισθλάβου τοῦ Βουλγαρίας βασιλέως. Scholars seem to accept that she was the
daughter of Ivan Vladislav.
33. Some are discussed in Nicol, ‘Mixed Marriages in Byzantium in the Thirteenth
Century’.
34. ‘in mores tamen tam recenter abhorruisti redire Latinos, Graece consuetudinis nimis
procaciter emulatrix . . . accepta benedictione Latina, susceptoque corpore Christi,
Latinis traditionibus consecrato’: Innocent III, Epistolae 8. 135 (134), Die Register
Innocenz’ III., ed. Hageneder et al., 8, p. 249 (PL 215, col. 714); see Nicol, ‘Mixed
Marriages in Byzantium in the Thirteenth Century’, pp. 162–3, for this and her later
return to ‘Greek custom’. For the name change, and the possibility that she reverted to
Margaret, see Thoma, Namensänderungen in Herrscherfamilien des mittelalterlichen Europa,
pp. 180–1.
35. Koran 5. 5; Friedmann, Tolerance and Coercion in Islam: Interfaith Relations in the Muslim
Tradition, pp. 160–93, analyzes early Sunni tradition on this subject.
36. Continuatio isidoriana hispana. Crónica mozárabe de 754, 59, ed. López Pereira, pp. 232–4
(also in MGH, AA 11, p. 356); Ibn ‘Abd al-Hakam, ‘Narrative of the Conquest of al-
Andalus’, pp. 39–40; Barton, Conquerors, Brides, and Concubines: Interfaith Relations and
Social Power in Medieval Iberia, pp. 15–17.
37. Codex Carolinus, ed. Gundlach, no. 95, p. 643 (dated to 785–91).
38. ‘filiam suam dux Francorum nomine Eudo causa federis ei in coniugio copulandam ob
persecutionem Arabum differendam iam olim tradiderat’: Continuatio isidoriana hispana.
Crónica mozárabe de 754, 79, ed. López Pereira, pp. 254–6 (also in MGH, AA 11, p. 361).
39. El-Hajji, ‘Intermarriage between Andalusia and Northern Spain in the Umayyad
Period’; Barton, Conquerors, Brides, and Concubines: Interfaith Relations and Social Power
in Medieval Iberia, pp. 25–32.

453
 NOTES TO PAGES 19–23

40. ‘Destruyó las murallas de Qastiliya, conquistó sus castellos y obligó a pactar a su rey,
que le dio su hija en matrimonio’: Una descripción anónima de al-Andalus, ed. Molina,
2, p. 198 (Spanish transl.); Barton, Conquerors, Brides, and Concubines: Interfaith
Relations and Social Power in Medieval Iberia, p. 27; Molina, ‘Las campanãs de
Almanzor a la luz de un nuevo texto’, pp. 246–7.
41. Barton, Conquerors, Brides, and Concubines: Interfaith Relations and Social Power in Medieval
Iberia, pp. 123–8, summarizes the evidence and discusses the legend; see also the
comments of González, Repoblación de Castilla la Nueva, 1, pp. 90–1.
42. Nicol, The Last Centuries of Byzantium 1261–1453, p. 74; Bryer, ‘Greek Historians on the
Turks: The Case of the First Byzantine-Ottoman Marriage’, p. 481.
43. Ibn Battuta, Travels, tr. Gibb and Beckingham, 2 (117), pp. 488, 497–501; she would be
a daughter of Andronicus III.
44. Bryer, ‘Greek Historians on the Turks: The Case of the First Byzantine–Ottoman
Marriage’; Nicol, The Reluctant Emperor: A Biography of John Cantacuzene, Byzantine
Emperor and Monk, c. 1295–1383, pp. 76–8, 89.
45. Friedmann, Tolerance and Coercion in Islam: Interfaith Relations in the Muslim Tradition,
p. 173, citing Ibn ‘Abbas.
46. Annales Bohemiae (1196–1278), s.a. 1261, ed. Emler, p. 297.
47. See the comments of Van Houts, Married Life in the Middle Ages, 900–1300, pp. 162–3.
48. Eadhild to Hugh the Great 926, Edith to Otto (I) 929–30, (another) Eadgifu to Louis,
brother of Rudolf II of Burgundy c. 930.
49. MacLean, ‘Making a Difference in Tenth-Century Politics: King Athelstan’s Sisters and
Frankish Queenship’, p. 169; see also Foot, Æthelstan: The First King of England, pp.
44–52.
50. ‘lucidissimi tres radii alias et oppositas Europae partes illustraverint’: Gerald of Wales,
Topographia Hibernica, 3. 54, ed. Dimock, p. 202.
51. ‘Inter hos itaque populos, victu, vestitu, moribus, habitatione tam remotos ab Anglia,
filias regis Angliae commorantes, barbaries saxea Saxonum, dubius Hyspanorum cum
Agarenis conflictus, tyrannis effera Siculorum, poterant in continuum horrorem indu-
cere, nisi generositas aviae suae Matildis imperatricis et in ejus foemineo corpore virile
pectus, neptibus suis tolerantiae semitas . . . imitabiles praemonstrassent’: Ralph de
Diceto, Ymagines historiarum, ed. Stubbs, 2, p. 17.
52. See Ahlers, Die Welfen und die englischen Könige 1165–1235.
53. As suggested by Gillingham, Richard Coeur de Lion: Kingship, Chivalry and War in the
Twelfth Century, pp. 70, 124–5.
54. ‘rex Castellae . . . laboravit ut haberet totam Vasconiam, quam sibi credebat de iure
competere tanquam sibi promissam ab Henrico, rege Anglorum, socero suo.
Duxerat quidem nobilis rex Castelle filiam dicti Henrici regis dominam Alienor . . .
cum qua sepe dictus rex Henricus dicebatur genero suo, regi Castelle, Vasconiam
promisisse . . . rex Castelle cum quibusdam de uassallis suis intrauit Vasconiam et fere
totam occupauit preter Baionam et Burdegalim; habuit et Blayam et Borc, que sunt
ultra Garonam, et terram que est inter duo maria, et sic reuersus est in regnum
suum’: Chronica latina regum Castellae, 17, ed. Charlo Brea, pp. 51–2; see González, El

454
 NOTES TO PAGES 23–5

reino de Castilla en la epoca de Alfonso VIII, 1, pp. 865–75. The Worcester Annals report
that King John, during his French expedition of 1206, captured the castle of ‘Mons
Alba’, which was garrisoned by the seneschal of the king of Spain, with 120 knights
and 2,000 sergeants: Annales Prioratus de Wigornia, ed. Luard, p. 394; Wendover
reports the capture of the castle on 1 August, with some details, but does not
mention the seneschal of the king of Spain: Matthew Paris, Chronica majora, ed.
Luard, 2, pp. 494–5. The most important southern French town called Montauban
is in Tarn-et-Garonne, about 30 miles north of Toulouse. Warren, King John, p. 134,
calls the castle that John captured ‘Montauban (Bourg-en-Gironde)’. Bourg (the
‘Borc’ in the passage above) is 18 miles north of Bordeaux and also known as Bourg-
sur-Gironde. However, in the second edition of 1978 (pp. 117–18) he identifies it as
Montauban in Tarn-et-Garonne. The capture of ‘Mons Alba’ was important enough
to be used as a legal dating point: Beverley, East Riding of Yorkshire Archives and
Local Studies Service, DDCC/141/68/p41/b.
55. ‘ratione donationis quam fecit, vel fecisse dicitur, dominus Henricus quondam rex
Angl’: Foedera (new edn.), 1. 1, p. 310 (the document is now TNA, E 30/1108).
56. ‘devolutum est ius regni Angliae ad reginam Castellae et haeredes suos, quae sola tunc
de omnibus fratribus et sororibus suis superstes fuit praeter dictum Johannem. Ipsa
autem regina et haeredes sui ius quod habuerunt in regno nobis et filiae suae quam
habemus uxorem liberaliter concesserunt’: Thorne, Chronica, cols. 1868–9; Foedera
(new edn.), 1. 1, p. 140 (from BL, MS Cotton Julius D II, a letter to St Augustine’s
Abbey, Canterbury).
57. Gesta regis Henrici secundi Benedicti abbatis, ed. Stubbs, 2, pp. 132–3; Roger of Howden,
Chronica, ed. Stubbs, 3, pp. 29, 55, 66.
58. The Records of the Parliaments of Scotland to 1707, ed. Brown et al., 1428/7/4.
59. Charters and Other Records of the City and Royal Burgh of Kirkwall with the Treaty of 1468
between Denmark and Scotland, pp. 96–102; Crawford, ‘The Pawning of Orkney and
Shetland: A Reconsideration of the Events of 1460–9’, pp. 37–8, 52–3. The
Norwegians made several later efforts to pay the cash but were rebuffed.
60. ‘Erat enim inter eos affinitatis vinculum, nam eorum uxores sorores erant, filie
Berengarii senioris comitis de Sulcebach, magni et egregii principis et in regno
Theutonicorum potentissimi: unde ampliore erga eum habundabat gratia et liberal-
itatem in eum et suos tenebatur, maxime interveniente imperatrice, effundere cumu-
latiorem’: William of Tyre, Chronicon, 16. 23, ed. Huygens, 2, p. 749.
61. Conradi III et filii eius Heinrici Diplomata, ed. Hausmann, nos. 229, DDH. (VI.) 11, pp.
404–6, 531–2.
62. ‘Hic [Charles the Simple] reliquit filium Ludovicum ex Eadgiva Anglorum regis filia
susceptum. Qui calamitatis paternae procellis semet involvi metuens, ad Anglos
Saxones maternae affinitatis invitatus gratia se contulit’: Chronicon sancti Benigni
Divionensis, col. 814.
63. His nickname certainly by the 1060s: ‘Hludovicus transmarinus quia de Anglorum terra
revocatus est’: Gautier, ‘Aux origines du dessin généalogique en France: l’exemple de
l’abbaye Saint-Aubin d’Angers (XIe-XIIe siècle)’, p. 12 (photograph of Angers,

455
 NOTES TO PAGES 25–8

Bibliothèque municipale, MS 58, fol. IIv). In the twelfth century, it is common:

‘regnante Ludovico transmarino’: Orderic Vitalis, Historia ecclesiastica, 5. 9, ed.
Chibnall, 3, p. 80; ‘Karolus Simplex genuit alium Ludovicum transmarinum’: Ralph
de Diceto, Opuscula, p. 219.
64. ‘les aliances des mariages des belles dames nées du sang royal, de qui naîtra nouveaulz
parens es estranges contrés et affinitez es nacions lointaines’: Christine de Pisan, Le livre
des fais et bonnes meurs du sage roy Charles V, 2. 17, ed. Solente, 1, p. 178.
65. ‘Semper enim Romanae ecclesiae obedientiae iugo placuit nobis colla submittere, et
nisi primo nobis ecclesia Romana defuerit, non erit ab ea nobis discendi voluntas’:
William of Æbelholt, Epistolae, 1. 30, ed. Christensen et al., p. 474.
66. ‘conquestus est ei de Philippo rege Franciae, qui Botildam (recte Ingeburgam) sponsam
suam, sororem illius, injuste relinquerat, et aliam loco ejus in uxorem duxerat’: Roger
of Howden, Chronica, ed. Stubbs, 4, pp. 85–6.
67. Cronica et cartularium monasterii de Dunis, ed. Van De Putte, pp. 530–1, nos. CCCCLXII
(601), CCCCLXIV (604); Davidsohn, Philipp II. August von Frankreich und Ingeborg,
p. 277.
68. ‘Pergo ignota locis, trepidans quidnam antea discam:/ gentem, animos, mores, oppida,
rura, nemus?/ Quem, precor, inveniam peregrinis advena terris, / quo mihi nemo
venis civis, amice, parens?’: Venantius Fortunatus, Carmina, 6. 5, ‘De Gelesuintha’, lines
111–14, ed. Reydellet, 2, p. 64 (MGH, AA 4.1, p. 139).
69. ‘Filie regum et principum in deliciis a lacte nutrite, nichil scientes preter gloriam et
felicitatem natalitie terre, nubunt in exteras nationes et aliena regna, barbaros mores et
ignotas linguas disciture sevisque dominis ac repugnantibus a naturali usu legibus
serviture’: Goscelin of Saint-Bertin, Liber confortatorius, ed. Talbot, p. 41; see the com-
ments of Van Houts, ‘The Flemish Contribution to Biographical Writing in England in
the Eleventh Century’, p. 124.
70. κατέλιπον ’Ελισσαῖον τὸν εὐνοῦχον καὶ νοτάριον πρὸς τὸ διδάξαι αὐτὴν τά τε τῶν Γραικῶν
γράμματα καὶ τὴν γλῶσσαν, καὶ παιδεῦσαι αὐτὴν τὰ ἦθη τῆς ‘Ρωμαίων βασιλείας:
Theophanes, Chronographia, AM 6274 (AD 781/2), ed. de Boor, 1, p. 455.
71. Ekkehard IV, Casus sancti Galli, 90, ed. Haefele, p. 184; the text says she was betrothed to
‘Constantino Graeco regi’, which would suggest Constantine VII (913–59), but there
seems to be agreement that the engagement was actually with Constantine’s son
Romanos, later Romanos II (959–63). He and Hadwig were of the same age. See
Garland, Byzantine Empresses: Women and Power in Byzantium, AD 527–1204, p. 126.
72. ‘Deinde consecratam reginam usque ad tempestivum tempus nuptiarum studiose
nutriri precepit, in quo nutrimento et linguam addisceret et se secundum Teutonicos
mores componeret’: Gesta Normannorum Ducum, ed. Van Houts, 2, p. 218, for other
details, and her age, see the notes to this passage; Annales de Wintonia, ed. Luard, p. 43;
Anglo-Saxon Chronicle (E), s.a. 1110, ed. Plummer and Earle, p. 242; Chibnall, The
Empress Matilda: Queen Consort, Queen Mother and Lady of the English, pp. 9, 22–5.
73. Thoma, Namensänderungen in Herrscherfamilien des mittelalterlichen Europa, pp. 169–201.
74. Constantine VII Porphyrogenitus, De administrando imperio, 26, ed. Moravcsik, p. 112;
Liudprand of Cremona, ‘Antapodosis’, 5. 20, in Liudprandi opera, ed. Becker, p. 141.

456
 NOTES TO PAGES 28–9

75. There is a letter of Hildegard of Bingen to ‘Bertha regina Graecorum’: Epistularium

Hildegardis Bingensis, classis 4, ep. 319, ed. Van Acker and Klaes-Hachmöller, p. 79. The
other evidence that she was first called Berta comes from one local monastic chronicle
and an entry in a necrology: ‘Anno Domini MCXLII Chunradus rex sororem uxoris sue
Berhtam filiam domini Perngeri comitis de Sultzpach domino Manueli
Constantinopituno imperatori (deponsavit an. 1144) misit uxorem’: Lateinische
Chronik des Klosters Kastl, ed. Moritz, p. 106; cf. ibid., p. 148; there is record of the
death on 28 September of ‘Berhta imperatrix Grecorum’: Monumenta Necrologica
Claustroneoburgensis, ed. Fuchs, p. 60. On Berta, see Dendorfer, Adelige Gruppenbildung
und Königsherrschaft: die Grafen von Sulzbach und ihr Beziehungsgeflecht im 12. Jahrhundert,
pp. 98–102; Weller, Die Heiratspolitik des deutschen Hochadels im 12. Jahrhundert, pp. 59–67.
76. Choniates, ‘De Manuele Comneno’, in Historia, 1. 2, ed. Bekker, pp. 72–3, ed. van
Dieten, pp. 53–4.
77. ‘filio imperatoris Heinrico regi venit regina Cunihild nomine, quae ibidem in natali
apostolorum regalem coronam accepit et mutato nomine in benedictione Cunigund
dicta est’: Annales Hildesheimenses, ed. Waitz, p. 40; the name forms Cunihild and
Gunhild both occur: Thoma, Namensänderungen in Herrscherfamilien des mittelalterlichen
Europa, pp. 196–7.
78. ‘propter barbariem Danorum sive Nortmannorum nominum’: Giesebrecht, Geschichte
der deutschen Kaiserzeit, 2, p. 714 (a letter of Siegfried of Gorze from 1043, discussed on
pp. 30–1.).
79. William of Malmesbury, Gesta regum Anglorum, 5. 394, ed. Mynors et al., p. 716; Orderic
Vitalis, Historia ecclesiastica, 8. 22, ed. Chibnall, 4, p. 272; in the Durham Liber Vitae, she
appears both as ‘Magtild regina’ (fol. 15v) and as ‘Eadgith’, along with her brothers
(fol. 47), ed. Rollason and Rollason, 1, pp. 92, 138.
80. ‘sa mere, qui estoit venue de Espaigne, n’avoit ne parens ne amis en tout le royaume de
France’: Jean de Joinville, Vie de saint Louis, 72, ed. Monfrin, p. 36; ‘femme estrange’,
‘estrange femme’: ibid., 72, 74, pp. 36, 38; Grant, Blanche of Castile, Queen of France, p. 82,
says Joinville’s claim is ‘untrue’ but she refutes it by referring to friends Blanche built up
after her arrival in France.
81. ‘exhilaravit’: Adam of Eynsham, Magna Vita sancti Hugonis, 5. 13, ed. Douie and Farmer,
2, p. 156.
82. The Court and Household of Eleanor of Castile in 1290: An Edition of British Library, Additional
Manuscript 35294, ed. Parsons, p. 12 n. 35; Parsons, Eleanor of Castile: Queen and Society in
Thirteenth-Century England, p. 54; for other aspects of Eleanor’s cultural influence in
England see Tolley, ‘Eleanor of Castile and the “Spanish” Style’.
83. ‘Cibos quoque suos manibus non tangebat, sed ab eunuchis eius alimenta quaeque
minutius concidebantur in frusta, quae mox illa quibusdam fuscinulis aureis atque
bidentibus ori suo ligurriens adhibebat’: Peter Damian, Epistolae 66 (Institutio monialis),
ed. Reindel, 2, p. 270 (also in PL 145, col. 744, c. 11); the lady has been identified as
Maria Argyropoula, sister of the Byzantine emperor Romanos III (1028–34) and wife of
John Orseolo, son of (and co-ruler with) Doge Peter II Orseolo (991–1008): Ciggaar,
Western Travellers to Constantinople: The West and Byzantium, 962–1204, p. 266. Herrin,

457
 NOTES TO PAGES 30–2

Byzantium: The Surprising Life of a Medieval Empire, pp. 203–11, ‘Venice and the Fork’,
takes the passage as the starting point of a brief discussion of Byzantine–Western
relations in the period.
84. ‘Quia videlicet multa superflua et luxuriosa mulierum ornamenta, quibus Grecia uti
solet, sed eatenus in Germanię Francię que provinciis erant incognita, huc primo detuli,
memeque eisdem plus quam humanę naturę conveniret, circumdans et in huiusmodi
habitu nocivo incedens alias mulieres similia appetentes peccare feci’: Otloh of
St. Emmeran, Liber Visionum, 17, ed. Schmidt, pp. 91–2 (written c. 1062).
85. ‘coeperunt confluere gratia eiusdem reginae in Franciam atque Burgundiam, ab
Arvernia et Aquitania, homines omni levitate vanissimi, moribus et veste distorti,
armis et equorum faleris incompositi, a medio capitis comis nudati, histrionum more
barbis rasi, caligis et ocreis turpissimi, fidei et pacis foedere omnino vacui’: Rodulfus
Glaber, Historiarum libri quinque, 3. 40, ed. France, p. 166. Glaber mistakenly thought
that Queen Constance was the daughter of the duke of Aquitaine and hence
identified her followers as Aquitainians, ibid., p. 107 n. 5. On Constance, see Woll,
Die Königinnen des hochmittelalterlichen Frankreich, 987–1237/38, pp. 64–95.
86. ‘Corpore perverso creat haec nunc vita tyrannos,/ Trunca veste viros, sine federe pacis
ineptos./ Consilio muliebre gemit respublica laxa’: Rodulfus Glaber, Historiarum libri
quinque, 3. 40, ed. France, pp. 166–8.
87. The relationship is set out in a family tree in Parisse, ‘Sigefroid, abbé de Gorze, et le
mariage du roi Henri III’, p. 553; see also p. 330.
88. ‘honestas regni, quae temporibus priorum imperatorum veste et habitu nec non in
armis et equitatione decentissime viguerat, nostris diebus postponitur, et ignominiosa
Franciscarum ineptiarum consuetudo introducitur, scilicet in tonsione barbarum, in
turpissima et pudicis obtutibus execranda decurtatione ac deformitate vestium mutis-
que aliis novitatibus’: Giesebrecht, Geschichte der deutschen Kaiserzeit, 2, pp. 714–19. The
letter is also printed, with French translation, in Parisse, ‘Sigefroid, abbé de Gorze, et le
mariage du roi Henri III’, pp. 554–64.
89. Chronica regia Coloniensis, continuatio secunda, ed. Waitz, pp. 186–7 (s.a. 1210, although
the event took place in 1213).
90. Rydén, ‘The Bride-Shows at the Byzantine Court – History or Fiction?’; Afinogenov,
‘The Bride-Show of Theophilos: Some Notes on the Sources’. Both scholars assume the
bride shows are fictional. For a vigorous assertion of their historicity see Treadgold,
‘The Bride-Shows of the Byzantine Emperors’; Treadgold, ‘The Historicity of Byzantine
Bride-Shows’. Dagron, Emperor and Priest: The Imperial Office in Byzantium, p. 47, simply
says ‘These accounts . . . seem to be largely true.’
91. Niketas, The Life of St Philaretos the Merciful, ed. Rydén, pp. 82–92; the Life was written
around 821. There is a discussion in Herrin, Women in Purple: Rulers of Medieval
Byzantium, pp. 132–8.
92. Hunger, ‘Die Schönheitskonkurrenz in “Belthandros und Chrysantza” und die
Brautschau am byzantinischen Kaiserhof ’, pp. 151–2 (‘das idealisierte Porträt einer
Kaiserin’); Rydén, ‘The Bride-Shows at the Byzantine Court – History or Fiction?’,
p. 175; Kazhdan and Sherry, ‘The Tale of a Happy Fool: The Vita of St. Philaretos the

458
 NOTES TO PAGES 33–4

Merciful (BHG 1511z-1512b)’, p. 353 n. 7; Vinson, ‘The Life of Theodora and the
Rhetoric of the Byzantine Bride-show’, p. 48 n. 50; Niketas, The Life of St Philaretos the
Merciful, ed. Rydén, p. 89 n. 95.
93. Martin, A Bride for the Tsar: Bride-Shows and Marriage Politics in Early Modern Russia, pp.
55–6.
94. ‘undecumque adductas procerum filias inspitiens’: Astronomus, Vita Hludowici imper-
atoris, 32, ed. Tremp, p. 392; see 195–6 below.
95. Vita S. Theophanonis Imperatricis, 10, ed. Kurtz, p. 6.
96. ‘Habet etiam in mandatis, quod videat pectus eius nudum. Nam secundum iudicia sibi
data cognoscetur, an sit apta ad prolem, quam multum desiderat dominus rex’: Acta
aragonensia, 1, ed. Finke, no. 319, p. 479.
97. Ibid., p. 484.
98. ‘la mandoe ad vedere dali duchi d’Orliens et Borbone et da madama di Borbone et
cum loro andoe mons. d’Aubigny, quale è stato multo adoperato in questa praticha et
tornoe ad fare la relatione de la conditione sua, perchè l’havevano vista nuda, et in
effecto è un pocho zoppa’: Labande-Mailfert, ‘Le mariage d’Anne de Bretagne avec
Charles VIII vu par Erasme Brasca’, p. 26 n. 23, from the reports of the Milanese envoy
Erasmus Brasca. The ‘mons. d’Aubigny’ is Bérault or Bernard Stuart, lord of Aubigny,
on whom see Contamine, ‘Stuart, Bérault (1452/3–1508), Soldier and Diplomat’,
ODNB, 53, pp. 134–5.
99. ‘ut quae ab eis placuisset sibi in matrimonium elegisset’: Æthelweard, Chronicon,
Prologue, ed. Campbell, p. 2.
100. Meller et al., eds., Königin Editha und ihre Grablegen in Magdeburg, pp. 105–56, esp.
p. 149.
101. Official Correspondence of Thomas Bekynton, ed. Williams, 2, p. 181 (modernized).
102. Foedera (original edition), 12, pp. 142–5.
103. Chaplais, English Medieval Diplomatic Practice, 1. i, p. 91, gives several examples, in his
valuable discussion of ‘viewing the bride’ (pp. 88–93).
104. ‘imaginem virginis, pictor eunuchus, domino mittendam uti simillime depingeret’:
Ekkehard IV, Casus sancti Galli, 90, ed. Haefele, p. 184.
105. Gregory of Tours, Libri historiarum decem, 4. 38; 5. 38, ed. Krusch and Levison, pp.
169–70, 243; John of Biclar, Chronica, ed. Cardelle de Hartmann, p. 61; see
Nelson, ‘A propos des femmes royales dans les rapports entre le monde wisigothi-
que et le monde franc à l’époque de Reccared’; Hartmann, Die Königin im frühen
Mittelalter, pp. 21–5.
106. ‘Ipse quoque, acceptam soceri sui uxorem, Galliciensium regnum obtinuit’:
Gregory of Tours, Libri historiarum decem, 6. 43, ed. Krusch and Levison, p. 316;
see also John of Biclar, Chronica, ed. Cardelle de Hartmann, p. 74: ‘His diebus
Audeca in Gallecia Suevorum regnum cum tirannide assummit et Sisegutiam relic-
tam Mironis regis in coniugium accepit.’
107. ‘Nec moratus Chlothacharius uxorem germani sui Guntheucam nomine sibi in matri-
monio sociavit’: Gregory of Tours, Libri historiarum decem, 3. 6, ed. Krusch and Levison,
p. 103.

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 NOTES TO PAGES 35–7

108. ‘regnumque eius Chlothacharius rex accepit, copulans Vuldotradam, uxorem eius,
stratui suo. Sed increpitus a sacerdotibus, reliquit eam, dans ei Garivaldum
ducem, . . . ’: Gregory of Tours, Libri historiarum decem, 4. 9, ed. Krusch and
Levison, p. 141.
109. ‘rex propter coniugatione Brunichildis suspectum habere coepit Merovechum,
filium suum’: Gregory of Tours, Libri historiarum decem, 5. 2–3, ed. Krusch and
Levison, pp. 195–6; 5. 14, 18, pp. 207–13, 222–4, for the persecution of Merovech
and his death.
110. ‘Regina vero Theudelinda quia satis placebat Langobardis, permiserunt eam in regia
consistere dignitatem, suadentes ei, ut sibi quem ipsa voluisset ex omnibus
Langobardis virum eligeret, talem scilicet qui regnum regere utiliter possit’: Paul
the Deacon, Historia Langobardorum, 3. 35, ed. Waitz, pp. 140–1.
111. ‘per ipsam omnes Langobardi eum sublimavant in regno’: Fredegar, Chronica, 4. 70,
ed. Krusch, p. 156, ed. Wallace-Hadrill, p. 59.
112. ‘ipsum coniugatum sublimarit in regnum’: Fredegar, Chronica, 4. 51, ed. Krusch,
p. 145, ed. Wallace-Hadrill, p. 42.
113. ‘nil regi defuit absque nobilissima coniuge; quam ubique sibi iussit inquirere, ut
inventam hanc legaliter adquireret, et adeptam imperii sui consortem faceret. Igitur
per regna et per urbes discurritur, et regalis sponsa perquiritur; sed longe lateque
quaesite, vix tandem digna repperitur . . . Sed abnegat illa, se unquam Cnutonis
sponsam fieri, nisi illi iusiurando affirmaret, quod numquam alterius coniugis filium
post se regnare faceret nisi eius, si forte ille Deus ex eo filium dedisset . . . Placuit ergo
regi verbum virginis, et iusiurando facto virgini placuit voluntas regis, et sic Deo gratias
domina Emma mulierum nobilissima fit coniunx regis fortissimi Cnutonis’: Encomium
Emma Reginae, 2. 16, ed. Campbell, p. 32.
114. ‘fortasse vix aut numquam bellandi adesset finis, nisi tandem huius nobilissimae
reginae iugali copula potiretur’: Encomium Emmae Reginae, Argumentum, ed.
Campbell, p. 6.
115. ‘Chnud regnum Adelradi accepit uxoremque eius’: Adam of Bremen, Gesta
Hammaburgensis ecclesiae pontificum, 2. 54 (52), ed. Schmeidler, p. 114.
116. Leo the Deacon, Historiae, 3. 9, ed. Hase, pp. 49–50; Skylitzes, Synopsis historiarum, ed.
Thurn, pp. 260–1.
117. ὀκνοῦσαν μέν, ὡς περιᾴδεται, τὴν συναφήν. Ἤδη γὰρ καὶ φρενῶν ὑπεπίμπλατο καὶ
πεπειραμένη δὲ ἄλλως λειότητος ἐραστοῦ τὸν τραχὺν ἀπέστεργε. Καί ποτε, φασί,
καθ᾽ὕπνους φαντασαμένη τὸν νεανίαν καὶ «ὦ Ἀλέξιε» ἀνακράξασα, οἷα ἔπαθεν οἶδεν
αὐτή: Eustathios of Thessaloniki, The Capture of Thessaloniki, ed. Kyriakides, p. 52.
118. ‘Defuncto autem Æthelwulfo rege, Æthelbald, filius eius, contra Dei interdictum et
Christianorum dignitatem, necnon et contra omnium paganorum consuetudinem,
thorum patris sui ascendens, Iuthittam, Karoli Francorum regis filiam, cum magna
omnibus audientibus infamia, in matrimonium duxit’: Asser, De rebus gestis Aelfredi, 17,
ed. Stevenson, p. 16.
119. ‘Talis fornicatio qualis nec inter gentes ita ut uxorem patris aliquis habeat’: 1
Corinthians 5: 1.

460
 NOTES TO PAGES 37–40

120. Bede, Historia ecclesiastica gentis Anglorum, 2. 5, ed. Colgrave and Mynors, p. 150;
‘Eadbold . . . lifode on he∂enum þeawe swa þ he heafde his feder lafe to wife’: Anglo-
Saxon Chronicle (E), s.a. 616, ed. Plummer and Earle, p. 23.
121. Bede, Historia ecclesiastica gentis Anglorum, 2. 6, ed. Colgrave and Mynors, p. 154.
122. Ibid., 1. 27, p. 84. The issue of whether these are authentic questions of Augustine of
Canterbury does not affect the main point here.
123. Paenitentialia minora Franciae et Italiae, ed. Kottje, p. 191 (Paenitentiale Oxoniense II,
c. 3); Kasten, ‘Stepmothers in Frankish Legal Life’, p. 57.
124. ‘Uxorem patris si quis acciperit, mortis periculum incurrat’: Capitularia regum
Francorum, 1, ed. Boretius, no. 7, p. 15; Pactus legis Salicae, ‘Capitula legi Salicae addita’,
6. 1. 2, ed. Eckhardt, p. 267; Lex Salica, ed. Eckhardt, pp. 176–7.
125. ‘Illicita etiam novercarum conjugia, similiter et uxorem fratris defuncti fratrem super-
stitem ducere, quæ ibi antea fiebant, nimis ostendit execranda, et a fidelibus velut
ipsam mortem devitanda’: Turgot, Vita S. Margaretae Scotorum Reginae, 8, ed. Hodgson
Hinde, p. 245.
126. ‘οἶμαι τοίνυν Οὐάρνοις ξυνοίσειν τὴν κηδείαν ἐς Φράγγους μᾶλλον ἢ ἐς τοὺς νησιώτας
ποιεῖσθαι. Βρίττιοι μὲν γὰρ οὐδὲ ὅσον ἐπιμίγνυσθαι ὑμῖν οἷοί τέ εἰσιν, ὅτι μὴ ὀψέ τε καὶ
μόλις· Οὔαρνοι δὲ καὶ Φράγγοι τουτὶ μόνον τοῦ Ῥήνου τὸ ὕδωρ μεταξὺ ἔχουσιν, ὥστε
αὐτοὺς ἐν γειτόνων μὲν ὡς πλησιαίτατα ὄντας ὑμῖν, ἐς δυνάμεως δὲ κεχωρηκότας μέγα τι
χρῆμα, ἐν προχείρῳ ἔχειν εὖ ποιεῖν τε ὑμᾶς καὶ λυμαίνεσθαι, ἡνίκα ἂν αὐτοῖς βουλομένοις
εἴη· λυμανοῦνται δὲ πάντως, ἢν μὴ τὸ κῆδος αὐτοῖς ἐμπόδιον ἔσται: Procopius, De bello
Gothico, 4. 20, ed. Dewing, 5, pp. 252–64 (History of the Wars, 8. 20). Taking the story as
historically accurate, Eugen Ewig identifies the Frankish bride as Theudechild, sister
of Theudebert I: ‘Die Namengebung bei den ältesten Frankenkönigen und im mer-
owingischen Königshaus’, p. 51.
127. López de Ayala, Crónica del Rey don Pedro, 1 (1350), 13, ed. Orduna, 1, pp. 24–5.
128. See the remarkable first-hand account by Helene Kottannerin, Die Denkwürdigkeiten der
Helene Kottannerin (1439–1440), ed. Mollay, pp. 12–13, 22.
129. Lexikon des Mittelalters, 3, col. 1319, s.v. ‘Dorothea’; The Cambridge History of Scandinavia,
1, pp. 742–4 (‘In Denmark it was the goal of the council to nominate a princely
candidate who would also be acceptable as a spouse for Queen Dorothea’, p. 744).
130. ‘quod si diabolus ipsum forsan temtaret, quod nollet nostram maiestatem ducere in
uxorem, relinqueretis ipsum regem et adhaerere nostrae maiestati velitis’ (she is
addressing the chief men of Hungary): Acta vitam Beatricis reginae Hungariae illustran-
tia, ed. Berzeviczy, p. 221, no. 156.
131. ‘el Re di Boemia essere stato electo Re de Hungaria et che ha pigliata la Regina per
mogliere’: Acta vitam Beatricis reginae Hungariae illustrantia, ed. Berzeviczy, p. 165, no. 115.
132. ‘propter aliquid secretum impedimentum, quod habet rex in animo et nemini vult
revelare’: Acta vitam Beatricis reginae Hungariae illustrantia, ed. Berzeviczy, pp. 229–30,
no. 156; the whole letter (pp. 219–31), from 1492, gives Beatrice’s detailed account of
events; there is some discussion of the case in d’Avray, Papacy, Monarchy and Marriage
860–1600, pp. 161–9, with p. 327–34.

461
 NOTES TO PAGES 40–4

133. ‘La infelicissima regina de Hungaria’, Acta vitam Beatricis reginae Hungariae illustrantia,
ed. Berzeviczy, p. 438, no. 311.
134. ‘ladite Dame ne convolera à autres nopces, fors avec le Roy futur, s’il lui plaist et faire
se peut’: Morice, Mémoires pour servir de preuves à l’histoire ecclésiastique et civile de Bretagne,
3, col. 717.
135. Nelson, ‘Queens as Jezebels: The Careers of Brunhild and Balthild in Merovingian
History’, p. 7; Hartmann, Die Königin im frühen Mittelalter, p. 21: ‘Nach Athanagilds Tod
heiratete Goiswinth den neuen König Leowigild, der dadurch wohl sein Königtum zu
stärken suchte.’
136. ‘Beispielen . . . in denen die Ehe mit der Königswitwe als Hebel zur Erringung
der Macht diente’: Ubl, Inzestverbot und Gesetzgebung: die Konstruktion eines
Verbrechens (300–1100), p. 101.
137. Stafford, ‘Charles the Bald, Judith and England’, p. 151; cf. her remarks in Queens,
Concubines and Dowagers: The King’s Wife in the Early Middle Ages, pp. 49–50.
138. Herbert, ‘Goddess and King: The Sacred Marriage in Early Ireland’, p. 265; cf. ‘The
assumption of power was seen as a marriage with the local goddess of sovereignty’:
Simms, From Kings to Warlords: The Changing Political Structure of Gaelic Ireland in the Later
Middle Ages, p. 11.
139. Chaney, The Cult of Kingship in Anglo-Saxon England: The Transition from Paganism to
Christianity, p. 27.
140. Fragmentary Annals of Ireland, ed. Radner, p. 85.
141. The Russian Primary Chronicle, tr. Cross and Sherbowitz-Wetzor, pp. 91, 93.
142. ‘Cupan voluit matrem Sancti Stephani regis sibi per incestuosum copulare connu-
bium et Sanctum Stephanum occidere ducatumque eius sue subdere potestati’:
Chronici Hungarici compositio saeculi XIV, 64, ed. Domanovszky, p. 313.
143. ‘Execrabile facinus et adsuetae [ad]modum iniquitatis est opus defunctis regibus
suppre[sti]tis eius coniugis regale torum appetere, et horrendis pollutionum maculis
sordidare. Quis enim christianorum aequanimiter ferat, defuncti regis coniugem
alieno postmodum connubio uti aut sequuturi principis libidini subiugari? . . .
Nullus ergo licebit supprestitem reginam sibi in coniugio adducere, non sordidis
contactibus maculare. Non hoc sequuturis regibus licitum, non cuique hominum
licebit esse permissum’: Concilios visigóticos e hispano-romanos, ed. Vives, p. 421
(Thirteenth Council of Toledo, 683, cl. 5).
144. Concilios visigóticos e hispano-romanos, ed. Vives, pp. 479–80 (Third Council of Zaragoza,
691, cl. 5).
145. Two of the most insistent statements of the rigorist position from the middle
decades of the eleventh century are Peter Damian’s ‘De parentelae gradibus’, in
Die Briefe des Petrus Damiani, 1, ed. Reindel, no. 19, pp. 179–99 (PL 145, cols.
191–204), and a letter of Pope Alexander II, Epistolae, no. 92, PL 146, cols.
1379–83, JL 4500, ‘Ad sedem apostolicam’, which was incorporated into Gratian’s
Decretum, 2. 35. 5. 2, ed. Friedberg, cols. 1271–4.
146. Recueil des actes de Philippe 1er, roi de France, ed. Prou, no. 16, pp. 47–9.

462
 NOTES TO PAGES 44–8

147. For her analysis of the Capetians’ dilemmas see Bouchard, ‘Consanguinity and Noble
Marriages in the Tenth and Eleventh Centuries’, pp. 273–9, and her conclusion, ‘It
[the definition of the prohibited degrees] kept the Capetians from marrying women
from other royal families of western Europe, as they would have preferred’ (p. 287).
148. Ubl, Inzestverbot und Gesetzgebung: die Konstruktion eines Verbrechens (300–1100), pp. 117,
482.
149. ‘statuimus ut nulli liceat christiano de propria consanguinitate sive cognatione
uxorem accipere usque dum generatio recordatur, cognoscitur aut memoria retine-
tur’: Concilia aevi Karolini DCCCLX–DCCCLXXIV, ed. Hartmann, pp. 130 (letter of
Pope Nicholas I to the Council of Mainz, 861–3), 266–7 (Council of Worms, cl. 8 (32),
868). The clause was incorporated in later collections, including Gratian, Decretum, 2.
35. 2. 18, ed. Friedberg, col. 1268.
150. Ubl, Inzestverbot und Gesetzgebung: die Konstruktion eines Verbrechens (300–1100), p. 85.
151. Tenbrock, Eherecht und Ehepolitik bei Innocenz III.; d’Avray, Dissolving Royal Marriages:
A Documentary History, 860–1600, pp. 58–68, 69–75; d’Avray, Papacy, Monarchy and
Marriage 860–1600, pp. 75–6, 80–5.
152. ‘Sane in Oriente una duobus fuit incestuose coniuncta, in Occidente vero unus sibi
duas presumpsit iungere per incestum’: Innocent III, Epistolae 2. 72 (75), Die Register
Innocenz’ III., ed. Hageneder et al., 2, p. 128 (PL 214: 611); cf. Gesta Innocentii III, 58, PL
214, col. CIV, ed. Gress-Wright, p. 79.
153. ‘ut dicitur, minus legitime copulata’: Innocent III, Epistolae 16. 149, PL 216, col. 940.
154. Davidsohn, Philipp II. August von Frankreich und Ingeborg; Gaudemet, ‘Le
dossier canonique du mariage de Philippe Auguste et d’Ingeburge de Denmark
(1193–1213)’; Conklin, ‘Ingeborg of Denmark, Queen of France, 1193–1223’;
d’Avray, Dissolving Royal Marriages: A Documentary History, 860–1600, Chapter 6.
155. Sigebert of Gembloux, Chronica: Continuatio Aquicinctina, ed. Bethmann, p. 431.
156. Les Registres de Philippe Auguste I: Texte, ed. Baldwin, pp. 549–53; Davidsohn, Philipp II.
August von Frankreich und Ingeborg, pp. 297–306, with the material in tabular form on
pp. 42, 307–9.
157. ‘ludibrii fabulam’: Innocent III, Epistolae 2. 188 (197), Die Register Innocenz’ III., ed.
Hageneder et al., 2, p. 360 (PL 214: 746).
158. ‘superinductam preciperet a regis consortio tam localiter quam carnaliter removeri,
ut non solum a regis amplexibus, verum etiam a regni finibus faceret illam excludi, et
prefatam reginam ab ipso rege solemniter recipi, et regaliter pertractari’: Gesta
Innocentii III, 54, PL 214, col. C, ed. Gress-Wright, pp. 75–6; cf. Innocent III,
Epistolae, 2. 188 (197), Die Register Innocenz’ III., ed. Hageneder et al., 2, p. 361 (PL
214: 747).
159. ‘utilitati et necessitati regni Franciae’: Innocent III, Epistola, ‘Apostolica sedes’, PL
214, cols. 1191–4; Cartellieri, Philipp II. August, König von Frankreich, 4, pp. 82–8 (2 Nov.
1201, Po. 1499).
160. Roger of Howden, Chronica, ed. Stubbs, 4, pp. 112–13; Gesta Innocentii III, 84, PL 214,
col. CXXXV–CXXXVI, ed. Gress-Wright, p. 170.

463
 NOTES TO PAGES 48–52

161. ‘recepit in gratiam et in coniugales affectus legitimam suam Ingelburgem reginam’:

Robert of Auxerre, Chronicon (continuatio), ed. Holder-Egger, p. 279.
162. Notably the case of Premysl Otakar I of Bohemia.
163. ‘venerunt Londonias nuncii dicti regis Castellae, ubi, duarum filiarum regis Angliae
inspectione habita diligenti, dominam Johannem de Wodestok, minorem regis filiam,
elegerunt, dicentes eam magis congruere aetati sui sponsi futuri’: Murimuth,
Continuatio chronicarum, ed. Thompson, p. 170; Joan is also known as Joan of the
Tower, as was her more celebrated aunt, daughter of Edward II, who became queen of
Scots.
164. For Joan’s life, see Green, Lives of the Princesses of England, 3, pp. 229–60; on the
Castilian marriage also see Russell, ‘Una alianza frustrada. Las bodas de Pedro I de
Castilla y Juana Plantagenet’.
165. ‘ad tractandum et concordandum cum nobili et potente viro duce Austriae . . . super
sponsalibus inter filium dicti ducis primogenitum et Johannam filiam nostram car-
issimam contrahendis’: Foedera (new edn.), 2. 2 (1821), p. 915 (Calendar of the Patent
Rolls Preserved in the Public Record Office, Edward III A. D. 1334–1338, p. 157).
166. ‘Et pro expensis ipsius domine factis in Bavarr’ per unum annum ut in esculentis et
poculentis quando non habuerunt sufficenter de imperatore, xlvi li’: TNA, E36/203
(Wardrobe accounts 12–14 Edward III), fol. 91v (p. 184); Green, Lives of the Princesses of
England, 3, p. 238.
167. Foedera (new edn.), 2. 2, p. 1164 (Calendar of the Close Rolls Preserved in the Public Record
Office, Edward III, 6, A. D. 1341–1343, p. 245).
168. TNA, SC1/37/182.
169. Foedera (new edn.), 3. 1, pp. 22–3.
170. Foedera (new edn.), 3. 1, p. 25 (Calendar of Close Rolls Preserved in the Public Record Office,
Edward III, 7, A. D. 1343–1346, p. 484, 27 December 1344).
171. Foedera (new edn.), 3. 1, p. 46.
172. ‘quant ils serront arivez a Burdeux, s’ils eient certeines novelles que le marriage de
l’enfant d’Espaigne soit afferme aillours, la dite dame retournera en Engleterre sanz
plus demourer’: Foedera (new edn.), 3. 1, p. 153 (15 February 1348).
173. Green, Lives of the Princesses of England, 3, p. 249.

2 WAITING FOR SONS TO BE BORN

1. Hollingsworth, ‘A Demographic Study of the British Ducal Families’, p. 365.

2. ‘inter principes vel magnos viros reconciliationis vel pacis causa’: Councils and Synods with
Other Documents Relating to the English Church, 1 (871–1204), ed. Whitelock et al., 2, p. 981
(Council of Westminster, 1175); cf. the exception ‘pro bono pacis’ in Decretales Gregorii
IX, 4. 2. 2, ed. Friedberg, col. 673. In general, see Onclin, ‘L’Age requis pour le mariage
dans la doctrine canonique médiévale’.
3. ‘cum adhuc essent pueruli in cunis vagientes’: Roger of Howden, Chronica, ed. Stubbs, 1,
p. 218.

464
 NOTES TO PAGES 53–5

4. Hathui, the niece of Queen Matilda, married a young Saxon noble ‘in her
thirteenth year (in tertio decimo aetatis suae anno)’, while the Westphalian aristocrat
Godila bore her first child by Margrave Liuthar of the Nordmark at the same age:
Thietmar of Merseburg, Chronicon, 4. 39; 7. 3 (4), ed. Holtzmann, pp. 176, 400. In both
cases ‘in her thirteenth year’ means, of course, at the age of twelve.
5. Parsons, ‘Mothers, Daughters, Marriage, Power: Some Plantagenet Evidence,
1150–1500’, pp. 66–7.
6. ‘ita quod nullum ad eam rex Norwag’ inhonestum accessum interim habeat vel car-
nalem’: The Acts of the Parliaments of Scotland, 1, ed. Thomson and Innes, p. 422 (80).
7. ‘Amor quoque coniugalis, eis pene nullus fuit. Nam cum ille adhuc pubesceret, illa vero
anus foret, contrariis moribus dissentiebant. Cubiculum commune sibi, non
patiebantur. . . . Si quando colloquendum erat, locum sub divo habebant. . . .
Quorum mores usque adeo discordes fuere, ut non multopost sequeretur et divor-
tium’: Richer of Saint-Rémi, Historiae, 3. 94, ed. Hoffmann, p. 221; Brühl, Deutschland-
Frankreich: die Geburt zweier Völker, p. 570, regards all this as as ‘eine böswillige Erfindung
Richers’.
8. Goldstone, Joanna: the Notorious Queen of Naples, Jerusalem and Sicily, p. 75.
9. ‘Ve populis, quibus regnandi spes in subsecutura dominorum sobole non relinquitur’:
Thietmar of Merseburg, Chronicon 1. 19, ed. Holtzmann, p. 25.
10. ‘quatenus a superna clementia pro continuanda regni pace imperatori filium dari
secum implorarent’: Brunwilarensis monasterii fundatorum actus, 27, ed. Waitz, p. 138
(1047).
11. ‘Premerement de parler au Roy dangleterre de pourueoir a ses enfanz les quiex se il
plest a dieu il aura de ma dame la Reynne fille du Roy de france / et fait a regarder ou
cas la ou il aroit pluseurs fiex & filles comment il voudroit estre pourueu as fils puis nez
& as filles / Jtem fait a regarder encor plus ou cas se ma dame moroit senz fils / et il
i eust filles pluseurs / comment seroit pourueu aus puis nees / Jtem se la premiere
estoit Reynne / Jtem fait encor [sic] a regarder / ou cas se ma dame moroit senz fil
marler [sic] et il i auoit vne fille ou – pluseurs et li Rois dangleterre auoit fil marle de sa
seconde femme qui seroit Rois / comment seroit pourueu / en ce cas a la fille ou as
filles du premier marriage’: Brown, ‘The Political Repercussions of Family Ties in the
Early Fourteenth Century: The Marriage of Edward II of England and Isabelle of
France’, p. 593, from AN, JJ 44, fol. 67, no. 103.
12. Loudon, Death in Childbirth: An International Study of Maternal Care and Maternal Mortality
1800–1950, p. 160; Schofield, ‘Did the Mothers Really Die? Three Centuries of
Maternal Mortality in “The World We have Lost”’, pp. 259–60, suggests a lower rate
of 10 maternal deaths per 1,000 births in Early Modern England. Rates of 40–50 per
1,000 births are recorded in late-eighteenth and early nineteenth-century lying-in
hospitals in the British Isles and the continent: Loudon, The Tragedy of Childbed Fever,
p. 61, table 5.1.
13. ‘Mortua est Constantia, regina Franciae, labore partus, superstite filia, cujus causa mors
sibi acciderat’: Robert of Torigni, Chronica, ed. Howlett, p. 207; see also Suger
(continuator), De glorioso rege Ludovico, Ludovici filio, 17, ed. Molinier, pp. 165–6.

465
 NOTES TO PAGES 55–8

14. ‘laborans in partu’: Ralph de Diceto, Ymagines historiarum, ed. Stubbs, 2, p. 77, wrongly
calling her Margaret; ‘mortua est autem de duobus geminis’: Flandria generosa,
‘Continuatio Claromariscensis’, ed. Bethmann, p. 329.
15. ‘Circa medium Quadragesimae, rege Karolo redeunte de partibus Tholosanis, cum
apud Exoldunum (Issoudun) castrum cum uxore sua praegnante devienisset, gravata
forte itinere, per mensem vel circiter ante tempus peperit masculum, qui baptizatus
satis cito post modicum expiravit; et aliquibus diebus mater post filium decessit’:
Continuatio Chronici Girardi de Fracheto, ed. Guigniaut and de Wailly, p. 62.
16. Froissart, Chroniques, ed. Kervyn de Lettenhove, 9, p. 44.
17. Stürner, Friedrich II., 2, pp. 142, 312.
18. ‘Cum autem eadem domina regina Guta pia, inclita, invalescente morbo, quem in
infantuli partu tunc noviter precedente contraxerat ex vehementibus doloribus velut
ex certis mortis nuncciis cognosceret, quod ei ultimus vite terminus advenisset, sapien-
ter de rebus et de domo sua incepit disponere et, que prodessent anime, cogitare’:
Peter of Zittau, Chronicon Aulae Regiae, 1. 65, ed. Emler, p. 79.
19. Ibid., 1. 7, 19, pp. 13–14, 25–6, for the date of her birth and marriage.
20. ‘pro conservatione sanitatis et liberatione regine que gravida est’; ‘duabus sororibus
que detulerunt pallium beati Edmundi usque Westm’ contra partum regine nostre’:
TNA, C62/21 (Liberate Roll 29 Henry III), membranes 16, 13: Calendar of the Liberate
Rolls Preserved in the Public Record Office, 2, pp. 275, 284; the St Edmund in question was
Edmund of Abingdon (d. 1240), whose cloak was preserved by the nuns of Catesby,
Northamptonshire; see Creamer, ‘St Edmund of Canterbury and Henry III in the
Shadow of Thomas Becket’, p. 130.
21. Exchequer Rolls of Scotland, 5: 1437–54, ed. Burnett, pp. 447, 512; Accounts of the Lord High
Treasurer of Scotland, 4: 1507–13, ed. Paul, p. 334.
22. For other examples see Bartlett, Why Can the Dead Do Such Great Things? Saints and
Worshippers from the Martyrs to the Reformation, pp. 246–7.
23. Grandeau, ‘Les enfants de Charles VI. Essai sur la vie privée des princes et des
princesses de la maison de France à la fin du Moyen Âge’, p. 812.
24. ‘ego Peronella, regina Aragonensis, iacens et in partu laborans apud Barchinonam . . . ’:
Liber feudorum major, ed. Miquel Rosell, 1, no. 16, pp. 22–3.
25. ‘infanti meo qui est ex utero meo, Deo volente, processurus . . . Si autem filia ex utero
meo processerit . . .’: ibid.
26. ‘gubernacula . . . sub nomine regentis tenenda si puer masculus nasceretur
usquequam ad intelligibilem etatem annorum quatuordecim pervenisset, si vero filia
nasceretur ipse Philippus rex Francie fieret et regnaret’: Bernard Gui, Reges Francorum
and Arbor genealogiae regum Francorum, CCCC, MS 45, fols. 28v, 46 (identical text) (also
in RHF, 21, pp. 725–6); this is confirmed by the wording of an oath Philip extracted in
Nîmes on 18 July 1316: Brown, ‘The Ceremonial of Royal Succession in Capetian
France: The Double Funeral of Louis X’, p. 245 and n. 76. For the provisions of
17 July 1316, see Lehugeur, Histoire de Philippe le Long, roi de France 1316–1322. 1. Le
règne, pp. 37–41; Giesey, Le Rôle méconnu de la loi salique. La succession royale (xive–xvie
siècles), pp. 28–35, 271–4.

466
 NOTES TO PAGES 58–61

27. An identical situation occurred in 1328 during the two months between the death of
Charles IV and the birth of his posthumous daughter.
28. Regesta Imperii, 12: Albrecht II, 1438–1439, ed. Hödl, no. 1178.
29. ‘Quo casu deficiente sive aborsum edente’: Bower, Scotichronicon, 11. 3, ed. Watt et al., 6,
p. 10.
30. ‘illa, astu femineo usa, impregnatam esse mentiebatur . . . nec matronas admitteret
honestas ad discernendum suum statum . . . statuit perpetuo deludere populum sup-
ponendo sibi partum alienum . . . recessit a terra cum verecundia’: Chronicon de
Lanercost, 1201–1346, ed. Stevenson, pp. 117–18: this part of the Chronicle was written
by Richard of Durham. On him, see Gransden, Historical Writing in England I: c.550–
c.1307, pp. 494–501.
31. See Duncan, ‘The Community of the Realm of Scotland and Robert Bruce: A Review’,
pp. 187–8 (as part of a review of the first edition of Geoffrey Barrow’s Robert Bruce and the
Community of the Realm of Scotland); also his brief comment in Duncan, The Kingship of the
Scots, 842–1292: Succession and Independence, pp. 175, 177–8.
32. ‘Regina Francie Margarita, uxor Ludovici regis, primo habuit filiam, et non auderunt
insinuare regi. Vocaverunt episcopum Guillelmum, ut ei nuntiaret’: Anecdotes histori-
ques, légendes et apologues tirés du receuil inédit d’Etienne de Bourbon, ed. Lecoy de la Marche,
p. 388 n. 1, from an exempla collection in Tours, now MS 468.
33. ‘Ex hoc iubet rex omnes e custodias relaxari, vinctos absolvi conpositionesque negle-
gentum fisco debitas praecipit omnino non exigi’: Gregory of Tours, Libri historiarum
decem, 6. 23, ed. Krusch and Levison, p. 290. The language might suggest that those who
were freed were imprisoned for debt or non-payment of fines or taxes rather than as
criminals.
34. Constantine VII Porphyrogenitus, Book of Ceremonies, 2. 21, ed. Reiske, 2, pp. 615–19; cf.
1. 42, ed. Reiske, 1, pp. 216–17.
35. ‘Ludovico regi Francorum circa foedera nuptiarum ultimis in diebus sors arrisit
benignior . . . ad suscipiendam in trigamia sobolem masculinam . . . Rex igitur ex
matrimonio tam primo quam secundo susceptis quatuor filiabus solummodo, tandem
ex tertio . . . multo felicius feliciter filium procreavit, desideratum a populis, a clero
devotius et propensius expetitum’: Ralph de Diceto, Ymagines historiarum, ed. Stubbs, 1,
p. 438.
36. ‘timebat ne regnum Francie ab herede qui de semine suo egrederetur gubernari
desisteret’: Suger (continuator), De glorioso rege Ludovico, Ludovici filio, 18, ed.
Molinier, p. 166.
37. Petrus Riga, Versus de gaudio filii regis, ed. Delaborde, p. 125, line 37.
38. ‘Nox erat, in partu celebri regina laborat;/ Urbs super hoc vigili te prece, Xriste,
rogat./ Urbis prona marem mendicant vota futurum,/ De mare sollicitat flebilis aula
Deum’: ibid., p. 124, lines 5–8; see the comments on the poem by Jordan, ‘“Quando fuit
natus”: Interpreting the Birth of Philip Augustus’.
39. ‘Quo rumore per urbem audito et cum gaudio suscepto, quale uel quantum lingua
explicari non posset, statim campanarum omnium per urbis amplitudinem totam
tantus undique sonus et clangor erupit, tantaque luminaria cerea fuerant per plateas

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 NOTES TO PAGES 61–3

omnes accensa, quod sonitus tanti tantique tumultus insoliti, nec non et nocturni
luminis tam immensi, causam ignorantes urbis incendium tunc imminere putabant.
Vnde et auctor operis huius . . . a strata quo recubans sompnum carpere iam ceperat
experrectus ad fenestram illico prosiliit, prospiciensque uidit in platea uetulas duas
admodum pauperculas, manibus tamen faces cereas preferentes et tam uultu quam
uocibus totoque gestu corporis exultantes passibusque properis, tanquam sibi inui-
cem obuiando et confligendo, cursitantes. Cumque causam tante commocionis et
exultacionis ab eis inquisisset, earum una respiciens statim et respondens: “Regem”,
inquit, “habemus nobis a Deo nunc datum et regni heredem Deo donante peruali-
dum”’: Gerald of Wales, De principis instructione, 3. 25, ed. Bartlett, p. 674 (RS edn.,
pp. 292–3).
40. ‘pre gaudio nativitatis illustrissimi pueri Philippi fillii domini regis’: Gallia christiana, 8,
instrumenta, col. 517, no. XLII.
41. Rigord, Gesta Philippi Augusti, prologue, ed. Carpentier et al., p. 116, calls his history of
Philip Augustus ‘liber gestorum regis Philippi Augusti a Deo dati’; later writers often
give Philip the soubriquet ‘Dieudonné’; see also Gerald of Wales, De principis instruc-
tione, 3. 25, ed. Bartlett, p. 674 (RS edn., pp. 291–2): ‘puerum in cunis ab alto dilapsum
et in Franciam demissum, Francisque regni heredem ualidum summo opere desider-
antibus tanquam a Deo datum’.
42. Chronique du religieux de Saint-Denys, 12. 6, ed. Bellaguet, 1, p. 732.
43. ‘pour le joyeux advenement et nativité de mons. le Dauphin’: Registre criminel du Châtelet
de Paris, du 6 septembre 1389 au 18 mai 1392, 1, p. 504; cf. p. 498. The similar reference on
p. 491 is to the previous Dauphin Charles, who was born and died in 1386.
44. ‘post obitum meum, heredem et successorem relinquo mei Sepulcrum Domini quod
est Iherosolimis et eos qui observant et custodiunt illud et ibidem serviunt Deo et
Ospitale pauperum quod Iherosolimis est et Templum Salomonis cum militibus qui ad
defendendum christianitatis nomen ibi vigilant. His tribus totum regnum meum
concedo . . . ut ipsi habeant et possideant per tres iustas et equales partes’: Colección
diplomática de Alfonso I de Aragón y Pamplona, 1104–1134, ed. Lema Pueyo, no. 241, pp.
356–66, quotation at pp. 359–60; also in Liber feudorum major, ed. Miquel Rosell, 1, no. 6,
pp. 10–12; El Gran Priorado de Navarra de la Orden de San Juan de Jerusalén; siglos XII–XIII,
ed. García Larragueta, 2, no. 10, pp. 15–18. See Forey, The Templars in the Corona de
Aragon, pp. 17–23. For a debate on whether Alfonso intended his will to be taken
seriously, see Lourie, ‘The Will of Alfonso “El Batallador”, King of Aragon and Navarre:
A Reassessment’; Forey, ‘The Will of Alfonso I of Aragon and Navarre’; Lourie, ‘The
Will of Alfonso I of Aragon and Navarre: A Reply to Dr. Forey’; Forey, ‘A Rejoinder’.
45. Cartulaire général de l’ordre du Temple, 1119?-1150, ed. d’Albon, p. 373, ‘Bullaire’, no. 2
(Innocent II, 1135–7); Papsturkunden in Spanien, 1, ed. Kehr, no. 50, p. 318.
46. ‘Hoc autem peccatum erat magnum coram Domino, sed Aragonenses, amisso charo
domino, hoc ideo faciebant, ut filii suscitarentur ex semine regio’: Chronica Adefonsi
imperatoris, 1. 62, ed. Maya Sánchez, pp. 178–9.
47. Procesos de las antiguas cortes y parlamentos de Cataluña, Aragon y Valencia, 4, no. 32, pp.
70–5; Liber feudorum major, ed. Miquel Rosell, 1, nos. 10–12, pp. 15–19.

468
 NOTES TO PAGES 64–7

48. Cartulaire général de l’ordre du Temple, 1119?-1150, ed. d’Albon, no. 314, pp. 204–5.
49. Procesos de las antiguas cortes y parlamentos de Cataluña, Aragon y Valencia, ed. Mascaró, 4,
no. 130, pp. 317–18 (Adrian IV, 1158); Papsturkunden in Spanien, 1, ed. Kehr, no. 81, pp.
364–5; Liber feudorum major, ed. Miquel Rosell, 1, no. 13, p. 19.
50. Genealogia Welforum, ed. Becher, 8; Historia Welforum, 12, ed. Becher, pp. 26, 46; see also
the case of Hugh, Margrave of Tuscany (d. 1001), discussed in Ubl, ‘Der kinderlose
König. Ein Testfall für die Ausdifferenzierung des Politischen im 11. Jahrhundert’, pp.
328–31 (‘Die Kirche als Erbe’).
51. Hudson, The Oxford History of the Laws of England II: 871–1216, pp. 656–7.
52. Eugenius III, Epistolae, 93, PL 180, cols. 118–19; Barlow, Edward the Confessor, app. D, pp.
323–4.
53. ‘partiren-se per parentesch e no ach negun fiyl d’ell’: James I, Llibre dels fets del rei en
Jaume, 34, ed. Bruguera, 2, p. 43.
54. ‘illa . . . causante se monacho non regi nupsisse’: William of Newburgh, Historia rerum
anglicarum, 1. 31, ed. Howlett, 1, p. 93.
55. Robert of Torigni, Chronica, ed. Howlett, pp. 164–5; the sources are discussed by Duby,
Medieval Marriage: Two Models from Twelfth-Century France, pp. 54–62.
56. ‘þa forlet se cyng þa hlæfdian. seo wæs gehalgod him to cwene. 7 let niman of hire eall
þæt heo ahte. on lande. 7 on golde. 7 on seolfre 7 on eallon þingon’: Anglo-Saxon
Chronicle (E), s.a. 1048 (recte 1051), ed. Plummer and Earle, p. 176; this source says Edith
was sent to the nunnery of Wherwell, where Edward’s sister was abbess; the Vita Ædwardi
regis, 1. 3, ed. Barlow, p. 36, says she was sent to Wilton, where she had been brought up;
see Stafford, Queen Emma and Queen Edith: Queenship and Women’s Power in Eleventh-
Century England, pp. 264–5.
57. ‘reducitur regina, eiusdem ducis filia, ad thalamum regis’: Vita Ædwardi regis, 1. 4, ed.
Barlow, p. 44.
58. ‘ob vinculum consanguinitatis’: Otto of Freising, Gesta Friderici I imperatoris, 2. 11, ed.
Waitz and von Simson, p. 111; on the family tree drawn up probably to demonstrate this
relationship, see p. 330.
59. The sources are gathered in Simonsfeld, Jahrbücher des Deutschen Reiches unter Friedrich I.,
1 (1152–8), pp. 167–9, who doubts the report of some, perhaps later, chroniclers, that
the grounds were adultery.
60. Chancelaria de D. Afonso III, ed. Ventura and Resende de Oliveira, index s.v.; on Beatrice
see Resende de Oliveira, ‘Beatriz Afonso, 1244–1300’.
61. ‘pro ea contra eundem regem proposuit coram nobis, quod, cum dicta comitissa
[Matilda] esset ipsius regis uxor legittima, idem rex cum filia . . . regis Castelle ac
Legionis illustris, matrimonium de facto, immo potius contubernium, manifeste con-
traxit’: Reg. Vat. 24, fols. 187v–188, no. 357 (26 July 1256); Les Registres d’Alexander IV,
ed. Bourel de la Roncière et al., 1, no. 1438, pp. 437–8.
62. ‘quod olim, tempore quo regni Portugalie gubernacula suscepisti, propter necessitates
urgentes, quibus tua sublimitas premebatur et propter vitanda gravia et manifesta
pericula, que tibi et regno tuo cominus imminebant, ac etiam propter metum qui
cadere poterat in constantem, vivente adhuc clare memorie Mattildi, . . . uxore tua

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 NOTES TO PAGES 68–71

legitima, cum nobili muliere Beatrice, nata carissimi in Christo filii nostri Alphonsi,
illustris regis Castelle, . . . de facto matrimonium contraxisti’: Reg. Vat. 27, fols.
104–v–105 (19 June 1263); Les Registres d’Urbain IV, ed. Guiraud and Clémencet, 1:
Registre dit Caméral, pp. 103–4, no. 375, ‘Qui celestia simul et terrena’; there is
a translation of the letter in d’Avray, Dissolving Royal Marriages: A Documentary History,
860–1600, pp. 109–11, who, working from the published text, suggests emending the
editor’s ‘statum’ to ‘constantem’; this is indeed the reading of the manuscript.
63. ‘cum sobolem habere non possent’: Annales Admuntenses, Continuatio Garstensis, ed.
Waitz, p. 600.
64. ‘sterilis regina sic repudiata’: Chronicon Rhythmicum Austriacum, line 629, ed.
Wattenbach, p. 363.
65. ‘Cum autem sicut accepimus ex persistentia matrimonii taliter inter te ac dictam
Kunigundim contracti pax in Ungarie atque Boemie regnis et aliis vicinis provinciis
conservetur’: Reg. Vat. 27, fol. 58v (20 April 1262, Po. 18277); calendared only in Les
Registres d’Urbain IV, ed. Guiraud and Clémencet, 1: Registre dit Caméral, no. 228, p. 64.
66. πατὴρ ἀκοῦσαι παιδὸς γλιχόμενος ἄρρενος: Choniates, ‘De Manuele’, in Historia, Comneno,
3. 5, ed. Bekker, p. 151, ed. van Dieten, p. 115.
67. A crucial piece of evidence for Alfonso’s wives is the passage in the Chronicon regum
Legionensium of Pelayo, bishop of Oviedo, listing Alfonso’s ‘five legitimate wives’ and
‘two concubines’, one of them Zaida-Elizabeth: Crónica del Obispo Don Pelayo, ed.
Sánchez Alonso, pp. 86–7 (translated, with notes, in The World of El Cid: Chronicles of
the Spanish Reconquest, pp. 87–8); for discussion, see Reilly, The Kingdom of León-Castilla
under King Alfonso VI, 1065–1109, pp. 79–80, 105–10, 146–7, 192–3, 234–5, 247, 295–8,
338–40, 345–6.
68. For a succinct account, see Tougher, The Reign of Leo VI (886–912): Politics and People, pp.
133–63.
69. ‘cogita te cottidie esse morituram, et numquam de secundis nuptiis cogitabis’: Jerome,
Epistulae, 54. 18, ed. Labourt, 3, p. 41 (PL 22, col. 560).
70. Ὁ δὲ δεύτερος γάμος, εἰ καὶ συγκεχώρηται, ’αλλ’ ἐπιτετίμηται: Theodore the Stoudite,
Epistulae, 50, ed. Fatouros, 1, p. 147; St Paul thought that a second marriage disqualified
a man for office in the Church: 1 Timothy 3: 2; Titus 1: 6.
71. Symeon Magister et Logotheta, Chronicon, 132. 22; 133. 13, 22–3, 31–2, ed. Wahlgren,
pp. 267, 274, 278–9, 282–3; Vita Euthymii patriarchae, 6–8, 10, ed. Karlin-Hayter, pp.
37–43, 45–9, 63.
72. Grierson et al., ‘The Tombs and Obits of the Byzantine Emperors’, p. 22.
73. Guilland, ‘Les noces plurales à Byzance’, with pp. 237–46 specifically on Leo VI.
74. Nicholas I, Patriarch of Constantinople, Letters, no. 32, ed. Jenkins and Westerink, p. 218.
75. Nicholas I, ibid., p. 230.
76. ‘quaecunque sequuntur primas, secundae dicuntur, etiam si millesimae sint’:
Hostiensis, Summa aurea, IV, ‘De secundis nuptiis’, col. 1443.
77. Symeon Magister et Logotheta, Chronicon, 133. 39, 47, 49, 50, 59, ed. Wahlgren, pp. 285,
288–9, 292; Vita Euthymii patriarchae, 11–15, ed. Karlin-Hayter, pp. 71–103; Nicholas I,
Patriarch of Constantinople, Letters, no. 32, ed. Jenkins and Westerink, pp. 214–44.

470
 NOTES TO PAGES 71–8

78. Tougher, The Reign of Leo VI (886–912): Politics and People, p. 163.
79. There is a very large bibliography. Examples include Duncan, The Kingship of the Scots,
842–1292: Succession and Independence, pp. 175–311; Barrow, Robert Bruce and the
Community of the Realm of Scotland, pp. 3–99. See also Stones and Simpson, Edward
I and the Throne of Scotland, 1290–1296: An Edition of the Record Sources for the Great Cause.
80. The Acts of the Parliaments of Scotland, 1, ed. Thomson and Innes, p. 424 (82); Foedera (new
ed.), 1. 2, p. 638.
81. Unless Alexander’s widow produced a child: see p. 59.
82. Documents Illustrative of the History of Scotland from the Death of Alexander III to the Accession of
Robert Bruce, ed. Stevenson, 1, no. 108, pp. 162–73 (The Treaty of Birgham).
83. ‘racione proximitatis in gradu’: Stones (ed.), Anglo-Scottish Relations 1174–1328: Some
Selected Documents, no. 19, p. 120 [60].
84. Ibid., no. 19, pp. 118–24 [59]–[62].
85. For the following, see Sesma Muñoz, El Interregno (1410–1412): concordia y compromiso
político en la Corona de Aragón.
86. ‘Quo finito sermone, dictus reverendus Magister Vincentius . . . publicationem de dicto
nostro rege et domino . . . ibi publice alta et intelligibili voce coram dictis dominis
ambaxiatoribus et populo ibidem congregato, legendo de verbo ad verbum unum ex
instrumentis . . . confectis, solemniter publicavit. Et cum in publicatione predicta fuit in
passu illo seu puncto in quo nomen excellentissimi ac magniffici principis et domini
domni Ferdinandi nostri veri regis et domini exprimitur seu continetur, idem Magister
Vincentius et et omnes desuper nominati et alii etiam ibidem presentes magnis et altis
vocibus jocunditatem et gaudium denotantes exclamarunt dicentes repetitis vicibus
per magnam pausam durantibus, “Viva, viva nostre rey e senyor don Ferrando!”’: Cortes
de los antiguos reinos de Aragón y de Valencia y principado de Cataluña, 10, pp. 491–2;
Parlamentos del Interregno (1410–1412), ed. Sesma Muñoz, 2, pp. 621–3.
87. The same point can be made about the ceremony of Ferdinand’s coronation: Salicrú
i Lluch, ‘La coronació de Ferran d’Antequera: l’organització i els preparatius de la
festa’.
88. ‘don Hernando era más útil para el regimiento deste reino . . . pero . . . creía que el
Duque de Gandía y el conde de Urgel como varones legítimos y descendientes por
línea de varón de la prosapia de los reyes de Aragón eran mejores en derecho’: Zurita,
Anales de la Corona de Aragón, 11. 87, ed. Canellas López, 5, p. 270.
89. ‘Et en este se acabó el linaje del Rey Felipe de Francia que dixieron el Grande, et
llamabaule en Francia el Bel. Et algunos dixieron que aquella muerte del Rey
Felipe, et otrosi el desfallecimiento de su linaje, veno, porque este Rey Felipe fizo
prender al Papa. Et otros dixieron . . . porque este Rey Felipe en el su tiempo fizo
grandes despechamientos en el regno de Francia . . . Et algunos dixieron . . .
porque este Rey Felipe echó los Judios de todo su regno . . . pero la razon porque
acaesció, Dios es sabidor’: Crónica del rey Don Alfonso el Onceno, 173, ed. Rosell,
p. 284.
90. ‘in familiam nomenque adoptauit’: Suetonius, De uita Caesarum, ‘Diuus Iulius’,
c. 83.

