НАШАТА БИБЛИОТЕКА: Medieval Self-Coronations. The History and Symbolism of a Ritual by Jaume Aurell

 Д-Р ИЛИЯНА БЕНИНА  Д-Р НИКОЛА БЕНИН

Medieval Self-Coronations. The History and Symbolism of a Ritual

Jaume Aurell, University of Navarra

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Contents

List of Figures page vii

Acknowledgements xi

Introduction 1

1 Self-Coronation As Ritual 36

Part I Heritage 59

2 Consecration without Mediation in Antiquity 61

3 The Hand of God 85

4 Symbolic Self-Coronations in Byzantium 96

5 The Sacralisation of Carolingian Accessions 127

6 Anglo-Saxon and Ottonian Christocentrism 147

Part II Infamy 173

7 Roger II of Sicily: Imagining Self-Coronation 175

8 Frederick II of Germany: Desacralising Rituals 196

Part III Convention 219

9 Alfonso XI of Castile: From Self-Knighting

to Self-Crowning 221

10 Peter IV of Aragon’s Self-Coronation:

A Conventionalisation Programme 242

11 Charles III of Navarra: Juridical Implications

of Self-Coronations 274

12 Early Modern Dramatisation: The Road to Napoleon 296

Conclusion 302

Index 318

Acknowledgements This research began in 2010, while I was finishing my monograph Authoring the Past: History, Politics and Autobiography in Medieval Catalonia (University of Chicago Press, 2012). Rereading Peter IV of Aragon’s autobiography, I was struck, once more, by the passage in which the king narrates his selfcoronation, performed in 1336 when he was sixteen years old, and the liturgical ordo he later commissioned to fix the ritual as an established ceremony for his successors. When I discovered that story, I could not understand how such a meaningful historiographical passage, and Peter’s impressive liturgical ordo, complete with miniatures, had been virtually unknown by scholars beyond the few Catalan specialists on that king. Figure 26 of this book, coming from one of the manuscripts of that liturgical ordo, shows King Peter holding the crown just before crowning himself under the passive gaze of the bishop. In the long time it took me to write this volume, I have benefited from the generous help of many colleagues and friends. My analysis and understanding of the ritual of self-coronations necessarily developed from an interdisciplinary approach from history, symbolic anthropology, political philosophy, art history, theology and liturgy. Thus, this book falls within the framework of the Religion and Civil Society project of the Institute for Culture and Society (ICS) of the University of Navarra (Spain). It owes a great deal to the comprehensive dynamic of this project, to the intense debates of the almost biweekly seminars and to frequent conversations with my colleagues. I particularly appreciate the advice I received from the head of the project, the political philosopher Montserrat Herrero. My research has greatly benefited from visits to various campuses of the University of California. At UCLA I learned much from the advice of the historians Patrick J. Geary, Lynn Hunt and Teófilo F. Ruiz, and from the anthropologists Andrew Apter and Sherry B. Ortner. During my stays at UC Berkeley I spoke with the historians Anthony Adamthwaite and Martin Jay and the anthropologist Geoffrey Koziol. Finally, I crowned this book in a fruitful stay at Stanford University, thanks to the invitation of Marisa Galvez, who was generous with advice as well as hospitality. xi In the middle of my research, I developed some of my theories in the seminars held at Johns Hopkins University, where I found alwaysinspiring advice from Gabrielle M. Spiegel and her colleagues of the department of history, and at Wesleyan University, where I largely benefited from the comments of Gary Shaw, Ethan Kleinberg and their colleagues in history and anthropology. In the course of this project, I learned from many colleagues from numerous disciplines. I thank Michael Axworthy and Rolf Strootman for their suggestions for the chapter on antiquity (Chapter 2); José Marin Riveros and Patricia Varona for information on Byzantium (Chapter 4); Jinty Nelson, my brother Martin Aurell, János Bak, Björn Weiler, Mirko Vagnoni, Stefano Manganaro and Nikolas Jaspert for their comments on the chapters on the Carolingians (Chapter 5), Sicily (Chapter 7) and Germany (Chapter 8); Adam M. Kosto, Paul Freedman, Alfons Puigarnau, José Enrique Ruiz-Domènec, Flocel Sabaté and Marta Serrano-Coll for their feedback on the chapter on Aragon (Chapter 10); Julia Pavón, Eloísa Ramírez, Juan Carrasco, Ángel Sesma and María Narbona for their input in the chapter on Navarra (Chapter 11); Laura Delbrugge and Álvaro Fernández de Córdova for their contributions to the chapter on Castile (Chapter 9); Peter Burke and Pablo Vázquez Gestal for their help with the chapter on early modern coronations (Chapter 12); Robert A. Rosenstone and Kalle Pihlainen for necessary theoretical perspectives; and Philippe Buc and Lynn Hunt for the shifting but always stimulating relationship between history and anthropology. I particularly thank the anonymous readers of the previous drafts for their comments and suggestions: my initial daze in receiving their advice turned into a genuine appreciation when I began working hard on their (literally) hundreds of suggestions. To work with Cambridge University Press has been an enjoyable example of professionalism. My deepest thanks go to Elisabeth FriendSmith and Atifa Jiwa. I also thank Gabriela Alba for her efficient job on the index. Finally, I greatly appreciate the enthusiastic support of my parents during the long process of the writing of this book. Their love for culture, books, history and tradition has always been a genuine impulse for my dedication to history. Earlier versions of some chapters of this book have already appeared as: ‘The Self-Coronation of Peter the Ceremonious (1336): Historical, Liturgical, and Iconographical Representations’, Speculum 89 (2014): 66–95 (with Marta Serrano-Coll); ‘The Self-Coronations of Iberian Kings: A Crooked Line’, Imago Temporis 8 (2014): 151–75; ‘Strategies of Royal Self-Fashioning: Iberian Kings’ Self-Coronations’, in Self-Fashioning xii Acknowledgements and Assumptions of Identity in Medieval and Early Modern Iberia, ed. Laura Delbrugge (Leiden: Brill, 2015), 18–45; ‘The Self-Coronation of Frederick II: A Non-sacred Consecration’, in Political Theology in Medieval and Early Modern Europe: Discourses, Rites, and Representations, ed. Montserrat Herrero, Jaume Aurell and Angela Miceli (Turnhout: Brepols, 2017), 245–66; and ‘Charles III of Navarra’s Oath and Coronation: The Juridical Implications of Self-Coronations’, in Le sacré et la parole: le serment au Moyen Age, ed. Martin Aurell, Jaume Aurell and Montserrat Herrero (Paris: Garnier, 2018), 227–49.

Introduction

Non aspettar mio dir più ne mio cenno:

libero, dritto e sano è tuo arbitrio

e fallo fora non fare a suo senno:

per ch’io te sovra te corono e mitrio

Dante, Divina Commedia, Purgatorio, Chant 271

In a small room in a corner of the Getty Villa in Los Angeles,

a gorgeous full-body bronze sculpture of a young athlete crowning

himself with an olive wreath, dating back to Greece from between

300 and 100 BC, is on display. The museum’s catalogue calls the

figure The Victorious Youth (see Figure 1), and describes it in these

terms:

In the traditional pose of a victorious athlete, a relaxed and confident youth

crowns himself with a wreath, probably olive. The olive wreath was the prize

for a victor in the Olympic Games and identifies this youth as a victorious

athlete. He may have carried palm branches, another attribute of victory, in

his left hand. The figure’s eyes were once inset with stones of glass paste to

create a naturalistic impression. This statue probably commemorated an

athletic triumph at Olympia, where the olive wreath was given as a prize.

It may have stood in the sanctuary there or in the athlete’s hometown.2

Although this is a self-coronation in an athletic rather than

a political context, the statue’s iconographic motif proves that the

ancient world was familiar with the custom of placing a crown on

one’s own head.3 From the start of the Christian era, this gesture of

1 ‘I do not give you sign or word; // free, upright and whole is thy will; // ‘twere a fault not to

act according to its prompting; // wherefore I do crown and mitre thee over thyself’

(Virgil’s declaration to Dante at the Paradiso’s thresholds, in Dante, Divina Commedia,

Purgatorio, Chant 27, verses 139–42). See Ernst H. Kantorowicz, The King’s Two Bodies

(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1957), 483–95. 2 Catalogue, Getty Villa museum in Los Angeles, available at www.getty.edu/art/collection/

objects/7792/unknown-maker-statue-of-a-victorious-youth-greek-300–100-bc/

(accessed 29 March 2017). 3 I do not intend to engage with the intensive historiographical debate on the meaning of the

gesture of this statue, which I noticed on my first visit to the Getty Villa museum. Rather,

1

Figure 1 The Victorious Youth, a statue of an athlete crowning himself

with an olive wreath, 300–100 BC. Bronze with inlaid copper. The

J. Paul Getty Museum, Villa Collection, Malibu, California. © Getty

Images. The J. Paul Getty Museum (Los Angeles).

I just take it as iconographic data for this book, taking into account its most probable sense.

The text describing the statue has actually changed several times in the past few years, and

the latest inscription states that the victorious athlete ‘is about to remove his wreath’ rather

than ‘crowning himself’. The most extensive work on the sculpture is Carol C. Mattusch,

The Victorious Youth (Los Angeles: Getty Museum, 1997). She adds another example of

the apparent self-crowning in a figure of the goddess Eros (Mattusch, The Victorious Youth,

9, figure 9).

2 Introduction

royal self-coronation has conventionally been considered a transgression of tradition on the part of the sovereign who practises it. The

sovereign who puts a crown on his own head clearly defies the priest,

to whom it naturally falls to act as mediator between the divinity that

confers temporal power from above and the person receiving this

authority on earth. The popularity and spread of the rite of selfcoronation reached its zenith with Napoleon’s imperial selfcoronation in Paris on 2 December 1804, an event that achieved

world notoriety in large part because of the monumental painting by

the court artist Louis David, currently on display at the Louvre (see

Figure 2).

The scene actually represents the coronation of Empress Josephine

by the emperor, but activates an inevitable reference to the transgressive gesture of Napoleon’s self-coronation that preceded it.

Figure 2 Coronation of Empress Josephine in the Cathedral of NotreDame de Paris on 2 December 1804, by Jacques-Louis David, 1807.

Louvre Museum in Paris, France. © Musée du Louvre, Dist. RMNGrand Palais / Angèle Dequier.4

4 Complete information on this painting may be found in Antoine Schnapper and

Arlette Sérullaz, ‘Le Couronnement de l’Empereur et de l’Impératrice, 169 à 181’, in

Jacques-Louis David, 1748–1825, ed. Antione Schnapper and Arlette Sérullaz (Paris:

Ministè

re de la Culture, 1989), 399–432.

