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HOW MEDIEVAL EUROPE WAS RULED
The vast majority of studies on rulership in medieval Europe focus on one kingdom; one type of rule; or one type of ruler. This volume attempts to break that mold and demonstrate the breadth of medieval Europe and the various kinds of rulership within it. How Medieval Europe was Ruled aims to demonstrate the multiplicity of types of rulers and polities that existed in medieval Europe. The contributors discuss not just kings or queens, but countesses, dukes, and town leadership. We see that rulers worked collaboratively with one another both across political boundaries and within their own borders in ways that are not evident in most current studies of kingship, inhibited by too narrow a focus.
The volume also covers the breadth of medieval Europe from Scandinavia in the north to the Italian peninsula in the south, Iberia and the Anglo-Normans in the west to Rus, Byzantium and the Khazars in the east. This book is geared towards a wide audience and thus provides a broad base of understanding via a clear explanation of concepts of rule in each of the areas that is covered. The book can be utilized in the classroom, to enhance the presentation of a medieval Europe survey or to discuss rulership more specifically for a region or all of Europe. Beyond the classroom, the book is accessible to all scholars who are interested in continuing to learn and expand their horizons. Christian Raffensperger is the Kenneth E. Wray Chair in the Humanities at Wittenberg University. The focus of his scholarly work has been on connecting eastern Europe with the rest of medieval Europe. This began with his first book, Reimagining Europe: Kievan Rus’ in the Medieval World (2012) and has continued through numerous other books and articles.
CONTRIBUTORS
Simon R. Doubleday is Professor of History at Hofstra University (New York). His books include The Lara Family: Crown and Nobility in Medieval Spain (2001) and The Wise King: A Christian Prince, Muslim Spain, and the Birth of the Renaissance (2015); he is also completing a book on León and Galicia in the reign of Sancha and Fernando I (forthcoming, 2024). He has co-edited In the Light of Medieval Spain: Islam, the West, and the Relevance of the Past (2008); Border Interrogations: Questioning Spanish Frontiers (2008); Why the Middle Ages Matter: Medieval Light on Modern Injustice (2011); and Galicia no tempo de Afonso X [Galicia in the age of Alfonso X] (2021). He was Founding Editor of the Journal of Medieval Iberian Studies and has also served as President of the American Academy of Research Historians of Medieval Spain. He has received several grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities, and a John Simon Guggenheim fellowship.
Alex M. Feldman completed his PhD at the University of Birmingham in 2018. As a postdoctoral fellow at the Warburg Institute, University of London, he published his PhD thesis as a book, entitled The Monotheisation of Pontic-Caspian Eurasia, 8–13th Centuries, which focuses on the process of the adoptions of various forms of monotheisms, involving historical ethnicity, theology, periodization and civilizational analysis between Central Europe, Byzantium, Rus’ and deeper into Eurasia. His next book on the evolution of Orthodox political economy from Byzantium to the Russian Empire is entitled Orthodox Mercantilism: Political Economy in the Byzantine Commonwealth. He is the chair of the Languages and Literature department at CIS Endicott International University of Madrid. Emir O. Filipović is Associate Professor of Medieval History and head of the Doctoral Studies Programme in History at the University of Sarajevo. He has obtained his PhD in 2014 and has authored, edited and co-edited several books pertaining to various topics from the history of Bosnia in the Middle Ages. His most recent monographs deal with relations between the Bosnian Kingdom and the Ottoman Empire (1386-1463), as well as with the construction of dynastic identity in medieval Bosnia. Lois L. Huneycutt is Associate Professor of History at the University of Missouri, Columbia. A specialist in northwestern Europe in the central medieval period, she is the author of Matilda of Scotland: A Study in Medieval Queenship, numerous articles on twelfth-century queens and queenship, and is currently writing a joint biographical study of Matilda of Boulogne, and the “Empress” Matilda, Countess of Anjou. She received her PhD from the University of California, Santa Barbara under the joint direction of C. Warren Hollister and Jeffrey Burton Russell. Erin L. Jordan is a member of the faculty in the department of history at Colorado State University. Her research investigates the intersection of power, religion and gender in the eleventh and twelfth centuries. She has published widely on the experience of monastic women. Her book, Women, Power and Religious Patronage (Palgrave, 2006) examined the political actions of the countesses of Flanders. Her current research focuses on the political culture of the Latin East, particularly in regard to the role played by women in the governance of the Crusader States. Work on this topic includes several published essays as well as her current book project, The Women of Antioch: Gender, Power and Political Culture in the Latin East. Paul W. Knol1 is Professor of History, Emeritus, at the University of Southern California (PhD, University of Colorado, 1964). His major scholarly interests are the political and cultural history of Central and Eastern Europe, particularly Poland, Bohemia, and Hungary, with specialization in university history and conciliarism. Among his numerous publications are two prize-winning books, The Rise of the Polish Monarchy. Piast Poland in East Central Europe, 1320–1370 (1972) and “A Pearl of Powerful Learning.” The University of Cracow in the Fifteenth Century (2016). He also has translated into English, with Frank Schaer, the Gesta principum Polonorum, a medieval Polish chronicle traditionally known as “Gallus Anonymous,” published by Central European University Press in 2003.