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 NOTES TO PAGES 78–9

91. See Levick, Augustus: Image and Substance, pp. 25–6, with notes on pp. 54–5, for
discussion of the exact legal status of this provision of Julius Caesar’s will.
92. Suetonius, De uita Caesarum, ‘Diuus Augustus’, c. 65; ‘certum erat, uni spem succes-
sionis incumbere’, ibid., ‘Tiberius’, c. 15.
93. For adoption in Byzantium, see Macrides, ‘Kinship by Arrangement: The Case of
Adoption’, and ‘Substitute Parents and their Children’; Pitsakis, ‘L’adoption dans le
droit byzantin’.
94. Nicholas I, Patriarch of Constantinople, Letters, no. 32, ed. Jenkins and Westerink,
p. 216.
95. In general, see Hlawitschka, ‘Adoptionen im mittelalterlichen Königshaus’; Médiévales
35 (1998): L’adoption. Droits et pratiques; Jussen, Spiritual Kinship as Social Practice:
Godparenthood and Adoption in the Early Middle Ages; Di Renzo Villata, ‘Adoption
between Ancien Régime and Codification: Is it in Remission in a Changing World?’.
96. Santinelli, ‘Continuité ou rupture? L’adoption dans le droit mérovingien’; for an
example in English translation, with some comment, see The Formularies of Angers and
Marculf: Two Merovingian Legal Handbooks, tr. Rio, pp. 196–7.
97. This is the case of ‘Childebertus adoptivus’ in the mid seventh century. See, for
example, Wood, The Merovingian Kingdoms 450–751, p. 222–4; Becher, ‘Der sogen-
annte Staatsstreich Grimoalds. Versuch einer Neubewertung’; Hamann, ‘Zur
Chronologie des Staatsstreichs Grimoalds’, pp. 51–8. The case of the adoption of
Theudebert I by Childebert I is described in Gregory of Tours, Libri historiarum decem,
3. 24, ed. Krusch and Levison, p. 123.
98. ‘“Evenit inpulso peccatorum meorum, ut absque liberis remanerem, et ideo peto, ut
hic nepus meus mihi sit filius”’: ibid., 5. 17, p. 216.
99. Usually interpreted as Guntram’s own kingdom, but possibly Childebert’s father’s.
This is the interpretation of ‘cunctum ei regnum tradedit’ by Santinelli, ‘Continuité
ou rupture? L’adoption dans le droit mérovingien’, p. 15; the fullest discussion of the
complexities of this transaction, and later dealings between Guntram and Childebert,
is in Jussen, Spiritual Kinship as Social Practice: Godparenthood and Adoption in the Early
Middle Ages; see also his ‘Adoptiones franques et logique de la pratique. Remarques sur
l’échec d’une importation juridique et les nouveaux contextes d’un terme romain’.
100. Childebert and his cousin, another nephew of Guntram’s, occur as ‘adoptivi filii’, and
‘filios . . . qui ei fuerant adoptati’, Guntram says ‘Non ego . . . alium filium praeter
Childebertum habeo’, and Gregory writes, correspondingly ‘Childebertus rex alium
patrem nisi patruum non habet’: Gregory of Tours, Libri historiarum decem, 7. 8, 13; 8. 3,
13, ed. Krusch and Levison, pp. 331, 334, 373, 379.
101. ‘“Hoc est indicium, quod tibi omne regnum meum tradedi. . . . Nihil enim, facientibus
peccatis, de stirpe mea remansit nisi tu tantum, qui mei fratris es filius. Tu enim heres
in omni regno meo succede, ceteris exheredibus factis”’: Gregory of Tours, Libri
historiarum decem, 7. 33, ed. Krusch and Levison, p. 353.
102. Roumy, L’adoption dans le droit savant du XIIe au XVIe siècle, provides a full study.
103. ‘les recherches entreprises pour étudier l’application pratique de l’adoption dans les
sources judiciaires ou notariales n’ont rien donné’: García Marsilla and Sansy,

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 NOTES TO PAGES 80–1

‘L’adoption dans les textes juridiques espagnols du XIIIe siècle’, p. 67; Las Siete
Partidas, 4. 16 (‘de los fijos porfijados’), 3, pp. 91–9.
104. Bresc and Beatrice, ‘Actes de la pratique, I – L’adoption en Sicile (XIVe–XVe siècles)’;
Kuehn, ‘L’adoption à Florence à la fin du Moyen Âge’; Aubenas, ‘L’adoption en
Provence au Moyen Âge (XIVe–XVIe siècles)’; Maurice, ‘Actes de la pratique, II –
L’adoption dans le Gévaudan (XVe siècle)’. There is an isolated but explicit case in
Provence dating to 3 February 1257 (1256 old style): Aubenas, ‘L’adoption en
Provence au Moyen Âge (XIVe–XVIe siècles)’, p. 704 n. 1; Roumy, L’adoption dans le
droit savant du XIIe au XVIe siècle, p. 199.
105. ‘ceste matiere chet plus en droict escrit qu’en coutume’: Bouteiller, Somme rural, tit.
94, p. 535; Roumy, L’adoption dans le droit savant du XIIe au XVIe siècle, p. 188 n. 267, cites
this passage from the 1611 printing as title 93. Bouteiller wrote in the late fourteenth
century.
106. ‘son fils substitué, et autres apres luy substituez, soient tenus de porter les nom,
surnom, cry, et armes d’iceluy seigneur testateur’: Du Bouchet, Preuves de l’histoire de
l’illustre maison de Coligny, p. 1131 (Lourdin’s will of 1441; his daughter was married to
a Coligny); Roumy, L’adoption dans le droit savant du XIIe au XVIe siècle, p. 209. See also
Maurel, ‘Un artifice contre l’extinction des familles? La substitution de nom et
d’armes à Marseille (fin XIVe–fin XVe siècle)’.
107. ‘Mortuo itaque Buosone, parvulus erat ei filius de filia Hludowici Italici regis; obviam
quem imperator ad Hrenum villa Chirihheim veniens honorifice ad hominem sibi
quasi adoptivum filium eum iniunxit’: ‘Continuatio Ratisbonensis’ in Annales
Fuldenses, s.a. 887, ed. Kurze, p. 115; Hermann of Reichenau dropped the ‘quasi’:
‘Mortuo Bosone, filius eius ex filia Ludowici Italiae imperatoris, puer Ludowicus, ad
Karolum imperatorem veniens, benigne ab eo susceptus et in filium adoptatus est’:
Hermann of Reichenau, Chronica, s.a. 887, ed. Pertz, p. 109.
108. MacLean, Kingship and Politics in the Late Ninth Century: Charles the Fat and the End of the
Carolingian Empire, p. 166. Timothy Reuter in his translation of the Annals of Fulda
wrote, ‘It is however unclear whether adoption in this sense was known to the Franks,
and it could equally be that Charles was simply making his peace with the son of a man
whom he and the other Carolingians had never accepted as a legitimate ruler [i.e.
Boso]’: The Annals of Fulda, tr. Reuter, p. 113 n. This Louis was the ruler later known as
‘Louis the Blind’, who died in 928. See also the discussion of the historiography of this
subject in Offergeld, Reges pueri. Das Königtum Minderjähriger im frühen Mittelalter, pp.
472–88 (‘Die Adoption Ludwigs von Vienne’).
109. ‘Stephanus bonae memoriae rex, avunculus ipsius, cum filius eius patre superstite
esset mortuus, quoniam alium non habuit filium, hunc fȩcit adoptivum ipsumque
regni heredem locavit’: Annales Altahenses maiores, s.a. 1041, ed. von Oefele, p. 24.
110. ‘Sciatis quod ego rex Stephanus Henricum ducem Normannie post me successorem
regni Anglie et heredem meum jure hereditario constitui . . . Ego etiam securitatem
sacramento duci feci quod . . . sicut filium et heredem meum . . . eum manutenebo’:
Regesta regum Anglo-Normannorum, 1066–1154, 3, ed. Cronne and Davis, no. 272, p. 97;
‘Ipsum [Henry of Anjou] siquidem rex in filium suscepit adoptivum, et heredem

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 NOTES TO PAGES 81–4

regni constituit’: Henry of Huntingdon, Historia Anglorum, 10. 37 (8. 37 in the RS

edition), ed. Greenway, p. 770; ‘Stephani regis Anglie et Henrici ducis Normannie
concors ad invicem facta est adopcio’: Gerald of Wales, Expugnatio Hibernica, 1. 31, ed.
Scott and Martin, p. 216; ‘Henrico duce Normannorum, quem rex Stephanus adop-
tavit sibi in filium et constituit heredem et successorem regni’: Roger of Howden,
Chronica, ed. Stubbs, 1, p. 212.
111. Matthew Paris, Chronica majora, ed. Luard, 1, pp. 204–6; Matthew Paris, Historia
Anglorum, ed. Madden, 1, pp. 294–5.
112. ‘dominum Ludovicum . . . in nostrum legitimum filium adoptaverimus, receperimus,
admiserimus et ordinaverimus . . . volentes . . . quod ipse dominus Ludovicus noster
legitimus filius omnibus et singulis privilegiis . . . gaudeat et utatur quibus filii legitimi
adoptivi uti et gaudere possunt et debent. Praeterea nos ipsum dominum
Ludovicum . . . nostrum legitimum filium adoptivum uberrimis ac maternis prose-
quentibus affectibus . . . in regem futurum . . . ipsum et eius posteros . . . nominaver-
imus, pronutiaverimus, declaraverimus, fecerimus, instituerimus et ordinaverimus in
heredem et successorem nostrum legitimum post decessum nostrum’: Thesaurus
novus anecdotorum, ed. Martène and Durand, 1, cols. 1580–1; the document is also
printed elsewhere; the original is AN J//1043 no. 3. For the preliminary negotiations,
see Jarry, ‘Instructions secrètes pour l’adoption de Louis Ier d’Anjou par Jeanne de
Naples (Janvier 1380)’.
113. Faraglia, Storia della regina Giovanna II d’Angiò, pp. 185 n. 1, 201, 249–52; Ryder, Alfonso
the Magnanimous: King of Aragon, Naples, and Sicily 1396–1458, pp. 77–112.
114. James I of Aragon made an agreement of mutual adoption (afillamiento) with the
king of Navarre in 1231 but nothing came of it: James I, Llibre dels fets del rei en Jaume,
139, 142, 146, ed. Bruguera, 2, p. 137–40; Documentos de Jaime I de Aragón, ed. Huici
and Cabanes, 1, no. 147, pp. 264–6. Margaret, ruler of all three Scandinavian king-
doms, is said to have adopted her great-nephew Erik of Pomerania: Etting, Queen
Margrete I (1353–1412), and the Founding of the Nordic Union, p. 65. The deposed
Queen Charlotte of Cyprus is said to have adopted Alfonso, illegitimate son of
Ferdinand of Naples, as her heir for Cyprus, plainly hoping in this way to acquire
powerful backing for a restoration. Alfonso’s career is traced in detail in Forcellini,
‘Strane peripezie d’un bastardo di casa di Aragona’; he discusses the adoption at 38,
pp. 442–3, citing as his primary source Navagero, Storia Veneziana, col. 1146.
Navagero says that Charlotte ‘addottò il figliuolo di detto Alonso’, who has just
been described as the ‘figliuolo naturale’ of Ferdinand of Naples. Presumably this
is an error or misprint. Many other secondary sources report this adoption but
without citing primary sources.
115. Goody, The Development of the Family and Marriage in Europe, p. 46.
116. Ibid., p. 95.
117. ‘Quid quod nonnulli, filios non habentes, a respectu se tamen salutis suae et remedio
peccatorum penitus auertunt, ac licet semine sanguinis sui careant, quaerunt tamen
quoscumque alios, quibus substantiam propriae facultatis addicant, id est, quibus
umbratile aliquod propinquitatis nomen inscribant, quos sibi quasi adoptiuos

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 NOTES TO PAGES 84–6

imaginarii parentes filios faciant, et in locum eorum quae non sunt pignorum perfidia
generante succedant?’: Salvian, Ad ecclesiam, 3. 2, ed. Lagarrigue, p. 246.
118. ‘ad ineundum vitae conjugalis ordinem nolite moras innectere . . . Festinate ergo ut de
lumbis vestris exeat qui vanam spem tot ambitiosorum hominum destruat et ad unius
spem mobilitatem reducat’: Ivo of Chartres, Epistolae 239, PL 162: 247.
119. ‘E nós haguem per muyler la reyna Dona Lionor per conseyl de nostres hòmens, que.
ns conseylaven que pus nostre pare no havia pus fiyl sinó nós, que prenguéssem
muyler estan jove, per ço car éls hanán gran regart de nostra vida . . . e que en totes
guises volien que hereu romangués de nós per tal que el regno no exís de la natura’:
James I, Llibre dels fets del rei en Jaume, 18, ed. Bruguera, 2, pp. 21–2.
120. ‘Quia vero nondum reginali conubio participarat, ueretur curie tota contio ne illo
absque liberis de medio facto sub extraneo regimine redigatur. Unde regi dant
consilium, dignitate regia dignam accipere in matrimonium’: Passio sancti Athelberhti
regis et martiris, 3, ed. James, p. 237 (this anonymous work survives in a manuscript of
the early twelfth century).
121. This is deduced partly from William of Malmesbury’s statement that he was ‘more
than forty (maior quadragenario)’ when he died (Gesta regum Anglorum, 4. 333, ed.
Mynors et al., p. 576), and partly from the birth order of William the Conqueror’s
other children.
122. ‘curialis juventus ferme tota crines suos juvencularum more nutriebat’: Eadmer,
Historia novorum, ed. Rule, p. 48.
123. ‘exsoletorum prostibulum’: William of Malmesbury, Gesta regum Anglorum, 4. 314, ed.
Mynors et al., p. 560; exsoletus seems to have several overtones: prostitution (i.e. paid
sex), bisexuality, a passive role in homosexual sex. OMT translates as ‘a brothel for
perverts’.
124. ‘Legitimam coniugem nunquam habuit sed obscenis fornicationibus et frequentibus
moechiis inexplebiliter inhesit’: Orderic Vitalis, Historia ecclesiastica 10. 2, ed. Chibnall
5, p. 202.
125. Barlow, William Rufus, pp. 101–10.
126. For discussion of Richard’s sexuality, see Gillingham, ‘Richard I and Berengaria of
Navarre’, pp. 133–6; Gillingham, Richard I, pp. 263–6.
127. ‘De te . . . iam publicus rumor est quia nec proprie coniugi maritalis thori fidem
conservas . . . ’: Adam of Eynsham, Magna vita sancti Hugonis, 5. 6, ed. Douie and
Farmer, 2, p. 104; ‘“Esto memor subversionis Sodomae, et ab illicitis te abstine” . . .
praefatus rex . . . mulierem suam, quam a multo tempore non cognoverat, recepit, et
abjecto concubitu illicito adhaesit uxori suae’: Roger of Howden, Chronica, ed. Stubbs,
3, pp. 288–9.
128. ‘In qua custodia cum idem Richardus peccata sua cuidam episcopo confessus, propo-
suisset se continere de caetero; non multo post quidam episcopus Angliae visitans
eum, et gratiam ejus captans, suadet ei, quasi pro salute corporis conservanda . . .
sicque miserum in sua nequitia confortavit’: Helinand of Froidmont, Chronica, 49, ed.
Tissier, p. 205 (PL 212, col. 1082).

475
 NOTES TO PAGES 87–92

129. ‘similium convenienciam’: Gerald of Wales, De principis instructione, 3. 30, ed. Bartlett,
p. 728 (RS ed., p. 326).
130. ‘ille parvos magna dulcedine fovit et adultos regni consortes faciens, nunquam eorum
intuitu dare operam matrimonio curavit’: William of Malmesbury, Gesta regum
Anglorum, 2. 140, ed. Mynors et al., p. 228 (the reading of the B version).
131. Foot, Æthelstan: The First King of England, pp. 43, 56, 59–62.

3 FATHERS AND SONS

1. Las Siete Partidas, 2. 1. 9, ed. Real Academia de la Historia, 2, p. 10.

2. As lifetime titles for Poland in 1025 and 1076 and Bohemia in 1085 and 1158; in 1198,
after Philip of Swabia was crowned king of the Romans (emperor elect), he then
crowned Premysl Otakar, duke of Bohemia, as hereditary king of Bohemia; kingship
was revived independently in Poland in 1295–6, 1300–6 and, more permanently, 1320.
3. ‘Post excessum incliti regis Heinrici ductores primi conveniebant et de statu regni con-
silium habebant. Perplures diiudicabant Heinricum regno potiri, quia natus esset in aula
regali; alii vero desiderabant Ottonem possidere principatus honorem, quia etate esset
maior et consilio providentior’: Vita Mathildis reginae posterior, 9, ed. Schütte, p. 161.
4. ‘Rectumne patrem egisse rere regia tibi in dignitate genito non in eadem genitum
praeponendo?’: Liudprand, Antapodosis, 4. 18, in Liudprandi opera,ed. Becker, p. 114.
Writing long after the event, Eadmer of Canterbury explained some of the opposition
to the succession of Edward (the Martyr), son of King Edgar, in 975, and the preference
for his younger half-brother, Æthelred, on the grounds that Edward’s mother had not
been consecrated queen (in regnum . . . sacratam) but Æthelred’s had: Eadmer, Vita
sancti Dunstani, 59, ed. Turner and Muir, p. 144.
5. Clanchy, From Memory to Written Record: England 1066–1307.
6. ‘he dyde þæt ealle þa heafodmæn on Normandig dydon manræden 7 holdaðas his
sunu Willelme’: Anglo-Saxon Chronicle (E), s.a. 1115, ed. Plummer and Earle, p. 246.
7. Dudo of Saint-Quentin, De moribus et actis primorum Normanniae ducum, 2. 34, 3. 58, 4. 67–8,
128, ed. Lair, pp. 173, 201–3, 220–2, 297; Gesta Normannorum Ducum, 6. 11 (12), ed. Van
Houts, 2, p. 80; in general, see Garnett, ‘“Ducal” Succession in Early Normandy’.
8. ‘Willelmum . . . haeredem regni substituere sibi volebat . . . Fide et sacramento professi
sunt se et regnum et regni coronam . . . in eum . . . translaturos’: Eadmer, Historia
novorum, 5, ed. Rule, p. 237.
9. ‘rex et dux iam designatus’: Hugh the Chanter, The History of the Church of York
1066–1127, ed. Johnson, p. 164.
10. ‘attulit ei praeceptum, per quod pater suus illi regnum ante mortem suam tradiderat, et
spatam quae vocatur sancti Petri, per quam eum de regno revestiret, sed et regium
vestimentum et coronam ac fustem ex auro et gemmis’: Annales Bertiniani, s.a. 877, ed.
Waitz, p. 138.
11. ‘sentiens se mortem evadere non posse . . . coronam et spatam ac reliquum regium
apparatum filio suo Hludowico misit, mandans illis qui cum eo erant, ut eum in regem
sacrari ac coronari facerent’: Annales Bertiniani, s.a. 879, ed. Waitz, pp. 147–8.

476
 NOTES TO PAGES 92–5

12. There is a remarkable first-hand account: Helene Kottannerin, Die Denkwürdigkeiten der
Helene Kottannerin (1439–1440), ed. Mollay.
13. Thietmar of Merseburg, Chronicon, 8. 7 (5), ed. Holtzmann, p. 500 (1018).
14. ‘ipse enim vere rex erit et imperator multorum populorum’: Widukind of Corvey, Res
gestae saxonicae, 1. 25, ed. Hirsch and Lohmann, pp. 37–8.
15. Richer of Saint-Rémi, Historiae, 3. 91, ed. Hoffmann, p. 220.
16. Brühl, Deutschland-Frankreich: die Geburt zweier Völker, p. 569; Bautier, ‘Sacres et couron-
nements sous les Carolingiens et les premiers Capétiens: Recherches sur la genèse du
sacre royal français’, pp. 51–2.
17. ‘regnante domno Lothario augusto serenissimo anno XXVII, filio vero ejus domno
Ludovico, adolescenti egregio, regnante anno III’: Recueil des actes de Lothaire et de Louis
V, rois de France (954–987), ed. Halphen, nos. 45–6, pp. 104, 107.
18. Lewis, ‘Anticipatory Association of the Heir in Early Capetian France’; Louis issued
charters as rex designatus in his father’s reign and, when he attended the Christmas court
of Henry I at London in 1100, he was called electus rex Francorum: Recueil des actes de Louis
VI, roi de France (1108–1137), ed. Bautier and Dufour, 1, nos. 7–8, pp. 10–14; Simeon of
Durham, Historia regum, 182, ed. Arnold, p. 232.
19. Rigord, Gesta Philippi Augusti, 3, ed. Carpentier et al., p. 126.
20. Delisle, Catalogue des actes de Philippe Auguste, pp. lxix–lxxv.
21. ‘coronam illi inposuit et imperialis nominis sibi consortem fecit’: Annales regni
Francorum, s.a. 813, ed. Kurze, p. 138; Einhard, Vita Karoli Magni, 30, ed. Holder-
Egger, p. 34.
22. ‘sicut Karolus pater eius fecerat ipsum’: Chronicon Moissiacense, s.a. 817, ed. Pertz, p. 312.
23. There is a full list of Byzantine co-emperors from the eighth to the fifteenth centuries,
with comment, in Ostrogorsky, ‘Das Mitkaisertum im Mittelalterlichen Byzanz’; see also
Dölger, ‘Das byzantinische Mitkaisertum in den Urkunden’.
24. ‘more Grecorum conregnantem instituere vultis?’: Die Briefsammlung Gerberts von Reims,
ed. Weigle, no. 26, p. 49 (Adalbero of Rheims to Egbert of Trier, 984).
25. Catalogue of the Byzantine Coins in the Dumbarton Oaks Collection and in the Whittemore
Collection, 3. 2, pp. 478, 482, 484–5, 496–500, plates XXXI–XXXII.
26. Constantine was born on 3 September 905 and was crowned at Pentecost (Whitsun),
15 May 908: Pingree, ‘The Horoscope of Constantine VII Porphyrogenitus’; Symeon
Magister et Logotheta, Chronicon, 133. 59, ed. Wahlgren, p. 292.
27. τελευταῖος πάντων ὁ Κωνσταντῖνος. οὗτος τοίνυν ὁ Κωνσταντῖνος σχῆμα μόνον καὶ ὄνομα
τῆς βασιλείας ἔχων: Skylitzes, Synopsis historiarum, ed. Thurn, p. 234.
28. Skylitzes, Synopsis historiarum, ed. Thurn, p. 248.
29. ἀπὸ μὲν γὰρ γεννήσεως ἄχρις εἰκοστοῦ χρόνου τῆς ἡλικίας αὐτοῦ τῷ τε πατρὶ καὶ τῷ Φωκᾷ
Νικηφόρῳ καὶ τῷ μετ’ ἐκεῖνον Ἰωάννῃ τῷ Τζιμισκῇ συνεβασίλευσεν ὑποκείμενος, εἶτα δὴ δύο
πρὸς τοῖς πεντήκοντα ἔτεσι τὴν αὐτοκράτορα ἔσχεν ἀρχήν: Psellos, Chronographia, 1. 37, ed.
Renauld, 1, pp. 23–4; ed. Reinsch, p. 23.
30. Skylitzes, Synopsis historiarum, ed. Thurn, p. 369; Cedrenus, Historiarum compendium, ed.
Bekker, 2, p. 480.

477
 NOTES TO PAGES 95–7

31. ‘pater dicti domini Thome fuit vocatus Willelmus de Cantilupo miles et baro qui fuit
potens homo et magne auctoritatis et senescallus domini Henrici quarti regis
Anglorum’: BAV, MS Vat. lat. 4015, fol. 92v (testimony of Robert of Gloucester,
chancellor of Hereford and a doctor of canon law, in the canonization process of
Thomas de Cantilupe). Nicholas Trevet, writing his Anglo-Norman chronicle in the
1330s, and the author of the Eulogium Historiarum, writing in the 1360s, also call our
Henry III ‘Henry IV’: Leiden, Universiteitsbibliotheek, MS VG G F 6, fol. 91v; Eulogium
historiarum, ed. Haydon, 3, pp. 123, 137–9.
32. Bernard Gui, Reges Francorum, Arbor genealogiae regum Francorum, discussed further,
pp. 335–9; on these works, see Delisle, ‘Notice sur les manuscrits de Bernard Gui’,
pp. 245–52, 254–8; I cite from CCCC, MS 45; see fols. 16v, 17v, 26v, 27, 29, 33, 43v, 44,
45, 45v, 46v, 47, 48. Numbering the Philips in this way was not only a practice of Bernard
Gui’s; see, for example, Geoffroy de Courlon, Chronique de l’abbaye de Saint-Pierre-le-Vif de
Sens, ed. Julliot, p. 564; Guillelmus Scotus, Chronicon, ed. Guigniaut and de Wailly,
p. 202.
33. Otto II as king in 961 and as emperor in 967; Otto III as king in 983; Henry III in 1028;
Henry IV in 1053; Conrad, son of Henry IV, in 1087; Henry V in 1098; Henry, son of
Conrad III, in 1147; Henry VI as king in 1169 (the plan to have him made co-emperor
was thwarted); Frederick II in 1196; Henry (VII) in 1220; Conrad IV in 1237; see Giese,
‘Zu den Designationen und Mitkönigserhebungen der deutschen Könige des
Hochmittelalters (936–1237)’.
34. ‘Otto iunior . . . coimperator’: Ottonis II. et III. Diplomata, ed. von Sickel, nos. 24–5,
pp. 33–5 (972).
35. Lampert of Hersfeld, Annales, s.a. 1051, 1052, ed. Holder-Egger, p. 63; Hermann of
Reichenau, Chronica, ed. Pertz, p. 133; Heinrici III. Diplomata, ed. Bresslau and Kehr, no.
330, p. 452, onwards.
36. ‘Cum vero puer ipse tribus annis gereret, omnis populus necnon et sublimes una cum
suo genitore ad principalem dignitatem eum videlicet asciverunt, atque eis iusiuran-
dum iuraverunt’: Chronicon Salernitanum, 159, ed. Westerbergh, p. 166; Loud, Age of
Guiscard, p. 41.
37. Simms, From Kings to Warlords: The Changing Political Structure of Gaelic Ireland in the Later
Middle Ages, p. 52.
38. ‘in ecclesia Dominice Resurrectionis regia decoratus est unctione et sollempniter
coronatus statimque sine dilatione exhibite sunt eidem puero universorum baro-
num cum solita iuramentorum forma manualiter fidelitates’: William of Tyre,
Chronicon, 22. 30 (29), ed. Huygens, 2, p. 1058.
39. ‘principibus . . . filio Waldemari Kanuto regios honores decernere placuit, qui non
solum paterne maiestatis futurus possessor, sed eciam presens dignitatis socius
nosceretur’: Saxo Grammaticus, Gesta Danorum, 14. 33. 1, ed. Friis-Jensen, 2,
p. 1244.
40. Danmarks middelalderlige annaler, ed. Kroman, index entries under ‘Valdemar (III)’.

478
 NOTES TO PAGES 98–103

41. ‘Fieri quoque asserebat posse, rege interempto, et patria desolata, primatum dis-
cordiam, pravorum contra bonos tirannidem, et inde totius gentis captivitatem’:
Richer of Saint-Rémi, Historiae, 4. 12, ed. Hoffmann, p. 240.
42. The term is from Giese, ‘Die designativen Nachfolgeregelungen der Karolinger
714–979’, p. 497: ‘Die Idee eines “Reservekönigs”’.
43. ‘ad refellendum emulorum tumultum’: Suger, Vita Ludovici Grossi, 32, ed. Waquet,
p. 268.
44. ‘In custamento militum et servientium ad custodiam patrie post mortem regis
Richardi’: The Great Roll of the Pipe for the First Year of the Reign of King John, ed. Stenton,
p. 38; cf. pp. 71, 79, 87; ‘universi . . . qui castella habebant munierunt illa hominibus et
victu et armis’: Roger of Howden, Chronica, ed. Stubbs, 4, p. 88.
45. ‘quod post unius regnantis occasum interstitium temporis inter predecessoris obitum
et plenum dominium successoris, quod interregnum veteres appellabant, grande possit
imperio . . . afferre discrimen’: Historia Diplomatica Friderici II, ed. Huillard-Bréholles, 5.
1, p. 31.
46. ‘Rex obiit, nec rege carens caret Anglia pace./ Hec Henrice creas miracula, primus in
orbe’: Henry of Huntingdon, Historia Anglorum, 10. 40, ed. Greenway, p. 776.
47. Byrne, ‘A Note on the Emergence of Irish Surnames’, p. xxxix.
48. Smith, ‘Dynastic Succession in Medieval Wales’; see also p. 203 herein.
49. Forey, The Templars in the Corona de Aragon, p. 64.
50. Gregory of Tours, Libri historiarum decem, 9. 20, ed. Krusch and Levison, p. 436; the so-
called Treaty of Andelot, generally now dated to 586.
51. Giese, ‘Die designativen Nachfolgeregelungen der Karolinger 714–979’.
52. ‘regni successio indivisa et integra . . . iuxta generalem totius Ispanie consuetudinem
aprobatam’: AN, AE/III/165, Cote d’origine: J//601/25 (consulted online); it is
printed in Piskorski, Las Cortes de Castilla, pp. 196–7, with a regularized spelling and
one important misprint (‘Iahennni’ for ‘duximus’); Daumet, Mémoire sur les relations de
la France et de la Castille de 1255 à 1320, pp. 1–9.
53. ‘affermons . . . ke coustume et vssaghes ont este tel ou roiaume Descoche de si lonch
tans de coi il nest point de memoire e sont encore ke se fiez de roi Descoche et ses oirs
malles a oirs de se proper char e muire cil fiex ainscois ki li rois ses pere li oir ki seront
issu de cel fil demeurent e doiuent demourer airete del roiame. Dont sil auenoit chose
ke chius Alixandres nos fiex et cele Margherite sasanbloient par mariaghe e eussent oirs
malles de leur deus chars chil oir ki diaus deus seroient issu demouroient airete del
roiaume Descoche selonch le coustume et lussaghe deuantdis’: The Acts of Alexander III,
King of Scots, 1249–1286, ed. Neville and Simpson, no. 133, pp. 165–8; see Duncan, The
Kingship of the Scots, 842–1292: Succession and Independence, pp. 166–9.
54. ‘tanquam vir strenuus et in actibus bellicis pro defensione juris et libertatis regni Scotie
quam plurimum expertus’: The Records of the Parliaments of Scotland to 1707, ed. Brown
et al., 1315/1; The Acts of Robert I, 1306–29, ed. Duncan, no. 58, pp. 342–3; Bower,
Scotichronicon, 12. 24, ed. Watt et al., 6, pp. 378–80; on this and the following paragraph,
see the discussion in Penman, ‘Diffinicione successionis ad regnum Scottorum: Royal
Succession in Scotland in the Later Middle Ages’, pp. 50–3.

479
 NOTES TO PAGES 103–7

55. The Acts of Robert I, 1306–29, ed. Duncan, p. 62.

56. ‘Preterea cum aliquibus preteritis temporibus a quibusdam . . . in dubium fuisset
revocatum quo jure successio in regno Scotie si clara forsitan non extiterit decidi
deberet et firmari, in eodem parliamento . . . declaratum extitit ac diffinitum quod
per consuetudinem in inferioribus feodis seu hereditatibus in regno observatam cum
in successione regni aliqua talis consuetudo hactenus non fuit introducta, minime
debuit seu in futurum debeat dicta successio terminari sed quod proximior masculus
tempore mortis regis ex linea recta descendente, vel masculo deficiente proximior
femella ex eadem linea, vel illa linea penitus deficiente, proximior masculus ex linea
collaterali . . . in regno debeat succedere. Quod jure imperiali satis consonum cense-
tur’: The Records of the Parliaments of Scotland to 1707, ed. Brown et al., 1318/30; The Acts of
Robert I, 1306–29, ed. Duncan, no. 301, pp. 560–1.
57. See, for example, Kunisch (ed.), Der dynastische Fürstenstaat: Zur Bedeutung von
Sukzessionsordungen für die Entstehung des frühmodernen Staates.
58. Duindam, Dynasties: A Global History of Power, 1300–1800, pp. 88–9.
59. Simms, From Kings to Warlords: The Changing Political Structure of Gaelic Ireland in the Later
Middle Ages, pp. 54–7.
60. Dumville, ‘The Ætheling: A Study in Anglo-Saxon Constitutional History’.
61. The title duke of Calabria was born by the following heirs: Robert, son of Charles II,
from 1297; his son Charles (d. 1328); Robert’s grand-daughter Joanna, with her hus-
band Andrew of Hungary, who were invested with the duchy of Calabria and the
principality of Salerno in 1333; Charles Martel, son of Joanna, in 1346; Otto of
Brunswick, husband of Joanna, in 1375; Louis of Anjou, Joanna’s adopted son, in
1380. The rival claimant, Louis of Hungary, styled himself prince of Salerno by 1348.
62. The agreement of 1349 is printed in Guiffrey, Histoire de la réunion du Dauphiné à la
France, pp. 223–46; for the heraldry, Mérindol, ‘L’héraldique des princes angevins’,
p. 286.
63. See the documents of 1367 printed in Guiffrey, Histoire de la réunion du Dauphiné à la
France, pp. 306–13.
64. ‘et pour ce estoit appellé monseigneur le dalphin’: Les Grandes chroniques de France:
chronique des règnes de Jean II et de Charles V, ed. Delachenal, 2, p. 66.
65. ‘Como el linage humano sea inclinado, y apetezca, que los hombres deban desear
pensar en el ensalzamiento del estado y honor de los hijos, y descendientes de ellos . . .
nuestro muy caro y muy amado nieto . . . y habemos erigido y erigimos, por las
presentes, nombre y título de Principado sobre las dichas villas y lugares, y le habemos
dado, y damos título y honor de Príncipe’: Anales del Reino de Navarra, 6, ed. Moret, pp.
261–2.
66. ‘non valet privilegium principis ante coronationem’: Accursius, Glossa ordinaria to Code
7. 37. 3, ad ‘infulas’, col. 1869; see the comment by Kantorowicz, The King’s Two Bodies,
p. 324, and, on interregna in general, pp. 317–36.
67. ‘Scotorum autem principes, qui et reges dicuntur, sicut et Hispanie principes, qui nec
coronari tamen consueuerant nec inungi’: Gerald of Wales, De principis instructione, 1.
20, ed. Bartlett, p. 388 (RS edn., p. 138).

480
 NOTES TO PAGES 107–10

68. Petit-Dutaillis, Étude sur la vie et le règne de Louis VIII (1187–1226), pp. xi–xii; Tessier,
Diplomatique royale française, pp. 224–6.
69. ‘Philippus Dei gratia Francorum Rex’: Ordonnances des roys de France de la troisième race, 1,
p. 295; Lewis, Royal Succession in Capetian France: Studies on Familial Order and the State,
p. 150, says he was ‘the first of his line’ to entitle himself king ‘before his coronation’.
70. ‘coronatio nichil fecit quantum ad transmittendam successionem’: Óváry, ‘Negoziati
tra il Re d’Ungheria e il Re di Francia per la successione di Giovanna I. d’Angiò’, p. 142
(the opinion of Louis of Piacenza).
71. ‘Alia est opinio quod rex hereditarie succedens non necessario accipit aliquam potes-
tatem super temporalia ex eo quod coronatur a persona ecclesiastica, quamvis posset
contingere quod ex hoc aliquam acciperet potestatem super temporalia’: William of
Ockham, Octo quaestiones de potestate papae, 5. 6, ed. Offler, p. 158; the work dates to
1341/2.
72. ‘Rex hereditarie succedens nullam recepit potestatem super temporalia ex eo quod
coronatur’: Somnium Viridarii, 1. 170, ed. Schnerb-Lièvre, 1, p. 234; cf. the French
version: ‘Roy qui vient a un royaume par succession ne prent aucun novel pover pour
rayson de son couronement’: Songe du Vergier, 1. 78, ed. Schnerb-Lièvre, 1, p. 127. Both
versions date to the 1370s.
73. Coke, La sept part des reports Sr. Edvv. Coke Chiualer, chiefe Iustice del Common Banke, fol. 10v.
74. On fathers and sons, see Schieffer, ‘Väter und Söhne im Karolingerhause’; Kasten,
Königssöhne und Königsherrschaft: Untersuchungen zur Teilhabe am Reich in der Merowinger-
und Karolingerzeit; Krüger, ‘Herrschaftsnachfolge als Vater-Sohn-Konflikt’; Weiler,
‘Kings and Sons: Princely Rebellions and the Structures of Revolt in Western Europe,
c. 1170–c. 1280’.
75. ‘Enimvero quasi leo regna quae adhuc cepit, firmissime tenuit, neque mihi, quamvis
filio, partem vel unam dedit’: Ekkehard IV, Casus sancti Galli, 146, ed. Haefele, p. 284
(MGH, SS 2, p. 147).
76. Vale, Charles VII, p. 163.
77. ‘de long temps il avoit eu désir de régner et d’avoir couronne en teste et encore plus
maintenant pour cause que son père lui tenoit la main roide’: Chastellain, Chronique, 4.
88, ed. Kervyn de Lettenhove, 3, p. 446.
78. ‘In processu quoque temporis cum adolevisset, cernens se nil dominii rei peculiaris
praeter victum et vestitum ex regno, unde coronatus fuerat, posse mandare, coepit
corde tristari atque apud patrem ut ei quidpiam dominii largiretur conqueri . . . Ille
vero cernens se non posse diutius talia aequanimiter tolerare, junctis secum aliquibus
suae aetatis juvenibus, coepit infestari ac diripere ad libitum res genitorum. Tamen
paulo post Dei nutu in se reversus, ad genitores rediens, humili eos satisfactione
benevolos erga se reddidit. Tunc demum ab eisdem largitur illi, ut optimum decebat
filium, jus ubique ac potestas regni. . . . repente illum mors invida mundo subripuit’:
Rodulfus Glaber, Historiarum libri quinque, 3. 32–3, ed. France, p. 152.
79. His life has been brilliantly illuminated by Strickland, Henry the Young King, 1155–1183.
80. Although Offa of Mercia had had his son consecrated king (‘to cyninge gehalgod’) during
his lifetime: Anglo-Saxon Chronicle (A), s.a. 785 (recte 787), ed Plummer and Earle, p. 54.

481
 NOTES TO PAGES 110–15

81. ‘suggerentes incongruum videri quibuslibet regem esse et dominationem regno deb-
itam non exercere’: Ralph de Diceto, Ymagines historiarum, ed. Stubbs, 1, p. 350.
82. ‘tam infrunito factus est animo patricida, ut in summis desideriis mortem eius
posuerit’: Walter Map, De nugis curialium, 4. 1, ed. James et al., p. 282.
83. ‘Dii boni! Si tanti fratres fraterno se inuicem federe filialique affectu patrem filii
respexissent, duplicique tam beneuolencie quam nature, uinculo astricti fuissent,
quanta et quam inestimabilis, quam inclita et incomparabilis in euum et patris fuisset
gloria et prolis uictoria!’: Gerald of Wales, Topographia Hibernica, 3. 52, ed. Dimock,
p. 201; Gerald of Wales, De principis instructione, 2. 11, ed. Bartlett, p. 483 (RS ed.,
p. 179).
84. ‘impie, inhumane et indigne’; ‘cupiens nos privare regno et vita’: Henry IV, Die Briefe
Heinrichs IV., ed. Erdmann, no. 37, pp. 47–9.
85. ‘meum inquam Absalon dilectissimum’: ibid., no. 39, p. 53.
86. He is labelled Henry (VII) to distinguish him from the later emperor Henry VII
(1308–13). He was born early in 1211, elected king of the Romans in April 1220 and
died in February 1242.
87. Historia Diplomatica Friderici II, ed. Huillard-Bréholles, 4. 1, p. 525.
88. Roland of Padua, Chronica, 3. 10, ed. Jaffé, p. 61.
89. ‘In morte filii natura condoluit et paternos affectus eduxit in lacrimas quas offense
filii denegabat’: Historia Diplomatica Friderici II, ed. Huillard-Bréholles, 6. 1, p. 29; the
fall of Henry (VII) is discussed by Weiler, Kingship, Rebellion and Political Culture:
England and Germany, c.1215–c.1250.
90. Ralph de Diceto, Ymagines historiarum, ed. Stubbs, 1, pp. 355–66.
91. Procès en nullité de la condamnation de Jeanne d’Arc, ed. Duparc 1, p. 328.
92. ‘ledit dampnable traittié fait a Troies’: Pour ce que plusieurs, ed. Taylor, p. 82.
93. Kölzer, ‘Das Königtum Minderjähriger im fränkisch-deutschen Mittelater: Eine Skizze’;
Wolf, ‘Königinwitwen als Vormünder ihrer Söhne und Enkel im Abendland zwischen
426 und 1056’; Offergeld, Reges pueri. Das Königtum Minderjähriger im frühen Mittelalter;
Beem (ed.), The Royal Minorities of Medieval and Early Modern England; Ward, ‘Child
Kingship in England, Scotland, France and Germany, c. 1050–c. 1250’.
94. ‘Gnedige fraw, Vnd hiett ainen Sun der Zehen Jar alt wër, wier nemen sein nicht auf zu
ainem herren, Wenn er moecht uns den tuerkken nicht vorgesein’: Kottannerin, Die
Denkwürdigkeiten der Helene Kottannerin (1439–1440), ed. Mollay, p. 22.
95. ‘ille, qui ex prosapia imperiali prodiens bonae puer indolis iam coadolescebat; cuius
etsi aetas idonea ad reprimendam barbarorum saevitiam minus sufficere videretur,
tamen nobilium principum istius regni, quorum non parvus est numerus, consilio et
fortitudine Deo iuvante comprimerentur’: Capitularia regum Francorum, 2, ed. Boretius
and Krause, no. 289, pp. 376–7 (Hludowici regis Arelatensis electio). For a birthdate of 881
for Louis, see Offergeld, Reges pueri. Das Königtum Minderjähriger im frühen Mittelalter,
p. 474 n. 567.
96. Vogtherr, ‘“Weh dir, Land, dessen König ein Kind ist”. Minderjährige Könige um 1200
im europäischen Vergleich’, p. 293, estimates ‘at least eighty cases’ between 1100 and
1500, compared with the fifty-seven for that period in Appendix B (see pp. 444–6).

482
 NOTES TO PAGES 115–19

97. Constans II in 641, aged eleven; Constantine VI in 780, aged nine; Michael III in 842,
aged two; Constantine VII in 913, aged eight; Alexius II in 1180, aged eleven; John IV
in 1258, aged seven; John V in 1341, aged nine; see the comments of Lilie, ‘Der Kaiser
in der Statistik. Subversive Gedanken zur angeblichen Allmacht der byzantinischen
Kaiser’, pp. 218–20.
98. Gregory of Tours, Libri historiarum decem, 7. 7, ed. Krusch and Levison, p. 330.
99. His age is given as eight by Jordanes, Romana, 367, ed. Mommsen, p. 48, and Procopius, De
bello Gothico, 1. 2, ed. Dewing, 3, p. 14 (History of the Wars, 5. 2), but as ‘scarcely ten (vix
decennem)’ in Jordanes, Getica, 304, ed. Mommsen, p. 136.
100. Procopius, De bello Gothico, 1. 4, ed. Dewing, 3, pp. 34–40 (History of the Wars, 5. 4);
Jordanes, Getica, 306, ed. Mommsen, p. 136.
101. Wolf, ‘Königinwitwen als Vormünder ihrer Söhne und Enkel im Abendland zwischen
426 und 1056’; Offergeld, Reges pueri. Das Königtum Minderjähriger im frühen Mittelalter,
pp. 182–293.
102. Martina for Constans II in 641 (in this case a stepmother), Irene for Constantine VI in
780, Theodora for Michael III in 842, Zoe Karbonopsina for Constantine VII in 913,
Maria of Antioch for Alexius II in 1180 and Anna of Savoy for John V in 1341; the
exception is John IV in 1258, whose mother was already dead.
103. ‘Hec, quamvis sexu fragilis . . . egregie conversacionis fuit regnumque filii sui custodia
virili servabat’: Thietmar of Merseburg, Chronicon, 4. 10, ed. Holtzmann, pp. 142–3.
104. ‘Bien est France abatardie, Signor baron entendes, Quant feme l’a en baillie’: Hugh
de la Ferté, ‘En talent ai que je die’, Recueil de chants historiques français depuis le XIIIe
siècle, 1, ed. Le Roux de Lincy, p. 171.
105. Grant, Blanche of Castile, Queen of France, pp. 78–105.
106. Bagge, From Viking Stronghold to Christian Kingdom: State Formation in Norway,
c. 900–1350, pp. 357–9.
107. Black-Veldtrup, Kaiserin Agnes (1043–1077): quellenkritische Studien, pp. 91–2, lists all
the sources for the following event.
108. ‘Summa tamen rerum et omnium quibus facto opus erat administratio penes imper-
atricem remansit, quae tanta arte periclitantis rei publicae statum tutata est, ut nihil
in ea tumultus, nihil simultatis tantae rei novitas generaret’: Lampert of Hersfeld,
Annales, s.a. 1056, ed. Holder-Egger, p. 69; his tone changed later: see p. 79, s.a.
1062.
109. Gregory VII, Registrum, 4. 3, ed. Caspar, p. 299.
110. Lampert of Hersfeld, Annales, ed. Holder-Egger, s.a. 1062, p. 80.
111. Peter of Zittau, Chronicon Aulae Regiae, 1. 6–83, ed. Emler, pp. 12–105.
112. ‘[Fridericus] Heinrici filii sui eum constituens tutorem et totius regni Romani per
Alemanniam provisorem’: Caesarius of Heisterbach, Vita, passio et miracula sancti
Engelberti, 1. 5, ed. Zschaeck, pp. 241–2.
113. ‘Balium vero regni domino pape dimisit, ab omnibus iuramento firmandum,
quoniam ad eum spectabat, tanquam ad dominum principalem . . . sicque debitum
carnis exsolvit, rege pupillo in familiarium custodia derelicto’: Gesta Innocentii III,
23, PL 214, col. XXXIX, ed. Gress-Wright, p. 20.

483
 NOTES TO PAGES 120–2

114. Recueil general des anciennes lois françaises, 5, nos. 546, 549–50, pp. 415–39.
115. ‘Cum autem sibi nil desit quod deceat regiam majestatem, per sacramentum fidelita-
tis, quo astringor, ipsum assero deinceps tutela non indigere, sed per ipsum debere
milicie domique negocia moderari’: Chronique du religieux de Saint-Denys, 9. 10, ed.
Bellaguet, 1, p. 558; the cardinal of Laon was Pierre Aycelin; he made his will ‘lying sick
in Rheims (jacente infirmo Remis)’ on 7 November 1388: Félibien and Lobineau, Histoire
de la ville de Paris, 5, pp. 675–7.
116. Le Livre au roi, 6, ed. Geilsammer, p. 148.
117. Recueil general des anciennes lois françaises, 5, no. 546, pp. 415–23.
118. Bisson, The Medieval Crown of Aragon: A Short History, p. 36.
119. Woodacre, The Queens Regnant of Navarre: Succession, Politics, and Partnership,
1272–1512, p. 64.
120. See the detailed study by Carpenter, The Minority of Henry III.
121. ‘rector noster et regni nostri’: Patent Rolls of the Reign of Henry III (1216–32), 1, pp.
3–187 passim.
122. ‘Sciatis quod provisum est per commune consilium regni nostri quod nulla carta,
nulle littere patentes de confirmacione, alienacione, vendicione, vel donacione, seu
de aliqua re que cedere possit in perpetuitatem, sigillentur magno sigillo nostro
usque ad etatem nostram completam’: Patent Rolls of the Reign of Henry III (1216–32),
1, p. 177.
123. ‘Vae tibi terra cuius rex est puer’: Ecclesiastes 10: 16.
124. ‘non regem sed puerum nominant deridendo’: Carpenter, The Minority of Henry III,
p. 161 n. 16, citing TNA, SC 1/1, no. 39.
125. ‘Rex enim puer erat, mater vero utpote femina his et illis consiliantibus facile cede-
bat’: Annales Altahenses maiores, s.a. 1060, ed. von Oefele, p. 56.
126. ‘Sed maledicta terra ubi puer regnat et mulier principatum tenet; regnum non
precibus uel blanditiis, sed legibus et inperio regendum est’: Historia Compostellana,
1. 107, ed. Falque Rey, p. 183.
127. ‘Nam rex puer erat, et pro suo velle sicut harundinem ad suum placitum agitabant’:
Andreas Marchianensis, Historia regum Francorum, 3. 27, ed. Waitz, p. 210.
128. Although the nickname first occurs only several generations after his reign:
‘Lodewicus . . . qui cognominatus est Infans’: Gesta episcoporum Halberstadensium, ed.
Weiland, p. 82 (material perhaps originally put together in the 990s); Bührer,
‘Studien zu den Beinamen mittelalterlicher Herrscher’, p. 209; see also Widukind of
Corvey, Res gestae saxonicae, 1. 22, ed. Hirsch and Lohmann, p. 34 (from the 960s):
‘tempore Ludewici adolescentis’; Thietmar of Merseburg (d. 1018), Chronicon, 1. 6,
ed. Holtzmann, p. 10: ‘Conradus . . . Luthuwici successor pueri’.
129. ‘Arnolfus imperator, habito conventu, nulli fidens, sacramentum fidelitatis denuo sibi
et filio parvulo Ludowico a cunctis exigit’: Hermann of Reichenau, Chronica, s.a. 897,
ed. Pertz, p. 111; see also Dümmler, Geschichte des Ostfränkischen Reiches, 3, p. 457 n. 1.
130. Bresslau, ‘Der angebliche Brief des Erzbischofs Hatto von Mainz an Papst Johann IX.’,
p. 27; Bresslau regarded this letter of Hatto of Mainz as a twelfth-century forgery, but
its authenticity was defended by Beumann, ‘Die Einheit des ostfränkischen Reichs

484
 NOTES TO PAGES 125–7

und der Kaisergedanke bei der Königserhebung Ludwigs des Kindes’; see Brühl,
Deutschland-Frankreich: die Geburt zweier Völker, p. 390; Offergeld, Reges pueri. Das
Königtum Minderjähriger im frühen Mittelalter, p. 529.

4 FEMALE SOVEREIGNS

1. There is a summary of her life in Hill, Imperial Women in Byzantium 1025–1204: Power,
Patronage and Ideology, pp. 62–6.
2. ‘Vnus igitur, loquens pro omnibus cunctis in idipsum consentientibus, ex persona
populorum recognouit regnum Castelle deberi de iure regine domine Berengarie et
quod eam omnes recognoscebant dominam et reginam regni Castelle. Verumptamen
supplicauerunt omnes unanimiter ut regnum, quod suum erat iure proprietatis, con-
cederet filio suo maiori, scilicet domino Fernando, quia, cum ipsa femina esset, labores
regiminis regni tolerare non posset. Ipsa uero, uidens quod ardenti desiderio concu-
pierat, petitis gratanter annuit et filio supradicto regnum concessit’: Chronica latina
regum Castellae, 35, ed. Charlo Brea, pp. 78–9.
3. Shadis, Berenguela of Castile (1180–1246) and Political Women in the High Middle Ages, esp.
pp. 97–121, and Bianchini, The Queen’s Hand: Power and Authority in the Reign of
Berenguela of Castile, esp. pp. 140–79.
4. Shadis, Berenguela of Castile (1180–1246) and Political Women in the High Middle Ages, p. 6;
Bianchini, The Queen’s Hand: Power and Authority in the Reign of Berenguela of Castile, p. 19;
there are many examples in Documentos medievais portugueses. Documentos régios, 1. 1, ed.
Azevedo.
5. ‘que se reginam appellari faciebat’; ‘que se reginam nominari faciebat’; ‘que se regi-
nam nominabat’; ‘dicta regina’: Gislebert of Mons, Chronicon Hanoniense, 125, 167, 174,
178, ed. Vanderkindere, pp. 193, 249, 259, 263. Matilda was also called Teresa. She titles
herself ‘queen’ in some of her charters: Nicolas, ‘Countesses as Rulers in Flanders’,
p. 125.
6. ‘Regina enim dicebatur, quia filia regis erat et pro fratre suo minus firmo regnum patris
sui tenuerat in Hyspaniis’: Vita Alberti episcopi Leodiensis, ed. Heller, p. 140.
7. General narratives in Garland, Byzantine Empresses: Women and Power in Byzantium, AD
527–1204, pp. 73–94; Herrin, Women in Purple: Rulers of Medieval Byzantium, pp. 51–129;
there is a succinct summary in Whittow, ‘Motherhood and Power in Early Medieval
Europe, West and East: The Strange Case of the Empress Eirene’, pp. 61–4, with
bibliography. For the coins, see Kotsis, ‘Defining Female Authority in Eighth-Century
Byzantium: The Numismatic Images of the Empress Irene (797–802)’; for the laws, Jus
Graecoromanum, ed. Ioannes and Panagiotes Zepos, 1, pp. 45, 49.
8. Annales Laureshamenses, s.a. 801, ed. Pertz, p. 38.
9. General narrative in Garland, Byzantine Empresses: Women and Power in Byzantium, AD
527–1204, pp. 136–57; on views of her many marriages, Laiou, ‘Imperial Marriages and
Their Critics in the Eleventh Century: The Case of Skylitzes’.
10. Psellos, Chronographia, 5. 22, ed. Renauld, 1, p. 99; ed. Reinsch, pp. 91–2.

485
 NOTES TO PAGES 127–30

11. Περιΐσταται οὖν ἡ βασιλεία ταῖς δυσὶν ἀδελφαῖς: Psellos, Chronographia, 6. 1, ed. Renauld,
1, p. 117; ed. Reinsch, p. 107.
12. Αἱ γοῦν ἀδελφαὶ μόναι τέως βασιλεύειν ἑλόμεναι: Psellos, Chronographia, 6. 2, ed. Renauld,
1, p. 117; ed. Reinsch, p. 107.
13. τἠν ἰσχὺν ἑαυτῇ ἐμνηστεύετο: Psellos, Chronographia, 6. 18, ed. Renauld, 1, p. 126; ed.
Reinsch, p. 114.
14. γίνεται ταῦτα ταῖς μὲν βασιλίσσαις τέλος τοῦ δι᾿ ἑαυτῶν τί ποιεῖν καὶ αὐτοκρατεῖν ἐν τοῖς
πράγμασιν, ἀρχὴ δὲ τῷ Μονομάχῳ Κωνσταντίνῳ καὶ πρώτη τῆς βασιλείας κατάστασις:
Psellos, Chronographia, 6. 21, ed. Renauld, 1, p. 127; ed. Reinsch, pp. 115–16.
15. Described (by Henry Maguire) and illustrated in The Glory of Byzantium: Art and Culture
of the Middle Byzantine Era, A.D. 843–1261, no. 145, pp. 210–12. There is debate about its
authenticity. See also Kotsis, ‘Mothers of the Empire: Empresses Zoe and Theodora on
a Byzantine Medallion Cycle’.
16. On Theodora, see Garland, Byzantine Empresses: Women and Power in Byzantium, AD
527–1204, pp. 161–7; Todt, ‘Die Frau als Selbstherrscher: Kaiserin Theodora, die letzte
Angehörige der makedonischen Dynastie’.
17. τὴν αὐτοκράτορα Ῥωμαίων ἀρχὴν ἑαυτῇ ἀνατίθησιν: Psellos, Chronographia, 6. 204 (a 1),
ed. Renauld, 2, p. 72; ed. Reinsch, p. 197.
18. ἀρρενώσασα: Psellos, Chronographia, 6. 205 (a 2), ed. Renauld, 2, p. 72; ed. Reinsch,
p. 197.
19. Aristakès of Lastivert, Récit des malheurs de la nation Arménienne, XVIII (101), p. 92.
20. τότε πρῶτον ὁ καθ’ ἡμᾶς χρόνος τεθέαται γυναικωνίτιν μετασχηματισθεῖσαν εἰς βασιλικὸν
βουλευτήριον: Psellos, Chronographia, 6. 1, ed. Renauld, 1, p. 117; ed. Reinsch, p. 107.
21. τὰ τῆς γυναικωνίτιδος παίγνια τοῖς βασιλικοῖς κατεκίρνων σπουδάσμασι: Psellos,
Chronographia, 6. 5, ed. Renauld, 1, p. 119; ed. Reinsch, p. 109.
22. ἐπιστασίας ἀνδρὸς: Psellos, Chronographia, 6. 10, ed. Renauld, 1, p. 121; ed. Reinsch,
p. 110.
23. Ὅτι μὲν οὖν ἀπρεπὲς ἔδοξε ξύμπασιν ἐξ ἀρρενωποτέρου φρονήματος ἐκθηλυνθῆναι τὴν
Ῥωμαίων ἀρχὴν: Psellos, Chronographia, 6. 207 (a 4), ed. Renauld, 2, p. 73; ed.
Reinsch, p. 198.
24. ἄρρενος, ἔφη, δεῖσθαι τὸ κράτος καὶ φρενὸς καὶ ψυχῆς: Psellos, ’Επιτάφιοι λόγοι εἰς τοὺς
πατριάρχας Μιχαὴλ Κηρουλλάριον, ed. Sathas, p. 358; see Todt, ‘Die Frau als
Selbstherrscher: Kaiserin Theodora, die letzte Angehörige der Makedonischen
Dynastie’, p. 157; cf. Psellos, Chronographia, 6. 220 (a 17), ed. Renauld, 2, p. 80; ed.
Reinsch, p. 204.
25. ἅτε γυναῖκα καὶ κληρονόμον τοῦ κράτους: Psellos, Chronographia, 4. 22, ed. Renauld, 1,
p. 67; ed. Reinsch, p. 63 (John the Orphanotrophus is speaking).
26. ποῦ ποτε . . . ἡ τὸν κλῆρον τῆς βασιλείας ἐννομώτατα ἔχουσα: Psellos, Chronographia, 5. 26,
ed. Renauld, 1, p. 102; ed. Reinsch, p. 94.
27. τὸ πᾶν κράτος περιέστη ὡς εἰς κληρονόμον τὴν βασιλίδα Ζωήν; Τὴν προγονικὴν δὲ
παραλαβοῦσα βασιλείαν: Skylitzes, Synopsis historiarum, ed. Thurn, pp. 416, 479.
28. Aristakès of Lastivert, Récit des malheurs de la nation Arménienne, XVII (95), p. 88.
29. Psellos, Chronographia, 6. 206 (a 3), ed. Renauld, 2, p. 73; ed. Reinsch, p. 197.

486
 NOTES TO PAGES 130–3

30. δεύτερον αἷμα βασίλειον: Psellos, Chronographia, 5. 36, ed. Renauld, 1, p. 108; ed.
Reinsch, p. 99.
31. Aristakès of Lastivert, Récit des malheurs de la nation Arménienne, IX (50), p. 39.
32. αἱ μάνναι ἡμῶν αἱ πορφυρογέννητοι: Skylitzes, Synopsis historiarum, ed. Thurn, p. 434.
33. Todt, ‘Die Frau als Selbstherrscher: Kaiserin Theodora, die letzte Angehörige der
Makedonischen Dynastie’, p. 169; Catalogue of the Byzantine Coins in the Dumbarton Oaks
Collection and in the Whittemore Collection, 3. 1, ed. Bellinger et al., p. 180; 3. 2, p. 753.
34. Psellos, Chronographia, 2. 5, ed. Renauld, 1, p. 28; ed. Reinsch, p. 27.
35. Ademar of Chabannes, Chronicon, 3. 32, ed. Bourgain, pp. 154–5; see Arbagi, ‘The
Celibacy of Basil II’.
36. Psellos, Chronographia, 3. 5, ed. Renauld, 1, p. 34; ed. Reinsch, p. 33. A marriage had
been planned for Zoe when she was much younger, but with a western ruler, Otto III,
not with a potential successor to the throne in Constantinople. Otto died before the
wedding could take place: Dölger, Regesten der Kaiserurkunden des oströmischen Reiches, 1.
2: Regesten von 867–1025, no. 784, p. 196. Wolf, ‘Zoe oder Theodora – Die Braut Kaiser
Ottos III. 1001/2?’, argues it was Theodora not Zoe who was the potential bride.
37. τὸν ἄζυγα βίον: Psellos, Orationes panegyricae, 11, ed. Dennis, p. 121.
38. Reilly, The Kingdom of León-Castilla under Queen Urraca, 1109–1126; her charters as
queen are edited by Irene Ruiz Albi in La reina doña Urraca (1109–1126), cancillería
y colección diplomática, ed. Ruiz Albi; for her coinage, see Crusafont, Balaguer and
Grierson, Medieval European Coinage, 6: The Iberian Peninsula, pp. 225–34; Martin,
Queen as King: Politics and Architectural Propaganda in Twelfth-Century Spain, for an
argument about her architectural patronage. It is possible that the Anglo-Saxon
queen Seaxburh ruled Wessex in her own right for a year in 672–3: Yorke,
‘Seaxburh [Sexburga] (d. 674?), queen of the Gewisse’, ODNB, XLIX, p. 616.
39. The Chronicon Compostellanum, ed. Falque Rey, p. 83, refers to Count Raymond, ‘quem
rex A. a Burgundia in Ispaniam venire fecerat, et cui totum suum regnum iureiurando
pollicitus fuerat’.
40. The evidence for Sancho’s designation as heir is a charter confirmation of 1107:
‘Sancius puer filius regis regnum electus patrifactum conf.’ This phrase is found only
in one version of a later copy but was enough to convince Reilly that ‘Sancho was
formally recognized as heir to the kingdom’: Reilly, The Kingdom of León-Castilla under
Queen Urraca, 1109–1126, p. 42. Tumbo A de la Catedral de Santiago, ed. Lucas Alvarez, no.
77, pp. 167–9, prints the version without the phrase ‘regnum electus patrifactum’,
which it gives in a note as a collation with the version in Tumbo C.
41. ‘. . . notum est et omnibus Hispanie regnum incolentibus quoniam pater meus impera-
tor Adefonsus, appropinquante sui transitus hora, mihi apud Toletum regnum totum
tradidit et filio meo Adefonso nepoti suo Gallitiam, si maritum susciperem’: Historia
Compostellana, 1. 64, ed. Falque Rey, p. 102; see also Alfonso’s own words: ‘totam ei [i.e
Alfonso, Urraca and Raymond’s son] Galletiam concedo, si eius mater Vrraca uirum
ducere uoluerit’: ibid., 1. 46, p. 84.
42. In the period between Raymond’s death and the death of her father Alfonso, Urraca
appears in documents as ‘mistress of the whole of Galicia’, or even ‘empress of the

487
 NOTES TO PAGES 133–5

whole of Galicia’: ‘totius Gallecie domina’: Tumbo A de la Catedral de Santiago, ed. Lucas
Alvarez, no. 78, pp. 176–7 (13 December 1107); ‘tocius Gallecie imperatrix’: Reilly, The
Kingdom of León-Castilla under Queen Urraca, 1109–1126, p. 50 (21 January 1108); both
also in Documentos medievales del Reino de Galicia: Doña Urraca (1095–1126), ed. Recuero
Astray, no. 14, pp. 53–4, no. 17, pp. 56–7, but with the document dated by Reilly as 1108
there dated 21 January 1107 and hence before Raymond’s death.
43. The argument that the marriage of Urraca and Alfonso of Aragon took place before the
death of Alfonso VI was advanced in detail by Ramos y Loscertales, ‘La sucesion del Rey
Alfonso VI’, but did not convince Reilly, The Kingdom of León-Castilla under Queen Urraca,
1109–1126, p. 52 n. 26.
44. ‘ayuntáronse los nobles e condes de la tierra e fuéronse para la dicha doña Vrraca su fija
diçiendole ansí: tu non podrás gouernar nin retener el reino de tu padre e a nosotros
regir si non tomares marido’: Crónicas anónimas de Sahagún, 18, ed. Ubieto Arteta, p. 26.
45. See especially La reina doña Urraca (1109–1126), cancillería y colección diplomática, ed. Ruiz
Albi, no. 4, pp. 360–2, of December 1109; in certain circumstances a union of Aragon
and Leon-Castile could have been the outcome. See the comments of Reilly, The
Kingdom of León-Castilla under Queen Urraca, 1109–1126, pp. 63–4.
46. ‘Urraka, Dei nutu totius Yspanie regina’: La reina doña Urraca (1109–1126), cancillería
y colección diplomática, ed. Ruiz Albi, no. 1, pp. 353–6; ‘regnante Adefonso rege
Aragoneni in Legione’: Reilly, The Kingdom of León-Castilla under Queen Urraca,
1109–1126, p. 63.
47. ‘non curo yo qué faga la mi hueste e mis guerreros’: Crónicas anónimas de Sahagún, 20,
ed. Ubieto Arteta, p. 34.
48. ‘a manera de bárvaro cruel’: ibid., pp. 32–3.
49. ‘Nul prince chrétien n’avait plus que lui de courage, d’ardeur à incessamment com-
battre les musulmans, de force de résistance. Il dormait avec sa cuirasse et sans matelas;
et comme un jour on lui demandait pourquoi il ne couchait pas avec les filles des chefs
musulmans qu’il avait faites prisonnières: “Un véritable soldat”, dit-il, “ne doit vivre
qu’avec les hommes, et non avec les femmes!”’: Ibn al-Athir, Annales du Maghreb et de
l’Espagne, tr. Fagnan, p. 555 (AH 529). There is another translation in Recueil des
Historiens des Croisades, Historiens Orientaux, 1, 414.
50. Historia Compostellana, 1. 64, ed. Falque Rey, p. 102.
51. ‘Aragonensis tyrannus’: Historia Compostellana, 1. 83, ed. Falque Rey, p. 131; this is
a standard term for Alfonso the Battler in the Historia Compostellana.
52. ‘como es costumbre de las lenguas lisonjeras, la dicha muger del conde era ya llamada
reina de los sus domésticos e caualleros’: Crónicas anónimas de Sahagún, 25, ed. Ubieto
Arteta, p. 41.
53. Papsturkunden in Portugal, ed. Erdmann, no. 16, pp. 169–70 (18 June 1116, an original).
54. Documentos medievais portugueses. Documentos régios, 1. 1, ed. Azevedo, no. 48, pp. 59–60
(‘ego regina Tarasia’), no. 49, pp. 60–2, (‘ego infant domna Tarasia regina de
Portugal’), both of 1117; the former is an original, the latter not. Earlier documentary
references to her as queen are dubious: ibid., 1. 2, pp. 571–2; Reilly, The Kingdom of
León-Castilla under Queen Urraca, 1109–1126, p. 117 n. 103. In 1121 a papal legate

488
 NOTES TO PAGES 135–40

addressed her as ‘T. venerabili regine Portugalen(sium)’: Papsturkunden in Portugal, ed.

Erdmann, no. 24, pp. 180–1.
55. Cf. the pithy account in the Chronica Adefonsi imperatoris, 1. 73, ed. Maya Sánchez,
p. 184; ‘Ipsa autem Tarasia erat filia regis domni Adefonsi, sed de non legitima, ualde
tamen a rege dilecta, nomine Xemena Munionis, quam rex dilectionis et honoris
causa dedit maritatam Enrrico comiti et dotauit eam magnifice dans Portugalensem
terram iure hereditario. Mortuo autem comite Enrrico, Portugalenses uocauerunt
eam reginam; qua defuncta, filium suum regem, sicut et postea fuit, ad honorem
nominis sui dixerunt.’
56. On her, see Chibnall, The Empress Matilda: Queen Consort, Queen Mother and Lady of the
English.
57. Blackburn, ‘Coinage and Currency’, pp. 187–8.
58. See Mayer, ‘Studies in the History of Queen Melisende of Jerusalem’; Hamilton,
‘Women in the Crusader States: The Queens of Jerusalem (1100–1190)’, pp. 147–57;
Mayer, ‘The Succession to Baldwin II of Jerusalem: English Impact on the East’. Her
charters are in Die Urkunden der lateinischen Könige von Jerusalem, ed. Mayer, 1, nos.
152–204, pp. 341–86.
59. ‘ei primogenita regis filia cum spe regni post regis obitum traderetur’: William of Tyre,
Chronicon, 13. 24, ed. Huygens, 1, p. 618.
60. ‘regni curam et plenam eis tradidit potestatem’: ibid., 13. 28, 1, p. 625.
61. ‘idem comes cum predicta uxore . . . in ecclesia Dominici Sepulchri . . . sollempniter et
ex more coronatus et consecratus est’: ibid., 14. 2, 2, p. 634.
62. ‘sollempniter inunctus, consecratus et cum matre coronatus est’: ibid., 16. 3, 12, p. 717.
63. ‘semper ad matris ubera dependere’: ibid.
64. ‘indignum esse ut femineo regeretur arbitrio’: ibid., 17. 13, 2, p. 778.
65. Chibnall, The Empress Matilda: Queen Consort, Queen Mother and Lady of the English, p. 206.
66. Chronicon Compostellanum, ed. Falque Rey, p. 82.
67. ‘comitem Larensem P. Gundisaluidem, qui cum matre ipsius regis [Alfonso VII]
adulterine concubuerat et ex ipsa regina adulterinos filios et filias genuerat’: Historia
Compostellana, 3. 24, ed. Falque Rey, p. 458.
68. Orderic Vitalis, Historia ecclesiastica, 12. 7, ed. Chibnall, 6, pp. 406–8.
69. ‘Animus mulieris infirmus est et instabilis et cito exorbitat, ut scriptum est: Melior est
iniquitas uiri quam benefaciens mulier’: Historia Compostellana, 1. 107, ed. Falque Rey,
p. 181; the biblical citation is Ecclesiasticus 42: 14.
70. ‘Quid non audet muliebris uecordia? Quid non presumit serpentis uersutia? Quid non
aggreditur sceleratissima uipera? Quid audeant, quid presumant, quid aggrediantur
muliebria figmenta, Eue prothoparentis nostre satis indicant exempla. Ruit in uetitum
audacissima mens mulieris: sacrosancta uiolat fas que nefas que confundit’: ibid., 2. 39,
ed. Falque Rey, p. 284.
71. ‘Erat autem mater mulier prudentissima, plenam pene in omnibus secularibus
negociis habens experientiam, sexus feminei plane vincens conditionem, ita ut
manum mitteret ad fortia’: William of Tyre, Chronicon, 16. 3, ed. Huygens, 2,
p. 717.

489
 NOTES TO PAGES 140–2

72. ‘Hanc [sc. regni curam et administrationem] consilio principum regionis strenue et
feliciter, vires et animum transcendens femineum, usque ad illum diem
administraverat . . .’: ibid., 17. 13, 2, p. 777.
73. Ibid., 16. 3, 18. 27, 2, pp. 717, 850.
74. ‘domina Milissendis regina, mulier provida et supra sexum discreta femineum, que
regnum tam vivente marito quam regnante filio congruo moderamine annis triginta et
amplius, vires transcendens femineas, rexerat . . .’: ibid., 18. 27, 2, p. 850.
75. ‘manum suum misit ad fortia’: Proverbs 31: 19, in midst of the eulogy of the strong
woman.
76. ‘oculi omnium in te respiciunt . . . Opus est ut manum tuam mittas ad fortia, et in
muliere exhibeas virum . . . Ita prudenter et moderate oportet te cuncta disponere, ut
omnes, qui te viderint, ex operibus regem te potius, quam reginam existiment . . . Sed
non sum, inquies, ad ista sufficiens . . . Opera haec opera sunt viri; ego autem mulier
sum, corpore debilis, mobilis corde, nec provida consilio, nec assueta negotiis’:
Bernard of Clairvaux, Epistolae, 354, ed. Leclerq and Rochais, 2 (8), pp. 297–8.
77. Arnulf of Lisieux, Epitaphium Matildis Imperatricis.
78. ‘She was unpopular because she was a woman’: Davis, King Stephen, 1135–1154, p. 13;
‘To many of the political elite, Matilda was unsuitable because she was a woman’:
Stringer, The Reign of Stephen: Kingship, Warfare, and Government in Twelfth-Century
England, p. 1; ‘An even stronger objection to Matilda . . . was that she was a woman’:
Bartlett, England under the Norman and Angevin Kings 1075–1225, p. 10. Even Marjorie
Chibnall wrote of ‘the reluctance of many magnates . . . to accept a woman ruler’: The
Empress Matilda: Queen Consort, Queen Mother and Lady of the English, p. 96.
79. John of Salisbury, Historia pontificalis, 42, ed. Chibnall, pp. 83–6; William of
Malmesbury, Historia novella, 1. 3, ed. King, p. 10.
80. ‘que filio magis competunt, non debere filie regalia sceptra addici’: Gilbert Foliot,
Letters and Charters, ed. Morey and Brooke, no. 26, p. 61. The letter is discussed at
length in Morey and Brooke, Gilbert Foliot and his Letters, Chapter 7, ‘The Case for the
Empress Matilda’, pp. 105–23; see also Chibnall, The Empress Matilda: Queen Consort,
Queen Mother and Lady of the English, pp. 85–7.
81. This is the case of the daughters of Zelophehad, which occurs in Numbers 27: 1–11 and
36: 1–13. The former passage contains God’s injunction that daughters should inherit
in the absence of sons, the latter the condition that they should not marry outside their
tribe. Gilbert Foliot refers to ‘the last chapter’ of Numbers, and hence the latter
passage, but must presumably also be invoking the earlier injunction. It has been
argued that this condition for the daughters inheriting – that they should not marry
outside their tribe – could be seen as relevant to Matilda’s unpopular marriage with
Geoffrey of Anjou: Crouch, ‘Robert, Earl of Gloucester, and the Daughters of
Zelophehad’, pp. 232–3; Garnett, Conquered England: Kingship, Succession, and Tenure
1066–1166, p. 233 n. 839; see also Hudson, The Oxford History of the Laws of England II:
871–1216, p. 352.
82. Holt, ‘Feudal Society and the Family in Early Medieval England: IV. The Heiress and
the Alien’, p. 5; ‘asserens filiam nepoti in paterna hereditate praeferendam’: John of

490
 NOTES TO PAGES 142–6

Salisbury, Letters, no. 131, ed. Millor et al., 1, p. 227. She lost her case but because she
was deemed illegitimate not because she was female.
83. ‘dexó el señorio de su reino a la dicha donna Hurraca su fixa’: Crónicas anónimas de
Sahagún, 16, ed. Ubieto Arteta, p. 25.
84. La reina doña Urraca (1109–1126), cancillería y colección diplomática, pp. 291–3
(‘Intitulación’), 321–2 (‘Los sincronismos de reinos’).
85. ‘dompna Urracha regina . . . decentis memorie domini Aldefonsi regis filia’: La reina
doña Urraca (1109–1126), cancillería y colección diplomática, no. 148, pp. 590–2.
86. ‘fide et sacramento spoponderunt filie regis se totum regnum Anglorum illi contra
omnes defensuros, si patrem suum superviveret’: John of Worcester, Chronicle, 3, ed.
McGurk, p. 166.
87. ‘justam heredem regni Anglie’: Regesta regum Anglo-Normannorum, 1066–1154, 3, ed.
Cronne and Davis, no. 391, p. 150.
88. ‘filia regis et regni Ierosolimitani haeres’: Die Urkunden der lateinischen Könige von
Jerusalem, ed. Mayer, 1, no. 109, p. 269.
89. For the late medieval examples, see Monter, The Rise of Female Kings in Europe,
1300–1800, esp. pp. 54–93; Woodacre, The Queens Regnant of Navarre: Succession,
Politics, and Partnership, 1272–1512.
90. ‘los homes sabios et entendudos . . . establescieron que si fijo varon hi non hobiese, la
fija mayor heredase el regno’: Las Siete Partidas, 2. 15. 2, 2, p. 133.
91. Epistolae saeculi XIII e regestis pontificum Romanorum selectae, ed. Rodenberg, 3, no. 646,
p. 643, Clement IV, ‘Constitui ab eo’, Po. 19434, 4 November 1265, confirming the
cardinals’ arrangements of 28 June 1265.
92. ‘Si vero solum feminini sexus liberos superesse contingat, succedat primogenita in
eisdem’: Reg. Vat. 41, fol. 162 v°, n° 7; Les Registres de Martin IV (1281–1285), ed. Olivier-
Martin, no. 455, pp. 191–2, ‘Qui regna transfert’, 27 August 1283, Po. 22061.
93. ‘rectam heredem’: The Acts of the Parliaments of Scotland, 1, ed. Thomson and Innes,
p. 424 (82); Foedera (new ed.), 1. 2, p. 638.
94. See the comments in Duncan, The Kingship of the Scots, 842–1292: Succession and
Independence, pp. 181–2. He is even more forthright in his article on Margaret in the
ODNB: ‘to see her as queen is misleading, and effectively connives at the manipulative
insensitivity of those men, led by the English king, of whose ambition for political power
she was the pathetic child victim’: Duncan, ‘Margaret [called the Maid of Norway]
(1282/3–1290), queen-designate of Scots’, ODNB, 36, p. 636.
95. Foedera (new edn.), 1. 2, p. 742.
96. ‘Quod si forte, deficientibus masculis, contigerit feminam innuptam in regno succedere,
illa maritabitur persone, que ad ipsius regni regimen et defensionem existat idonea,
Romani tamen pontificis super hoc consilio requisite’: Epistolae saeculi XIII e regestis pontifi-
cum Romanorum selectae, ed. Rodenberg, 3, no. 646, p. 644, Clement IV, ‘Constitui ab eo’, Po.
19434, 4 November 1265, confirming the cardinals’ arrangements of 28 June 1265.
97. ‘Elisabeth Regina uxorque dicti Regis Ludovici, una cum Maria filia ejus, regimen
Hungariæ gubernabat, quæ quidem Maria appellabatur Rex Hungariæ . . . cum rege
Maria . . . Rex autem Maria’, etc.: Caresinus, Chronica, ed. Pastorello, pp. 67–8.

491
 NOTES TO PAGES 146–8

98. ‘omnis vulgus concordi animo hanc virginem regem appellat’; ‘cumulatis viribus
plateas civitatis vagantur per omnes et regem regnare Mariam clamitant’;
‘rex femineus’: Thurocz, Chronica Hungarorum, 187–8, 194, ed. Galántai and
Kristó, pp. 190–1, 203; a particular agility in reconciling feminine verb form and
masculine noun is shown by Paulus de Paulo: ‘Maria filia senior antedicti regis in
civitate praedicta coronata fuit in regem’: Memoriale Pauli de Paulo patritii Iadrensis,
ed. Šišić, p. 5.
99. One chronicler reports that Louis had recognized her ‘during his lifetime as his
legitimate daughter’, but this obviously implies a need to do so, and the existence of
doubters: ‘quam rex Ludovicus, dum viveret, pro filia legitima recognovit’: John of
Saint-Victor, Memoriale historiarum, ed. Guigniaut and de Wailly, p. 663; see also the
report to the king of Aragon claiming the same thing: Acta aragonensia, 1, ed. Finke,
no. 137, p. 211 (‘quam ipse rex filiam recognovit’); see, in general, Brown, ‘The
Ceremonial of Royal Succession in Capetian France: The Double Funeral of Louis X’.
100. Fawtier, The Capetian Kings of France: Monarchy and Nation, 987–1328, p. 129.
101. ‘proceribus et paribus regni (licet non omnibus) praesentibus’: Continuatio Chronici
Girardi de Fracheto, ed. Guigniaut and de Wailly, p. 47; Continuatio Chronici Guillelmi de
Nangiaco, ed. Géraud, 1, p. 431.
102. ‘Tunc etiam declaratum fuit quod ad coronam regni Franciae mulier non succedat’:
Continuatio Chronici Girardi de Fracheto, ed. Guigniaut and de Wailly, p. 47; Continuatio
Chronici Guillelmi de Nangiaco, ed. Géraud, 1, p. 434. In his comment on the accession of
Charles IV in 1322, Bernard Gui explains the exclusion of female candidates simply
‘because one has never read that daughters succeeded to rule in the kingdom of France
(quia filie in regno Francie ad regnandum numquam leguntur successisse)’: Reges Francorum,
Arbor genealogiae regum Francorum, CCCC 45, fols. 29, 47: also in RHF, 21, p. 732.
103. ‘non aequanimiter ferentes subdi regimini Anglicorum’: Continuatio Chronici Guillelmi
de Nangiaco, ed. Géraud, 2, p. 83.
104. Recueil general des anciennes lois françaises, 5, no. 546, pp. 415–23.
105. Taylor, ‘The Salic Law and the Valois Succession to the French Crown’, pp. 362–4;
Giesey, Le Rôle méconnu de la loi salique. La succession royale (xive–xvie siècles), pp. 82–98.
106. See Taylor, ‘The Salic Law and the Valois Succession to the French Crown’; Taylor,
‘The Salic Law, French Queenship and the Defence of Women in the Late Middle
Ages’.
107. Lewis, ‘War Propaganda and Historiography in Fifteenth-Century France and
England’; Contamine, ‘“Le royaume de France ne peut tomber en fille.”
Fondement, formulation et implication d’une théorie politique à la fin du Moyen
Âge’.
108. Pour ce que plusieurs, ed. Taylor; Giesey, Le Rôle méconnu de la loi salique. La succession
royale (xive–xvie siècles), pp. 119–25.
109. Ibid., p. 58.
110. Ibid., p. 63.
111. ‘car leurs pensees et leurs jugemens pourroient estre un pou trop soudains’: ibid.,
p. 64.