Introduction 3

Notably, Pope Pius VII appears in the painting as a passive spectator, an attitude reflected in the apparently melancholy smile on his

face. Received through heredity, election, military victory or usurpation, royal dignity is usually established through a solemn ceremony

of investiture that tends to take multiple ritual forms. In the postConstantinian Christian world, the recognition of self-coronation as

a transgressive gesture presupposes the belief that the king should

receive sacred authority, with the necessary mediation of a priest,

solemnised in the ceremony of the investiture of the sovereign.

It is obvious that between the relaxed and confident figure of the

Greek athlete and Napoleon’s authoritative gesture lies a complex

evolution of historical context, ritual forms and iconographic motifs

through which self-coronations have been enacted and represented –

a multilayered development this book examines and interprets.

Though Napoleon’s self-coronation in 1804 is generally taken to

have been an extraordinary event that broke the long tradition of

kings being crowned by bishops, research shows that the ritual of

self-coronation was already known and practised by Christian

European kings. Thus, considering both the imaginary representations and the ceremonial experience of self-coronation, and in order

to reflect on its symbolic meaning and its ritual dimension, this book

focuses on the self-coronations imagined and/or performed by sovereigns. It traces the origins of these specific rituals and their continuity and discontinuity, as well as their evolution from exceptionality to

normativity, from ancient civilisations to the present, particularly

focusing on the Middle Ages. It narrates the long history of selfcoronations, highlighted by placing the chronological accounts of

self-coronations in their own particular context. It challenges previous assumptions, since it shows that self-coronations began in the

very distant past, that they were not extraordinary events at all, and

they were not as transgressive or non-conventional as we might

perhaps want to imagine. It poses two essential questions: one historical –‘What is the long-term story of royal self-coronations?’–

and the other anthropological –‘What does self-crowning reveal

about the operation of ritual, and what is its symbolic meaning?’

***

One may naturally question the ability of coronations to generate

social transformations, especially if one considers the ostensibly

passive role of the king during the ceremony, as traditional scholarship on the subject has argued. Richard A. Jackson notes that ‘the

king seems to play a role definitely minor’ during the ceremony of

4 Introduction

his own investiture.5 Meyer Fortes states that ‘the part played by

ecclesiastical dignitaries in these ceremonies is significant’ and that

‘the occupant of [the] office cannot legitimately install himself.’

6

That priests make kings in Europe, Africa and Asia has been posited

by scholars who have published comprehensive approaches to the

topic, such as Arthur M. Hocart and, more recently, David Graber

and Marshall Sahlins.7

Royal investment in the different kingdoms of medieval Europe

was usually composed by an addition of ceremonies. The most

common were the unction and the crowning by the bishop.8 The

normative structure of the ceremony requires that, at the climax of

the event, the bishop places the crown on the king’s head, as most

medieval Western European iconography shows (see Figure 3).

This practice was certainly normative in England, France and

Germany, and was quickly adopted in Sicily and Jerusalem. In those

5 Richard A. Jackson, ‘Le pouvoir monarchique dans la cérémonie du sacre et couronnement des rois de France’, in Représentation, pouvoir et royauté à la fin du moyen âge, ed.

Joël Blanchard (Paris: Picard, 1995), 237–51, here 237. 6 Meyer Fortes, ‘Of Installation Ceremonies’, Proceedings of the Royal Anthropological

Institute of Great Britain and Ireland (1967): 5–20, here 6 and 11. 7 Arthur M. Hocart, Kingship (Oxford: Clarendon, 1927) and David Graeber and

Marshall Sahlins, On Kings (Chicago: Hau, 2017). For a general vision of medieval

kingship see, among others, Henry A. Myers, Medieval Kingship (Chicago: Nelson-Hall,

1982) and Bernhard Jussen, ed., Die Macht des Königs (Munich: C. H. Beck, 2005). 8 Classical works on medieval coronations include: Cornelius A. Bouman, Sacring and Crowning

(Groningen: J. B. Wolters, 1957); János M. Bak, ed., Coronations: Medieval and Early Modern

Monarchic Ritual(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990); Richard A. Jackson, Ordines

coronationis Franciae. 2 vols. (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1995);

Joachim Ott, Krone und Krönung (Mainz: Philipp von Zabern, 1998); Janet L. Nelson,

Politics and Ritual in EarlyModern Europe(London: Hambledon Press, 1986). For coronation’s

connection with political and legal theory see Fritz Kern, Kingship and Law in the Middle Ages

(Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1956); Frederic W. Maitland, Roman Canon Law (New York: Burt

Franklin, 1968); Walter Ullmann, The Carolingian Renaissance and the Idea of Kingship

(London: Methuen, 1969). For a more specific analysis of medieval European coronations

see Percy E. Schramm, A History of the English Coronation (Oxford: Clarendon, 1937);

Roy Strong, Coronation: A History of Kingship and the British Monarchy (London: Harper

Collins, 2005); H. G. Richardson, ‘The Coronation in Medieval England: The Evolution of

the Office and the Oath’, Traditio 16 (1960): 111–202; Ernst H. Kantorowicz, ‘Inalienability:

A Note on the Canonical Practice and the English Coronation Oath in the Thirteenth

Century’, Speculum, 29 (1954): 488–502; Paul L. Ward, ‘The Coronation Ceremony in

Medieval England’, Speculum 24 (1939): 160–78; Eloísa Ramírez, ed., Ceremonial de la

Coronación, unción y exequias de los reyes de Inglaterra (Pamplona: Gobierno de Navarra,

2008); Richard A. Jackson, Vive le Roi! (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press,

1984). For analyses of the long-term continuity of the political symbols see Ernst

H. Kantorowicz, ‘Oriens Augusti – Lever du roi’, Dumbarton Oaks Papers 17 (1963):

117–77; Percy E. Schramm, Der König Von Frankreich. 2. Das Wesen Der Monarchie Vom 9.

Zum 16. Jahrhundert(Darmstadt:Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1960); Jacques Le Goff,

Eric Palazzo, Jean-Claude Bonne and Marie-Noël Collette, eds., Le Sacre Royal a L’epoque De

Saint-Louis (Paris: Gallimard, 2001).

Introduction 5

European kingdoms other forms of coronations were not practised at

all, with the possible exceptions of the intriguing story of the autoinvestiture of King Cnut (1016–35)9 and the self-coronation of

Figure 3 The Coronation of Edward III. Miniature by Loyset Liédet,

Chroniques de Jean Froissart, c.1470–5. BNF, Ms. Fr. 2643, fol. 12.

© Bibliothèque nationale de France.

9 Henry of Huntingdon documents that Cnut enthroned himself at the seashore. Since he was

at the peak of his power, he ordered the incoming tide not to presume to wet the ruler of

England. The tide, however, rose and soaked the king. Cnut then regretted his arrogance

and humbly recognised that the power of earthly kings was worthless and that the only one

6 Introduction

Richard I of England in 1189,10 both clearly seen as opprobrium. From

the thirteenth century onwards, departure from established tradition

was not really an option for the French and English, since they could

not truly become kings in the medieval and early modern eras until they

had been anointed and crowned by the bishops. But the variety of

rituals of coronations and, crucially, the diversity of the places in

which they were performed, show that the French, English and

German models should not be taken as conventional elsewhere.

Thus, this book aims to demonstrate that at some points in the

Middle Ages, and particularly in some areas, such as Iberia and other

Central and Northern European kingdoms, the coronation by the

bishop was not the more common or even orthodox or conventional

ritual of investiture. In these kingdoms, coronations by bishops were

replaced by coronations by the kings themselves, or other forms of

worthy of the name was He who ruled the universe. Consequently, Cnut never again wore

the gold crown that he had given himself and put it on the head of Christ crucified instead

(Robert Deshman, ‘Christus Rex et Magi Reges: Kingship and Christology in Ottonian and

Anglo-Saxon Art’, Frühmittelalterliche Studien 10 (1976): 367–405, here 404–5). Matthew of

Paris relates the same story in his Chronica Majora when telling of Cnut’s death. He confirms

that ‘rex quoque deinceps nunquam coronam portavit; sed coronam suam super caput

imaginis Crucifixi componens, magnum regibus futuris praebuit humilitatis exemplum’–

‘the king never wore the crown again; it was put on the head of a Crucifix image, offering

a great example of humility for future kings’ (Matthew of Paris, Mattaei Parisiensis, monachi

Sancti Albani, Chronica majora, ed. Henry Richards Luard [London: Rerum Britannicarum

Medii Aevi Scriptores, Rolls Series, Kraus Reprint, 1964], vol. 57: 1, p. 510). The tale seems

to have some basis in reality, since in 1023 Cnut recorded in a charter to Christchurch,

Canterbury, that he laid ‘the royal crown from my head with my own hands upon the altar of

Christ in Canterbury’ (Agnes J. Robertson, Anglo-Saxon Charters [Cambridge: Cambridge

University Press, 1956], 159, n. 82, 407). A posterior list of Canterbury donors states that

Christ’s crown was kept on the head of Christ in Canterbury (William A. Chaney, The Cult of

Kingship in Anglo-Saxon England: The Transition from Paganism to Christianity [Manchester:

Manchester University Press, 1970], 139). Cnut’s regret for having put the crown on his

own head sends the message that self-coronation was not approved of in England at the time

Henry of Huntingdon and Matthew of Paris wrote their chronicles – the mid-twelfth to midthirteenth centuries. 10 The chronicler Roger of Howden records that Richard I’s ceremony of investiture,

performed on 13 September 1189, consisted of the usual anointing by Baldwin,

Archbishop of Canterbury. Yet, at the moment of coronation, Richard himself picked

up the crown and handed it to the archbishop, instead of the bishop taking it from the

altar. However, the bishop actually placed the crown on the king’s head, with the

assistance of two nobles: ‘Deinde ipse [the king] cepit coronam de altari, et tradidit

eam archiepiscopo, et erchiepiscopus posuit eam super caput illius, quam duo comites

sustinebant propter ponderositatem ipsius’ (Roger of Howden, Chronica. Magistri Rogeri

de Houedene, ed. William Stubbs. 4 vols. [Oxford: Macmillan, 1870], 3:11). In later

coronations, the archbishop would take the crown from the altar in order to place it on the

king’s head. Yet it is not clear if Richard I finally crowned himself or if he just took the

crown from the altar (as the chronicler says) before the bishop put the crown on his head.