Nathan Leidholm holds a PhD in Byzantine History from the University of Chicago. He is currently Assistant Professor in the Program in Cultures, Civilizations and Ideas at Bilkent University in Ankara, Turkey. He is the author of Elite Byzantine Kinship: Blood, Reputation, and the Genos (Arc Humanities Press, 2019), in addition to several articles and book chapters. Jonathan R. Lyon is Professor of History at the University of Chicago. His research and teaching focus on the political and social history of Germany, Austria, and the Holy Roman Empire in the medieval period, particularly the eleventh through thirteenth centuries. He has held fellowships from the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation, the Austrian Science Fund, the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD), the J. William Fulbright Program, and the Dolores Zohrab Liebmann Foundation. His first book, Princely Brothers and Sisters: The Sibling Bond in German Politics, 1100– 1250 (Cornell, 2013), won the 2017 John Nicholas Brown Prize for the best first book from the Medieval Academy of America. Hans Jacob Orning is Professor of Medieval History at the University of Oslo. He submitted his PhD in 2004, published as Unpredictability and Presence: Norwegian Kingship in the High Middle Ages (2008). He has also published The Reality of the Fantastic: The Magical, Geopolitical and Social Universe of Late Medieval Saga Manuscripts (2017) and Constant Crisis – The Civil Wars in Norway Deconstructed, c. 1196–1208 (forthcoming 2021). He is co-editor of Nordic Elites in Transformation I-III (2019–20). His main research area is Nordic political culture in the Middle Ages. Kiril Petkov is Professor of Medieval and Mediterranean History at the University of Wisconsin River Falls, USA. He holds PhDs in medieval Bulgarian and Balkan History (1994, Bulgarian Academy of Sciences) and in medieval and early modern Western European history (NYU, 2002). His research interest is in the inter-faith and intercultural history of the premodern Western world and the Eastern Mediterranean. He is the author and translator of numerous works including; The Maltese Dialogue: Guiseppe Cambiano, History, Institutions, and Politics of the Knights of Saint John of Jerusalem, 1554–1556, Coriolano Cippico, The Deeds of Commander Pietro Mocenigo in Three Books, The Voices of Medieval Bulgaria, Seventh-Fifteenth Century: The Records of a Bygone and was the editor of State and Church: Studies in Medieval Bulgaria and Byzantium. Christian Raffensperger is the Kenneth E. Wray Chair in the Humanities as well as professor and chair of History at Wittenberg University. He is the author of several books including Reimagining Europe: Kievan Rus’ and the Medieval World (2012), Conflict, Bargaining, and Kinship Networks in Medieval Eastern Europe (2018), and Rulers and Rulership in the Arc of Medieval Europe (2023). The larger goal of his work is to demonstrate the interconnectivity of medieval Europe and to break down the barrier between eastern and western Europe created and perpetuated in the historiography. Kirsi Salonen is Professor of Medieval History at the University of Bergen, Norway. She is a specialist in the medieval papal administration, especially the Apostolic Penitentiary and the Sacra Romana Rota, and has done research in the Vatican Archives for over 20 years. Her latest monograph on the topic is Papal Justice in the Late Middle Ages: The Sacra Romana Rota (Routledge: London & New York, 2016). Edward M. Schoolman is Associate Professor of History and the University of Nevada, Reno, where he focuses on the late antique and early medieval Mediterranean. He published a monograph, Rediscovering Sainthood in Italy: Hagiography and the Late Antique Past in Medieval Ravenna in 2016, and is working on a new book project on Greek identity; as part of an interdisciplinary team, his research extends into the interconnections between history and ecology in Italy.