492
 NOTES TO PAGES 148–53

112. Ibid.
113. Ibid., p. 65.
114. ‘gener illius in regnum succederet’: Simeon of Durham, Historia regum, 213, ed.
Arnold, p. 282.
115. ‘Angliam calumpniabantur sponsus et sponsa’: Henry of Huntingdon, Historia
Anglorum, 10. 5, ed. Greenway, p. 708.
116. ‘sceptro regni transmaritimo . . . aspiravit’: Actus pontificum Cenomannis in urbe degen-
tium, ed. Busson and Ledru, p. 445. The new edition of this text by Weidemann does
not include these later continuations.
117. ‘Cui successit arbitrio et electione optimatum Thancredus nothus, cunctis
Teutonicam aspernantibus ditionem, quippe Constantia defuncti regis amita, cui eo
defuncto jus successionis competere videbatur, Henrico Frederici imperatoris
Teutonici filio nupserat’: William of Newburgh, Historia rerum anglicarum, 5. 7, ed.
Howlett, 2, p. 429.
118. ‘dicentes quod filiam suam non reciperent reginam, quia non erat consuetudo regni
illius quod mulier regnum illud haberet quamdiu frater vel nepos esset in progenie
qui regnum de jure habere posset’: Roger of Howden, Chronica, ed. Stubbs, 3, p. 299.
119. ‘statutum et ordinatio hujusmodi jus successionis eorundem filiorum nostrorum ac
liberorum eorum, sexum excludendo feminium, nimium restringebat’: Parliament
Rolls of Medieval England, ed. Given-Wilson, 8, pp. 341–7, 354–61 (quote at pp.
359–60); Given-Wilson, Henry IV, pp. 294–5, 298; Bennett, ‘Henry IV, the Royal
Succession and the Crisis of 1406’, pp. 16–27.
120. ‘Lege divinitus Salphat data filiabus Usurpator iuris iusti probaris heredis’: BL, MS
Harley 7353.
121. The Popular Songs of Ireland, ed. Croker, p. 321 (from a manuscript, no longer extant, in
the ‘State Paper Office’); Verse in English from Tudor and Stuart Ireland, ed. Carpenter,
p. 38; Robbins and Cutler, eds., Supplement to the Index of Middle English Verse, no.
2571.5. The poem is in the form of a letter sent to Walter, archbishop of Dublin, by
the loyal city of Waterford at the time of the Warbeck rebellion.
122. ‘qua lege quid iniquius dici aut cogitari possit, ignoro’: Augustine, De civitate Dei, 3. 21,
ed. Dombart and Kalb, 1, p. 90.
123. ‘iure naturali pater plus tenetur cuilibet sue proli quam extraneo’: François de
Meyronnes, Flores beati Augustini extracti per veritates ex libris De Civitate Dei extracti, fol.
10v. A sixteenth-century printing of the work adds a mention of the Salic Law to this
passage: Flores d. Augustini ex suis libris De Civitate Dei excerpti (Lyons, 1580), fol. 26v.
124. ‘Sed oritur dubium quare in regnis que ex genere habent regnantes mulieres com-
muniter non succedunt’: François de Meyronnes, Flores Augustini ex libris De Civitate Dei
extracti, fol. 10v.
125. ‘regnum nedum est hereditas sed eciam dignitas pertinens ad totam rem publicam;
nunc autem in dignitatibus non succedunt mulieres quia dignitatis capaces non sunt
sicut hereditatis’: ibid.
126. ‘quod videtur iniquum valde in personis privatis quamvis rationabilis esse possit in
personis publicis sicut in regibus et principis’: Thomas Waleys, Expositio super libros

493
 NOTES TO PAGES 153–7

Augustini De Civitate Dei, 3. 21, cited from Utrecht, Universiteitsbibliotheek, MS 306

(3 C 3), fol. 48v.
127. Raoul de Presles’ translation of the City of God in BnF, MS fr. 22912–3, fols. 150–1
(a presentation copy to Charles V, 1376); see Taylor, ‘The Salic Law and the Valois
Succession to the French Crown’, pp. 362–3; Giesey, Le Rôle méconnu de la loi salique.
La succession royale (xive–xvie siècles), pp. 69–72.
128. ‘ut exemplo Francorum legem statuerent, ne femina fieret heres regni’: Chronicon
Angliae ab Anno Domini 1328 usque ad annum 1388, ed. Thompson, p. 92; the accuracy
of this account has been questioned, since the author was so hostile to Gaunt: Given-
Wilson, ‘Legitimation, Designation and Succession to the Throne in Fourteenth-
Century England’, pp. 91–2.

5 MISTRESSES AND BASTARDS

1. Duindam, Dynasties: A Global History of Power, 1300–1800, p. 122.

2. ‘in concubinam accepit’; ‘concubinam suam Richildem desponsatam atque dotatam in
coniugem sumpsit’: Annales Bertiniani, s.a. 869, 870, ed. Waitz, pp. 107–8; Nelson, Charles
the Bald, pp. 221–2, calls the first event a ‘betrothal’ and interprets the use of the term
‘concubine’ as stemming from the annalist’s hostility; Charles himself called the
October event a ‘conjunctio’: Recueil des actes de Charles II le Chauve, roi de France, ed.
Tessier, 2, pp. 288–91, no. 355; he labelled his link with his first wife, Ermentrud,
differently: ‘uxoreo vinculo’, ibid., 2, p. 55, no. 246.
3. Mikat, Dotierte Ehe, rechte Ehe: zur Entwicklung des Eheschliessungsrechts in fränkischer Zeit;
Hyam, ‘Ermentrude and Richildis’, p. 154, interprets ‘desponsatam atque dotatam in
coniugem sumpsit’ in the following sense: ‘They were married on 22 January . . .
Richildis was already desponsata atque dotata’, rather than the whole phrase as describing
a constituitive act.
4. Unless the use of the term ‘concubine’ is interpreted in this way.
5. Digest 20. 1. 8; 23. 2. 24; 23. 2. 41; 23. 2. 56; 24. 1. 3; 24. 1. 58; 24. 2. 11; 25. 2. 17; 25. 7 (‘De
Concubinis’); 31. 29; 32. 29; 32. 41; 31. 49; 33. 2. 24; 34. 1. 15; 34. 9. 16; 38. 1. 46; 38. 10. 7;
39. 5. 31; 42. 5. 38; 45. 1. 121; 48. 5. 14; 48. 5. 35; 50. 16. 144 (‘quae uxoris loco sine nuptiis
in domo sit’).
6. ‘Is, qui non habet uxorem, et pro uxore concubinam habet, a communione non
repellatur: tamen ut unius mulieris, aut uxoris aut concubinae, sit coniunctione
contentus . . . Christiano non dicam plurimas, sed nec duas simul habere licitum est,
nisi unam tantum aut uxorem, aut certe loco uxoris (si coniux deest) concubinam’:
Gratian, Decretum, 1. 34. 4–5, ed. Friedberg, col. 126. The first canon is derived ultimately
from the First Council of Toledo, c. 17 (Concilios visigóticos e hispano-romanos, ed. Vives,
p. 24).
7. ‘luxoriam super modum deditus tres habebat maxime ad instar reginas et pluremas
concupinas. Reginae vero haec fuerunt: Nantechildis, Vulfegundis et Berchildis.
Nomina concubinarum, eo quod plures fuissent, increvit huius chronice inseri’:
Fredegar, Chronica, 4. 60, ed. Krusch, p. 151, ed. Wallace-Hadrill, p. 50.

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 NOTES TO PAGES 157–9

8. ‘Praetermissis nunc generibus feminarum, regis vocantur liberi, qui de regibus fuerant
procreati’: Gregory of Tours, Libri historiarum decem, 5. 20, ed. Krusch and Levison,
p. 228.
9. ‘Si vero absque legitimis liberis aliquis eorum [i.e. his three sons] decesserit, potestas
illius ad seniorem fratrem revertatur. Et si contigerit illum habere liberos ex concubi-
nis, monemus ut erga illos misericorditer agat’: Capitularia regum Francorum, 1, ed.
Boretius, no. 136, cl. 15, p. 273 (the ‘Ordinatio imperii’ of 817).
10. ‘consuetudo regni Norweiae est usque in hodiernum diem, quod omnis qui alicujus
regis Norweiae dinoscitur esse filius, licet sit spurius, et de ancilla genitus, tantum sibi
jus vendicat in regnum Norweiae, quantum filius regis conjugati, et de libera genitus’:
Roger of Howden, Chronica, ed. Stubbs, 3, p. 272.
11. ‘In der Tat also bekannte sich das Norwegen der Sagas zu der “merowingischen”
Auffasung, nach dem das väterliche Blut genügte, um Königsfähigkeit zu vermitteln’:
Rüdiger, Der König und seine Frauen: Polygynie und politische Kultur in Europa (9.–13.
Jahrhundert), p. 92.
12. ‘Nam Carlomannus, filius magni Ludovici, filios non habuit nisi tantum unum nomine
Arnulfum, ex nobilissima quidem femina sed non legaliter sibi desponsata concep-
tum’: Erchanbert, Breviarium regum Francorum, continuatio, ed. Pertz, p. 330; Arnulf
names her in his charters: Arnolfi Diplomata, ed. Kehr, nos. 87, 136, pp. 129, 204.
‘Similiter Ludovicus rex Franciae habuit unum filium nomine Hug, bellissimum et
bellicosissimum iuvenem, de concubina praecellentissimae generositatis’: Erchanbert,
Breviarium regum Francorum, continuatio, ed. Pertz, p. 330.
13. Annales Laubacenses, ed. Pertz, p. 15; Annales Bertiniani, s.a. 853, ed. Waitz, p. 43; Lotharii
I. et Lotharii II. Diplomata, ed. Schieffer, no. 113, pp. 262–3.
14. Le Jan, Famille et pouvoir dans le monde franc (VIIe–Xe siècle): essai d’anthropologie sociale,
p. 276 (the ‘6’ by Lothar I is a misprint for ‘26’); Kasten, Königssöhne und
Königsherrschaft: Untersuchungen zur Teilhabe am Reich in der Merowinger- und
Karolingerzeit, p. 252.
15. The Gesta Normannorum Ducum, ed. Van Houts, 1, pp. xxxviii n. 91, 58, 68, 78, 128; 2,
p. 268.
16. ‘hoc nullatenus secundum scita canonum posse esse, ideo quod mater eius non
fuisset desponsata’: ibid. 2, p. 268; for comment, see Rüdiger, Der König und seine
Frauen: Polygynie und politische Kultur in Europa (9.–13. Jahrhundert), pp. 343–4, and
Van Houts, Married Life in the Middle Ages, 900–1300, pp. 79–80; on Gunnor, see Van
Houts, ‘Countess Gunnor of Normandy’.
17. Génestal, Histoire de la légitimation des enfants naturels en droit canonique, pp. 147–9, thinks
the latter.
18. Rodulfus Glaber, Historiarum libri quinque, 4. 20, ed. France, p. 204.
19. Esmyol, Geliebte oder Ehefrau? Konkubinen im frühen Mittelalter, pp. 142–3.
20. Konecny, Die Frauen des karolingischen Königshauses, pp. 54–6, 89, 118, 120; Konecny,
‘Eherecht und Ehepolitik unter Ludwig dem Frommen’, pp. 3, 12.
21. ‘Am Beispiel Alpais’ und Swanahilds wird deutlich, dass Erfolg oder Misserfolg der
Söhne einer Frau, oder die Parteizugehörigkeit eines Historiographen oft darüber

495
 NOTES TO PAGES 159–62

entschied, ob eine Frau als “uxor” oder “concubine” bezeichnet wurde’: Konecny, Die
Frauen des karolingischen Königshauses, p. 26. The ambiguity in the classification is
reflected in the interrogative titles chosen by some modern historians who discuss
the issue, e.g. Esmyol, Geliebte oder Ehefrau? Konkubinen im frühen Mittelalter; Hartmann,
‘Concubina vel regina? Zu einigen Ehefrauen und Konkubinen der karolingischen
Könige’.
22. E.g. Annales Bertiniani, s.a. 862, ed. Waitz, p. 60; Nicolas I, Epistolae, nos. 46, 53, ed.
Perels, pp. 325, 350.
23. ‘id est meretrices, sumpto uocabulo a pollutione uel formositate suae pellis qua
incautos inliciant’: Glossae biblicae, ed. Vaciago, pp. 197, 354, 538.
24. Her father was Walter Clifford: The English Register of Godstow Nunnery, ed. Clark, 3, nos.
156, 200, pp. 135, 161.
25. ‘pro amore Rosemunde filie sue’: Rotuli Hundredorum, 2, pp. 93–4.
26. ‘tumbam in medio chori ante altare, sericis pannis velatam, et lampadibus et cereis
circumdatam’: Roger of Howden, Chronica, ed. Stubbs, 3, pp. 167–8 (Gesta regis Henrici
secundi Benedicti abbatis, ed. Stubbs, 2, pp. 231–2); for the king’s grants to Godstow, The
Letters and Charters of Henry II King of England (1154–1189), ed. Vincent, nos. 1180–93.
27. ‘Et porque el rey era muy acabado hombre en todos sus fechos, teníase por muy
menguado porque no tenía fijos de la reina; et por esto cató manera cómo oviere
fijos de otra parte’: Crónica del rey don Alfonso el Onceno, 90, ed. Rosell, p. 227.
28. Daumet, Étude sur l’alliance de la France et de la Castille au XIVe et au XVe siècles, p. 143 (from
AN J 602, no. 44).
29. López de Ayala, Crónica del Rey don Pedro, 2 (1351). 3, ed. Orduna, 1, p. 34.
30. Sitges, Las mujeres del rey don Pedro, assembles much of the relevant documentation in
Castilian translation.
31. López de Ayala, Crónica del Rey don Pedro, 4 (1353). 2, 11–12, ed. Orduna, 1, pp. 84, 97–9.
32. ‘E nunca jamas vio a la rreyna doña Blanca, su muger’: López de Ayala, Crónica del Rey
don Pedro, 4 (1353). 21, ed. Orduna, 1, p. 110.
33. ‘E nunca vio jamas a doña Iohana de Castro’: López de Ayala, Crónica del Rey don Pedro, 5
(1354). 10, 12, ed. Orduna, 1, pp. 139–40.
34. Estow, Pedro the Cruel, p. 211, for discussion of this issue.
35. Jones, Blanche de Bourbon, p. 9.
36. ‘tu novissima tua faciens pejora prioribus, adultera non dimissa nec regina recepta pre-
dictis, quamdam superinduxisti aliam impudenter adulteram’: Daumet, ed., Innocent VI et
Blanche de Bourbon: Lettres du Pape publiées d’après les Registres du Vatican, p. 105 (Reg Vat. 236,
fol. 91v, 12 May 1354); Daumet prints all of Innocent’s relevant letters.
37. López de Ayala, Crónica del Rey don Pedro, 13 (1362). 7, ed. Orduna, 2, pp. 62–3; Sitges,
Las mujeres del rey don Pedro de Castilla, p. 388 (a letter of the king from Archivo de la
Corona de Aragón, R. 1. 178, fol. 130v).
38. The will is printed in Crónicas de los reyes de Castilla, ed. Rosell, 1, pp. 593–8; Sitges, Las
mujeres del rey don Pedro de Castilla, p. 252.
39. Tuck, ‘Vere, Robert de, ninth earl of Oxford, marquess of Dublin, and duke of Ireland
(1362–1392), courtier’, ODNB, 56 (2004), pp. 312–15, citing TNA: PRO, E 36/66.

496
 NOTES TO PAGES 163–6

40. ‘His operibus feminæ deputabantur, quæ natu nobiles, et sobriis moribus probabiles,
interesse reginæ obsequiis dignæ judicabantur. Nullus ad eas virorum introitus erat,
nisi quos ipsa, cum interdum ad illas intraret, secum introire permittebat. Nulla eis
inhonesta cum viris familiaritas, nulla unquam cum petulantia levitas’: Turgot, Vita
S. Margaretae Scotorum Reginae, 4, ed. Hodgson Hinde, p. 239; ‘Domicellas suas vacare
non pertulit, sed singulis singula iniungens opera, illam texere, illam nere, illam vero
consuere doctrix sedula erudivit’: Peter of Zittau, Chronicon Aulae Regiae, 1. 20, ed.
Emler, p. 27.
41. George Akropolites, Historia, 52, ed. Heisenberg, pp. 103–4; see the comments in the
translation by Macrides, pp. 274–6; for the empress’ red shoes, see Macrides, Munitiz
and Angelov, Pseudo-Kodinos and the Constantinopolitan Court: Offices and Ceremonies,
pp. 267, 354.
42. López de Ayala, Crónica del Rey don Pedro, 4 (1353). 26; 11 (1360). 14, ed. Orduna, 1,
p. 117; 2, pp. 19–20; Lopes, Crónica do Rei D. Pedro I, 27, 31, 44, ed. Macchi, tr. Steunou,
pp. 158–60, 180–4, 244–6.
43. Tompkins, ‘The Uncrowned Queen: Alice Perrers, Edward III and Political Crisis in
Fourteenth-Century England, 1360–1377’, pp. 13–40, establishes her origins for the
first time, building on the work of Mark Ormrod.
44. Henzler, Die Frauen Karls VII. und Ludwigs XI.: Rolle und Position der Königinnen
und Mätressen am französischen Hof (1422–1483), pp. 21–3, 30–1, 38–41, 56–62, 66–7,
83–4, 102–4, 133–43, 189–90, 201–2, 215–16; Champion, La dame de Beauté Agnès Sorel.
45. ‘sibi data fuit in concubinam quedam pulcherrima, delectabilis et placens juvenis . . .
vulgariter vocabatur palam et publice parva regina’: Chronique du religieux de Saint-Denys,
43. 5, ed. Bellaguet, 6, pp. 486–8; see Autrand, Charles VI: la folie du roi, pp. 415–18.
46. Gray, Scalacronica, ed. Stevenson, pp. 196–7; Bower, Scotichronicon, 14. 24, ed. Watt et al.,
7, pp. 318–20; Penman, David II, 1329–71, pp. 242–53.
47. ‘Only two bastards are recorded for the fourteen kings of the dynasty’ (i.e. the direct
line from Hugh Capet to 1328): Fawtier, The Capetian Kings of France: Monarchy and
Nation, 987–1328, p. 53; for a list of Henry I’s illegitimate children, see The Complete
Peerage, 11, Appendix D, pp. 105–21; Thompson, ‘Affairs of State: The Illegitimate
Children of Henry I’, Appendix A.
48. González, Alfonso IX, 1, pp. 309–21; Calderón Medina, ‘Las otras mujeres del rey: El
concubinato regio en el reino de León (1157–1230)’.
49. ‘Habuerat tamen ex concubina filium, qui Tancredus vocatus fuit, et fuerat ipsa
concubina filia comitis Licii’: Breve chronicon de rebus Siculis, ed. Stürner, pp. 50–2.
50. ‘ex concubina natus’: Adam of Clermont, Flores historiarum (Excerpta), ed. Holder-
Egger, p. 592; there are many other examples of this phrase applied to Manfred.
51. ‘Nothus dicitur, qui de patre nobili et de matre ignobili gignitur, sicut ex concubina . . .
Huic contrarius spurius, qui de matre nobili et patre ignobili nascitur’: Isidore of
Seville, Etymologiae, 9. 5. 20.
52. E.g. ‘spurius est qui patre ignobili sed nobili est matre generatus, sicut e contra nobili
patre sed matre procreatus ignobili nothus consuete uocatur’: Bede, In primam partem
Samuhelis libri iv, 3. 17, ed. Hurst, pp. 147–8; ‘Spurius et hybrida ignobilis ex parte patris,

497
 NOTES TO PAGES 166–7

sicut manzer et nothus ex parte matris dicitur’: Andrew of St Victor, Expositio hystorica in
librum Regum, in Reg. 1. 17, ed. Van Liere, p. 58: ‘spurius et hibida [hibrida] dicitur
ignobilis ex patre, manzer et nothus ex matre’: Rodrigo Jiménez de Rada, Breviarium
historie catholice, 4. 80, ed. Fernández Valverde, 1, p. 250. Isidore’s distinction is the
guiding thread of the argument in McDougall, Royal Bastards: The Birth of Illegitimacy,
800–1230. Another way of describing these children was that they were ‘of oblique
blood (obliquo sanguine)’: Vita Ædwardi regis, ed. Barlow, p. 32 (Harold Harefoot); Adam
of Bremen, Gesta Hammaburgensis ecclesiae pontificum, 3. 52 (51), ed. Schmeidler, p. 197
(William the Conqueror). Sara McDougall interprets Adam’s phrase as indicating
William had ‘mixed blood . . . his combination of high and low status blood’, ‘his
high status father and low status mother’ (Royal Bastards, pp. 46–7, 118). The classical
usage, as in Lucan, is to indicate ‘collateral descent’; ‘ex obliquo’ in Gratian’s Decretum
means collateral descent.
53. Génestal, Histoire de la légitimation des enfants naturels en droit canonique, p. 157.
54. Oxford English Dictionary, s.vv ‘bastard’, ‘bast’; this etymomogy is far from being gener-
ally agreed: see Wartburg, Französisches Etymologisches Wörterbuch, 1, pp. 276–7, s.v.
‘bastardus’; Le Trésor de la langue française, 4, p. 264, s.v. ‘bâtard’.
55. Domesday Book, ed. Farley, 1, fol. 113b (Devon 29).
56. ‘Heinrici quondam regis Anglorum filius sed bastardus’: John of Worcester, Chronicle,
3, ed. McGurk, p. 268.
57. E.g. in the testament of James II of Cyprus (1473): Mas Latrie, Histoire de l’isle de Chypre
sous le règne des princes de la maison de Lusignan, 3, pp. 345–7.
58. ‘qui abastardatus est in curia christianitatis’: The Great Roll of the Pipe for the First Year of the
Reign of King John, p. 152.
59. ‘saniori . . . consilio’: Gesta Stephani, ed. Potter, p. 12.
60. This interpretation is much contested by McDougall, Royal Bastards: The Birth of
Illegitimacy, 800–1230, pp. 4, 16, 125–8, 137.
61. Sickel, ‘Das Thronfolgerecht der unehelichen Karolinger’; MacLean, Kingship and
Politics in the Late Ninth Century: Charles the Fat and the End of the Carolingian Empire,
pp. 129–34; Hagn, Illegitimität und Thronfolge: zur Thronfolgeproblematik illegitimer
Merowinger, Karolinger und Ottonen, pp. 144–64.
62. ‘Imperator cum suis apud Franconofurt colloquium habuit missisque Romam nuntiis
Hadrianum pontificem invitavit in Franciam. Voluit enim, ut fama vulgabat, quosdam
episcopos inrationabiliter deponere et Bernhartum filium suum ex concubina haer-
edem regni post se constituere; et hoc, quia per se posse fieri dubitavit, per pontificem
Romanum quasi apostolica auctoritate perficere disposuit. Cuius fraudulenta consilia
Dei nutu dissipata sunt; nam pontifex Romanus ab urbe digressus et Heridano flumine
transito vitam praesentem finivit sepultusque est in monasterio Nonantulas. Quod cum
imperator comperisset, contristatus est valde, eo quod in tali negotio voti compos effici
non potuit’: ‘Continuatio Mogontiacensis’ in Annales Fuldenses, s.a. 885, ed. Kurze,
p. 103.
63. Génestal, Histoire de la légitimation des enfants naturels en droit canonique, p. 181 (referring
it mistakenly to Charlemagne).

498
 NOTES TO PAGES 168–9

64. ‘Siquidem ab illo genealogia regum caelitus provisa per intervalla temporum secundis
incrementorum successibus coepit exuberare, quousque in magno Carolo summum
imperii fastigium non solum Francorum, verum etiam diversarum gentium regnorum-
que obtineret. Post cuius decessum variante fortuna rerum gloria, quae supra vota
fluxerat, eodem, quo accesserat, modo cę pit paulatim diffluere, donec deficientibus
non modo regnis, sed etiam ipsa regia stirpe partim inmatura aetate pereunte partim
sterilitate coniugum marcescente hic solus de tam numerosa regum posteritate ido-
neus inveniretur, qui imperii Francorum sceptra susciperet’: Regino of Prüm,
Chronicon, s.a. 880, ed. Kurze, pp. 116–17.
65. ‘eo tamen modo, ut si de legali sua uxore heres ei non produceretur’: ‘Continuatio
Ratisbonensis’ in Annales Fuldenses, s.a. 889, ed. Kurze, p. 118; ‘Luduwicus filius eius, qui
unicus tunc parvulus de legali uxore natus illi erat, in regnum successit’:
‘Continuationes Altahenses’ in Annales Fuldenses, s.a. 900, ed. Kurze, p. 134.
66. Cramp, ‘Aldfrith (d. 704/5), King of Northumbria’, in ODNB, 1, pp. 618–19.
67. ‘frater eius [sc. of Ecgfrith] nothus’, Bede, Vita sancti Cuthberti (prose), 24, ed. Colgrave,
p. 238.
68. ‘quia nothus erat’: William of Malmesbury, Gesta regum Anglorum, 1. 51–2, ed. Mynors
et al., pp. 78–80.
69. ‘in ordinatione regum nullus permittat pravorum praevalere assensum, sed legitime
reges a sacerdotibus et senioribus eligantur, et non de adulterio vel incoestu procreati,
quia sicut nostris temporibus ad sacerdotium secundum canones adulter pervenire non
potest, sic nec christus Domini esse valet et rex totius regni et haeres patriae, qui ex
legitimo non fuerit connubio generatus’: Councils and Ecclesiastical Documents Relating to
Great Britain and Ireland, ed. Haddan and Stubbs, 3, p. 453 (cl. 12); Alcuin, Epistolae, no.
3, ed. Dümmler, pp. 23–4; the translation of adulter as ‘bastard’ is supported by the
usage in cl. 16, ed. Haddan and Stubbs, p. 455, ed. Dümmler, p. 25: ‘Adulterinos
namque filios . . . spurios et adulteros iudicamus.’
70. ‘iste Willelmus quem Franci Bastardum vocant’: Adam of Bremen, Gesta
Hammaburgensis ecclesiae pontificum, 2. 54 (52), ed. Schmeidler, p. 115; for the date,
see the editorial comment on p. lxvi.
71. ‘nobilibus indigenis et maxime ex Ricardorum prosapia natis despectui erat utpote
nothus’: Gesta Normannorum Ducum, 7. 3, ed. Van Houts, 2, p. 96.
72. ‘me nothum degeneremque et principatu indignum detestatus indicavit . . . me velut
nothum contempserunt’: Orderic Vitalis, Historia ecclesiastica, 7. 15, ed. Chibnall, 4,
pp. 82–4. George Garnett notes ‘there is no hint to this effect in contemporary sources’:
‘“Ducal” Succession in Early Normandy’, p. 108 n. 156. As is often the case with
information in Orderic, one can either dismiss it as uncorroborated or accept it and
recognize that corroboration is unlikely, given the state of the surviving sources.
73. ‘eo quod spurius sit, natus scilicet ex nobili patre et matre ignobili quae lanas
carpere, dum viveret ipsa, non cessaret’: Galbert of Bruges, De multro, traditione et
occisione gloriosi Karoli comitis Flandriarum, 47, ed. Rider, p. 97. McDougall, Royal
Bastards: The Birth of Illegitimacy, 800–1230, pp. 150, 152, cites this passage but then
goes on to say, ‘we do not know for certain that William was, in fact, the son of a low

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 NOTES TO PAGES 169–72

status mother’. Suger calls him ‘Guilelmus Bastardus’, an appellation more com-
monly applied to William the Conqueror: Suger, Vita Ludovici Grossi regis, 30, ed.
Waquet, p. 248.
74. Sancho III ‘dedit Ramiro, quem ex concubina habuerat, Haragon, quandam semotim
regni sui particulam, scilicet ne fratribus, eo quod materno genere inpar erat, quasi
hereditarius regni videretur’: Historia Silensis, 29, ed. Estévez Sola, p. 201.
75. ‘constituit Constantiam amitam suam, uxorem Henrici regis Alemannorum, haeredem
regni Siciliae; et fecit omnes primates regni sui jurare fidelitates praedictae amitae, ut
ipsi illam in dominam et reginam susciperent si ille sine prole decessisset’: Gesta regis
Henrici secundi Benedicti abbatis, ed. Stubbs, 2, pp. 202–3; cf. Richard of San Germano,
Chronica, ed. Garufi, p. 6. See Fröhlich, ‘The Marriage of Henry VI and Constance of
Sicily: Prelude and Consequences’, and, in general on Tancred, Reisinger, Tankred von
Lecce. Normannischer König von Sizilien 1190–1194.
76. For the place, see Annales Casinenses, ed. Pertz, p. 314: ‘Tancredus comes Licii, qui apud
Troiam cum quibusdam aliis iuraverat fidelitatem Constantiae uxori Henrici regis
Theutonicorum et filiae quondam regis Roggerii’; for the date, Baaken, ‘Unio
regni ad imperium. Die Verhandlungen von Verona 1184 und die Eheabredung
zwischen König Heinrich VI. und Konstanze von Sizilien’, pp. 277–9.
77. ‘intelligens ac mecum reputans quantum hec rerum mutatio calamitatis afferret,
quantum illius regni quietissimum statum, vel hostilis incursus procella concuteret,
vel gravis sedictionum turbo subverteret, repente consternatus animo cepta
deserui . . . Intueri michi iam videor turbulentas barbarorum acies eo quo feruntur
impetu irruentes, civitates opulentas et loca diuturna pace florentia metu concutere,
cede vastare, rapinis atterere et fedare luxuria’: Epistola ad Petrum Panormitane Ecclesie
Thesaurarium de calamitate Sicilie, pp. 169–70; there is a translation in A History of the
Tyrants of Sicily by ‘Hugo Falcandus’, tr. Loud and Wiedemann, pp. 252–63, which also
sets out very clearly the grounds for the dating, at pp. 36–7 n. 91; Clementi, ‘The
Circumstances of Count Tancred’s Accession to the Kingdom of Sicily, Duchy of
Apulia and the Principality of Capua’, p. 72 n. 59, argues that the letter must date
from 1194 not 1190; see also the comments of Reisinger, Tankred von Lecce.
Normannischer König von Sizilien 1190–1194, pp. 185–7.
78. ‘fedissime gentis . . . pueri puelleque barbare lingue stridore perterriti . . . gens dura et
saxea . . . nepharium esset et monstro simile [for Palermo] . . . barbarorum ingressu
pollui’: Epistola ad Petrum Panormitane Ecclesie Thesaurarium de calamitate Sicilie,
pp. 170–2.
79. ‘Utrumne regem sibi creandum existiment et collectis viribus contra barbaros dimi-
candum? An vero . . . malint quodlibet durum servitutis iugum suscipere quam fame
et dignitati sue et patrie libertati consulere?’: Epistola ad Petrum Panormitane Ecclesie
Thesaurarium de calamitate Sicilie, p. 172.
80. ‘Disce prius mores Augusti, disce furorem!/ Teutonicam rabiem quis tolerare potest?/
. . . pueri tibi more licebit / Discere barbaricos barbarizare sonos?’: Petrus de Ebulo,
Liber ad honorem Augusti sive de rebus Siculis, lines 120–3, ed. Kölzer and Stähli, p. 53.
81. Lopes, Crónica do Rei D. Pedro I, 1, 43, ed. Macchi, tr. Steunou, pp. 22, 238–42.

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 NOTES TO PAGES 172–6

82. On this, see Monteiro, ‘The Battle of Aljubarrota (1385): A Reassessment’.

83. Monumenta Portugaliae Vaticana, 2, ed. Costa, CXII-CXV, CVIII-CXI (Boniface IX,
27–28 January 1391); also in Portuguese in Lopes, Crónica del Rei Dom João I, 2. 125–6,
in The English in Portugal, 1367–1387, pp. 316–29.
84. There are translated excerpts from the main chronicle source for his regency and
reign, Fernão Lopes, Crónica del Rei Dom João I, in Lopes, The English in Portugal,
1367–1387.
85. Woodacre, The Queens Regnant of Navarre: Succession, Politics, and Partnership, 1272–1512,
p. 80.
86. ‘prolem de legali conubio non habuerat . . . sed Normanni Eustachium de concubina
filium eius susceperunt, quia compatriotam nothum quam Britonem seu
Burgundionem liberum praeesse sibi maluerunt’: Orderic Vitalis, Historia ecclesiastica,
11. 4, ed. Chibnall 6, p. 40.
87. ‘Si ne purroit consentir/ Un bastard roialme tenir’; ‘vous deveroiez bien sentir/ En
vostre coer qe ceo n’est pas droitz/ Q’un bastard deust estre rois’: Chandos Herald, La
vie du Prince Noir, lines 1803–4, 2928–30, ed. Tyson, pp. 97, 129.
88. ‘Et mist li sains Peres tout le royaumme d’Espagne en le main de Henry frere bastart à
ce roy Piere et le legitima à tenir royaumme et hiretage’: Froissart, Chroniques, 1. 113.
691, ed. Diller, 3, p. 365; cf. Chroniques, ed. Kervyn de Lettenhove, 7, pp. 83, 87.
89. Lopes, The English in Portugal, 1367–1387, p. vi (from a document of 1434).
90. Rodríguez, ‘Pero López de Ayala and the Politics of Rewriting the Past’.
91. Ryder, Alfonso the Magnanimous: King of Aragon, Naples, and Sicily 1396–1458, p. 239.
92. Boustronios, Chronicle, 161, 206, tr. Dawkins, pp. 41, 48; Alfonso’s career is traced in
detail in Forcellini, ‘Strane peripezie d’un bastardo di casa di Aragona’.
93. Mas Latrie, Histoire de l’isle de Chypre sous le règne des princes de la maison de Lusignan, 3, pp.
345–7; Boustronios, Chronicle, 98, tr. Dawkins, p. 33.
94. ‘Sub eadem quoque tempestate Iacobus Ioannis Cypri regis e pellice filius defuncto
patre regno potitur; hunc pater intellexerat imperandi cupidissimum, utpote qui
egregia forma, procera statura corporis, magna eloquentia et singulari ingenio pre-
ditus regio se honore dignum reputabat’: Antonius de Bonfinis, Rerum Ungaricarum
decades, 3. 8. 362, ed. Fogel et al., 3, p. 204.
95. ‘Alii filii mei se revera bastardos, iste vero solus se legitimum et verum esse probavit’:
Gerald of Wales, Vita Galfridi archiepiscopi Eboracensis, 1. 3, ed. Brewer, p. 368.
96. ‘Cum summa, dilecti filii nostri bastardi, Johannis de Gloucestria, ingenii vivacitas,
membrorum agilitas et ad omnes bonos mores pronitas, magnam et indubiam nobis de
futuro eius servitio bono spem, gratia divina, promittant’: Foedera, ed. Thomas Rymer
(original edn.), 12, p. 265.
97. ‘quem de Alayta nobili muliere Theotonica soluta dudum suscepimus non soluti’:
Winkelmann, ‘Zum Leben König Enzio’s’, pp. 311–12 (from BAV, MS Pal. lat. 272,
fols. 77-77v).
98. ‘ex matre infami et ignobili’: Thomas Tuscus, Gesta imperatorum et pontificum, ed.
Ehrenfeuchter, p. 515.
99. Werner, ‘Die Nachkommen Karls des Grossen’, p. 418.

501
 NOTES TO PAGES 176–81

100. Airlie, ‘Private Bodies and the Body Politic in the Divorce Case of Lothar II’, pp. 17–18;
note the reservations of Hagn, Illegitimität und Thronfolge: zur Thronfolgeproblematik illegiti-
mer Merowinger, Karolinger und Ottonen, pp. 165–9, who recognizes ‘eine gewisse
Tendenz . . . jedoch kein völlig festgefügtes System’.
101. Kasten, ‘Chancen und Schicksale “unehelicher” Karolinger im 9. Jahrhundert’, pp.
48–9.
102. Gentile, ‘Les bâtards princiers piémontais et savoyards’, pp. 392–3.
103. Narbona Cárceles, ‘Les bâtards royaux et la nouvelle noblesse de sang en Navarre (fin
XIV siècle–début XVe siècle)’, pp. 425, 429; Harsgor, ‘L’essor des bâtards nobles au
XV e siècle’, p. 322.
104. Hicks, ‘The Royal Bastards of Late Medieval England’, pp. 377–8; The Complete Peerage
of England, Scotland, Ireland, Great Britain and the United Kingdom, 6, pp. 138–9.
105. ‘en aucuns pays, lez bastars portent lez armes du lygnage duquel ilz descendent,
aveques aucune differance, laquelle coustume est assez raysonnable’: Songe du
Vergier, 1. 148. 18, ed. Schnerb-Lièvre, 1, p. 292.
106. ‘sunt qui signum bastardiae portant et tales portant arma suorum parentum integra
cum quadam benda ex traverso’: Johannes de Bado Aureo, Tractatus de armis, ed.
Jones, p. 138 (the work was commissioned by the queen, Anne of Bohemia).
107. Duerloo, ‘Marks of Illegitimacy in the Southern Netherlands’, p. 36 n. 6; Norton, ‘The
Heraldry of the Illegitimate Children of the Nobility’, p. 76.
108. Johannes de Bado Aureo, Tractatus de armis, ed. Jones, p. 138; Boudreau, ‘Théories et
discours des anciens sur les brisures de bâtardise (XIVe–XVIIIe siècles)’, p. 90 n. 16.
109. Hablot, ‘L’emblématique des bâtards princiers au XVe siècle’, p. 443.
110. BL, MS Yates Thompson 3, fol. 1.
111. ‘Johannes bastardus Burgundie’: Maillard-Luypaert, ‘Jean de Bourgogne, bâtard de
Jean Sans Peur, évêque de Cambrai de 1439 à 1480’, pp. 12–13, 45.
112. ‘Ii in illis regionibus in nullo probro habentur, veluti apud nos . . . Eam consuetudi-
nem habent reges et principes aliqui ut pellices in suis arcibus alant. Earum filiis, quot
ex eis sustulerint, vita incolumi ditiones aliquas attribuunt. Has eis, patre vita defunto,
filii justi non adimunt’: Leo of Rozmital, De Leonis a Rosmital nobilis Bohemi itinere per
partes Germaniae, Belgii, Britanniae, Franciae, Hispaniae, Portugalliae atque Italiae, annis
MCCCCLXV–VII, pp. 28–9; there is an English translation, The Travels of Leo of Rozmital,
tr. Letts, p. 40.
113. Marchandisse, ‘Corneille, Bâtard de Bourgogne (ca 1426–1452)’, p. 55.
114. Aurell, Les noces du comte: mariage et pouvoir en Catalogne (785–1213), pp. 445, 481.
115. ‘In regnum vero et terram predictam nullus succedet, qui non fuerit de legitimo
matrimonio procreatus’: Epistolae saeculi XIII e regestis pontificum Romanorum selectae, ed.
Rodenberg, 3, no. 646, p. 644, Clement IV, ‘Constitui ab eo’, Po. 19434,
4 November 1265, confirming the cardinals’ arrangements of 28 June 1265.
116. Génestal, Histoire de la légitimation des enfants naturels en droit canonique.
117. ‘divinis et humanis legibus detestabile’: Epistolae pontificum romanorum ineditae, ed.
Loewenfeld, Epistola 106, pp. 52–53 (from the Collectio Britannica, BL, MS Add.
8873, fol. 45). The grandee was judge Orzocco Torchitorio.

502
 NOTES TO PAGES 181–4

118. Conciliorum oecumenicorum decreta, 4, cl. 51, ed. Alberigo et al., p. 258; Decretales Gregorii
IX, 4. 3. 3, ed. Friedberg, cols. 679–80.
119. ‘Qui filii sint legitimi’: Decretales Gregorii IX, 4. 17, ed. Friedberg, col. 709.
120. Decretales Gregorii IX, 4. 17. 2, ed. Friedberg, col. 710; 4. 17. 4, col. 711; ‘Tanta est vis
matrimonii ut qui antea sunt geniti post contractum matrimonium legitimi habean-
tur’: 4. 17. 6, col. 712, Alexander III, Tanta est vis, JL 13917. See Lefebvre-Teillard,
Autour de l’enfant: du droit canonique et romain médiéval au code civil de 1804, pp. 275–373,
‘La légitimation de l’enfant naturel’.
121. Glanvill, The Treatise on the Laws and Customs of England Commonly Called Glanvill, 6. 17,
ed. Hall, p. 68.
122. ‘ut qui ex ambobus nati erant legitimi haberentur et in bona paterna successionis
plenum ius obtinerent’: William of Tyre, Chronicon, 19. 4, ed. Huygens, 2, p. 869.
123. ‘ne quis tibi geniture defectum possit obicere’: Reg. Vat. 18, fol. 16 (20 April 1235, Po.
9883); Alfonso in fact predeceased his father.
124. ‘Robertus et Elizabeth diu cohabitantes prolis utriusque sexus multitudinem
procrearunt . . . proles . . . regi Scotie . . . et ipsius regis regno Scotie subsidia non
modicum sperantur verisimiliter profutura’: Vetera monumenta Hibernorum et Scotorum
historiam illustrantia, ed. Theiner, no. 577, pp. 289–90; Calendar of Entries in the Papal
Registers Relating to Great Britain and Ireland: Papal Letters, 3 (1342–1362), ed. Bliss and
Twemlow, p. 265; Bower, Scotichronicon, 11. 13, 14. 54, ed. Watt et al., 6, p. 36; 7, p. 446;
Fordun, ‘Gesta Annalia’, 77, in Chronica gentis Scotorum, ed. Skene, 1, p. 317.
125. Glanvill, The Treatise on the Laws and Customs of England Commonly Called Glanvill, 7. 15;
7. 13, ed. Hall, pp. 88, 87.
126. ‘Ac rogaverunt omnes episcopi magnates ut consentirent quod nati ante matrimo-
nium essent legitimi, sicut illi qui nati sunt post matrimonium, quantum ad successio-
nem hereditariam, quia ecclesia tales habet pro legitimis; et omnes comites et barones
una voce responderunt quod nolunt leges Anglie mutare’: Statutes of the Realm, 1, p. 4
(Statute or Provisons of Merton).
127. ‘Quoniam . . . Philippus rex Francorum, praeter primogenitum suum, quem de con-
juge prima suscepit, aliorum prolem non habet nisi puerum et puellam quos ei nobilis
mulier quondam filia nobilis viri ducis Meraniae peperit nuper defuncta, de sua
posteritate provide cogitans a nobis humiliter postulavit ut eos legitimare per favorem
sedis apostolicae curaremus . . . ut . . . utilitati et necessitati regni Franciae provide
consulamus’: Innocent III, Epistola ‘Apostolica sedes’, PL 214: 1191–4; Cartellieri,
Philipp II. August, König von Frankreich, 4, pp. 82–8 (2 Nov. 1201, Po. 1499).
128. ‘auctoritate apostolica decernentes, ut si ex tam incestuosa et dampnata copula proles
est vel fuerit quecumque suscepta, spuria et illegitima penitus habeatur, que secun-
dum statuta legitima in bonis paternis nulla prorsus ratione succedit’: Innocent III, Die
Register Innocenz’ III., ed. Hageneder et al., 2, no. 72 (75), p. 133 (PL 214, col. 614)
(25 May 1199, Po. 716).
129. ‘cum prolem ex huiusmodi copula incestuosa susceptam denuntiaverimus spuriam et
secundum constitutiones legitimas in bona paterna nullo unquam tempore succes-
suram, tu, de quo miramur non modicum, callide procurasti ut ei pene penitus totum

503
 NOTES TO PAGES 184–8

regnum Legionense iuraret’: Innocent III, Epistolae 6. 80, Die Register Innocenz’ III., ed.
Hageneder et al., 6, no. 80, pp. 126–7 (PL 215, col. 83) (5 June 1203, Po. 1932).
130. Reg. Vat. 25, fol. 260 (21 October 1260, Po. 17956–7).
131. ‘Nous ne yrons, ne vendrons en nulle place où elle soit; car ce nous tourneroit à trop
grant blasme que une telle duchesse qui vient de basse lignie et qui a esté concubine
du duc ung trop long temps en ses mariages, se ores qu’elle est mariée, alloit, ne
passoit devant nous. Les coeurs nous devroient crever de dueil et à bonne cause’:
Froissart, Chroniques, ed. Kervyn de Lettenhove, 15, p. 240.
132. Calendar of Entries in the Papal Registers Relating to Great Britain and Ireland: Papal Letters, 4
(1362–1404), p. 545; Parliament Rolls of Medieval England, ed. Given-Wilson et al., 7, pp.
322–3; Walsingham, The St Albans Chronicle, ed. Taylor et al., 2, p. 52; Goodman, John of
Gaunt: The Exercise of Princely Power in Fourteenth-Century Europe, pp. 363–4; Goodman,
Katherine Swynford.
133. Pollard, The Reign of Henry VII from Contemporary Sources, 2, pp. 8–9, no. 5.
134. See Helmholtz, ‘The Sons of Edward IV: A Canonical Assessment of the Claim that
They Were Illegitimate’.
135. The Saga of Hacon, 14, 41–6, tr. Vigfusson and Dasent, pp. 22, 42–5.
136. ‘ut huiusmodi non obstante defectu ad regalis solii dignitatem . . . admittaris, nec non
quod heredes tui legitimi tibi in dominio et honore succedant’: Diplomatarium
Norvegicum, 1. 1, no. 38, pp. 29–30, 8 November 1246, from Reg. Vat. 21, no. 221,
fol. 340 (Po. 12350).
137. Diplomatarium Norvegicum, 1. 1, no. 32, pp. 26–7, 3 November 1246, from Reg. Vat. 21,
no. 31, fol. 419v (Po. 12340).
138. Landrecht des Königs Magnus Hakonarson, Christenrecht 5, ed. Meissner, pp. 38–9.
139. Jochens, ‘The Politics of Reproduction: Medieval Norwegian Kingship’; Rüdiger, Der
König und seine Frauen: Polygynie und politische Kultur in Europa (9.–13. Jahrhundert), pp.
58–9.

6 FAMILY DYNAMICS

1. Schultze, Die Mark Brandenburg 1: Entstehung und Entwicklung unter den askanischen
Markgrafen (bis 1319); other branches of the family, descended from Albert the Bear’s
younger sons, continued.
2. ‘Quia me mea fata vocant et atra mors iam pre oculis volat, volo vobis assignare et vestre
fidei commendare, qui post me debeat rem publicam gubernare. Vos scitis, quia nostra
principalis genealogia partim sterilitate partim pereuntibus in inmatura etate me
usque ad unum fuit redacta. Nunc autem, ut ipsi cernitis, sunt mihi a Deo dati quinque
nati, inter quos dividere regnum Boemie non videtur mihi esse utile, quia omne
regnum in se ipsum divisum desolabitur. Quia vero ab origine mundi et ab initio
Romani imperii et usque ad hec tempora fuerit [fratrum] gratia rara, testantur nobis
exempla rata. Nam Cain et Abel, Romulus et Remus et mei attavi Bolezlaus et sanctus
Wencezlaus si spectes quid fecerint fratres bini, quid facturi sunt quini?’: Cosmas of
Prague, Chronica Boemorum, 2. 13, ed. Bretholz, p. 102.

504
 NOTES TO PAGES 188–95

3. ‘quatinus inter meos natos sive nepotes semper maior natu summum ius et solium
obtineat in principatu’: ibid., 2.13, p. 102.
4. ‘secundum patrie morem debitum’: ibid., 3. 15, p. 177.
5. The Russian Primary Chronicle, tr. Cross and Sherbowitz-Wetzor, pp. 142–3; Vincent
Kadlubek, Chronica Polonorum, 3. 26, ed. Plezia, pp. 118–19.
6. ‘par nobile fratrum’: Cosmas of Prague, Chronica Boemorum, 2. 1, ed. Bretholz, p. 82 (the
phrase is from Horace).
7. ‘Ve tibi Boemia, que non adeo nimis ampla,/ Cum sis communis dominis subiectaque
multis,/ Herili de stirpe sati sexuque virile/ Iam sunt bis deni, nisi fallor ego, dom-
inelli’: ibid., 3. 29, p. 198.
8. ‘Per morsum mortis regum generacio fortis/ Sic est devicta, stirps mascula nulla
relicta’: Peter of Zittau, Chronicon Aulae Regiae, 1. 85, ed. Emler, p. 109.
9. Chronicon de Lanercost, 1201–1346, ed. Stevenson, pp. 40–1.
10. ‘Post cuius tempora longo seculorum intervallo filius patri nullus in regno successit, sed
(filiarum) nepotes, altera nempe parte regali stirpe editi’: Sven Aggesen, Brevis historia
regum Dacie, 4, ed. Gertz, pp. 106–7. Gertz’s suggested addition of filiarum is described as
‘unwarranted’ by Eric Christiansen in his translation, The Works of Sven Aggesen, p. 113
n. 50.
11. There is a particularly acute analysis of fraternal relations at the level of the great dukes
and counts of Germany in Lyon, Princely Brothers and Sisters: The Sibling Bond in German
Politics, 1100–1250.
12. Jaski, Early Irish Kingship and Succession, p. 152, with other comparable examples.
13. Duindam, Dynasties: A Global History of Power, 1300–1800, pp. 110–11.
14. ‘regalia funera fraterno sanguine maduerunt’: Rodrigo Jiménez de Rada, Historia de
rebus Hispaniae, 6. 14, ed. Fernández Valverde, pp. 194–5.
15. ‘Tanta fuit discordia fratrum cupiditate dominandi . . . Scrutare sedulo regum gesta et
inuenies quia sociis in regno fere nunquam pax diuturna fuit. Porro Yspanici reges
tante ferocitatis dicuntur fuisse, quod cum ex eorum stirpe quilibet regulus adulta
etate iam arma primo sumpserit, siue in fratres siue in parentes, si superstites fuerint,
ut ius regale solus obtineat, pro iuribus contendere parat’: Luke of Tuy, Chronicon
mundi, 4. 61, ed. Falque Rey, p. 296, based on Historia Silensis, 7, ed. Estévez Sola,
p. 140.
16. Fredegar, Chronica, 4. 27, 37–8, ed. Krusch, pp. 131, 138–40, ed. Wallace-Hadrill, pp. 18,
30–2; Jonas, Vita Columbani, 1. 28, ed. Krusch, pp. 217–19.
17. The Chronicle of Duke Erik: A Verse Epic from Medieval Sweden, tr. Carlquist and Hogg,
quotations from pp. 195, 198, 203.
18. ‘Adefonsus . . . Garsiam minimum fratrem cepit, cui in uinculis presto posito, preter
licentiam inperitandi omnis regius honor exhibebatur. Considerabat namque
Adefonsus hunc interim salva pace post se regnaturum’: Historia Silensis, 9, ed.
Estévez Sola, pp. 143–4.
19. John of Worcester, Chronicle, 3, ed. McGurk, p. 212, with n. 1.
20. Historia et Cartularium Monasterii Sancti Petri Gloucestriae, ed. Hart, 1, pp. 110–11.
21. Historia Silensis, 9, ed. Estévez Sola, p. 144.

505
 NOTES TO PAGES 195–7

22. ‘nichil preter solitudinem passus sit mali, si solitudo dici potest ubi . . . iocorum . . . et
obsoniorum non deerat frequentia’: William of Malmesbury, Gesta regum Anglorum, 4.
389, ed. Mynors et al., p. 706; cf. Orderic Vitalis, Historia ecclesiastica, 12. 24, ed.
Chibnall, 6, p. 286.
23. The arrangement is set out in the ‘Ordinatio Imperii’, in Capitularia regum Francorum, 1,
ed. Boretius, no. 136, pp. 270–3.
24. ‘Karolo quidem nato . . . quid huic faceret ignorabat’: Nithard, Historiarum libri IIII, 1. 3,
ed. Müller, p. 3.
25. ‘ceteri filii ob hoc indignati sunt’: Thegan, Gesta Hludowici imperatoris, 21, ed. Tremp,
p. 210.
26. Ibid., 35, p. 220.
27. ‘Quo peracto imperator inspectis plerisque nobilium filiabus Huelpi comitis filiam
nomine Iudith duxit uxorem’: Annales regni Francorum, s.a. 819, ed. Kurze, p. 150.
28. ‘Qua tempestate monitu a suorum uxoriam meditabatur inire copulam; timebatur
enim a multis, ne regni vellet relinquere gubernacula. Sed compellebatur tandemque
eorum voluntati satisfatiens et undecumque adductas procerum filias inspitiens, Iudith
filiam Uuelponis nobilissimi comitis in matrimonium iunxit’: Astronomus, Vita
Hludowici imperatoris, 32, ed. Tremp, p. 392. This passage is analysed in detail by De
Jong, ‘Bride Shows Revisited: Praise, Slander and Exegesis in the Reign of the Empress
Judith’; she argues for the fictional nature of this account and the importance of the
Esther story as a model.
29. See the comments of De Jong, The Penitential State: Authority and Atonement in the Age of
Louis the Pious, 814–840, p. 31.
30. ‘Nato siquidem regi filio ex moderno coniuge, ferebatur eidem puero rex regnum
suum promittere, quod olim . . . Liudolfo delegaverat, et magnates suos eidem promit-
tere fidelitatem jurejurando fecerat’: Flodoard, Annales, s.a. 953, ed. Lauer, p. 135. This
child was Henry, who died young. The later life of Bruno of Cologne, which was
composed in the twelfth century, gives the same explanation of Liudolf’s rebellion
but calls the child Otto: ‘Interea dominus rex, uxore priore defuncta, ex regina, quam
ab Ytalia duxerat, filium equivo cum suscepit, quem sibi successorem regali benedic-
tione consecrari disponebat. Quo comperto filius eius Ludolfus maior natu, qui plur-
imo iam tempore spei huius detinebatur cupiditate, dampnum hoc irrecuperabile
duxit intolerabile, adeo ut paterne vite sive saluti discrimen meditaretur in temptare’:
Vita Brunonis altera, 8, ed. Pertz, p. 276. This could not be Otto II, who was born in 955.
31. ‘adolescens acer et fortis’: Widukind of Corvey, Res gestae saxonicae, 2. 33, ed. Hirsch and
Lohmann, p. 94.
32. ‘so war es vielleicht für ihn wie für das Reich ein Gluck, dass ihm ein längeres Wirken
nicht beschieden ward’: Köpke and Dümmler, Kaiser Otto der Grosse, p. 291.
33. For the terms of the Treaty of Montmirail of January 1169, in which this arrangement
was made, see John of Salisbury, Letters, no. 288, ed. Millor et al., 2, pp. 636–8; Robert of
Torigni, Chronica, ed. Howlett, p. 240; Gervase of Canterbury, Chronica, ed. Stubbs,
1, pp. 207–8. Geoffrey was engaged to the heir of Brittany. Henry confirmed the
division in 1170: Gesta regis Henrici secundi Benedicti abbatis, ed. Stubbs, 1, pp. 6–7.

506
 NOTES TO PAGES 197–202

34. ‘Johannes minor filius regis Anglorum, quem vocant Sine Terra, quamvis multas et latas
habeat possessiones et multas comitatus, transivit in Hiberniam’: Robert of Torigni,
Chronica, ed. Howlett, pp. 311–12.
35. ‘quartum natu minimum Johannem Sine Terra agnominans’: William of Newburgh,
Historia rerum anglicarum, 2. 18, ed. Howlett, 1, p. 146.
36. ‘Antea quam fato fieres ludente monarcha, / Patris ab ore tui Sine-terra nomen
habebas’: William the Breton, Philippis, 6, lines 591–2, ed. Delaborde, p. 175.
37. Gesta regis Henrici secundi Benedicti abbatis, ed. Stubbs, 1, pp. 35–43; Roger of Howden,
Chronica, ed. Stubbs, 2, pp. 41–6; The Letters and Charters of Henry II King of England
(1154–1189), ed. Vincent, no. 1779; Strickland, Henry the Young King, 1155–1183, pp. 120–2.
38. ‘quae ad communem utilitatem vel ad perpetuam pacem pertinent’: Capitularia regum
Francorum, 1, ed. Boretius, no. 136, pp. 270–3 (the ‘Ordinatio Imperii’).
39. ‘ne posset inter eos discordia suboriri’: Layettes du Trésor des Chartes, ed. Teulet et al., 2,
no. 1710, p. 55.
40. Actes et lettres de Charles Ier, roi de Sicile, concernant la France (1257–1284), ed. de Boüard,
nos. 810–11, 854, 913, 932, 1044–6, pp. 234–6, 250–1, 277, 286–7, 332–7; Actes du
Parlement de Paris, ed. Boutaric, 1, appendix, no. 537, pp. 388–9; Wood, The French
Apanages and the Capetian Monarchy 1224–1328, p. 41.
41. Gregory of Tours, Libri historiarum decem, 3. 1; 4. 22, ed. Krusch and Levison, pp. 97, 155.
Widdowson, ‘Merovingian Partitions: A “Genealogical Charter”?’, argues that Gregory
had his own reasons for presenting these divisions as legitimate and equitable but they
were in fact ‘more contested than traditionally acknowledged’ (p. 21).
42. Francorum regum historia (continuation of Ado of Vienne), ed. Pertz, p. 325; Erchanbert,
Breviarium regum Francorum, continuatio, ed. Pertz, p. 329.
43. ‘Hludowici regis filii in pago Retiense convenientes paternum inter se regnum diviser-
unt et sibi invicem fidelitatem servaturos esse sacramento firmaverunt. Cuius sacra-
menti textus theutonica lingua conscriptus in nonnullis locis habetur’: ‘Continuatio
Mogontiacensis’, in Annales Fuldenses, s.a. 876, ed. Kurze, p. 89.
44. ‘Her Eadgar æþeling feng to Myrcna rice’: Anglo-Saxon Chronicle (B and C), s.a. 957, ed.
Plummer and Earle, p. 113. The Life of Dunstan, a source hostile to Eadwig, says ‘rex . . .
a brumali populo relinqueretur contemptus’ and specifices that the frontier between
the two kings’ territories was ‘the famous river Thames’: ‘B.’, Vita sancti Dunstani, 24, ed.
Winterbottom and Lapidge, p. 74.
45. ‘feng þa Eadmund cing to Weast Seaxan and Cnut to Myrcean’, Anglo-Saxon Chronicle
(E), s.a. 1016, ed. Plummer and Earle, p. 153; ‘feng tha Eadmund cyng to West Sexan
and Cnut to þam norð dælae’: Anglo-Saxon Chronicle (D), s.a. 1016, ed. Plummer and
Earle, p. 152.
46. ‘regnum sorte dividitur Anglie’: John of Worcester, Chronicle, 2, ed. Darlington and
McGurk, p. 520.
47. Anglo-Saxon Chronicle (A, C, D, E), s.a. 1035–7, ed. Plummer and Earle, pp. 158–61.
48. Some kind of division of the kingdom of the West Franks was planned by Louis IV in 953
but did not take effect: Brühl, ‘Karolingische Miszellen III: Ein westfränkisches
Reichsteilungsprojekt aus dem Jahre 953’.

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 NOTES TO PAGES 202–7

49. ‘regnum Scocie non est partibile’: Stones (ed.), Anglo-Scottish Relations 1174–1328: Some
Selected Documents, no. 19, p. 122 [61].
50. ‘David rex Scotorum dedit terram de Torphigan. Feregus rex Galwitensium dedit
terram de Galvyte’: Dugdale, Monasticon, 6. 2, p. 838, from London, College of Arms,
MS L. 17, fols. 141–156v, a sixteenth-century copy of records of Hospitaller property
made by John Stillingwell in 1434 (including properties previously held by the
Templars); the places are Torphichen in Lothian and Galtway in Galloway; see the
comments of Oram, The Lordship of Galloway, p. 62.
51. Chaplais, ‘Un message de Jean de Fiennes à Edouard II et le projet de démembrement
du royaume de France (janvier 1317)’.
52. Smith, ‘Dynastic Succession in Medieval Wales’, argues that there was no rule or law of
partible inheritance applying to the Welsh principalities in the twelfth and thirteenth
centuries, although disputed successions might well produce divisions of the
principality.
53. ‘ut post obitum suum, si fieri posset, quietam inter se duceret vitam’; ‘Adefonsum
itaque, quem pre omnibus liberis carum habebat’: Historia Silensis, 43, ed. Estévez Sola,
p. 227.
54. See the careful analysis by Spiess, ‘Lordship, Kinship, and Inheritance among the
German High Nobility in the Middle Ages and Early Modern Period’.
55. ‘Hoc scilicet fiebat, ne in plures divisa provincia claritas illius familiae per inopiam rei
familiaris obsoleret’: Lampert of Hersfeld, Annales, s.a. 1071, ed. Holder-Egger, p. 121.
56. ‘Si vero aliquis illorum decedens legitimos filios reliquerit, non inter eos potestas ipsa
dividatur; sed potius populus pariter conveniens unum ex eis, quem Dominus voluerit,
eligat’: Capitularia regum Francorum, 1, ed. Boretius, no. 136, cl. 14, p. 272 (the
‘Ordinatio imperii’ of 817).
57. Nelson, ‘A Tale of Two Princes: Politics, Text and Ideology in a Carolingian Annal’,
p. 109.
58. ‘Non ut confuse atque inordinate vel sub totius regni denominatione iurgii vel litis
controversiam eis relinquamus, sed trina portione totum regni corpus dividentes,
quam quisque illorum tueri vel regere debeat porcionem describere et designare
fecimus’: Capitularia regum Francorum, 1, ed. Boretius, no. 45, Preface, p. 127 (the
Divisio regnorum of 806).
59. Ibid., pp. 126–30 ; there is a large literature, which can be approached through Giese,
‘Die designativen Nachfolgeregelungen der Karolinger 714–979’, pp. 453–4 n. 65.
60. Sumption, Trial by Battle (The Hundred Years War I), pp. 170–3.
61. Ganshof, ‘On the Genesis and Significance of the Treaty of Verdun (843)’.
62. ‘propter nomen imperatoris . . . et propter dignitatem imperii’: Nithard, Historiarum
libri IIII, 4. 3, ed. Müller, p. 43.
63. It was divided 870–80, part of the East Frankish kingdom 880–911, part of the West
Frankish kingdom 911–25.
64. See Brühl, Deutschland-Frankreich: die Geburt zweier Völker.
65. It is first recorded in Spanish texts, before entering English in the fifteenth century;
when Innocent III urged the knights of Calatrava to join Peter of Aragon in war against

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 NOTES TO PAGES 207–12

the Muslims, exhorting them ‘to come to his frontier and manfully conquer those
Saracens there (quatinus in ipsius fronteriam veniretis et ibidem Sarracenos eosdem curaretis
viriliter expugnare)’, he clearly had a harsh and dangerous borderland in mind:
Innocent III, Epistolae 8. 97 (96), Die Register Innocenz’ III, ed. Hageneder et al., 8, pp.
175–6 (PL 215: 667) (16 June 1205, Po. 2558).
66. Simon (Symon) de Phares, Recueil des plus célèbres astrologues et quelques hommes doctes, ed.
Wickersheimer, p. vii, n. 1.
67. ‘pro regno fragmina regni’: Florus of Lyons, Querela de divisione imperii, line 76, ed.
Dümmler, p. 561.
68. ‘hoc nomen, videlicet regnum Francorum, quandoque large quandoque stricte accipi-
tur: large quando Franci ubicumque manerent . . . stricte vero regnum Francorum
accipitur quando sola Gallia Belgica regnum Francorum vocatur, que est infra Renum,
Mosam et Ligerim coartata, quam Galliam appropriato vocabulo, moderni Franciam
vocant’: Delaborde, ‘Notice sur les ouvrages et sur la vie de Rigord moine de Saint-
Denis’, p. 604, from Soissons, Bibliothèque municipale, MS 129 (120).
69. See the brief but lucid comments of Guenée, ‘Les limites de la France’.
70. Über die Grundung des deutschen Reiches durch den Vertrag von Verdun: Brühl, Deutschland-
Frankreich: die Geburt zweier Völker, p. 8; Bresslau, Das tausendjährige Jubiläum der deutschen
Selbständigkeit, gives a detailed account of the celebrations organized in 1843; his own
title argues for the accession of Conrad I in 911 as the defining moment.
71. Lot, La naissance de la France.
72. Zatschek, Wie das erste Reich der Deutschen entstand (Zatschek was a member of the Nazi
party).
73. ‘Pas plus qu’on ne visa à Verdun à détruire à jamais l’unité du monde chrétien, on ne
crut que les frontières ainsi définies dureraient longtemps. En fait, le traité détermina
pour tout le Moyen Age, et même au delà, la géographie politique de la France et, dans
une moindre mesure, celle de la future Allemagne. Personne ne s’attendait à ces
résultats’: Lot, La naissance de la France, p. 389.
74. ‘le traité de Verdun constitue comme une prefiguration de la carte politique de
l’Europe occidental’: Depreux, ‘Le partage de l’Empire à Verdun (843) et les condi-
tions d’exercice du pouvoir au haut Moyen-Age’, p. 18.
75. ‘Nec mora, adpraehensum Chlothacharius puerum seniorem brachium elesit in terra,
defixumque cultrum in ascella, crudiliter interfecit . . . “Aut eiece eum a te, aut certe
pro eo morieris” . . . Quibus interfectis, Chlothacharius, ascensis equitibus, abscessit,
parvi pendens de interfectione nepotum’: Gregory of Tours, Libri historiarum decem, 3.
18, ed. Krusch and Levison, pp. 117–19.
76. ‘Cum rex Johannes cepisset Arthurum eumque aliquamdiu in carcere vivum tenuisset,
in turre tandem Rothomagensi, feria quinta ante Pascha, post prandium, ebrius et
daemonio plenus, propria manu interfecit, et grandi lapide ad corpus ejus alligato,
projecit in Secanam; quod reti piscatorio, id est, sagena, inventum est, et ad littus
tractum, cognitum; et in prioratu Becci . . . occulte sepultum propter metum tyranni’:
Annales de Margam, ed. Luard, p. 27; the source is probably Arthur’s captor, William de
Briouse.

509
 NOTES TO PAGES 212–16

77. ‘Patrue, clamabat, parvi miserere nepotis;/ Patrue, parce tuo, bone patrue, parce
nepoti;/ Parce tuo generi; fraterne parcito proli’; William the Breton, Philippis, 6,
lines 558–60, ed. Delaborde, pp. 173–4.
78. Holt, ‘The Casus Regis: The Law and Politics of Succession in the Plantagenet
Dominions, 1185–1247’; Holt, ‘The Casus Regis Reconsidered’.
79. ‘Cum quis vero moritur habens filium postnatum et ex primogenito filio premortuo
nepotem, magna quiden iuris dubitatio solet esse uter illorum preferendus sit alii in illa
successione, scilicet utrum filius an nepos’: Glanvill, The Treatise on the Laws and Customs
of England Commonly Called Glanvill, 7. 3, ed. Hall, p. 77.
80. ‘Filius, licet postgenitus, heres propinquior est hereditatis patris quam nepotes, filii
fratris sui primogeniti’: Le Très Ancien Coutumier de Normandie, 12. 1, ed. Tardif, pp.
12–13; it is possible, however, that this text postdates 1200.
81. ‘notandum quod hec inquisicio facta fuit per preceptum domini regis non
per consideracionem curie vel secundum consuetudinem regni’: Rotuli curiae regis
(1194–1200), ed. Palgrave, 2, p. 189.
82. ‘Sine die quia iudicium pendet ex voluntate domini regis’: Pleas before the King or his
Justices, 1198–1202, 2, ed. Stenton, nos. 484, 528, pp. 126–7, 144.
83. Bracton, De legibus et consuetudinibus Angliae, ed. Woodbine, 3, pp. 284–5, 320; 4, p. 46.
84. Acta aragonensia, 1, ed. Finke, no. 216, p. 323.
85. Goldstone, Joanna: The Notorious Queen of Naples, Jerusalem and Sicily, p. 145.
86. See the discussion in Léonard, La Jeunesse de la reine Jeanne, pp. 111–24 (‘La question
hongroise’), where several of the following sources are cited.
87. ‘quaeritur quis debeat praeferri in successione dicti regni, an scilicet dictus filius ex
propria persona, an dictus nepos ex persona patris . . . expedit regi a seniori . . . et id
apostolicus videtur cogitasse . . . nepos non potest dici primogenitus, nisi ficte et
improprie, cum sit contra naturales terminos veritatis, sed nos non debemus attendere
fictionem’: Baldus de Ubaldis, Commentaria in sextum Codicis librum, 6. 30. 19, ‘De jure
deliberandi’, ‘Cum antiquioribus’.
88. ‘Is autem de predictis liberis primogenitus intelligatur et in eodem regno tibi
sit successor et heres, quem mortis tue tempore priorem gradu et maiorem natu
reperiri continget’: Reg. Vat. 48, fol. 269v; calendared in Les Registres de Boniface VIII
(1294–1303), ed. Digard et al., 1, no. 1977, col. 757 (Po. 24473); the Register reads ‘de
predictis liberis primogenitis’, which Léonard, surely rightly, corrects silently to ‘de
predictis liberis primogenitus’: Léonard, La Jeunesse de la reine Jeanne, p. 113 n. 1.
89. ‘Instituimus haeredem et universalem successorem nostrum in regnis nostris . . .
Robertum primogenitum nostrum . . . relinquimus . . . Carolo, nepoti nostro, primo-
genito quondam primogeniti nostri regis Hungariae, duo millia unciarum auri’: Codex
Italiae diplomaticus, 2, ed. Lünig, cols. 1066–8. The king of Hungary mentioned here is
Canrobert’s father, Charles Martel, who had assumed the title in 1292 but had never
made it a reality.
90. Léonard, La Jeunesse de la reine Jeanne, pp. 119–21.
91. ‘Vulgaris et communis opinio [not operis] est quod filius filii primogeniti intelligatur
primogenitus in successione et preferatur patruo’: Óváry (ed.), ‘Negoziati tra il Re

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 NOTES TO PAGES 216–20

d’Ungheria e il Re di Francia per la successione di Giovanna I. d’Angiò’, pp. 141–2

(the opinion of Louis of Piacenza).
92. ‘li ’nganni/ che ricever dovea la sua semenza’: Dante, Paradiso 9, lines 2–3, in La
Commedia, ed. Petrocchi, 4, p. 137.
93. ‘se il y euist ung bon roy à chief en Angleterre qui la guerre désirast et son héritage à
recouvrer, . . . il trouveroit cent mille archiers et six mille hommes d’armes qui le
serviroient . . . Je suis le darrain né de tous les enffans d’Angleterre mais . . . je seroie le
premier à renouveller les guerres’: Froissart, Chroniques, ed. Kervyn de Lettenhove, 16,
p. 3.
94. Given-Wilson (tr.), Chronicles of the Revolution 1397–1400, p. 2.
95. ‘Ait dux: “Gratiose agatis mecum, saluando vitam meam.” Cui rex: “Illam gratiam
habebis quam prestitisti Symoni de Burley”’: Continuatio Eulogii: The Continuation of the
Eulogium Historiarum, 1364–1413, ed. Given-Wilson, p. 74.
96. ‘pour la très-singuliere, parfaitte loyal et vraye amour qu’il a toujourz eu à Nous et à
noz Enfanz . . . nostre dit Frere d’Anjou ait le gouvernement de nostre Royaume . . .
Noz très chiers et très amez Freres Phelippes Duc de Bourgoigne et Loys Duc de
Bourbon soïent Tuteurs et Gouverneurs de noz diz Enfanz’: Ordonnances des roys de
France de la troisième race, 6, pp. 46, 50.
97. ‘velut vir non sane mentis, verbis fatuis utendo, gestus eciam majestatem regiam
dedecentes exercuerat . . . quemdam abjectissimum virum obvium habuit, qui eum
terruit vehementer . . . “Non progrediaris ulterius, insigne rex, quia cito prodendus
est!” . . . Cujus fragore rex furore subito commotus est, et quasi alienatus a sensibus
servientem ense vibrato interfecit . . . “Sum ego adversariis tradendus”’: Chronique du
religieux de Saint-Denys, 13. 5, ed. Bellaguet, 2, pp. 18–20.
98. Ibid., 13. 6, ed. Bellaguet, 2, p. 24.
99. Froissart, Chroniques, ed. Kervyn de Lettenhove, 15, pp. 35–45.
100. ‘existimabat nonnumquam se vitreum esse nec tangi patiebatur, virgas ferreas vesti-
mentis inserebat’: Pius II, Commentarii rerum memorabilium, 6, ed. Meserve and
Simonetta, 3, p. 208.
101. ‘Magnates regni Castelle et Legione et Gallecie adque Lusitanie fecerunt omagium
domino Sancio filio illustris regis Alfonsi Castelle’: Anales toledanos III, ed. Floriano,
p. 173.
102. ‘fijo mayor heredero’: Crónica de Alfonso X, ed. González Jiménez, p. 186; González
Jiménez, ‘Sancho IV, infante’, p. 153; Ballesteros-Beretta, Alfonso X el Sabio, p. 824;
Salvador Martínez, Alfonso X, the Learned: A Biography, pp. 365–6.
103. ‘los homes sabios et entendudos . . . mandaron que si el fijo mayor moriese ante que
heredase, si dexase fijo ó fija que hobiese de su muger legítima, que aquel ó aquella lo
hobiese, et non otro ninguno’: Las Siete Partidas, 2. 15. 2, ed. Real Academia de la
Historia, 2, p. 133.
104. For events in Castile 1275–84, González Jiménez, ‘Sancho IV, infante’; Salvador
Martínez, Alfonso X, the Learned: A Biography, pp. 369–523.
105. ‘Et por esto el regno pasó mucho mal et mucho daño’: Crónica del rey Don Alfonso el
Onceno, 92, ed. Rosell, p. 228 (recounting the final settlement of 1331).