In any case, whether or not this was an innovation, it was a real gesture of self-affirmation:

John Gillingham, Richard I (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1999), 107.

Introduction 7

investiture, more than we tend to think. Perhaps the time has come to

revise a paradigm so deeply established, not only in the popular imagination that sees Napoleon’s self-coronation as the paradigm of originality, unconventionality and transgression, but also in scholarship.

More specifically, these supposed conventional forms of coronation

were not practised in Denmark and Norway until the second half of the

twelfth century, in Bohemia until the thirteenth century or in Poland and

Scotland until the fourteenth century, and they were only occasionally

practised in other European kingdoms, especially in Wales and Ireland.

Iberian rulers temporarily adopted unction and coronation or occasionally abandoned them. Unction and coronation were introduced, sought

out and petitioned for by kings across the Latin West without a particular

chronological or special regularity and uniformity.11 The general perspective provides one of the key data for this project.

Consequently, we should clarify the difference between the notions of

‘coronation’ and ‘self-coronation’, and examine the historical and symbolic

implications of the latter term. While the French, English and imperial

coronations by the bishops and the Pope have been largely examined,

expanding this particular model to all the Western kingdoms, the allegedly

unconventional strategy of self-coronations deserves more attention. Some

primary sources speak clearly of the essential difference between coronations and self-coronations, beginning with Charlemagne’s initial reluctance

to be crowned by the Pope. According to Einhard, if the emperor ‘had

known beforehand the [P]ope’s plan, he would never have entered the

church [to be crowned by the Pope]’.

12 The Franks believed Charlemagne

owed his title of emperor not to papal coronation but to an acknowledgement of his power by the people he ruled.13

11 For detailed evidence on the European kingdoms’ different rhythms of the adoption of

the installation ceremonies see Matthias Becher, ed., Die mittelalterliche Thronfolge im

europäischen Vergleich (Ostfildern: Jan Thorbecke, 2017). For Scandinavian kingdoms see

Philip Line, Kingship and State Formation in Sweden, 1130–1290 (Leiden: Brill, 2007),

388–400; Elisabeth Vestergaard, ‘A Note on Viking Age Inaugurations’, in Coronations:

Medieval and Early Modern Monarchic Ritual, ed. János M. Bak (Berkeley: University of

California Press, 1990), 119–24; Erich Hoffmann, ‘Coronations and Coronation

Ordines in Medieval Scandinavia’, in Coronations: Medieval and Early Modern

Monarchic Ritual, ed. János M. Bak (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990),

125–51. For East-Central European kingdoms see Aleksander Gieysztor, ‘Gesture in the

Coronation Ceremonies of Medieval Poland’, in Coronations: Medieval and Early Modern

Monarchic Ritual, ed. János M. Bak (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990),

152–64; Paul W. Knoll, The Rise of the Polish Monarchy (Chicago: Chicago University

Press, 1972), 27, 38–40, 65–6. 12 Einhard, Vita Caroli Magni, ed. Oswald Holder-Egger (Hannoverae: Impensis Bibliopolii

Hahniani, 1965), 32 (chapter 28). 13 Percy E. Schramm, Kaiser, Könige und Päpste. 4 vols. (Stuttgart: Hiersemann, 1968),

1:215–63, and Janet L. Nelson, ‘Kingship and Empire’, in The Cambridge History of

8 Introduction

Further evidence of the difference between coronations and selfcoronations, and their respective symbolic implications, comes from the

chronicler William of Malmesbury, who documents that on

29 January 1121 Henry of England married Adeliza of Louvain at

Windsor. The next day, as Ralph d’Escures, Archbishop of Canterbury,

was presiding over Adeliza’s coronation, he

noticed that the king was seated on his throne wearing the crown. Furious that

another man had anticipated a duty he should have carried out himself, he went

up to the king, just as he was, in his holy pallium. The king rose, out of respect for

him. Ralph said: ‘Who crowned you?’ The king excused himself, saying he did not

know. ‘You have been crowned unlawfully,’ Ralph said. ‘Either you must take off

your crown, or I will not celebrate [M]ass.’‘No, lord father,’ answered the king,

‘correct the error, and do what should be done.’ Ralph therefore put out his hands

to take off the crown [‘Illo ergo manus ad auferendum diadema compnente’], and the

king began to untie the fastening at his chin.14

Malmesbury views Ralph’s angry action as a result of the archbishop’s

conviction that ‘when something was done that affected the rights of his

church, he would resent it and seek a sharp revenge.’

15 Kings were not

expected to put on their crowns habitually or casually. This is what

Archbishop Gervais wanted to emphasise when he crowned Philip I of

France in 1059: ‘Taking the staff of Saint-Remi, he explained quietly and

peacefully how the election and consecration of the king pertained especially to him[self] as successor to the holy Remigius, who had baptized

and consecrated Clovis.’

16

A fourth testimony comes from the nineteenth century, when Henry de

Saint-Simon argued for the hegemony of his own class of nobles, which he

identified as possessing the same dignity as the old Peers of France. Thus,

he stated, without their agreement, it was impossible for the king to be

crowned:

Medieval Political Thought, c. 350–c. 1450, ed. James H. Burns (Cambridge: Cambridge

University Press, 1988), 211–51, here 231. 14 William de Malmesbury, Gesta Pontificum Anglorum: The History of the English Bishops, 1:

Text and Translation, ed. Michael Winterbottom and Rodney M. Thomson. 2 vols.

(Oxford: Clarendon, 2009), chapter 1, 71, 1–4 (here pp. 210–13). The story is also

told by Eadmer of Canterbury; see Historia novorum in Anglia, ed. Martin Rule (London:

Rolls Series, 1884), 292–4. See Robert Bartlett, England under the Norman and Angevin

Kings, 1075–1225 (Oxford: Clarendon, 2000), 127. The story is also told in Eadmer,

Historia novorum, 4:292; Geoffrey Koziol, ‘England, France and the Problem of Sacrality

in Twelfth-Century Ritual’, in Cultures of Power: Lordship, Status and Power in TwelfthCentury Europe, ed. Thomas N. Bisson (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press,

1995), 124–48, here 138. 15 Malmesbury, Gesta Pontificum, 211. 16 See Thomas N. Bisson, The Crisis of the Twelfth Century: Power, Lordship, and the Origins of

European Government (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2009), 158, who takes

it from Jackson, Ordines coronationis Franciae, 1:217–32.

Introduction 9

The king cannot bear the great weight of the crown except with the aid of those

who have placed it upon his head and who support it there. That is to say that the

great affairs of the kingdom ought to be equally shared with them in writing, in

counsel, in power because they equally support the Crown; that without them

there is no important sanction, no law, no new structure; that they are those who

come closest to approaching and supporting the Crown and are even the only who may

place their hand upon it, that is to say, who may join together with the king, establish

laws with the king, coexecute the most important things with him, constitute,

colegislate, and validate, authorize by the power, by virtue of the whole nation

residing in them, all that it pleases the king to do with their concurrence.17

From these accounts, it would appear that the practice of self-coronation

was viewed as a transgression of the norm, leading to a generalised idea that

might have actually artificially projected Napoleon’s legendary selfcoronation in 1804 back to those performed during the Middle Ages.

Yet, as I try to show in this book, the assumption of self-coronations as

a transgressive ritual is valid only for French, English and German kingdoms, where the ceremonial norm of the king being crowned by the bishop

was firmly established, particularly in France, where it became a symbol

‘for the principle that political authority was sacrosanct’.

18 But this was not

the case for other kingdoms of medieval Europe, which witnessed very

different ritual formulas of accession, self-coronations among them. Here

also appears the anachronism of projecting our modern ideas about ‘secularisation’ back to the Middle Ages which, once again, leads to multiple

misunderstandings.

Historians do not use the word ‘coronation’ to describe accession

rituals in medieval Europe because they consider it misleading. Apart

from the fact that more occurs in this ceremony than the specific gesture

of the coronation by the bishop, the reduction of the royal accession to the

‘coronation’ would exclude other ceremonial forms such as selfcoronations – which have not necessarily been conceived as ‘transgressive

rituals’.

19 I think the modern word ‘coronation’ can be obstructive

because it stresses one particular act. This complicates our approach to

coronations in non-inaugural circumstances. For instance, the Germans

felt the need to invent the term Festkrönung to designate events medieval

17 Saint-Simon, ‘Mémoire succincte sur les formalités desquelles nécessairement la renonciation du Roy d’Espagne’, in Escrits inédits de Saint Simon, ed. Prosper Faugère. 6 vols.

(Paris: Hachette, 1880), 2:1, 179–408, here 212–13 (emphasis added). 18 Koziol, ‘England, France and the Problem of Sacrality’, 148. 19 Johanna Dale has examined medieval chronicles to see how inaugurations were described

and, although chroniclers occasionally do use the word ‘coronation’ or linked words (i.e.

‘crowning’), they more often prefer other terms, particularly those linked to anointing or

consecration: see Johanna Dale, Inauguration and Liturgical Kingship in the Long Twentieth

Century: Male and Female Accession Rituals in France, England and the Empire (Suffolk:

Boydell & Brewer, 2019), chapter 3.

10 Introduction

people simply called ‘coronations’. Other historians have highlighted the

double meaning of the concept of ‘accession’: ‘The Latin word “accessio”

can be translated into English both as “accession” (i.e. enthronement or

the adoption of royal status) and as “access” (i.e. the right of non-royal

persons to approach or petition the person seated on the royal throne).’

20

In any case, no one can deny that the specific gesture of ‘putting the

crown on the king’s head’ has a special relevance relating to the other

ceremonies of the investiture, because of its intrinsic symbolic meaning

and ritual dramatisation. Then, the decision of who places the crown on

the king’s head in the ceremony of investiture is not a trivial choice, since

the formula of royal investiture as declared in the first imperial ceremonials clearly states that ‘the Pontiff [or bishop] must stay at the altar and

put the diadem on the emperor’s [or king’s] head.’

21 In opposition to

what is usually believed, there are multiple forms of transferring the

office of the kingdom to an individual apart from ecclesiastical

mediation.22 Björn Weiler has analysed the theme of the rex renitens, in

which ‘reluctant kingship was not merely confined to being hesitant

before assuming office; it could also, and just as frequently, include an

unwillingness to accept the trappings of office, that is the title, insignia,

or ceremonial of kingship’, as happened with Saint Ladislaus of

Hungary, Henry I of France and Godfrey I of Jerusalem.23 Jacek

Banaszkiewicz gives details of Conrad II of Germany’s peculiar investiture – or its propagandistic narrative – in which four petitioners with

a separate claim and an individual complainant approach the king.

