![]() ![]() The Golden Era of Liberalism and the Apogee of the Nation-State.The Crisis of the Nation-State in the Era of European Integration.From the Conservative King to the Reformist Monarch: The Stage of Enlightened Absolutism (Eighteenth Century).From Territorial Power to Spiritual Rule: Christianity’s Political Dimension. ![]() ![]() Emperors: The Rise and Fall of Papal Power From Kings to Monarchs: The Resurgence of Public Power in Late Medieval Europe.The Apogee of Royal Power: Absolute Monarchy (The Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries).In the Iberian Peninsula, meanwhile, to shore up their power, the kings relied upon papal authorization, as was clearly the case in Aragón and Portugal. His interpretation includes many elements of successive conceptions of kingship, based on what Ullmann ( 2010, 71) calls the “rebirth of the ruler”. By virtue of unction, Gregory believed that the king held, thus, a ministerial office, and was called upon to serve in accord with his “divine inheritance”. 18 In this regard, it is important to mention that another important contribution made by Pope Gregory I, was his interpretation of royal unction, included in the Old Testament, which he viewed as a Divine sanctioning of the king’s legitimacy. According to the accord reached with Pepin the Short in 752, only kings were to be anointed by the Church. Thus, in France, for example, the Church refused to consecrate or crown the great lords. In the first place, the bishops did their best to maintain the kings’ supremacy over the feudal lords, at least in terms of formal recognition. As counties became hereditary and were partitioned the counts’ rights as legitimate heirs of the Frankish officials disintegrated, with the upshot that the idea of public office gave way to new conceptions and realities of power informed by feudal concepts (Bloch 2005, 124). 17 Soon lords found themselves being defied by their own castellans, who tended to become themselves the heads of their own dynasties. Kings and princes were powerless to maintain control over castles they had built themselves, so they handed them over as fiefs to their vassals, at times even to prevent the raising of new fortresses, which became administrative capitals for surrounding districts and the centers of a whole network of facilities. By the tenth century, they were practically independent, but their own authority, in turn, was being eroded by viscounts, castellans, and other leaders of smaller communities. ![]() Royal officials tended to become leaders of autonomous local communities rather than agents of central authority. Strayer ( 1971, 14) has indicated, that during the feudal era, interests and loyalties were primarily local, limited to the family, the neighborhood and the county. In some cases, their judicial decisions were eventually recorded and collected to serve as an example and precedent in the event of future conflicts, leading to the appearance of texts making up “feudal law”. Kings generally, did not enjoy a preeminent position in these tribunals which, as a result of the contractual nature of feudal pacts, were composed of the most important feudal lords, who considered themselves on a level with the king ( Cour des pairs). Vassal relationships were part of this ancient order, and this is why time-honored practices defined the legal features of feudal pacts, through the verdicts of feudal courts ruling on conflicts arising between lords and vassals (Ganshof 1996, 158–159). Crowned by bishops, Christian monarchs were primarily considered “righteous kings” ( roi justicier), whose main mission was to defend the immemorial order created by God-an order at the time defined by tradition and custom. This important transformation led to a specific form of social organization that historians have called feudalism, 2 which, from the perspective of constitutional history, Strayer ( 2005, 63) has described as a type of government in which political power was considered to be a private prerogative and asset wielded by a whole series of local lords.Īs the notion of public power had dissolved, the feudal system was not initially set down in laws, for the king lacked the authority and political power to establish legal precepts. The Germanic kings, thus, struggled to be considered superiors in the way the Roman emperor had been because they had to grapple with the nobles of their kingdoms, to whom they often entrusted territorial government. One of the reasons why the Germanic kings wielded less power than the Roman emperors was because the old hierarchical relationship which singled out the emperor as the representative of public authority was replaced, in the case of the Germanic kingdoms, by a series of interpersonal, private accords between the king and his most important subjects: the heads of clans or lineages ( sippe), which could challenge the crown, as royal succession was based on election rather than hereditary principle. ![]()
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