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 NOTES TO PAGES 220–8

106. Although the illegitimate Trastámara branch did use their de la Cerda descent
through the female line as an argument for their rightful possession of the throne
in 1386, according to the chronicler Fernão Lopes: Lopes, Crónica del Rei Dom João I, 2.
85, in The English in Portugal, 1367–1387, pp. 200–1.
107. Davies, Conquest, Coexistence and Change: Wales 1063–1415, pp. 60–1, 240 (diagrams
1–2, 5).
108. Lecuppre-Desjardin, Le royaume inachevé des ducs de Bourgogne: XIVe–XVe siècles.
109. ‘qu’il yroit et actendroit telle adventure qu’il plairoit à Dieu de lui envoyer . . . “Veez cy
en qui je me fie” . . . “Il est temps!”’: this account follows Monstrelet, Chronique, 1. 212,
ed. Douët d’Arcq, 3 (SHF 99), pp. 338–46; Vaughan, John the Fearless, pp. 274–86, lists
and assesses the various contemporary sources.
110. Les grands traités de la guerre de Cent ans, ed. Cosneau, pp. 116–51.
111. ‘s’il lui plaisoit estre roy et prendre couronne au tiltre d’aucun de ses pays, come de
Frise, qui de ancien temps a estré royaume, ou de Brabant, qui est la plus ancienne et
excellent duchié de toute la chrétienneté’: Bonenfant and Bonenfant, ‘Le projet
d’érection des États bourguignons en royaume en 1447’, p. 12.
112. ‘Le duc . . . n’oblia pas de parler du royaume de Bourgoingne, que ceulx de France ont
longtemps a usurpé’: Paravicini, ‘Theatre of Death. The Transfer of the Remnants of
Philip the Good and Isabel of Portugal to Dijon, November 1473–February 1474’,
p. 57 n. 139.
113. Stein, ‘Un diplomate bourguignon de XVe siècle, Antoine Haneron’, pp. 339–41.
114. Vaughan, Charles the Bold, pp. 145–55, describes these events.
115. Bührer-Thierry, ‘La reine adultère’.
116. See, for instance, McCracken, The Romance of Adultery: Queenship and Sexual
Transgression in Old French Literature.
117. Thegan, Gesta Hludowici imperatoris, 26, ed. Tremp, p. 214. For a detailed account of
events, see Dohmen, Die Ursache allen Übels. Untersuchungen zu den Unzuchtsvorwürfen
gegen die Gemahlinnen der Karolinger, pp. 109–80.
118. ‘asserentes etiam eum – quod dictu nefas est – thori incestatorem paterni; patrem
porro adeo quibusdam elusum praestigiis, ut haec non modo vindicare, sed nec
advertere posset’: Astronomus, Vita Hludowici imperatoris, 44, ed. Tremp, p. 456; for
Bernard’s relationship with Louis, see Thegan, Gesta Hludowici imperatoris, 36, ed.
Tremp, p. 222; see the comments of Koch, Kaiserin Judith: eine politische Biographie,
pp. 103–20; De Jong, The Penitential State: Authority and Atonement in the Age of Louis the
Pious, 814–840, pp. 195–200.
119. ‘Richgarda imperatrix adulterii cum Liutwardo Vercellensi episcopo, qui apud
eam et imperatorem familiariter in palatio vigebat, ab imperatore et aliis
incusata . . .’: Hermann of Reichenau, Chronica, ed. Pertz, p. 109; cf. Regino of
Prüm, Chronicon, s.a. 887, ed. Kurze, p. 127. For a detailed account of events, see
Dohmen, Die Ursache allen Übels. Untersuchungen zu den Unzuchtsvorwürfen gegen die
Gemahlinnen der Karolinger, pp. 242–87.
120. Richer of Saint-Rémi, Historiae, 3. 66, ed. Hoffmann, p. 205; for the identity of the
accuser, Die Briefsammlung Gerberts von Reims, ed. Weigle, no. 31, pp. 54–7 (Dietrich of

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 NOTES TO PAGES 228–33

Metz to Charles of Lorraine, 984). For a detailed account of events, see Dohmen, Die
Ursache allen Übels. Untersuchungen zu den Unzuchtsvorwürfen gegen die Gemahlinnen der
Karolinger, pp. 312–34.
121. ‘Ad ignominiam meam et totius generis mei nefandissima in Laudunensem confin-
xerunt episcopum’: ibid., no. 97, pp. 126–7. See the comments of Dufour, ‘Emma II,
femme de Lothaire, roi de France’, pp. 219–21.
122. Annales de Wintonia, ed. Luard, pp. 20–5.
123. Choniates, ‘De Alexio Isaacii Angeli fratro’, in Historia, 2 (1). 2–3, ed. Bekker, pp.
641–7, ed. van Dieten, pp. 484–9. See the comments of Garland, ‘Morality Versus
Politics at the Byzantine Court: The Charges against Marie of Antioch and
Euphrosyne’, pp. 286–92; Garland, Byzantine Empresses: Women and Power in
Byzantium, AD 527–1204, pp. 210–24.
124. Continuatio Chronici Girardi de Fracheto, ed. Guigniaut and de Wailly, pp. 40–1;
Continuatio Chronici Guillelmi de Nangiaco, ed. Géraud, 1, p. 404–6.
125. ‘omnes tres captae sunt et in quadrigis coopertis de nigro ductae ad loca fortia,
custodiendo portatae’: Ex anonymo regum Franciae chronico, ed. de Wailly and Delisle,
p. 17 (from BnF, MS lat. 5689C).
126. Maurer, Margaret of Anjou: Queenship and Power in Late Medieval England, pp. 46–8,
176–8; Geaman, ‘A Bastard and a Changeling? England’s Edward of Westminster and
Delayed Childbirth’.
127. ‘Rex noster stupidus est et mente captus; regitur non regit; apud uxorem, et qui regis
thalamum foedant, imperium est’: Pius II, Commentarii rerum memorabilium, 3. 41, ed.
Meserve and Simonetta, 2, p. 178.
128. Calendar of State Papers and Manuscripts, Existing in the Archives and Collections of Milan, 1,
ed. Hinds, no. 38, p. 27 (translated from the Italian).
129. ‘qui fecit Billas dicentes quod Edwardus princeps non fuit filius regine’: John Benet’s
Chronicle for the Years 1400 to 1462, ed. Harriss and Harriss, p. 216.
130. An English Chronicle of the Reigns of Richard II., Henry IV., Henry V. and Henry VI., ed.
Davies, p. 79 (spelling modernized).
131. Flodoard, Annales, s.a. 951, ed. Lauer, p. 132; Richer of Saint-Rémi, Historiae, 2. 101,
ed. Hoffmann, p. 169; see the comments by MacLean, ‘Making a Difference in
Tenth-Century Politics: King Athelstan’s Sisters and Frankish Queenship’, pp. 183,
185–6.
132. ‘Regina enim nostra Comiti Radulpho nupsit, quod factum Rex noster quam maxime
dolet’: Gervase of Rheims, Epistola ad Alexandrum II papam.
133. Griffiths, ‘Queen Katherine of Valois and a Missing Statute of the Realm’.
134. La reina doña Urraca (1109–1126), cancillería y colección diplomática, ed. Ruiz Albi, nos.
1–2, pp. 355, 357 (armiger regine), no. 138, p. 576 (venerabilis comes domnus Petrus de
Lara); Diplomatario de la Reina Urraca de Castilla y León (1109–1126), ed. Monterde
Albiac, lists considerably more than 149 documents but includes mentions, lost
documents, etc.
135. Reilly, The Kingdom of León-Castilla under Queen Urraca, 1109–1126, pp. 216–17; Reilly,
The Kingdom of León-Castilla under King Alfonso VII, 1126–1157, pp. 31–2; Barton, The

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 NOTES TO PAGES 233–6

Aristocracy in Twelfth-Century León and Castile, pp. 113, 280; Chronica Adefonsi imperatoris,
1. 18, ed. Maya Sánchez, pp. 158–9.
136. ‘Hunc si vidisses, fore regem iam putavisses’: Praefatio de Almaria, line 77, ed. Gil,
p. 257.
137. ‘Siquidem fama refert, quadam die in ecclesia Visiensi, eo predicante, memoratam
reginam, et consulem Fernandum, qui eo tempore contubernalis eius, non vir legit-
imus erat, rubore verecundie suffusos de ecclesia festinanter exisse’: Vita sancti
Theotonii, 5, ed. Herculano, p. 81.
138. Reilly, The Kingdom of León-Castilla under Queen Urraca, 1109–1126, p. 153; Barton, The
Aristocracy in Twelfth-Century León and Castile, p. 241.
139. ‘Sepe caret victu . . . Contritis pannis ibi mansit pluribus annis . . . et lineis vestibus sibi
denegatis, solis laneis contentatur. Inruptis calciis frequenter apparuit, quia pro
emendacione eorundem dare nummisma non habuit’: Peter of Zittau, Chronicon
Aulae Regiae, 1. 10, ed. Emler, p. 16.
140. ‘Quanto putas cor regis . . . turbacionis pungatur aculeo, qui regnum suum penitus
desolatum invenit’: ibid., 1. 15, p. 21.
141. Pangerl, ‘Zawisch von Falkenstein’.
142. ‘Sed quia de facili mutatur mens mulieris, regina, ut aiunt, quibusdam artis magice ab
ipso illusa fallaciis, ipsum arccius amans, sibi mox complacere studuit . . . Zewissius in
oculis regine se graciam invenisse considerans ampliora appeciit et regine animum in
amorem suum, quibusdam nigromancie conatibus ipsam circumveniens, provocavit.
Diabolus igitur . . . inter reginam et Zewissium illicitarum nupciarum commercium
consumari paranimphus subdolus procuravit’: Peter of Zittau, Chronicon Aulae Regiae,
1. 16, ed. Emler, pp. 22–3.
143. ‘Sawischius mundam sic prostituit Chunigundam,/ Defunctique thorum maculat
regis Bohemorum’: ibid., p. 23.
144. ‘Rex Chunegundam matrem iubet esse iocundam,/ Sic puer in matre letatur, qui sine
patre,/ Vixerat in penis prius in terris alienis’: ibid., 1. 17, p. 23.
145. ‘Sewischius pueriles ludos regem exercere docuit, quatenus eo ludente statum regni
pro propria utilitate disponeret’: ibid., 1. 18, p. 24.
146. ‘Vivas tranquille iuvenis rex’: ibid., 1. 25, p. 33.
147. See the relevant sections of Phillips, Edward II, and Ormrod, Edward III.
148. Phillips, Edward II, pp. 3, 24, 25–6, 28–9, 97–103.
149. ‘Beal fitz, beal fitz, eiez pitie de gentil Mortymer’: Baker, Chronicon, ed. Thompson,
p. 46.
150. ‘aliam duxit uxorem, quae valide contra filium eius, sicut novercarum mos est, malignari
ac scandalizare coepit. Unde factum est, ut una solemnitatum die, cum puer super
eam vestimenta matris agnusceret, commotus felle diceret ad eam: “Non enim eras
digna, ut haec indumenta tua terga contegerent, quae dominae tuae, id est matre
meae, fuisse nuscuntur”’: Gregory of Tours, Libri historiarum decem, 3. 5, ed. Krusch and
Levison, pp. 100–1; see Kasten, ‘Stepmothers in Frankish Legal Life’; Kasten, ‘Noverca
venefica. Zum bösen Ruf der Stiefmütter in der gallischen und fränkischen
Gesellschaft’.

514
 NOTES TO PAGES 237–41

151. ‘super amisso care genitricis amore/ Ex egri latebris ducens suspiria cordis’:
Hroswitha, Gesta Ottonis, lines 742–3, in Hrotsvit, Opera omnia, ed. Berschin, p. 301;
on Hroswitha’s attitude to Liudolf, see Sonnleitner, ‘Der Konflikt zwischen Otto
I. und seinem Sohn Liudolf als Problem der zeitgenössischen Geschichtsschreibung’.
152. Suger, Vita Ludovici Grossi regis, 14, 18, ed. Waquet, pp. 84, 124; Orderic Vitalis, Historia
ecclesiastica, 11. 9, ed. Chibnall, 6, pp. 50–4.
153. ‘Erant enim quidam regni perturbatores, qui ad haec omni studio vigilabant, ut aut
regnum in aliam personam transferretur, aut non mediocriter minueretur’: Ivo of
Chartres, Epistolae 189, PL 162: 193.
154. ‘Quapropter exitium illi magnopere peroptaverat, et multis conatibus per plurimos
iniquitatis complices procuraverat, ut et ipsa . . . in principatu gloriaretur, et filios
suos, Philippum et Florum, si ille moreretur, in regni solio securior intronizare
moliretur. . . . quidam hirsutus de Barbarie venit, . . . Hic nimirum inter ethnicos
diu conversatus fuerat, et profunda physicae secreta subtiliter a didascalis indaga-
verat’: Orderic Vitalis, Historia ecclesiastica, 8. 20, 11. 9, ed. Chibnall, 4, pp. 260–2, 6,
pp. 50–4.
155. αὗτε γὰρ ἀποπνιγομένη μικροῦ τῷ τὴν πατρῴαν κοίτην ἀνοσίως ὑπὸ τοῦ πρωτοσεβαστοῦ
ἐρευνᾶσθαι, καὶ ἄλλως δὲ θερμουργίαν ἀσπαζομένη καὶ ἀνδρικὴ τὸ φρόνημα οὖσα,
προσκτωμένη δὲ καὶ τὸ φύσει πρὸς τὴν μητρυιὰν βαρύζηλον: Choniates, ‘Alexius
Manuelis Comneni filius’, in Historia, 4, ed. van Dieten, p. 230; the text in Bekker’s
edition, p. 300, has a different reading. On these incidents, see Garland, ‘Morality
Versus Politics at the Byzantine Court: The Charges against Marie of Antioch and
Euphrosyne’, pp. 271–86; Garland, Byzantine Empresses: Women and Power in
Byzantium, AD 527–1204, pp. 201–3, 206–8.
156. τὸ γένος οἱ ἐντεῦθεν ἐπιθολοῦν: Choniates, ‘Alexius Manuelis Comneni filius’, in
Historia, 5, ed. Bekker, p. 302, ed. van Dieten, p. 232.
157. ψεκάδι τοῦ μητρικοῦ διεντυπούμενος αἵματος: ibid., ed. Bekker, p. 347, ed. van Dieten,
p. 268.

7 ROYAL MORTALITY

1. Hollingsworth, ‘A Demographic Study of the British Ducal Families’, pp. 360–1.

2. Whether Berenguela should be included in the list or not is debateable. She has been
excluded here.
3. Suger, Vita Ludovici Grossi regis, 32, ed. Waquet, p. 266.
4. ‘Sed quia iuvenis erat, quandam puellam, filiam cuiusdam Germundi, insecutus est;
illa in domo paterno fugiens, rex equo sedens iocando eam insecutus scapulas super-
liminare et pectus sella equi attrivit eumque valide confregit’: Annales Vedastini, s.a.
882, ed. von Simson, p. 52; there is no mention of the incident in the account of Louis’
death in the Annales Bertiniani, s.a. 882, ed. Waitz, p. 152.
5. ‘el rey . . . cabalgó en un caballo ruano castellano . . . E salió fuera de la villa por la
puerta que dicen de Burgos, é en un barbecho dió el rey de las espuelas al caballo en
que iba, é en medio de la carrera estropezó el caballo, é cayó con el rey, en manera que

515
 NOTES TO PAGES 241–5

le quebró todo por el cuerpo’: López de Ayala, Crónica del rey don Juan primero de Castilla
é de Leon, 10 (1390). 20, ed. Rosell, 2, p. 143.
6. ‘elle chevauchoit ung aubin ardent . . . Ledict seigneur [Louis] me compta ces nou-
velles et en eut tres grand joye’: Commynes, Mémoires, 6. 6. 2, ed. Blanchard, p. 453.
7. ‘Rex autem, arrepta lancea, ut eundem leporem insectaretur sinistro actus casu
equum ad illas cepit urgere partes et cursui vehementer instare. Tandem inconsulte
festinans, equus in preceps agitur corruensque in terram regem dedit precipitem
iacentique pre casus dolore attonito, sella caput obtrivit, ita ut cerebrum tam per
aures quam per nares etiam emitteretur’: William of Tyre, Chronicon, 15. 27, ed.
Huygens, 2, p. 710.
8. Fredegar, Chronica, Continuatio, 39, ed. Krusch, p. 186, ed. Wallace-Hadrill, p. 108.
9. ‘Karolus iuvenis rex Galliae in quadam venatione ictibus cuiusdam apri fertur occisus;
re autem vera a suo satellite in eadem venatione non sponte vulneratus occubuit’,
‘Continuatio Mogontiacensis’, in Annales Fuldenses, s.a. 884, ed. Kurze, p. 101.
10. William of Malmesbury, Gesta regum Anglorum, 3. 275, ed. Mynors et al., pp. 502–4;
Orderic Vitalis, Historia ecclesiastica, 10. 14, ed. Chibnall, 5, pp. 282–4; John of
Worcester, Chronicle, 3, ed. McGurk, p. 92. Richard, second son of William the
Conqueror, collided with a branch while chasing an animal in the New Forest accord-
ing to Orderic Vitalis, Historia ecclesiastica, 5. 11, ed. Chibnall, 3, p. 114; William of
Malmesbury says he died from the bad air during a stag hunt.
11. Chronica Sealandie, ed. Kroman, p. 114; Tabula Ringstadiensis, ed. Gertz, p. 85.
12. Guilland, ‘La destinée des empereurs de Byzance’, pp. 11–12 (Theodosius II, Basil I,
John II Comenus).
13. Flodoard, Annales, s.a. 954, ed. Lauer, p. 138; Richer of Saint-Rémi, Historiae, 2. 103, 4. 5,
ed. Hoffmann, pp. 170, 234.
14. Anales toledanos II, s.a. 1220, ed. Porres Martín-Cleto, p. 191.
15. Eisner, ‘Killing Kings: Patterns of Regicide in Europe, AD 600–1800’, p. 563.
16. For Byzantium, Lilie, ‘Der Kaiser in der Statistik. Subversive Gedanken zur angeblichen
Allmacht der byzantinischen Kaiser’, p. 214.
17. Guilland, ‘La destinée des empereurs de Byzance’; for the uncertainty whether
Constantine VI died very soon after or some years after blinding, see Theophanes,
The Chronicle of Theophanes the Confessor, tr. Mango and Scott, pp. 649–50.
18. Ralph de Diceto, Ymagines historiarum, ed. Stubbs, 1, p. 440.
19. ‘Hii uero, serie hereditaria semper et iure naturali regna paterna consecuti, . . . et
decurso demum uite temporalis spacio, fine beato decedentes et eternam in celis
retribucionem de tam pio iustoque regimine recipientes, filiis suis et heredibus sua
feliciter regna contradunt’: Gerald of Wales, De principis instructione, 3. 30, ed. Bartlett,
p. 718 (RS ed., p. 320).
20. Suger, Vita Ludovici Grossi regis, 14, 18, ed. Waquet, pp. 84, 124; Ivo of Chartres, Epistolae
189, PL 162: 193; Orderic Vitalis, Historia ecclesiastica, 11. 9, ed. Chibnall, 6, pp. 50–4; see
above, pp. 237–8.
21. William, Sugerii Vita, 3, ed. Lecoy de la Marche, pp. 396–7.
22. Theophanes, Chronographia, AM 6303, ed. de Boor, 1, p. 491.

516
 NOTES TO PAGES 245–50

23. ‘dignissimam periurii vindictam’: Vita Heinrici IV. imperatoris, 4, ed. Eberhard, p. 19.
24. Matthew Paris, Chronica majora, ed. Luard, 5, p. 550.
25. ‘Sumpserant enim Gothi hanc detestabilem consuetudinem, ut, si quis eis de regibus
non placuisset, gladio eum adpeterent, et qui libuisset animo, hunc sibi statuerent
regem’: Gregory of Tours, Libri historiarum decem, 3. 30, ed. Krusch and Levison, p. 126.
26. ‘interficiens omnes illos qui regis [sic] interemere consueverant, non relinquens ex eis
mingentem ad parietem’: Gregory of Tours, Libri historiarum decem, 4. 38, ed. Krusch
and Levison, p. 170; the phrase is biblical, 3 Kings (1 Kings), 16: 11.
27. ‘Quippe, ut dicitur, a centum retro annis, et eo amplius, cum regum ibidem numerosa
successio fuerit, nullus eorum senio aut morbo vitam finivit, sed omnes ferro interiere;
suis interfectores tanquam legitimis successoribus, regni fastigium relinquentes’:
William of Newburgh, Historia rerum anglicarum, 3. 6, ed. Howlett, 1, p. 228.
28. Bagge, From Viking Stronghold to Christian Kingdom: State Formation in Norway, c. 900–1350,
p. 287.
29. As pointed out by Bagge, Cross and Scepter: The Rise of the Scandinavian Kingdoms from the
Vikings to the Reformation, p. 51.
30. Capitularia regum Francorum, 1, ed. Boretius, no. 45, c. 18, pp. 129–30 (the Divisio
regnorum).
31. Lydon, ‘A Land of War’, p. 249.
32. Pollock and Maitland, The History of English Law before the Time of Edward I, 2, p. 506.
33. νήπιος, ὃς πατέρα κτείνας παῖδας καταλείπει: Stasinus, Cypria, fragment, cited by Clement
of Alexandria, Stromateis, 6. 19. 1, in Greek Epic Fragments, ed. West, p. 106.
34. Theophylact Simocatta, Historiae, 8. 11, ed. de Boor, p. 305; Chronicon Paschale, s.a. 602,
ed. Dindorf, 1, pp. 693–4; Theophanes, Chronographia, AM 6094, ed. de Boor, 1,
pp. 289–90.
35. Nikephoros of Constantinople, Breviarium historicum, 45, ed. Mango, p. 112;
Theophanes, Chronographia, AM 6203, ed. de Boor, 1, p. 380.
36. ‘Filius eius nomen Merovius parvolus iusso Theuderici adprehensus, a quidam per
pede ad petram percutitur, cerebrum eius capite aeruptum, amisit spiritum’: Fredegar,
Chronica, 4. 38, ed. Krusch, pp. 139–40, ed. Wallace-Hadrill, p. 32.
37. Theophanes continuatus, 1. 10; 2. 1, ed. Bekker, pp. 20, 41; ed. Featherstone, pp. 32, 64.
38. Psellos, Chronographia, 5. 42, ed. Renauld, 1, p. 111; ed. Reinsch, p. 102.
39. Theophanes, Chronographia, AM 6284, ed. de Boor, 1, p. 468; they had all been forcibly
tonsured some years earlier: Theophanes, AM 6273, ed. de Boor, 1, p. 454.
40. Annales regni Francorum, s.a. 818, ed. Kurze, p. 148; Annales Bertiniani, s.a. 873, ed. Waitz,
p. 122; Annales Xantenses, s.a. 873, ed. von Simson, p. 32; ‘Continuatio Mogontiacensis’,
in Annales Fuldenses, s.a. 873, ed. Kurze, p. 78; see Nelson, ‘A Tale of Two Princes:
Politics, Text and Ideology in a Carolingian Annal’; ‘Continuatio Mogontiacensis’, in
Annales Fuldenses, s.a. 885, ed. Kurze, p. 103.
41. Liudprand, Antapodosis, 2. 35–41, ed. Becker, pp. 53–6.
42. ‘Ilicet admissi penetrant miserabile templum,/ Quo Ludovicus erat, subito rapiuntque
ligantque/ Et pulchros adimunt oculos. Securus in aula/ Forte sedebat enim, idcirco

517
 NOTES TO PAGES 250–4

pia munera lucis/ Perdidit, obsessus tenebris quoque solis in ortu’: Gesta Berengarii
imperatoris, 4, lines 61–5, ed. Dümmler, p. 128 (also in MGH, Poetae, 4. 1, p. 397).
43. Annals of Ulster (to A.D. 1131), ed. Mac Airt and Mac Niocaill, pp. 430–529 passim.
44. Annals of Ulster (Annála Uladh), ed. Hennessy and MacCarthy, 3, p. 153.
45. Brut y Tywysogyon or The Chronicle of the Princes: Red Book of Hergest Version, s.a. 1175, ed.
Jones, p. 163.
46. Gillingham, ‘Killing and Mutilating Political Enemies in the British Isles from the Late
Twelfth to the Early Fourteenth Century: A Comparative Study’, p. 122; see also
Gillingham, ‘Conquering the Barbarians: War and Chivalry in Twelfth-Century
Britain’.
47. Brut y Tywysogyon or The Chronicle of the Princes: Red Book of Hergest Version, ed. Jones,
pp. 163, 175.
48. Roger of Howden, Chronica, ed. Stubbs, 3, p. 270.
49. Chronici Hungarici compositio saeculi XIV, 150, 157–8, 160, ed. Domanovszky, pp. 430,
443–4, 446–7.
50. Promis, Monumenta historiae patriae: Scriptores, 1, cols. 666–70; Butaud and Piétri, Les
Enjeux de la généalogie (XIIe–XVIIIe s.): pouvoir et identité, p. 21.
51. ‘in venatione occisus’: Munich, Bayerische Staatsbibliothek, clm 29880/6 (the
‘Bamberger Tafel’); on this, see p. 331 ‘a porco interfectus’: Bernard Gui, Arbor
genealogiae regum Francorum, CCCC 45, fol. 43v (cf. fol. 16v).
52. ‘Cujus corpus gloriose sepultum fuit in ecclesia Sancte Marie de Barbael quam ipse
fundavit: Ubi ad honorem Domini nostri Jhesu Christi et beate Dei Genitricis et Virginis
Marie et omnium sanctorum die et nocte a sanctis et religiosis viris divina celebrantur
officia pro anima ipsius et omnium predecessorum suorum et pro statu regni
Francorum’: Rigord, Gesta Philippi Augusti, 10, ed. Carpentier et al., p. 142.
53. ‘sepulturam meam et sucessorum meorum’: Tumbo A de la Catedral de Santiago, ed. Lucas
Alvarez, no. 130, p. 264.
54. Brown, ‘Death and the Human Body in the Later Middle Ages: The Legislation of
Boniface VIII on the Division of the Corpse’, p. 251.
55. Grierson et al., ‘The Tombs and Obits of the Byzantine Emperors’.
56. Gregory of Tours, Libri historiarum decem, 2. 43, ed. Krusch and Levison, p. 93; Erlande-
Brandenburg, Le roi est mort: étude sur les funérailles, les sépultures et les tombeaux des rois de
France, p. 50; Périn, ‘The Undiscovered Grave of King Clovis I (+511)’.
57. Yorke, ‘The Burial of Kings in Anglo-Saxon England’, pp. 243, 247–8, 251.
58. Taking Louis XII as the last medieval king; the exceptions were Philip I, Louis VII and
Louis XI; royal burial at St-Denis continued to be the rule after the medieval period.
59. ‘a sepultura patrum suorum regum, que in ecclesia Beati Dionisii quasi jure naturali
habetur, se absentari deliberaverat’: Suger, Vita Ludovici Grossi regis, 13, ed. Waquet,
p. 84.
60. ‘“Francorum” inquit “regum sepulturam apud sanctum Dionisium esse scio, sed quia
me nimium esse peccatorem sentio, secus tanti martiris corpus sepeliri non audeo”’:
Orderic Vitalis, Historia ecclesiastica, 11. 34, ed. Chibnall 6, p. 154.

518
 NOTES TO PAGES 254–7

61. Conrad III at Bamberg, Frederick I at Tyre, Henry VI at Palermo, Philip of Swabia at
Speyer (transferred from Bamberg), Frederick II at Palermo, Henry (VII) at Cosenza,
Conrad IV at Messina.
62. Conrad II, Henry III, Henry IV, Henry V (1039–1125); Philip of Swabia (d. 1208, buried
at Speyer 1213); Rudolf of Habsburg (1291); Adolf of Nassau (d. 1298) and Albert
I (d. 1308) were both transferred to Speyer in 1309.
63. This was Philip of Swabia, whose body was transferred to Speyer from Bamberg by his
nephew Frederick II in 1213, five years after his death: Annales Marbacenses, ed. Bloch,
p. 78; Burchard of Ursberg, Chronicon, ed. Holder-Egger and von Simson, p. 91.
64. ‘ubi etiam eorum quilibet mausoleum habuerit’: Delaborde, ‘Notice sur les ouvrages et
sur la vie de Rigord moine de Saint-Denis’, p. 600, from Soissons, Bibliothèque muni-
cipale, MS 129 (120).
65. ‘Pour ce que moult de gent et meismememt li haut homme et noble qui souvent
viennent en liglise monsegnour saint Dyonise de France ou partie de vallans roys de
France gisent en sepouture, desirent cognoistre et savoer la nessance et la descendue
de leur très haute generacion et les mervellous faiz qui sunt raconté e publié par
maintes terres des devans diz roys de France, je frere Guillaume, diz de Nangis,
moine de la devant dite eglise Saint Dyonise, ay translaté du latin en franceys a la
requeste de bonnes gens, pour ce que cil qui latin nentendent puissent savoer
e cognoistre dont si noble gent e si beneureuse descendit e vint premierement’:
William de Nangis, Chronique abrégée des rois de France, p. 649. The French translation
went on to be a popular text and was continued by later writers: Guyot-Bachy, ‘La
Chronique abrégée des rois de France de Guillaume de Nangis: trois étapes de l’histoire d’un
texte’; Guyot-Bachy, ‘La Chronique abrégée des rois de France et les Grandes chroniques de
France : concurrence ou complémentarité dans la construction d’une culture historique
en France à la fin du Moyen Age?’.
66. For a comparison, see Jordan, A Tale of Two Monasteries: Westminster and Saint-Denis in the
Thirteenth Century; note also the reflections of Genet, ‘Londres est-elle une capitale?’.
67. See Wolverton, Hastening Toward Prague: Power and Society in the Medieval Czech Lands,
esp. pp. 82–5.
68. ‘tocius Boemie domnam’: Cosmas of Prague, Chronica Boemorum, 1. 9, ed. Bretholz,
p. 19.
69. ‘sedes regis Bohemorum et totius regni’: Annales de rebus gestis post mortem Przem. Otakari
regis (II), s.a. 1279, ed. Emler, p. 347.
70. See the list in Wolverton, Hastening Toward Prague: Power and Society in the Medieval Czech
Lands, p. 95, supplemented by information on the last four Premyslid rulers.
71. ‘monasterium . . . quod prope civitatem que dicitur Burgis construximus et de propriis
bonis ditavimus . . . Preterea, promisimus . . . quod nos et filii nostri, qui consilio et
mandato nostro acquiescere voluerint, in supra dicto monasterio . . . sepeliamur’:
Documentación del monasterio de Las Huelgas de Burgos (1116–1230), ed. Lizoain Garrido,
no. 52, p. 93.
72. Anderson, Kings and Kingship in Early Scotland, pp. 266–8, 273–6, 279, 282–4,
288–91.

519
 NOTES TO PAGES 257–63

73. Miracula sancte Margarite Scotorum regine, 7, ed. Bartlett, pp. 86–8; Bower, Scotichronicon,
10. 15, ed. Watt et al., 5, pp. 336–8.
74. Vasconcelos Vilar, ‘Lineage and Territory: Royal Burial Sites in the Early Portuguese
Kingdom’, p. 165.
75. Tabula Ringstadiensis, ed. Gertz.
76. Klein, ‘Comment parler des arts au XIVe siècle? La genèse du panthéon aragonais-
catalan à Poblet à l’époque du roi Pierre le Cérémonieux’, p. 94.
77. ‘Apud Sanctum-Dionysium in Francia facta est regum Francorum in monasterio illo
per diversa loca quiescentium, per sanctum regem Franciae Ludovicum et Mathaeum
abbatem illius monasterii, simul adjuncta translatio; et qui erant tam reges quam
reginae de genere Magni Karoli descendentes simul in dextera parte monasterii per
duos pedes et dimidium super terram caelatis imaginibus elevati positi sunt, et alii
procedentes de genere regis Hugonis Capucii in sinistra’: William of Nangis, Chronicon,
ed. Géraud, 1, pp. 232–3, s.a. 1267; see Wright, ‘A Royal Tomb Programme’; Erlande-
Brandenburg, Le roi est mort: étude sur les funérailles, les sépultures et les tombeaux des rois de
France, pp. 81–3; Meier, Die Archäologie des mittelalterlichen Königsgrabes im christlichen
Europa, p. 333, fig. 165.
78. ‘Elegerat autem dominus rex sepulturam suam apud sanctum Dionysium et sepul-
turam filii sui . . . in ecclesia Regalis-montis quod nolebat quod sepultus esset in ecclesia
beati Dionysii, in qua sepulti erant soli reges’: Achery, Veterum scriptorum spicilegium, 3,
p. 667 (a letter of 1270 from Peter de Condé, probably the later archdeacon of Soissons,
to the treasurer of the royal church of St-Frambaud de Senlis, who is not named but was
Philip de Chaorse, one of the king’s executors, as bishop-elect of Evreux); for Louis
carrying stones, William de Saint-Pathus, Vie de saint Louis, 9, ed. Delaborde, p. 71.
79. Theophanes continuatus, 6. 1, ed. Bekker, p. 353; Symeon Magister et Logotheta,
Chronicon, 133. 2, ed. Wahlgren, pp. 270–1.
80. Symeon Magister et Logotheta, Chronicon, 131.45, ed. Wahlgren, p. 255; see the discus-
sion in Tougher, The Reign of Leo VI (886–912): Politics and People, pp. 42–67.
81. Ibid., p. 62, citing the view of ‘several Byzantinists’.
82. Saul, Richard II, p. 428.
83. Lopes, Crónica do Rei D. Pedro I, 2, 16, ed. Macchi, tr. Steunou, pp. 24–6, 100–2.
84. Recueil des actes de Charles II le Chauve, roi de France, ed. Tessier, 2, nos. 246, 379, pp. 53–6,
347–50.
85. Regino of Prüm, Chronicon, s.a. 877, ed. Kurze, p. 113.
86. ‘rogans, eum etiam Spire iuxta parentes suos sepelire’: Annales Hildesheimenses, ed.
Waitz, p. 57.
87. ‘precipue autem ecclesiam Spirensem a nostris parentibus Cůnrado imperatore
augusto, avo videlicet nostro, et Heinrico imperatore augusto, patre videlicet nostro,
et a nobis gloriose constructam veneramur’: Heinrici IV. Diplomata, ed. von Gladiss and
Gawlik, 2, no. 489, p. 666.
88. ‘anniversarium permagnifice celebrat . . . iuxta maiores suos in aecclesia sepelitur’:
Frutolfi et Ekkehardi Chronica necnon Anonymi Chronica imperatorum, ed. Schmale and
Schmale-Ott, pp. 304–6; ibid., p. 239 (Ekkehard III) (MGH SS 6, pp. 245, 239);

520
 NOTES TO PAGES 263–7

Annales Hildesheimenses, ed. Waitz, pp. 57, 62; Annales Patherbrunnenses eine verlorene
Quellenschrift des zwölften Jahrhunderts, ed. Scheffer-Boichorst, p. 115.
89. ‘Regina etiam Sancia postulante patrem suum regem Sancium a monasterio
Oniensi transtulit et cum aliis regibus Legione sepeliuit’: Luke of Tuy, Chronicon
mundi, 4. 56, ed. Falque, p. 292; followed by Rodrigo Jiménez de Rada, Historia de
rebus Hispaniae, 6. 12, ed. Fernández Valverde, p. 192.
90. Dectot, Les tombeaux des familles royales de la péninsule ibérique au Moyen Age, pp. 183, 193.
91. Ibid., p. 213.
92. ‘el rey don Alfonso, que gano a Toledo . . . a los pies de la iglesia . . . la capilla ante el
altar mayor . . . en un monumento verde’: Crónica del rey don Sancho el Bravo, 3, ed.
Rosell, pp. 73–4.
93. Grierson et al., ‘The Tombs and Obits of the Byzantine Emperors’.
94. ‘Theodoricus . . . mortuus est sepultusque est in mausoleum, quod ipse aedificare
iussit extra portas Artemetoris, quod usque hodie vocamus Ad Farum, ubi est mon-
asterium sanctae Mariae quod dicitur Ad memoria regis Theodorici. Sed, ut michi
videtur, ex sepulcro proiectus est, et ipsa urna, ubi iacuit, ex lapide porfiretico valde
mirabilis, ante ipsius monasterii aditum posita est’: Agnellus of Ravenna, Liber ponti-
ficalis ecclesiae Ravennatis, 39, ed. Mauskopf Deliyannis, p. 197; ed. Holder-Egger,
p. 304; see Ambrogi, Vasche di età romana in marmi bianchi e colorati, pp. 109–11, with
photo on p. 123 (B. I. 32).
95. Montesquiou-Fezensac, ‘Le tombeau de Charles le Chauve à Saint-Denis’; Erlande-
Brandenburg, Le roi est mort: étude sur les funérailles, les sépultures et les tombeaux des rois de
France, p. 39 and fig. 31.
96. Deér, The Dynastic Porphyry Tombs of the Norman Period in Sicily; the scientific analysis of
Frederick’s tomb undertaken in the 1990s is described in Il sarcofago dell’imperatore.
Studi, ricerche e indagini sulla tomba di Federico II nella Cattedrale di Palermo 1994–1999.
97. Rogerii II regis Diplomata Latina, ed. Brühl, no. 68, p. 199 (1145); Roger intended to be
buried in one of the porphyry sarcophagi in Cefalù; his daughter, the Empress
Constance, recognized this original intention in a document of 1198 for Cefalù:
Constantiae imperatricis Diplomata, ed. Kölzer, no. 56, p. 176.
98. Deér, The Dynastic Porphyry Tombs of the Norman Period in Sicily, p. 18; Historia Diplomatica
Friderici II, ed. J.-L.-A. Huillard-Bréholles (6 vols. in 12, Paris, 1852–61) 1. 2, pp. 426–7
(the status and nature of this document is not quite clear).
99. The various arguments are set out in Johnson, ‘The Porphyry Alveus of Santes Creus
and the Mausoleum at Centcelles’.
100. Nickson, ‘The Royal Tombs of Santes Creus. Negotiating the Royal Image in Medieval
Iberia’, p. 7.
101. There is an extremely thorough analysis of this topic in Meier, Die Archäologie des
mittelalterlichen Königsgrabes im christlichen Europa.
102. Ibid., pp. 167–211.
103. ‘Hic iacet Danorum rex Waldemarus primus, Sclauorum expugnator et dominator,
patrie liberator, pacis conservator. Qui filius sancti Kanuti Rugianos expugnavit et ad
fidem Christi primus convertit . . . Murum quoque ad tocius regni presidium, qui wlgo

521
 NOTES TO PAGES 267–74

Danewerch dicitur, ex lateribus coctis primus construxit’: Scriptores minores historiae

Danicae, ed. Gertz, 2, pp. 87–8 (the first comma should be after, not before, ‘primus’,
as in Gertz; this is clear from the inscription on the reverse, ‘rex Waldemarus primus,
sancti Kanuti filius’).
104. Rapp, ‘Death at the Byzantine Court: The Emperor and his Family’, pp. 278–9.
105. ‘Rex magnus parva iacet hac Guillelmus in urna/ Sufficit et magno parva domus
domino’: Orderic Vitalis, Historia ecclesiastica, 8. 1, ed. Chibnall, 4, p. 110.
106. ‘sacra victima belli . . . ecclesiae cecidit’: Schramm and Mütherich, Denkmale der
deutschen Könige und Kaiser I: Ein Beitrag zur Herrschergeschichte von Karl dem Grossen bis
Friedrich II. 768–1250, p. 176.
107. Meier, Die Archäologie des mittelalterlichen Königsgrabes im christlichen Europa, pp. 242–3;
the effigy of Rudolf I (d. 1291) in Speyer was not originally associated with his tomb.
108. Meier, Die Archäologie des mittelalterlichen Königsgrabes im christlichen Europa, pp. 306–7,
fig. 158.
109. ‘fecit construi sepulchrum miro artificio compositum ex lapidibus, auro et argento et
ere et gemmis subtilissime decoratum’: Rigord, Gesta Philippi Augusti, 10, ed.
Carpentier et al., p. 142.
110. It was destroyed during the French Revolution, but antiquarian drawings survive:
Erlande-Brandenburg, Le roi est mort: étude sur les funérailles, les sépultures et les tombeaux
des rois de France, pp. 161–2, figs. 37–8.
111. Dectot, Les tombeaux des familles royales de la péninsule ibérique au Moyen Age, p. 89.
112. Hartmann, Die Königin im frühen Mittelalter, pp. 214–16; the statement that Fredegund
and Chilperic I were buried in St-Denis (ibid., p. 208) must be a slip.
113. Klein, ‘Comment parler des arts au XIVe siècle? La genèse du panthéon aragonais-
catalan à Poblet à l’époque du roi Pierre le Cérémonieux.’
114. ‘de coper et laton endorrez, coronez, ajonauntz et cloisauntz ensemble lour meyns
dextres, et tenantz septres en lour meyns senestres’: Foedera (original edn.), 7, pp. 797–8;
Age of Chivalry: Art in Plantagenet England, 1200–1400, ed. Alexander and Binski, no. 446,
pp. 393–4 (with photograph of the contract for the marble tomb); both contracts are in
TNA, E 101/473/7; see also Duffy, Royal Tombs of Medieval England, pp. 163–73.
115. ‘mortuus est predictus dux Boemiae Cunradus in Apulia circa Neapolim, cuius carnes
in monte Cassino positae, sed ossa Pragam sunt deportata’: Gerlach of Mühlhausen,
Chronicon, ed. Wattenbach, p. 706, ed. Emler, p. 509.
116. Brown, ‘Death and the Human Body in the Later Middle Ages: The Legislation of
Boniface VIII on the Division of the Corpse’; Gaude-Ferragu, D’or et de cendres. La mort
et les funérailles des princes dans le royaume de France au bas Moyen Âge, pp. 313–44; Bande,
Le Coeur du roi. Les Capétiens et les sepultures multiples XIIIe–XVe siècles; Warntjes,
‘Programmatic Double Burial (Body and Heart) of the European High Nobility,
c. 1200–1400. Its Origins, Geography, and Functions’.
117. ‘praecepit rex, ut cerebrum suum et sanguis ejus et viscera sua sepelirentur apud
Charrou, et cor suum apud Rothomagum, et corpus suum apud Frontem Ebraudi, ad
pedes patris sui’: Roger of Howden, Chronica, ed. Stubbs, 4, p. 84.
118. William de Nangis, Gesta Philippi tertii regis Franciae, pp. 466–8, 486–8.

522
 NOTES TO PAGES 274–9

119. Enderlein, Die Grablegen des Hauses Anjou in Unteritalien. Totenkult und Monumente
(1266–1343), pp. 33–5.
120. ‘Otrosí mandamos que luego que muriéremos, que nos saquen el coraçón e quel
lieuen a la sancta Terra de Ultramar e quel sotierren en Jherusalem en Monte Calvar,
allí do yazen algunos de nuestros auuelos’: Diplomatario andaluz de Alfonso X, ed.
González Jiménez, no. 521, p. 559.
121. ‘And myn hart fichyt sekyrly was/ Quhen I wes in prosperité/ Off my synnys to sauffyt
be/ To travaill apon Goddis fayis,/ And sen he now me till him tayis/ Sua that the body
may na wys/ Fullfill that the hart gan devis/ I wald the hart war thidder sent/ Quharin
consavyt wes that entent./ Tharfor I pray you everilkan/ That ye amang you ches me
ane/ That be honest wis and wicht/ And off his hand a noble knycht/ On Goddis fayis
my hart to ber/ Quhen saule and cors disseveryt er,/ For I wald it war worthily /
Brocht thar, sen God will nocht that I/ Haiff power thidderwart to ga’: Barbour, The
Bruce, 20, lines 182–99, ed. Duncan, pp. 751–3.
122. ‘legavit suum cor mitti Jerusolimis, et recondi apud Sepulcrum Domini’: Bower,
Scotichronicon, 12. 19, ed. Watt et al., 7, p. 64.
123. ‘nobilis vir, Jacobus dominus de Douglas in Scotia, versus Terram Sanctam, in
auxilio Christianorum contra Sarracenos, cum corde domini R. Regis Scotiae,
nuper defuncti, sit profecturus’: Foedera (new edn.), 2. 2, pp. 770–1 (Calendar of
Documents Relating to Scotland, ed. Bain, 3, nos. 990–1, p. 179; Calendar of the Patent
Rolls Preserved in the Public Record Office, 1327–30, p. 436; Calendar of the Close Rolls
Preserved in the Public Record Office, 1327–30, p. 568).
124. Fordun, Chronica gentis Scotorum, ed. Skene, 1, pp. 353–4, Gesta Annalia 144; Barbour,
The Bruce, 20, lines 309–600, ed. Duncan, pp. 759–73; Bower, Scotichronicon, 13. 20, ed.
Watt et al., 7, pp. 66–70; Brown, The Black Douglases: War and Lordship in Late Medieval
Scotland, 1300–1455, p. 27.
125. Calendar of Entries in the Papal Registers Relating to Great Britain and Ireland: Papal Letters, 2
(1305–1343), p. 235; 3 (1342–1362), p. 168.
126. ‘scindendis, decoquendis, vel alias quomodolibet dividendis, ac in una, vel diversis
ecclesiis, sive locis, prout devotio vobis suaserit, tumulandis’: Privilèges accordés à la
couronne de France par la Saint-Siége, ed. Tardif, no. 270, p. 245 (Clement VI for John II,
20 April 1351); for earlier, individual privileges, see Brown, ‘Death and the Human
Body in the Later Middle Ages: The Legislation of Boniface VIII on the Division of the
Corpse’, pp. 254–61.
127. Hunter, ‘On the Death of Eleanor of Castile, Consort of King Edward the First, and the
Honours Paid to her Memory’, pp. 186–7; Age of Chivalry: Art in Plantagenet England,
1200–1400, ed. Alexander and Binski, no. 379, pp. 365–6 (drawing of c. 1641).
128. Elliott, ‘Violence against the Dead: The Negative Translation and damnatio memoriae in
the Middle Ages’.
129. Theophanes, Chronographia, AM 6102, ed. de Boor, 1, p. 299; Grierson et al., ‘The
Tombs and Obits of the Byzantine Emperors’, p. 47.
130. Symeon Magister et Logotheta, Chronicon, 131. 44, ed. Wahlgren, p. 255; this happened ‘at
some time (which can no longer be accurately identified)’, Skylitzes, A Synopsis of Byzantine

523
 NOTES TO PAGES 279–84

History 811–1057, tr. Wortley, p. 107 n. 99. Judith Herrin argues that the removal of his
tomb gave a space for the reinterment of the remains of the empress Irene: Herrin,
‘Moving Bones: Evidence for Political Burials from Medieval Constantinople’, pp. 288–90.
131. Thietmar of Merseburg, Chronicon, 7. 37, ed. Holtzmann, p. 444; see also Encomium
Emmae Reginae, 2. 3, ed. Campbell, p. 18. According to Simeon of Durham, Historia
regum, 125, ed. Arnold, p. 146, and Gaimar, Estoire des Engleis, line 4162, ed. Short,
p. 226, Sven was buried at York; there is a full discussion in Marafioti, The King’s Body:
Burial and Succession in Late Anglo-Saxon England, pp. 198–206.
132. ‘He let dragan up þæne deadan Harald 7 hine on fen sceotan’: Anglo-Saxon Chronicle
(C), s.a. 1040, ed. Plummer and Earle, p. 162; discussed in Marafioti, The King’s Body:
Burial and Succession in Late Anglo-Saxon England, pp. 125–7, 144–60.
133. Roger of Howden, Chronica, ed. Stubbs, 3, p. 270.
134. ‘Or le bagna la pioggia e move il vento/ di fuor dal regno’: Dante, Purgatorio 3. 130–1,
ed. Petrocchi, 3, p. 51; Villani, Nuova Cronica, 8. 9, ed. Porta, 1, pp. 423–4.

8 NAMES AND NUMBERING

1. ‘Gaufridum, qui cognominatus est Plantegenest (sic)’: William of Tyre, Chronicon, 14. 1,
ed. Huygens, 2, p. 632; ‘Gaufridus Plantagenet . . . ab Henrico frater suo comite
Andegavensi invaditur’: Chronicon Turonense magnum, ed. Martène and Durand, col.
1015; ed. Salmon, p. 136, s.a. 1152. These two sources, one distant and one late, may
have confused father and son.
2. Wolffe, Henry VI, pp. 35 n. 26, 323 n. 48; the earliest reference to him as ‘Richard
Plantagenet’ seems to be in a chronicle entry describing events of that year: Gregory,
Chronicle of London, ed. Gairdner, p. 189.
3. There is debate about whether Manetho was actually a historical figure.
4. ‘apud Aegyptios autem sexta decima erat potestas, quam sua lingua dinastiam vocabant’:
Gregory of Tours, Libri historiarum decem, 1. 17, ed. Krusch and Levison, p. 16.
5. ‘In Ebreis Lepdon iudex erat, et in Aegypto dinastia rex erat’: Fredegar, Chronica, 2. 8,
ed. Krusch, p. 47.
6. ‘Variate autem sunt dinastie per diversa regum genera usque ad hunc Cambisem’:
Gervase of Tilbury, Otia Imperialia, 2. 15, ed. Banks and Binns, p. 364. Gervase is slightly
recasting his source, Peter Comestor: ‘Variatae quoque sunt dynastiae de generibus
quorumdam regum ad alia saepe transeuntes, usque ad Cambysem’, Historia scholastica,
Genesis 64, col. 1109.
7. ‘Dinastia autem dicitur principatus qui durat apud aliquam domum’: Rodrigo Jiménez
de Rada, Breviarium historie catholice, 2. 60, ed. Fernández Valverde, 1, p. 101.
8. ‘Nicolaus tertius, natione Romanus de domo Ursinorum’: Annales Sanctorum Udalrici et
Afrae Augustenses, ed. Jaffé, p. 433.
9. López de Ayala, Crónica del Rey don Pedro, 18 (1367). 30, ed. Orduna, 2, p. 231; Lopes,
Crónica del Rei Dom João I, 2. 80, 81, pp. 186, 188.
10. Moeglin, ‘Les dynasties princières allemandes et la notion de maison à la fin du Moyen-
Age’; Carozzi, ‘Familia-domus: étude sémantique et historique’.

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 NOTES TO PAGES 285–8

11. ‘das haws von Osterreich’: Die Stadtrechte von Bremgarten und Lenzburg, ed. Merz, p. 63. In
the late fourteenth and early fifteenth century such phrases expanded their meaning to
describe also the lands and territories of the dynasty, and even the inhabitants of their
lands: Moeglin, ‘Les dynasties princières allemandes et la notion de maison à la fin du
Moyen-Age’.
12. James I, Llibre dels fets del rei en Jaume, 9, ed. Bruguera, 2, p. 14; 1, p. 255, for the
frequency of the term, in various spellings.
13. ‘qui huius prosapie [sc. from Rollo] loco .vii. fuisse dinoscitur’: ‘Additamenta’, in Gesta
Normannorum Ducum, ed. Van Houts, 2, p. 284; ‘tueque christianissime domui’: Reg.
Vat. 28, fol. 107v, no. 95 (3 May 1264); Les Registres d’Urbain IV, ed. Guiraud and
Clémencet, 2, no. 809, p. 396.
14. ‘discordias et dissensiones quae olim inter illustres Eboracensem et Lancastriae domos
viguerant’: Memorials of King Henry VII, ed. Gairdner, p. 396.
15. Hartman and DeBlasi, ‘The Growth of Historical Method in Tang China’, pp. 18, 21.
16. ‘Ita Francorum regum secunda deficiente linea, regnum in tertiam translatum est’:
Miracula sancti Genulfi, 26, ed. Holder-Egger, p. 1213; this was copied in the early twelfth
century by Hugh of Fleury, Modernorum Francorum regum actus, 7, ed. Waitz, p. 384 (the
manuscript of the Miracula sancti Genulfi was at Fleury).
17. ‘tercia familia regum Francie’: Gesta Normannorum Ducum, 8. 26, ed. Van Houts, 2,
p. 244 (Robert of Torigny).
18. ‘pour ce que III generacions ont esté des rois de France’: Les Grandes chroniques de
France, Prologue, ed. Viard, 1 (SHF 395), p. 3.
19. Calendar of the Liberate Rolls (1226–72), 1, p. 53.
20. Patlagean, ‘Les débuts d’une aristocratie byzantine et le témoinage de l’historiogra-
phie: système des noms et liens de parenté aux IXe–Xe siècles’; for the appearance of
such names on seals, and a hypothesis about the reasons, see Stephenson,
‘A Development in Nomenclature on the Seals of the Byzantine Provincial
Aristocracy in the Late Tenth Century’.
21. Theophanes continuatus, 6. 27, ed. Bekker, p. 374; Skylitzes, Synopsis historiarum, ed.
Thurn, p. 189.
22. Catalogue of the Byzantine Coins in the Dumbarton Oaks Collection and in the Whittemore
Collection, 3. 1, ed. Bellinger et al., p. 180.
23. Zacos and Veglery, Byzantine Lead Seals, 1. 1, no. 103, p. 92; Garland, Byzantine Empresses:
Women and Power in Byzantium, AD 527–1204, p. 286 n. 111.
24. Kazhdan, ‘The Formation of Byzantine Family Names in the Ninth and Tenth
Centuries’, p. 90.
25. ‘Most royal surnames derive from a tenth-century ancestor’: Byrne, ‘A Note on the
Emergence of Irish Surnames’, p. xxxiv.
26. Bede, Historia ecclesiastica gentis Anglorum, 2. 5, ed. Colgrave and Mynors, p. 150.
27. ‘De genealogia qui vocantur Hosi, Drazza, Fagana, Hahilinga, Anniona, isti sunt quasi
primi post Agilolfingos qui sunt de genere ducali’: Lex Baiwariorum, 3. 1, ed. Schwind,
pp. 312–13; ‘quidam ex procerebus de gente nobile Ayglolfingam nomen

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 NOTES TO PAGES 288–92

Chrodoaldus’: Fredegar, Chronica, 4. 52, ed. Krusch, p. 146, ed. Wallace-Hadrill,

p. 42.
28. ‘clarissimo genere Inmedingorum oriundus’: Adam of Bremen, Gesta Hammaburgensis
ecclesiae pontificum, 2. 47 (45), ed. Schmeidler, p. 108. For nobles named Immed, see, for
example, Widukind of Corvey, Res gestae saxonicae, 1. 31; 3. 28, ed. Hirsch and Lohmann,
pp. 44, 117 (in both cases there are manuscripts having ‘Inm-’ rather than ‘Imm-’).
29. Ptolemy of Lucca, Annales, ed. Schmeidler, pp. 71, 76, 97, 98.
30. ‘Meroveus, a quo omnes post eum reges Merovingi vocati sunt. Eodem modo et filii
regum Anglorum a patribus patronimica sumpserunt, ut filius Edgari Edgaring, filius
Edmundi Edmunding vocentur’: William of Malmesbury, Gesta regum Anglorum, 1. 68,
ed. Mynors et al., p. 98.
31. Sermo in tumulatione Sanctorum Quintini, Victorici, Cassiani, ed. Holder-Egger, p. 271;
Miracula sancti Benedicti, 3. 8 (Aimoin of Fleury), ed. de Certain, p. 148.
32. Genealogia ducum Brabantiae ampliata, ed. Heller, p. 395.
33. Chronicon Werumensium: Continuatio (a. 1276–1280), ed. Weiland, pp. 565, 568; for
a detailed discussion of the Frisian cognationes as Fehdeverbände, see Schmidt, ‘Eine
Friesische Fehde: Die “Menalda-Fehde” von 1295’.
34. ‘Nunc de eodem castro . . . et de principibus, qui inde nomen traxerunt et adhuc
habent, aliqua compendiose dicamus . . . partem unam principes, qui et postea de
Dachawe castro dicti sunt possederant . . . Aliam partem comites de Grube habebant,
qui et postea de castro Valeie nuncupati sunt’: Conrad of Scheyern, Chronicon Schirense,
15, 17, ed. Jaffé, pp. 620–1.
35. ‘der ward genannt Kung Lassla, das tet ettleichen zaren vnd maynten, man salt in Kung
Peter haben genant, darumb daz er den nam mit im pracht hiet. So maynaten ettlich,
man solt in Kung Albrecht haben gehaissen durch seins vaters willen, der so gar ain
frumer Kunig ist gewesen. Aber meiner frau gnad het das verhaissen got und dem
heiligen Kung sand Lassla’: Helene Kottannerin, Die Denkwürdigkeiten der Helene
Kottannerin (1439–1440), ed. Mollay, p. 21.
36. For a good case-study of such names, see Le Jan, Famille et pouvoir dans le monde franc
(VIIe–Xe siècle): essai d’anthropologie sociale, pp. 179–223.
37. Karl Schmid, the great historian of medieval German aristocratic families, calls such
labels ‘Hilfsnamen’: ‘Zur Problematik von Familie, Sippe und Geschlecht, Haus und
Dynastie beim mittelalterlichen Adel’, p. 13 (repr. in Schmid, Gebetsgedenken und adliges
Selbstverständnis im Mittelalter, p. 195).
38. ‘In comitatu Balduwini eiusque familia id multis iam seculis servabatur quasi sancitum
lege perpetua, ut unus filiorum, qui patri potissimum placuisset, nomen patris acci-
peret et tocius Flandriae principatum solus hereditaria successione optineret’:
Lampert of Hersfeld, Annales, s.a. 1071, ed. Holder-Egger, p. 121.
39. Richard, Histoire des comtes de Poitou, 1, pp. 237–40, 266–7.
40. Liber feudorum maior, ed. Miquel Rosell, 1, no. 494, p. 533: ‘filio suo maiori Raimundo’;
ibid., p. 24, no. 17: ‘dilecto filio meo Ildefonso . . . qui in testamento eiusdem viri mei
vocaris [sic] R(aimundus)’.

526
 NOTES TO PAGES 292–4

41. Curiously, Alfonso/Raymond’s younger brother, who bore the name Peter, a royal
name in Aragon and a version of Petronilla’s, subsequently seized the opportunity to
change his name to Raymond Berengar when he obtained the county of Provence,
whose rulers had often borne that name. In his will of 1162, Raymond Berengar refers
to ‘alio filio suo Petro’, granting him the county of Cerdaña and the senioraticum of
Carcasonne: Liber feudorum maior, ed. Miquel Rosell, 1, no. 494, p. 533. This was
Raymond Berengar IV (III), count of Provence 1168/73–81.
42. ‘i Filippi e i Luigi/ per cui novellamente è Francia retta’: Dante, Purgatorio, 20, lines
50–1, ed. Petrocchi, 3, p. 336.
43. ‘Hec stirps francigenam regni dum strinxit habenam Rome sceptrigenos Karolos dedit
ac Ludovicos’: Schmid, ‘Ein verlorenes Stemma Regum Franciae’, p. 217.
44. Althoff, Family, Friends and Followers, p. 18; Werner, ‘Die Nachkommen Karls des
Grossen’, p. 418.
45. Notker Balbulus, Gesta Karoli magni imperatoris, 2. 11, 14, ed. Haefele, pp. 68, 78.
46. ‘Duae . . . famosae familiae . . . una Heinricorum de Gueibelinga, alia Gwelforum de
Aldorfo’: Otto of Freising, Gesta Friderici I imperatoris, 2. 2, ed. Waitz and von Simson,
p. 103.
47. ‘At ipse potius gloriabatur se de regia stirpe Waiblingensium progenitum fuisse, quos
constat de duplici regia prosapia processisse, videlicet Clodoveorum . . . et Carolorum’:
Burchard of Ursberg, Chronicon, ed. Holder-Egger and von Simson, pp. 24–5; see the
comments of Schmid, ‘“De regia stirpe Waiblingensium”. Bemerkungen zum
Selbstverständnis der Staufer’.
48. Attested as early as the twelfth century: Walter Map, De nugis curialium, 5. 3, ed. James
et al., p. 412.
49. Nithard, Historiarum libri IIII, 4.5, ed. Müller, p. 48.
50. ‘Nunc ad principes nostri temporibus stilum vertamus quia difficile et superfluum
videtur singulorum scribere facta. Nam ut supra diximus, non duo vel tres, sed plurimi
erant principes Schyrenses dicti, qui fere omnes, exceptis paucis, duobus nominibus
vocati sunt, videlicet Otto et Ekkehardus’: Conrad of Scheyern, Chronicon Schirense, 18,
ed. Jaffé, p. 621.
51. ‘Et hoc inquam, ne Karolorum aliorumque frequens in utroque opere repetitio, operis
utriusque ordinem turbet. Ubi enim rerum ordo non advertitur, tanto nitentem error
confundit, quanto a serie ordinis errantem seducit. Unde cum hic atque illic sepe
Karoli, sepe Ludouici notę offeruntur pro tempore auctorum prudens lector reges
ę quivocos pernotabit’: Richer of Saint-Rémi, Historiae, Prologue, ed. Hoffmann, p. 35
(Richer is referring here to his use of the earlier history of Hincmar); this did not
prevent him confusing the relationship between Carlomann and Charles the Simple
(see p. 339).
52. ‘Genealogias quoque regum, quae propter similitudines nominum valde confusae
erant, quanta potui diligentia distinxi, unumquemque vel patris nomine, vel Senioris
Juniorisve appellatione ab altero distinguens, quemadmodum diligens lector in suis
animadvertere potest locis’: Aimoin of Fleury, Historia Francorum, Preface, PL 139: 628;
RHF 3, p. 22.

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 NOTES TO PAGES 294–6

53. Lehmann, ‘Mittelalterliche Beinamen und Ehrentitel’; Bührer, ‘Studien zu den Beinamen
mittelalterlicher Herrscher’; Morby, ‘The Sobriquets of Medieval European Princes’;
Schieffer, ‘Ludwig “der Fromme”. Zur Entstehung eines karolingischen
Herrscherbeinamens’; Brühl, ‘Herrscherbeinamen’, in Deutschland-Frankreich: die Geburt
zweier Völker, pp. 142–4.
54. For example, Ademar of Chabannes, Chronicon, 3. 22, 30 (β and γ versions), ed.
Bourgain, pp. 143, 150.
55. Rigord, Gesta Philippi Augusti, 41, ed. Carpentier et al., pp. 202–10; for the date of
composition, see the editorial comment on p. 75; Louis VII is also called ‘Louis the
Pious’ in the Historia Francorum usque ad annum 1214, ed. Molinier, p. 395, and in the
Chronique des rois de France, ed. Delisle, p. 754 (the ‘Anonymous of Béthune’), which, for
Louis’ reign, is based on it; it is also his style in Alberic of Trois-fontaines, Chronica, ed.
Scheffer-Boichorst, pp. 848, 854, 856.
56. Les Registres de Philippe Auguste I: Texte, ed. Baldwin, pp. 550–1, 553.
57. ‘qui Balbus appellabatur’: Regino of Prüm, Chronicon, s.a. 878, ed. Kurze, p. 114.
58. Byrne, Irish Kings and High Kings, p. 221.
59. See Lot, ‘Origine et signification du mot “Carolingien”’.
60. Fulcher of Chartres, Historia Hierosolymitana, 1. 30 (variant reading), ed. Hagenmeyer,
p. 307.
61. West, The East Face of Helicon: West Asiatic Elements in Greek Poetry and Myth, pp. 29–30;
Iliad, 18. 487; Odyssey, 5. 273; Ælfric, De temporibus anni, 9. 6, ed. Henel, p. 68; Trevisa, On
the Properties of Things, 8. 23, ed. Seymour et al., 1, p. 502; the Ælfric reference, ‘Carles
wæn’, may mean ‘churl’s wagon’ but Trevisa’s ‘Cherlemaynes Wayne’ is explicit.
62. Nonn, ‘Karl Martell: Name und Beiname’.
63. Boutet, ‘Bâtardise et sexualité dans l’image littéraire de la royauté (XIIe–XIIIe
siècles)’, p. 60.
64. ‘Ultimus vero Karolorum apud orientales Francos imperantium’: Widukind of Corvey,
Res gestae saxonicae, 1. 16, ed. Hirsch and Lohmann, p. 25.
65. E.g. ‘Karolorum stirpe’: Ekkehard of Aura, Chronicon universale, s.a. 919, ed. Waitz,
p. 175 (Frutolf); ‘de antiquo et glorioso Karolorum sanguine’: Otto of Freising,
Chronica sive Historia de duabus civitatibus, 6. 28, ed. Hofmeister, p. 291.
66. ‘Karlensium regia . . . prosapia’: Chronicon Vedastinum, ed. Waitz, p. 692; ‘Hic
Merovingorum regno in Hilderico finito, Karolingorum a Pippino . . . inicium sumpsit’:
Annales sancti Trudberti, s.a. 753, ed. Pertz, p. 285; in the Gesta episcoporum Cameracensium (an
original composition of 1025) both Lothar (d. 986) and Robert II (d. 1031) are ‘rex
Karlensium’, and Gerard, bishop of Cambrai (1012–51), springs from ‘non infimis par-
entibus Lothariensium atque Karlensium’: 1. 97, 105, 114; 3. 1, ed. Bethmann, pp. 440, 444,
452, 465.
67. ‘Dicunt preterea aliud ibidem esse vulgare propheticum, quod de Karlingis, id est de
stirpe regis Karoli et de domo regum Francie, imperator suscitabitur Karolus nomine,
qui erit princeps et monarcha totius Europe et reformabit ecclesiam et imperium, sed
post illum nunquam alius imperabit’: Alexander von Roes, Memoriale, 30, ed.
Grundmann and Heimpel, pp. 136–7.

528
 NOTES TO PAGES 297–300

68. For a long and learned, if not entirely conclusive, discussion of the introduction of the
unprecedented name Philip into the Capetian dynasty in the person of Philip
I (1060–1108), see Dunbabin, ‘What’s in a Name? Philip, King of France’.
69. ‘quae peperit ei . . . primogenitum, patris sui nomine appellans Wirinharium’:
Thietmar of Merseburg, Chronicon, 4. 39, ed. Holtzmann, p. 176.
70. The chain runs: Matilda, wife of Henry I; Gerberga, her daughter, wife of Louis IV of
France; Matilda, her daughter, second wife of Conrad, king of Burgundy; Gerberga, her
daughter, wife of Hermann (II), duke of Swabia; Matilda of Swabia, her daughter. See
Giesebrecht, Geschichte der deutschen Kaiserzeit, 2, p. 715, a letter of Siegfried of Gorze
from 1043, arguing from the ‘feminarum . . . equivocatio’ that the second Gerberga
could not be a child of King Conrad’s first marriage but must be a child of Matilda.
71. ‘Philippum clericum’: Gislebert of Mons, Chronicon Hanoniense, 54, ed. Vanderkindere,
p. 94.
72. Alberic of Trois-fontaines, Chronica, ed. Scheffer-Boichorst, pp. 919, 930; Abbreviationes
gestorum Franciae regum, RHF 17, p. 433; Genealogia regum Franciae tertiae stirpis, RHF 17,
p. 434; ‘Dagobertum, id est Philippum’: Chronicon Turonense magnum (excerpts), RHF
18, p. 317. His birth, as ‘Philip’, on 20 February 1222 is recorded in ‘Annales de Saint-
Denis généralement connues sous le titre de Chronicon Sancti Dionysii ad Cyclos
Paschales’, ed. Berger, p. 280 (s.a. 1221, with Easter reckoning). Berger, Histoire de
Blanche de Castille, reine de France, p. 207, expresses doubts about the date given for his
death, because of mention of a dominus Dagobertus in the royal household accounts for
1234 (RHF 21, p. 240), but this is simply a reference to a capellanus qui fuit ad dominum
Dagobertem. An earlier son of Louis, also called Philip, was born in September 1209 and
died in 1218 or 1219: Les Registres de Philippe Auguste I: Texte, ed. Baldwin, p. 545;
Baldwin, The Government of Philip Augustus, pp. 270, 536 n. 53. After he succeeded to
the throne Louis endowed a chantry for this child: Dubois, Historia ecclesiae Parisiensis, 2,
p. 309.
73. Chronicon Moissiacense, s.a. 781, ed. Pertz, p. 297; Annales regni Francorum, s.a. 781, ed.
Kurze, p. 57.
74. ‘gibbo deformis’: Einhard, Vita Karoli Magni, 20, ed. Holder-Egger, p. 25; although one
source does term him ‘rex’: Airlie, ‘Earthly and Heavenly Networks in a World in Flux:
Carolingian Family Identities and the Prague Sacramentary’.
75. Baaken, ‘Die Altersfolge der Söhne Friedrich Barbarossas und die Königserhebung
Heinrichs VI’, explores the complex evidence.
76. ‘misitque me meus pater iam dictus ad dictum regem Francie, me existente in septimo
anno puericie mee, fecitque me dictus rex Francorum per pontificem confirmari et
imposuit michi nomen suum equivocum, videlicet Karolus, et dedit michi in
uxorem filiam Karoli, patrui sui, nomine Margaretam, dictam Blancza’: Charles
IV, Karoli IV Imperatoris Romanorum Vita ab eo ipso conscripta, 3, ed. Nagy and Schaer,
p. 22.
77. ‘quod ipse sit ita katholicus, ita devotus, ita ecclesie munificus, non solum sibi debetur
ex successione, quia a sanctis parentibus et consimilia facientibus noscitur descendisse,
sed etiam debetur sibi ex nomine, quia Karolus. Quis autem magis devotus et munificus

529
 NOTES TO PAGES 300–5

ecclesie quam Karolus Magnus fuit?’: Constitutiones et acta publica imperatorum et regum, 8,
no. 100, p. 146; see the discussion in Schneider, ‘Karolus, qui et Wenceslaus’.
78. Beneš Krabice of Weitmile, Cronica ecclesiae Pragensis, pp. 517, 527.
79. ‘de consensu statuum vocatus est abhinc rex Robertus tercius’: Bower, Scotichronicon,
15. 1, ed. Watt et al., 8, p. 2, and note on p. 149.
80. ‘Nomen, ut auguror, propterea mutarunt quia Iohannes infaustos reges suspicabantur
cum ad paucos ante dies Iohannem Francum ab Anglis captum viderunt’: Mair, Historia
Maioris Britanniae, 6, c. 6, fol. 122.
81. For example, ‘Sed quoniam Ioannes inauspicatum videbatur nomen propter Ioannem
regem Franciae captum, commutato vocabulo Robertus appellatus est, patris nomen
accipiens’: Boece, Scotorum Historia, 16, fol. 347 (‘an vnchancy name’ in John
Bellenden’s translation of 1531: Chronicles of Scotland, 2, p. 354).
82. Constable, ‘The Numbering of the Crusades’.
83. For the following see Rabikauskas, ‘Papstname und Ordnungszahl. Über die Anfänge
des Brauches, gleichnamige Päpste durch eine Ordnungszahl zu unterscheiden’.
84. Liber pontificalis, ed. Duchesne, 1, pp. 359, 363.
85. ‘Gregorium a primo secundum et novissimo priorem . . . (qui et vulgarica Romanorum
lingua dicitur iunior); defuncto . . . Gregorio secundo . . . et Gregorio iuniore . . .
praesidente; Gregorio iuniore secundo; a . . . Gregorio iuniore, a primo secundo, et
a Gregorio a secundo iuniore, cum primo tertio’: Willibald, Vita Bonifatii, 5–8, ed.
Levison, pp. 21, 34, 36, 42.
86. Hartmann, ‘Über die Entwicklung der Rota’.
87. Erben et al., Urkundenlehre, pp. 312–13 and 317–18.
88. E.g. Recueil des actes des ducs de Normandie (911–1066), ed. Fauroux, nos. 34, 36, 44, 53, 55,
93, pp. 131, 141, 151, 171, 176, 244, all from the period 1017–40.
89. Crusafont, Balaguer and Grierson, Medieval European Coinage, 6: The Iberian Peninsula,
pp. xxviii–xxix.
90. Philippi regis Diplomata, ed. Rzihacek and Spreitzer, pp. lxxvii–lxxviii.
91. Otto of Freising, Chronica sive Historia de duabus civitatibus, 6. 22, ed. Hofmeister, p. 285;
cf. ibid., 6. 13, p. 273, where the Italian emperors of the tenth century ‘confuse regnar-
unt’; and the catalogue of emperors at the end of Book 7, pp. 382–3.
92. And even then, their official title was imperator electus.
93. ‘Hainricus huius nominis sextus vel secundum cronicam Romanorum quintus – ipsi
namque Hainricum primum, patrem Ottonis primi, non connumerant in katalogo
imperatorum’: Burchard of Ursberg, Chronicon, ed. Holder-Egger and von Simson, p. 70.
94. ‘Heinrico regi, filio Heinrici imperatoris, . . . totius regni Teutonicorum et Italie,
gubernacula contradico’: Gregory VII, Registrum, 3. 10a, ed. Caspar, 1, p. 270.
95. Otto of Freising calls the same rulers Henry III, Henry IV and Henry V in the body of his
text but Henry II, Henry III and Henry IV in the catalogue of emperors appended to
Book 7: Otto of Freising, Chronica sive Historia de duabus civitatibus, 6. 32, 34; 7. 13, ed.
Hofmeister, pp. 297, 302, 324, 384–5.
96. ‘anno autem domni Henrici tertii regis imperatoris autem secundi . . . regni quidem
XVII, imperii vero VIIII’: Heinrici III. Diplomata, ed. Bresslau and Kehr, no. 351, p. 478.

530
 NOTES TO PAGES 306–9

97. The first occurrence is in the records of the Parliament of December 1332: Parliament Rolls
of Medieval England, ed. Given-Wilson, 4, p. 182. A very early example of the style in
historical writing is found in Nicholas Trevet’s Anglo-Norman chronicle: ‘Edward
le second apres le conquest de William Bastard’, Cambridge, Trinity College, MS O. 4.
32, fol. 100; Leiden, Universiteitsbibliotheek, MS VG G F 6, fol. 91. This work was written
for Mary, daughter of Edward I, who died in 1332, but since it says John XXII (1316–34)
held the papacy for 19 years, Nicholas must have continued it or revised it: Calendar of the
Close Rolls Preserved in the Public Record Office, Edward III, A. D. 1330–1333, p. 511;
Cambridge, Trinity College, MS O. 4. 32, fol. 100v; Leiden, Universiteitsbibliotheek, MS
VG G F 6, fol. 91v.
98. ‘Anno Domini milllesimo CCCm°XXVII . . . et regis Edwardi tertii a conquaestu primo – et
nota quod hoc verbum, “a conquaestu”, a quibusdam mundi sapientibus est inventum ad
denotandum tertium Edwardum, eo quod duo ejusdem nominis eum praecesserant post
Willelmum conquaestorem, scilicet avus suus et pater; quorum primus vocabatur
Edwardus de Wyntonia, secundus de Carnervan, a locis in quibus nati fuerunt’:
Murimuth, Continuatio chronicarum, ed. Thompson, p. 55. See Ormrod, Edward III, p. 4.
99. ‘Hec prophetia Merlini Silvestris Anglorum Eadwardo regi sancto nominis huius tercio
revelata fuit’: BL, MS Cotton Faustina A VIII, fol. 116 (the prophecy of the green tree,
discussed pp. 356–7); ‘seneschallus regis Henrici tercii patris inclite memorie domini
Edwardi quarti regis Anglorum’: BAV, MS Vat. lat. 4015, fol. 76 (testimony in the canoniza-
tion process of Thomas de Cantilupe given on 29 August 1307, less than 8 weeks after
Edward’s death); ‘transitu magni regis Edwardi quarti’: Commendatio lamentabilis in transitu
magni regis Edwardi, ed. Stubbs, p. 3.
100. Melville, ‘Geschichte in graphischer Gestalt. Untersuchungen zu einem
spätmittelalterlichen Darstellungsprinzip’, pp. 88–90, citing BAV, MS Reg. lat. 518,
fols. 75v–78v.
101. Corpus juris confoederationis Germanicae, ed. Meyer, pp. 90–2; though the term Heiliges
römisches Reich deutscher Nation had been current for three centuries by that time.
102. ‘dei gratia Latinitatis Iherosolimorum rex’: Die Urkunden der lateinischen Könige von
Jerusalem, ed. Mayer, 1, no. 64, p. 197 (1115).
103. Die Urkunden der lateinischen Könige von Jerusalem, ed. Mayer, 1, p. 46, and passim; the
kings of Cyprus recommenced the practice when they acquired the title king of
Jerusalem in 1269, although their system of numbering seems to have been eccentric!
104. BL, MS Royal 14 C VII, fols. 8v–9 (the Historia Anglorum); the form post conquisiconem
eius is unusual, or a mistake.
105. See, for example, Constitutiones et acta publica imperatorum et regum, 11, ed. Schwalm, for
documents of the emperor Charles IV from 1354–6; Bernard Gui, Reges Francorum,
Arbor genealogiae regum Francorum, CCCC 45, fols. 29, 47, for ‘Charles IV’ of France.
106. ‘ultimus fuit Karolorum’: Quedam exceptiones de hystoria Normannorum et Anglorum, 1, ed.
Van Houts, p. 293.
107. This observation was the starting point for the investigations of Lévy, Louis I, II, III . . .
XIV . . . : l’étonnante histoire de la numérotation des rois de France, the work of an amateur
historian but full of insight.

531
 NOTES TO PAGES 309–16

108. See, for example, the list of emperors in Otto of Freising, Chronica sive Historia de duabus
civitatibus, appendix to Book 7, ed. Hofmeister, pp. 381–2; Regino of Prüm calls Charles
the Fat ‘Carolus imperator, tertius huius nominis et dignitatis’, Chronicon, s.a. 888, ed.
Kurze, p. 128.
109. For the following, see Gimeno Casalduero, ‘Sobre las numeraciones de los reyes de Castilla’.