Conrad had to attend to these four claimants – a peasant, an orphan,

a widow and a vagabond – before being anointed.24 Philip Lane details

some of the ‘rituals of ruling’ in medieval Scandinavia, in which ‘the

20 Nicholas Vincent, ‘Royal Sacrality in England, 1154–1272’, in El acceso al trono.

Concepción y ritualización (Pamplona: Gobierno de Navarra, 2017), 167–90, here 168. 21 Reinhard Elze, Ordines coronationis imperialis (Hannover: Hahnsche Buchhandlung,

1960), 18 (Pontifical of Mainz, in which is included the Ordo Coronationis of Ottonian

kings). 22 A good number of them are gathered in Björn Weiler, ‘Crown-Giving and King-Making

in the West ca. 1000–ca. 1250’, Viator 41(1) (2010): 57–88. 23 Björn Weiler, ‘The Rex Renitens and the Medieval Idea of Kingship, ca. 900–ca. 1250’,

Viator 31 (2000): 1–42, here 7. On a related approach for ecclesiastical offices see

Timothy Reuter, ‘Pastorale Pedum ante Pedes Apostolici Posuit: Dis- and Reinvestiture in

the Era of the Investiture Context’, in Belief and Culture in the Middle Ages: Studies

Presented to Henry Mayr-Harting (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), 197–210. 24 Jacek Banaszkiewicz, ‘Conrad II’s “Theatrumrituale”: Wipo on the Earliest Deeds of the

Salian Ruler’, in Central and Eastern Europe in the Middle Ages: A Cultural History. Essays in

Honour of Paul W. Knoll, ed. Nancy van Deusen and Piotr Górecki (London: Tauris

Academic Studies, 2009), 50–63, and Ludger Körntgen, Königsherrschaft und Gottes

Gnade. Zu Kontext und Funktion sakraler Vorstellungen in Historiographie und

Bildzeugnissen der ottonisch-frühsalischen Zeit (Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 2001), 136–47.

Introduction 11

crown was normally placed by nobles’ under the archbishop’s supervision; in others, ‘German emperors conferred the crowns on Danish

princes or kings in return for an act of submission.’

25 Dusan Zupka

offers a variety of rituals of accession enacted by Central European

rulers in Germany, Bohemia and Hungary. He describes several forms

of these ceremonies, whose variation depended on specific occasions

and circumstances. The sources do not always allow us to identify

clearly demarcated boundaries among them: Erstkrönung, Festkrönung,

Mitkrönung, Beikrönung, Unter-Krone-gehen and Kronentragen, among

others.26

Another variation of the alleged conventional ritual (the bishop crowning the king) is the practice of self-coronations. When a king decides to

crown himself, this gesture not only has symbolic implications which

affect the content of the ceremony, but it also reshapes the entire ritual

and subverts participants’ expectations. So the self-crowned kings analysed in this book, such as Alfonso IV of Aragon (1328), Alfonso XI of

Castile (1332), Peter IV of Aragon (1336), Charles III of Navarra (1390),

Martin I of Aragon (1399) and Ferdinand I of Aragon (1414), were using

their agency to emphasise their authority as well as their autonomy in

temporal matters over the sacred hierarchy.27 Certainly, there can be

many types of self-coronation, as many as there can be self-investitures.

In the first place, the self-coronation could occur in the context of the

royal consecration Mass, which would therefore be a properly sacred

context. That was the case with the fourteenth-century Iberian kings,

whose self-coronations preserved all the ceremonies established by the

rituals, except at the solemn moment of the actual crowning, when the

kings placed the crown on their heads themselves. In the second instance,

25 Line, Kingship and State Formation in Sweden, 389, with other examples in 388–400. 26 Dusan Zupka, Ritual and Symbolic Communication in Medieval Hungary under the Árpád

Dynasty (Leiden: Brill, 2016), 38. 27 Perhaps Henry I the Fowler, king of East Francia (919–36) and founder of the Ottonian

Dynasty should be added to this list. It seems that Archbishop Heriger of Mains offered to

anoint him according to the usual ceremony, but he refused because he wished to be king

not by the church’s authority but by the people’s acclaim. Nevertheless, scholars agree

that the evidence is insufficient to assert this: Weiler, ‘Rex Renitens and the Medieval Idea

of Kingship’,5–6; Johannes Fried, ‘Die Königserhebung Heinrichs I. Erinnerung.

Mündlichkeit und Traditionsbildung im 10. Jahrhundert’, in Mittelalterforschung nach

der Wende 1989, ed. Michael Borgolte (Munich: Oldenbourg, 1995), 267–318;

Ernst Karpf, ‘Königserhebung ohne Salbung. Zur politischen Bedeutung von

Heinrichs. I. Ungewöhnlichern Verzicht in Fritzlar (919)’, Hessisches Jahrbuch für

Landesgeschichte 34 (1984): 1–24; Walter Schlesinger, ‘Die Königserhebung Heinrichs

I. zu Fritzlar im Jahre 919’, in Fritzlar im Mittelalter. Festschrift zur 1250-Jahrfeier(Fritzlar:

Magistrat der Stadt Fritzlar, 1974), 121–43, here 137–8; Schramm, ‘Vom Tode Karls

des Grossen (814) bis zum Anfang des 10. Jahrhunderts’, in Kaiser, Könige und Päpste,

2:303–4. See the previous notes on the rex renitens.

12 Introduction

self-coronation may be orchestrated directly by the king crowning his heir

without resorting to the ecclesiastical hierarchy, as happened in some

Byzantine and Carolingian investitures. Finally, there may be a selfcoronation (or, more properly, a ceremony of wearing the crown) without

the presence of a sacred minister or any ceremony and therefore, strictly

speaking, without consecration, as appears to have been the case with

Frederick II in Jerusalem.

Previous scholarship has rarely analysed self-coronations. Carlrichard

Brühl uses the concept of self-coronation in 1984, in an article which

referred to the practice of self-coronation by kings and emperors from the

thirteenth to nineteenth centuries.28 Hans E. Mayer documents the

(supposed) self-coronation of Frederick II of Hohenstaufen in

Jerusalem in 1229.29 Teófilo F. Ruiz discusses this in his article on the

self-coronation of Alfonso XI of Castile in 1332, connecting it with the

concept of (de)sacralisation.30 Marta Serrano-Coll and I use the concept

in our historical and iconographic analysis of Peter IV of Aragon’s selfcoronation in 1336.31 Finally, Christopher Clark and Philippe Buc have

published valuable articles on the self-coronation of Frederick I of Prussia

(1701).32

In addition to the analysis of these ceremonies of self-coronation, this

book also focuses on what the Byzantinist André Grabar calls ‘celestial

coronation’ or ‘symbolic coronation’ (couronemment symbolique) to refer

to the imaginative iconographic dimension of the ritual of self-coronation

developed in the East by ancient and medieval empires such as Persia and

Byzantium.33 Rather than the emperor being crowned by the priest, those

28 Carlrichard Brühl, ‘Les auto-couronnements d’empereurs et de rois (XII–XIXe siècles)’,

Comptes rendus des séances de l’Académie des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres 128(1) (1984):

102–18, and Carlrichard Brühl, ‘Kronen- und Krönungsbrauch im frühen und höhen

Mittelalter’, Historische Zeitschrift 234 (1982): 1–31. See also the section ‘Selbstkrönung’,

in Ott, Krone und Krönung, 127–8. 29 Hans E. Mayer, ‘Das Pontifikale von Tyrus und die Krönung der lateinischen Könige

von Jerusalem’, Dumbarton Oaks Papers 21 (1967): 141–232. 30 Teófilo F. Ruiz, ‘Une royauté sans sacre: la monarchie castillane du Bas Moyen Age’,

Annales. Économies, Sociétés, Civilizations 39 (1984): 429–53. 31 Jaume Aurell and Marta Serrano-Coll, ‘The Self-Coronation of Peter the Ceremonious

(1336)’, Speculum 89 (2014): 66–95. 32 Christopher Clark, ‘When Culture Meets Power: The Prussian Coronation of 1701’, in

Cultures of Power in Europe during the Long Eighteenth Century, ed. Hamish M. Scott and

Brendan Simms (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 15–35; Philippe Buc,

‘1701 in Medieval Perspective: Monarchical Rituals between the Middle Ages and

Modernity’, Majestas 10 (2002): 91–124. 33 André Grabar, L’Empereur dans l’Art Byzantin (Paris: Les Belles lettres, 1936), 112–22.

See also Andrea Torno Ginnasi, L’incoronazione celeste nel mondo bizantino (Oxford:

Archaeopress, 2014). A rich and interdisciplinary approach on the relationship between

images and ritual is presented in Bild und Ritual, ed. Claus Ambos, Petra Rösch and

Stefan Weinfurter (Darmstadt: WBG, 2010).

Introduction 13

societies developed the iconography of the divinity Ahura Mazda (in

Persia) or Christ himself (in Byzantium) crowning the ruler. This peculiar

iconography conveys the idea of the divinity of the sovereign, who need

not be crowned by the priest-mediator because he already has direct

access to God. Yet paradoxically, and contrasting with these symbolic

self-coronations, we have historical evidence that the ritual of coronation

was performed by the priest or the patriarch in most cases, in both Persia

and Byzantium.

***

I have used three different primary sources for analysing the ritual of selfcoronation: historiographical, liturgical and iconographic imprints.

First, and guided by my own work on medieval historiography in the

book Authoring the Past, I have employed the descriptions written by

witnesses of those coronations as well as the historical narratives produced by chroniclers at the time or shortly after the event. The use of

narrative texts in the analysis of the ritual connects with debates around

the correct understanding of these sources to enter the substance of the

rituals. Here the core of the issue is divided into two main problems: first,

on the veracity of the sources and, second, on the danger of projecting

modern interpretive categories back to the medieval spirit of these

sources. In his study on the rex renitens, Weiler gives one of the keys for

approaching the first of these dilemmas:

Many of our sources contain anecdotes, legends, and episodes which bear little or

no resemblance to what we know to have happened. At the same time, their veracity

is of only marginal concern here. Although an awareness of the wider background

will be useful, it is not our primary aim to establish whether a king had really been

reluctant, but rather why a particular author may have described him as such.34

To deal with medieval self-coronations is thus not only to try to establish what really happened, especially when we can base our historical

knowledge of the event on a variety of sources – as in the case of Peter

the Ceremonious’ self-coronation, for which we have the narrative

account, the liturgical ordo and some iconographic representations. It is

also, and crucially, to learn how a particular ritual of self-coronation was

represented and interpreted by people at the time or by the next generations of chroniclers.