Katalin Szende is Professor of Medieval Studies at Central European University. Her research concentrates on medieval cities and towns in the Carpathian Basin and Central Europe: their society, demography, literacy, everyday life, and topography. She has published Trust, Authority and the Written Word in the Royal Towns of Medieval Hungary (Utrecht Studies in Medieval Literacy 41, Brepols, 2018), is co-editor and contributor of the volumes Medieval Buda in Context (Brill, 2016) and Medieval East Central Europe in a Comparative Perspective (Routledge, 2016, with Gerhard Jaritz). She is a board member of the International Commission for the History of Towns and president of the Medieval Central Europe Research Network (MECERN).
REIMAGINING MEDIEVAL RULERSHIP IN THE TWENTYFIRST CENTURY
Christian Raffensperger
More than half a century ago, Ernst Kantorowicz published The King’s Two Bodies, a book that was incredibly positively reviewed and helped to shape our understanding of kingship in medieval Europe as situated around ritual and belief.1 The book spawned a reaction among revisionist scholarship in more recent times, most well known among them perhaps The King’s Other Body by Theresa Earenfight; an attempt to add the queen into the discourse of monarchy with the formulation of “collective monarchy,” explicitly challenging Kantorowicz’s definition of rulership as implicitly about kingship.2 This dichotomy of discourse and revision could be repeated in regard to the historiographies of rulership across medieval Europe; taking France as just one example, we see the scholarship of Georges Duby which largely excludes women from discussions of elite rulership challenged successfully by numerous authors such as Amy Livingstone.3 Both of these examples are about the inclusion of women – an essential element in discussing rulership in medieval Europe. However, there are other shifts afoot as well. Geographically speaking the majority of territory discussed in older studies of rulership was focused on England and France, and their progression toward centralization in the late medieval period. This was noted as recently as 2000 when Joseph Huffman critiqued this model: The Anglo-American historiographical tradition was built around Whig notions of state building and modernization. The common purpose of both Anglo-American and French historiography was to show how the rise of impersonal institutions shaped the state.
Of course, such a historical paradigm naturally produced the conclusion in Anglo-French historiography that medieval Germany was simply backward in comparison to western Europe.4 Huffman’s purpose, as is clear, is to attempt to include the German Empire in the conception of medieval Europe and medieval governance that had been clearly defined in opposition to models created to fit England and France. Iberia, as advocated for by Earenfight and others including Lucy Pick, Therese Martin, and Miriam Shadis has a yet different model for developing rulership and one also not easily mapped onto a modern nationstate.5 Such attempts to remake our understanding of medieval rulership in circumscribed areas are essential building blocks for understanding medieval rulership more broadly. But one must also look at the whole tapestry of rulership to attempt to understand what is going on in the broader world, medieval Europe, or in the Christian world at the very least. Works that broad are largely a lacuna in the scholarship. In fact, 2020 and 2021 saw three publications on rulership in medieval Europe with differing levels of success in this regard. Political Culture in the Latin West, Byzantium and the Islamic World created a tripartite division of states and rulers.6 The goal of the tripartite division is to cover a broader area, but the editors’ perspective that the three regions would be dealt with separately hamstrung any ideas of a larger world that could be elicited by the contributors, leaving it to the mind of the reader. More successful was Björn Weiler’s Paths to Kingship in Medieval Latin Europe. 7
Though Weiler creates a circumscribed area of Latin Europe, purposefully excluding Byzantium and any “Orthodox” area, he covers a wide range of territory with examples not just from England and France, but Iberia, Scandinavia, Poland, Hungary, and elsewhere. Of course, the title also gives away another narrowing factor of the work which is its sole focus on kings, as opposed to rulers, inclusive of queens. The final of the three recent books is Robert Bartlett’s Blood Royal which is a thematic overview of the possible life cycles of a medieval ruling family and includes male and female rulers (though unevenly dealt with) and all of medieval Europe, inclusive of Byzantium.8 But with a focus on life cycles and episodic across a wide time range, it does not deal with rulership in much depth in any one particular place – this is not its purpose. All of these books then demonstrate the interest and appetite that scholars have for engaging and reengaging with ideas of rulership in the twenty-first century. What they do not do, largely, is engage with all of medieval Europe or with the idea that “ruler” means more than “king.” This volume aims to serve as a corrective to such developments, though within a particular scope. The essays in this volume all deal with rulership, but they are purposefully about different regions of medieval Europe, different types and levels of rulership, and with different foci to demonstrate that rulership was manifold in the Middle Ages.