9 SAINTS, IMAGES, HERALDRY, FAMILY TREES

1. Dagron, Emperor and Priest: The Imperial Office in Byzantium, p. 203.

2. Phillips, Edward II, pp. 604–5; for the book of Edward’s miracles, Issues of the Exchequer,
Being a Collection of Payments Made Out of His Majesty’s Revenue from King Henry III to King
Henry VI, ed. Devon, p. 259; Wolffe, Henry VI, pp. 351–8; Henrici VI Angliae regis miracula
postuma, ed. Grosjean.
3. Folz, Les saints rois du moyen âge en Occident (VIe–XIIIe s.), pp. 23–67; Vauchez, Sainthood in
the Late Middle Ages, pp. 158–67.
4. Folz, Les saintes reines du Moyen Age en Occident.
5. ‘De eius genealogia et stirpis magnificentia’: Vita et miracula sanctae Kyngae ducissae
Cracoviensis, 1, ed. Kę trzyński, p. 683. See, in general, Klaniczay, Holy Rulers and Blessed
Princesses: Dynastic Cults in Medieval Central Europe.
6. Ibid., pp. 304–9.
7. Grandeau, ‘Les enfants de Charles VI. Essai sur la vie privée des princes et des
princesses de la maison de France à la fin du Moyen Âge’, p. 825.
8. ‘exultationis praerogativa vobis attribuitur in communione generis et germine nativae
propagationis’; ‘nepos et heres legitimus sanctissimi confessoris Edwardi regis Angliae,
jure hereditario Anglici regni, per lineas rectas et directas successivae generationis in
vos devoluto, vos sceptrigeros effecisset, nisi Normannorum violenta direptio, Deo
permittente, usque ad tempus praefinitum praepedisset. Nec solum in illo glorioso
stemmate regum Anglicorum in divitiis et gloria in regno potentissimi praefulserunt,
sed etiam in sanctitate et justitia magna Deo placentes, in vita et post mortem miraculis
multimodis magnifice claruerunt. A sancto namque rege Adwolfo, qui totam Angliam
decimans, decimam Deo et Ecclesiae consecravit, novem numerantur reges sancti,
quorum posterior par vel praestantior in Christiana religione micuisse dignoscitur: in
decimo vero S. Edwardo cunctorum praedecessorum sanctitas quasi transfusa con-
fluxit, et sic ex illo, tamquam fonte lucidissimo, vitae religiosæ rivulus in
S. Margaritam proneptem ejus, et ex illa in filium suum regem David avum vestrum,
et ex eo in Malcolmum regem fratrem vestrum emanavit’: Jocelin of Furness, Vita sancti
Walthenis abbatis, pp. 248–9.
9. In general on this topic, Holladay, Genealogy and the Politics of Representation in the High
and Late Middle Ages.
10. Lammers, ‘Ein karolingisches Bildprogramm in der Aula Regia von Ingelheim’;
the verses of Ermoldus Nigellus that describe the pictures can be found, with
English translation, in Godman (ed.), Poetry of the Carolingian Renaissance,
pp. 254–5.

532
 NOTES TO PAGES 316–24

11. ‘Childeric troisiesme, frere de Thedoric, regna neufs ans, et mourut sans hoirs. Pepin
fils de Charles Martel de la lignee de Clotaire second, fut esleu Roy’: Corrozet, Les
antiquitez, histoires, croniques et singularitez de la grande et excellente cite de Paris, fol. 99.
12. Ibid., fol. 99v.
13. Bennert, ‘Art et propagande politique sous Philippe IV le Bel: le cycle des rois de
France dans la Grand’salle du palais de la Cité’; Holladay, ‘Kings, Notaries, and
Merchants: Audience and Image in the Grand’Salle of the Palace at Paris’; the
sequence of statues was continued for later kings, down to the sixteenth century;
there were eventually fifty-eight statues: Guerout, ‘Le Palais de la Cité, des origines à
1417. Essai topographique et archéologique’, 2, pp. 132–5.
14. ‘ex ipsis ibi facere et formare decem et novem ymagines ab omni expedienti et
necessario opere expeditas et quantoque potuerit et sciverit pulcriores, quarum octo
representabunt effigies octo regum qui fuerunt unus post alium successive usque ad
nostra tempora reges Aragonum et Barchinone comites inclusive, et cetere effigies
illorum undecim qui fuerent tum comites Barchinone, titulum regium non habentes’:
Documents per l’història de la cultura catalana mig-eval, ed. Rubió i Lluc, 1, pp. 124–5, no.
112, from Archivo de la Corona de Aragón, Reg. 1. 305, fol. 92v.
15. The similarities between the two projects are pointed out by Žůrek, ‘Godfrey of Viterbo
and his Readers at the Court of Emperor Charles IV’, p. 98.
16. Vienna, Österreichische Nationalbibliothek, MS 8330, fols. 6–59; also, copied from
there, Prague, Archiv der Nationalgalerie, AA 2015, Codex Heidelbergensis.
17. Genealogiae Karolorum: Commemoratio genealogiae Karoli imperatoris, ed. Waitz; Oexle, ‘Die
Karolinger und die Stadt des heiligen Arnulf’, pp. 252–62; see also pp. 339, 385.
18. The paintings are numbered 1 to 56 but that includes several of husbands and wives
numbered separately.
19. Catalogue of the Byzantine Coins in the Dumbarton Oaks Collection and in the Whittemore
Collection, 3. 1, ed. Bellinger, pp. 337–8, 340–1, 344 (‘Class I’).
20. Ibid., pp. 292–3, 300, 325–6, 328–33.
21. Dagron, Emperor and Priest: The Imperial Office in Byzantium, p. 32.
22. Clarke, ‘The Wilton Diptych’, p. 283.
23. D’azur, semé de fleurs-de-lys d’or, au lambel de gueules.
24. Mérindol, ‘L’héraldique des princes angevins’, pp. 281–6.
25. Vita Edwardi Secundi, ed. Denholm-Young, rev. Childs, pp. 232–4.
26. Ailes, ‘Heraldry in Medieval England: Symbols of Politics and Propaganda’, p. 88.
27. Costa-Gomes, ‘Alfarrobeira: The Death of the Tyrant?’, p. 157.
28. ‘he gave them baners with the hole armys of Inglonde with owte any dyversyte’:
Gregory, Chronicle of London, ed. Gairdner, p. 208.
29. ‘videntes quod parvam insulam Anglie magno regno Francie preiudicet honoran-
dam’: Geoffrey le Baker, Chronicon, ed. Thompson, pp. 66–7; Michael, “The Little
Land of England is Preferred before the Great Kingdom of France”: The Quartering
of the Royal Arms by Edward III’; Ailes, ‘Heraldry in Medieval England: Symbols of
Politics and Propaganda’, pp. 88–94; Hinkle, The Fleurs de Lis of the Kings of France,
1285–1488.

533
 NOTES TO PAGES 324–7

30. Morganstern, Gothic Tombs of Kinship in France, the Low Countries, and England, pp.
95–102 and Appendix VI, pp. 179–85, ‘The Program of the Tomb of Philippa of
Hainault, Queen of England (d. 1369)’; Fehrmann, Grab und Krone: Königsgrabmäler
im mittelalterlichen England und die posthume Selbstdarstellung der Lancaster, pp. 60–6.
31. Wiener, Das Grabmal des Johann von Brienne: Kaiser von Konstantinopel und König von
Jerusalem.
32. Or a lion rampant gules armed and langued azure within a double tressure flory-
counter-flory of the second.
33. Azure, three open crowns or; Or, semé of hearts gules, three lions passant guardant in
pale azure, crowned or; Gules, a lion rampant or, holding a long-handled axe argent;
Azure a wyvern or.
34. Gules, two batons crossed in saltire enfiled by a twisted wreath or; Or, two lions passant
guardant in pale azure.
35. Or, two bars gules.
36. Thompson and Campbell, Hugo van der Goes and the Trinity Panels in Edinburgh, p. 32;
alternative versions of the arms exist.
37. For example, in the fifteenth-century Wernigeroder (Schaffhausensches)
Wappenbuch (Bayerische Staatsbibliothek, Cod. icon. 308 n), fols. 1v–2 (available
online).
38. Clarke, ‘The Wilton Diptych’, p. 284.
39. See, for example, Wyss, ‘Die neun Helden: eine ikonographische Studie’, pp. 98–102.
40. General bibliography on medieval family trees in graphic form can be approached
through Melville, ‘Geschichte in graphischer Gestalt. Untersuchungen zu einem
spätmittelalterlichen Darstellungsprinzip’; Melville, ‘Vorfahren und Vorgänger.
Spätmittelalterliche Genealogien als dynastische Legitimation zur Herrschaft’;
Schmid, ‘Ein verlorenes Stemma Regum Franciae’; Klapisch-Zuber, L’ombre des ancêtres:
essai sur l’imaginaire médiéval de la parenté; Norbye, ‘Genealogies in Medieval France’;
Laborderie, Histoire, mémoire et pouvoir. Les généalogies en rouleau des rois d’Angleterre
(1250–1422); Salonius and Worm (ed.), The Tree: Symbol, Allegory, and Mnemonic Device
in Medieval Art and Thought; Norbye, ‘“Iste non ponitur in recta linea arboris genealo-
gie.” Graphische Darstellung und Legitimität in französischen Königsgenealogien’;
Holladay, Genealogy and the Politics of Representation in the High and Late Middle Ages;
Greer, ‘All in the Family: Creating a Carolingian Genealogy in the Eleventh Century’.
41. Universitätsbibliothek Erlangen, MS 406; see Schmid, ‘Ein verlorenes Stemma Regum
Franciae’, p. 218, with figure 7b (Plate XI).
42. See, for example, Sisam, ‘Anglo-Saxon Royal Genealogies’; Duby, ‘Remarques sur la
littérature généalogique en France aux XIe et XIIe siècles’; Genicot, Les généalogies;
Dumville, ‘Kingship, Genealogies and Regnal Lists’; Croenen, ‘Princely and Noble
Genealogies, Twelfth to Fourteenth Century: Form and Function’; Butaud and Piétri,
Les Enjeux de la généalogie (XIIe–XVIIIe s.): pouvoir et identité; Radulescu and Kennedy, eds.,
Broken Lines: Genealogical Literature in Late-Medieval Britain and France.
43. Genealogiae Karolorum: Commemoratio genealogiae Karoli imperatoris, ed. Waitz; ‘die erste
Herrschergenealogie des christlichen Mittelalters’: Oexle, ‘Die Karolinger und die

534
 NOTES TO PAGES 327–30

Stadt des heiligen Arnulf’, p. 252. Helmut Reimitz seems more justified in calling it the
‘älteste überlieferte Karolingergenealogie’: Reimitz, ‘Anleitung zur Interpretation:
Schrift und Genealogie in der Karolingerzeit’, p. 170.
44. Ó Corráin, ‘Creating the Past: The Early Irish Genealogical Tradition’, p. 180; for
a guide to this material and a survey of the state of scholarship, see Ó Muraílele, ‘The
Irish Genealogies: An Overview and Some Desiderata’.
45. Ó Corráin, ‘Creating the Past: The Early Irish Genealogical Tradition’, p. 190; for the
date of the text (Urcuilte Bretheman), Kelly, A Guide to Early Irish Law, p. 250.
46. They are in BnF, MS lat. 9376 (a miscellany), fols. 1–12v (which is available online) and
edited by Waitz as Genealogiae scriptoris Fusniacensis. There is an extensive discussion in
Guenée, ‘Les généalogies entre l’histoire et la politique: la fierté d’être Capétien, en
France, au Moyen Âge’.
47. ‘Hugo Pius rex genuit Robertum regem et filiam Hadevidem nomine comitissam
Hainonensium . . . Hadevidis comitissa Hainonensium, soror Roberti regis, peperit
Beatricem . . . Prima filiarum predicte Ale . . . Altera filia prime Ale . . . Nunc ad
Hugonem Magnum revertamur . . . Nunc ad narrationem eorum quos superius obmi-
simus, liberorum scilicet Hadevidis comitisse Hainonensium . . . ’: BnF, MS lat. 9376,
fols. 2v–5; Genealogiae scriptoris Fusniacensis, ed. Waitz, pp. 252–3.
48. As in BnF, MS fr. 13565, pp. 201–3, the so-called Récit d’un ménestrel d’Alphonse de Poitiers
of 1250–70.
49. Berlin, Staatsbibliothek, MS lat. fol. 295, fol. 80v (Ekkehard of Aura, Chronicon); the
genealogies of the Saxon and Salian kings on the following pages use architectural
elements too, but not to the same degree.
50. Schadt, Die Darstellungen der Arbores consanguinitatis und der Arbores affinitatis:
Bildschemata in juristischen Handschriften; Klapisch-Zuber, L’ombre des ancêtres: essai sur
l’imaginaire médiéval de la parenté, pp. 61–7, 75–82; Williams, The Illustrated Beatus:
A Corpus of the Illustrations of the Commentary on the Apocalypse, passim, with a list of the
manuscripts which have these diagrams at 1, pp. 179–80.
51. BAV, MS Reg. lat. 339, fol. 7 (olim fol. 32); Genealogiae Karolorum, VII, ed. Waitz.
52. ‘unusquisque suam genealogiam cum testibus et chartis, tum etiam ex recitatione
maiorum scire laborat’: Gratian, Decretum, 2. 35. 6, ed. Friedberg, col. 1278; Decretales
Gregorii IX, 4 .18. 3, ed. Friedberg, cols. 718–19; this is attributed both to Celestine II
(1142–3) and Clement III (1187–91).
53. ‘prae manibus habemus scriptam genealogiam, quam scribi fecerunt nobiles viri de
eadem tribu progeniti’: Ivo of Chartres, Epistolae 261, PL 162: 265–6.
54. Wibald of Stablo, Das Briefbuch Abt Wibalds von Stablo und Corvey, ed. Hartmann, 3, no.
385 ( J408), pp. 812–13; Hlawitschka, ‘Weshalb war die Auflösung der Ehe Friedrich
Barbarossas und Adelas von Vohburg möglich?’, doubts that Wibald’s chart was used
for this purpose.
55. ‘figuram quandam facere curavimus . . . hanc . . . regi ostendite . . . cum ibi parentum
suorum nomina invenerit’: ed. Giesebrecht, Geschichte der deutschen Kaiserzeit, 2, p. 716;
see also pp. 30–1.
56. Gädeke, Zeugnisse Bildlicher Darstellung der Nachkommenschaft Heinrichs I.

535
 NOTES TO PAGES 331–4

57. As argued by Gautier, ‘Aux origines du dessin généalogique en France: l’exemple de

l’abbaye Saint-Aubin d’Angers (XIe–XIIe siècle)’, pp. 19–28. These family trees are to
be found in BAV, MS Reg. lat. 1283A, fol. 65v, and are reproduced in Gautier’s article at
p. 20. They were first published by Poupardin, ‘Généalogies Angevines du XIe siècle’.
58. Munich, Bayerische Staatsbibliothek, clm 29880/6 (the ‘Bamberger Tafel’); see
Gädeke, Zeugnisse Bildlicher Darstellung der Nachkommenschaft Heinrichs I, pp. 221–5;
Schmid, ‘Ein verlorenes Stemma Regum Franciae’; Margue, ‘Bamberger Tafel’, pp.
216–18; Jackman, Studia Luxembourgensia.
59. ‘post quem nullus prosapie istius regale solium ultra possedit’.
60. Binbas, ‘Structure and Function of the Genealogical Tree in Islamic Historiography’.
61. Liber aureus Prumiensis (SB Trier, HS 1709), a sheet between fols. 73v and 74; Schmid,
‘Ein verlorenes Stemma Regum Franciae’, plate III.
62. ‘qui pauperibus clericis consulens excogitavit arbores historiarum veteris Testamenti in
pellibus depingere’: Alberic of Trois-fontaines, Chronica, ed. Scheffer-Boichorst, p. 886.
63. See Panayotova, ‘Peter of Poitiers’ Compendium in genealogia Christi: The Early English
Copies’.
64. Laborderie, ‘Les généalogies des rois d’Angleterre sur rouleaux manuscrits (milieu
XIIIe siècle–début XVe siècle): conception, diffusion et fonctions’; Laborderie, ‘A New
Pattern for English History: The First Genealogical Rolls of the Kings of England’;
Laborderie, Histoire, mémoire et pouvoir. Les généalogies en rouleau des rois d’Angleterre
(1250–1422); Laborderie, ‘The First Manuals of English History: Two Late Thirteenth-
Century Genealogical Rolls of the Kings of England in the Royal Collection’.
65. Clanchy, From Memory to Written Record: England 1066–1307, pp. 137–46.
66. Laborderie, ‘The First King of England? Egbert and the Foundations of Royal
Legitimacy in Thirteenth-Century Historiography’.
67. The Chaworth Roll: A Fourteenth-Century Genealogy of the Kings of England, ed. Bovey.
68. ‘Cestui Thomas fut counte de Lancastre e de Leycestre e seneschal d’Engletere. E si fut
counte de Derby e par la contesse Aleyse, sa compaigne, il fut counte de Nicol e de
Saleburi’: ibid., p. 46.
69. Colker, ‘The “Karolinus” of Egidius Parisiensis’, with some of the additional narrative
material edited on pp. 238–41 (from BnF, MS lat. 6191, fols. 46v–48v); the text is
discussed by Lewis, ‘Dynastic Structures and Capetian Throne-Right: The Views of
Giles of Paris’, with two photographs and some edited text (from both BnF, MS lat.
6191 and Bern, Burgerbibliothek, MS 22); in contrast to the traditional view, that the
genealogical material was added between 1216 and1223, Lewis thinks it was incorpo-
rated much earlier, in 1200 or 1201.
70. ‘Ad habendam maiorem evidenciam in personis que in sequentibus describuntur, hoc
secus in hoc loco dicimus quod reges Franc’, quos specialius describimus, litteris
rubricatis damus intelligi ab aliis discernendos. Reginas uxores eorum per lineas de
incausto interius rubricatas. Alios reges sive eos qui de regum prosapia descenderunt
nec reges fuerunt per simplices lineas de incausto seponimus. Porro eos qui reges
fuerunt et imperatores tanquam digniores duplici colore adonio minioque distingui-
mus. Eos qui tantum imperatores fuerunt et non reges Franc’ per litteras de adonio

536
 NOTES TO PAGES 334–7

depromimus. Reges Franc’ bonos per lineas de minio adoniatas sed hoc secretius
designamus’: BnF, MS lat. 6191, fol. 46v; Lewis, ‘Dynastic Structures and Capetian
Throne-Right: The Views of Giles of Paris’, pp. 228–9 n. 15, reading ‘non secus’;
translation of colour terms is notoriously tricky.
71. See, for example, Rouse and Rouse, ‘Statim invenire: Schools, Preachers, and New Attitudes
to the Page’; Clanchy, From Memory to Written Record: England 1066–1307, pp. 174–86.
72. ‘sub quadam arboris formula’: BnF, MS lat. 6184, fol. 1. On this text, see Lamarrigue,
‘La rédaction d’un catalogue des rois de France. Guillaume de Nangis et Bernard Gui’;
Guyot-Bachy, ‘La Chronique abrégée des rois de France de Guillaume de Nangis: trois étapes
de l’histoire d’un texte’; Guyot-Bachy, ‘La Chronique abrégée des rois de France et les
Grandes chroniques de France : concurrence ou complémentarité dans la construction
d’une culture historique en France à la fin du Moyen Age?’.
73. BnF, MS lat. 6184, fol. 3 (‘At the instigation of his mother, he killed Sigismund, king of
the Burgundians, son of King Gundebald, along with his wife and children’).
74. For the manuscripts of the Arbor genealogiae see Delisle, ‘Notice sur les manuscrits de
Bernard Gui’, pp. 245–8; Kaeppeli, Scriptores ordinis praedicatorum medii aevi, 1, pp.
218–19, no. 620; for discussion, see Lamarrigue, ‘La rédaction d’un catalogue des
rois de France. Guillaume de Nangis et Bernard Gui’; Lamarrigue, Bernard Gui,
1261–1331: un historien et sa méthode, esp. pp. 52–3, 320, 439–47; Norbye, ‘Arbor genealo-
giae : Manifestations of the Tree in French Royal Genealogies’, pp. 80–3; Norbye, ‘“Iste
non ponitur in recta linea arboris genealogie.” Graphische Darstellung und Legitimität
in französischen Königsgenealogien’, pp. 341–4. I cite from CCCC, MS 45, which is
online.
75. Cf. the comment of Bernard Guenée: ‘Une généalogie des rois de France a moins pour
but de faire apparaître la famille des rois que leur succession’: ‘Les généalogies entre
l’histoire et la politique: la fierté d’être Capétien, en France, au Moyen Âge’, p. 466; for
comment on the concept of recta linea, see also Schneidmüller, ‘Constructing the Past
by Means of the Present: Historiographical Foundation of Medieval Institutions,
Dynasties, Peoples, and Communities’, pp. 169–72.
76. Laborderie, ‘The First Manuals of English History: Two Late Thirteenth-Century
Genealogical Rolls of the Kings of England in the Royal Collection’, p. 17.
77. ‘iste Hugo recta linea generationis de Caroli et regum Francorum progenie non
descendit . . . Carolus dux frater Lotharii regis Francorum, qui recta linea de prole
regum descenderat’: Chronicon Turonense magnum, ed. Martène and Durand, col. 993
(RHF, 10, p. 281).
78. ‘Unde apparet liquide quod recta linea regum Franciae defecit, et in isto translatus est
(var. translatum est regnum) ad lineam transversalem’: Continuatio Chronici Guillelmi de
Nangiaco, ed. Géraud, 2, p. 86.
79. Les Grandes chroniques de France, ed. Viard, 9, p. 75.
80. Bernard Gui, Arbor genealogiae regum Francorum, CCCC, MS 45, fol. 33v (cf. fol. 2).
81. ‘ex eo quod pueris ipse puer capucia ludo auferre solebat’: Bernard Gui, Arbor genealogiae
regum Francorum, CCCC, MS 45, fol. 41v; this explanation first occurs in the supplemen-
tary notes that Giles of Paris added to his Karolinus in the years 1216–23: ‘Pater huius

537
 NOTES TO PAGES 338–43

Hugo cognominatus est Chapeth eo quod puer<is> ipse puer capas suas ludo auferre
soleb<at>’: BnF, MS lat. 6191, fol. 48v; Colker ‘The “Karolinus” of Egidius Parisiensis’,
p. 240; Lewis, ‘Dynastic Structures and Capetian Throne-Right: The Views of Giles of
Paris’, plate opposite p. 241.
82. ‘Iste Karlomannus in recta linea arboris depingitur cuius causam nescio nec inveni cum
per ipsum regalis prosapie successio non fuerit continuata nisi forte quia tunc Karolus
simplex legitimus sed parvulus non regnabat’: Bernard Gui, Reges Francorum, Arbor
genealogiae regum Francorum, CCCC, MS 45, fol. 40 (cf. fol. 13v).
83. Richer of Saint-Rémi, Historiae, 1. 4, ed. Hoffmann, p. 39.
84. BnF, MS lat. 6191, fol. 48; BnF, MS fr. 13565, p. 202, the former dating to 1216–23, the
latter to 1250–70.
85. Les Grandes chroniques de France, ed. Viard, 4, pp. 300–3; Continuation of Aimoin, BnF,
MS lat. 12711, fols. 161v–r.
86. Bernard Gui, Reges Francorum and Arbor genealogiae regum Francorum, CCCC, MS 45, fols.
6v, 36; see also pp. 318, 385.

10 RESPONSES TO DYNASTIC UNCERTAINTY

1. BL, MS Arundel 66 (available online); it is described and analysed in depth in Fronska,

‘The Royal Image and Diplomacy: Henry VII’s Book of Astrology (British Library,
Arundel 66)’.
2. McCluskey, ‘Gregory of Tours, Monastic Timekeeping, and Early Christian Attitudes to
Astronomy’, pp. 16–18; Dagron, ‘Das Firmament soll christlich werden: Zu zwei
Seefahrtskalendern des 10. Jahrhunderts’.
3. Smoller, ‘The Medieval Debate about Astrology’, in History, Prophecy, and the Stars: The
Christian Astrology of Pierre d’Ailly, 1350–1420, pp. 25–42, provides a summary; for
Byzantium see Magdalino, L’orthodoxie des astrologues: la science entre le dogme et la divina-
tion à Byzance, VIIe–XIVe siècle; Magdalino, ‘Astrology’.
4. Anna Comnena, Alexias, 6. 7. 5, ed. Reinsch and Kambylis, p. 182.
5. John, Bishop of Nikiu, Chronicle, 95. 18–19, tr. Charles, pp. 153–4.
6. ψευδοπροφήτην καὶ ἀστρονόμον: Theophanes, Chronographia, AM 6284 (AD 792), ed. de
Boor, 1, p. 468.
7. Magdalino, L’orthodoxie des astrologues: la science entre le dogme et la divination à Byzance,
VIIe–XIVe siècle, pp. 109–32, esp. 113–22.
8. Choniates, ‘De Manuele Comneno’, in Historia, 2. 7; 5. 2, 8; 7. 7, ed. Bekker, pp. 126–7,
199–200, 219–20, 286–8, ed. van Dieten, pp. 95–6, 154, 169, 220–1.
9. Pingree, ‘The Astrological School of John Abramius’.
10. Petrus de Ebulo, Liber ad honorem Augusti sive de rebus Siculis, ed. Kölzer and Stähli, p. 43
(fol. 97).
11. Mentgen, Astrologie und Öffentlichkeit im Mittelalter, pp. 159–273; Boudet, Entre science et
nigromance. Astrologie, divination et magie dans l’Occident médiéval (xiie–xve s.); Boudet et al.,
eds., De Frédéric II à Rodolphe II. Astrologie, divination et magie dans les cours (XIIIe–XVIIe
siècle).

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 NOTES TO PAGES 343–5

12. ‘Ergo ista corpora superiora non sunt causa eorum quae sunt sed signa tantum
veluti est circulus pendens ad tabernam, quia non est idem vinum sed signum vini’:
Michael Scot, Liber introductorius, ed. Edwards, p. 5.
13. ‘Sciendo quod per predicta duo, scilicet 12 signa posita in zodiaco et per planetas 7 sub
firmamento, potest multum cognosci fortuna et infortunium temporis futuri et perso-
narum a principia sui ortus usque in finem’: ibid., p. 12.
14. Haskins, Studies in the History of Medieval Science, p. 293.
15. ‘Sed sic est – celum si non mentitur, et astra/ Si non delirant, et mobilitate perhenni/
Corpora si sequitur supracelestia mundus – :/ Excellens alias prudencia principis
hujus/ Cisma voluntatum dirimet, populosque rebelles/ Conteret et legum dabit
irresecabile frenum’: Winkelman (ed.), ‘Drei Gedichte Heinrichs von Avranches an
Kaiser Friedrich II.’, p. 486 (from Cambridge, University Library, Dd. XI. 78) (‘Cisma’
does seem to be accusative here).
16. ‘A Michaele Scoto me percepisse recordor,/ Qui fuit astrorum scrutator, qui fuit
augur,/ Qui fuit ariolus, et qui fuit alter Apollo’: ibid.
17. Aly Aben Ragel, El libro conplido en los iudizios de las estrellas. Partes 6 a 8. Traducción hecha
en la corte de Alfonso el Sabio, ed. Hilty, pp. 256–68.
18. Mentgen, Astrologie und Öffentlichkeit im Mittelalter, pp. 201–2; ‘Cy dit comment le roy
estoit astrologien . . . tres expert et sage en ycelle . . . celle science d’astrologie’:
Christine de Pisan, Le Livre des fais et bonnes meurs du sage roy Charles V, 3. 4, ed.
Solente, 2 (SHF 444), pp. 15–19.
19. Boudet, Entre science et nigromance. Astrologie, divination et magie dans l’Occident médiéval
(xiie–xve s.), p. 304.
20. Pingree, ‘The Horoscope of Constantine VII Porphyrogenitus’.
21. North, ‘Scholars and Power: Astrologers at the Courts of Medieval Europe’, p. 23 n. 38.
22. Poulle, ‘La date de la naissance de Louis VIII’; Juste, Les manuscrits astrologiques
latins conservés à la bibliothèque nationale de France à Paris, pp. 236–7 (BnF, MS lat.
16208).
23. Boudet and Poulle, ‘Les jugements astrologiques sur la naissance de Charles VII’, pp.
169–70; Juste, Les manuscrits astrologiques latins conservés à la Bibliothèque nationale de
France à Paris, pp. 224 (with plate 8) (BnF, MS lat. 15971), 254–5 (BnF, MS n.a.l. 398).
24. Chastellain, Chronique, 4. 88, ed. Kervyn de Lettenhove, 3, pp. 446–7.
25. ‘tous voz predecesseurs, roys tres crestiens, qui ont aymee et eue cherie et affectionee
plus ceste science de astrologie que nulle des autres science liberalles . . . Charles VIIe,
vostre grand pere, qui tousjours a eu a l’entour de lui les plus expers astrologiens qu’il
povoit finer’: Simon de Phares, Le Recueil des plus celebres astrologues, Prologue, 11–14, ed.
Boudet, 1 (SHF 515), pp. 21–3.
26. Juste, Les manuscrits astrologiques latins conservés à la bibliothèque nationale de France à Paris,
pp. 162–7 (BnF, MS lat. 7443).
27. Simon de Phares, Le Recueil des plus celebres astrologues, 11. 38, ed. Boudet, 1 (SHF 515),
pp. 552–3.
28. Pangerl, ‘Sterndeutung als naturwissenschaftliche Methode der Politikberatung.
Astronomie und Astrologie am Hof Kaiser Friedrichs III. (1440–1493)’.

539
 NOTES TO PAGES 345–8

29. Hayton, ‘Martin Bylica at the Court of Matthias Corvinus: Astrology and Politics in
Renaissance Hungary’.
30. Carlin, ‘Parron, William (b. before 1461, d. in or after 1503), astrologer’, in ODNB, 42,
pp. 861–2.
31. ‘conseillé par . . . son astrologien, de nom aller contre les Suisses et que d’y aller, si Dieu
ne destournoit les influences celestes, il lui en prendroit mal, respondit ces propres
motz, que la fureur de son espee vainqueroit le cours du ciel, et lors y alla et lui en print
comme l’on scet’: Simon de Phares, Le Recueil des plus celebres astrologues, prologue, 38,
ed. Boudet, 1 (SHF 515), p. 33.
32. ‘Multi principes et magnates, noxia curiositate solliciti, vanis nituntur artibus occulta
perquirere et investigare futura’: Oresme, Tractatus contra judiciarios astronomos, ed.
Coopland, p. 123.
33. ‘Derechief, l’en raconte que le roy Jacques de Maillogues, quant il vault departir
d’Avingnon, fist appeller tous lez astrologiens de court de Rome pour eslire l’eure de
son department, lequel se departi en telle heure, laquelle fust prise et esleüe par
conmun acort de tous lez astrologyens et, neantmoins, en celle veage, il perdy la vie
et son royaume aussi’: Songe du Vergier, 1. 184. 11, ed. Schnerb-Lièvre, 1, p. 405; the Latin
version is much shorter: Somnium Viridarii, 2. 356. 11, ed. Schnerb-Lièvre, 2, p. 238.
34. Choniates, ‘De Isaacio Angelo’ in Historia, 1. 8, ed. Bekker, p. 506, ed. van Dieten,
p. 388.
35. An English Chronicle of the Reigns of Richard II., Henry IV., Henry V. and Henry VI., ed.
Davies, p. 69.
36. Third Report of the Deputy Keeper of the Public Records, Appendix 2, pp. 213–14, on the trial
of John Stacy, astrologer, in 1477; Kittredge, Witchcraft in Old and New England, pp.
138–9, 227–8.
37. Coote, Prophecy and Public Affairs in Later Medieval England, with a list of more than 150
English manuscripts of political prophecies, pp. 239–80; Daniel, Les prophéties de Merlin
et la culture politique (xiie–xvie s.).
38. The Visio Caroli Grossi is found in Hariulf, Chronicon Centulense, 3. 21, ed. Lot, pp.
144–50; The Annals of St Neots, ed. Dumville and Lapidge, pp. 86–94; William of
Malmesbury, Gesta regum Anglorum, 2. 111, ed. Mynors et al., pp. 162–8; and numerous
subsequent historical works. See Levison, ‘Die Politik in Jenseitsvisionen des frühen
Mittelalters’; Dutton, The Politics of Dreaming in the Carolingian Empire, Chapter 8. There
is an English translation in Le Goff, The Birth of Purgatory, pp. 118–21.
39. ‘Dum viximus, amavimus tecum et cum patre tuo et cum fratribus tuis et cum avunculis
tuis facere praelia et homicidia et rapinas pro cupiditate terrena’: Visio Caroli Grossi, in
Hariulf, Chronicon Centulense, ed. Lot, p. 146.
40. ‘vidique ibi aliquos reges generis mei esse in magnis suppliciis . . . hocque fit precibus
sancti Petri sanctique Remigii, cuius patrociniis hactenus genus nostrum regale regna-
vit’: ibid., pp. 146–7.
41. ‘Karole, successor meus nunc tutius in imperio Romanorum, veni ad me; sapio quo-
niam venisti per poenalem locum, ubi est pater tuus fraterque meus positus in thermis
sibi destinatis, sed per misericordiam Dei citissime liberabitur de illis poenis, sicut et

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 NOTES TO PAGES 348–51

nos liberati sumus meritis sancti Petri sanctique precibus Remigii, cui Deus magnum
apostolatum super reges et super omnem gentem Francorum dedit. Qui nisi reliquias
nostrae propaginis suffragatus fuerit et adiuverit, iam deficiet nostra genealogia
regnando et imperando. Unde scito quoniam tolletur ocius potestas imperii de manu
tua, et postea parvissimo vives tempore’: ibid., pp. 147–8.
42. ‘Imperium Romanorum quod hactenus tenuisti, iure haereditario, debet recipere
Hludogvicus filius filiae meae’: ibid., p. 148.
43. ‘Denique sciant omnes, velint an nolint, quoniam secundum destinationem Dei in
manu illius revertetur totum imperium Romanorum’: ibid.
44. ‘Per nostras enim orationes rex efficieris Galliae, et postea heredes tui usque ad
septimam generationem possidebunt gubernacula totius regni’: Historia relationis sancti
Walarici, 4, ed. Holder-Egger, p. 695; dated ‘probably before 1050’ by Lewis, Royal
Succession in Capetian France: Studies on Familial Order and the State, p. 36.
45. ‘promitto tibi . . . te fore regem prolemque tuam Francigenarum stirpemque tuam
regnum tenere usque ad septem successiones’: Hariulf, Chronicon Centulense, 3. 23, ed.
Lot, p. 154; the work was completed in 1088, as the author himself states (ibid., 4. 36,
pp. 283–4).
46. Spiegel, ‘The Reditus regni ad stirpem Karoli Magni: A New Look’, p. 166.
47. William the Breton, Philippis, Preface, line 28; 1, line 351; 2, line 485; 3, lines 188, 427,
643; 4, lines 439, 528; 7, line 86; 10, line 99, ed. Delaborde, pp. 3, 21, 58, 72, 81, 89, 115,
118, 179, 285.
48. Werner, ‘Die Legitimität der Kapetinger und die Entstehung des “Reditus regni
Francorum ad stirpem Karoli”’; Spiegel, ‘The Reditus regni ad stirpem Karoli Magni:
A New Look’; Brown, ‘La généalogie capétienne dans l’historiographie de Moyen
Âge. Philippe le Bel, le reniement du reditus et la création d’une ascendence
carolingienne pour Hugues Capet’.
49. ‘Si iste post patrem regnaverit, constat regnum reductum ad progeniem Karoli Magni’:
ed. Brown, ‘Vincent de Beauvais and the reditus regni Francorum ad stirpem Caroli
imperatoris’, p. 190.
50. For the following, see Brevis relatio de Guillelmo nobilissimo comite Normannorum, 12, 15, ed.
Van Houts, pp. 39, 43–4; ‘Additamenta’, in Gesta Normannorum Ducum, ed. Van Houts,
2, pp. 284–6.
51. ‘respondit illam diutius manere illudque imperium usque ad septimam generationem
viriliter durare’: Brevis relatio de Guillelmo nobilissimo, 15, ed. Van Houts, pp. 43–4;
‘Additamenta’, in Gesta Normannorum Ducum, ed. Van Houts, 2, p. 284–6.
52. Rollo, William Longsword, Richard I, Richard II, Robert I, William the Conqueror,
Henry I.
53. ‘Quis vero post eum has terras possidebit et possessas gubernavit generatio que tunc
erit videre poterit’: Brevis relatio de Guillelmo nobilissimo, 12, ed. Van Houts, p. 39.
54. ‘Quod nos iam ex magna parte impletum videmus, qui Henrico regi . . . superviximus’:
‘Additamenta’, in Gesta Normannorum Ducum ed. Van Houts, 2, p. 284.
55. ‘Evigilabunt regentis catuli et postpositis nemoribus infra moenia civitatum venabun-
tur. Stragem non minimam ex obstantibus facient et linguas taurorum abscident. Colla

541
 NOTES TO PAGES 351–4

rugientium onerabunt catenis et avita tempora renovabunt. Exin de primo in quartum,

de quarto in tercium, de tercio in secundum rotabitur pollex in oleo. Sextus Hibernie
moenia subvertet et nemora in planiciem mutabit’: Geoffrey of Monmouth, Historia
regum Britannie, 7. 3 (114. 15–17), ed. Reeve, p. 149.
56. Gesta regis Henrici secundi Benedicti abbatis, ed. Stubbs, 1, pp. 42–3; Roger of Howden,
Chronica, ed. Stubbs, 2, p. 47; Alanus de Insulis, Explanatio in Prophetia Merlini
Ambrosii, 3. 34–8, ed. Wille, 1, pp. 166–7; Walter of Coventry, Memoriale, ed.
Stubbs, 2, pp. 213–14 (the ‘Barnwell Chronicle’).
57. ‘linx penetrans omnia, quae ruinae propriae gentis imminebit’: Geoffrey of
Monmouth, Historia regum Britannie, 7. 3 (115. 18), ed. Reeve, p. 149.
58. ‘per illam dominatus Normannorum in insula Britannie finem accipiet’: Alanus de
Insulis, Explanatio in Prophetia Merlini Ambrosii, 3. 45, ed. Wille, 1, p. 171.
59. Walter Map, De nugis curialium, 4. 1, ed. James et al., p. 282.
60. ‘Vere ipse est linx typica Merlini, de qua idem Merlinus de patre eius, quem leoni
comparaverat, loquens: Ex eo, inquit, procedet linx penetrans omnia, que ruine proprie
gentis imminebit’: William the Breton, Gesta Philippi Augusti, ed. Delaborde, p. 293.
61. ‘Vere linx penetrans, quia non est crumena in Anglia quam non perforet et contenta
excutiat’: Matthew Paris, Chronica majora, ed. Luard, 5, p. 451.
62. ‘robustus viribus sed praeceps in factis, in quibus tamen, quia fortunatos et felices
exitus habuerit, putant eum multi apud Merlinum fatidicum per lyncem designatum
omnia penetrantem’: Trevet, Annales sex regum Angliae, 1135–1307, ed. Hog, p. 280.
63. ‘Hoc Galterium inscium et casu fecisse uulgaris et pene omnium una opinio est. Sed
Merlini oraculum, quod spiculo inuidiȩ suffocandum predixit, aliud nos intelligere
cogit’: Alanus de Insulis, Explanatio in Prophetia Merlini Ambrosii, 2. 45, ed. Wille, 1, pp.
149–50.
64. They are listed in Crick, The Historia Regum Britanniae of Geoffrey of Monmouth, 3:
A Summary Catalogue of the Manuscripts, pp. 330–2.
65. See Daniel, Les prophéties de Merlin et la culture politique (xiie–xvie s.).
66. Les Prophécies de Merlin, edited from the ms. 593 in the Bibliothèque municipale of Rennes, ed.
Paton; for a study of this text, see Koble, Les Prophéties de Merlin en prose. Le roman
arthurien en éclats.
67. ‘En las partidas de Oçidente entre los montes e la mar nasçera un ave negra, comedora,
e rrobadora, e todos los panares del mundo querria acoger en si, e todo el oro del
mundo ençerrara en su estomago; e despues gomarlo ha e tornara atras, e non
peresçera luego por esta dolençia . . . caersele ante las alas, e secarsele han las plumas
al sol, e andara de puerta en puerta, e non le querra acoger, e ençerrarse ha en selva,
e morra ý dos vezes, una al mundo e otra ante Dios’: López de Ayala, Crónica del rey don
Pedro, 20 (1369). 3, ed. Orduna, 2, pp. 270–1.
68. Alvar, ‘The Matter of Britain in Spanish Society and Letters’, p. 247, is more definite:
‘López de Ayala did not invent the letters’. See in general Jardin, ‘Les prophéties dans
la chronique de Pierre Ier de López de Ayala: respect et manipulation du temps’.
69. ‘como viene rey nuevo, luego fazen Merlín nuevo’: Díaz de Games, El Victorial, ed.
Beltrán Llavador, p. 325.

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 NOTES TO PAGES 354–7

70. ‘Or est-il qu’il eut opinion de veoir les propheties de Merlin, pour sçavoir ce qu’il devoit
advenir à sa postérité, qui est une superstition laquelle regne en Angleterre dez le
temps du roy Arthus. Voyant lesdites propheties, par l’interprétation qui luy en fut
faicte (car ce sont comme les oracles d’Apollo, où il y a tousjours double intelligence),
fut trouvé que l’un de ses freres, duquel le nom se commenceroit par un G, osteroit la
couronne hors des mains de ses enfans’: Du Bellay, Mémoires, ed. Bourrilly and Vindry,
1, p. 42.
71. Gerald of Wales, Expugnatio Hibernica, 2, Preface, explicit; 3, Introduction, ed. Scott and
Martin, pp. 134, 252–6; Bartlett, ‘Political Prophecy in Gerald of Wales’.
72. ‘Merlis, que fo bos devinaire’: La chanson de la croisade albigeoise, 150, lines 43–6, ed.
Martin-Chabot, 2, p. 76.
73. ‘aliquos versus, in quibus futura praesagia civitatum Lombardie, Tuscie, Romagnole et
Marchie pleniter et veraciter continentur’: Salimbene de Adam, Cronica, ed. Scalia, 1,
pp. 61, 361–85; 2, pp. 549–50, 811, 813–16.
74. ‘ille vates ruralis’: Bower, Scotichronicon, ed. Watt et al., 5, pp. 426–9.
75. Choniates, ‘De Manuele Comneno’ and ‘De Andronico Comneno’, in Historia, 5.8, 1. 5;
2. 9, ed. Bekker, pp. 220, 379, 442–4, ed. van Dieten, pp. 169, 293, 339–41. See
Shukurov, ‘AIMA: The Blood of the Grand Komnenoi’.
76. ‘Primus F., in pilis agnus, in villis leo, erit depopulator urbium. In iusto proposito
terminabit inter corvum et cornicem. Vivet in H., qui occidet in portis Melatii.
Secundus autem F. insperati et mirabilis ortus, inter capras agnus laniandus, non
absorbendus ab eis’: Holder-Egger, ‘Italienische Prophetieen des 13. Jahrhunderts’,
pp. 175–6; Salimbene cites this prophecy but substitutes names for initials: Salimbene
de Adam, Cronica, ed. Scalia, 2, pp. 549–50.
77. ‘Populus namque in ligno et ferreis tunicis superveniet . . . Catuli leonis in aequoreos
pisces transformabuntur’: Geoffrey of Monmouth, Historia regum Britannie, 7. 3 (112.
9–12), ed. Reeve, p. 147.
78. ‘Si arbor viridis a medio sui succidatur corpore et pars abscisa trium iugerum spatio
a suo deportetur stipite, cum per se et absque humana manu vel quovis amminiculo,
suo connectetur trunco, ceperitque denuo virescere et fructifare ex coalescentis suci
amore pristino, tunc primum tantorum malorum sperari poterit remissio’: Vita
Ædwardi regis, 2. 11, ed. Barlow, p. 118.
79. ‘Huius ergo vaticinii veritatem nos experimur, quod scilicet Anglia exterorum facta est
habitatio et alienigenarum dominatio . . . nec ulla spes est finiendae miseriae’: William
of Malmesbury, Gesta regum Anglorum, 2. 227, ed. Mynors et al., pp. 414–16.
80. ‘Neque enim hodie regem aut ducem aut pontificem ex eadem gente cernimus aliter
originem ducere quam arborem succisam ut reuirescat et fructum proferat suo stipiti
denuo coherere’: Osbert of Clare, Vita sancti Edwardi confessoris, 22, ed. Bloch, p. 109.
81. ‘de sancta eius progenie traxisse carnis originem Henrici nostri specialis est gloria’:
Aelred of Rievaulx, Vita sancti Ædwardi regis et confessoris, Prologue, ed. Marzella, p. 88.
82. ‘semen regum Normannorum et Anglorum coniungens . . . noster Henricus . . . quasi
lapis angularis utrumque populum copulavit. Habet nunc certe de genere Anglorum
Anglia regem, habet de eadem gente episcopos et abbates, habet et principes, milites

543
 NOTES TO PAGES 358–60

etiam optimos, qui ex utriusque seminis coniunctione procreati aliis honori sunt, aliis
consolationi’: ibid, 30, pp. 154–5.
83. Lopes, Crónica do Rei D. Pedro I, 1, 43, ed. Macchi, tr. Steunou, pp. 22, 238–40.
84. Lopes, Crónica del Rei Dom João I, 1. 23–4, summarized in The English in Portugal,
1367–1387, p. 166.
85. Kittredge, Witchcraft in Old and New England, pp. 416–17 n. 40, gives a long list of sources
for this notorious case; the indictments themselves are in TNA, KB9/72/1–6, 9, 11, 14;
there is a detailed study by Griffiths, ‘The Trial of Eleanor Cobham: An Episode in the
Fall of Duke Humphrey of Gloucester’; Carey, Courting Disaster: Astrology at the English
Court and University in the Later Middle Ages, pp. 138–53, concentrates on the technical
astrological aspects; the main chronicle sources are The Brut or The Chronicles of England,
ed. Brie, 2, pp. 478–82; An English Chronicle of the Reigns of Richard II, Henry IV, Henry
V and Henry VI, ed. Davies, pp. 56–60; A Chronicle of London, from 1089 to 1483 (ed. Tyrrell
and Nicolas), pp. 128–30.
86. ‘a diutino tempore iam preterito se ad alciorem statum in regno Anglie quam habuerat
exaltare machinans’: TNA, KB9/72/5–6, 9, 14.
87. ‘quandam figuram de dicto rege ac quamplurima alia res, ymagines, vestimenta,
circulos et instrumenta per artem magicam et nigromanticam colore astronomie sub-
dole figurarum fecit’: TNA, KB9/72/1–4.
88. ‘ut idem Rogerus . . . in circulo securus esse poterit et ad ipsum demones et alios
malignos spiritus in aiero et in terra existentes convocare possit’: ibid.
89. ‘bene scivit quod idem rex non diu viveret set infra breve obiret et sic ut per detextio-
nem et huiusmodi materie manifestacionem populus ipsius regis maius ab eo cordia-
lem amorem retraherent ac idem rex per noticiam huiusmodi detectionis et
manifestacionis, videlicet quod ipse sic ut promittitur infra breve obiret, caperet
talem tristiciam in corde suo quod per illam tristiciam ac dolorem citius moreretur’:
ibid.
90. TNA, KB9/72/11; this is the only document among the indictments not to be in
quadruplicate, and hence probably did not stem from the four simultaneous inquests
mentioned in the Brut: The Brut or The Chronicles of England, ed. Brie, 2, p. 479.
91. The Brut, or The Chronicles of England, ed. Brie, 2, p. 480 (modernized).
92. An English Chronicle of the Reigns of Richard II, Henry IV, Henry V and Henry VI, ed. Davies,
pp. 58, 60.

11 PRETENDERS AND RETURNERS

1. Bennett, Lambert Simnel and the Battle of Stoke.

2. See, in general, Platelle, ‘Erreur sur la personne. Contribution à l’histoire de l’im-
posture au Moyen Âge’; Evans, The Death of Kings: Royal Deaths in Medieval England, pp.
147–73; Lecuppre, L’imposture politique au Moyen Âge: la seconde vie des rois; Menzel,
Falsche Könige zwischen Thron und Galgen: Politische Hochstapelei von der Antike zur
Moderne. There are references to four Byzantine cases, ranging from the seventh to
the thirteenth centuries, in Dagron, Emperor and Priest: The Imperial Office in Byzantium,

544
 NOTES TO PAGES 361–4

p. 15. For useful Early Modern comparisons, Bercé, Le roi caché: sauveurs et imposteurs:
mythes politiques populaires dans l’Europe modern; Perrie, Pretenders and Popular Monarchism
in Early Modern Russia: The False Tsars of the Time of Troubles. A famous twentieth-century
case concerned the supposed return, in 1920, of the Kumar of Bhawal, an Indian prince
reported to have died in 1909.
3. Wolff, ‘Baldwin of Flanders and Hainault, First Latin Emperor of Constantinople: His
Life, Death and Resurrection, 1172–1225’, pp. 294–301; Tschirch, ‘Der falsche
Woldemar und die märkischen Städte’; Strück, ‘Märkische Urkunden aus der Zeit des
falschen Woldemar im Anhaltischen Staatsarchiv Zerbst’; Schultze, Die Mark Brandenburg
2: Die Mark unter Herrschaft der Wittelsbacher und Luxemburger (1319–1415), pp. 75–109;
Schwinges, ‘Verfassung und kollektives Verhalten. Zur Mentalität des Erfolges falscher
Herrscher im Reich des 13. und 14. Jahrhunderts’.
4. Mayer, ‘Two Crusaders Out of Luck’.
5. Thacker, ‘The Cult of King Harold at Chester’.
6. Snorri Sturluson, Heimskringla, tr. Laing, 1, p. 483.
7. Snorri Sturluson, Heimskringla, tr. Hollander, p. 242.
8. Anna Comnena, Alexias, 10. 2. 2–4. 5, ed. Reinsch and Kambylis, pp. 283–93. Anna
Comnena calls him Leo but this is an error and he probably claimed to be Constantine,
the son who died at Antioch in 1073: Mathieu, ‘Les faux Diogènes’, pp. 134–5.
9. Chronica Adefonsi imperatoris, 1. 58, ed. Maya Sánchez, p. 177; Orderic Vitalis, Historia
ecclesiastica, 13. 10, ed. Chibnall, 6, pp. 412–18; Ibn al-Athir, Chronicle, tr. Richards, p. 323.
10. ‘post illam multam et malam mactationem christianorum in Fraga, in qua fere omnes
gladio ceciderunt, perpauci vero vix inermes per fugam evaserunt cum rege’: Lacarra,
Documentos para el estudio de la reconquista y repoblación del Valle del Ebro, 1, no. 236, pp.
239–40.
11. ‘dicitur a Mauris fuisse interfectus. Aliorum uero fuit opinio quia tunc euaserat de
infortunio illo . . . Qui post multa annorum curricula temporibus nostris uenisse
dicebatur in Aragoniam’: Chronica latina regum Castellae, 4, ed. Charlo Brea, p. 38.
12. ‘ab aliis dicitur uiuus a prelio euasisse, et confusionem prelii nequiens tolerare pere-
grinum se exibuit huic mundo effigie et habitu inmutatus’: Rodrigo Jiménez de Rada,
Historia de rebus Hispaniae, 7. 3, ed. Fernández Valverde, p. 224.
13. The date of Alfonso’s return depends on that of a letter of Alfonso II describing
the case. See Lecuppre, L’imposture politique au Moyen Âge: la seconde vie des rois,
pp. 88–9 n. 1, on the date of the letter, preferring 1162–3; one later source places the
emergence of the pseudo-Alfonso in 1181: Floriano, ‘Fragmento de unos viejos anales
(1089–1196)’, p. 153. See the brief but cogent comments of Bisson, ‘The Rise of
Catalonia: Identity, Power and Ideology in a Twelfth-Century Society’, pp. 146–7.
14. ‘Et multos tales diebus illis occidit Manfredos’: Salimbene de Adam, Cronica, ed. Scalia,
1, p. 264 (cf. 2, p. 714) (MGH, SS 32, p. 174).
15. ‘Harold, þe sæde þæt he Cnutes sunu wære 7 þære oðre Ælfgyfe, þeh hit na soð nære’;
‘Sume men sædon be Harolde þæt he wære Cnutes sunu cynges. 7 Ælfgiue Ælfelmes
dohtor ealdormannes. ac hit þuhte swiðe ungeleaflic manegum mannum’: Anglo-Saxon
Chronicle (C), s.a. 1035, (E), s.a. 1036, ed. Plummer and Earle, pp. 158, 161.

545
 NOTES TO PAGES 364–7

16. Encomium Emmae Reginae, 3. 1, ed. Campbell, pp. 38–40.

17. John of Worcester, Chronicle, 2, ed. Darlington and McGurk, p. 520.
18. di Carpegna Falconieri, The Man Who Believed He Was King of France: A True Medieval Tale,
p. 122. This book contains a full account of the case, along with a careful analysis of the
amount of trust one can place in the fifteenth-century Istoria di re Giannino, which some
regard as entirely fictional. The story features in Maurice Druon’s famous series of
historical novels, Les rois maudits (1955–77).
19. ‘Sed quid dixisset poeta noster, si vidisset, non est diu, Zaninum senensem, qui permisit
sibi persuaderi tam facile, quam vane, quod erat rex Franciae?’: Benvenuto da Imola on
Purgatorio 13. 151–4, Comentum super Dantis Aldigheris comoediam, ed. Lacaita, 3, p. 372.
20. Cohn, The Pursuit of the Millennium, Chapter 6; Struve, ‘Die falschen Friedriche und die
Friedenssehnsucht im Mittelalter’; Lerner, ‘Frederick II, Alive, Aloft and Allayed, in
Franciscan-Joachite Eschatology’; Möhring, Der Weltkaiser der Endzeit: Entstehung, Wandel
und Wirkung einer tausendjährigen Weissagung, pp. 209–68; Lecuppre, L’imposture politique
au Moyen Âge: la seconde vie des rois, pp. 357–64.
21. ‘Nam et ego ipse usque ad multos dies vix potui credere quod mortuus esset, nisi cum
auribus meis ab ore Innocentii pape quarti audivi . . . Horrui, cum audirem, et vix potui
credere’: Salimbene de Adam, Cronica, ed. Scalia, 1, p. 264 (MGH, SS 32, pp. 173–4).
22. The primary source for this event is a letter of 1 February 1320 printed in Diplomatarium
Norvegicum, 6. 1, no. 100, pp. 104–5; there is discussion, along with a translation of this
letter, in Anderson, ‘Notes of Some Entries in the Iceland Annals Regarding the Death
of the Princess “The Maiden of Norway”, in A.D. 1290, and “The False Margaret”, who
was Burned at Bergen in A.D. 1301’; the continuing cult of the false Margaret is
mentioned in another letter of 1320: Diplomatarium Norvegicum, 8. 1, no. 67, pp. 88–9;
see also Lecuppre, L’imposture politique au Moyen Âge: la seconde vie des rois, p. 127; Menzel,
Falsche Könige zwischen Thron und Galgen: Politische Hochstapelei von der Antike zur Moderne,
pp. 168–9.
23. ‘si dictus rex Norwag’ de dicta Margareta filiam vel filias procreaverit succedent in
omnibus que ipsam vel ipsas contingere possunt secundum leges et consuetudines
Norichanas eciam in regno si consuetudo fuerit’: Acts of the Parliaments of Scotland, 1,
ed. Thomson and Innes, p. 422 (80) (25 July, 1281).
24. ‘lofflige arffuingie’: Diplomatarium Norvegicum, 6. 1, no. 100, p. 104.
25. Anderson, ‘Notes of Some Entries in the Iceland Annals Regarding the Death of the
Princess “The Maiden of Norway”, in A.D. 1290, and “The False Margaret”, who was
Burned at Bergen in A.D. 1301’, pp. 413–15.
26. Miracles were also reported at the site of the execution of pseudo-Baldwin: Annales de
Dunstaplia, ed. Luard, p. 95.
27. Albert of Stade, Annales Stadenses, ed. Lappenberg, p. 358.
28. Gregory VII, Registrum, 8.6, ed. Caspar, pp. 523–4; Notae Weingartenses, ed. Waitz, p. 831;
McNiven, ‘Rebellion, Sedition and the Legend of Richard II’s Survival in the Reigns of
Henry IV and Henry V’.
29. ‘Pluribus autem querentibus, si ipse esset imperator, cur tanto tempore latuerit’: John
of Vikting, Liber certarum historiarum, 2. 11, ed. Schneider, 1, p. 245.

546
 NOTES TO PAGES 367–71

30. Albert of Stade, Annales Stadenses, ed. Lappenberg, p. 358; there is a much
more melodramatic version in Matthew Paris, Chronica majora, ed. Luard, 3, pp.
90–1.
31. ‘indicat se olim obitu simulato de divine permissionis oraculo ad expianda delicta
nonum annum in peregrinationis exercicio peregisse’: Malaspina, Chronicon, 2. 6, ed.
Koller and Nitschke, p. 132.
32. Gesta archiepiscoporum Magdeburgensium, ed. Schum, p. 436.
33. Anderson, ‘Notes of Some Entries in the Iceland Annals regarding the Death of the
Princess “The Maiden of Norway”, in A.D. 1290, and “The False Margaret”, who was
Burned at Bergen in A.D. 1301’, pp. 411–12.
34. ‘usque in annos certos’: Madden, ‘Documents Relating to Perkin Warbeck, with
Remarks on his History’, pp. 199–200, with translation at pp. 156–8. This is Warbeck’s
letter of 1493 to Isabella the Catholic (BL, MS Egerton 616). There is a photograph of
the letter in Arthurson, The Perkin Warbeck Conspiracy 1491–1499, p. 49.
35. Gregory VII, Registrum, 8.6, ed. Caspar, pp. 523–4; Guiscard’s daughter was married to
the (real) Michael VII’s son: Falkenhausen, ‘Olympias, eine normannische Prinzessin
in Konstantinopel’.
36. ‘Erant autem tunc etiam quidam cum duce, qui, in palatio tempore Michaelis imper-
atoris servientes, faciem eius se novisse et hunc similem illi minime, vel in modico,
assimilari dicerent, sed fraudulenter hunc spe alicuius a duce accipiendi muneris
advenisse’: Malaterra, De rebus gestis Rogerii Calabriae et Siciliae comitis et Roberti Guiscardi
ducis fratris eius, 3. 13, ed. Pontieri, p. 65.
37. μὴ ἐπιγινώσκειν αὐτὸν ὅλως διισχυριζόμενοι: Anna Comnena, Alexias, 4. 1. 3, ed. Reinsch
and Kambylis, p. 121; ‘Iste solebat/ Crateras mensis plenos deferre Lieo,/ Et de
pincernis erat inferioribus unus’: William of Apulia, La Geste de Robert Guiscard, 4,
lines 269–71, ed. Mathieu, p. 218.
38. Choniates, ‘De Isaacio Angelo’ in Historia, 3. 1, ed. Bekker, pp. 549–53, ed. van Dieten.
39. McNiven, ‘Rebellion, Sedition and the Legend of Richard II’s Survival in the Reigns of
Henry IV and Henry V’; Bower, Scotichronicon, 15. 9, 19, 31, ed. Watt et al., 8, pp. 28, 64,
114; Arthurson, The Perkin Warbeck Conspiracy 1491–1499.
40. ‘respondit se non habere iudicem inter eos, vivente ligeo domino suo in regno Scocie,
rege Ricardo’: Walsingham, The St Albans Chronicle: the Chronica maiora of Thomas
Walsingham, ed. Taylor et al., 2, p. 728; cf. p. 720 for his attempt to bring the pseudo-
Richard into England.
41. ‘Chlodoveum, quem falso regem fecerant’: Passio Leudegarii, 23, ed. Krusch, p. 305
(19–20, pp. 300–1, for other details and names of some of the main supporters).
42. The Great Chronicle of London, ed. Thomas and Thornley, p. 285 (spelling modernized).
43. ‘Partout fu quens nommés de tos,/ Mais il n’i vot respondre à rien,/ Fors c’on l’apieloit
Crestiien’: Philippe Mouskes, Chronique rimée, ed. de Reiffenberg, 2, p. 456, lines
24614–16 (MGH SS 26, p. 769).
44. ‘Et quant il plus s’escondissoit,/ “Vous iestes quens” cascuns dissoit’: ibid., 2, p. 457,
lines 24629–30 (MGH SS 26, p. 770).

547
 NOTES TO PAGES 372–4

45. Anderson, ‘Notes of Some Entries in the Iceland Annals regarding the Death of the
Princess “The Maiden of Norway”, in A.D. 1290, and “The False Margaret”, who was
Burned at Bergen in A.D. 1301’, p. 418.
46. ‘La fu il deux jours sur terre pour le monstrer a ceulx de Londres afin que ilz creussent
pour certain quil fust mort’: Chronicque de la traïson et mort de Richart Deux Roy Dengleterre,
ed. Williams, p. 103.
47. An English Chronicle of the Reigns of Richard II, Henry IV, Henry V and Henry VI, ed. Davies,
p. 21 (spelling modernized).
48. ‘advena, cuius pater molinas gobernavit, et ut vere dicam, pater eius pectinibus insedit
lanasque conposuit’: Gregory of Tours, Libri historiarum decem, 7. 14, ed. Krusch and
Levison, p. 336. On the alternative name of the pretender, Ballomer, see Widdowson,
‘Gundovald, “Ballomer” and the Problems of Identity’, with older literature cited at
p. 609 n. 9.
49. ‘Tune es pictur ille, qui tempore Chlothacharii regis per oraturia parietis adque camaras
caraxabas?’: Gregory of Tours, Libri historiarum decem, 7. 36, ed. Krusch and Levison,
p. 357. There is a tendency to translate caraxare as ‘daub’ or an equivalent (‘barbouillait’:
Viollet-le-Duc, Dictionnaire raisonné de l’architecture française du XIe au XVIe siècle, 7, p. 56;
‘slap whitewash’, Gregory of Tours, History of the Franks, tr. Thorpe, p. 419), but the word
seems to mean the more neutral ‘write’ or ‘paint’, deriving from a Greek word with
implications of scratching or inscribing. The Dictionary of Medieval Latin from British Sources
defines charaxare simply as ‘to write’; the glossary to Krusch and Levison’s edition of
Gregory gives both scribere and pingere as equivalents (p. 582).
50. Arthurson, The Perkin Warbeck Conspiracy 1491–1499, p. 23.
51. Ibid., p. 46.
52. Anna Comnena, Alexias, 10. 2. 2, ed. Reinsch and Kambylis, pp. 283–4; Floriano,
‘Fragmento de unos viejos anales (1089–1196)’, p. 153 (‘hun ferrero’); Notae
Weingartenses, ed. Waitz, p. 831; Vita Henrici archiepiscopi Treverensis altera, ed. Waitz,
p. 462; Gesta archiepiscoporum Magdeburgensium, ed. Schum, p. 436; Bennett, Lambert
Simnel and the Battle of Stoke, p. 121.
53. ‘ad simulachrum . . . concurrunt . . . ad subvertendum ydolum et cultores eius’:
Malaspina, Chronicon, 2. 6, ed. Koller and Nitschke, pp. 132–3.
54. Walker, ‘Rumour, Sedition and Popular Protest in the Reign of Henry IV’, p. 59.
55. Both the Middle English Dictionary, s.v. maumet, and the Oxford English Dictionary, s.v.
mammet, give ‘a puppet, tool’ as one meaning of the word, but their citations do not
always make this sense certain.
56. Parliament Rolls of Medieval England, 8, p. 326.
57. ‘Cicatrices in corpore habuit quas habuerat Baldewinus’: Albert of Stade, Annales
Stadenses, ed. Lappenberg, p. 358; cf. Annales de Dunstaplia, ed. Luard, p. 94.
58. Leo of Rozmital, De Leonis a Rosmital nobilis Bohemi itinere per partes Germaniae, Belgii,
Britanniae, Franciae, Hispaniae, Portugalliae atque Italiae, annis MCCCCLXV–VII, pp. 74–6;
Leo of Rozmital, The Travels of Leo of Rozmital, tr. Letts, pp. 97–9.
59. Długosz, Annales seu Cronicae incliti regni Poloniae, ed. Da˛browski et al., 4, p. 25.

548
 NOTES TO PAGES 375–7

60. ‘“Tu mecum fuisti uere, sed semper proditor, et in una prodicionum tuarum inter-
ceptus, euasisti, sed tibi quidam satellitum pedem dextrum spiculo misso perforauit,
unde uulnus adhuc aut cicatrix apparet. Comprehendite, famuli, tricatorem, et
uidebitis!” Et apparuit cicatrix; at iuuenis ait: “Domino meo, quem iste se fingit
singularis erat in brachio dextro proceritas, ut stans extentus posset palma genu
dextrum operire”. Quod ipse surgens statim impleuit’: Walter Map, De nugis curia-
lium, 5. 6, ed. James et al., pp. 480–2; the story that a man impersonating Henry had
retired to Cluny can also be found in Richard of Poitiers, Chronica, ed. Waitz, p. 80,
and Sigebert of Gembloux, Chronica: Continuatio Praemonstratensis, ed. Bethmann,
p. 451.
61. ὅσα γε ἀπὸ τῆς φωνῆς τοῦ ἀνδρὸς τεκμαιρόμενος ἔλεγε μήτε υἱὸν αὐτὸν ἐπιγινώσκειν
Ῥωμανοῦ τοῦ Διογένους: Anna Comnena, Alexias, 10. 3. 4, ed. Reinsch and Kambylis,
p. 289.
62. Choniates, ‘De Isaacio Angelo’, in Historia, 3. 1, ed. Bekker, p. 549, ed. van Dieten,
p. 420.
63. Widdowson, ‘Gundovald, “Ballomer” and the Problems of Identity’, p. 622; Davis, The
Return of Martin Guerre, p. viii.
64. ‘Le problème . . . de l’identité des personnes . . . des insuffisances techniques’: Platelle,
‘Erreur sur la personne. Contribution à l’histoire de l’imposture au Moyen Âge’, p. 145.
65. ‘quod ferebatur Wibertus pictore Romam misso imaginem eius in tabula pingi fecisse,
ut quocumque se habitu effigiaret, non lateret’: William of Malmesbury, Gesta pontifi-
cum Anglorum, 1. 55, ed. Winterbottom, 1, p. 160. Rodney Thomson comments, ‘At
a time when realistic portraiture was not current, accurate multiple copying and its
rapid and widespresad distribution impossible, it is difficult to imagine that this really
happened’ (ibid., 2, p. 68).
66. Ibn Battuta, Travels, tr. Gibb and Beckingham, 4 (178), p. 892.
67. ‘annis aliquot interpositis quispiam se ostendit qui se eundem publice fatebatur, et
multorum Castelle et Aragonie id ipsum testimonia affirmabant, qui cum eo in utroque
regno fuerant familiariter conuersati, et ad memoriam reducebant secreta plurima, que
ipse olim cum eis habita recolebat’: Rodrigo Jiménez de Rada, Historia de rebus Hispaniae, 7.
3, ed. Fernández Valverde, p. 224.
68. ‘imperatori similis in omnibus videbatur, et multas conditiones regni et imperii cur-
ieque regalis peroptime noverat’: Salimbene de Adam, Cronica, ed. Scalia, 1, p. 263
(MGH, SS 32, pp. 173–4).
69. Chronicon Turonense magnum (excerpts), ed. Holder-Egger, p. 470; Alberic of Trois-
fontaines, Chronica, ed. Scheffer-Boichorst, p. 915; Annales de Dunstaplia, ed. Luard,
p. 94; Heinricus Surdus de Selbach, Chronica, ed. Bresslau, p. 91. The word also occurs
in a passage describing the case of a man claiming in 1344 to be Alexander Bruce,
(illegitimate) nephew of King Robert Bruce of Scotland: Bower, Scotichronicon, 13. 50,
ed. Watt et al., 7, p. 158.
70. Philippe Mouskes, Chronique rimée, ed. de Reiffenberg, 2, p. 471, lines 24961–9 (MGH
SS 26, p. 773); Albert of Stade, Annales Stadenses, ed. Lappenberg, p. 358; Robert of
Auxerre, Chronicon (additamentum), ed. Holder-Egger, pp. 286–7.

549
 NOTES TO PAGES 377–83

71. See the list in Lecuppre, L’imposture politique au Moyen Âge: la seconde vie des rois, p. 311
n. 2.
72. For Oluf, see Etting, Queen Margrete I (1353–1412), and the Founding of the Nordic
Union, pp. 135–8; she gives the main chronicle source in English translation.
73. Foedera (new edn.), 1. 1, p. 177; TNA C54/34 part 2 (Close Rolls 9 Henry III), m. 17d.
74. ‘E pendet son ancessor’: Bertran de Born, The Poems of the Troubadour Bertran de Born, ed.
Paden et al., p. 331: Molt m’es dissendre car col, verse 5, line 39 (Bibliographie des
Troubadours, ed. Pilet and Carstens, 80, 28); see Riquer, ‘La littérature provençale à la
cour d’Alphonse II d’Aragon’, p. 193.
75. Chronicon Turonense magnum (excerpts), ed. Holder-Egger, p. 471.
76. Gesta archiepiscoporum Magdeburgensium, ed. Schum, p. 436.
77. ‘Utrum comes Baldewinus fuerit nec ne, Flamingi certant, et adhuc sub iudice lis est’:
Albert of Stade, Annales Stadenses, ed. Lappenberg, p. 358.
78. ‘Mirabile valde fuit de isto homine Woldemaro, et usque in hodiernum diem sunt de eo
opiniones’: Gesta archiepiscoporum Magdeburgensium, ed. Schum, p. 436.

12 NEW FAMILIES AND NEW KINGDOMS

1. Cited by Mottahedeh, Loyalty and Leadership in An Early Islamic Society, p. 100; there is
a translation of this text: Al-Tanukhi, The Table-talk of a Mesopotamian Judge, tr.
Margoliouth; the quote is at p. 63.
2. Al-Tanukhi, The Table-talk of a Mesopotamian Judge, tr. Margoliouth, p. 62.
3. ‘Quis nesciat reges et duces ab iis habuisse principium, qui Deum ignorantes superbia
rapinis perfidia homicidiis postremo universis pene sceleribus mundi principe diabolo
videlicet agitante super pares, scilicet homines, dominari cę ca cupidine et intollerabili
presumptione affectaverunt?’: Gregory VII, Registrum, 8. 21, ed. Caspar, 2, p. 552.
4. Οὗτος τοίνυν ὁ Ῥωμανὸς, ὥσπερ ἀρχὴν περιόδου τὴν ἡγεμονίαν οἰηθεὶς, ἐπειδὴ ἐς τὸν
πενθερὸν Κωνσταντίνον τὸ βασίλειον γένος ἀπετελεύτησεν ἐκ Βασιλείου τοῦ Μακεδόνος
ἠργμένον, εἰς μέλλουσαν ἀπέβλεπε γενεάν: Psellos, Chronographia, 3. 1, ed. Renauld, 1,
p. 32; ed. Reinsch, p. 31.
5. ‘eotenus quod rex regum et dux ducum eum Polonie ducem concorditer ordinavit’:
Gesta principum Polonorum, 3, ed. Maleczynski, p. 22 (this text was traditionally known as
Gallus Anonymus).
6. ‘facile est ducem ponere, sed difficile est positum deponere’: Cosmas of Prague, Chronica
Boemorum, 1. 5, ed. Bretholz, p. 14.
7. Adam of Dryburgh, De tripartito tabernaculo, 2. 13 (108–24), cols. 712–27; 2. 6 (87), col.
692, for 1180 as the date of composition.
8. Orderic Vitalis, Historia ecclesiastica, 4, ed. Chibnall, 2, p. 340.
9. ‘quasi stella matutina et quasi luna plena in diebus suis luxit. Ipse Anglis non minus
memoralis quam Cyrus Persis, Carolus Francis, Romulusve Romanis’: Adam of
Dryburgh, De tripartito tabernaculo, 2. 13, col. 719; this is borrowed from Aelred of
Rievaulx, De genealogia Henrici regis, 8, ed. Pezzini, p. 38. The first part is biblical
(Ecclesiasticus 50: 6–7) and liturgical.

550
 NOTES TO PAGES 384–6

10. ‘pacificus rex Edgarus, non minus memorabilis Anglis, quam Romulus Romanis, Cirus
Persis, Alexander Macedonibus, Karolus magnus Francis, Arcturus Britannis’: Chronica
de Mailros, ed. Stevenson, p. 34.
11. ‘Sic Arsaces quaesito simul constitutoque regno non minus memorabilis Parthis quam
Persis Cyrus, Macedonibus Alexander, Romanis Romulus’: Justinus, Epitoma historiarum
Philippicarum Pompei Trogi, 41. 5. 5, ed. Seel, p. 280.
12. Biddle, King Arthur’s Round Table: An Archaeological Investigation.
13. Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Bodley 968 (Mirouer historiale abregie), fol. 175; Daly,
‘A Rare Iconographic Theme in a Bodleian Library Manuscript: An Illustration of the
Reditus regni ad stirpem Karoli Magni in MS. Bodley 968’; Huth, ‘Erzbischof Arnulf von
Reims und der Kampf um das Königtum im Westfrankenreich’, p. 87 (re identification
as Louis IX not Louis VIII).
14. ‘Carolus . . . de cuius genere rex ipse noscitur descendisse’: Innocent III, Epistolae 7. 43
(42), Die Register Innocenz’ III., ed. Hageneder et al., 7, p. 73 (PL 215: 326); Decretales
Gregorii IX, 2. 1. 13, ed. Friedberg, col. 243 (‘Novit ille’); the French royal lawyer Pierre
Dubois wrote, ‘rex a tempore Karoli Magni sui (sic) de cuius genere descendit, ut in
canone legitur’: Dupuy, Histoire du différend d’entre le pape Boniface VIII et Philippes le Bel,
p. 45; see Brown, ‘La généalogie capétienne dans l’historiographie du Moyen Âge.
Philippe le Bel, le reniement du reditus et la création d’une ascendance carolingienne
pour Hugues Capet’, p. 205 n. 45.
15. Wipo, Gesta Chuonradi imperatoris, 4, ed. Breslau, p. 24.
16. ‘In ipsoque dignitas imperialis, quae per longum iam tempus a semine Karoli
exulaverat, ad generosum et antiquum germen Karoli reducta est’: Otto of Freising,
Chronica sive Historia de duabus civitatibus, 6. 32, ed. Hofmeister, p. 297.
17. Genealogiae Karolorum: Commemoratio genealogiae Karoli imperatoris, ed. Waitz, pp. 245–6;
Oexle, ‘Die Karolinger und die Stadt des heiligen Arnulf ’, pp. 252–62; see also above,
pp. 318, 339.
18. ‘Post hos per muliebrem lineam reparatum est genus regium hoc modo’: Ralph Niger,
Chronicon II, ed. Anstruther, p. 146.
19. ‘Mahalde . . ., Malcolmes cynges dohter of Scotlande & Margareta þære goda cwæne
Eadwardes cynges magan. 7 of þan rihtan Ængla landes kyne kynne’: Anglo-Saxon
Chronicle (E), s.a. 1100, ed. Plummer and Earle, p. 236.
20. ‘Þo smot uerst þis tre aȝen · to is kunde more’: Robert of Gloucester, Metrical Chronicle,
line 7255, ed. Wright, 1, p. 524.
21. Paul the Deacon, Liber de episcopis Mettensibus, ed. Kempf, p. 76 (MGH, SS 2, p. 265);
Paul the Deacon, Carmina, ed. Dümmler, no. 39, pp. 71–3, ‘Epitaphium Chlodarii’,
lines 29–30: ‘Priscorum nimium regum devictus amore/ Hlutharium genitor nomen
habere dedit’; Astronomus, Vita Hludowici imperatoris, 3, ed. Tremp, pp. 288–90; Jarnut,
‘Chlodwig und Chlothar. Anmerkungen zu den Namen zweier Söhne Karls des
Grossen’, discusses theories about this choice of names and points to the particular
circumstances of 778, when the twins were born.
22. ‘Ceti Edward se fit apeler Edward le tierz apres le conquest, cest a dire apres William
bastard, en se(s) lettres et chartres, et fut avis a plusours que ceo ne fu mie al honur de ly

551
 NOTES TO PAGES 388–92

ne de ses ancestres pur ceo que conquest par force ne done iames dreit, mes
covendreit que il hust hu dreit devant le conquest, car autrement li et tuz ses
successours huissent este possessours de male foy et entrusours’: BL, MS Royal 14
B VI, membrane 7, an addition of the 1340s to a royal genealogy; see Laborderie,
‘La mémoire des origines normandes des rois d’Angleterre dans les généalogies en
rouleau des XIIIe et XIVe siècles’, p. 215; Laborderie, ‘The First Manuals of English
History: Two Late Thirteenth-Century Genealogical Rolls of the Kings of England in
the Royal Collection’, pp. 24–5.
23. ‘cum naturali virium robore’: Richer of Saint-Rémi, Historiae 2. 102, ed. Hoffmann,
p. 169.
24. ‘Lotharius puer, filius Ludowici, apud Sanctum Remigium rex consecratur . . . favente
Hugone principe ac Brunone archiepiscopo ceterisque praesulibus ac proceribus
Franciae, Burgundiae atque Aquitaniae. Burgundia quoque et Aquitania Hugoni dan-
tur ab ipso’: Flodoard, Annales, s.a. 954, ed. Lauer, p. 139.
25. Böhmer and von Ottenthal, Die Regesten des Kaiserreichs unter den Herrschern aus dem
Sächsischen Hause 919–1024, 1, no. 386, pp. 181–2.
26. ‘Licet enim a fratre de regno pulsus sim’; ‘Emmam quoque reginam cuius instinctu sese
repulsum a fratre arbitrabatur’: Richer of Saint-Rémi, Historiae 4. 9, 16, ed. Hoffmann,
pp. 236, 243.
27. ‘Karolum ducem regis Lotharii fratrem, quem Otto imperator multis beneficiis con-
ductum, ut fraternis motibus secum fortior resisteret, citeriori Lotharingiae sub se
prefecerat’: Gesta episcopum Cameracensium, 1. 101, ed. Bethmann, p. 443.
28. ‘nec regnum iure hereditario adquiritur’: Richer of Saint-Rémi, Historiae 4. 11, ed.
Hoffmann, p. 238.
29. ‘Hinc fide promissa regibus Francorum urgemur, hinc potestati principis K. regnum ad
se revocantis addicti permutare dominos aut exules fieri cogimur’: Die Briefsammlung
Gerberts von Reims, ed. Weigle, no. 168, p. 196 (Arnulf to Egbert of Trier, 990).
30. ‘ut et regia potestas infirmaretur, et patruo virtus dominandi augesceret, nec ipse
desertor videretur’: Richer 4. 33, MGH SS 38, p. 253.
31. ‘XIII kalendas. Madii. anno. III. regnante Karulus rex frater Leutarius’; ‘anno
V regnante Carulo rege’: Zimmermann, ‘La datation des documents catalans du IXe
au XIIe siècle: un itinéraire politique’, p. 360 and n. 77.
32. ‘Quo iure legitimus heres exheredatus est, quo iure regno privatus?’: Die Briefsammlung
Gerberts von Reims, ed. Weigle, no. 164, p. 193 (Gerbert to Adalbero of Laon, 990);
Gerbert was only a spokesman for Charles temporarily.
33. ‘Hic deficit regnum Karoli Magni’: Historia Francorum Senonensis, ed. Waitz, p. 368.
34. Carozzi, ‘Le dernier des Carolingiens: de l’histoire au mythe’, discusses the representa-
tion of Charles and his fate.
35. ‘Adelinum . . . amplis terris ditavit, atque in carissimis habuit eum, quia regis Edwardi
genus contigerat’: William of Poitiers, Gesta Guillelmi ducis Normannorum, 2. 35, ed. Davis
and Chibnall, p. 162.
36. Domesday Book, ed. Farley, 1, fol. 142a (Hertfordshire 38).
37. John of Worcester, Chronicle, 3, ed. McGurk, p. 44.