As for the second issue, the projection of modern interpretive categories,

Buc has alerted historians to the danger of constructing their interpretations of medieval rituals on modern social scientific models rather than on

medieval hermeneutics and theological models. This was especially

34 Weiler, ‘Rex Renitens and Medieval Ideas of Kingship’, 3.

14 Introduction

notable in interwar Germany, where Percy E. Schramm developed his

work. In his influential Dangers of Ritual, Buc opens a lively debate

between history and anthropology of the rituals to medieval studies,

which I analyse in Chapter 1.

35 Buc’s perspectives are particularly useful

for my own theories on the practice of self-coronations since this book is

in part an inductive demonstration that ‘the ceremonies that the early

modernist takes for granted were not central to medieval kingship at all

times and in all places.’

36 As I argue, it is wrong to take the coronation

enacted by the bishop as a model for ceremonies of royal accession in the

Middle Ages, as a plurality of ceremonies, self-coronations among them,

existed.

One of Buc’s main conclusions is that ‘medieval sources seldom present a ceremony as it actually happened.’

37 Yet Buc does not promote

scepticism towards these sources because, though subjective, they constitute our only access to medieval rituals. The same heuristic scepticism

could be actually applied to all narratives and historiographical texts used

as sources of all aspects of the past.38 Yet the very existence of narratives

implies the explicit recognition of the ritual, as well as its relevance

beyond its actual enactment. More properly, these narrations of the

rites by the medieval chroniclers ‘meant not so much to report a ritual

as to influence how a ritual would come to be interpreted. ... It was not

some magical power of ritual but rather a ritual’s reception that shaped

society and politics’.

39

Buc concludes that the process of interpreting ritual began at the time

of performance and continued thereafter.40 To be sure, the record of

a ritual constitutes an event in itself: although of a narrative nature, it

35 Philippe Buc, The Dangers of Ritual(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001), 1–28.

See also David A. Warner, ‘Ritual and Memory in the Ottonian Reich: The Ceremony of

Adventus’, Speculum 76 (2001): 255–83; Timothy Reuter, ‘Pre-Gregorian Mentalities’,

Journal of Ecclesiastical History 45 (1994): 465–74; Mayke de Jong, ‘Power and Humility in

Carolingian Society: The Public Penance of Louis the Pious’, Early Medieval Europe 1

(1992): 29–52; Mayke de Jong, The Penitential State: Authority and Atonement in the Age of

Louis the Pious, 814–840 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009). A good example

of how medievalists have applied these ideas is presented in the detailed analysis of one ‘case

study’; see Simon MacLean, ‘Ritual, Misunderstanding, and the Contest for Meaning:

Representations of the Disrupted Royal Assembly at Frankfurt (873)’, in Representations of

Power in Medieval Germany, 800–1500, ed. Simon MacLean and Björn Weiler (Turnhout:

Brepols, 2006), 97–120. 36 Buc, ‘1701 in Medieval Perspective’, 94. 37 Buc, ‘1701 in Medieval Perspective’, 110. 38 Jaume Aurell, Authoring the Past: History, Autobiography, and Politics in Medieval Catalonia

(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012), 155–76. 39 Buc, ‘1701 in Medieval Perspective’, 110. 40 Philippe Buc, ‘Ritual and Interpretation: The Early Medieval Case’, Early Medieval

Europe 9 (2000): 1–28, here 4.

Introduction 15

generates a new historical reality, as we consider its effects on its audience.

The act of remembering ‘changed the very nature of what would be

preserved’.

41 As David A. Warner argues:

In any case, whether the ritual in question actually occurred or not, the ability to

impose a particular reading on it implied a kind of power or authority, which, in

the case of literary account, had the potential to increase as the event itself receded

into the past and competing, nonliterary accounts faded.42

Compared to legal briefs, notarial documentation and chancellery

records, narrative sources are probably less reliable from a strict heuristic

point of view. But they convey more accurately the richness of cultural

manifestations, and the historian should not discard them because of their

heuristic ambiguity or epistemic complexity. Actually, in some of the selfcoronations analysed in this book, particularly those of Frederick II of

Germany and Peter IV of Aragon, we explore how the informant has

manipulated the historical account to articulate an approach to reality in

order to achieve certain political aims. Thus, the story narrated by the

chronicler should be contrasted with other documents. This comparative

analysis of sources, though useful, nonetheless cannot provide a detailed

and definitive reconstruction of the facts. Since the question of whether

the ritual narrated ‘really happened’ and ‘in what form’ is certainly

relevant but unanswerable in the end, it is perhaps more useful to analyse

what criteria might have led a chronicler to include an account of a ritual

in his historical narrative, how these criteria affected the content of his

work and how the narration was shaped and the event remembered.43

In addition to narrative accounts, I have also used sources of a liturgical

nature: missals, pontificals and ordines and, for the fourteenth century

onwards, the books of ceremonies or liturgical collections.44 Since verbal

and gestural ritual are too easily corrupted by the passage of time, lapses

of memory and deliberate falsifications, ecclesiastics firstly and rulers

later commissioned liturgical ceremonials, before or after the events, in

order to establish and validate the ritual performed in the ceremonies of

41 Patrick Geary, Phantoms of Remembrance: Memory and Oblivion at the End of the First

Millennium (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1994), 177. On the literary

implications of the remembering see Brian Stock, The Implications of Literacy

(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1983), 15–25. 42 Warner, ‘Ritual and Memory in the Ottonian Reich’, 256. 43 David A. Warner, ‘Thietmar of Merseburg on Rituals of Kingship’, Viator 26 (1995):

53–76, here 75. 44 For an interesting comment on the nature of liturgical text as sources see Johanna Dale,

‘Inauguration and Political Liturgy in the Hohenstaufen Empire, 1138–1215’, German

History 2 (2016): 191–213. See also Johanna Dale, ‘Royal Inauguration and the

Liturgical Calendar in England, France and the Empire, c.1050–c.1250’, AngloNorman Studies 37 (2015): 83–98.

16 Introduction

investiture. Some historians have turned to royal consecration ordines for

insights about medieval kingship.45 These ordines were subsequent to

royal consecrations since they first emerged in Carolingian Europe.

Liturgical texts prescribe the actions and words during a rite. The theological discipline of the liturgy, mostly applied to medieval and early

modern religious ceremonies, has been of great value for the interpretation of this kind of resource: any ceremony connected with the sacred

represents the liturgification of a ritual.46 Coronation orders, liturgical

plays and the ceremonial scripts fill the signs of rulership with life through

the codification of the most auspicious and politically important ceremonies and spectacles of the Middle Ages.47 Though they are not always

accurate descriptions of what really happened in a ritual, ordines provide

us with primary evidence for the motives, perceptions and beliefs of their

promoters and compilers. The ceremonial commissioned by Peter the

Ceremonious to consolidate the specific gesture of self-coronations (see

Chapter 10) has been particularly useful in my research on this ritual.

Johanna Dale is right when she states that ‘the narrative and liturgical

testimonies are rarely complementary’,

48 so that Peter’s propagandistic

programme – gathering narrative, liturgical and iconographic evidence –

has provided us with an extraordinary ensemble of sources and inspired

historical interpretations.

In my analysis of the ceremonies of the investiture through liturgical

sources I have also used as a model some works published by medievalists

interested in the ritual dimension of the coronations.49 Ritual studies has

45 Elze, Ordines coronationis, chapter xii (with an exhaustive bibliographical annotation);

Michel Andrieu, Les Ordines Romani du haut moyen âge (Louvain: Spicilegium Sacrum

Lovaniense, 1931–61) and Andrieu, ‘Die Ordines der mittelalterlichen Kaiserkrönung.

Ein Beitrag zur Geschichte des Kaisertums’, Archiv für Urkundenforschung 11 (1930):

285–390; Ernst H. Kantorowicz, Laudes Regiae: A Study in Liturgical Acclamations and

Mediaeval Ruler Worship (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1946); Walter Ullmann,

Liber Regie Capelle(London: Henry Bradshaw, 1961) and ‘Der Souveränitätsgedanke in den

mittelalterlichen Krönungsordines’, in Festschrift Percy Ernst Schramm, ed. Peter Classen and

Peter Scheibert. 2 vols. (Wiesbaden: F. Steiner, 1964), 1:72–89; Otto Treitinger, Die

oströmische Kaiser- und Reichsidee nach ihrer Gestaltung im höfischen Zeremoniell (Darmstadt:

Herman Gentner, 1956); Richardson, ‘The Coronation in Medieval England’, 111–82. 46 Eric Palazzo, Liturgie et société au Moyen Âge (Paris: Aubier, 2000); Matthew

Cheung Salisbury, ‘Establishing a Liturgical Text: Text for Performance, Performance

As Text’, in Late Medieval Liturgies Enacted, ed. Sally Harper, P. S. Barnwell and

Magnus Williamson (London: Routledge, 2016), chapter 6. 47 János M. Bak, ‘Medieval Symbology of the State: Percy E. Schramm’s Contribution’,

Viator 4 (1973): 33–63, here 41. 48 Dale, ‘Inauguration and Political Liturgy’, 193. 49 Some excellent surveys on the different scholarship approaches to medieval rituals appear

in Giovanni Isabella, ‘Rituali altomedievali: le ragioni di un dibattito’, Storica 41–2