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 NOTES TO PAGES 392–9

38. ‘ducemque sibi coevum et quasi collactaneum fratrem diligebat’: Orderic Vitalis,
Historia ecclesiastica, 10. 12, ed. Chibnall, 5, p. 272.
39. Anglo-Saxon Chronicle (E), s.a. 1091, ed. Plummer and Earle, p. 226; John of Worcester,
Chronicle, 3, ed. McGurk, p. 58.
40. Orderic Vitalis, Historia ecclesiastica, 10. 12, ed. Chibnall, 5, pp. 270–1, says Edgar was
with a body of English crusaders who occupied Latakia in Syria during the Muslim siege
of Antioch (June 1098). William of Malmesbury, Gesta regum Anglorum, 3. 251, ed.
Mynors et al., p. 466, says Edgar went to Jerusalem at the time the Turks were besieging
King Baldwin in Ramleh (May 1102). Both statements may be true, of course.
41. ‘diverso fortunae ludicro rotatus, nunc remotus et tacitus canos suos in agro consumit’:
William of Malmesbury, Gesta regum Anglorum, 3. 251, ed. Mynors et al., p. 466.
42. ‘eall swa him wel ge cynde waes’: Anglo-Saxon Chronicle (D), s.a. 1066, ed. Plummer and
Earle, p. 199.
43. Leon, Navarre, France, Burgundy, the Empire (Germany and northern Italy), England,
Scotland, Denmark, Norway, Sweden, Hungary (although it is probably an oversimplifi-
cation to assume the unitary nature of Scotland and Sweden); the rulers of Poland and
Bohemia were dukes, not kings, at this time.
44. ‘regnum Portugalense cum integritate honoris et dignitate quae ad reges pertinent’:
Alexander III, Epistolae, no. 1424, PL 200, col. 1237, JL 13420, ‘Manifestis probatum’;
the original is available online.
45. Deér, Das Papsttum und die süditalienischen Normannenstaaten, 1053–1212, pp. 62–4,
74–5; Hoffmann, ‘Langobarden, Normannen, Päpste. Zum Legitimitätsproblem in
Unteritalien’, pp. 173–8; Innocent II, Epistola 416, PL 179, cols. 478–9; both pope’s
privileges are translated in Loud, Roger II and the Making of the Kingdom of Sicily: Selected
Sources, pp. 304–6, 310–12.

13 DYNASTIES AND THE NON-DYNASTIC WORLD

1. ‘regnum Dacie transit per eleccionem liberam set tamen consueuerunt ibidem semper
eligere regales proximiores in sanguine, et si fuerint plures liberi consueuerunt saltem
unum eorum eligere qui ipsis eligentibus uidetur esse utilior et sufficientior . . . Swecie
regnum transit per eleccionem et non per successionem set consueuerunt eligere
proximiorem regalem aut unum de liberis, ut supra de regno Dacie dictum est, set
regnum Norwegie transit per successionem et non per eleccionem’: Diplomatarium
Norvegicum, 19. 2, no. 650, pp. 791–5, from BL, MS Cotton Nero B III, fol. 13.
2. The exception was Erik III the Lamb (1137–46), the son of a daughter of Erik I.
3. ‘se imperatorem et augustum omnium regum cis mare consistentium appellare praece-
pit’: ‘Continuatio Mogontiacensis’, in Annales Fuldenses, s.a. 876, ed. Kurze, p. 86.
4. ‘id iuris Romani imperii apex, videlicet non per sanguinis propaginem descendere, sed
per principum electionem reges creare, sibi tamquam ex singulari vendicat prerogative’:
Otto of Freising, Gesta Friderici I imperatoris, 2. 1, ed. Waitz and von Simson, p. 103.
5. ‘regnum Alemanniae, quod regnum Romanorum, eo quod sit quasi arra ad imperium
Romanorum adquirendum, dicitur’: Matthew Paris, Chronica majora, ed. Luard, 5, p. 624.

553
 NOTES TO PAGES 400–2

6. ‘Hoc etiam ibi consensu communi comprobatum, Romani pontificis auctoritate est
corroboratum, ut regia potestas nulli per hereditatem, sicut ante fuit consuetudo,
cederet, sed filius regis, etiam si valde dignus esset, potius per electionem sponta-
neam quam per successionis lineam rex proveniret; si vero non esset dignus regis
filius, vel si nollet eum populus, quem regem facere vellet, haberet in potestate
populus’: Bruno, De Bello Saxonico Liber, 91, ed. Lohmann, p. 85.
7. ‘imperator habuit curiam Herbipolis circa mediam quadragesimam, in qua plurimi
signum dominice crucis acceperunt. Ad eandem curiam imperator novum et inaudi-
tum decretum Romano regno voluit cum principibus confirmare, ut in Romanum
regnum, sicut in Francie vel ceteris regnis, iure hereditario reges sibi succederent, in
quo principes qui aderant assensum ei prebuerunt et sigillis suis confirmaverunt’:
Annales Marbacenses, ed. Bloch, p. 68; the subject had already been broached at an
assembly in Mainz some months earlier: Cronica Reinhardbrunnensis, ed. Holder-Egger,
p. 556; for general discussion, see Schmidt, Königswahl und Thronfolge im 12. Jahrhundert,
pp. 231–55; Csendes, Heinrich VI, pp. 171–8.
8. ‘apud rebelles atrocissimus, hostibus invictus, contumacibus severus, proditoribus
immisericors’: Gervase of Tilbury, Otia Imperialia, 2. 19, ed. Banks and Binns, p. 462.
9. ‘terminus . . . electionis principiumque successive dignitatis’: ibid., p. 462.
10. Cronica Reinhardbrunnensis, ed. Holder-Egger, p. 558 (Frederick was called Constantine
at this time).
11. ‘In eo quoque stamus pro principum libertate quod ei favorem penitus denegamus qui
sibi iure successionis imperium nititur vindicare. Videretur enim imperium non ex
principum electione conferri, sed sanguinis successione deberi, si, prout olim patri
filius, sic nunc fratri frater vel natus patri nullo succederet mediante’: Regestum
Innocentii III papae super negotio Romani imperii, ed. Kempf, no. 55, p. 149 (PL 216:
1057); cf. no. 29, p. 83 (PL 216: 1028).
12. ‘ad unitatem inter electores fovendam et electionem unanimem inducendam’: Bulla
Aurea Karoli IV. Imperatoris, ed. Fritz, p. 45.
13. ‘Est ergo temporalis monarchia, quam dicunt imperium, unicus principatus et super
omnes in tempore’: Monarchia, 1. 2, ed. Chiesa and Tabarroni, pp. 6–8.
14. Dante, On World Government or De Monarchia, tr. Schneider.
15. ‘Et sic patet quod ad bene esse mundi necesse est monarchiam esse sive imperium’:
Monarchia, 1. 5, ed. Chiesa and Tabarroni, p. 28 (and repeatedly).
16. ‘non inveniemus nisi sub divo Augusti, monarcha existente monarchia perfecta mundi
undique fuisse quietum’: ibid., 1. 16, p. 68.
17. ‘auctoritas monarche Romani, qui de iure monarchia mundi est’: ibid., 3. 1, p. 154.
18. ‘Moysen alium . . . qui de gravaminibus Egiptiorum populum suum eripiet, ad
terram lacte ac melle manantem perducens’: Dante, Epistola 5. 1, ed. Pastore
Stocchi, p. 30.
19. ‘quia sponsus tuus, mundi solatium et gloria plebis tue, clementissimus Henricus, divus
et Augustus et Cesar, ad nuptias properat’: ibid., 5. 2, p. 30.
20. ‘alto Arrigo, ch’a drizzare Italia/ verrà in prima ch’ella sia disposta’: Dante, Paradiso 30,
lines 137–8, in La Commedia, ed. Petrocchi, 4, p. 507.

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 NOTES TO PAGES 403–8

21. ‘diminutum, mutilatum, laceratum et occupatum a pluribus et diversis principibus . . . ad

brevissimum terrarum subiectarum sibi numerum est redacta . . . gentem acerbam et
intractabilem, que magis adheret barbarice feritati quam Christiane professioni . . . quod
bonum aut utile contingat mundo’: Constitutiones et acta publica imperatorum et regum, 4. 2,
ed. Schwalm, no. 1253, pp. 1369–73.
22. For a lively argument of this type, see Gillingham, ‘Elective Kingship and the Unity of
Medieval Germany’.
23. See, in general, Yorke, Nunneries and the Anglo-Saxon Royal Houses.
24. They are listed in Hartmann, Die Königin im frühen Mittelalter, pp. 203–4 (the number of
fourteen excludes those prior to the family’s accession to the throne and those cate-
gorized only as Inhaberin).
25. ‘contempto habitu seculari, sacrum Christi velamen induere voluistis, . . . fluxa et caduca
spernere, certa aeternaque requirere, abrenuntiare diabolo et seculo et pompae et oper-
ibus eius, et sequi Christum . . . Haec te caesareo generatam semine karta,/ Moribus et
specie ornatam, Theodrada, salutat’: Dungal, Epistolae, 7, ed. Dümmler, pp. 581–2.
26. ‘multae nobiles moniales’: Asser, De rebus gestis Aelfredi, 98, ed. Stevenson, p. 85.
27. Æthelweard, Chronicon, 4. 6, ed. Campbell, p. 54; Anglo-Saxon Chronicle (E), s.a. 980, ed.
Plummer and Earle, pp. 123–5; Byrhtferth of Ramsey, Vita sancti Oswaldi, 4. 21, ed.
Lapidge, p. 144.
28. The Heads of Religious Houses: England and Wales 1 (940–1216), ed. Knowles et al., p. 219.
29. Prestwich, ‘Mary [Mary of Woodstock] (1278–c. 1332)’, ODNB, 36, pp. 66–7; Bartlett,
Why Can the Dead Do Such Great Things? Saints and Worshippers from the Martyrs to the
Reformation, pp. 438–9.
30. Klaniczay, Holy Rulers and Blessed Princesses: Dynastic Cults in Medieval Central Europe, pp.
195–294.
31. Klaniczay, Holy Rulers and Blessed Princesses: Dynastic Cults in Medieval Central Europe.
32. ‘als einziger regierender Karolinger’: Schieffer, ‘Väter und Söhne im Karolingerhause’,
p. 157.
33. Annales Bertiniani, s.a. 873, ed. Waitz, p. 122; Annales Xantenses, s.a. 873, ed. von Simson,
p. 32; ‘Continuatio Mogontiacensis’, in Annales Fuldenses, s.a. 873, ed. Kurze, p. 78; see
Nelson, ‘A Tale of Two Princes: Politics, Text and Ideology in a Carolingian Annal’.
34. ‘Ibi principes vi et rapto assueti, populi rerum novarum cupidi, civilibus omnes cladibus
intenti aliorum ditescere miseriis preoptabant’: Ruotger, Vita Brunonis Archiepiscopi
Coloniensis, 10, ed. Ott, p. 11.
35. ‘fratrem suum Brunonem occidenti tutorem et provisorem, et, ut ita dicam, archidu-
cem, in tam periculoso tempore misit’: ibid., 20, p. 19.
36. For a story of Bruno once contemplating betrayal of Otto, see Thietmar of Merseburg,
Chronicon, 2. 23, ed. Holtzmann, pp. 66–7, although the confused details make it doubtful.
37. ‘In te namque et sacerdotalis religio et regia pollet fortitudo’: Ruotger, Vita Brunonis
Archiepiscopi Coloniensis, 20, ed. Ott, p. 19.
38. Although Charles of Anjou, the youngest son of Louis VIII, was intended for the
Church until his elder brother John died, something pointed out by an anonymous
reader of this book for Cambridge University Press.

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39. ‘De fructu vero ventris sui decimas Deo obtulit filias suas, I. ad Quidilingeburg
Aethelheidam nomine, alteram ad Gonnesheim, quae Sophia dicitur’: Thietmar of
Merseburg, Chronicon, 4. 10, ed. Holtzmann, p. 142.
40. ‘pro liberatione sua et regni . . . quasi piaculum quoddam, si filia nasceretur, ut
sanctimonialem eam facerent, devoverunt (emended from devenerunt)’: Vita beatae
Margaritae de Hungaria, 2, ed. Csepregi et al., p. 44.
41. Leo VI, Oraison funébre de Basile I par son fils Léon VI le Sage, p. 64.
42. ‘Scotticana ecclesia apostolicae sedi, cujus filia specialis existit, nullo mediante debeat
subjacere’: Gesta regis Henrici secundi Benedicti abbatis, ed. Stubbs, 2, p. 234 (there
ascribed to Clement III, but in fact issued by Celestine III).
43. Sancho, youngest son of James I of Aragon and Yolande of Hungary, became arch-
bishop of Toledo in 1266 at the age of sixteen; he was killed by Muslims in 1275. John,
a younger son of James II of Aragon, was archbishop of Toledo 1319–28.
44. ‘multorum peritorum nobilium ac magnatum decenti pariter ac potenti comitiva
vallatus’: Continuatio Chronici Guillelmi de Nangiaco, ed. Géraud, 1, p. 389; Barber, The
Trial of the Templars, p. 228.
45. ‘Quia damnate memorie Johannes Henrrici, tunc Castelle et Legionis regnorum detentor,
ipsa Portugalie et Algarbii regna devastare et occupare nitebatur . . . filio perditionis
Roberto olim basilice duodecim Apostolorum presbytero cardinali, tunc et nunc antipape,
qui se Clementem VII ausu sacrilego nominare presumebat, prout et nunc presumit’:
Monumenta Portugaliae Vaticana, 2, ed. Costa, CXII–CXV, CVIII–CXI (Boniface IX,
27–28 January 1391).
46. ‘Apud illos non est rex, nisi tantum lex’: Adam of Bremen, Gesta Hammaburgensis
ecclesiae pontificum, Scholion 156 (150) to 4. 36 (35), ed. Schmeidler, p. 273.
47. The Saga of Hacon, 257, tr. Vigfusson and Dasent, p. 262.
48. Annales regni Francorum, s.a. 810, ed. Kurze, p. 133.
49. ‘praecationem ad nostrum fecerunt imperium’: Tafel and Thomas, ed., Urkunden zur
älteren Handels- und Staatsgeschichte der Republik Venedig, 1, no. 17, pp. 36–9.
50. E.g. at the court held at Würzburg in October 1152, ‘expeditio Italica . . . paulo
minus quam ad duos annos iurata est’: Otto of Freising, Gesta Friderici I imperatoris
2. 7, ed. Waitz and von Simson, p. 108; the phrase expeditio Italica is a standard
term.
51. ‘civitas haec inimica regibus ab antiquo fuisse dicatur’: Rahewin, Gesta Friderici
I imperatoris, 3. 37, ed. Waitz and von Simson, p. 210.
52. ‘Et quis esset, qui posset lacrimas retinere, qui videret planctum et luctum atque
merorem marium et mulierum et maxime infirmorum et feminarum de partu et
puerorum egredientium et proprios lares relinquentium?’: Narratio de Longobardie
obpressione, ed. Schmale, pp. 276–8 (MGH, SRG 27, p. 53).
53. Raccagni, The Lombard League 1167–1225, pp. 113–18.
54. A late medieval chronicler says these names arose from the war-cries of the
Hohenstaufen and their rivals, the Welfs, with ‘Ghibelline’ being derived from
Waiblingen, the place where Barbarossa’s father had been raised: Andrew of
Regensburg, Cronica de principibus terrae Bavarorum, ed. Leidinger, pp. 538–9.

556
 NOTES TO PAGES 418–25

55. ‘Absit enim, ut in populo Christiano sceptrum regiminis ulterius maneat apud illum vel
in vipeream eius propaginem transferatur’: Epistolae saeculi XIII e regestis pontificum
Romanorum selectae, ed. Rodenberg, 2, no. 585, p. 416, 30 August 1248 (Po. 13007).
56. ‘sicque . . . coram textoribus, fullonibus et vulgaribus Flamingis et peditibus . . . corruit
ars pugne, flos militie cum electissimorum equorum et dextrariorum fortitudine; et
pulcritudo ac potentia validissimi exercitus conversa est in sterquilinium factaque est
ibi [gloria] Francorum stercus et vermis’: Annales Gandenses, ed. Johnstone, p. 30.
57. ‘dominum Ferdinandum tertium, electum Romanorum imperatorem, semper augus-
tum, Germaniae, Hungariae, Bohemiae, Dalmatiae, Croatiae, Sclavoniae regem, archi-
ducem Austriae, ducem Burgundiae, Brabantiae, Styriae, Carinthiae, Carniolae,
marchionem Moraviae, ducem Luxemburgiae, Superioris ac Inferioris Silesiae,
Württenbergae et Teckae, principem Sueviae, comitem Habsburgi, Tyrolis, Kyburgi
et Gorritiae, marchionem Sacri Romani Imperii, Burgoviae ac Superioris et Inferioris
Lusatiae, dominum Marchiae Sclavonicae, Portus Naonis et Salinarum’: Acta Pacis
Westphalicae, Serie III Abteilung B: Verhandlungsakten 1: Die Friedensverträge mit Frankreich
und Schweden 1: Urkunden, ed. Oschmann, pp. 3–4.
58. Gislebert of Mons, Chronicon Hanoniense, 186, 188, 190, ed. Vanderkindere, pp. 275,
276, 277.
59. ‘“Ego Alexander rex Scocie devenio ligeus homo domini Edwardi regis Anglie contra
omnes gentes”’ . . . salvo jure et clamio ejusdem regis Anglie et heredum suorum de
homagio predicti regis Scocie et heredum suorum de regno Scocie, cum inde loqui
voluerint . . . servicia debita de terris et tenementis que teneo de rege Anglie’: Stones
(ed.), Anglo-Scottish Relations 1174–1328: Some Selected Documents, no. 12 (a), pp. 78–80
[39]–[40].
60. ‘quia regnum ipsum Scocie . . . de jure communi per quod par in parem non haberet
imperium, et per quod rex regi non subest vel regnum regno . . . quo ad ipsum regem
Anglie fuit semper omnino liberum’: Bower, Scotichronicon, 11. 48, ed. Watt et al., 6,
p. 138; ‘par droit commun que un roialme ne deit mye estre sugiet a un autre’:
Chronicon de Lanercost, 1201–1346, ed. Stevenson, p. 517, ‘Illustrative Documents’, no.
40 (from BL, MS Cotton Vespasian F VII).
61. Zimmermann, ‘La datation des documents catalans du IXe au XIIe siècle: un itinéraire
politique’.
62. The text of the Treaty is in Layettes du Trésor des Chartes, ed. Teulet et al., no. 4411, 3, pp.
405–8.
63. ‘cum nequeat quis competenter duobus dominis servire, vel penitus mihi vel regi Angliae
inseparabiliter adhaereat’: Matthew Paris, Chronica majora, ed. Luard, 4, p. 288.
64. Book of Fees, 2, pp. 1142–3.
65. ‘Mettons par exemple que le roy de France ait une fille ainsnee et un filz mainsné; ceste
fille est mariee au filz du roy de Honguerie, duquel marriage est né un filz; lequel, par
rayson, devera miex amer le pueple et le royaume de France, ou le filz mainsné du Roy,
ou le filz de celle fille aisnee? Certes . . . le filz du Roy’: Songe du Vergier, 1. 142. 8, ed.
Schnerb-Lièvre, 1, p. 250.

557
 NOTES TO PAGES 425–8

66. ‘quod regnum Angliae in nullo regno Franciae subjiceretur’: Chronicon de Lanercost,
1201–1346, ed. Stevenson, p. 333 (s.a. 1340); Parliament Rolls of Medieval England, ed.
Given-Wilson, 4, p. 268, no. 9.
67. ‘jura, leges, libertates et consuetudines ejusdem regni Scotiae . . . integre et inviolabili-
ter perpetuis temporibus observentur . . . regnum Scotiae remaneat separatum et
divisum et liberum in se sine subjectione a regno Angliae’: Documents Illustrative of the
History of Scotland from the Death of Alexander III to the Accession of Robert Bruce, ed.
Stevenson, 1, no. 108, pp. 162–73 (The Treaty of Birgham).
68. ‘nullum capitaneum, nullum purcravium vel castellanum in castris nostris, nullum
beneficiarium vel officialem aliquem in Boemia vel Moravia, vel in curia nostra pone-
mus alienigenam, nec bona, possessiones vel castra, vel officia aliqua alienigenis ipsis in
perpetuum vel ad tempus dabimus, nec eos hereditare in regno Boemiae aliqualiter
admittemus’: Regesta diplomatica nec non epistolaria Bohemiae et Moraviae, 2, ed. Emler, no.
2245, pp. 973–5.
69. Długosz, Annales seu Cronicae incliti regni Poloniae, ed. Da˛browski et al., 5, pp. 273–6.
70. ‘Sed quantum dampnum regnum Swecie et indigine pertulerunt propter regem extra-
neum et dominum [dominium?] et principatum extraneorum sane mentis poterit
estimare. Deus custodiet nos ne umquam dominentur nobis Sweivis principes extra-
nei!’: Paulsson, ‘Studier i “Strängnäsmartyrologiet”’, p. 33, from the Strängnäs
Martyrology (Stockholm, National Library, MS A 28).
71. ‘ne . . . aliquid unionis regnum ad imperium quovis tempore putaretur habere’: Friderici
II. Diplomata, 2, ed. Koch, no. 369, p. 396 (1 July 1216).
72. ‘de illo ex ejusdem regis Francie filiis quem ad hoc ipse rex elegerit, alio tamen ab eo
qui sibi est in dicto regno Francie successurus . . . Eadem insuper regnum et comitatus
in eandem personam cum Francie vel Castelle seu Legionis aut Anglie regnis aliquo
umquam tempore non concurrant’: Reg. Vat. 41, fol. 162 v., n. 7; Les Registres de Martin
IV (1281–1285), ed. Olivier-Martin, no. 455, pp. 191–2, ‘Qui regna transfert’,
27 August 1283, Po. 22061.
73. Regum Burgundiae e Stirpe Rudolfina Diplomata et Acta, ed. Schieffer (1977), p. 77; this
example, ‘Rodulfus divina favente clementia rex’, is no. 3, p. 97 (an original of 888).
74. For a refutation of the common assertion that French kings were ‘kings of the French’
in their documents before the reign of Philip Augustus (1180–1223), and ‘kings of
France’ from that time, see Schneidmüller, ‘Herrscher über Land oder Leute? Der
kapetingische Herrschertitel in der Zeit Philipps II. August und seiner Nachfolger
(1180–1270)’.
75. Reinado y diplomas de Fernando III, ed. González, 1, p. 518.
76. See the comments of Schneidmüller, ‘Herrscher über Land oder Leute? Der
kapetingische Herrschertitel in der Zeit Philipps II. August und seiner
Nachfolger (1180–1270)’, pp. 134–6.
77. Reynolds, Kingdoms and Communities in Western Europe, 900–1300, pp. 261–98, passim;
Davies, ‘The Peoples of Britain and Ireland 1100–1400 II: Names, Boundaries and
Regnal Solidarities’.

558
 NOTES TO PAGES 429–33

CONCLUSION

1. ‘Dominium quod rex habet in regno est alterius specie a dominio rerum quae patri-
monialiter succedentur’: Joannes de Terra Rubea (Terrerouge), Contra rebelles suorum
regum, 1. 1. 13, fol. 15; for a summary of this author’s views, see Giesey, ‘The Juristic Basis
of Dynastic Right to the French Throne’, pp. 12–17; Giesey, Le Rôle méconnu de la loi
salique. La succession royale (xive–xvie siècles), pp. 129–35.
2. Robinson, The Papacy 1073–1198: Continuity and Innovation, pp. 312–18, on idoneitas.
3. ‘juravit quod ipse omnibus diebus vitae suae pacem et honorem atque reverentiam Deo
et Sanctae Ecclesiae et ejus ordinatis portaret. Deinde juravit, quod rectam justitiam et
aequitatem exerceret in populo sibi commisso. Deinde juravit quod malas leges et
consuetudines perversas, si quae sunt in regno suo inductae sunt, deleret et bonas leges
conderet et sine fraude et malo ingenio eas custodiret’: Roger of Howden, Chronica, ed.
Stubbs, 3, p. 10; cf. Gesta regis Henrici secundi Benedicti abbatis, ed. Stubbs, 2, pp. 81–2.
4. Bagge, Cross and Scepter: The Rise of the Scandinavian Kingdoms from the Vikings to the
Reformation, pp. 149–50.
5. Recueil general des anciennes lois françaises, 5, no. 411, p. 291; Carlyle and Carlyle, A History
of Medieval Political Theory in the West, 6, pp. 67–8.
6. ‘Quem si ab inceptis desisteret, regi Anglorum aut Anglicis nos aut regnum nostrum
volens subicere, tanquam inimicum nostrum et sui nostrique iuris subversorem statim
expellere niteremus et alium regem nostrum . . . faceremus’: Acts of the Parliaments of
Scotland, 1, ed. Thomson and Innes, p. 475 (115); an original survives in the National
Records of Scotland in Edinburgh.
7. Davies, ‘The Peoples of Britain and Ireland 1100–1400 II: Names, Boundaries and
Regnal Solidarities’, p. 11.
8. ‘quod, alienigenis ab Anglia remotis, per indigenas gubernetur’: Annales Londonienses,
ed. Stubbs, p. 61.
9. ‘Inauditum enim erat, quod aliquis antecessorum suorum umquam illuc venisset’:
Gislebert of Mons, Chronicon Hanoniense, 137, ed. Vanderkindere, p. 204.
10. Bennett, Lambert Simnel and the Battle of Stoke, p. 17.
11. ‘Dies bedeutet eben nicht nur, dass Eheschliessungen, Geburten und Todesfälle zu
politischen Vorgängen ersten Ranges werden, sondern auch dass sich personelle
Veränderungen an der Spitze schon Jahre oder gar Jahrzehnte vor ihrer
tatsächlichen Wirksamkeit sichtbar am Horizont abzeichnen’: Schieffer, ‘Väter und
Söhne im Karolingerhause’, p. 149.
12. ‘Nihil certius morte, nihil incertior hora mortis’; the phrase is proverbial; see, e.g.,
Anselm (attrib.), Meditatio VII, col. 741; Peter Comestor, Sermones, 9, col. 1748; Bracton’s
Notebook, ed. Maitland, 1, pp. xix, 93.
13. ‘Super haec attendant, quia cum in Francorum terra reges ex genere prodeant, quis
regum a centum et amplius annis recolitur in filiis suis vel usque in quartam gener-
ationem regnasse? Siquidem Ottones, prae omnibus ante se regibus sacerdotalis officii
praesumptores, vix attigere tertiam. Post quos primus Heinricus nullam. Quod et in
aliis regnis et principatibus contigisse, qui disquisierit, invenire poterit’: Humbertus of
Silva Candida, Adversus Simoniacos, 3. 15, ed. Thaner, p. 217. Here I have taken

559
 NOTES TO PAGE 434

‘Francorum’ to refer to the French, i.e. the West Franks, which harmonizes with the use
of the title ‘rex Francorum’ for Henry I of France elsewhere in the text (3. 7, p. 206), but
if ‘siquidem’ is taken strongly, as indicating the grounds for the previous statement, the
‘Francorum terra’ would mean the land of the East Franks. If so, the implication would be
that Humbert thinks East Frankish kingship hereditary. ‘In Francorum regno reges ex
genere prodeunt’ is a quotation from Gregory I, Homilia in evangelia, 1. 10. 5, ed. Etaix,
p. 69.
14. ‘puisque les princes sont hommes, et leurs affaires sont haulx et agus, et leurs natures
sont subgettes à passions maintes comme à haine et envie . . . et sont leurs coeurs vray
habitacle d’icelles à cause de leur gloire en régner’: Chastellain, Chronique, 4. 6, ed.
Kervyn de Lettenhove, 3, p. 30.

560
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p41/b (document dated by the capture of ‘Mons Alba’, 1206)
Cambridge, CCCC, MS 45 (Bernard Gui, Reges Francorum, Arbor genealogiae regum Francorum)
Trinity College, MS O. 4. 32 (Nicholas Trevet’s Anglo-Norman chronicle)
Leiden, Universiteitsbibliotheek, MS VG G F 6 (Nicholas Trevet’s Anglo-Norman
chronicle)
London, BL, MS Arundel 66 (‘Henry VII’s Book of Astrology’)
BL, MS Cotton Faustina A VIII (prophecies)
BL, MS Harley 7353 (genealogy of Edward IV)
BL, MS Royal 14 B VI (genealogical roll)
BL, MS Royal 14 C VII (Matthew Paris, Historia Anglorum)
BL, MS Yates Thompson 3 (Dunois Hours)
TNA, C62/21 (Liberate Roll 29 Henry III)
TNA, E36/203 (Wardrobe accounts 12–14 Edward III)
TNA, KB9/72/1–6, 9, 11, 14 (indictments against Eleanor Cobham)
TNA, SC1/37/182 (letter of Frederick of Habsburg)
Munich, Bayerische Staatsbibliothek, clm 29880/6 (the ‘Bamberger Tafel’)
Bayerische Staatsbibliothek, Cod. icon. 308 n (Wernigeroder or Schaffhausensches
Wappenbuch)
Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Bodley 968 (Mirouer historiale abregie)
Paris, AN, AE/III/165, Cote d’origine: J//601/25 (marriage agreement between
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BnF, MS fr. 13565 (Récit d’un ménestrel d’Alphonse de Poitiers)
BnF, MS fr. 22912–3 (Raoul de Presles’ translation of the City of God)
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BnF, MS lat. 6191 (Giles of Paris, Karolinus)
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Prague, Archiv der Nationalgalerie, AA 2015, Codex Heidelbergensis (sixteenth-century
copies of the Karlštejn wall paintings)
Utrecht, Universiteitsbibliotheek, MS 306 (3 C 3) (Thomas Waleys, Expositio super libros
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Vatican City, BAV, MS Reg. lat. 339 (genealogy from St.-Gallen)
BAV, MS Reg. lat. 1283A (genealogy from Angers)

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BAV, MS Vat. lat. 4015 (canonization process of Thomas de Cantilupe)

Reg. Vat. 18, 21, 24, 25, 27, 28, 41, 48
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606
 Index

People prior to 1400 are alphabetized by first name or, if not, are cross-referenced. Rulers are
alphabetized by name of kingdom or people ruled and then by numerical sequence (so
Henry I of England precedes Henry I of Germany and Louis VI precedes Louis IX, though
the kings of Leon and Castile are listed as a continuous sequence). Roman emperors down to
Justinian are termed ‘Roman emperor’, thereafter ‘Byzantine emperor’. Western emperors
are termed ‘emperor’; rulers elected ‘king of the Romans’ are termed ‘German king’; their
dates are always those of their reign as king. For a note on the term ‘Holy Roman Emperor’,
see pp. 437–8. Smaller places in (modern) France are identified by department, smaller
places in the British Isles by historic county.

Aachen, Rhineland, 93, 96, 199, 206, 389, Adela of Vohburg, wife of Frederick I
399, 415 Barbarossa, 66, 330
Abd al-‘Aziz, governor of al-Andalus Adelheid of Aquitaine (1026), wife of Louis
(714–16), 18 V, 54
Abel, son of Adam and Eve, 188 Adelheid of Burgundy (d. 999), wife of
Abraham, biblical patriarch, 284, 410 Lothar of Italy and Otto I, 12
Absalom, son of biblical King David, 111 Adelheid, abbess of Quedlinburg (d. 1043),
Accursius, Roman lawyer (d. 1263), 106, daughter of Otto II, 409–10
108 Adelheid, mistress of Frederick II, 176
Achilles, name, 177 Adolf of Nassau, German king (1292–8),
Adalbero, bishop of Laon (977–c.1030), 245, 519
228, 389, 390–1 adoption, 78–84, 472
Adalbero, archbishop of Rheims (969–89), Adrianople (Edirne, Turkey), 375
390, 451 Adriatic Sea, 214, 368, 414–15
Adaloald, king of the Lombards (616–26), adultery, 57, 86, 139, 146, 155, 162, 166,
444 168, 181, 226–31, 236, 237, 239, 389,
Adam of Bremen, chronicler (fl. 1066–80), 390, 469
4, 36, 42 Ælfgifu (d. 944), wife of Edmund, king of
Adam of Dryburgh, auther of The Triple England, 405
Tabernacle (1180), 382–3 Ælfgifu (fl. 1006–1036), wife of Canute the
Adela (d. 1076), daughter of Robert II of Great, 364
France, 328 Aelred of Rievaulx (d. 1167), 357, 383
Adela (d. 1115), daughter of Robert the Æthelbald, king of Wessex (858–60), 37,
Frisian, wife of Canute II (or IV) of 293
Denmark and Duke Roger Borsa, 21 Æthelbert, St, king of the East Angles
Adela of Champagne (d. 1206), wife of (d. 794), 85
Louis VII of France, 269 Æthelbert, king of Kent (d. 616), 253

607
 INDEX

Æthelbert, king of Wessex (860–5), 293 Albert, Prince Consort (1819–61), husband
Æthelgeofu, abbess of Shaftesbury, of Queen Victoria, 204
daughter of Alfred the Great of Albert, royal name, 290
Wessex, 405 Albigensian Crusade (1209–29), 423
Æthelred the Unready, king of England Alcalá de Henares, Castile, 241
(978–1013, 1014–16), 12–13, 35–6, Alcobaça, Cistercian monastery, Portugal,
42, 279, 293, 445, 476 163–4, 165, 258, 260, 271, 273, 274
Æthelred, king of Wessex (865–71), 293 Aldebaran, star, 343
Æthelred, son of Malcolm III and queen Aldfrith, king of Northumbria
Margaret of Scotland, 298 (685–704/5), 168
Æthelred, royal name, 305 Alessandria, Piedmont, 418
Æthelstan, king of England (924–39), 21, Alexander II, pope (1061–73), 181, 298
33, 87, 201 Alexander III, pope (1159–81), 408, 418
Æthelstan, son of Æthelwulf of Wessex, 293 Alexander VI, pope (1492–1503), 345
Æthelwulf, king of Wessex (839–58), 12, 37, Alexander, Byzantine emperor (912–13), 94
293, 315 Alexander I, king of Scots (1107–24), 180,
Afghanistan, maternal mortality rate in, 298
55 Alexander II, king of Scots (1214–49), 190,
Africa, 221 298, 313, 448
Agilolfings, dukes of Bavaria, 288 Alexander III, king of Scots (1249–86), 190,
Agilulf, king of the Lombards (d. 616), 35 298, 448
Agincourt, battle of (1415), 113 accedes as minor, 445
Agnes (d. 1077), wife of Henry III of and Maid of Norway, 144
Germany, 30, 118, 122, 330 and marriage of his son Alexander, 101,
Agnes (d. 1143), daughter of Henry IV of 103
Germany, 14 death of, 59, 73, 74, 355
Agnes (d. 1282), daughter of Premysl his relations with Edward I, 421
Otakar I of Bohemia, 405 widow of, See Yolande of Dreux
Agnes of Edessa, wife of Amalric I of Alexander (d. 1284), son of Alexander III of
Jerusalem, 182 Scotland, 101–2, 448
Agnes of Meran (d. 1201), wife of Philip Alexander Bruce, nephew of Robert I of
Augustus of France, 47, 183 Scotland, 549
Agnes-Anna, Byzantine empress, wife of Alexander the Great (d. 323 BC), 298, 315,
Alexius II and Andronicus I 384
Comnenus, 36 Alexander, name, 298
Aimery of Lusignan, See Amalric of Lusignan Alexius I Comnenus, Byzantine emperor
Aimoin of Fleury, chronicler (c. 1000), 294, (1081–1118), 252, 287, 355, 363
339 Alexius II, Byzantine emperor (1180–3),
Aistulf, king of the Lombards (d. 756), 242 36–7, 238–9, 445, 483
Aix-en-Provence (Bouches-du-Rhône), 253 pretender claiming to be, 366, 368–9, 375
Akkadians, 295 Alexius III Angelus, Byzantine emperor
Alan, lord of Galloway (d. 1234), 202 (1195–1203), 194, 228, 229
Albert II, king of the Belgians (1993–2013), Alexius Branas, Byzantine rebel (d. 1187),
290 346
Albert I of Habsburg, German king Alexius Comnenus, protosebastos (blinded
(1298–1308), 48, 191, 246, 519 1182), 238
Albert of Habsburg, king of Hungary and Alfonso I, king of Asturias (739–57), 309
Bohemia (1438–9), 39, 58, 114, 290 Alfonso I the Battler, king of Aragon
Albert of Habsburg, duke of Austria (d. (1104–34), 63–4, 133–4, 135, 138,
1358), 49 141, 232–3, 310, 363–4, 409, 412
Albert the Bear, margrave of Brandenburg pretender claiming to be, 363–4, 366,
(d. 1170), 187 373, 377, 378

608
 INDEX

Alfonso II, king of Aragon (1164–96), 120, Alfonso VII, as style for Alfonso the Battler,
292, 378, 445, 527 310
Alfonso IV, king of Aragon (1327–36), 75, Alfonso VIII, as style for Alfonso VII, 310
449 Alfonso IX, as style for Alfonso VIII, 310
Alfonso V, king of Aragon (1416–58) and Alfred, king of Wessex (871–99), 37, 293,
Naples (1442–58), 82–3, 175, 440 382–3, 405
Alfonso V, king of Leon (999–1028), 264, Algarve, Portugal, 413
445 Algeciras, Andalusia, 49
Alfonso VI, king of Leon and Castile (1065– Alice (d. 1173x1178), daughter of Humbert
1109), 19, 69, 131, 133, 135, 138, 141, of Maurienne, 197
142, 194, 203–4, 264, 310, 441, 470 Alice (d. 1348), wife of Thomas of
Alfonso VII, king of Leon and Castile Lancaster, 333
(1126–57), 131, 133–4, 232–3, 310 Alice Perrers (d. 1400/01), mistress of
Alfonso VIII, king of Castile (1158–1214), Edward III of England, 164
23, 125, 256–7, 310, 445 Aljubarrota, battle of (1385), 172, 173, 258
Alfonso IX, king of Leon (1188–1230), 46, Almoravids, Muslim dynasty, 19
165, 183–4, 253, 310 Almos, Hungarian duke (blinded c. 1113),
Alfonso X the Wise, king of Leon and 251
Castile (1252–84) Aloy, Master, Catalan sculptor
age at death of, 240 (fl. 1342–1360), 317
and astrology, 344 Alphonse of Poitiers (d. 1271), son of Louis
and marriage of his daughter Berengaria, VIII of France, 200
101, 102, 103, 144 Alps, 197, 416–18, 437
and numbering of monarchs, 309–10 Alsace, 12, 452
and the Siete Partidas, 219 Altdorf, Swabia, 292
burial of, 275–6 Aly Aben Ragel (Abuˉ l-Hasan ‘Alıˉ ibn Abıˉ l-
˙
his conflict with his son Sancho, 220 Rijaˉ l), North African astrologer, 344
illegitimate children of, 67, 165, 180 Amal dynasty of the Ostrogoths, 380
sons of, 101, 219 Amalfi, Campania, 394
Alfonso XI, king of Leon and Castile (1312– Amalric I, king of Jerusalem (1162–74), 46,
50), 39, 49, 160–1, 165, 174, 220, 262, 145, 182
276, 445 Amalric of Lusignan, king of Cyprus
Alfonso I, king of Portugal (1139–85), 233, (1197–1205), king of Jerusalem
257–8, 394, 441 (1198–1205), 145, 307
Alfonso II, king of Portugal (1211–23), 258 Amalswintha (d. 534/5), daughter of
Alfonso III, king of Portugal (1248–79), Theodoric of the Ostrogoths,
67–8, 258, 303 116–17
Alfonso IV, king of Portugal (1325–57), Amazons, 3
163, 258 Amesbury (Wiltshire), 405
Alfonso V, king of Portugal (1438–81), 258, Amorians, Byzantine dynasty, 287
303, 323, 446 Anacletus II, antipope (1130–8), 395
Alfonso (d. 1260), son of James I of Aragon, Anarchy, The (in England, 1139–53), 222
182 Anastasia (d. 1317), wife of Henry I of
Alfonso (d. 1284), son of Edward I of Mecklenburg, 362
England, 62 Andalus, al-, 20
Alfonso (d. 1510), illegitimate son of Andelot, Treaty of (586), 479
Ferdinand (Ferrante) of Naples, Andrew II, king of Hungary (1205–35), 31,
175, 474 312–13
Alfonso de la Cerda (d. c. 1333), claimant to Andrew of Hungary (d. 1345), husband of
the throne of Castile, 219–20 Joanna I of Naples, 247, 480
Alfonso de Gandía, claimant to Aragonese Andrew of Marchiennes, chronicler
throne (d. 1412), 75, 77, 449 (d. 1202), 350

609
 INDEX

Andrew Albert Christian Edward, son of Anna of Kiev (d. 1075x1089), wife of Henry
Elizabeth II, 290 I of France, 44, 232
Andronicus I Comnenus, Byzantine Anna porphyrogenita (d. 1011), sister of
emperor (1183–5), 36, 238–9, 355 Basil II, wife of Vladimir of Kiev, 13
Andronicus III, Byzantine emperor Anna of Savoy (d. 1365), wife of Andronicus
(1328–41), 454 III, 483
Andronicus IV, Byzantine emperor Annals of Ulster, 250
(1376–9), 342 Anne (d. 1265), daughter of Premysl
Angeloi, Byzantine dynasty, 287, 436 Otakar I of Bohemia, 406
Angevin kings of England, 21–4, 66, 108, Anne of Bohemia (d. 1394), wife of Richard
252, See also Henry II; Richard I; John II of England, 162, 271–2
Angevin kings and queens of Sicily, Naples Anne, duchess of Brittany (1488–1514),
and Hungary, 246, 247–8, 322–3, queen of France, 33, 40–1
380, 418, 438, 442, See also Charles of Anne Elizabeth Alice Louise, daughter of
Anjou; Charles II; Charles of Elizabeth II, 290
Durazzo; Joanna I; Joanna II; Louis Anno, archbishop of Cologne (1056–75), 118
the Great; Mary, queen of Hungary; annulment of marriage, 40, 46–7, 64–8, 134,
Robert 182, 185, 330, 358
Angilberga (d. 896x901), wife of emperor Ansegisel (fl. c. 648), son of Arnulf, bishop
Louis II, 159 of Metz, 318
Anglo-Norman barons, 149, 160, 167, 170, 424 Anselm, St (d. 1109), 376
Anglo-Norman conquest of Wales, 410, 443 Anthony, Grand Bastard of Burgundy (d.
Anglo-Norman ecclesiastics, 4 1504), 178
Anglo-Norman invasion of Ireland, 355 Antigone, illegitimate daughter of
Anglo-Norman language, 333 Humphrey of Gloucester, 177
Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, 37, 364, 385, 393 Antioch, Syria (now Turkey), 363, 553
Anglo-Saxon England, 25, 168, 245 Antwerp, 49, 378
division of kingdom in, 201 Apennines, 275
title atheling in, 104 Apollo, god, 344, 354
Anglo-Saxon kingdoms, See East Anglia; Apulia, 21, 274, 368, 392, 394, 395
Essex; Kent; Mercia; Northumbria; Apulia and Calabria, dukes of, See Robert
Sussex; Wessex Guiscard; Roger Borsa; William
Anglo-Saxon kings, 245, 246, 253, 305, 333, Apulia, duke of, See Roger
357, 360, 380, 386, See also under Aquitaine, 30, 65, 197, 285, 388, 428
individual kingdoms dukes of, 65, 421, 458, See also Eudo;
Anglo-Saxon names, 298, 305–7 William X; Eleanor of Aquitaine
Anglo-Saxon princesses as foreign brides, king of, See Pippin
21, 38 Arabic, 342–4, 395
Anglo-Saxon settlement in Lothian, 441 Arabs, 18, 379
Angoulême (Charente), 231 Aragon
Anjou, 65, 136, 197, 213, 270 and pretended Alfonso the Battler, 363,
Anjou, counts of, 237, See also Angevin kings 377
of England; Charles of Anjou; Fulk; female succession in, 144
Geoffrey formation of, 393, 435
Anjou, second house of (also known as third heir to, See Girona, Prince of
house of), 440, See also Louis (I), (II), kings of, 3, 169, 174, 220, 411, 423, 427,
(III) of Anjou, René of Anjou 439, 442, 492, See also Alfonso I the
Anna, daughter of Leo VI and Zoe Battler; Alfonso II; Alfonso IV;
Zaoutzaina, 70 Alfonso V; Ferdinand I; Ferdinand
Anna Comnena (d. c. 1153), daughter of II; James I; James II; John I; John II;
Alexius I Comnenus, 363, 368, Martin I; Peter II; Peter III; Peter IV;
372–3, 375 Ramiro I; Ramiro II

610
 INDEX

burial places of, 260, 265, 270 Athalaric, Ostrogothic king (526–34), 117,
images of, 317 444
marriage alliances of, 16 Athanagild, Visigothic king (555–67), 34
marriage negotiations with, 33 Atlantic Ocean, 308
queen of, See Petronilla Atwater, John, Yorkist plotter (1491), 370
royal names in, 527 Audica, king of the Suevi (584–5), 34
succession crisis after 1410, 72, 74–7 Augustine of Canterbury, St (d. 604x609),
succession to, 57, 63–4, 100, 144, 198, 461
263, 292, 409, 412, 435 Augustine of Hippo, St (d. 430), 152
union with Barcelona, 57, 63, 260, 292, Augustus, Roman emperor (27 BC–14 AD),
317, 409, 422–3, 435 78, 304, 402
union with Castile, 76, 133 Austria, 49, 58, 233, 420
Arbroath, Declaration of (1320), 431 dukes of, See Albert of Habsburg; Otto of
Archives Nationales, Paris, 101, 102 Habsburg
Argyros, Byzantine surname, 287 Austria, ‘house of’, 285
Arioald, king of the Lombards (d. 636), Austria-Hungary, 420, 432
35 Authari, king of the Lombards (584–90), 35
Aristakès of Lastivert, eleventh-century Aversa, Campania, 394
Armenian chronicler, 4, 128, 129–30 Avignon popes of Great Schism, 412–13
Ark of the Covenant, 382 Avila, bishopric of, 411
Armagnac, count of, 33 Avis, ‘house of’, 174
Armenian chroniclers, See Aristakès of Avis, Order of, 172
Lastivert Ayala, See López de Ayala
Arnulf of Carinthia, king of the East Franks Aymer de Valence, earl of Pembroke (d.
(887–99), emperor, 122, 158, 167–8, 1324), 231
495 Ayr, Scotland, 102
Arnulf, bishop of Metz (d. c. 640), 318, 326,
331 Babylonians, 341
Arnulf, archbishop of Rheims (988–91, Badajoz, bishopric of, 411
999–1021), illegitimate son of Baldus de Ubaldis, lawyer (d. 1400), 214–15
Lothar, king of the West Franks, Baldwin I, king of Jerusalem (1100–18),
390–1, 408 307, 438, 553
Arpads, Hungarian royal dynasty, 3, 72, 438, Baldwin II, king of Jerusalem (1118–31),
See also Hungary, kings of 136, 138, 307, 438
Arras, Treaty of (1435), 224 Baldwin III, king of Jerusalem
Arsaces, Parthian ruler (c. 247–217 BC), 384 (1143/52–62), 138
Artabasdos, Byzantine usurper (741/2–3), Baldwin IV, king of Jerusalem (1174–85),
450 97, 307, 445
Arthur of Brittany (d. 1203), 211–14 Baldwin V, king of Jerusalem (1185–6), 97,
Arthur, illegitimate son of Humphrey of 120, 145, 445
Gloucester, 177 Baldwin VIII, count of Flanders (1191–5),
Arthur, legendary king, 227, 354, 371, 384 420
Arthurian romance, 353 Baldwin IX, count of Flanders, Latin
Artois, 222 emperor of Constantinople (d. c.
Asia, 4, 261, 332 1205), 361, 370, 377, 378
Asser (d. c. 908), author of a Life of Alfred pretender claiming to be, 361, 366, 367,
the Great, 37 370, 371, 374, 377, 378
Assisi, Umbria, 324 Baldwin of Hainault, See Baldwin VIII of
Assyria, king of, See Belus Flanders
astrology, 341–7, 358 Baldwin of Le Bourg, See Baldwin II of
Asturias, kings of, 309, 439 Jerusalem
Asturias, Prince of, title, 105 Baldwin, name of counts of Flanders, 291

611
 INDEX

Balearic Islands, 198 Beatus of Liébana (fl. 776–798), author of a

Balkans, 363 commentary on the Book of
Ballomer, alternative name for pretender Revelation, 328
Gundovald, 548 Beaufort family, 184–5
Baltic languages, 296 Beauvais, bishops of, See Henry
Baltic Sea, 63, 265 Bec, abbey (Eure), 158, 212
Baltic Slavs, 325 Bede, monk and historian (d. 735), 37, 168,
Bamberg, Franconia, 254, 271, 331, 400, 245, 404
519 Before France and Germany (Geary), 309
Barbary, man from, 238 Begga (d. c. 690), daughter of Pippin I,
Barbeau abbey (Seine-et-Marne), 252, 269 mayor of the palace, 318
Barcelona, 57, 83, 206 Bela II ‘the Blind’, king of Hungary (1131–
Royal Palace of, 317, 321 41), 251
Barcelona, counts of, 292, 317, 422, See also Bela IV, king of Hungary (1235–70), 406
Raymond-Berengar IV Belgians, 434
Barcelona, county of, 260, 292, 422–4, Belus, legendary king of Assyria, 317
union with Aragon, 57, 63, 260, 292, 317, Benedict II, pope (684–5), 302
409, 422–3, 435 Benedict XIII, antipope (1394–1423), 301–2
Basil I, Byzantine emperor (867–86), 15, 78, Benedict XIII, pope (1724–30), 302
94, 130, 261, 381, 408, 410 Benedict XIV, pope (1740–58), 302
Basil II, Byzantine emperor (976–1025), 13, Benedict XIV, original style of Benedict
85, 87, 94–5, 130, 267, 415 XIII (1724–30), 302
bastardy, See illegitimacy Benedictines, 31, 257, 259, 409
Batalha (Santa Maria da Vitória), Benevento, battle of (1266), 246, 279, 364
Dominican convent, Portugal, Bennet, Matthew, historian, 432
258–9, 260, 271 Benvenuto da Imola (d. 1387/8), Dante
Bavaria, Bavarians, 12, 199, 201, 204, 431 scholar, 365
Bavaria, dukes of, 288, See also Agilolfings; Berbers, 18
Henry the Lion Berchildis, wife of Dagobert I, 157
Bavaria, Electors of, 402 Berengar, king of Italy (888–924), emperor,
Bavaria-Ingolstadt, 204 250
Bavaria-Landshut, 204 Berengar the Older, count of Sulzbach (d.
Bavaria-Munich, 204 1125), 25
Bavarian chroniclers, 80, 289 Berengaria (or Berenguela) (b. 1253),
Bavaria-Straubing, 204 daughter of Alfonso X of Leon and
Bayeux Tapestry, 30 Castile, 101
Béarn, county of, 422 Berenguela (or Berengaria) of Castile (d.
Beatrice, queen of Portugal (1383–5), 171, 1246), daughter of Alfonso VIII of
446, 447 Castile, wife of Alfonso IX of Leon,
Beatrice (early eleventh century), daughter 46, 125, 184, 219, 515
of Hadwig, countess of Hainault, Berengaria of Navarre (d. 1230), wife of
328 Richard I of England, 86, 231
Beatrice, wife of Alfonso VI of Leon and Bergen, Norway, 366, 372
Castile, 69 Bernard, king of Italy (812–17), 250
Beatrice (b. 1353), daughter of Peter the Bernard (d. 891), illegitimate son of
Cruel and Maria de Padilla, 161 Charles the Fat, 167
Beatrice of Aragon (d. 1508), wife of Bernard Gui (d. 1331), Dominican,
Matthias Corvinus, 39–40 inquisitor and historian, 95, 335–9,
Beatrice of Burgundy (d. 1184), wife of 492
Frederick I Barbarossa, 191 Bernard, count of Septimania (d. 844), 227–8
Beatrice of Castile (d. 1306), wife of Alfonso Bernard, St (d. 1153), 140
III of Portugal, 67–8, 165, 180 Berry, duke of, See John, duke of Berry

612
 INDEX

Berta (Eudokia) (d. 949), daughter of Boleslav I; Borivoj II; Bretislav I;

Hugh of Arles, wife of Romanos (II), Charles IV; Conrad-Otto; Ferdinand
28, 453 III; John; Ladislas Postumus; Premysl
Berta (d. 1099), wife of Alfonso VI of Leon Otakar I; Premysl Otakar II; Vladislav
and Castile, 69 II; Wenceslas (Wenzel); Wenceslas I;
Berta of Sulzbach (Irene) (d. 1159/60), Wenceslas II; Wenceslas III;
wife of Manuel Comnenus, 25, 28 Wenceslas, St
Bertrada (d. 783), wife of Pippin III, 159 burial places of, 256, 259
Bertrada of Montfort (d. c. 1117), mistress/ names of, 300
wife of Philip I of France, 237, 244 dynasties of, 435
Bertran de Born, troubadour (fl. 1159–95), end of monarchy in, 432
378 marriage patterns of rulers of, 20–1, 68,
Bertrand, bishop of Senez (d. 1358), 162 162
Berwick-on-Tweed, 74 prohibition of foreign officials in, 426
Betelgeuse, star, 343 royal title in, 89, 189, 393, 476
Béziers (Hérault), 422 saintly royal women of, 405
Bilichilde (d. 610), wife of Theudebert II, 9 succession in, 58, 187–90, 426
Birger Magnusson, king of Sweden Bohemian chroniclers, 189, 256
(1290–1318), 193–4, 259, 445 Boleslav I, duke of Bohemia (935–72), 188
Birger Jarl, Swedish noble (d. 1266), 442 Boleslaw III, duke of Poland (1102–38), 189
Birgitta of Sweden, St (d. 1373), 340, 355 Boleslaw the Pious, duke of Great Poland
Black Sea, 32 (d. 1279), 406
Blanca, queen of Navarre (1425–41), 106, Boleslaw V of Cracow-Sandomir (d. 1279),
172, 447 406
Blanche (d. 1326), wife of Charles IV of Bolingbroke, Henry, See Henry IV of
France, 229–30 England
Blanche of Anjou (d. 1310), wife of James II Bologna, 176, 345
of Aragon, 265, 270 Boniface VIII, pope (1294–1303), 215
Blanche of Bourbon (d. 1361), wife of Peter Boniface IX, pope (1389–1404), 172, 413
the Cruel of Castile, 161–2 Boniface of Montferrat (d. 1207), a leader
Blanche of Castile (d. 1252), wife of Louis of the Fourth Crusade, 18
VIII of France, 23, 29, 117, 124, 232, Boniface, St (d. 754), Life of, 302
260, 299 Book of Ceremonies, 60
Blanche of France (d. 1323), daughter of Bordeaux, 50, 455
Louis IX, wife of Ferdinand de la Borgia, Rodrigo, See Alexander VI, pope
Cerda, 220 Borivoj II, duke of Bohemia (1100–7, 1117–
Blanche of Valois (d. 1348), wife of Charles 20), 188
IV, Holy Roman Emperor, 300, 318, Boso, king of Provence (879–87), 349, 473
320 Boso, noble German name, 291
Bleddyn ap Cynfyn of Powys (d. 1075), 221 Bosoniden or Bosonids, noble German
blinding, 81, 126, 127, 194, 238, 244, 248, kindred, 291
250–1, 349, 363, 406, 408, 516 Bosworth, battle of (1485), 246, 346
Blithildis or Blitilda, supposed daughter of Bouchard, Constance, historian, 44
Clothar I or Clothar II, 318, 339, 385 Boulogne, count of, 438
Bodil, wife of Erik I Evergood of Denmark, Bourbon, dukes of, 120, 162, See also Louis
452 Bourbon, lordship of, 200
Bohemia Bourbon, royal house of, 199, 283
delegation from, at the Burgundian Bourg-en-Gironde (Bourg-sur-Gironde)
court, 178 (Gironde), 455
ducal title in, 553 Bouvines, battle of (1214), 23
dukes and kings of, 311, 401, See also Brabant, 225, 420
Premyslids; Albert of Habsburg; Brabant, dukes and duchesses of, 318

613
 INDEX

Brandenburg, margraves of, 21, 233, 401, Bush, George W., US president (2001–9), 1
See also Albert the Bear; Woldemar Bylica, Martin (d. 1493), astrologer of
Brandenburg, Mark of, 119, 187, 367 Matthias Corvinus, 345
Brasca, Erasmus (d. 1502), Milanese Byrne, Francis John, historian (1934–2017),
diplomat, 459 99
Bratislava (Pressburg), 58 Byzantine chroniclers, 95
Bratislava, university of, 345 Byzantium See also Constantinople
Braunschweig-Grubenhagen, 204 adoption in, 78, 83, 472
Braunschweig-Lüneburg, 204 and Bulgars, 453
Braunschweig-Wolfenbüttel, 204 and concept of barbarians, 245
Breifne, Irish kingdom, 288 and Venice, 414–15, 458
Bretislav I, duke of Bohemia (1034–55), astrology in, 341–2, 343, 344, 346
187–90 blinding in, 194, 250
Bretons, 211, 371 bride shows in, 32–3
bride-shows, 32–3 brides from, in the West, 29, 409
Brief History of the Kings of Denmark (Sven burial places of emperors of, 252, 253, 261
Aggesen), 190 castration in, 249
Britain, 38 celebrations for birth of imperial son in,
British Library, 178 60
British Library manuscript Harley 7353, co-emperorship in, 93–5
327 cousin marriage in, 45
Britons, 384 deaths of rulers of, 242, 243–4
Brittany, 33, 40, 41, 197, 206, 211, 217, 350 dynasties of, 436
Brittany, duke of, 34, 59 Edgar Atheling in, 393
Bruce dynasty, 77, 441 emperors and empresses regnant of, See
Brunhild (d. 613), wife of Sigebert I, Alexander; Alexius I Comnenus;
Merovingian king, 35, 193 Alexius II; Alexius III Angelus;
Bruno, archbishop of Cologne (953–65), Andronicus I Comnenus;
90, 388–9, 407, 506 Andronicus III; Andronicus IV
Brut y Tywysogyon, Welsh chronicle, 251 Palaeologus; Basil I; Basil II;
Bulgars, 17, 245, 342, 453 Christopher; Constans II;
Bultybrok (or Bolingbroke), Roger, Constantine V; Constantine VI;
magician (d. 1441), 358–9 Constantine VII Porphyrogenitus;
Burchard of Ursberg, chronicler (d. c. Constantine VIII; Constantine IX
1231), 304 Monomachos; Constantine X Dukas;
Burgau, Swabia, 420 Constantine XII; Irene; Isaac I
Burgos, Castile, 51, 139, 257 Comnenus; Isaac II Angelus; John I
Burgos Gate, Alcalá de Henares, 241 Tzimiskes; John II Comnenus; John
Burgundian chroniclers, 30, 158 III Vatatzes; John IV; John V
Burgundy, 30, 44, 164, 177, 206, 388, 553 Palaeologus; John VI Cantacuzenus;
county of, 66, 222 Justinian II; Leo III; Leo IV; Leo V;
dukes of, 80, 110, 113, 120, 146, 178, Leo VI; Manuel Comnenus;
222–6, 241, 416, 418, 420, 435, See Maurice; Michael I Rangabe;
also Charles the Bold; John the Michael III; Michael IV; Michael V;
Fearless; Philip the Bold Michael VII; Michael VIII;
kings of (443–534), 435, See also Nicephorus I; Nicephorus II Phocas;
Sigismund Nicephorus III Botaniates; Phocas;
kings of (888–1032), 21, 72, 428, 435, See Romanos I Lecapenos; Romanos II;
also Conrad; Rudolf I; Rudolf II; Romanos III Argyros; Romanos IV
Rudolf III Diogenes; Theodora; Zoe
burial churches, See mausolea female rule in, 124–5, 126–31, 143, 154
Bush, George, US president (1989–93), 1 iconoclast controversy in, 279

614
 INDEX

imperial relatives as patriarchs in, 408 Charles V; Charles VI; Charles VII;
length of reign of emperors of, 243 Charles VIII; Henry I; Henry III;
lists of emperors of, 304 Henry IV; Hugh Capet; John I; John
marriage practices of rulers in, 13–14, 15, II; Louis VI; Louis VII; Louis VIII;
17, 19–20, 24–5, 27, 28, 34, 36, 70–1, Louis IX; Louis X; Louis XI; Louis
180 XII; Louis XIV; Louis XVI; Philip I;
minorities in, 115, 116 Philip II Augustus; Philip III; Philip
naming patterns in, 28 IV; Philip V; Philip VI; Robert I;
Old Testament saints in, 311 Robert II
pretenders in, 361, 363, 364, 366, 367–9, Capetians
372–3, 375, 378 accession of (987), 3, 243, 306, 316, 318,
prophecy in, 355 388, 391
regencies in, 117 ancestry of, 21
rule of in Italy, 394–5 as usurpers, 337, 380
ruler images on coins in, 321, 322 average length of reign of, 243
succession in, 3, 4, 90, 131, 244 bastard children of, 165
surnames in, 287 branches of, See Angevin kings of Sicily,
usurpation in, 243 Naples and Hungary; Burgundy,
Byzantium and Venice (Nicol), 415 dukes of
burial places of, 254, 260, 275, 298
Caen (Calvados), 252 dating of their reigns, 107
Caerleon (Monmouthshire), 250 links with Carolingians, 339, 349, 384
Caesars, 297, 304, 307 numbering of, 306–7, 308–9
Cain, son of Adam and Eve, 188 prophecy about, 349–50, 351
Cairo, 362 queens of, 55, 269
Calabria, 368, 394–5 rule in France, 437
dukes of, See Apulia and Calabria, dukes of rule in Navarre, 440
Calabria, duke of, title, 104, 480 saints of, 311, 313
Calais (Pas-de-Calais), 114, 176, 217, 421 sons of placed in the Church, 407
Calatrava, knights of, 508–9 territorial sway, 431
Callan, river, Ulster, 295 as a term, 285–6, 288, 292
Calvary, Jerusalem, 275 their association of their sons as kings, 93,
Cambyses, ruler of Persia, conqueror of 108
Egypt (d. 522 BC), 284 transmission of the throne among, 3, 4,
Canrobert, See Charles Robert 65, 244, 338
Canterbury, 56, 253, 255, 271 Cappenberg, counts of, 14
Canterbury, archbishops of, 410, See also Capua, Prince of, 395
Augustine, Edmund, Thomas Carcassonne (Aude), 422, 527
Canute I the Great, king of England (1016– Cardiff, 194
35), Denmark (1018–35) and Norway Carinthia, 420
(1028–35), 4, 28, 35–6, 42, 202, 279, Carloman (d. 880), king of Bavaria and
364 Italy, son of Louis the German, 158,
Canute II (or IV), king of Denmark (1080– 452
6), 21, 312 Carloman, king of the West Franks
Canute IV, king of Denmark (1182–1202), (879–84), 242, 252, 338–9, 444, 527
26, 97 Carloman (b. 853), illegitimate son of
Canute Laward, duke of Schleswig (d. emperor Lothar I, 158
1131), 259, 267 Carloman (d. 876), abbot of St-Médard,
Canute Porse, Danish noble (d. 1330), 118 Soissons, son of Charles the Bald,
Capet, as surname, 286, 337 250, 406
Capetian kings of France (including Carloman, Carolingian name, 176
branches after 1328), See Charles IV; Carloman See also Pippin-Carloman

615
 INDEX

Carniola, 420 illegitimate children of, 167, 177

Carolingian period, 284 in Vision of Charles the Fat, 296, 347–9
Carolingian, as a term, 283, 295–6, 308 links with Capetians, 339, 349, 357, 384–5
Carolingians See also Arnulf of Carinthia; links with Merovingians, 339, 385
Arnulf, archbishop of Rheims; marriage practices of, 11–12, 157–8, 159
Bernard, illegitimate son of Charles minorities among, 116
the Fat; Bernard, king of Italy; naming patterns of, 176, 292, 386
Carloman, abbot of St-Médard; numbering of, 306–7, 308–9
Carloman, king of Bavaria and Italy; queens of, 269
Carloman, illegitimate son of rule of, in Italy, 394
emperor Lothar I; Carloman, king of rule of, in the Frankish kingdoms, 437
the West Franks; Charlemagne; rule of, in the kingdom of the East
Charles Martel; Charles of Lorraine; Franks, 437
Charles the Bald; Charles the Fat; rule of, in the kingdom of the West
Charles the Simple; Charles, king of Franks, 242, 437
Provence; Gerberga, daughter of sons of placed in the Church, 406
Charles of Lorraine; Hugh, statues of, in St-Denis, 260
illegitimate son of Lothar II; Lothar succession among, 100
(Clothar), son of Charlemagne; termed ‘Charleses’, 293
Lothar, abbot of St-Germain; Lothar wall-paintings of, in Karlštejn, 318
II; Lothar, emperor (840–55); Caspe, Aragon, 75–7
Lothar, king of the West Franks; Castile
Louis the Pious; Louis II, king of and Great Schism, 413
Italy, emperor; Louis the German, and pretended Alfonso the Battler, 377
king of the East Franks; Louis, East bishoprics of, 411
Frankish king (876–82); Louis the claim of John of Gaunt to, 199
Child, king of the East Franks; Louis defeat of, at Aljubarrota (1385), 172, 173,
II the Stammerer, king of the West 258
Franks; Louis III, king of the West division of, from Leon, 203, 310, 393, 439
Franks; Louis IV d’Outremer, king female rule in, 125, See also Berenguela;
of the West Franks; Louis V, king of Isabella; Urraca
the West Franks; Pippin III; Pippin female succession in, 144
the Hunchback; Pippin, king of heir to, 105
Aquitaine; Pippin-Carloman; invasion of Portugal by (1384), 171–2,
Rotrud; Theodrada 358
ancestry of, 318, 331, 334 junior branch of royal family of, acquire
as second family of the kings of France, Aragon (1412), 435
286 kings of, 22–4, 48, 171, 184, 439, 455, See
as usurpers, 316, 380 also Alfonso VI; Alfonso VII; Alfonso
blinding among, 250 VIII; Alfonso X; Alfonso XI;
concubinage among, 155 Ferdinand I; Ferdinand III;
daughters of, as nuns, 404 Ferdinand IV; Henry I; Henry II;
descent from, 115, 250, 293, 331, 349, Henry III; Henry IV; John I; John II;
384–5, 388 Peter I; Sancho II; Sancho IV
division of empire of, 195, 199, 201, 202, kings of, average age at death of, 240
205, 206–10 kings of, burial sites of, 256–7, 260, 263–4
family conflicts among, 348 kings of, from the house of Trastámara,
family trees of, 292, 326–7, 328, 329, 331, 174
332, 338–9 kings of, heraldry of, 322
father-son relations among, 432 kings of, numbering of, 303, 309–10
genealogies of, 328, 331 potential union with Aragon, 427
history (writtten) of, 294 potential union with France, 101, 434

616
 INDEX

prophecies in, 354 capital of, at Aachen, 199, 389

queen regnant of, See Urraca coat-of-arms of, 325–6
reunion with Leon, 46, 184, 393 crowned emperor, 11, 126, 307, 382, 398,
succession in, 101, 144, 162, 220 437
union with Aragon, 76, 133 daughter of, See Rotrud
Castilian chroniclers, 63, 77 death of, 167, 206, 295
Castilian language, 344 descendants of, 12, 14, 207, 260, 292, 331,
castration, 249–51, 408 337, 339, 347, 349, 384–5, 391
casus regis, 213–14 extent of his empire, 308
Catalan language, 285 father of, See Pippin III
Catalonia, 75, 246, 303, 391, 423 his conquest of the Lombards, 416, 439
Catesby (Northamptonshire), 466 his name, 294, 295–7, 308
Catherine Cornaro, queen of Cyprus in chronicles, 304
(1474–89), 436, 447 in genealogies, 318, 327, 331, 385
Catherine, queen of Navarre (1483–1517), in poetry, 334
446, 447 wall-painting of, 316
Catherine (d. after 1063), wife of Isaac I Charles the Bald, king of the West Franks
Comnenus, 17 (840–77), emperor
Catherine (b. 1378), daughter of Joan of and blinding of his son Carloman, 250
Bourbon and Charles V of France, and numbering of rulers, 309
56 and partition of the empire, 206
Catherine of Aragon (d. 1536), wife of birth of, 195–6, 198, 227
Henry VIII of England, 25 burial of, 262, 265
Catherine of Valois (d. 1437), wife of Henry daughter of, See Judith
V of England, 232 death of, 91
Catholics, 364 father of Louis the Stammerer, 288,
Cedrenus, George, Byzantine chronicler (c. 331
1100), 95 his name, 296
Cefalù, Sicily, 521 imperial title of, 398
Celestine III, pope (1191–8), 26 in genealogies, 318
Celtic kingdoms, 393 marriages of, 11, 115–6, 494
Celtic paganism, 42 nickname of, 294
Celtic succession practices, 4 seen as first king of France, 227
Centcelles, Catalonia, 265 sons of, placed in the Church, 406
Cerda, de la, branch of Castilan royal house, Charles the Fat, Frankish king (876–87),
219–20, 512 emperor (d. 888), 80, 167, 168,
Cerdaña, county of, Catalonia, 527 228, 250, 292, 296, 309, 347–9,
Champagne, counts of, 440 452, 473
Chandos Herald, 174 Charles the Simple, king of the West Franks
Charibert, Merovingian king (d. 567), 9 (893–923), 12, 14, 21, 25, 167, 294,
Charla (d. 1480), illegitimate daughter of 308, 338–9, 408, 527
James II of Cyprus, 175 Charles IV, king of France (1322–8)
Charlemagne, king of the Franks and Charles IV, Holy Roman Emperor,
(768–814), emperor, 404 300, 309
and astrology, 344 and succession, 147, 203, 492
and his daughters, 15, 21 burial of, 269, 277, 278
and names of his sons, 386 death of, 467
and the Church, 300 marriages of, 33, 45, 55, 229–30
and the succession, 93, 157, 205, 247 numbering of, 308–9
and Venice, 415 Charles V, king of France (1364–80),
as father of Louis the Pious, 306 56, 105, 119, 120, 217, 309,
as hero to the French, 383 344, 494

617
 INDEX

Charles VI, king of France (1380–1422), 57, Charles Martel, duke of Calabria (d. 1348),
178, 222 son of Joanna I of Naples, 480
birth of, 105 Charles of Valois (d. 1325), son of Philip III
children of, 61, 191, 291–2, 313 of France, 300
death of, 345 Charles, sons of Charles VI and Charles VIII
disinherits son, 106, 112–13 of France, 292
horoscope of, 344 Charles Philip Arthur George, son of
madness of, 217–18, 219, 341 Elizabeth II, 290
minority of, 119–20, 216, 217, 219, 446 Charles, last ruler of prophecy, 296
mistress of, 164 Charles, royal name, 176, 292, 294, 295–7,
Charles VII, king of France (1422–61), 24, 308
106, 110, 112–13, 164, 191, 223–5, Charles’ or Charlemagne’s Wagon (Ursa
344–5 Major), 295
Charles VIII, king of France (1483–98), 33, Charles Bridge, Prague, 300
40, 292, 344, 446 Charles University, Prague, 300
Charles IV, German king, king of Bohemia ‘Charleses’, term for Carolingians, 293, 296
(1346–78), emperor, 299–300, Charlotte, queen of Cyprus (1458–60), 447,
308–9, 317–20, 370, 398, 402 474
Charles Robert (Canrobert), king of Charroux (Vienne), 273
Hungary (1310–42), 214–15, 510 Chartres (Eure-et-Loir), 57
Charles of Durazzo, king of Naples Chartres, diocese of, 330
(1381–6), of Hungary (1385–6), 82, Chastellain, Georges, courtier and historian
146, 248 (d. 1475), 434
Charles III, king of Navarre (1387–1425), Chaworth Roll, 333
105, 172, 177 Chernigov, Russian principality, 20
Charles, Prince of Viana (titular Charles IV Cherson, Crimea, 363
of Navarre) (d. 1461), 105–6, 303 Chester, 362
Charles, king of Provence (855–63), 444 Chester, earl of, title, 104
Charles of Anjou, king of Sicily (1266–85), Chibnall, Marjorie, historian (1915–2012),
144, 200, 208, 273–5, 279–80, 322–3, 138
364, 440, 442, 555 childbirth, 5, 54, 55–62, 70, 139, 164, 236
Charles II, king of Sicily (1285–1309), 104, Childebert I, Merovingian king (d. 558),
214–16, 221, 253, 323, 480 210, 472
Charles V, king of Spain (1516–56), German Childebert II, Merovingian king (d. 596),
king (1519–56), emperor, 25, 309 38, 79, 100, 444, 472
Charles Knutsson, king of Sweden Childebertus ‘adoptivus’, Merovingian or
(1448–57, 1464–5, 1467–70), 427 adopted Merovingian king (d. c.
Charles the Bold, duke of Burgundy 662), 472
(1467–77), 225–6, 345, 346 Childeric II, Merovingian king (662–75), 444
Charles, duke of Calabria (d. 1328), son of Childeric III, Merovingian king (deposed
Robert of Naples, 480 751), 316, 338
Charles, Dauphin, son of Charles VI (b. and Chilperic, Merovingian king (d. 584), 60,
d. 1386), 468 61, 115, 522
Charles of Durazzo (d. 1348), 248 China, 155, 191, 285, 376
Charles, count of Flanders (1119–27), 21 Chlodomer, Merovingian king (d. 524), 34,
Charles of Lorraine (d. c. 993), son of Louis 210
IV of the West Franks, 10, 228, 318, Chlodwig (Ludwig), royal name, 386
337, 388–91, 393, 451 Choniates, Niketas, Byzantine chronicler
Charles Martel (d. 741), Frankish mayor of (d. 1217), 229, 238
the palace, 159, 295–6, 308, 316 Christ, 18, 61, 67, 163, 215, 244, 252, 267,
Charles Martel (d. 1295), son of Charles II 325, 326, 403, 404, 412
of Sicily, 214–16, 510 genealogies of, 327, 328, 332