(2008): 165–91; Christina Pössel, ‘The Magic of Early Medieval Ritual’, Early

Medieval Europe 17 (2009): 111–25; Geoffrey Koziol, ‘The Dangers of Polemic: Is

Introduction 17

shifted between a comparative-presentist tendency, privileging the analysis

of contemporary rituals in some traditional societies preserved in different

places of Africa, America, Australia and Asia, and the very influential

‘myth-ritual school’ of Cambridge in the 1920s–1930s, entirely based on

ancient studies. Therefore, medieval and early modern rituals did not fit

well between these two poles, so the scholars of ritual studies have not

usually paid attention to those intermediary periods. Nevertheless, three

very qualified exceptions serve as forerunners of current medieval ritual

studies: Marc Bloch’s Les rois thaumaturges (1924), Ernst Kantorowicz’s

Ladues Regiae (1949) and Percy E. Schramm’s Kaiser, Könige und Päpste

(1968). In the 1980s, British medievalists, notably Janet L. Nelson, connected medieval studies on investitures with the best of the Cambridge

ancient studies developed in the 1920s and 1930s. At that time, certain

French medievalists of the mentalités, notably Jacques Le Goff and afterwards Jean-Claude Schmitt, Eric Palazzo and Philippe Buc, were inspired

by classic historians of the first generation of the Annales like Marc Bloch,

and they found their own path to medieval ritual and liturgy. In addition,

Central European and American medievalists, including Gerd Althoff,

Geoffrey Koziol, János Bak, Teófilo Ruiz and Patrick Geary, also found

different ways to approach the rituals of accession, and engaged themselves in an interesting debate on the nature of medieval rituals and the

limitations of the negotiation with anthropological ritual studies and

social sciences-oriented approaches.50 Finally, a new generation of

scholars, such as Björn Weiler, Johanna Dale, Simon John, Nicholas

Vincent, Christina Pössel and Simon MacLean, most of them trained in

the British historiographical tradition pioneered by Timothy Reuter and

Janet Nelson, have approached medieval rituals of accession blending

narrative and liturgical sources, have provided a convincing analytical

prospection, and have taken the best of the recent debate on medieval

rituals just mentioned. Since self-coronations occurred mostly in medieval Iberia, I have also based my research on the work of scholars such as

Bonifacio Palacios, José Manuel Nieto Soria and Peter Linehan, who

have analysed Iberian royal coronations in depth.51

Ritual Still an Interesting Topic of Historical Study?’, Early Medieval Europe 11 (2002):

367–88; Philippe Buc, ‘The Monster and the Critics: A Ritual Replay’, Early Medieval

Europe 15 (2007): 441–52. 50 Geoffrey Koziol, Begging Pardon and Favor (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1992);

Gerd Althoff, Die Macht der Rituale (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft,

2003); Nelson, Politics and Ritual in Early Modern Europe; Frans Theuws and Janet

L. Nelson, eds., Rituals of Power (Leiden: Brill, 2000); Bak, Coronations; Geary,

Phantoms of Remembrance; Ruiz, ‘Une royauté sans sacre’. 51 Bonifacio Palacios Martin, La coronación de los reyes de Aragón, 1204–1410 (Valencia:

Anubar, 1975); Peter Linehan, History and the Historians of Medieval Spain (Oxford:

18 Introduction

In addition to narrative and liturgical sources and to this rich tradition

of scholarship, I have collected numerous iconographic representations of

self-coronations. These primarily include reliefs, sculptures, mural pictures and coins for the chapter on the forms of mediation in antiquity

(Chapter 2), and miniatures, pictures and mosaics from the Middle Ages.

Some of these images reveal coronations performed historically while

most of them show coronations without historical referentiality, as an

event imagined by artists or promoted by their patrons. Nevertheless,

I deploy both forms of images, the referential and the non-referential, as

examples of ‘symbolic’ or ‘heavenly’ coronations, and they provide us

with keys to the meaning of self-coronations as well. Relevant literature

has been published on the historical function of miniatures and other

medieval images, especially those promoted by or connected with royal

power. They teach us how to locate the images in their textual and

historical context.52 This operation of ‘putting the events and the images

in context’ shapes my research on self-coronations since, as Robert

Darnton argues, ‘symbols work not merely because of their metaphorical

power but also by virtue of their position within a cultural frame.’

53

Understanding the specific ritual of self-coronation involves comprehending both its metaphorical dimension (the general meaning encoded

in this ceremony and its location in the entire system of the nature of the

ritual to which it belongs) and the particular context in which this dimension is enacted. Thus, we comprehend both its common system of meaning and how this meaning is socially shared.

Nevertheless, the operation of taking the iconographic sources for

historical inquiry should take into account the function of the audience

of these images. Most of the images I have used as historical evidence –

particularly those miniatures I discuss in the chapters devoted to Iberian

monarchies – were limited to an aristocratic and clerical audience. They

were usually placed in ceremonial books, which were read by a small

audience (see Figure 4).

Clarendon, 1993); José Manuel Nieto Soria, ‘Dialécticas monocráticas. El acceso al

trono y la legitimidad de origen’, in El acceso al trono. Concepción y ritualización

(Pamplona: Gobierno de Navarra, 2017), 11–36. 52 Solid literature on art history helps us understand the image in a particular context: Carra

F. O’Meara, Monarchy and Consent (London: Harvey Miller, 2001); Anne D. Hedeman,

The Royal Image: Illustrations of the Grandes Chroniques de France, 1274–1422 (Berkeley:

University of California Press, 1991); Robert A. Maxwell, ed., Representing History,

900–1300 (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2010); Henry MayrHasting, Ottonian Book Illumination (London: Harvey Miller, 1991). 53 Robert Darnton, ‘The Symbolic Element in History’, Journal of Modern History 58

(1986): 218–34, here 227.

Introduction 19

Figure 4 One of the pages of the Ceremonial de consagración y coronación

de los reyes de Aragón. Annex to the Ordinacions de Cort, second half of the

fourteenth century. Biblioteca de la Fundación Lázaro Galdiano, reg.

14425, fol. 19 r. © Museo Lázaro Galdiano. Madrid.

20 Introduction

The subject and the composition of the image inserted in one of the

pages of Peter the Ceremonious’ ceremonial, in which the king crowns

his wife (see Figures 27 and 30), is strikingly similar to David’s drawing

of Napoleon’s self-coronation (see Figure 2). Yet the former was

designed for contemplation by a small ecclesiastical and noble elite,

and probably just for practical purposes, while the latter was intended

to be seen by multiple visitors to the ruler’s palace. Actually, the later

story of both images validates their designers’ original purpose. Peter’s

miniature was produced for a reduced contemporary audience and for

a few scholars who have been fortunate enough to see the manuscript,

which lies in a corner of the Lázaro Galdiano Library in Madrid. By

contrast, Napoleon’s imposing painting is visited by hundreds of

thousands of people a year in the Louvre museum in Paris.

Paradoxically, images related to ceremonies of royal investiture usually

develop a more elaborate symbolic language so as to reinforce the authority of the king. As John Elliott argues:

It is as if a form of ‘Avis principle’ operates in the world of imagery and propaganda: those who are only second try harder. Where ... the supremacy of the king

is taken for granted, political imagery can be studiously understated, and there is

no need to deck out the ruler with elaborate allegorical trappings.54

This would also justify the distinction between the symbolic and ritual

self-coronations that govern the structure of this book. Those powerful

kings who were able to perform self-coronations such as Frederick II of

Germany, Alfonso XI of Castile or Peter IV of Aragon did not need to

return to the iconographic motif of Jesus Christ crowning the king, unlike

the Byzantine emperors or Roger II of Sicily.

***

Apart from these historical sources, this project has also been framed by

methodological choices and theoretical assumptions such as the emphasis

on political theology, the use of long-term chronology and cultural comparative exercise, the concept of agency, and the use of the ritual studies

and theories.

Political theology, as first developed by the political philosopher Carl

Schmitt in the 1920s, is based on the analysis of the transferences between

the spiritual and the temporal, the sacred and the profane, the political

and the religious.55 It is therefore a useful methodological tool that

54 John H. Elliott, ‘Power and Propaganda in Spain of Philip IV’, in Rites of Power, ed.

Sean Wilentz (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1985), 145–73, here 151. 55 Carl Schmitt, Political Theology: Four Chapters on the Concept of Sovereignty (Cambridge,

MA: MIT Press, 1985) and Political Theology II: The Myth of the Closure of Any Political

Introduction 21

recognises the affinity between the systematic structure of theological and

juridical concepts and the political consequences that this resemblance or

analogy entails. This analogy is relevant because all significant concepts of

the theory of the modern state are secularised concepts. For instance, the

state of exception in modern jurisprudence would be the secularised

version of the miracle in theology just as the ‘king’s two bodies’ would

be the secularised version of the doctrine of the two natures of Jesus Christ

in theology. The monarchical sovereignty would be the secular version of

the monotheistic conviction in religion just as the idea of utopia would be

the secularised version of paradise, and the communist ideal would be

a secular version of chiliastic eschatology.56 As Schmitt declared in his

foundational definition of the term in 1922:

All significant concepts of the modern theory of the state are secularised theological concepts not only because of their historical development – in which they

were transferred from theology to the theory of the state, whereby, for example,

the omnipotent God became the omnipotent law-giver – but also because of their

systematic structure.57

Schmitt offers a methodological tool that has also been relevant for the

examination of the development of political and religious ideas and

cultural practices. To be sure, Schmitt conceived this methodology for

the analysis of the early modern and modern eras rather than the medieval. Nevertheless, some medievalists have used it, more or less explicitly,

in their studies, and scholars of law, theology and sociology have

expanded it to their respective disciplines. Kantorowicz is probably the

most relevant of them, in applying it to his monograph The King’s Two

Bodies (1957), which he subtitled A Study on Medieval Political Theology.

58

Theology (New York: Polity Press, 2014). See also the epigraph on ‘Theologie Politique’,

in Henri de Lubac, Théologies d’occasion (Paris: Desclée de Brouwer, 1984), 215–54, in

which he applies this methodology to the historical evolution of the church. On the

theoretical and practical assumptions of this concept for historiographical purposes see

two recent collective works: Montserrat Herrero, Jaume Aurell and Angela

C. Miceli Stout, eds., Political Theology in Medieval and Early Modern Europe

(Turnhout: Brepols, 2017) and Karolina Mroziewicz and Aleksander Sroczynski, eds.,

Premodern Rulership and Contemporary Political Power: The King’s Body Never Dies

(Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2017). 56 A survey of the definition and theoretical and practical implications of the concept of

‘political theology’ is presented in Montserrat Herrero, The Political Discourse of Carl

Schmitt (London: Rowman & Littlefield, 2015), chapter 8, ‘Political Theology’, 157–77,

here 157. See also Álvaro d’Ors, ‘Teología Política: una revisión del problema’, in Sistema

de las ciencias, IV, ed. Álvaro d’Ors (Pamplona: Eunsa, 1977), 86–135. 57 Schmitt, Political Theology, 36. 58 Robert E. Lerner, Ernst Kantorowicz: A Life (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press,

2017), 344–57, and György Geréby, ‘Carl Schmitt and Erik Peterson on the Problem of

Political Theology: A Footnote to Kantorowicz’, in Monotheistic Kingship, ed. Aziz AlAzmeh and János M. Bak (Budapest: Central European University, 2004), 31–62.

22 Introduction

Kantorowicz was aware of the dual nature of the concept, which embodies both historical-temporal development and systematic-normative

structure. This normative structure allows the concept to be applied to

the examination of any period, but particularly those after the

Christianisation of the Roman Empire after the fourth century.

Approaching medieval self-coronations under the light of political theology allows us to discern parallels, contrasts, transferences, transpositions,

filters and dualities between the temporal power exercised by kings and the

spiritual authority proper to bishops. Political theology avoids misunderstandings in the necessary dual approach – from the temporal to the

spiritual – in royal coronations since ‘a world wholly demystified is

a world wholly depoliticized.’

59 Philosophers of religion such as Mircea

Eliade and historians of kingship such as Arthur M. Hocart have arrived to

the same conclusion after their ambitious comparative approach: ‘When it

is prayed that he [the king] may defend the “fortresses of God”, it is as... to

say whether these fortresses are material or spiritual. The fact is, they are

both, for the material and the spiritual cannot be separated.’

60 The question of the universality of kingship and its eventual divinity has allowed

historians and anthropologists to approach it through cross-cultural, multidisciplinary and cross-temporal comparisons, as visible in the collective

volumes edited by Nicole Brisch, Rolf Gundlach and Hermann Weber,

Franz-Reiner Erkens and Declan Quigley.61 This approach promotes general visions and theories, so that anthropologists such as Michael Puett

have related the conviction of the divinity of kingship with the development

of and reaction to imperial policies.62

Kantorowicz’s article ‘Mysteries of State: An Absolutist Concept and Its Late Medieval

Origins’, Harvard Historical Review 48 (1955): 65–91, is another example of the efficacy

of political theology for interpreting medieval political theory and practice, as

Kantorowicz opens the article by stating that the concept ‘mysteries of State’ is the result

of the infinite cross-relations between church and state (p. 31, emphasis added). 59 Clifford Geertz, ‘Centers, Kings, and Charisma: Reflections on the Symbolics of Power’,

in Culture and Its Creators, ed. Joseph Ben-David and Terry Nichols Clark (Chicago:

University of Chicago Press, 1977), 150–71, here 168. 60 Arthur M. Hocart, Kings and Councillors (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,

1936), 160. 61 Nicole Brisch, ed., Religion and Power: Divine Kingship in the Ancient World and Beyond

(Chicago: Oriental Institute of the University of Chicago, 2008); Rolf Gundlach and

Hermann Weber, eds., Legitimation und Funktion des Herrschers: Von ägyptischen Pharao

zum neuzeitlichen Diktator(Stuttgart: Franz Steiner, 1992); Franz-Reiner Erkens, ed., Die

Sakralität von Herrschaft: Herrschaftslegitimierung im Wechsel der Zeiten und Räume (Berlin:

Akademie-Verlag, 2002); Declan Quigley, The Character of Kingship (Oxford: Berg,

2005). 62 Michael Puett, ‘Human and Divine Kingship in Early China: Comparative Reflections’,

in Religion and Power: Divine Kingship in the Ancient World and Beyond, ed. Nicole Brisch

(Chicago: Oriental Institute of the University of Chicago, 2008), 207–20.

Introduction 23

Thus, the practice of self-coronation, with all its symbolic implications, serves as an excellent field from which to discuss the tensions

and transferences between these realms: spiritual and temporal, religious and political, supernatural and natural, ecclesiastical and civil

and transcendent and mundane. In addition, the use of the political

theology allows us to evade the presentism and anachronism that

might arise from applying contemporary concepts, such as that of

‘political religion’, to medieval cultural phenomena.63 In the public

sphere, a nuanced approach to the relationships between the spiritual

and temporal spheres avoids in its turn artificial fusions between the

religious and the political which could potentially damage social

stability.64

My second methodological strategy assumes the long-term approach

that compares the sixth century BC with its establishment of the new

Persian-Achaemenid dynasty to Napoleon’s self-coronation in NotreDame of Paris in 1804, although certainly privileging my own speciality

of medieval history, and its extensive geographical framework from

Spain to Persia and from Sicily to Sweden. This broad approach carries

the risk of falling into historical anachronism and diachronism, but it

activates the aim of all historical narration, what Reinhardt Koselleck

calls ‘the synchrony of the anachronism’: the historian uses synchronic

and diachronic procedures simultaneously, ‘favoring synchrony when

he describes, and diachrony when he narrates’.

65 As Alexander

Beihammer argues, ‘approaching rituals and symbolic communication

as historical phenomena of longue durée stretching from the early Middle

Ages to the early modern period and as phenomena shared by different

cultural and religious spheres is no doubt a forward-looking and futureoriented viewpoint.’

66

This tactic is not new in the scholarly approach to ceremonies

of investiture. Traditional anthropology began working on parallels

among the royal investiture ceremonies of kings from Africa, Europe,

America, Asia and Oceania from different periods and ages, namely

63 Philippe Burrin, ‘Political Religion: The Relevance of a Concept’, History and Memory 9

(1997): 321–49, and Hans Maier, ‘Political Religion: A Concept and Its Limitations’,

Totalitarian Movements and Political Religions 8 (2007): 5–16. 64 Clifford Geertz, ‘Ritual and Social Change: A Javanese Example of Funeral’, American

Anthropologist 59 (1957): 32–45, here 44–5. 65 Reinhardt Koselleck, Futures Past (New York: Columbia University Press), 217. See also

Hans-Georg Gadamer, Truth and Method (London: Sheed & Ward, 1989), 297, and Paul

Ricoeur, Time and Narrative. 3 vols. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990), 3:220. 66 Alexander Beihammer, ‘Comparative Approaches to the Ritual World on the Medieval

Mediterranean’, in Court Ceremonies and Rituals of Power in Byzantium, ed.

Alexander Beihammer, Stavroula Constantinou and Maria G. Parani (Leiden: Brill, 2013),

1–36, here 7.

24 Introduction

Arthur M. Hocart,67 Meyer Fortes68 and Robert S. Ellwood.69 More

recent anthropologists such as Roy Rappaport and Catherine Bell still

believe that there is something universal and common among, ‘say, rites

such as the Catholic Mass, the Sun Dance, the rites of passage in the

deserts of Central Australia, Papua New Guinea curing rituals, and

human sacrifice in Aztec Mexico’.

70 They have tried to explore ‘what

makes us identify some acts as ritual, what such a category does for the

production and organization of knowledge about other cultures, and how

we might assess the assumptions that create and constrain the notion of

ritual’.

71 Francis Oakley has published a general review on the nature of

kingship, arguing that kingship may be the most common form of government known to humankind, beyond the formal differences among the

pharaohs of Egypt, the emperors of Japan, the Maya rulers of

Mesoamerica and the medieval popes and emperors of the European

monarchies.72 All these general approaches demonstrate that rituals have

been one of the privileged fields of anthropological studies, beyond theoretical assumptions or methodological concerns supporting their approach:

‘functionalism with authority, Marxism with contradiction and change,

structuralism with binary contrast and equivalence, phenomenology with

the construction of experience’, as Andrew Apter notes.73

Though I am aware of the limitations of the essentialist method, I argue

that this comparative approach may be still revisited, not only from the

geographical-synchronical terms within which it has been traditionally

practised, but also in its chronological-anachronical dimension – which

particularly interests me in my long-term approach to royal selfcoronations. In this way I have tried to diminish the natural divergence

between ‘the theoretical and the observational language’, as Wolfgang

Stegmüller puts it in his analysis of the language of theory in the hard

67 Hocart took as a case study ceremonies performed ‘from the Aegean to the Ganges’

(Hocart, Kingship, 98) and he enumerates twenty-five common features of these royal

coronations. See also Reginald M. Woolley, Coronation Rites (Cambridge: Cambridge

University Press, 1915), 165–76, section ‘The Inter-relation of the Different Rites’. 68 Meyer Fortes argues for the ‘confirmation for the thesis in Hocart’s study, namely, that

installation ceremonies have much the same structure, use similar procedures, and serve

broadly the same ends in all societies’ (Fortes, ‘Of Installation Ceremonies’, 19). 69 Robert S. Ellwood,The Feast of Kingship (Tokyo: Sophia University, 1973), 1–36. For African

ceremonies of investitures see Hilda Kuper,An African Aristocracy (Oxford: Oxford University

Press, 1947), 72–87 and 197–225. 70 Roy A. Rappaport, Ritual and Religion in the Making of Humanity (Cambridge:

Cambridge University Press, 1999), 29. 71 Catherine Bell, Ritual Theory, Ritual Practice (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992), 4. 72 Francis Oakley, Kingship: The Politics of Enchantment (Oxford: Blackwell, 2006). 73 Andrew Apter, ‘The Embodiment of Paradox: Yoruba Kingship and Female Power’,

Cultural Anthropology 6 (1991): 212–29, here 223.

Introduction 25

sciences.74 Approaches on self-coronations actually oscillate between the

two opposing points of view: synchronicity and diachronicity.

Anthropologists privilege the study of culture as a system of meanings

which encapsulates the primordial values of a specific community. From

this point of view, coronation rituals may be read synchronically and, as

a consequence, analysed like a text, as a coherent script or a master

narrative that actors follow and participants believe.75 Historians, on

their part, privilege the specificity of each ritual, given its particular

context, circumstances and the agency of its promoters. They consequently proceed diachronically, acknowledging the manipulation, artificiality and historicity of the ritual rather than its essentialist, permanent

and universal nature. This approach adopts a perspective through which

each ritual performance constitutes one link in a chain of causes and

consequences extending through time.76

The progressive specialisation of modern historiography, which has

privileged micro- rather than macro-historical approaches, has alerted

us not to fall into abstract and, ultimately, imaginative generalisations.

But recent historiographical trends argue in favour of a more comprehensive chronological perspective, in order to establish reasonable comparisons among agents from different places and ages, and to provide society

with historical models that may empathically connect with an audience

beyond the academic world.77 Since my story of the self-coronations is, in

the end, the genealogy of a ritual, it requires a large-scale temporal and

comparative approach rather than a microscopic historical analysis. This

larger-time-scale approach also facilitates a more multilayered contextualisation of the ritual of self-coronation, within the general system of

coronations. Thus, I have moved from the necessary detailed historical

account of the singular events in each chapter to the comparative and

comprehensive anthropological approach in the conclusions.