618
 INDEX

Christ Church Cathedral (Holy Trinity), Coimbra, Portugal, 134, 164, See also Holy
Dublin, 360 Cross
Christ, Order of, See Knights of the Order of Coimbra, bishop of, 135
Christ Coke, Edward, lawyer (1552–1634), 109
Christian I of Oldenburg, king of Denmark Coldingham (Berwickshire), 404
and Norway (1448–81), 24, 39, 98, Cologne, Rhineland, 118, 407
325 Cologne, archbishops of, 27, 54, 401,
Christian, name claimed by pseudo-Baldwin See also Anno, Bruno, Engelbert
IX of Flanders, 371 Columba, St (d. 597), 257
Christina, queen of Sweden (1632–54), 124 Comnenians, Byzantine dynasty, 287, 355, 436
Christine de Pisan, writer (d. c. 1430), 25, 344 Compendium of History in the Form of a
Christopher, Byzantine emperor (921–31), Genealogy of Christ (Compendium
son of Romanos Lecapenos, 94 historiae in genealogia Christi) (Peter
Christopher II, king of Denmark (1319– of Poitiers), 332–3
32), 430 Compiègne (Oise), 224
Christopher, king of Denmark, Norway and Complete Book on the Judgments of the Stars (Aly
Sweden (1440–8), 39, 98, 426–7 Aben Ragel), 344
Christos Philanthropos, monastery of, Conchobar, king of Connacht (d. 973), 288
Constantinople, 252 concubinage, 4, 83, 155–9, 165–7, 175, 191,
Chrysopolis, Anatolia, 261 364, 470, 494
Cistercians, 119, 252, 257, 258, 259, 260, 265 Connacht, kings and kingdom of, 247, 288,
Citizen Capet, term for Louis XVI of 438, See also Conchobar; Toirdelbach
France, 285, 286 Ua Conchobair
City of God (Augustine), 152 Conquest, Coexistence and Change: Wales 1063–
Ciudad Rodrigo, bishopric of, 411 1415 (Davies), 220
Clanchy, Michael, historian, 91 Conrad, king of Burgundy (937–93), 529
Clare of Assisi, St (d. 1253), 405 Conrad I, king of the East Franks
Clarence, duke of, See George (Germany) (911–18), 14, 90, 92, 98,
Clemencia (d. 1328), wife of Louis X, 58 305, 509
Clement III, antipope, See Guibert Conrad II, German king (1024–39),
Clement IV, pope (1265–8), 144 emperor, 262–3, 385, 400, 519
Clement V, pope (1305–14), 412 Conrad III, German king (1138–52), 14,
Clement VI, pope (1342–52), 182 24–5, 28, 305, 519
Clement VII, antipope (1378–94), 413 Conrad IV, German king and king of Sicily
Clermont-en-Beauvaisis, county of, 200 (1250–4), 96, 99, 478, 519
Clothar (Lothar) I, Merovingian king (d. Conrad (d. 1101), son of Henry IV of
561), 34, 210, 372, 385 Germany, 478
Clothar (Lothar) II, Merovingian king (d. Conrad, duke of Lotharingia (944–53), 196
629), 115, 316, 317, 385, 444 Conrad of Montferrat, ruler of Jerusalem
Clothar (Lothar) III, Merovingian king (1190–2), 46, 145
(657–73), 444 Conrad of Scheyern, chronicler
Clovis, Merovingian king (d. 511), 34, 115, (fl. 1205–41), 289, 293
201, 210, 253, 317, 334, 382–3, 386 Conrad II, style of Conrad III as king of the
Clovis II, Merovingian king (639–57), 444 Romans, 305
Clovis III (IV), Merovingian king Conrad See also Frederick (formerly
(690/1–4), 444 Conrad)
Clovis, supposed Merovingian (675), 370 Conradin (d. 1268), son of Conrad IV,
‘Clovises’, term for Merovingians, 293 claimant to the throne of Sicily, 364,
Cluny (Sâone-et-Loire), 374 366
Cobham, Eleanor (d. 1452), wife of pretender claiming to be, 366, 373
Humphrey, duke of Gloucester, Conrad-Otto of Znojmo, duke of Bohemia
358–9 (1189–91), 188–9, 272–3

619
 INDEX

consanguinity, See prohibited degrees attack on by Andronicus IV (1376),

Constance, queen of Sicily (1194–8), 53, 342
119, 149, 170–1, 418, 442, 447, 521 Berta of Sulzbach (Irene) in, 25
Constance, daughter of Louis VI, 113 bride shows in, 32
Constance, illegitimate daughter of Peter II Byzantine reconquest of (1261), 436
of Aragon, 180 conquest of (1204), 3, 17, 229, 415
Constance (d. 1348/9), wife of Peter I of conquest of (1453), 244, 245, 436
Portugal, 163 Conrad III in, 24
Constance of Arles (d. 1034), wife of Robert eunuch painter from, 34
II of France, 458 factional conflicts of 1180s in, 239
Constance of Brittany (d. 1201), 211 foundation of, 244
Constance of Burgundy (d. 1093), wife of inhabitants of, support Zoe, 130
Alfonso VI of Leon and Castile, 69 Latin empire of, 324
Constance of Castile (d. 1160), wife of Louis Latin empire of, rulers of, See Baldwin IX
VII, 55 of Flanders; John of Brienne
Constans II, Byzantine emperor (641–68), patriarchs of, 60, See also Ignatius;
444, 483 Michael Cerularius; Nicholas;
Constantina, wife of the emperor Maurice, Stephen; Theophylact
342 Venetian trading privileges in, 415
Constantine I the Great, Roman emperor walls of, 267
(306–37), 13, 158, 244, 253, 316, wife of khan Uzbeg in, 19
382–3 Zoe expelled from, 127
Constantine V, Byzantine emperor (741– Constantius II, Roman emperor (337–61),
75), 279, 321, 453 253
Constantine VI, Byzantine emperor (780– Constanza-Anna, illegitimate daughter of
97), 27, 32, 244, 250, 321, 322, 382, Frederick II, wife of John III
444, 483, 516 Vatatzes, 163, 180
Constantine VII Porphyrogenitus, Corbeil, Treaty of (1258), 423–4
Byzantine emperor (913–59), 13, 60, Cordoba, Andalusia, 161, 184, 257, 428
70, 94, 344, 444, 456, 483 Coria, Spain, bishopric of, 411
Constantine VIII, Byzantine emperor Cork, Ireland, 151, 370
(1025–8), 126, 130, 381, 415 Cornelius (Corneille), Bastard of Burgundy
Constantine IX Monomachos, Byzantine (d. 1452), 178
emperor (1042–55), 127, 130, Cornwall, 213
252 Cornwall, duke of, title, 105
Constantine X Dukas, Byzantine emperor Cornwall, earl of, 178
(1059–67), 124 coronation, 20, 27, 92, 98, 99, 106–9, 114,
Constantine XII, Byzantine emperor 121, 145, 147, 237, 255, 260, 304–5,
(1449–53), 244, 245 307, 360, 386, 391, 392, 399, 401,
Constantine (d. c. 946), son of Romanos 414, 426, 429–30, 471
Lecapenos, 94 during father’s lifetime, 92–8, 99, 111
Constantine Mesopotamites, minister of coronation charters, 430
Alexius III, 228 Cortes of Portugal, 172
Constantine, original name of Frederick II, Cosenza, Calabria, 254, 519
554 Cosenza, bishop of, 279
Constantinople See also Christos Cosmas of Prague, chronicler (d. 1125),
Philanthropos; Holy Apostles; 189, 256
Pantokrator; St George Mangana; St Cotentin peninsula, Normandy, 394
Mary Peribleptos; Studios monastery Courtrai, battle of (1302), 419
as seat of empire, 487 Cracow, 345, 406
astrologers in, 341 Cranford (Gaskell), 356
attack on by Alexius Branas (1187), 346 Crimea, 363

620
 INDEX

Cristina, cousin and wife of Owain David I, king of Scots (1124–53), 298, 313,
Gwynedd, 45 315, 448
Croatia, 214, 420 David II, king of Scots (1329–71), 298, 445
Crusade, First, 2 David, biblical king, 208, 298, 326, 382
Crusade, Second, 24, 244 David, sixth-century Welsh saint, 298
Crusade, Third, 2 David, earl of Huntingdon (d. 1219), 73–4,
Crusade, Fourth, 3, 229, 366, 415 313, 448
crusades, 107, 275, 302, 393, See also David (d. 1281), son of Alexander III of
Albigenisan Crusade Scotland, 448
Cumans, 363, 375 David, name, 298
Cunigunda (b. c. 890/5), mother of Davies, Rees, historian (1938–2005), 220–1
Siegfried, count of Luxemburg, 331 Davis, Natalie Zemon, historian, 375
Cunigunda (d. 1033), wife of Henry II of Decretals of 1234, 181, 385
Germany, 271, 331 Decretum (Gratian), 156
Cunigunda (d. 1285), wife of Premysl Deheubarth, Welsh principality, 443
Otakar II, 20, 68, 234 princes of, See Owain ap Hywel Dda
Cunigunda, St (d. 1292), daughter of Bela Denis, king of Portugal (1279–1325),
IV of Hungary, 312, 406 258
Cunigunda See also Gunhilda Denis, St, early martyr, 254, 255, 262, See also
Cunihild, name form for Gunhilda St-Denis
(Cunigunda), daughter of Canute Denmark
the Great, 457 association of sons as kings in, 97
Cyprus, kingdom of, 175, 393, 415, 436, 474, burial places of rulers of, 259
531, See also Lusignan family coronation charters in, 430
kings and queens regnant of, See Amalric dynasties of, 436
of Lusignan; Catherine Cornaro; flight of Birger Magnusson of Sweden to,
Charlotte; James II; John II 194
Cyrus, ruler of Persia (d. 530 BC), 315, 383 heraldic arms of, 325
Czechs, See Bohemia, Moravia, Premyslids invaded by Norway (1322–3), 118
kingdom of, 553
Dachau, Bavaria, 289 kings of, 436, See also Canute I the Great;
Dagobert I, Merovingian king (d. 639), 10, Canute II (or IV); Canute IV;
157, 298–9 Christian I; Christopher II;
Dagobert III, Merovingian king Christopher, king of Denmark,
(d. 715/16), 444 Norway and Sweden; Erik I
Dagobert (or Philip) (d. 1231/2), son of Evergood; Erik III the Lamb; Erik IV
Louis VIII, 298–9, 529 Ploughpenny; Erik V Klipping; Erik
Dalmatia, 420 VI Menved; Erik of Pomerania;
Dalriada, kingdom of, 441 Gorm the Old; Harold Hen;
Danewerk (Danevirke), 267 Harthacnut; Ingeld; Olaf; Sven
Danish conquest of England, 333 Forkbeard; Sven Estrithson;
Danish kings of England, 437 Valdemar I; Valdemar II; Valdemar
Danish style marriage, 158 IV
Dante, poet (d. 1321), 216, 280, 292, 365, marriage practices of rulers of, 15, 16
402 names in, 28
Danube, river, 58, 214, 420 queen regnant of, See Margaret II
Darwinians, 379 royal names in, 297
Dauphin, title, 105, 114, 209, 299 royal tombs of, 265, 267
Dauphiné, 105, 208, 430 rule of Harthacnut in, 279
Dauphins of France, 61, 105, 110, 113, 313, shared monarchs with Norway and
344, 430, 468, See also Charles VII Sweden, 436, 440, 442, See also
Dauphins of Vienne, 251–2 Margaret of Denmark (d. 1412)

621
 INDEX

Denmark (cont.) Eadbald, king of Kent (616–40), 37–8

succession in, 43, 190, 398 Eadgifu (d. after 951), daughter of Edward
violent deaths of kings of, 247 the Elder, wife of Charles the
Derby, earl of, 49, See also Thomas of Simple, 12, 21, 25, 232
Lancaster Eadgifu, daughter of Edward the Elder, wife
Dessau, Saxony, 378 of Louis of Burgundy, 454
Devon, 166 Eadhild (d. before 937), daughter of
Devorguilla (d. 1290), wife of John Balliol Edward the Elder, wife of Hugh the
(d. 1268), 448 Great, 454
Diego Gelmírez, archbishop of Santiago de Eadwig, king of England (955–7/9), 202
Compostella (1121–39/40), 131, 139 Ealdred, archbishop of York (1060–9), 392
Digest, 156 East Anglia, Anglo-Saxon kingdom of, 436
Dipolt (d. 1167), son of Vladislav I, duke of East Anglia, king of, 404, See also Edmund
Bohemia, 189 East Franks
Dipoltici, branch of the Premyslids, 189 kingdom of, 12, 116, 122, 167, 202, 207,
division of the kingdom, See partible 296, 305, 331, 389, 437, 560
inheritance kings of, 12, See also Arnulf of Carinthia;
Doda (d. after 855), mistress of Lothar, son Conrad I; Henry I; Louis the Child;
of Louis the Pious, 158 Louis the German
Dolphinus, name of counts of Vienne, 208, Ebba, St (d. c. 683), 404
299 Ebbo Menalda, thirteenth-century Frisian
Domesday Book, 166, 392 chief, 289
Domesday Survey (1086), 405 Ebbonides, Frisian group, 289
Dominicans, 68, 75, 153, 253, 260, 274, 277, Ebro, river, 423
335, 352, 355, 410 Ebroin, Frankish mayor of the palace (d.
Donald III (Domnall Bán), king of Scots 680/1), 370
(1093–4, 1094–7), 248, 257, 392 Ecclesiasticus, 139
Dorothea of Brandenburg, queen of Ecgfrith, king of Northumbria (670–85),
Denmark (d. 1495), 39 168, 245
Douglas family, 276 Ecloga of Leo III, 44
Doukai, Byzantine dynasty, 287 Eco, Umberto, novelist (1932–2016), 335
dowries, 24, 49, 50, 52, 67, 155–6 Edgar, king of England (957/9–975), 202,
Draco, constellation, 340 383, 445, 476
Dryburgh (Berwickshire), 382 Edgar, king of Scots (1097–1107), 298,
Duarte (Edward), king of Portugal (1433– 393
8), 174, 258, 297 Edgar Atheling, last candidate for the
Dublin, 151–2, 370–1, 378 English throne from the Wessex
Duindam, Jeroen, historian, 155, 159 dynasty (d. c. 1125), 388, 391–3
Duncan II, king of Scots (1094), 190 Edgar, royal Anglo-Saxon name, 288
Duncan, A.A.M., historian (1926–2017), 59 Edgaring, name for son of Edgar, 288
Dúnchad mac Murchado, king of Leinster Edinburgh, 378
(727–8), 42 Edith (d. 1075), wife of Edward the
Dunfermline (Fife), 257, 259 Confessor, 13, 66, 469
Dungal, Irish monk (fl. c. 815), 404 Edith (Eadgyth) (d. 946), daughter of
Dunois Hours, 178, 179 Edward the Elder, wife of Otto I, 33,
Dunois, count of (d. 1468), illegitimate son 454
of Louis of Orleans, 177–8, 179 Edith (Eadgyth), wife of Henry I of
Duns Scotus, theologian (d. 1308), 152 England, See Matilda
Dürnkrüt (Marchfeld), battle of (1278), Edmund, king of East Anglia, martyr (d.
246 869), 56, 312
Dutch language, 290 Edmund Ironside, king of England (1016),
Dyrrachium (Dürres, Albania), 368 202, 391

622
 INDEX

Edmund, son of Malcolm III and queen deposition of, 235

Margaret of Scotland, 298 in genealogical rolls, 333
Edmund (d. 1296), son of Henry III of marriage of, 54
England, 57, 198 name of, 305
Edmund of Abingdon, St, archbishop of pretender claiming to be, 364
Canterbury (1233–40), 466 proposed canonization of, 311, 312
Edmund of Langley (d. 1402), son of proposed marriage to the Maid of
Edward III, 216 Norway, 73
Edmund, royal Anglo-Saxon name, 288 reported survival of, 360
Edmunding, name for son of Edmund, 288 Edward III, king of England (1307–77), 387
Edward the Martyr, king of England (975– accedes as minor, 445
8), 306, 312, 405, 445, 476 and James Douglas, 276
Edward the Confessor, king of England and marriage of Joan of Woodstock,
(1042–66) 48–50
and Edgar Atheling, 391–2 and regime of Isabella and Mortimer,
and Godwinsons, 13, 66 235–6, 238
and naming of Edward I, 298, 386, 388 burial of, 255
and Norman kings, 384 claim of, to the French throne, 147, 324,
and numbering of monarchs, 305–6 421, 425
and prophecy of green tree, 356 creates son Prince of Wales, 105
and Scottish royal family, 313, 315, 385 descendants of, 151, 153, 162, 184, 199,
and William the Conqueror, 307 222, 297
burial of, 255, 269 mistress of, 164
canonization of, 64, 298, 311 numbering of, 306, 307, 308, 386–7
childlessness of, 64, 434 Edward IV, king of England (1461–70,
death of, 72, 381 1471–83), 5, 10–11, 34, 62, 151, 185,
heraldic arms of, 325 255, 285, 327, 347, 354, 367, 371
Life of (Aelred), 357 Edward V, king of England (1483), 446
mother of, See Emma pretender claiming to be, 364
sister of, 469 Edward, king of Portugal, See Duarte
Edward I, king of England (1272–1307) Edward the Elder, king of Wessex
accession of, 107 (899–924), 12, 21, 306
age at death of, 240 Edward, son of Malcolm III and queen
and Aymer de Valence, 231 Margaret of Scotland, 298
and King Arthur, 384 Edward Bruce (d. 1318), brother of Robert
and Scotland, 73–4, 77, 421 I Bruce, king of Scots, 102–3
burial of, 255 Edward, Prince of Wales (d. 1376), ‘the
children of, 62, 71 Black Prince’, 50, 105, 174
creates son Prince of Wales, 104–5 Edward, Prince of Wales (d. 1471), son of
marriages of, 29, 71–2, 191 Henry VI, 230–1
name of, 298, 305, 386 Edward, earl of Warwick (d. 1499), 371
numbering of, 305–6 Edward Antony Richard Louis, son of
regulates succession (1290), 144 Elizabeth II, 290
Edward II, king of England (1307–27) Edward IV, as style of Edward I, 306
and Aymer de Valence, 231 Edward VI, style of Lambert Simnel, 360,
and French succession, 203 361, 371, 378
birth of, 62 Edward, royal name, 62, 298, 386
burial of, 255 effigies, 164, 172, 258, 268–72, 277, 373, 522
conflict with Thomas of Lancaster, 222, 323 Egbert, king of Wessex (802–39), 333
created Prince of Wales, 104–5 Egbert, royal name, 305
daughter of, See Joan of the Tower (d. Egica, Visigothic king (687–702), 43
1362) Egypt, 264

623
 INDEX

Egypt, ancient, 277, 284 Elizabeth (Isabella) of Hainault (d. 1190),

Egypt, Sultan of, 362 wife of Philip Augustus, 55, 349
Egyptians, ancient, 402 Elizabeth Mure (d. 1349x1355), mistress/
Ekbert, count of Brunswick (d. 1068), 118 wife of Robert II of Scotland, 182–3
Ekkehard, name of counts of Scheyern, Elizabeth of Thuringia, St (d. 1231),
294 daughter of Andrew II of Hungary,
Ekkehard, noble German name, 291 313
Ekkehardiner, noble German kindred, 291 Elizabeth of the Tyrol (d. 1313), wife of
Elbe, river, 308 Albert I of Germany, 191
Eleanor (d. 1214), daughter of Henry II of Elvira (d. 1135), legitimate daughter of
England, wife of Alfonso VIII of Alfonso VI of Leon and Castile, 69
Castile, 22–3, 256–7 Elvira (d. after 1157), illegitimate daughter
Eleanor (d. 1297), daughter of Edward I of of Alfonso VI of Leon and Castile, 69
England, 144 Ely (Cambridgeshire), 404
Eleanor (d. 1382), daughter of Peter IV of Emma (d. after 988), wife of Lothar, king of
Aragon, wife of John I of Castile, 449 the West Franks, 12, 228, 389, 390
Eleanor (d. 1386), wife of Ferdinand I of Emma (d. 1052), daughter of Richard I of
Portugal, 171 Normandy, wife of Æthelred and
Eleanor of Aquitaine (d. 1204), wife of Canute, 13, 35–6, 228, 364
Louis VII of France and Henry II of Encomium Emmae, 35–6
England, 23, 65–6, 110, 269, 270, 428 Engelbert, archbishop of Cologne
Eleanor of Castile (d. 1244), wife of James I (1216–25), 119
of Aragon, 84, 182 England, 358, 427
Eleanor of Castile (d. 1290), wife of Edward abolition of monarchy in, 432
I of England, 29, 71, 191, 277 age at marriage of aristocracy in, 52, 53
Eleanor de Guzmán (d. 1351), mistress of age of majority in, 121
Alfonso XI, 50, 160, 165, 174 alien priories in, 424
Eleanor of Portugal (d. 1467), wife of and Alfred the Great, 383
Frederick III of Habsburg, 345 and Burgundians, 224
Eleanor of Provence (d. 1291), wife of and France, 206, 216, 217, 421, 424, 425,
Henry III of England, 405 See also Edward III, claim of, to the
elective monarchy, 3, 14, 72, 98, 154, French throne; Hundred Years War
397–403, 427, 430 and Great Schism, 412, 413
Electors of the Holy Roman Empire, 401–2 and Normans, 357
Elijah, biblical prophet, 311 and Plantagenet-Welf alliance, 22, 24
Elissaios, Byzantine eunuch (fl. 781/2), 27 and Scotland, 73–4, 76, 206, 257, 315,
Elizabeth, queen of England (1558–1603), 369, 392, 421–2, 424–5, 431, 441
124 and Wales, 105, 203, 443
Elizabeth II of the United Kingdom (acc. archbishoprics of, See Canterbury; York
1952), 290, 301 aristocratic titles in, 105
Elizabeth (Isabella), wife of Alfonso VI of as inheritance of Henry the Young King,
Leon and Castile, 69 197
Elizabeth, possible Christian name of Zaida, as papal fief, 121
wife or mistress of Alfonso VI of assessed for tithes, 315
Leon and Castile, 69 association of sons as kings in, 93, 110, 113
Elizabeth (d. 1387), wife of Louis the Great astrology in, 344
of Hungary, 146, 248 baronage of, 198
Elizabeth (d. 1411), wife of Rupert of the bastardy in, 166, 177, 183
Palatinate, 271 Beaufort family in, 185
Elizabeth (d. 1442), wife of Albert of burial places of kings of, 252, 255–6, 260,
Habsburg, king of Hungary, 39, 58, 261, 270, 273
114–15, 290 burial places of queens of, 270

624
 INDEX

Christianity in, 404 marriage practices of rulers of, 15, 16

claim of Louis of France to (1216), 23, 24 maternal mortality rate in seventeeth-
conquered by Canute, 35 century, 55
conquered by Sven Forkbeard, 279 minorities in, 216
coronation in, 109, 260, 430 names of kings of, 298, 386
coup of 1326 in, 235 numbering of kings of, 305–6, 307, 308,
dynasties of, 436 386
early unity of, 431 nunneries of, 405
ecclesiastics of, 4, 91 partitions of, 201–2
Edgar Atheling in, 391, 393 power of Godwinsons in, 13
envoys from, 398 princesses from, 22, 33, See also Joan of
envoys of Alfonso XI in, 49 Woodstock
female succession in, 142, 144, 150, 153 prophecies and visions concerning, 340,
genealogical rolls in, 151, 327, 333, 337 352, 354, 356–7
government of, 398 queens regnant of, See Mary Tudor;
government of, centred in Westminster, Elizabeth I
256 reputation of King Edgar in, 384
great revolt of 1173–4 in, 110 Robert of Normandy imprisoned in, 194
Henry the Lion in, 22 royal heraldry of, 322, 323
imprisonment of David II of Scotland in, royal sons in the Church in, 408
165 royal tombs in, 271
in Anglo-Saxon period, 436 rule of Roger Mortimer in, 235
interregna in, 99, 107 separation from Normandy, 351
kingdom of, 553 succession in, 90, 168, 198, 211–13, 279,
kings of, 382–3, 421, See also Æthelred the 381
Unready; Æthelstan; Canute the term ‘house of’, 284
Great; Eadwig; Edgar; Edmund title of heir in, 104
Ironside; Edward the Martyr; towns of, 419
Edward the Confessor; Edward I; Wars of the Roses in, 221
Edward II; Edward III; Edward IV; younger sons of kings endowed with
Edward V; Harald Harefoot; Harold earldom and dukedoms in, 408
Godwinson; Harthacnut; Henry I; English, 295
Henry II; Henry the Young King; ancestry of, 288
Henry III; Henry IV; Henry V; Henry in Hundred Years War, 301
VI; Henry VII; Henry VIII; James I English Channel, 81, 392
(VI of Scotland); James II (VII of English chroniclers, 246, 308, 385, 399
Scotland); John; Richard I; Richard English language, 161, 362, 371, 386, 434,
II; Richard III; Stephen; Sven 508
Forkbeard; William I; William II; English law, 64, 182, 183, 185, 213
Angevin kings of England; Danish English names, 28
kings of England; Norman kings of Enzio (d. 1272), son of Frederick II, 176
England; Plantagenets; Stuart Epaon, council of (517), 44
dynasty; Tudors; Wessex, royal Erasmus (d. 1536), 10
dynasty of Erchanger (d. 864), Alsatian count,
title of, 428 452
Lady of, See Matilda, daughter of Henry I Erchanger (d. 917), German noble, 14
of England Erik I Evergood, king of Denmark
Lambert Simnel in, 360, 378 (1095–1103), 452, 553
lands held by French in, 424 Erik III the Lamb, king of Denmark
levels of violence in, 249 (1137–46), 553
life expectancy of aristocracy in, 240 Erik IV Ploughpenny, king of Denmark
Louis IV d’Outremer in, 25 (1241–50), 97

625
 INDEX

Erik V Klipping, king of Denmark Fath al Ma’mun, al-, son of the ruler of
(1259–86), 247, 430, 445 Seville (d. 1091), 19
Erik VI Menved, king of Denmark Faversham (Kent), 252
(1286–1319), 259, 445 Fawtier, Robert, historian (1885–1966), 147
Erik of Pomerania, king of Denmark, female rule, 73, 122, 124–54, 172, 226, 439,
Norway and Sweden (1397/1412– 447, 492
1439), 397–8, 474 Ferdinand I, king of Aragon (1412–16),
Erik II Magnusson, king of Norway 75–6, 77, 449, 471
(1280–99), 53, 365, 372, 445, 448 Ferdinand II, king of Aragon (1479–1516),
Erik (d. 1317), brother of Birger 76, 133
Magnusson of Sweden, 193–4 Ferdinand III, Holy Roman Emperor
Erik II, duke of Schleswig (d. 1325), 452 (1637–57), 420
Erik dynasty of Sweden, 442 Ferdinand I, king of Leon and Castile
Ermengard (d. 818), wife of Louis the (1035/7–65), 203, 263–4, 439
Pious, 11, 159 Ferdinand II, king of Leon (1157–88), 253,
Ermengard (d. 896), wife of Boso of 269
Provence, 349 Ferdinand III, king of Castile (1217–52)
Ermentrud (d. 869), wife of Charles the and Leon (1230–52), 46, 125, 184,
Bald, 494 219, 428
Ermintrude (b. c. 875), daughter of Louis Ferdinand IV, king of Leon and Castile
the Stammerer, 331 (1295–1312), 445
Ernst, Bavarian count and duke (d. 865), Ferdinand (Ferrante), king of Naples
452 (1458–94), 175, 474
Ervig, Visigothic king (680–7), 43 Ferdinand I, king of Portugal (1367–83),
Erythro, See Rotrud 169, 171, 258, 413
Essex, Anglo-Saxon kingdom of, 436 Ferdinand of Antequera, See Ferdinand I of
Esther, biblical queen, 32, 506 Aragon
Etheldreda, St (d. 679), 404 Ferdinand de Castro, supporter of Peter the
Ethiopian language, 341 Cruel of Castile, 174
Eudo, duke of Aquitaine (d. 735), 18 Ferdinand de la Cerda (d. 1275), son of
Eudokia (died as a child), daughter of Leo Alfonso X, 219
VI, 70 Ferdinand de la Cerda junior, son of
Eudokia, wife of Romanos (II), See Berta Ferdinand de la Cerda (d. 1275), 219
Eudokia Baiane (d. 901), wife of Leo VI, 70 Ferdinand Perez, count of Traba (d. c.
Eudokia Makrembolitissa, wife of 1155), lover of Teresa of Portugal,
Constantine X Dukas and Romanos 233
IV Diogenes, 124–5 Fergus, lord or king of Galloway (d. 1161),
Euphrosyne (d. c. 1211), wife of Alexius III, 202
228–9 Fernão Lopes, chronicler (d. c. 1460), 174
Eustace (d. 1153), son of Stephen, king of Ferrer, Vincent, St (d. 1419), 75–6
England, 113 Figueira Square, Lisbon, 172
Eustathios, archbishop of Thessalonica (d. Finland, 193
1195x1198), 36 Flanders, 21, 120, 205, 207, 217, 222, 367,
Eve, first woman, 148 378, 416, 419
Evora, Portugal, 262 Flanders, counts of, 169, 420–1, See also
Evora, bishopric of, 411 Baldwin VIII; Baldwin IX; Charles;
Guy; Louis de Male; Philip; Robert
Fáelán mac Murchado, king of Leinster the Frisian; countess of, see Joan
(728–38), 42, 43 Flemings, 27, 325, 378
Fakhr-i Mudabbir, Persian genealogist (d. Fleury, abbey (Loiret), 253
1236), 332 Florence, 79, 416, 419
family trees, See genealogies and family trees Florence, dukes of, 416

626
 INDEX

Florus, son of Philip I of France by Bertrada lands in England of abbeys of, 424
of Montfort, 237 lands of counts of Barcelona in, 246, 423
Foggia, Apulia, 274 lands of the king of England in, 106, 114,
Folkungs, Swedish dynasty, 442 176, 198, 206, 212, 421, 424, 455
Fontevrault, abbey (Maine-et-Loire), 252, lawyers of, 147
269, 270, 274 marriage practices of rulers of, 16
Foot, Sarah, historian, 87 minorities in, 116, 216, 217
Forchheim, Franconia, 400 nicknames of kings of, 294
Forey, Alan, historian, 100 nineteenth-century historiography in,
Forfar (Angus), 190 209
Fraga, battle of (1134), 363–4 numbering of kings of, 306, 308–9
France, 44, 74, 117, 202, 207, 429, See also potential union with Castile, 101, 434
Edward III, claim of, to the throne of prophecies and visions concerning, 340,
France; French chroniclers; French 349
language; West Franks, kingdom of queens of, 55, 149
abolition of monarchy in, 432 return of Louis IV to, 25
adoption in, 79 revolutionaries in, 286
and Brittany, 40, 41 royal arms of, 178, 322, 323, 324, 326
and Burgundy, 110, 113, 178, 222–6, 241, royal brides from, 15, 30, 51, 54, 59, 63,
434 67, 69, 161, 235
and Charlemagne, 308, 325 royal burial places of, 252, 253–5, 260,
and Great Schism, 412 277, 299, 518
and Plantagenet-Welf alliance, 24 royal names of, 292
and Scotland, 24 royal registers of, 47
and Treaty of Troyes, 113 ruling dynasties of, 437
apanages in, 200 statues of kings of, in the royal palace,
aristocracy of, 136, 177, 289, 330, 388, Paris, 316–17, 321, 338
394, 419, 423 succession in, 3, 10, 60, 90, 244, 401, 433
in Spain, 131, 134 Templars in, 412
association of sons as kings in, 93, 97, 110, term ‘house of’, 284
113 title of heir in, 105
astrology in, 344–5 title of kings of, 428
bishops of, 47, 93, 385, 388 towns of, 419
borders of, 49, 201, 207–10, 391, 422–4 violent deaths of kings of, 245
Church in, 408 warfare of 1173–4 in, 110
coronation in, 108–9, 114, 147 witchcraft in, 218
customs and fashions of, 31 Francis II, Holy Roman Emperor
exclusion of women from succession to, (1792–1806), 307
2, 146–9, 153 Francis Phoebus, king of Navarre
formation of, 206, 208–9, 388, 437 (1479–83), 446
genealogies and family trees of, 327, Franciscans, 59, 152, 258, 260, 312, 324,
334–9 355, 364, 405
Greek customs in, 29 Franco, General Francisco (1892–1975), 143
Henry the Lion in, 22 François de Meyronnes (d. c. 1328), 152–3
interdict in, 26, 47 Franconia, 201
interregna in, 107 Frankfurt, 401
kingdom of, 47, 252, 553 Frankish law, 78, 147–8
kings of, 36, 52, 54, 68, 74, 82, 107, 111, Franks, 312, 337, 348
144, 148, 160, 162, 182, 197, 220, adoption among, 473
243, 382–3, 392, 427, 430, 440, 558, ancestry of, 288
See also Capetians (and list under and Byzantium, 13, 126, 414
Capetian kings); Dauphins aristocracy of, 11–12, 18

627
 INDEX

Franks (cont.) marries Isabella of Jerusalem, 56, 145

conquest of Burgundians by (534), 435 normally based in Italy, 417
conquest of southern Gaul by (507), 442 number of bastard children, 165
kingdom of, 11, 200, 206, 208, 210, 292, patron of Michael Scot, 343–4
338, 383 pretenders claiming to be, 365, 366, 367,
ruling dynasties of, 437 370, 373, 377, 378
kings of, 26, 122, 286, 306, 311, 317, 416, proclaimed king (1196), 401
See also Carolingians; East Franks, prophecies about, 355–6
kings of; Merovingians; West Franks, supported by Philip of Swabia, 409
kings of tomb of, 265, 266, 521
marriage alliances of, 38 transfers body of Philip of Swabia, 519
names of, 28 Frederick III of Habsburg, German king
Franks, as constituent people of East (1440–93), emperor, 225–6, 345
Frankish (German) kingdom, 98 Frederick III, king of Sicily (1355–77), 445
Fredegar, chronicle attributed to, 284 Frederick of Habsburg (d. 1344), 48–9
Fredegund (d. 597), wife of Chilperic, Frederick de Luna, claimant to Aragonese
Merovingian king, 115, 522 throne (d. 1438), 75, 449
Frederick I Barbarossa, German king Frederick, duke of Swabia (d. 1105), 14
(1152–90), emperor Frederick, duke of Swabia (d. 1147), 14
age at death of, 240 Frederick, duke of Swabia (d. 1169), 299
and Henry the Lion, 22 Frederick (formerly Conrad), duke of
and Italy, 417–18 Swabia (d. 1191), 299
and Otto of Freising, 292, 399 French chroniclers, 252, 285, 288, 337
burial of, 519 French language, 166, 255, 286, 290, 300,
death of, 254, 356 309, 337, 353, 386, 434
father of, 556, See also Frederick, duke of Freyja, goddess, 42
Swabia (d. 1147) Frisia, 225, 289
in Adam of Dryburgh, 383 Frisians, 37, 245
marriages of, 66, 191, 330 Froissart, Jean, chronicler (d. c. 1404), 174,
prophecies about, 355–6 218
sons of, See Frederick, duke of Swabia (d. Fulcher of Chartres, chronicler (d. 1127),
1169); Frederick (formerly Conrad), 295
duke of Swabia; Henry VI; Philip of Fulk, count of Anjou, king of Jerusalem
Swabia (1131–43), 136–8, 140, 241, 307
Frederick II, king of Sicily (1197–1250),
German king (1212–50), emperor, Gaelic names, 298
478 Galicia (Spain), 133, 134, 141, 203, 428
accedes to the throne as a minor, 53, 445 Galloway, 202–3
as both king of Sicily and emperor, 418 Galswintha, Visigothic princess (d. c. 568),
attacked by Otto IV, 427 26
buried at Palermo, 519 Galtway (Galloway), 508
Constanza-Anna, illegitimate daughter Gandersheim, Saxony, female religious
of, 163, 180 house, 410
has his son Conrad elected king of the García, king of Galicia (1065–71), 194, 203,
Romans, 99 264
his conflict with his son Henry (VII), 96, García I Sánchez, king of Navarre (925–70),
111–12 444
his conflict with Lombard League, 417 García III, king of Navarre (1035–54),
his conflict with the popes and Italian 263
cities, 418 Garibald, king of the Lombards (671), 444
his illegitimate son Enzio, 176 Garigliano river, Italy, 279
his illegitimate son Manfred, 166, 364 Gascony, 23, 24, 49

628
 INDEX

Gaskell, Mrs, novelist (1810–65), 356 average age at death of, 240
Gaul, 83, 89, 115, 186, 208, 337, 375, 442 burial places of, 254, 256, 262
Geary, Patrick, historian, 309 campaigns of, in Italy, 416–18
genealogies and family trees, 45, 151, 251, numbering of, 303–5, 307
292, 294, 326–39, 387, 469 tombs of, 268, 271
Genealogies of Foigny, 327–8 violent deaths of, 245
Geoffrey, count of Anjou (d. 1151), 53, German language, 28, 171, 201, 207, 208,
135–6, 138, 141, 149, 170, 249, 283, 285, 288–9, 290, 293, 300, 434
490 Germanic kings, 380
Geoffrey of Anjou junior (d. 1158), 283 Germanic names, 293
Geoffrey (d. 1186), son of Henry II of Germanic paganism, 42
England, 197, 211, 212–13 Germanic peoples, 34, 38, 288, 439
Geoffrey of Monmouth, author of History of Germans, 26, 366, 374, 414
the Kings of Britain (d. 1154/5), 351, hostility to, 149, 170–1, 403, 427, 430
353, 356 Germany, 25, 27, 167, 420, See also German
Geoffrey, bishop-elect of Lincoln, chroniclers; German kings; German
archbishop of York (1189–1212), language; Germans; Holy Roman
illegitimate son of Henry II of Empire; East Franks, kingdom of
England, 175–6, 180, 408 ‘special path’ of, 403
George Cedrenus, See Cedrenus abolition of monarchy in, 432
George, duke of Clarence (d. 1478), 354, age at marriage of aristocracy in, 53
370 and Burgundy, 222, 225–6, 434
Georgians, 11, 17 and Charlemagne, 309, 325
Gerald of Wales, archdeacon and writer (d. and Plantagenet-Welf alliance, 24
1223), 244, 355 aristocracy of, 21, 66, 118, 176, 262, 289,
Gerard, bishop of Cambrai (1012–51), 528 303, 345, 361, 419, 420, 426
Gerberga (d. c. 968), daughter of Henry I of as part of Holy Roman Empire, 112, 305,
Germany, wife of Louis IV, 12, 307, 398, 438, 553
388–9, 529 association of sons as kings in, 95–6
Gerberga, daughter of Conrad of bishops of, 118
Burgundy, wife of Hermann (II), Bohemian queens and duchesses from,
duke of Swabia, 529 20
Gerberga (d. after 1018), daughter of borders of, 201
Charles of Lorraine, 318 captivity of Richard I of England in, 86
Germain de Thibouville, French astrologer Danish queens from, 15
(fl. 1422), 345 Edgar Atheling in, 391
German chroniclers, 4, 36, 169, 288, 296, elective kingship in, 72, 398–403
378, 385 family trees of, 292, 326, 330
German kings, 22, 81, See also Adolf of formation of, 206, 208–9, 388
Nassau; Albert I; Charles IV; Charles Greek customs in, 29
V; Conrad II; Conrad III; Conrad IV; imperial eagle of, 326
East Franks, kings of; Frederick I; interregna in, 98
Frederick II; Frederick III; Henry II; kings of, See German kings
Henry III; Henry IV; Henry V; Henry marriage ties with Byzantium, 34
VI; Henry (VII); Henry VII; Louis marriage ties with England, 27, 33, 48
the Bavarian; Maximilian; Otto I; minorities in, 116, 118, 122
Otto II; Otto III; Otto IV; Philip of names in, 28
Swabia; Rudolf of Habsburg; Rudolf nineteenth-century historiography in,
of Rheinfelden (anti-king); Rupert 209
of the Palatinate; Sigismund; partible inheritance in, 204
Wenceslas (Wenzel); William of pretenders in, 367
Holland (anti-king) queen from, in Hungary, 31

629
 INDEX

Germany (cont.) Goody, Jack, anthropologist (1919–2015), 83

regencies in, 119 Gorizia, Italy and Slovenia, 420
rule of Ottonians in, 380 Gorm the Old, king of Denmark (tenth
ruling dynasties of, 96, 398, 437 century), 436
succession in, 54, 72, 90, 100, 399 Goscelin, Flemish monk (fl. c. 1058–c.
Gertrude of Meran (d. 1213), wife of 1107), 27
Andrew II of Hungary, 31 Granada, Andalusia, 353
Gervase of Tilbury, writer (d. c. 1222), 284 Grandes chroniques de France, 286, 339
Gervase, abbot of Westminster (d. c. 1158), Gratian, author of the Decretum (c. 1150),
illegitimate son of Stephen, king of 156, 498
England, 408 Great Britain, 420
Géza, duke, ruler of Hungary (d. 997), 42–3 Great Schism, 301, 412–13
Ghent, Flanders, 49, 418–19 Greece, 126, 265, 432, See also Byzantium
Ghibellines, imperial party, 418, 556 Greece, ancient, 156, 249, 268, 295, 341
Giannino of Siena (fl. 1359), pretender Greek Christianity, 17, 20, 33, 395
claiming to be John I of France, 365, Greek customs, 18, 28, 29, 93
366 Greek language, 27, 104, 166, 229, 284, 288,
Gibbon, Alfonso, not the name of Edward 341, 395, 548
Gibbon, 62 Greek names, 17, 27, 289
Gilbert Foliot, abbot of Gloucester (d. Greek territory, 19–20
1187), 141, 151, 490 Green, Mary Anne Everett (1818–95), 51
Gilbert of Mons, chronicler (d. 1225), 125 Gregorians, supporters of pope Gregory
Giles of Paris, author of the Karolinus VII, 305
(1200), 334, 335, 339 Gregory I the Great, pope (590–604), 37
Girona, Prince of, title, 105 Gregory II, pope (715–31), 302
Gisela (d. 1043), wife of Conrad II, Gregory III, pope (731–41), 302
385 Gregory VII, pope (1073–85), 268, 305, 368,
Gisela, supposed daughter of Charles the 380, 429
Simple, 14 Gregory IX, pope (1227–41), 182
Gisulf I of Salerno (d. 977), 97 Gregory of Tours, chronicler (d. 594), 79,
Glanvill, English legal treatise, 183, 213 236, 246, 284
Glasgow, 59 Grub, Bavaria, counts of, 289
Glasgow, bishop of, 182 Gruffudd ap Cynan, ruler of Gwynedd (d.
Glastonbury (Somerset), 384 1137), 221
Gloucester, 194, 255 Guala, papal legate (d. 1227), 121
dukes of, See Humphrey; Richard III; Guarda, bishopric of, See Idanha
Thomas of Woodstock Guelfs, pro-Church party, 353, 418
earl of, See Robert Guenée, Bernard, historian (1927–2010),
Gniezno, 406 328
Godfrey de Bouillon, ruler of Jerusalem Guibert, antipope (Clement III, 1080,
(1099–1100), 2, 438 1084–1100), 376
Godgiva, mock name, 28 Guimarães (or São Mamede), battle of
Godila (d. after 1003), wife of Liuthar, (1128), 233
margrave of the Nordmark, 297, 465 Guinevere, wife of King Arthur, 227, 384
Godric, mock name, 28 Gundeberga, Lombard queen, wife of
Godstow (Oxfordshire), 160, 165 Arioald and Rothari, 35, 42
Godwin, earl (d. 1053), 13, 66 Gundovald (d. 585), Merovingian
Godwinsons, 13, 66 pretender, 372, 375, 377
Golden Book of Prüm, 332 Gunhilda (Cunigunda) (d. 1038), daughter
Golden Bough (Frazer), 42 of Canute the Great, 28
Golden Bull of 1356, 402 Gunnor (d. 1031), wife of Richard I of
Golden Horde, 19 Normandy, 158

630
 INDEX

Guntram, Merovingian king (d. 592/3), 79, Harold Harefoot, king of England (1035/
100, 115, 372, 472 7–40), 202, 279, 364, 498
Gustaf III, king of Sweden (1771–92), 247 Harold Godwinson, king of England
Guta (d. 1297), wife of Wencelas II, 56, 163 (1066), 13, 66, 357, 360, 362, 381,
Guy of Burgundy, grandson of Richard II of 392
Normandy, 169 Harthacnut, king of England (1035/40–2),
Guy, count of Flanders and margrave of king of Denmark (1035–42), 202, 279
Namur (d. 1305), 101–2 Hartnid, Frankish noble, brother of
Guy of Lusignan (d. 1194), husband of Nithard, 293
Sybilla of Jerusalem, 145 Hastings, battle of (1066), 246, 362
Guy-Geoffrey of Poitou, See William VIII Hathui (d. 1014), niece of Queen Matilda
Gwynedd, Welsh principality, 221, 443 of Germany, 465
princes of, See Gruffudd ap Cynan; Owain Hatto, archbishop of Mainz (891–913), 122,
Gwynedd 484
Håtuna, Sweden, 193
Haakon II Sigurdsson, king of Norway Hebrides, 257
(1157–62), 445 Hector, bastard of Bourbon and archbishop
Haakon III Sverresson, king of Norway of Toulouse (1491–1502), 177
(1202–4), 186 Hector, name, 177
Haakon IV Haakonsson, king of Norway Hedwig (Jadwiga), queen of Poland
(1217–63), 186, 414 (1384–99), 146, 441, 446, 447
Haakon V Magnusson, king of Norway Hedwig See also Hadwig
(1299–1319), 118 Heidelberg, 271
Habichtsburg, ‘Hawk Castle’, 289 Heilsbronn, Franconia, 326
Habsburgs, 49, 72, 96, 226, 289, 304, 399, Heimskringla (Snorri Sturluson), 362
420, 437, See also Albert I; Albert, Helinand of Froidmont, chronicler (fl.
king of Hungary and Bohemia; 1197–1229), 86
Albert, duke of Austria; Frederick Helwig (d. 1374), wife of Valdemar IV of
III; Frederick (d. 1344); Maximilian; Denmark, 452
Otto; Rudolf Hemma (d. 876), wife of Louis the German,
Hadrian I, pope (772–95), 18 11
Hadwig (Hedwig) (d. 994), niece of Otto I, Hengist, early Anglo-Saxon leader, 191
27, 34 ‘Henries’, term for Hohenstaufen, 292
Hadwig, countess of Hainault (d. after Henry I, king of Castile (1214–17), 125, 219,
1013), daughter of Hugh Capet, 328 257, 445
Hagarenes (i.e. Muslims), 22 Henry II of Trastámara, king of Castile
Hagia Sophia, Constantinople, 13, 238 (1369–79), 162, 174, 353–4, 413, 439
Hainault, 184 Henry III, king of Castile (1390–1406), 75,
Hallfredr Ottarsson, Norse poet (c. 1000), 446, 449
362 Henry IV, king of Castile (1454–74), 303
Hamburg, 206 Henry I, king of England (1100–35)
Hamlet (Shakespeare), 374 and his brother Robert, 194, 393
Hamo de Masci, English landholder (fl. and prophecy, 350–1, 356, 357
1199), 166 burial of, 252
Hannibal, name, 177 daughter of, See Matilda (d. 1167)
Hanover, Electors of, 402 illegitimate children of, 165, 166, 178, 330
Harald Hardrada, king of Norway (1046/7– marriage of, to Matilda of Scotland, 28,
66), 440 385, 388
Harald Gille, king of Norway (1130–6), plans succession of his daughter Matilda,
203 135–6, 138, 141–2, 170
Harold Hen, king of Denmark (1074–80), plans succession of his son William,
452 91

631
 INDEX

Henry I, king of England (1100–35) (cont.) Henry V, king of England (1413–22), 106,
seen as seventh of his dynasty, 285, 541 112–13, 150, 177, 232, 255, 261, 345,
seizure of throne by, 242 369
visited by Louis, son of Philip of France, Henry VI, king of England (1422–61, 1470–
237, 477 1), 33, 62, 124, 151, 218–19, 221,
Henry II, king of England (1154–89) 230–1, 255, 311, 312, 341, 358, 446
accedes to the throne, 53 Henry VII, king of England (1485–1509),
acquires the Vexin, 52 151, 185, 311, 340, 346, 360, 369,
ancestry of, 357, 385 371, 372
and conflict with his sons, 109, 175, 197, Henry VIII, king of England (1509–47), 25,
351 69, 301, 311
and Henry the Young King, 93, 110 Henry I, king of France (1031–60), 44, 110,
and King Stephen, 81, 99, 112–13, 167 560
and marriages of his daughters, 21–4, 53 Henry III, king of France (1574–89), 245
and Rosamund Clifford, 160 Henry IV, king of France (1589–1610),
burial of, 252, 269, 270, 274 200
death of, 98 Henry I, king of the East Franks (Germany)
illegitimate sons of, See Geoffrey, bishop- (919–36), 12, 90, 92, 98, 304, 380,
elect of Lincoln, archbishop of York; 405, 407, 529
Salisbury, earl of Henry II, German king (1002–24),
marriage to Eleanor of Aquitaine, 65–6 emperor, 54, 64, 92, 271, 304–5, 311,
parentage of, 135 331, 433
sister of, 405 Henry III, German king (1039–56),
sons of, 351, See also Henry the Young emperor, 28, 30, 96, 262–3, 305, 330,
King; Richard I; Geoffrey; John 385, 400, 478, 519, 530
succession plans of, 196–8 Henry IV, German king (1056–1105),
takes the cross, 1188, 450 emperor, 14, 96, 111, 116, 118, 122,
title of, 421 245, 262–3, 268, 305, 400, 445, 478,
Henry ‘the Young King’ (d. 1183), son of 519, 530
Henry II of England, 52, 95, 110–11, Henry V, German king (1105–25),
197, 352, 382–3 emperor, 27, 96, 111, 112, 231,
Henry III, king of England (1216–72) 262–3, 305, 360, 400, 478, 519, 530
and (pseudo) Baldwin of Flanders, pretender claiming to be, 374–5
378 Henry VI, German king (1190–7), emperor,
and birth of son Edmund, 56 478
and France, 424 and Philip of Swabia, 409
and his mother Isabella, 231 buried at Palermo, 519
burial of, 255 death of, 356
creates son Edward earl of Chester, his conquest of Sicily, 150, 171, 251, 272,
104 279–80, 409, 427, 442
death of, 107 his marriage to Constance of Sicily, 53,
in genealogical rolls, 327 150, 170, 418
in prophecy, 352 his plans for hereditary succession, 400–1
minority of, 121–2, 445 numbering of, 304
names his son Edward, 298, 386, 388 prophecies about, 355–6
numbering of, 95, 308, 478 son of, See Frederick II
opponents of, 431 succession of, 400
title of, 421 tomb of, 265
wife of, See Eleanor of Provence Henry (VII), German king (1220–35), 96,
Henry IV, king of England (1399–1413), 62, 112, 119, 427, 478, 482, 519
150, 151, 222, 255, 261, 271, 306, Henry VII, German king (1308–13),
333, 369, 398 emperor, 318, 402–3, 482

632
 INDEX

Henry (d. 955), son of Henry I of Germany, History of the Kings of Britain (Geoffrey of
90 Monmouth), 351, 353
Henry (died young), son of Otto I, 506 Hluboká (Frauenberg), Bohemia, 235
Henry (d. 1150), son of Conrad III of Hohenstaufen, 14, 20, 283, 305, 398, 401,
Germany, 478 418, 427, 437, See also Conrad III;
Henry (d. 1274), son of Edward I of Conrad IV; Conradin; Enzio;
England, 62 Frederick I Barbarossa; Frederick II;
Henry of Anjou, See Henry II of England Frederick, duke of Swabia (d. 1105);
Henry of Burgundy, count of Portugal (d. Frederick, duke of Swabia (d. 1147);
1112), 134–5, 441 Frederick, duke of Swabia (d. 1169);
Henry of Champagne, ruler of Jerusalem Frederick (formerly Conrad), duke
(1192–7), 46, 145 of Swabia (d. 1191); Henry VI; Henry
Henry of Huntingdon, chronicler (d. c. (VII); Manfred; Philip of Swabia
1157), 99 as kings of Jerusalem, 394, 438
Henry, earl of Leicester (d. 1345), 323 burial places of, 254
Henry the Lion, duke of Saxony and Bavaria fall of, 96, 246, 280, 364, 418
(d. 1195), 22, 53 rule in Sicily, 89, 144, 150, 442
Henry of Luxemburg, See Henry VII of termed the Henries of Waiblingen, 292
Germany war cry of, 556
Henry I of Mecklenburg (d. 1302), 361–2 Holstein, 325
Henry, earl of Northumberland (d. 1152), Holy Apostles, Church of the,
son of David I of Scotland, 448 Constantinople, 70, 253, 261, 264, 267
Henry II, duke of Silesia (1238–41), 374, 406 Holy Apostles, Church of the, Paris, 253
Henry of Trastámara, See Henry II of Castile Holy Cross, priory of, Coimbra, 233, 258
Henry Tudor, See Henry VII of England Holy Roman Emperors, 72, 136, 170, 225,
Henry, bishop of Beauvais, archbishop of 241, 245, 303–5, 313, 353, 361, 399,
Rheims (1162–75), son of Louis VI, 402, 416, 419, 426, See also Arnulf of
407–8 Carinthia; Berengar; Charlemagne;
Henry I, imperial style of Henry II of Charles IV; Charles the Bald; Charles
Germany, 305, 433 the Fat; Charles V; Conrad II;
Henry II, imperial style of Henry III of Ferdinand III; Francis II; Frederick I
Germany, 530 Barbarossa; Frederick II; Frederick
Henry III, as title of Henry the Young King, III; Henry II; Henry III; Henry IV;
95, 383 Henry V; Henry VI; Henry VII;
Henry III, imperial style of Henry IV of Lothar; Louis II; Louis the Bavarian;
Germany, 305, 530 Louis the Blind; Louis the Pious;
Henry IV, as title of Henry III of England, Maximilian; Otto I; Otto II; Otto III;
95, 478 Otto IV; Sigismund
Henry IV, imperial style of Henry V of Holy Roman Empire, 89, 105, 111, 119, 154,
Germany, 305, 530 204, 207–8, 222, 225, 300, 304, 307,
Henry, royal name, 286, 305, 306 348, 398–403, 416, 420, 422, 427,
Heptarchy, 436 435, 437, 553
Heraclians, Byzantine dynasty, 3, 436 defined, 438
heraldry, 80, 271, 321–6 Holy Sepulchre, Church of, Jerusalem, 63,
Heribert, count of Omois (d. 980x984), 232 136, 241, 276
Hermann (II), duke of Swabia (d. 1003), 529 Horsa, early Anglo-Saxon leader, 191
Hermegisclus, king of the Varni, 38 Hospitallers, 63–4, 411–12, 508
Herod, biblical king, 212 Hroswitha of Gandersheim, tenth-century
Hincmar, archbishop of Rheims (845–82), canoness and writer, 237
527 Hugh Capet, king of France (987–96), 97,
Historia Compostellana, 131, 133, 136, 139 253, 260, 285–6, 288, 292, 294, 316,
History of the Franks (Aimoin of Fleury), 294 327, 337, 349, 389–91, 393

633
 INDEX

Hugh of Arles, king of Italy (926–47), 28 queen of, See Mary

Hugh (d. after 895), illegitimate son of royal burial in, 260
Lothar II, 176, 250 royal names in, 290
Hugh (d. 1025), son of Robert II of France, ruling dynasties of, 438
110, 111 saintly royal women of, 312–13, 405
Hugh the Great (d. 956), father of Hugh succession in, 39, 42–3, 58, 89, 114, 214,
Capet, 21, 294, 388, 454 248, 251, 426
Hugh ‘the Great’ (d. 1101), son of Henry I Hywel ap Iorweth of Caerleon (fl. 1171–c.
of France, 328 1200), 250
Hugh the Pious, nickname of Hugh Capet,
327 Iberian kingdoms, 106, 143, 165, 204, 396
Hugh, Margrave of Tuscany (d. 1001), Iberian peninsula, 18–19, 68, 105, 125, 207,
469 265, 269, 303, 309, 353, 411, 412, 442
Hugo van der Goes, painter (d. 1482), Ibn Battuta, Arab traveller (d. 1368x1377),
324–5 19, 376
Hugonides Rotbertus, designation for Iceland, 414, 416
Robert II of France, 288 Iconium, Sultan of, 369
Hugonids, term for Capetians, 288 Idanha (Guarda), bishopric of, 411
Humbert, count of Maurienne (d. 1189), Ignatius (formerly Niketas), patriarch of
197 Constantinople (847–58, 867–77), 408
Humbert of Silva Candida, cardinal (d. Ile de la Cité, Paris, 316
1061), 433, 560 Ile-de-France, 148, 203, 254, 431
Humphrey, duke of Gloucester (d. 1447), Ilkhans of Persia, 19, 332
177, 358, 359 illegitimacy, 5, 15, 19, 23, 46, 63, 67, 69,
Humphrey of Toron (d. 1198), husband of 74–5, 87, 90, 117, 131, 134, 142, 149,
Isabella of Jerusalem, 145 155, 157, 160, 163, 165–86, 204, 231,
Hundred Years War, 24, 120, 148, 206, 216, 233, 250, 258, 295, 326, 330, 358,
222, 225, 324 370–1, 390, 405, 407, 408, 413, 435,
Hungarian chroniclers, 146 439, 441, 491
Hungary Ilona, wife of Bela the Blind of Hungary,
adoption in, 80–1 251
Angevin rule in, 247 Immed, noble Saxon name, 288, 526
coronation in, 92, 260 India, 332
Edgar Atheling in, 391 Ines (Agnes) of Poitou, wife of Alfonso VI of
female rule in, 143, 145–6 Leon and Castile, 69
German settlers in, 31 Ines de Castro (d. 1355), mistress of Peter I
Habsburg rule in, 420 of Portugal, 163–4, 165, 271, 273,
kingdom of, 553 274
kings of, 68, 214–16, 234, 425, See also Inge Haraldsson, king of Norway
Albert of Habsburg; Andrew II; (1136–61), 445
Angevin kings of Sicily, Naples and Ingeborg (d. 1361), daughter of Haakon
Hungary; Arpads; Bela II; Bela IV; Magnusson of Norway, 118, 121
Charles Robert (Canrobert); Ingeborg of Denmark (d. c. 1237), wife of
Charles of Durazzo; Koloman; Philip Augustus of France, 26, 46–8,
Ladislas, St; Ladislas III; Ladislas 183
Postumus; Louis the Great; Mary; Ingeld, legendary king of Denmark, 190
Matthias Corvinus; Peter Orseolo; Ingelheim, Rhineland, 315–16, 321
Sigismund of Luxemburg; Stephen, Ingram, Frankish noble, father of empress
St; Stephen II; Vladislav II Ermengard, 11
marriage practices of rulers of, 16, 20 Inmed, noble Saxon name, 288
Mongol invasion of, 410 Inmedingi, noble Saxon kindred, 288
princesses from, 17, 20 Innocent II, pope (1130–43), 395

634
 INDEX

Innocent III, pope (1198–1216), 17–18, 26, Isabella II (Yolande), queen of Jerusalem
46–8, 119, 183–4, 385, 401, 427, (1212–28), 56, 447
508–9 Isabella, daughter of David, earl of
Innocent IV, pope (1243–54), 186, 418 Huntingdon, 448
Innocent VI, pope (1352–62), 161 Isabella (d. 1379), daughter of Edward III, 49
Innocents, Holy, 212 Isabella of Angoulême (d. 1246), wife of
interdict, 26, 46, 47, 67 John, king of England, 231
interregna, 98–9, 106–7, 435 Isabella of Bavaria (d. 1435), wife of Charles
Iona (Argyllshire), 257, 259 VI of France, 57, 164, 191
Iran, 379 Isabella of England (d. 1241), wife of
Ireland, 351, 404 Frederick II, 56
Anglo-Norman invasion of, 355 Isabella of France (d. 1358), wife of Edward
association of sons as kings in, 97 II of England, 54, 203, 235–6, 276–7,
blinding in, 250 324, 425
concept of sovereignty in early, 42 Isabella of France (d. 1409), wife of Richard
dynastic continuity in, 380 II of England, 52
Edward Bruce in, 103 Isabella of Gloucester (d. 1217), first wife of
family conflict in, 220–1, 247 John of England, 452
genealogies in, 327 Isaurians, Byzantine dynasty, 287, 321
Henry II in, 110 Isidore of Seville (d. 636), 166, 169
John, son of Henry II, in, 197 Isolde, wife of Mark of Cornwall, 227
Lambert Simnel in, 360 Israel, kingdom of, 208, 382
legal treatises of, 327 Israelites, 382
lordship of, 124, 198, 360, 421 Issoudun (Indre), 55
marriage practices of rulers in, 157, 191 Italian language, 353, 395
origin of Scots kings in, 257 Italy See also Lombards; Lombardy; Naples,
origins of Scots in, 441 kingdom of; Sicily, kingdom of
Oswiu of Northumbria in, 168 abolition of monarchy in, 432
Perkin Warbeck in, 370 and imperial title, 437
ruling dynasties of, 438 as part of Carolingian empire, 206, 308
succession practices in, 4–5, 89, 99, 104, as part of Holy Roman Empire, 112, 305,
114, 172, 180, 189, 191 307, 394, 398, 438, 553
surnames in, 287–8 Byzantine rule in, 394–5
warfare in, 245 campaigns of German kings in, 407,
Irene, Byzantine empress (797–802), 126, 416–18
128, 321, 322, 382, 447, 483, 524 cities of northern, 343, 416–19, 432, See
Irene Doukaina, wife of Alexius Comnenus, also Lombard League
287 conflict of popes and emperors in, 418
Irene the Khazar, wife of Constantine V, 453 courts of, 40
Irene, wife of Manuel Comnenus, See Berta death of Charles the Bald in, 262
of Sulzbach death of Conrad-Otto of Bohemia in, 272
Isaac I Comnenus, Byzantine emperor Edgar Atheling in, 393
(1057–9), 17 emperor Henry VII in, 402
Isaac II Angelus, Byzantine emperor Enzio, son of Frederick II, in, 176
(1185–95, 1203–4), 17, 194, 355 Henry (VII) imprisoned in, 112
Isaac Dukas Comnenus, ruler of Cyprus kingdom of, 331
(deposed 1191), 355 kings of, See Berengar; Bernard;
Isaac, biblical prophet, 410 Carloman; Hugh of Arles; Lothar;
Isabella, queen of Castile (1474–1504), 76, Louis II; Louis the Blind; Lombards,
133, 439, 447, 547 kings of; Ostrogoths; Pippin-
Isabella, queen of Jerusalem (1190–1205), Carloman
46, 145, 447 lands of emperor Lothar (d. 855) in, 206

635
 INDEX

Italy (cont.) James of Urgell (d. 1347), son of Alfonso IV

lawyers of, 214–15 of Aragon, 449
Metternich’s view of, 394 James of Urgell (d. 1433), claimant to
Michael Scot in, 343 Aragonese throne, 75–7, 449
names in, 288 Jean Froissart, See Froissart
news of Wars of Roses in, 230 Jean de Joinville, See Joinville
Normans in, 394–5 Jean de Montreuil, diplomat and writer
origin of Marchesina, mistress of John III (d. 1418), 148
Vatatzes, 163 Jelling, house of, 436
Ostrogothic kingdom of, 116, 264 Jerome, St (d. 420), 70, 284
Ottonian rule in, 380, 416 Jerusalem, 138, 275, 276, 553, See also
pretenders in, 365, 366, 368 Calvary; Holy Sepulchre; Temple of
principalities of southern, 97 Jerusalem
probable origin of Berta, wife of Alfonso capture of by crusaders (1099), 295, 307,
VI, 69 438
prophecy in, 356 Jerusalem, kingdom of, 120, 124, 136, 142,
tombs of Hohenstaufen in, 254 393, 396, 438, 531
Welf III in, 64 female rule in, 145
Ivan (John) Vladislav, Bulgarian leader kings of, See Amalric I; Amalric of
(1015–18), 453 Lusignan; Baldwin I; Baldwin II;
Ivanhoe (Walter Scott), 104 Baldwin III; Baldwin IV; Baldwin V;
Ivo, bishop of Chartres (d. 1115/16), 84, Fulk; John of Brienne. See also
237, 330 Jerusalem, kingdom of, rulers of;
Hohenstaufen; Lusignan family
Jacob, biblical patriarch, 158 numbering of kings of, 307–8
Jacques de Molay, Grand Master of the queens regnant of, See Isabella, Isabella II,
Templars (d. 1314), 230 Maria, Melisende, Sybilla
Jaén, Andalusia, 428 rulers of, See Conrad of Montferrat;
Jagiello, prince of Lithuania (Wladyslaw II Godfrey de Bouillon; Henry of
of Poland, 1386–1434), 146, 441 Champagne. See also Jerusalem,
Jagiellonian dynasty, 441 kingdom of, kings of; Jerusalem,
James I, king of Aragon (1213–76), 84–5, kingdom of, queens regnant of
182, 198, 285, 423, 445, 474, 556 succession in, 182
James II, king of Aragon (1291–1327), 75, Jesse, father of biblical King David, 326
265, 270, 449, 556 Jesus, See Christ
James II, king of Cyprus (1460–73), 175, Jews, 18, 77
436, 498 Joachim of Fiore, abbot and apocalyptic
James II, king of Majorca (1276–85 and thinker (d. 1202), 355
1298–1311), 198 Joan, wife of Philip V of France, 229
James III, king of Majorca (1324–44), 346 Joan of Arc (d. 1431), 106, 114, 178, 179, 224
James I, king of Scots (1406–37), 24, 116, Joan of Bourbon (d. 1378), wife of Charles
248, 446 V of France, 56
James II, king of Scots (1437–60), 116, 249, Joan of Evreux (d. 1371), wife of Charles IV
446 of France, 45, 277, 278
James III, king of Scots (1460–88), 24, 116, Joan, countess of Flanders (1206–44), 370,
324, 446 377, 378
James IV, king of Scots (1488–1513), 446 Joan of the Tower (d. 1362), wife of David II
James VI of Scotland and I of England of Scotland, 464
(1567/1603–1625), 105 Joan of Woodstock (d. 1348), daughter of
James VII of Scotland and II of England Edward III of England, 48–51
(1685–8), 364 Joanna I, queen of Naples (1343–81), 81–2,
James Douglas (d. 1330), 276 247–8, 447, 480

636
 INDEX

Joanna II, queen of Naples (1414–35), 81, nicknamed Lackland, 196–7

82–3, 447 not a rebel in 1173–4, 111
Joanna I, queen of Navarre (1274–1305), proposed marriage with Alice of
445, 447 Maurienne, 197, 198
Joanna II, queen of Navarre (1328–49), title of, 428
daughter of Louis X, 146, 230, 447 John I, king of France (1316), 147, 365, 445
Joanna (d. 1199), daughter of Henry II of pretender claiming to be, 365–6
England, wife of William II of Sicily, John II, king of France (1350–64), 222, 301
22, 23–4 John of Brienne, king of Jerusalem
Joanna de Castro (d. 1374), wife of Peter (1210–25), Latin emperor of
the Cruel of Castile, 161–2, 163 Constantinople (1231–7), 145,
Joanna of Navarre (d. 1437), wife of Henry 307–8, 324
IV of England, 271 John II, king of Navarre (1425–79) and
Jocelin of Furness, hagiographer (fl. Aragon (1458–79), 106
1199–1214), 313 John I (John of Avis), king of Portugal
John XXII, pope (1316–34), 531 (1385–1433), 169–70, 171–2, 173,
John I, king of Aragon (1387–95), 449 174, 258, 271, 297, 358, 413
John of Luxemburg, king of Bohemia John II, king of Portugal (1481–95), 258
(1311–46), 299, 426 John Balliol, king of Scots (1292–6), 73–4,
John I Tzimiskes, Byzantine emperor 76–7, 248, 441, 448
(969–76), 95 John (d. c. 1227), son of Louis VIII of
John II Comnenus, Byzantine emperor France, 555
(1118–43), 17, 252, 355 John (d. 1271), son of Edward I of England,
John III Vatatzes, Byzantine emperor 62
(1222–54), 163 John, illegitimate son of Peter I of Portugal
John IV, Byzantine emperor (1258–61), (not John of Avis), 358
445, 483 John (d. 1417), son of Charles VI, 113
John V Palaeologus, Byzantine emperor John, son of Robert II of Scotland, See
(1341–91), 19, 342, 445, 483 Robert III
John VI Cantacuzenus, Byzantine emperor John Balliol (d. 1268), 448
(1341–54), 19–20 John, bastard of Burgundy, bishop of
John I, king of Castile (1379–90), 75, 241, Cambrai (1439–79), 178
413, 449 John, duke of Berry (d. 1416), 120, 216,
John II, king of Castile (1406–54), 75, 303, 218
446, 449 John I, duke of Brabant (d. 1294), 318
John II, king of Cyprus (1432–58), 175 John of Bridlington (d. 1379), prophecies
John, king of England (1199–1216) attributed to, 340
and loss of Normandy 1204, 351–2 John of Durazzo (d. 1336), son of Charles II
and Louis of France, 23 of Sicily, 323
and the casus regis, 212–14 John the Fearless, duke of Burgundy
and Welf alliance, 22 (1404–19), 178, 218, 223–5
as lord of Ireland, 198 John of Gaunt, duke of Lancaster (d. 1399),
as ‘Prince John’ in literature, 104 49, 153, 184–5, 199, 216
as youngest sibling, 196–8 John of Gloucester or Pontefract,
burial of, 252 illegitimate son of Richard III of
coronation of, 98 England, 176, 371
death of, 231 John Orseolo, son of Doge Peter II Orseolo,
French campaign in 1206, 455 457
his murder of his nephew Arthur, 197, John of Prades, claimant to Aragonese
211–12 throne (d. 1414), 75, 449
in Ireland 1185, 197 John, earl of Somerset (d. 1410), 185
marriage to Isabella of Gloucester, 452 John Skylitzes, See Skylitzes

637
 INDEX

John of Thurocz, chronicler (d. c. 1488), 146 Kildare, earl of, 360, 372
John of Trastámara, See John II of Navarre King John (Shakespeare), 212
and Aragon king of the Romans, 58, 66, 99, 119, 199,
John Tristan (d. 1270), son of Louis IX, 261 225, 233, 300, 303–5, 399, 401, 402,
John of Worcester, chronicler (fl. 1095– 476, 482
1140), 166 Kings of the French, The (Reges Francorum)
John, archbishop of Toledo (1319–28), 556 (Bernard Gui), 335
Joinville, Jean de, chronicler (d. 1317), 29 Knights of St John, See Hospitallers
Judas, disciple of Jesus, 212 Knights of the Order of Christ, Portuguese
Judith (d. 843), wife of Louis the Pious, 11, crusading Order, 172
195–6, 227 Koloman, king of Hungary (1095–1116),
Judith (d. after 870), daughter of Charles 251
the Bald, wife of Æthelwulf and Konecny, Sylvia, historian, 159
Æthelbald of Wessex, 12, 37 Koppány, Hungarian duke (d. c. 998), 42–3
Judith, wife of Wencelas II, See Guta Koran, 18, 20
Julian the Apostate, Roman emperor (361– Korea, North, 429
3), 382 Kumar of Bhawal (d. 1909), Indian prince,
Julius Caesar, dictator (d. 44 BC), 78 545
Jumièges, abbey (Seine-Maritime), 164, 165
Jupiter, god, 317 Lackland, nickname of John of England,
Jura Mountains, 222 196–8
Justin, Roman emperor (518–27), 78 Ladislas, St, king of Hungary (1077–95),
Justinian, Roman emperor (527–65), 78, 290
156 Ladislas III, king of Hungary (1204–5), 445
Justinian II, Byzantine emperor (685–9, Ladislas Postumus, king of Bohemia and
705–11), 249, 453 Hungary (1440–57), 58, 114, 290,
Justinus, ancient historian, 384 446
Laing, Samuel, translator of Heimskringla
Kaiserswerth, Rhineland, 118 (1844), 362
Kalundborg, Denmark, 242 Lake Geneva, 262
Karlenses, term for Carolingians and for the Lambert, count of Louvain (d. 1015), 318
French, 296 Lamego, bishopric of, 411
Karlštejn (Karlstein), Bohemia, 317–20, 321 Lampert of Hersfeld, chronicler (fl.
Karolides Ludovicus, designation for Louis 1058–81), 118
the Stammerer, 288 Lancaster, Duchy of, 150
Karolides, term for Philip Augustus, 349 Lancaster, house of, 185, 285
Karolingi, term for Carolingians, 296 Lancastrians, 437
Karolinus (Giles of Paris), 334 Lancelot (d. 1422), son of Charles III of
Katherine de Mortimer (d. 1360), mistress Navarre, 177
of David II of Scotland, 165 Lancelot, knight of King Arthur, 227
Kazhdan, Alexander, Byzantinist (1922– Lancelot, name, 177
97), 287 Laon (Aisne), 254, 390–1
Kenneth Macalpine (Cináed mac Alpin), Laon, cardinal of (d. 1388), 120, 484
king of Scots and Picts (d. 858), 257, Lara, noble house of, 220
441 Lara, Peter González, count of (d. 1130),
Kent, Anglo-Saxon kingdom of, 436 139, 232–3
Kent, kings of, 288, See also Æthelbert, Las Huelgas, Cistercian nunnery, Castile,
Eadbald, Oisingas 256–7, 260
Khazars, 4, 17 Las Navas, battle of (1212), 423
Kiburg, Swabia, 420 Latakia, Syria, 553
Kiev, princes of, See Vladimir; Vladimir Lateran Council, Fourth (1215), 181
Monomakh; Yaropolk; Yaroslav Latin Chronicle of the Kings of Castile, 363

638
 INDEX

Latin language, 104, 255, 284, 285, 286, Lincoln, earl of, See Thomas of Lancaster
342–3 Lisbon, 172, 258
Lausitz, 420 Lisbon, bishopric of, 411
Lear, Alfonso, not the name of Edward Lithuania, prince of, See Jagiello
Lear, 62 Liudolf (d. 866), Saxon count, 452
Lecce, count of, 166 Liudolf (d. 957), son of Otto I, 196, 198,
Legnano, battle of (1176), 417 237, 506
Leicester, 255 Liudprand of Cremona (d. c. 972), 13
Leicester, earl of, See Thomas of Lancaster Liutgard (d. 885), wife of Louis the
Leinster, kings of, 438, See also Dúnchad Younger, son of Louis the German,
mac Murchado; Fáelán mac 452
Murchado Liuthar, margrave of the Saxon Nordmark
Leo II, pope (682–3), 302 (985–1003), 297, 465
Leo III, Byzantine emperor (716–41), 44, 321 Liutpert, king of the Lombards (700–1), 444
Leo IV, Byzantine emperor (775–80), 321 Liutswind (d. before 891), concubine of
Leo V, Byzantine emperor (813–20), Carloman, son of Louis the German,
249–50 158
Leo VI, Byzantine emperor (886–912), 32, Liutward, bishop of Vercelli (880–c.900), 228
70–1, 78, 94, 261, 311, 408, 410 Livonia, 411
Leo Argyros (9th century), 287 Lluchmajor, battle of (1349), 346
Leon, 134, 194, 263–4, See also San Isidoro Loches (Indre-et-Loire), 164, 165
Leon, kingdom of, 264, 427, 428, 553 Loire, river, 65, 208
bishoprics of, 411 Lollards, 373
burial places of kings of, 263–4 Lombard law, 78
conquest of, by Castile, 263 Lombard League, 417–18
division of, from Castile, 203–4, 310, 393, Lombards, 35, 394–5, 398, 416, 439,
411, 439 kings of, See Adaloald; Agilulf; Aistulf;
female rule in, 154, See also Urraca Arioald; Authari; Garibald; Liutpert;
heraldry of, 322 Rothari
kings of See Alfonso V; Alfonso VI; Lombardy, 355
Alfonso VII; Alfonso IX; Ferdinand I; London, 48, 60, 164, 256, 271, 277, 372, 477
Ferdinand II; for kings after 1230 see Looke about you (Robin Hood play), 104
under Castile López de Ayala, Pero, chronicler (d. 1407),
kings of, numbering of, 309–10 175, 353–4
queen regnant of, See Urraca Lorraine, the name, 206
reunion with Castile, 46, 184, 393 Lothar, emperor (840–55), son of Louis the
rule of Alfonso the Battler in, 133–4 Pious, 11, 93, 158, 195, 199, 206, 348
ruling dynasties of, 439 Lothar, king of the West Franks (954–86),
separation of Portugal from, 393 12, 92, 228, 318, 337, 388–9, 390,
succession to, 184 391, 407, 408, 444, 528
Leon, logothete under emperor Maurice, Lothar, king of Italy (948–50), 12
342 Lothar II, king of Lotharingia (855–69),
Leonor, queen of Navarre (1479), 447 159, 176, 206, 250
Leovigild, Visigothic king (568–86), 34, 246 Lothar (Clothar), son of Charlemagne
Lewellen, John, mayor of Cork (1491), 370 (died as an infant), 386
Lex Voconia, 152 Lothar (d. 865), abbot of St-Germain,
Libuše, prophetess, Bohemian ruler, 382 Auxerre, son of Charles the Bald, 406
Liège, 262 Lothar, royal name, 176
Liège, bishop of, 263 Lothar See also Clothar
Life of St Leger, 370 Lotharingia, 159, 206–7, 296, 318, 389, 407,
Lincoln, 277 431
Lincoln, bishop of, 29, 86 duchess of, See Begga