To take advantage of what each discipline has to offer, I have tried, in

this book, to analyse like a historian and to interpret like an

anthropologist.78 I have followed Marshall Sahlins’ attempt to blend the

74 Wolfgang Stegmüller, The Structure and Dynamic of Theories(New York: Springer, 1976), 24. 75 Sherry B. Ortner, ‘Introduction’, Representations 59 (1997): 1–13, here 8–9;

Lisa Wedeen, ‘Conceptualizing Culture: Possibilities for Political Science’, American

Political Science Review 96 (2002): 713–28, here 716; Clark, ‘When Culture Meets

Power’, 15–16. 76 William H. Sewell Jr, ‘Geertz, Cultural Systems, and History: From Synchrony to

Transformation’, Representations 59 (1997): 35–55, here 40. 77 Jo Guldi and David Armitage, The History Manifesto (Cambridge: Cambridge University

Press, 2014). 78 See an interesting example of this double approach in Clark, ‘When Culture Meets

Power’.

26 Introduction

methods of history and anthropology rather than simply searching for

more mutual collaboration between the disciplines: ‘The problem now is

to explode the concept of history by the anthropological experience of

culture so that the historical experience will surely explode the anthropological concept of culture – structure included.’

79 Royal rituals share

‘universal characteristics of the symbolic construction of authority and

also gain specific meaning through their adoption and adaptation of

symbolic forms which organized non-royal life’.

80 Structure and symbol,

particularism and generalisation, system and individual, and analysis and

interpretation naturally converge in my medieval self-coronation

approach since, as Victor Turner argues, ‘we see the meaning of

a symbol as deriving from its relation to other symbols in a specific cluster

or gestalt of symbols whose elements acquire much of their significance

from their position in its structure.’

81 Thus, one self-coronation must be

connected, in comparative terms, not only with its particular historical

context and with the historical reality of other self-coronations performed

in medieval Europe, but also with the whole system of that ritual perceived as a ceremony of investiture. In this direction, I question, in this

book, up to what extent self-coronations are a simple ‘variety’ of the ritual

of investiture, or rather are an ‘anomaly’ or ‘failure’ of the form, or even

another kind of ritual.

Most of these questions require deep reflection on the historical context

in which self-coronations were enacted. That is why I open each chapter

with the temporal, geographical, political, social and cultural circumstances of each self-coronation analysed. The exercise of contextualising

each ritual is necessary so as to understand that the degree of transgressivity of each event does not depend only on the nature of the ceremonies

enacted within the ritual itself, but also, and more properly, on the particular circumstances during which they were performed. In the Crown of

Aragon, for instance, the most transgressive self-coronation was probably

that of Alfonso the Benign, while his successors Peter, John, Martin and

Ferdinand used the same ritual, following an ‘established’ tradition. Thus,

one understands Turner’s insistence on the ‘semantic bipolarity’ of ritual

symbols which involves the diverse meanings resulting from the different

circumstances in each ceremony.82 An accurate knowledge of the

performance context is necessary to determine which particular

79 Marshall D. Sahlins, Islands of History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985), xvii.

See especially chapter 5, ‘Structure and History’, 136–56. 80 Maurice Bloch, Ritual, History and Power (Oxford: Berg, 2004), 188. 81 Victor Turner, ‘The Syntax of Symbolism in an African Religion’, Transactions of the

Royal Philosophical Society 25 (1966): 295–303, here 295. 82 Victor Turner, The Ritual Process (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1966), 69.

Introduction 27

connotations are intended, because ‘the same symbols have varying significance in different contexts.’

83 As Clyde Kluckhohn puts it, myths and

rituals may convey symbolic realities, since they ‘may express not only the

latent content of ritual [depending on the ceremonial itself] but of other

culturally organized behaviours [depending on the context in which the

ritual is inserted]’.

84

This leads to my scepticism regarding the alleged transgressivity of selfcoronations. This label was probably established because of the great

symbolic power of Napoleon’s self-coronation in 1804 and the uncritical

projection of Capetian – and successively English – coronation models

onto other medieval and early modern realms. Weiler explains,

As a kind of historiographical commonplace, high medieval European is often

equated with Capetian kingship. As with historians of feudalism who experience

an existential crisis on realizing that in their chosen region patron–client relationships did not resemble those of the Mâconnais, many historians of kingship also

set their regional case against the image of kingship as developed by the learned

denizens in and around St. Denis in the decades after the 1270s. ... That is, the

prestige claimed by the descendants of St. Louis may have led modern historians

to project backwards in time a cultural hegemony that only emerged, and only for

a short period, in the closing decades of the thirteenth and the first quarter of the

fourteenth century.85

Medieval rituals are rather inserted in a general context in which the

ritual behaviour and symbolic gestures become relevant, but they may

passively express or actively react against their own context. Rituals are

conditioned by tradition, since they must reiterate an earlier performance,

and they depend on the precise repetition of specific words or symbolic

gestures. Of course, there were variations in the rites, but it is difficult to

find sources which describe the attendants’ reactions to them. But we

have enough evidence to assert that the emphasis of the medieval rituals

was placed on the ability to repeat certain formulas in the proper order

and in the proper language. Nevertheless, it is also true that some royal

rituals, such as the royal and triumphal entries in the cities, ‘though with

certain recognizable elements maintained over long periods of time, were

quite malleable, and the symbols displayed in these performances quite

fluid. Exact reiteration, such as that of the Mass, was not required:

changes and slight variations could occur’.

86

83 Turner, The Ritual Process, 53. 84 Clyde Kluckhohn, ‘Myths and Rituals: A General Theory’, Harvard Theological Review

35 (1942), 45–79, here 54. 85 Weiler, ‘Crown-Giving and King-Making’, 85–6. 86 Teófilo F. Ruiz, ‘The Symbolic Meaning of Sword and Palio in Late Medieval and Early

Modern Ritual Entries’, Memoria y Civilización 12 (2009): 13–48, here 15–16.

28 Introduction

Thus, based on this long-term approach, I analyse the (historical)

action-field context in which the ritual enacted is simply a phase, and

the (anthropological) cultural context in which symbols become

clusters of abstract meanings. I also include a third approach, the

historical-genealogical perspective, which blends both the event and

interpretations of the whole system. I do not merely describe and

interpret each coronation, but also read its place within the entire

cultural system of ‘self-coronation’– in the end, not a cultural event

but a conceptual construction. Combining these three approaches (the

action-field, the cultural context and the interpretation of the cultural

system) allows me to clarify the meaning of the particular symbols that

emerge from this complex ritual. They are full of cultural rather than

material implications: what distinguishes self-coronations from other

rituals is that their performance is not concerned, like most traditional

rituals, with natural phenomena, technological processes, human life

crises or the breach of crucial social relationships, but with the emergence, legitimation and representation of the complex reality of power.

In addition, this comparative approach helps gather the three basic

coordinates in which all rituals are encompassed: the spatial (the

physical and architectonic context, usually sacral such as the cathedral,

but also civil, such as the royal palace), the temporal (the development

of the ritual following the rhythm of the liturgy) and the visual (the

iconographic representations and the artistic programme conveyed in

the ceremony itself).

The third key concept I use in my reading of self-coronation is an

emphasis on agency. Self-coronations are dense crossroads of semiotically charged royal ceremonies that require both an anthropological and

a historical approach. They arise from a tradition that obeys the symbolic logic of European kingship, anchored on the solid foundation of

the culture of a given society, but at the same time they are highly

purposive and manipulative, an opportunity to activate their actors’

agency. This fits well with the formula proposed by Lisa Wedeen and

Christopher Clark, who see the rituals as ‘processes of meaning-making’

in which ‘the intentions and strategies of actors interact with language,

ritual and other symbolic systems’.

87 As Gabrielle Spiegel argues, we are

experiencing a partial restoration of the concept of agency, after the

double determinism of social (Marxist) and subsequently cultural studies constructionism, via methodologies associated with the linguistic

turn, postmodernism and post-structuralism:

87 Wedeen, ‘Conceptualizing Culture’, 713 and 716, and Clark, ‘When Culture Meets

Power’, 16.

Introduction 29

Rather than being governed by impersonal semiotic codes, historical actors are

now seen as engaged in inflecting the semiotic constituents (signs) that shape their

understanding of reality so as to craft an experience of that world in terms of

a situational sociology of meaning, or what might be called a social semantics.

This shift in focus from semiotics to semantics, from given semiotic structures to

the individual and social construal of signs – in short, from culture as discourse to

culture as practice and performance – entails a recuperation of the historical actor

as a rational and intentional agent.88

As Goethe wrote recalling the investiture of Joseph II at Frankfort:

A politico-religious ceremony possesses an infinite charm. We behold earthly

majesty before our eyes, surrounded by all the symbols of its power; but while it

bends before that of heaven, it brings to our minds the communion of both. For

even the individual can only prove his relationship with the Deity by subjecting

himself and adoring.89

Thus, part of the interest and, as Goethe would say, the charm of selfcoronation is that it responds to the action of individual agency rather

than to social structures. In the end, the interest for ritual studies among

medievalist since the 1990s, in which they have applied the theories and

practices that emanated from symbolic anthropology during the 1970s

and 1980s, is the result of an attempt ‘to move away from structure and to

find new ways of talking about individuals’ agency’.

90 Historians and

anthropologists have argued, in one way or another, that ‘in the institutions of a given society changes are slow and subtle; transformations are

mostly the result of an adaptation to exigencies of the moment, rather

than of conscious innovations.’

91 Yet some rituals show that sometimes

new traditions – or, at least, variations of traditions – are shaped by

conscious innovations by individuals.

My own interest in issues associated with the concept of agency has

materialised in my projects on authorship in the Middle Ages and

modern historians’ autobiographies.92 Now, I see in the practice of

self-coronation not only a palpable manifestation of human agency

88 Gabrielle M. Spiegel, ‘Reflections on the New Philology’, in Rethinking the New

Medievalism, ed. R. Howard Bloch, Alison Calhoun, Jacqueline Cerquiglini-Toulet,

Joachim Küpper and Jeanette Patterson (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University

Press, 2014): 39–50, here 48–9. See also Amanda Anderson, The Way We Argue Now:

A Study in the Cultures of Theory (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2006). 89 Johann W. Goethe, The Autobiography of Goethe, trans. John Oxenford. 2 vols. (London:

Bell, 1864), 1:168. 90 Pössel, ‘The Magic of Early Medieval Ritual’, 125. 91 Marion F. Facinger, ‘A Study on Medieval Queenship: Capetian France, 987–1237’,

Studies in Medieval and Renaissance History 5 (1968): 3–47, here 31. 92 Jaume Aurell, Theoretical Perspectives on Historians’ Autobiographies (London: Routledge,

2016) and Aurell, Authoring the Past.