639
 INDEX

Lotharingia (cont.) Louis IX (St Louis), king of France

dukes of, 12, 318, 389, 391, 407, See also (1226–70)
Charles of Lorraine; Conrad; Otto accedes as minor, 445
king of, See Lothar II and birth of first child, 59
Lotharingia, the name, 206 and brothers, 199, 200, 208, 322
Lothian, 441 and cross-Channel landholders, 424
Lothringen, the name, 206 and endowment of Robert of Clermont,
Louis the Pious, Frankish king, emperor 200
(814–40) and links with Charlemagne, 384, 551
and Bernard of Italy, 250 and marriage of son Louis, 101
and numbering of monarchs, 306 and regency of mother Blanche, 124,
and paintings at Ingelheim, 315 232
and the succession, 93, 157, 195, 199, and royal burials, 260–1
205 and term ‘house of’, 285
his name, 386 as dynastic saint, 311, 312–13
in Carolingian family tree, 331 burial of, 273, 274–5
marriages of, 11, 33, 159, 195, 227, See also death of, 107, 274, 261
Judith marriage and children of, 191
nickname of, 294 rebellion against (1227–31), 244
sons of, 347 Louis X, king of France (1314–16), 57–8,
Louis II the Stammerer, king of the West 146–7, 203, 229–30, 344, 492
Franks (877–9), 91–2, 288, 331, 338, Louis XI, king of France (1461–83), 110,
nickname of, 295 241, 344, 518
Louis III, king of the West Franks (879–82), Louis XII, king of France (1498–1515), 40,
92, 241 518
Louis IV d’Outremer, king of the West Louis XIV, king of France (1643–1715),
Franks (936–54), 12, 25, 232, 242, 209, 301
318, 388, 389, 507, 529 Louis XVI, king of France (1774–92), 285,
Louis V, king of the West Franks (986–7), 286
53, 92, 242, 316, 389, Louis the Great, king of Hungary (1342–
labelled Louis IV, 316 82), king of Poland (1370–82), 145,
Louis VI, king of France (1108–37), 65, 84, 214, 247–8, 426, 441, 480
93, 95, 98, 237–8, 240, 244, 245, 252, Louis II, king of Italy, emperor (855–75),
407, 477, 159, 348–9
labelled Louis I, 307 Louis the German, king of the East Franks
nicknamed the Fat, 294–5 (840–76), 11, 158, 199, 201, 206,
Louis VII, king of France (1137–80), 55, 60, 347–8
65–6, 93, 95, 98, 107, 109, 113, 187, Louis the Younger, East Frankish king
244, 252, 269, 408, 428, 518, (876–82), son of Louis the German,
nicknamed the Pious, 294 158, 452
Louis VIII, king of France (1223–6) Louis the Child, king of the East Franks
and pseudo-Baldwin of Flanders, (900–11), 122–3, 168, 296, 331, 444
377 Louis the Bavarian, German king
Carolingian blood of, 350, 357, 551 (1314–47), emperor, 49, 108, 344
claim to England, 24, 121 Louis the Blind, king of Provence
death of, 117 (890–928), king of Italy, emperor,
horoscope of, 344 80, 115, 250, 348–9, 444, 473
Karolinus presented to, 334 Louis, brother of Rudolf II of Burgundy, 454
marriage of, 23, 29 Louis (d. 1260), son of Louis IX of France,
regnal years of, 107 101
sons of, 298, 529, 555 Louis (d. 1415), son of Charles VI of France,
will of, 199 113, 313

640
 INDEX

Louis (I), duke of Anjou (d. 1384), 82, 119, MacWilliam family, descendants of Duncan
216, 217, 218, 440, 480 II of Scotland, 190
Louis (II), duke of Anjou (d. 1417), 82, 449 Magdeburg, Saxony, 33
Louis (III), duke of Anjou (d. 1434), 75, 82, Magnus Erlingsson, king of Norway
449 (1161–84), 247, 445
Louis (I), duke of Bourbon (d. 1342), Magnus Haakonsson, king of Norway
200 (1263–80), 186
Louis (II), duke of Bourbon (d. 1410), 216, Magnus Eriksson, king of Norway
217 (1319–55), king of Sweden (1319–
Louis de Male, count of Flanders 64), 118, 121, 194, 445
(1346–84), 222 Mainz, Rhineland, 315
Louis, duke of Orleans (d. 1407), 178, 179, Mainz, archbishops of, 21, 401
218, 222–3 Mair, John, Scottish historian (d. 1550), 301
Louis of Toulouse, St (d. 1297), 214, 215, Maitland, Frederic William, historian
312–13, 314 (1850–1906), 249
Louis Fainéant, supposed Carolingian king, Majorca, kingdom of, 198, 204, 393, 439, See
339 also James II, James III, kings of
Louis the Pious, as nickname of Louis VII, Malcolm II, king of Scots (1005–34), 248
294 Malcolm III Canmore, king of Scots (1057/
Louis, name of French kings, 292 8–93), 257, 298, 383, 385, 392
Louis, royal name, 176, 292, 294, 386 Malcolm IV, king of Scots (1153–65), 315,
Lourdin de Saligny, chamberlain of the 445, 448
duke of Burgundy, 80 Mamluks, 362
Louvain, University of, 178 Manetho, Egyptian priest, 284, 339
Louvre museum, Paris, 265 Manfred, king of Sicily (1258–66), 166, 279,
Lower Lotharingia, See Lotharingia 364
Lucan, classical poet, 498 Mansur, al-, Muslim general (d. 1002), 18
Lucca, Tuscany, 288 Manuel Comnenus, Byzantine emperor
Ludwig, royal name, 386 (1143–80), 28, 68, 238, 342, 355
Lusignan (Vienne), 394 Manuel I, king of Portugal (1495–1521),
Lusignan family, kings and queens of 177
Cyprus, kings of Jerusalem, 394, 436, Manzikert, battle of (1071), 125
438, See also Amalric of Lusignan; March, earl of, title, 235
Charlotte, queen of Cyprus; Guy of Marche, Italian, 355
Lusignan; James II, king of Cyprus; Marchesina, mistress of John III Vatatzes,
John II, king of Cyprus 163
Luther, Martin (1483–1546), 309 Marchfeld (Dürnkrüt), battle of (1278),
Luxemburg, 300, 420 246
Luxemburg, counts of, See John of Margaret II, queen of Denmark (acc. 1972),
Luxemburg, king of Bohemia 143
Luxemburg, house of, 435 Margaret of Denmark, queen consort of
Lyons, 376 Norway, regent of Denmark, Norway
and Sweden (d. 1412), 53, 143, 259,
MacCarthys (MacCarthaigh), Irish dynasty, 447, 474
438 Margaret (d. before 1228), daughter of
Macedonians, 384 David, earl of Huntingdon, 448
Macedonians, Byzantine dynasty, 3, 130–1, Margaret (d. 1259), daughter of William
287, 311, 381, 436 the Lion of Scotland, 150
MacMurroughs (Mac Murchada), Irish Margaret (d. 1270), daughter of Bela IV of
dynasty, 438 Hungary, 410
MacTurk, George, character in Vanity Fair, Margaret (d. 1315), wife of Louis X of
192 France, 229–30

641
 INDEX

Margaret (d. 1445), daughter of James I of Maria Argyropoula, sister of Romanos III,
Scotland, 24 wife of John Orseolo, 457
Margaret, daughter of Guy of Flanders and Maria de Padilla (d. 1361), mistress of Peter
wife of Alexander, son of Alexander the Cruel of Castile, 161–2, 163
III of Scotland, 101–2 Maria porphyrogenita (d. 1182), daughter
Margaret, given name of Blanche of Valois, of Manuel Comnenus, 238–9
300 Marjorie (d. 1316), daughter of Robert
Margaret, wife of Harold Hen of Denmark, Bruce (Robert I of Scotland),
452 102
Margaret, wife of Isaac II and Boniface of Mark, legendary king of Cornwall, 227
Montferrat, See Maria Martha, Georgian princess, See Maria of
Margaret of Anjou (d. 1482), wife of Henry Alania
VI of England, 124, 230–1 Martin Guerre, 375
Margaret of Austria (d. 1266), wife of Martin IV, pope (1281–5), 144, 427
Premysl Otakar II of Bohemia, 68 Martin I, king of Aragon (1395–1410),
Margaret Beaufort (1443–1509), mother of 74–5, 449
Henry VII of England, 185 Martin the Young (d. 1409), son of Martin I
Margaret of Burgundy (d. 1503), wife of of Aragon, 449
Charles the Bold, 5, 285, 360, 399 Martin, St (d. 397), 311
Margaret of Denmark (d. 1486), wife of Martina, stepmother of Constans II,
James III of Scotland, 24, 324–5 483
Margaret of France (d. 1318), wife of Martinakioi, Byzantine family, 287
Edward I of England, 71–2 Mary Tudor, queen of England (1553–8),
Margaret of Hainault (d. 1356), wife of 124
Louis the Bavarian, 49 Mary, queen of Hungary (1382–5,
Margery Jourdemayne, the ‘Witch of Eye’ 1386–95), 145–6, 248, 446, 447
(d. 1441), 359 Mary (d. 1332), daughter of Edward I of
Margaret, the Maid of Norway (d. 1290), 73, England, nun of Amesbury, 405,
74, 144, 372, 448 531
pretender claiming to be, 365–6, 367, Mary (d. 1438), daughter of Charles VI of
372, 377 France, nun and prioress of Poissy,
Margaret of Provence (d. 1295), wife of 313
Louis IX of France, 59, 191 Mary of Anjou (d. 1463), wife of Charles VII
Margaret, St, queen of Scots (d. 1093), 38, of France, 191
57, 163, 257, 298, 313, 315, 385, 392 Mary of Burgundy (d. 1482), daughter of
Margaret of Scotland (d. 1283), wife of Erik Charles the Bold, 225–6, 241
II of Norway, 53, 365–6, 448 Mary of Luxemburg (d. 1324), wife of
Maria, queen of Jerusalem (1205–12), 145, Charles IV of France, 33, 55
447 Mary, Blessed Virgin, 57, 164, 252
Maria, queen of Sicily (1377/92–1402), Mathgamain Ua Brian (Ua Briain), king of
446, 447 Thomond (1438–44), 250
Maria (d. after 824), wife of Constantine VI, Matilda (d. 968), wife of Henry I of
32 Germany, 297, 312, 465, 529
Maria (Margaret), wife of Isaac II and Matilda (d. 981/2), daughter of Louis IV of
Boniface of Montferrat, 17–18, 453 France, wife of Conrad of Burgundy,
Maria (d. 1357), wife of Alfonso XI of 529
Castile, 39, 50, 160, 162, 174, 261–2 Matilda (d. 1030x1033), daughter of
Maria of Alania (Martha), wife of Michael Hermann (II), duke of Swabia, 297,
VII and Nicephoros III, Byzantine 529
emperors, 11, 17 Matilda (Edith) (d. 1118), wife of Henry
Maria of Antioch (Xene) (d. 1182), wife of I of England, 28, 333, 357, 385,
Manuel Comnenus, 238–9, 483 388

642
 INDEX

Matilda (d. 1167), daughter of Henry I of adoption among, 79, 80

England, wife of Henry V of as ‘first family’ of the kings of France, 286,
Germany and Geoffrey of Anjou, 22, 296
27, 53, 81, 113, 135–6, 138, 140, cousin marriage among, 45
141–2, 144, 149, 151, 153, 167, 170, descendants of Meroveus, 288
180, 222, 231, 357, 490 division of the kingdom among, 200–1,
Matilda (d. 1189), daughter of Henry II of 203, 210
England, wife of Henry the Lion, 22, family conflict among, 192, 210–11, 249
53 in genealogies and family trees, 334–5,
Matilda (d. 1218), wife of Philip, count of 338, 339
Flanders, 125 links with Carolingians, 385
Matilda of Boulogne (d. 1262), wife of marriage practices of, 9, 157
Alfonso III of Portugal, 67 members of royal dynasty of, See
Matthew, abbot of St-Denis (d. 1286), 260 Charibert; Childebert I; Childebert
Matthew Paris, monk of St Albans, II; Childebertus adoptivus; Childeric
chronicler (d. 1259), 308, 352, 399 II; Childeric III; Chilperic;
Matthias Corvinus, king of Hungary Chlodomer; Clothar (Lothar) I;
(1458–90), 39, 345, 438 Clothar (Lothar) II; Clothar
Maubuisson (Val-d’Oise), 277, 278 (Lothar) III; Clovis; Clovis II; Clovis
Maurice, Byzantine emperor (582–602), III (IV); Dagobert I; Dagobert III;
249, 341–2 Gundovald; Guntram; Merovech;
Maurienne, Savoy, 198 Meroveus; Pharamund; Sigebert I;
mausolea, 70, 163, 194, 251–61, 263, 265, Sigebert II; Sigebert III;
275, 518 Theudebald; Theudebert;
Maximilian of Habsburg, German king Theudebert I; Theudebert II;
(1493–1519), emperor, 226, 241, 345 Theuderic; Theuderic II; Theuderic
Mayor Guillén de Guzmán, mistress of IV
Alfonso X, 165 minorities among, 115, 120
Mebh, legendary Irish queen, 42 names of, 293, 298, 386
Mecklenburg, 362 pretenders among, 361, 370, 372, 375,
Medici, 416 377
Mediterranean, 423, 424 queens as regents among, 117
Mediterranean region, 143 queens of, 269
Melatium, city in prophecy, 355 rule of, in the Frankish kingdoms, 437
Melisende, queen of Jerusalem (1131–52/ statues of in St-Denis, 260
61), 136–8, 140, 141, 142, 447 statues of in the royal palace, Paris, 316
Melrose Chronicle, 384 succession among, 89, 180, 186
Melrose abbey (Roxburghshire), 276 termed ‘Clovises’, 293
Menaldingi, Frisian group, 289 wall-paintings of in Karlštejn, 317, 318
Meran, duke of, 183 Merseburg, Saxony, 268
Mercia, 202, 445 Merton, council of (1236), 183
Mercia, Anglo-Saxon kingdom of, 436 Messina, Sicily, 254, 519
king of, See Offa Metternich, Prince, statesman
Merlin, 340, 351–6, See also Prophecies of (1773–1859), 394
Merlin Metz, bishopric of, 209
Merovech (d. 577), son of Chilperic, Meuse, river, 208, 263
Merovingian king, 35 Michael I Rangabe, Byzantine emperor
Meroveus, ancestor of the Merovingians, (811–13), 249, 408
286, 288 Michael III, Byzantine emperor (842–67),
Meroveus, son of Theudebert II, 249 78, 261, 279, 444, 483
Merovingians Michael IV, Byzantine emperor (1034–41),
absent from Ingelheim images, 316 126, 129

643
 INDEX

Michael V, Byzantine emperor (1041–2), Nablus, Palestine, 138, 140

127, 129, 250 La naissance de la France (Lot), 209
Michael VII, Byzantine emperor (1071–8), Naissance de la France (Geary), 309
17, 125, 367–8 Nájera, battle of (1367), 174
pretender claiming to be, 364, 366, 368, name change, 17, 28, 291, 299–301, 453,
372 527
Michael VIII, Byzantine emperor Name of the Rose, The (Eco), 335
(1258–82), 19 Namur, 102
Michael Cerularius, patriarch of Nantechildis, wife of Dagobert I, 9–10, 157
Constantinople (1043–59), Nantua (Ain), 262
129 Naples, 82, 253, 274, 275, 313, 394, 440
Michael Psellos, See Psellos Naples, kingdom of, 81–3, 120, 124, 174,
Michael Scot, astrologer, 343–4 175, 221, 248, 403, 440, See also Sicily,
Middle Kingdom, 331 kingdom of
Milan, 416, 417–18, 419 Angevin rule in, 247
Milazzo, Sicily, 356 female rule in, 143
minorities, 58, 114–23, 147, 216–17, 219, kings and queens regnant of, See Alfonso
407, 444–6 V; Charles of Durazzo; Ferdinand
Miro, king of the Suevi (d. 583), 34 (Ferrante); Joanna I; Joanna II;
Monarchia (Dante), 402 René of Anjou; Robert
Mongols, 19, 20, 374, 406, 410 Napoleon, emperor of the French (1804–
Monomachos Crown, 127 14, 1815), 324
Monreale, Sicily, 274, 275 Napoleon III, emperor of the French
Mons Alba, castle in France, 455, See also (1852–70), 301
Bourg-en-Gironde, Montauban Narbonne (Aude), 422
Mons, Hainault, 389 Navarre, 63, 106, 121, 172, 174, 263, 303,
Montauban (Tarn-et-Garonne), 455 393, 447, 553
Montcada, house of, 180 ruling dynasties of, 440
Monte Cassino, 272 Navarre, kings and queens regnant of, 439,
Montereau (Seine-et-Marne), 223–4 474, See also Blanca; Catherine;
Montiel, Castile, 354 Charles III; Charles, Prince of Viana;
Montmartre (Paris), 254 Francis Phoebus; García I Sánchez;
Montmirail, Treaty of (1169), 506 García III; Joanna I; Joanna II; John
Montpellier (Hérault), 422, 423 II; Leonor; Sancho II; Sancho III;
Moors, Christian term for Spanish Muslims, Theobald II
363 Nazi party, 509
Moravia, 20–1, 188, 189, 420, 426 Nero, Roman emperor (54–68), 212
Morocco, 19 Neszmély (Langendorf), Hungary, 58
Moses, biblical prophet, 151, 402 Netherlands, kingdom of, 143
Muhammad, prophet, 373 New Forest (Hampshire), 242, 252, 352,
Munich, Bavaria, 49, 289 516
Munster, kings and kingdom of, 438 New History of the Tang, 285
Murad III, Ottoman sultan (1574–95), New World, 309
192 Niall mac Aéda (Niall Caille), Irish king (d.
Murcia, 275–6, 428 846), 295
Muret, battle of (1213), 246, 423 Nice (Alpes-Maritimes), 423
Muscovy, 33 Nicephorus I, Byzantine emperor (802–11),
Muslim–Christian marriages, 18–20 245
Muslims, 69, 115, 134, 171, 207, 332, 342, Nicephorus II Phocas, Byzantine emperor
353–4, 362, 364, 367, 376, 394–5, (963–9), 36
439, 442, 509, 553, 556, See also Nicephorus III Botaniates, Byzantine
Spain, Muslim emperor (1078–81), 11

644
 INDEX

Nicephorus Bryennios, Byzantine general succession in, 213

(fl. 1069–1095), 375 Viking settlement of, 14, 285
Nicephorus, uncle of emperor Constantine William I as duke of, 169
VI, 250 Normans of Sicily, 368, 392, 394–5, 442
Nicholas III, pope (1277–80), 284 North Sea, 206, 222, 308
Nicholas, patriarch of Constantinople Northampton, battle of (1460), 230
(901–7, 912–25), 70–1, 78 Northumbria, Anglo-Saxon kingdom of, 436
Nicholas Oresme, philosopher (d. 1382), Northumbria, kings of, 404, See also
346 Aldfrith, Ecgfrith, Osred, Oswald,
Nicholas Trevet (d. c. 1334), chronicler, Oswiu
531 Norway
Nicholas of the Tower, ship, 347 coronation charters in, 430
nicknames, 25, 61, 134, 169, 197, 293, coronation in, 109, 186, 414
294–5, 393, 455, 484 heraldic arms of, 325
Nicol, Donald, historian (1923–2003), 415 invasion of Scotland by (1263), 257
Niketas Choniates, See Choniates kingdom of, 553
Nîmes (Gard), 466 kings of, 24, 53, 414, 440, See also Canute I
Nimrod, biblical figure, 317 the Great; Christian I of Oldenburg;
Nithard, Frankish noble and chronicler (d. Christopher, king of Denmark,
844), 293 Norway and Sweden; Erik II
Noah, biblical patriarch, 317, 318 Magnusson; Erik of Pomerania;
Norman chroniclers, 139, 237, 253, 308 Haakon II Sigurdsson; Haakon III
Norman Conquest of England, 66, 72, 142, Sverresson; Haakon IV Haakonsson;
246, 298, 305–6, 307, 308, 315, 333, Haakon V Magnusson; Harald Gille;
356–7, 381, 386, 388, 434 Harald Hardrada; Inge Haraldsson;
Norman kings of England, 15, 108, 141, Magnus Eriksson; Magnus
252, 270, 305, 350, 357, 380, 384, Erlingsson; Magnus Haakonsson;
421, 437, See also Henry I; Stephen; Olaf Haraldsson; Olaf Magnusson;
William I the Conqueror; William II Olaf Tryggvason; Olaf, king of
Rufus Denmark (1376–87), king of Norway
Normandy, 174 (1380–7); Sigurd Haraldsson; Sigurd
ancestry of Bruce family in, 257 Magnusson
Arthur of Brittany imprisoned in, 211 Maid of, See Margaret
as inheritance of Henry the Young King, marriage practices of rulers of, 158
197 names in, 28
as inheritance of Robert of Normandy partition of, 203
(1087), 198 pretenders in, 361, 363, 365
burial of heart of Richard I of England in, settlement of Iceland from, 414
274 shared monarchs with Denmark and
conflict of William Rufus and duke Sweden, 436, 440, 442, See also
Robert in, 392 Margaret of Denmark (d. 1412)
dukes of, 158, 303, 350, 421, 424, See also succession in, 158, 186, 366, 398
Richard I; Richard II; Richard III; violent deaths of kings of, 246–7
Robert I; Robert (d. 1134); Rollo; Notker, chronicler (d. 912), 292
William Longsword; and English Notre-Dame-de-Barbeau, See Barbeau
kings after 1066 Notre-Dame-de-Nazareth, Aix-en-Provence,
Edgar Atheling in, 392–3 253
French conquest of (1204), 351, 424, 428 Nottingham, 235
hair-styles in, 30 numbering of crusades, 302
Henry I as duke of, 91 numbering of dynasties, 284, 285–6
Henry of Anjou (Henry II) as duke of, 65 numbering of monarchs, 95, 301–10, 311,
prophecy about, 351–2 386, 478, 531

645
 INDEX

Nur ad-Din al-Bitruji, Spanish Muslim Oswiu, king of Northumbria (642–70), 168,
astronomer, 343 404
Nuremberg, Franconia, 400 Otto I, German king (936–73), emperor
Nykoping, Sweden, 193 and Bruno of Cologne, 407
and fate of his dynasty, 433
O’Briens (Uí Briain), Irish dynasty, 438 and his son Liudolf, 196, 237
O’Connors (Uí Conchobhair), Irish and his son Otto, 96, 109
dynasty, 288, 438 and Italy, 417
O’Neils (Uí Néill), Irish dynasty, 168, 438 and numbering of monarchs, 303, 304
O’Rourkes (Uí Ruairc), Irish dynasty, 288 brothers of, See Bruno of Cologne; Henry
Occitan language, 423 (d. 955)
Octavius, See Augustus crowned emperor, 438
Odette de Champdivers (d. c. 1425), father of, See Henry I of the East Franks
mistress of Charles VI, 164 makes illegitimate son William
Offa, king of Mercia (757–96), 481 archbishop of Mainz, 408
Oisc, ancestor of the kings of Kent, 288 marriages of, 12, 21, 33, 454
Oisingas, kings of Kent, 288 niece of, See Hadwig (Hedwig)
Olaf Tryggvason, king of Norway sister of, See Gerberga
(995–1000), 362–3 succession of, 90
Olaf Haraldsson, king of Norway (1015–28) Otto II, German king (973–83), emperor,
(d. 1030), 312 13, 29, 96, 109, 303, 389, 433, 478, 506
Olaf Magnusson, king of Norway Otto III, German king (983–1002),
(1103–15), 445 emperor, 29, 116, 117, 303, 433, 445,
Olaf, king of Denmark (1376–87), king of 478, 487
Norway (1380–7), 445 Otto IV, German king (1198–1218),
pretender claiming to be, 377 emperor, 22, 150, 401, 427
Oldcastle, Sir John (d. 1417), 369 Otto (d. before 1012), son of Charles of
Oldenburg, counts of, 325 Lorraine, 391
Oña, See San Salvador de Oña Otto of Brunswick, See Otto IV
Order of the Golden Fleece, 177 Otto of Brunswick (d. 1398), husband of
Order of the Holy Sepulchre, 63–4 Joanna I of Naples, 480
Orderic Vitalis, Anglo-Norman chronicler Otto, bishop of Freising (1138–58),
(d. c. 1142), 139, 169, 237, 253–4 chronicler, 292, 304, 385, 399
Ordonnances des rois de France de la troisième Otto of Habsburg (d. 1339), 48–9
race, 286 Otto Orseolo, doge of Venice (1009–26), 81
Orhan, Ottoman ruler (d. 1362), 20 Otto, name of counts of Scheyern, 294
Orkney, 24, 372 Ottomans, 10, 19–20, 155, 191–2, 243, 362
Orleans (Loiret), 254 Ottonians, 53, 304, 332, 380–1, 405, 416,
Orleans (Loiret), bishop of, 61 431, 437, 535, See also Henry I; Henry
Orseoli family of Venice, 397, See also John II; Otto I; Otto II; Otto III
Orseolo; Otto Orseolo, doge; Peter Owain ap Hywel Dda, ruler of Deheubarth
Orseolo, king of Hungary; Peter II (d. 988), 221
Orseolo, doge Owain Gwynedd, ruler of Gwynedd (d.
Orsini family, 284 1170), 45
Orzocco Torchitorio, Sardinian judge, 502 Owain Pen-carn of Caerleon (blinded and
Osbert of Clare, monk of Westminster, castrated 1175), 250
writer (fl. 1118–1158), 357 Oxford, 160, 351
Osred, king of Northumbria (705–16), 444
Ostrogothic Italy, 264 Palaeologans, Byzantine dynasty, 436
Ostrogoths, 116, 380 Palencia, Castile, 101
Oswald, king of Northumbria (634–42), Palermo, Sicily, 170, 254, 265, 266, 274, 275,
312, 404 394, 519

646
 INDEX

Palestine, 276 Peter, duke of Coimbra (d. 1449), 323

Pamplona, kingdom of (earlier name of the Peter de Condé, archdeacon of Soissons,
kingdom of Navarre), 440 520
Pankratios, eighth-century Byzantine Peter Damian, reformer (d. 1072), 29
astrologer, 342 Peter González, See Lara
Pantokrator monastery, Constantinople, Peter Lombard, bishop of Paris (d. 1160),
252 337
Papa Luna, See Benedict XIII, antipope Peter de Luna, See Benedict XIII, antipope
Paphlagonia, Anatolia, 32 Peter Mauclerc, French noble (d. 1250),
Paris, 29, 60–1, 208, 223, 240, 252, 254, 256, 245
262, 269, 275, 277, 389, 412, See also Peter II Orseolo, doge of Venice
Archives nationales; Holy Apostles, (991–1008), 457
Church of the; Ile de la Cité; Louvre Peter of Poitiers, chancellor of Paris
museum; Parlement of Paris; St- (d. 1205), 332–3
Germain-des-Prés Peter of Poitou, See William VII
Dominican church in, 274 Peter of Ribagorza, son of James II of
royal palace in, 316–17, 321, 338 Aragon, 449
Schools of, 332 Peter of Urgell (d. 1408), 449
University of, 147, 344 Peter, St, 290, 348
Paris, bishop of, 59, 254, See also Denis, St; Peter, original name of Raymond-Berengar
Peter Lombard IV (III) of Provence, 527
Parlement of Paris, 200, 229 Peter, name, 290
Parliament of England, 150, 153, 185, 232, Peter, royal name in Aragon, 527
306, 373 Petronilla, queen of Aragon (1137–64), 57,
Parliament of Scotland, 103 63, 292, 409, 435, 445, 447, 527
Parron, William, astrologer of Henry VII of Pharamund, legendary ancestor of the
England, 345–6 Merovingians, 316, 334, 336–8
Parsons, John Carmi, historian, 53 Philaretos, eighth-century saint, 32
Parthians, 384 Philip I, king of France (1060–1108), 44, 93,
partible inheritance, 89, 100, 200–6, 210, 232, 237, 244, 253–4, 445, 518, 529
211, 506, 507, 508 Philip II Augustus, king of France
Passau, bishop of, 21 (1180–1223)
Paul, St, 37, 70 and Arthur of Brittany, 211–12
Pelayo, bishop of Oviedo (d. 1153), 470 and astrology, 344
Peñiscola, Valencia, 301 and prophecy, 349
Persia, 19, 332 and reditus regni ad stirpem Karoli Magni,
Persians, 383 339, 349–50, 384–5
Peter II, king of Aragon (1196–1213), 246, as boy-king, 122
423, 508 as father of Louis VIII, 23, 377
Peter III, king of Aragon (1276–85), 198, birth of, 60–1
265, 427 conquest of Normandy by, 352, 428
Peter IV, king of Aragon (1336–87), 260, coronation of, 93, 107
270, 317, 449 eulogized by William the Breton, 197
Peter I the Cruel, king of Castile (1350–69), marriages of, 26, 46–8, 55, 183,
39, 48, 49–51, 160–2, 163, 174–5, 339, 384
262, 327, 353–4 nickname of, 61, 294
Peter Orseolo, king of Hungary registers of, 295, 349
(1038–41, 1044–6), 80–1 style of, 558
Peter I, king of Portugal (1357–67), 163, takes the cross, 1188, 450
171, 258, 271, 273, 358 visit of, to Tournai, 431
Peter, duke of Cantabria, ancestor of the Philip III, king of France (1270–85), 107,
kings of Asturias and Leon, 439 200

647
 INDEX

Philip IV, king of France (1285–1314), 77, Pippin I, mayor of the palace (d. 640), 318
229–30, 239, 313, 316, 324, 412 Pippin III, king of the Franks (751–68), 159,
nicknames of, 77 286, 296, 316, 338, 386
Philip V, king of France (1316–22), 58, 147, Pippin, king of Aquitaine (d. 838), son of
203, 229, 466 Louis the Pious, 199
Philip VI, king of France (1328–50), 48, 50, Pippin-Carloman, king of Italy (d. 810), son
147, 324, 336 of Charlemagne, 299
Philip of Swabia, German king Pippin ‘the Hunchback’ (d. 811), son of
(1198–1208), 20, 297–8, 304, 307, Charlemagne, 299
409, 476, 519 Pippin, Carolingian name, 176
Philip the Arabian, Roman emperor (244– Plantagenets, 3, 4, 15, 24, 198, 240, 246, 249,
9), 304 270, 283, 285, 286, 305, 377, 384,
Philip II, king of Spain (1556–98), 124 421, 437, See also Edward I; Edward
Philip the Bold, duke of Burgundy (1363– II; Edward III; Edward IV; Edward V;
1404), 216, 217, 218, 222 Henry II; Henry the Young King;
Philip the Good, duke of Burgundy (1419– Henry III; Henry IV; Henry V; Henry
67), 178, 224 VI; John; Richard I; Richard II;
Philip de Chaorse, bishop of Evreux (1270– Richard III; Richard, duke of York
81), 520 Plasencia, bishopric of, 411
Philip, count of Flanders (d. 1191), 125 Platelle, Henri, historian (1921–2011), 375
Philip Hurepel (d. 1234), son of Philip Plymouth, 50
Augustus, 244–5 Poblet, Cistercian monastery, Catalonia,
Philip (d. 1160), archdeacon of Paris, son of 260, 270–1
Louis VI, 408 Poitiers, battle of (1356), 301
Philip of Taranto (d. 1331), son of Charles Poitou, counts of, 291, 299, See also Otto IV;
II of Sicily, 323 William VII; William VIII
Philip of Valois, See Philip VI Poland
Philip, son of Philip I of France by Bertrada division of after 1138, 204, 205, 441
of Montfort, 237, 244 ducal title in, 553
Philip (d. 1131), son of Louis VI, 95, 187, dukes and kings of, 21, 114, See also
240, 252 Boleslaw III; Boleslaw the Pious;
Philip (b. 1209, d. 1218/19), son of Louis Boleslaw V; Jagiello; Louis the Great;
VIII, 529 Piasts; Siemowit; Wenceslas II;
Philip (d. 1231/2), alternate name of Wenceslas III; Wladyslaw III
Dagobert, son of Louis VIII, 298–9, female rule in, 143, 145–6, 154
529 homeland of Martin Bylica, 345
Philip, name of French kings, 95, 292 marriage links with Bohemia, 20
Philippa (d. 1430), daughter of Henry IV of queen regnant of, See Hedwig (Jadwiga)
England, 398 royal title in, 89, 204, 393, 476
Philippa of Hainault (d. 1369), wife of rulers of, 440
Edward III, 48–9, 164, 184, 324 saintly royal women of, 405
Philippa of Lancaster (d. 1415), wife of succession in, 189, 426
John of Avis, 258, 271 Poland-Lithuania, 146, 420
Philippis (William the Breton), 212 Pole, Miss, character in Cranford, 356
Phocas, Byzantine emperor (602–10), Polonius, character in Hamlet, 374
279 Poor Clares, 312, 405–6
Piasts, 204, 381, 440, See also Poland, dukes popes, 77, 122, 195, 214, 232, 263, 279, 285,
and kings of 300, 343, 365, 367, 395, 397, 402, See
Picardy, 164 also Alexander II; Alexander III;
Picts, 245, 441 Alexander VI; Anacletus II
Piedmont, 177 (antipope); Benedict II; Benedict
Pierre Aycelin, See Laon, cardinal of XIII (antipope); Benedict XIII;

648
 INDEX

Benedict XIV; Boniface VIII; royal names in, 297

Boniface IX; Celestine III; Clement royal title in, 394
III (antipope); Clement IV; Clement succession in, 169–70, 171–2, 413
V; Clement VI; Clement VII Pour ce que plusieurs, 148–9
(antipope); Gregory I; Gregory II; Powys, Welsh principality, 221, 443
Gregory III; Gregory VII; Gregory princes of, See Bleddyn ap Cynfyn
IX; Hadrian I; Innocent II; Innocent Poytron, Stephen, Yorkist plotter (1491), 370
III; Innocent IV; Innocent VI; John Prague, 20–1, 234–5, 256, 259, 273, 300,
XXII; Leo II; Martin IV; Nicholas III; 317, 319, 405
Urban IV; Urban V; Victor II Prague, bishops of, 189
and Albigensian Crusade, 423 Premonstratensians, 382
and anti-popes, 361 Premysl, ancestor of the Premyslids, 382
and canonization, 311 Premysl Otakar I, duke of Bohemia
and conflict with emperors, 418 (1192–3, 1197–8), king of Bohemia
and coronation, 109 (1198–1230), 188, 189, 405, 464, 476
and elective kingship, 400–1 Premysl Otakar II, king of Bohemia
and female inheritance, 144, 145 (1253–78), 20, 68, 184, 189, 233, 246
and grant of royal title, 89, 394, 396, 441 Premyslids, 20, 72, 187–90, 256, 300, 382,
and Great Schism, 412–13 426, 435, 440, See also Bohemia,
and imperial coronation, 96, 304–5, 399 dukes and kings of
and legitimation, 167, 184 foundation legends of, 381–2
and multiple burial of body parts, 276 pretenders, 151, 360–78
and regulation of marriage, 45, 48, 66, 67, Priam, king of Troy, 317
134, 230 Prince of Wales, title, 105, 106
numbering of, 301–3 Princes in the Tower, 185–6, 367, 371, 372
ties of Portugal to, 68 Princes of Wales, 34, 105, 124, 174, 230, 347
ties of Sicily to, 119 Procopius, sixth-century historian, 38
Poppo, noble German name, 291 prohibited degrees, 43–8, 64–5, 66, 134,
Popponen, noble German kindred, 291 181–2, 183–4, 185, 330–1, 367
Pordenone, Italy, 420 prophecies, 296, 340–1, 347–58, 369, 385
Porto, Portugal, 134 Prophecies of Merlin (Geoffrey of
Porto, Portugal, bishop of, 135 Monmouth), 351–3, 356
Portsmouth, 29 Prophetic History, The (Gerald of Wales)
Portugal (=Expugnatio Hibernica), 355
abolition of monarchy in, 432 Protestantism, 143
and Great Schism, 413 Provence, 30, 79, 152, 206, 208, 422–3,
bishoprics of, 411 counts of, 253, 527
dreams and prophecies in, 358 kingdom of, 115, 116, 349
female rule in, 143 kings of, See Boso; Charles (855–63);
interdict in, 67 Louis the Blind
invasion of, by Castile (1384), 171 Prussia, 21, 411
kings of, 50, 68, 125, 160, 165, 174, 441, Prussia, king of, 209
See also Alfonso I; Alfonso II; Alfonso Psellos, Michael, Byzantine chronicler (d. c.
III; Alfonso IV; Alfonso V; Denis; 1078), 95, 127–31, 140, 381
Duarte (Edward); Ferdinand I; John Purgatorio (Dante), 292
I (John of Avis); John II; Manuel I; Pyrenees, 65, 227, 422, 424
Peter I; Sancho I; Sancho II
burial places of, 257–9, 260, 271 Quedlinburg, Saxony, female religious
numbering of, 303 house, 405, 409
origins of, 135, 141, 204, 233, 393
queens of, 269 Radegund, St (d. 587), 312
queens regnant of, See Beatrice, Teresa Radigis, prince of the Varni, 38

649
 INDEX

Ralph de Diceto, dean of St Paul’s, Rhodes, 63, 411

chronicler (d. c. 1200), 22, 60, 112, Rhone, river, 105, 207, 227
244 Richard I, king of England (1189–99), 22–3,
Ralph Glaber, chronicler (d. c. 1046), 30–1, 86–7, 98, 104, 150, 180, 197, 198,
158 211, 213, 252, 269, 270, 273–5, 430
Ramiro I, king of Aragon (1035–63), 169, Richard II, king of England (1377–99)
263, 435 accession as minor, 216, 445
Ramiro II, king of Aragon (1134–7), 63, 409 and Edward II, 311
Ramleh, Palestine, 553 and Thomas of Woodstock, 216, 219
Raoul, count of Crépy and Valois (d. 1074), burial of, 255, 261, 271, 272, 372
second husband of Anna of Kiev, 232 deposition of, 62, 222
Raoul de Presles (d. 1382), translator of City heraldic arms of, 325
of God, 494 marriages of, 52, 162
Rashıˉd al-Dıˉn, Persian vizier (d. 1318), 332 numbering of, 306
Ravenna, 264 pretender claiming to be, 364, 366, 369,
Raymond of Burgundy, count of Galicia (d. 373
1107), 131, 133, 269, 439 Richard III, king of England (1483–5), 5,
Raymond, alternate name for Alfonso II of 176, 185, 255, 285, 340, 354, 367,
Aragon, 292 370–1
Raymond Berengar IV (III), count of Richard (d. 1069x1075), son of William the
Provence (1168/73–81) (previously Conqueror, 516
Peter), 527 Richard of Cornwall (d. 1272), brother of
Raymond Berengar IV, count of Barcelona Henry III of England, 199
(d. 1162), 57, 63, 292, 409, 435, 527 Richard of Ireland, collection of prophecies
Reading (Berkshire), 252 under the name of, 353
Reccared, Visigothic king (586–601), 246 Richard I, duke of Normandy (942–96), 13,
Reccared II, Visigothic king (621), 444 158, 169, 303, 541
Récit d’un ménestrel d’Alphonse de Poitiers, 339 daughter of, See Emma
reditus regni ad stirpem Karoli Magni, 339, 350, Richard II, duke of Normandy (996–1026),
357, 384 169, 303, 541
Reformation, 413 Richard III, duke of Normandy (1026–7),
Regino of Prüm, chronicler (d. 915), 167 303
reinterment, 255, 256, 261–4, 524 Richard Plantagenet, See Richard, duke of
remarriage, 4–5, 12, 47, 55, 60, 66, 68–72, 83, York (d. 1460)
102, 124, 133, 195, 230, 231, 232, 367 Richard, duke of York (d. 1460), 230, 283,
Remigius, St (d. c. 533), 348, 349 286, 323
Remus, brother of Romulus, 188, 191 Richard, duke of York, son of Edward IV,
René of Anjou, king of Naples (1435–42) 371, 372
(d. 1480), 440 Richard IV, style of Perkin Warbeck, 369, 377
Rennes (Ille-et-Vilaine), 350 Richard, royal name, 306
republics, 397, 413–16 Richardis, wife of Charles the Fat, 228, 452
Reynold Sanz-surnun, English royal Richer of Saint-Rémi, chronicler (fl. 991–
messenger (1220s), 287 998), 294, 339, 451
Rheims (Marne), 93, 114, 120, 147, 349, Richildis, wife of Charles the Bald, 91,
389, 390, 484 155–6
Rheims, archbishops of, 232, See also Rigord, monk of St-Denis, chronicler (d. c.
Adalbero; Arnulf; Henry, son of 1207), 252, 254, 294
Louis VI; Hincmar Ringsted, Zealand, 259, 260, 267
Rhine, river, 38, 49, 118, 148, 208, 209 Riquier, early medieval saint, 349
Rhine, counts palatine of the, 401 Robert I, king of the West Franks (922–3), 245
Rhineland, 21, 49, 332, 370 Robert II, king of France (996–1031), 30,
pseudo-Frederick II in, 365 110, 288, 328, 390, 528

650
 INDEX

Robert ‘the Wise’, king of Naples (1309– Roger, count of Sicily (1072–1101), 394–5
43), 214–15, 312–13, 314, 323, Roger (d. 1194), son of Tancred of Sicily,
402–3, 480 95, 279
Robert Bruce (Robert I), king of Scots Rogvolod, Prince of Polotsk (d. c. 978), 42
(1306–29), 102–3, 257, 276, 422, Rollo, founder of Normandy (d. c. 930), 14,
430–1 285, 350, 541
Robert II, king of Scots (1371–90), 103, 182, Romagna, 355
301 Roman Church, 26, 71, See also popes
Robert III, king of Scots (formerly John) Roman emperors (ancient), 3, 78, 261, 264,
(1390–1406), 301 304, 316, 382–3, 416
Robert of Artois (d. 1342), 206 Roman empire, 4, 13, 44, 80, 156, 188, 244,
Robert Bastard, Domesday landholder, 264, 268, 277, 302, 304, 337, 341,
166 398, 402, 414
Robert Bruce (d. 1226x1233), 448 Roman Law, 45, 79–80, 103, 106, 152, 156,
Robert Bruce the Competitor (d. 1295), 73, 157, 159, 176, 183, 200
448 Roman popes of Great Schism, 412–13
Robert Bruce the elder (d. 1304), 422 Romance languages, 207–8, 395
Robert of Clermont (d. 1318), son of Louis Romanos I Lecapenos, Byzantine emperor
IX, 199 (920–44), 94, 408
Robert of Dreux (d. 1188), son of Louis VI, Romanos II, Byzantine emperor (959–63),
244 28, 36, 94, 453, 456
Robert the Frisian, count of Flanders Romanos III Argyros, Byzantine emperor
(1071–93), 21 (1028–34), 126, 130, 252, 381, 457
Robert, earl of Gloucester (d. 1147), 142, Romanos IV Diogenes, Byzantine emperor
166–7, 178 (1068–71), 124–5, 244
Robert of Gloucester, chancellor of pretender claiming to be son of, 363, 373,
Hereford (1299–c. 1322), 478 375, 378
Robert Guiscard, duke of Apulia and Romans, common language of, 302
Calabria (1059–85), 368, 394–5 Romans, king of (title), See king of the
Robert I, duke of Normandy (1027–35), 541 Romans
Robert, duke of Normandy (1087–1106) (d. Romans, meaning Byzantines, 13, 27
1134), 194, 198, 392–3 Rome
Robert of Torigny, chronicler (d. 1186), as source of porphyry, 265
158 birthplace of pope Nicholas III, 284
Robert de Vere, earl of Oxford (d. 1392), Charlemagne crowned in, 398
162 geographical position of, 214
Robert (of Geneva) (antipope Clement in papal domains, 394
VII), 413 Otto I crowned in, 416
Robert, fine name, 301 Otto IV crowned in, 427
Robin Hood, 104 overlordship of emperor Lothar over,
Rodrigo Jiménez de Rada, archbishop of 206
Toledo (1208–47), chronicler, 284, St Anselm in, 376
363–4, 377 synonym for empire, 292
Roger II, king of Sicily (1130–54), 165, 265, Romulus, founder of Rome, 188, 191, 383
395, 521 Rorico, bishop of Laon (949–76),
Roger, duke of Apulia (d. 1148), 165 illegitimate son of Charles the
Roger Borsa, duke of Apulia and Calabria Simple, 408
(1085–1111), 21 Rosamund Clifford (d. c. 1175), mistress of
Roger de Furnival, astrologer to Philip Henry II of England, 160, 165
Augustus, 344 Roskilde, Zealand, 259
Roger Mortimer, earl of March (d. 1330), Roskilde, bishop of, 259
235–6 Røsnæs, Zealand, 242

651
 INDEX

Rothari, king of the Lombards (d. 652), 35 St-Remi, Rheims, 388

Rothesay, duke of, title, 105 St-Sanctin-de-Chuisnes (Eure-et-Loir), 57
Rotrud (Erythro) (d. 810), daughter of St Stephen’s, Caen, 267
Charlemagne, 27 St Stephen’s, Westminster, 358
Rouen (Seine-Maritime), 212, 274, 350 St Vitus’ cathedral, Prague, 256
Rouen, archbishop of, 158 Salamanca, bishopric of, 411
Roussillon, county of, 422, 424 Salerno, Prince of, title, 104, 480
Roxburgh, 249 Salian dynasty, 254, 385, 405, 437, 535, See
Royaumont, Cistercian monastery also Conrad II; Henry III; Henry IV;
(Val-d’Oise), 260–1, 299 Henry V
Ruairc of Breifne (d. 893), 288 Salian or Salic Law, 147–8, 153
Rüdiger, Jan, historian, 157–8 Salimbene, Franciscan chronicler
Rudolf I, king of Burgundy (888–912), 428 (d. 1288/9), 355, 364, 365, 543
Rudolf II, king of Burgundy (912–37), 454 Salins (Jura), 420
Rudolf III, king of Burgundy (993–1032), Salisbury (Wiltshire), 91
72, 92 Salisbury, earl of, 180, See also Thomas of
Rudolf of Rheinfelden, German anti-king Lancaster
(1077–80), 245, 268, 400 Salome (d. 1268), wife of Coloman, brother
Rudolf of Habsburg, German king (1273– of Bela IV of Hungary, 406
91), 20, 56, 233, 246, 370, 519, 522 Salvian, fifth-century priest, 83–4
Rudolfingers, Burgundian dynasty, 435 Samuel, Tsar of the Bulgarians (997–1014),
Rügen, Baltic island, 267 453
Rumanian language, 296 San Isidoro, Leon, 263
Rupert of the Palatinate, German king San Salvador de Oña, Castile, 263
(1400–10), 271 Sancha (d. 1067), wife of Ferdinand I of
Rurikids, 204 Leon and Castile, 263
Russia, 10, 14, 15, 19, 20, 189, 204, 256 Sancha (d. c. 1125), daughter of Alfonso VI
Russian Primary Chronicle, 189 of Leon and Castile, 69
Sancho II, king of Castile (1065–72), 194,
Saba Malaspina, chronicler (d. 1297/8), 373 203
Sahagún, Benedictine monastery, Leon, Sancho IV, king of Castile (1284–95),
264 219–20, 264
St Albans, Benedictine abbey Sancho II, king of Navarre (970–94), 18
(Hertfordshire), 308 Sancho III ‘the Great’, king of Navarre
St-Aubin, Angers, 330–1 (1000–35), 263–4, 435
St Augustine’s, Canterbury, 56 Sancho I, king of Portugal (1185–1211),
St-Denis, 208, 253–6, 259, 260–1, 262, 264, 257–8
265, 269, 274–5, 277, 298–9, 518, 522 Sancho II, king of Portugal (1223–48), 67,
St Denis, Odivelas, Portugal, 258 258, 445
St-Frambaud de Senlis, 520 Sancho (d. 1108), son of Alfonso VI of Leon
Saint-Gallen, 328 and Castile, 19, 69, 131
St George Mangana, Constantinople, 252 Sancho of Leon (d. 1220), son of Ferdinand
St-Germain-des-Prés, Paris, 269 II of Leon, 242
St-Louis-de-Poissy (Yvelines), 313 Sancho, archbishop of Toledo (1266–75),
St Mary, Canterbury, 253 556
St Mary Peribleptos, Constantinople, Santa María la Real, Murcia, 275
252 Santarém, Portugal, 258
St Peter and St Paul, monastery of, Santes Creus, Cistercian monastery,
Canterbury (later St Augustine’s), 253 Catalonia, 260, 265, 270
St Peter’s, Rome, 96 Santiago de Compostella
St Peter’s Sword, part of the Carolingian archbishop of, 67, See also Diego
regalia, 91 Gelmírez

652
 INDEX

archbishopric of, 411 female succession in, 73, 102, 144, 150,
cathedral of, 253, 269 154
São Mamede (or Guimarães), battle of heraldic arms of, 325
(1128), 233 incorporation of Orkney and Shetland
Saône, river, 207 into, 24
Saracens, Christian term for Muslims, 367, invasion of by William II of England, 392
509 kingdom of, 553
Sardinians, 181 kings of, 383, See also Alexander I;
Saturn, god, 317 Alexander II; Alexander III; David I;
Savoy, 177, 197 David II; Donald III; Edgar; James I;
Saxe-Coburg-Gotha, 204 James II; James III; James IV; James
Saxon dynasty, See Ottonians VI; James VII; John Balliol; Kenneth
Saxons, 14, 22, 98, 288, 431, 452, 465 Macalpine; Malcolm II; Malcolm III;
Saxony, 12, 201, 204, 378, 405 Malcolm IV; Robert Bruce; Robert
dukes of, 401, See also Henry I, king of the II; Robert III; William the Lion
East Franks; Henry the Lion levels of violence in, 116, 248–9
Scandinavia minorities in, 116
coronation charters in, 430 murder of Katherine de Mortimer in, 165
female rule in, 143 objections of, to logo EIIR, 301
monarchs of, as ancestor of King Otto (IV) as candidate for kingship of, 22,
Christopher (d. 1448), 426 150
names in, 28 prophecy in, 355
regicide in, 246–7 queens of, 57
settlers from in Iceland, 414 relations of, with England, 73–4, 76, 206,
settlers from in Scotland, 441 421–2, 424–5
succession practices in, 4, 180, 191, 398 royal names of, 298, 301
Sven Forkbeard’s body repatriated there, ruling dynasties of, 441
279 saintly connections of kings of, 313, 315
Scandinavian kingdoms, 15, 39, 53, 143, struggle for independence of, 431
325, 434, 436, 440, 442, 474, See also succession crisis after 1286, 59, 72–4, 75,
Denmark; Norway; Sweden 76–7, 202, 203
Scheyern, Bavaria, 289, 293 succession in, 101–3, 114, 182, 190, 191,
Schieffer, Rudolf, historian (1947–2018), 365
432 union with England (1707), 324
Schleswig, 325 Scots Guards (of king of France), 33
Scone (Perthshire), 103 Scott, Walter, novelist (1771–1832), 104
Scotland Seaxburh, Anglo-Saxon queen (d. 674?),
alliance of, with France, 24 487
and Galloway, 202 Seine, river, 212, 223, 269, 350
and Great Schism, 412 Sens (Yonne), 391
and Perkin Warbeck, 369, 378 Septimania, 227
and pseudo-Richard II of England, Serbs, 19, 251
369 Seville, Andalusia, 19, 160, 162, 184, 257,
burial places of kings of, 257, 259, 276 262, 275, 428
Church in, 410–11 archbishop of, 262
claim to English throne of kings of, 315 archbishopric of, 411
coronation in, 106, 109 Sforza, Francesco, duke of Milan
deaths of kings of, 248 (1450–66), 180
dynastic union of, with England (Union Shaftesbury, nunnery (Dorset), 405
of the Crowns) (1603), 105 Shajara-yi ansaˉb (‘Tree of Genealogies’)
Edgar Atheling in, 392–3 (Fakhr-i Mudabbir), 332
Edward III’s campaigns in, 48 Shakespeare, William, 212

653
 INDEX

Shetland, 24 Sigebert III, Merovingian king (d. 656),

Sicilian Vespers (1282), 275, 439, 442 444
Sicily, 75, 265, 275, 342, 395 Sigeric, son of Sigismund of Burgundy,
adoption in, 79 236–7, 238
count of, See Roger, Roger II Sigismund, king of the Burgundians
death of Henry VI of Germany in, 356 (516–24), 236–7, 312, 335
duke of, See Robert Guiscard Sigismund of Luxemburg, king of Hungary
Edward I of England in, 107 (1387–1437), German king (1410–
Muslim rule in, 394 37), emperor, 39, 89
Norman conquest of, 395, 442 Sigurd Magnusson, king of Norway (1103–
porphyry from, 265 30), 445
pseudo-Frederick II in, 365, 367, 370, Sigurd Haraldsson, king of Norway (1136–
377, 378 55), 445
Richard I of England in, 23 Silesia, 204, 406, 420
rule of Alfonso V in, 82 Silo, king of Asturias (774–83), 439
Sicily, kingdom of, 24, 439, See also Naples, Silves, bishopric of, 411
kingdom of; Normans of Sicily Simnel, Lambert, pretender, claimant to
Angevin rule in, 246, 275, 322, 380, 418 the English throne (1486–7), 151,
border of, 279 360, 361, 371, 373, 378, 432
conquest of, by Henry VI of Germany, Simon Burley (d. 1388), tutor of Richard II
150, 171, 251, 279, 409, 418, 427 of England, 216–17
disputed succession to after 1309, 214, Simone Martini, painter (d. 1344), 313, 314
216 Simon de Montfort the elder (d. 1218), 355,
Edmund, son of Henry III of England, 423
proposed as king of, 198 Skiold, legendary ruler of the Danes,
female succession in, 53, 143, 144, 190
145 Skylitzes, John, Byzantine chronicler (late
formation of, 89, 393, 394–5 eleventh century), 95, 129–30
Hohenstaufen rule in, 89, 144, 254 Slavic languages, 296
invaded by Otto IV of Germany, 427 Slavonia, 420
kings of, 22, 108, 253, See also Charles of Slavs, 15, 267, See also Baltic Slavs; Wends
Anjou; Charles II; Conrad IV; Smith, J. Beverley, historian, 100, 508
Conradin; Frederick II; Frederick Snorri Sturluson, Icelandic author (d.
III; Manfred; Roger II; Tancred; 1241), 362–3
William II; William III Sodom, biblical city, 86
queens regnant of, See Constance; Maria Soffredings, noble Italian kindred, 288
rule of house of Trastámara in, 174 Soffredo, Italian noble, 288
ruling dynasties of, 442 Sognefjord, Norway, 247
succession in, 169–71, 172, 180 Solomon, biblical king, 63, 208
ties of, to papacy, 119 Sophia, abbess of Gandersheim (d. 1039),
union of, with the Empire, 427 daughter of Otto II, 409–10
Siegfried, abbot of Gorze (d. 1055), 30–1, Sorel, Agnes (d. 1450), mistress of Charles
529 VII of France, 164, 165
Siegfried, count of Luxemburg (d. 998), Sorø abbey, Zealand, 259, 260
331 Spain, 29, 49, 160–2, 227, 309, 342, 362, 374,
Siemowit, first Piast duke of Poland, 381 See also Aragon; Castile; Leon;
Siena, 365 Navarre; Spain, Muslim; Visigothic
Sienese, 365 Spain
Siete Partidas, 79, 89, 144, 219 abolition of monarchy in, 432
Sigebert I, Merovingian king (d. 575), 35 adoption in, 79
Sigebert II, Merovingian king (d. 613), 157, borders of, 424
444 coronation in, 106

654
 INDEX

creation of, 76, 420, 434 Sven Aggesen, twelfth-century Danish

fraternal strife in, 192 chronicler, 190
kings of, See Charles V; Philip II Sverker dynasty of Sweden, 442
pretenders in, 361 Svolde, battle of (1000), 362
restoration of monarchy in, 143 Swabia, 201, 420
Suevi in, 34 Swabia, dukes of, 299, 442, See also
under the Bourbons, 283 Frederick, duke of Swabia (d. 1105);
used as synonym for Leon-Castile, 22, 50, Frederick, duke of Swabia (d. 1147);
101, 133, 142, 174, 455 Frederick, duke of Swabia (d. 1169);
word ‘frontier’ in, 508–9 Frederick (formerly Conrad), duke
Spain, Muslim, 18, 22, 49, 131, 184, 242–3, of Swabia (d. 1191); Hermann (II)
257, 264, 276, 411, 422–3 Sweden
Spanish chroniclers, 192, 284 coronation charters in, 430
Speyer, Rhineland, 254, 262–3, 519, 522 family conflict in, 193–4
Spoleto, duchy of, 394 heraldic arms of, 325
Staufer, See Hohenstaufen kingdom of, 553
Stephen, king of England (1135–54), 81, kings of, See Birger Magnusson; Charles
99, 112–13, 135, 141–2, 149, 222, 252 Knutsson; Christopher; Erik of
Stephen, St, king of Hungary (1000–38), Pomerania; Gustaf III; Magnus
42–3, 81, 312 Eriksson
Stephen II, king of Hungary (1116–31), opposition to foreign kings in, 427
251 polygamy in, 4
Stephen (d. 963), son of Romanos queens of, See Christina; Margaret
Lecapenos, 94 ruling dynasties of, 442
Stephen, patriarch of Constantinople shared monarchs with Denmark and
(886–93), 408, 410 Norway, 436, 440, 442, See also
Stephen, St, Crown of, 92 Margaret of Denmark (d. 1412)
stepmothers, 11, 37–9, 236–9, 244 succession practices in, 398
Stewart kings, 441, See also Stuart, See James Swiss, 346
I; James II; James III; James IV; James Switzerland, 289, 432
VI; James VII; Robert II; Robert III Swynford, Katherine (d. 1403), mistress and
Stillingwell, John (fl. 1434), 508 wife of John of Gaunt, 184–5
Stockholm, 194 Sybilla, queen of Jerusalem (1186–90), 145,
Stoudios monastery, Constantinople, 447
70 Sybilla (d. 1122), illegitimate daughter of
Strängnäs, Sweden, 427 Henry I of England, wife of
Strassburg, 209 Alexander I of Scotland, 180
Strathclyde, kingdom of, 441 Székesfehérvár (Alba Regia), Hungary,
Stuart dynasty, 286 260
Stuart, Bérault (1452/3–1508), lord of
Aubigny, 459 Talavera, Castile, 160
Styria, 420 Tancred (Tancred of Lecce), king of Sicily
Suffolk, duke of, 346–7 (1190–4), 23, 95, 149, 165–6,
Suger, abbot of St-Denis (1122–51), 98, 169–71, 251, 279–80
253 Tancred de Hauteville, Norman knight,
surnames, 80, 184, 185, 286–9, 290, 321 394–5, 442
Sussex, Anglo-Saxon kingdom of, 436 Tang dynasty (618–907), 191–2, 285
Sven Forkbeard, king of Denmark (c. 987– Tanneguy du Châtel, killer of John the
1014), king of England (1013–14), Fearless, 223–4
279, 524 Tarragona, archbishop of, 76–7
Sven Estrithson, king of Denmark Tasso, Lombard duke (fl. 630), 35
(1047–74/6), 398, 436 Teck, Swabia, 420

655
 INDEX

Templars, 63–4, 230, 411–12, 508 Theudebert, Merovingian king (perhaps

Temple of Jerusalem, 63, 382 Theudebert I, d. 548), 38
Teresa (d. 1130), illegitimate daughter of Theudebert, Merovingian royal name, 293
Alfonso VI, queen of Portugal, 69, Theudechild, sister of Theudebert I, 461
134–5, 233, 441, 447 Theuderic II, Merovingian king (d. 613),
Teresa Lourenzo, mistress of Peter I of 157, 192–3, 249, 444
Portugal, 171 Theuderic IV, Merovingian king (d. 737),
Teresa of Portugal (d. 1250), wife of 338
Alfonso IX of Leon, 46 Theuderic, Merovingian king (Theuderic
Teutberga (d. after 869), wife of Lothar II, IV?), 316
159 Thietmar, bishop of Merseburg (1009–18),
Teutonic Knights, 63, 411 54, 409–10
Thackeray, William Makepeace, novelist Thomas Becket, archbishop of Canterbury
(1811–63), 109, 192 (1162–70), 56
Thames, river, 202 Thomas de Cantilupe, bishop of Hereford
Theobald II, king of Navarre (1253–70), 445 (1275–82), 478
Theodehad, Ostrogothic king (534–6), 117 Thomas, earl of Lancaster, Leicester,
Theodolinda, Lombard queen (d. 627), 35, Derby, Lincoln and Salisbury (d.
42 1322), 222, 323, 333
Theodora, Byzantine empress (1042, 1055– Thomas Rymer, thirteenth-century seer,
6), 127–31, 140, 142, 447, 487 355
Theodora the Khazar, wife of Justinian II, Thomas Southwell, magician (d. 1441),
453 358–9
Theodora (d. after 867), mother of Michael Thomas Waleys, Dominican theologian (fl.
III, 279, 483 1318–1349), 153
Theodora (d. 922), wife of Romanos Thomas Warde of Trumpington, pretender
Lecapenos, 94 claiming to be Richard II, 373
Theodora, daughter of John VI Thomas of Woodstock, duke of Gloucester
Cantacuzenus, 19–20 (d. 1397), 216–17, 219
Theodore the Stoudite, abbot (d. 826), 70 Thomas, St, doubting, 375
Theodoric, Ostrogothic king (489–526), Thomond, kings of, See Mathgamain Ua
116, 236, 265 Brian (Ua Briain); Toirdelbach Ua
Theodosius the Great, Roman emperor Brian (Ua Briain)
(379–95), 316 Thuringia, 304, 312
Theodrada (d. 844), daughter of Tiberius, Roman emperor (14–37), 78
Charlemagne, 404 Tiberius, son of Justinian II, 249
Theophano (d. after 978), wife of Romanos Tinchebray, battle of (1106), 393
II and Nicephorus II Phocas, 36 Toirdelbach Ua Brian (Ua Briain), king of
Theophano Martinakia (d. 897), wife of Thomond (1444–59), 250
Leo VI, 32, 70, 287, 311 Toirdelbach Ua Conchobair (Turlough
Theophanu (d. 991), wife of Otto II, 29, O’Connor), king of Connacht
117, 409 (1106–56), 191
Theophylact, patriarch of Constantinople Toledo, Castile, 34, 51, 131, 161, 162, 258,
(933–56), 408 264, 343, 428
Theotonius, prior of the Holy Cross, Toledo, archbishops of, 135, 195, 411
Coimbra (d. 1166), 233 Toledo, council of (400), 494
Theudebald, Merovingian king (d. 555), Toledo, council of (683), 43
34, 444 tombs, 33, 160, 163–4, 165, 172, 251, 253,
Theudebert I, Merovingian king (d. 548), 254, 258–60, 261–72, 275, 277, 312,
461, 472 321, 324, 384, 405, 521, 524
Theudebert II, Merovingian king (d. 612), Torphichen (West Lothian), 508
9, 192–3, 249, 444 Tortosa, Catalonia, 423

656
 INDEX

Toul, bishopric of, 209 Valdemar I, king of Denmark (1157–82),

Toulouse (Haute-Garonne), 55, 355, 455 97, 259, 267, 297
Tournai, 371, 372, 431 Valdemar II, king of Denmark (1202–41),
Tours (Indre-et-Loire), 337 26, 97, 242, 267
Tower of London, 49, 235–6, 347, 359 Valdemar IV, king of Denmark (1340–75),
Trastámara, house of, 174, 439, 512 452
Tree of Jesse, 326–7 Valdemar (d. 1231), son of Valdemar II of
Tree of the Lineage of the Kings of the French, The Denmark, 97, 242
(Arbor genealogiae regum Francorum) Valdemar (d. 1317), brother of Birger
(Bernard Gui), 335–9 Magnusson of Sweden, 193–4
Tribur (now Trebur), Franconia, 96 Valencia, 75
Trier, Rhineland, 225 Valentinian III, Roman emperor (425–55),
Trier, archbishops of, 401 44
Trinity Altarpiece (van der Goes), 324–5 Valery, early medieval saint, 349–50, 351
Triple Tabernacle, The (Adam of Dryburgh), Valladolid, Castile, 161
382–3 Valley, Bavaria, 289
Tristan, lover of Isolde, 227 Valois dynasty, branch of Capetians, 437
Troia, Apulia, 170 Vanity Fair (Thackeray), 109, 192
Trojans, 318 Varna, battle of (1444), 362, 374
Troyes, Treaty of (1420), 113–14 Varni, Germanic people, 38
Tsar, title, 297 Vatatzes, accused of adultery with Empress
Tudors, 69, 108, 185, 198, 246, 283, 286, Euphrosyne, 228
306, 340, 361, 372, 437 Venantius Fortunatus, sixth-century poet,
Tunis, 107, 261, 274 26
Turin, duke of, See Agilulf Venetians, 353
Turkish language, 296 Venice, 146, 394, 397, 414–16
Turks, 19–20, 115, 192, 245, 362, doges of, 29, 397, See also Otto Orseolo;
436, 553 Peter II Orseolo
Tuscany, 355 Verdun Prize, 209
Tuscany, duke of, 409 Verdun, battle of (1916), 209
Tyre, 254, 519 Verdun, bishopric of, 209
Tyrol, 420 Verdun, Treaty of (843), 206, 209
Vermudo II, king of Leon (982–99), 264
Ubl, Karl, historian, 45 Vermudo III, king of Leon (1028–37),
Udalric (d. 1115), son of Conrad, duke of 263–4, 445
Bohemia, 188 Verona, 250
Ulster, kings and kingdom of, 438 Vexin, 52
United Kingdom, 434 Viana, Prince of, title, 105
Unwan, archbishop of Hamburg-Bremen Victor II, pope (1055–7), 118
(1013–29), 288 Victoria, queen of Great Britain
Uppsala, Sweden, 193 (1837–1901), 204
Urban IV, pope (1261–4), 67–8 Victorian (term), 283
Urban V, pope (1362–70), 174 Vienna, 49, 51, 378
Urgell, county of, Catalonia, 76 Vienne (Isère), 412
Urraca, queen of Leon and Castile Vienne, county of, 208, 251
(1109–26), 69, 131–5, 136, 138–9, Vienne, council of (1311–12), 412
141, 142, 143, 232–3, 264, 310, 439, Vikings, 14, 115, 285, 436
447 Violante (d. 1353), daughter of James II of
Ursa Major, constellation, 295 Aragon, 33
USA, 1 Violante See also Yolande
Uzbeg, ruler of the Golden Horde Visconti, Bianca Maria (d. 1468), wife of
(1313–41), 19 Francesco Sforza, 180

657
 INDEX

Visconti, Filippo Maria, duke of Milan Warbeck, Perkin, pretender (d. 1499), 367,
(1412–47), 180 369, 370–1, 372, 377, 378, 493
Visegrád, Hungary, 214 Wars of the Roses, 185, 221, 285, 327
Viseu, Portugal, 233 Warwick, earl of, 230
Visigothic kingdom, 34, 246, 442 Waterford, 493
Visigothic Spain, 18, 246, 264 Welf III (d. 1055), 64
Vision of Charles the Fat, 296, 347–9 Welf, Frankish noble, father of empress
Vladimir, Prince of Novgorod and Kiev Judith, 11, 195–6
(d. 1015), 13, 42, 43 Welfs, 22, 24, 292, 556
Vladimir Monomakh, Prince of Kiev Welsh Marches, 160, 443
(d. 1125), 297 Wenceslas, St, duke of Bohemia (d. 929 or
Vladislav II, king of Bohemia (1471–1516), 935), 188, 300, 311, 312
king of Hungary (1490–1516), 39–40 Wenceslas I, king of Bohemia (1230–53),
Vysehrad, Bohemia, 256 20, 189
Wenceslas II, king of Bohemia (1278–
Wagon, The, ancient name for Ursa Major, 1305), king of Poland (1291–1305),
295 20, 56, 118–19, 121, 163, 233–5, 236,
Waiblingen, Swabia, 292, 556 238, 239, 300, 445
Waitz, Georg, German historian (1813–86), Wenceslas III, king of Bohemia and Poland
209 (1305–6), 190, 300
Waldrada, wife of Theudebald, Wenceslas (Wenzel), king of Bohemia
Merovingian king, 34 (1378–1419), German king
Waldrada, wife or mistress of Lothar II, (1378–1400), 96, 300, 398
159 Wenceslas, first son of Charles IV, Holy
Wales See also David, St; Prince of Wales Roman Emperor (died young), 300
blinding and castration in, 250 Wenceslas, original name of Charles IV,
Church in, 410 Holy Roman Emperor, 300, 309
conquest of, 105, 410 Wends, 325
family conflict in, 220–1 Werner, margrave of the Saxon Nordmark
King Arthur hero in, 384 (1003–9), 297
native princes of, See Bleddyn ap Cynfyn Wessex, 33, 202, 436, 487,
of Powys; Gruffudd ap Cynan of royal dynasty of, 13, 255, 298, 307, 315,
Gwynedd; Hywel ap Iorweth of 385, 386, 405, 437, See also
Caerleon; Owain ap Hywel Dda of Æthelbald; Æthelbert; Æthelred;
Deheubarth; Owain Gwynedd of Æthelwulf; Alfred; Edward the Elder;
Gwynedd; Owain Pen-carn of Egbert; England, kings of
Caerleon marriage practices of, 12, 37
native principalities of, 443, See also marriages of daughters of, 21
Caerleon; Deheubarth; Gwynedd, West Franks, 296
Powys kingdom of, 12, 21, 116, 202, 207, 331,
partible inheritance in, 203, 508 389, 391, 407, 437, 507, 560
Robert of Normandy imprisoned in, 194 kings of, 12, 107, 388, See also Carloman;
succession practices in, 4–5, 100 Charles the Bald; Charles the
Wallace-Hadrill, J. M., historian (1916–85), Simple; Lothar; Louis II; Louis III;
10 Louis IV; Louis V; Robert I
Walter Clifford, father of Rosamund association of sons as rulers by, 92
Clifford, 496 Westminster, 56, 121, 217, 255–6, 260, 261,
Walter Tyrrel, presumed killer of William 269, 271–2, 277, 386, 421
Rufus, 352 Westphalia, 465
Walter, archbishop of Dublin (1484–1511), Westphalia, Peace of (1648), 420
493 Wherwell nunnery (Hampshire), 469
Waltheof of Melrose (d. 1159), 313, 315 White Ship, wreck of (1120), 91, 356

658
 INDEX

Widdowson, Marc, historian, 375 William Marshal (d. 1219), regent of

widows, royal, 34–43, 117–19, 140, 149, England, 121
231–6, 239, 312, 404, 405, 471 William of Montferrat (d. 1177), husband
Widukind, Saxon leader (fl. 777–85), of Sybilla of Jerusalem, 46, 145
14 William de Nangis, archivist of St-Denis
Widukind of Corvey, chronicler (d. 1300), 254–5, 334–5
(fl. 941–73), 92, 296 William of Newburgh, chronicler
Wie das erste Reich der Deutschen entstand (d. c. 1198), 197, 246–7
(Zatschek), 209 William Longsword, duke of Normandy (c.
William I the Conqueror, king of England 928–42), 541
(1066–87) William of Ockham, theologian and
and conquest of England, 381, 392 philosopher (d. 1347), 108
as duke of Normandy, 541 William VII, count of Poitou (1039–58),
burial of, 252, 267 291
claim to England, 307 William VIII, count of Poitou (1058–86),
death of, 198, 392 291
illegitimacy of, 169, 498 William of Sabina, cardinal (d. 1251),
in prophecy, 356–7 414
nicknamed the Bastard, 386 William, cardinal-deacon of St Mary in
nicknamed the Conqueror, 393 Cosmedin (1342–68), 162
numbering of, 308 William of Tyre, chronicler (d. c. 1185),
sons of, 194, 242, 385, 475 136, 140
title of, 421 William of Ypres, claimant to the county of
William II Rufus, king of England Flanders, 1127, 169
(1087–1100), 85, 87, 242, 252, William (d. 1120), son of Henry I of
352–3, 356, 357, 392 England, 91, 356
William of Holland, German anti-king William (d. 1159), son of Stephen, king of
(1248–56), 245 England, 112–13
William the Lion, king of Scots William, name of counts of Poitou, 291, 299
(1165–1214), 74, 150, 190, 313, 448 William, royal name, 305
William II, king of Sicily (1166–89), 23, 149, Wilton Diptych, 325
169–70, 342 Wilton nunnery (Wiltshire), 469
William III, king of Sicily (1194), 251 Winchester, 22, 252
William, duke of Apulia and Calabria Winchester Castle, 384
(1111–27), 21, 395 Winchester, bishop of, 121, 228
William X, duke of Aquitaine (1127–37), Windsor (Berkshire), 255
65 Wittelsbachs, 426
William, count of Arques, son of Richard II Wladyslaw III, king of Poland (1434–44),
of Normandy, 169 39, 360, 362, 374, 446
William the Bastard, See William the Woden, god, 380
Conqueror Woldemar, margrave of Brandenburg
William the Breton, chronicler (d. c. 1225), (d. 1319), 361, 367
197, 212, 349, 352 pretender claiming to be, 366, 367, 370,
William de Briouse (d. 1211), 373, 377, 378
Anglo-Norman baron, 509 Woodville, Elizabeth (d. 1492), wife of
William Clito (d. 1128), son of Robert, duke Edward IV of England, 10
of Normandy, 104 Worcester, 252
William, archbishop of Mainz (954–68), World War I, 2, 72, 420
illegitimate son of Otto I, 407, 408 Worms, 96
William of Malmesbury, chronicler Wroclaw, 406
(d. c. 1142), 14, 87, 168, 288, 357, Wulfegundis, wife of Dagobert I, 157
376, 393 Württemberg, 420

659
 INDEX

Würzburg, 400, 556 York, archbishops of, 410, See also Ealdred,
Würzburg, bishop of, 409 Geoffrey
York, duke of, 371, See also Richard
Xene, See Maria of Antioch York, house of, 185, 285, 360, 361, 371,
437
Yaropolk, Prince of Kiev (d. 978), Yorkists, 230–1, 371
42
Yaroslav, Prince of Kiev (1019–54), Zaida, wife or mistress of Alfonso VI of Leon
189 and Castile, 19, 69, 470
Yolande (d. 1298), daughter of Bela IV of Zamora, bishopric of, 411
Hungary, 406 Zaragoza, Aragon, 423
Yolande (Violante) of Aragon (d. 1300), Zawisch von Falkenstein, Bohemian noble
wife of Alfonso X of Castile, 220 (d. 1290), 119, 234–5, 236, 239
Yolande, daughter of John I of Aragon, Zbraslav (Königssaal), Bohemia, 119
449 Zealand, 259
Yolande of Dreux, wife of Alexander III of Zelophehad (Salphaad), biblical figure,
Scotland, 59 151–2, 490
Yolande of Hungary, wife of James I of Zoe, Byzantine empress (1042), 126–30,
Aragon, 556 134, 142, 447, 487
Yolande See also Isabella II Zoe Karbonopsina, wife of Leo VI, 70, 78,
Yonne, river, 223 94, 483
York, 524 Zoe Zaoutzaina (d. 899), wife of Leo VI, 70

660