There are, of course, still limitations and one of the main ones of this volume is that almost all of the contributions focus upon Christian Europe. While Alex M. Feldman’s piece on the Khazars stands out for its inclusion of Jews, Muslims, and pagans, the rest of the contributions are within the bounds of Christianized polities. This is in no way meant to privilege those regions, though they represent the majority of the physical territory of medieval Europe in the period under discussion. While one may choose to dip in and out of this book, selecting a chapter or region to read up on to improve one’s knowledge, use for graduate readings, etc., there are, both purposeful and otherwise, thematic similarities that run throughout the whole collection. I would like to take just a bit of time to elucidate a few of those themes to highlight the broader picture of medieval European rulership. The first theme which is apparent is a negotiation of political power between rulers and elites. Such an idea is growing in popularity in medieval studies, moving beyond the once common view of hierarchical power in England as normative and the German imperial example requiring its own “special way.” Thomas Bisson’s Crisis of the Twelfth Century centralized many of his ideas about lordship and government. One of the main takeaways from that work, important for our purposes here is that “Royal order was seldom centralized order.”9 And further, Bisson adds that “Without ceasing to be a sphere of public order, the kingdom had become a fabric of lordships sharing patrimonial wealth.”10 Björn Weiler, too, has discussed the importance of elites to the good functioning of kings and kingdoms in his Paths to Kingship. For Weiler, elites were part of the governmental process, but also the succession process and helped to make both a success, or not, depending on the circumstances.11 In this volume, we see negotiated authority in numerous places, but I will single out four of the contributions which make it most apparent, those by Hans Jacob Orning, Jonathan Lyon, Katalin Szende, and Emir Filipović. Orning’s “Governance of High Medieval Norway” is focused precisely on the issue of negotiated power over the course of three moments in Norwegian history. The king may be king over a wide territory, and the breadth of Norwegian geography is stressed by Orning, but to actually make things happen in localities he needs the help and consent of the local community. Over the period examined by Orning (1100–1300), we see this local community shift from a local lord or elite who could choose to support the king and his efforts, or not; to an actual community organization inclusive of individuals who might not even be named in the sources – the importance comes from the organization rather than the people themselves. Orning’s choice of case studies to illustrate his point emphasizes the lack of centralized control noted by Bisson and Weiler to get at the negotiated reality of medieval political, even royal, power. Lyon’s contribution telegraphs by its title (“The Princes and the King in Medieval Germany”) that it will be about not just royal authority, but the ways that multiple levels of power interacted to generate rule in the medieval German empire. As noted earlier, studies of medieval Germany have often dealt with its Sonderweg and one can look at the work of Benjamin Arnold or Joseph Huffman to find other examples of this kind of conversation.12 Lyon creatively engages this narrative by focusing on multiple power centers including the Babenbergs and early Habsburgs in Austria and the rise of the Wittelsbach dynasty in Bavaria, as well as the importance of ecclesiastical power to those, and other families, in his discussion of the ways that important aristocratic families shaped not only their own regions, but the empire as a whole. Their means to do this came through local power, yes, but also through the tradition of elective monarchy in the medieval German Empire which allowed them, as highlighted by Weiler, to shape the future of their kingdom as a whole. The contribution by Szende focuses not on royal or even elite power but on towns. Of course, those towns were situated within a kingdom, Hungary in her example, but they also existed in a wider spectrum of trade and travel, law and commerce as citizens moved and migrated throughout medieval central Europe. Szende notes that, initially at least, town creation was the preserve of the king, creating an immediate interaction between the authority of the ruler and the existence of the town. However, over time, towns became increasingly independent and were able to utilize their increasing economic prominence to create avenues of self-governance for themselves, within the hierarchy of the kingdom.
This self-government, though, was real and powerful and allowed the towns to enforce laws, trade, and manage documents with their own seals; all prerogatives which were once only allowed to royal authority. Thus, as Szende notes, these towns had, “spatial and legal structures like those of other European polities.”13 Emir Filipović brings the medieval polity of Bosnia into our look at medieval rulership; an example of the breadth of medieval Europe that is being examined in this volume. Bosnia, as discussed by Filipović, is much akin to Orning’s Norway wherein the king, or ban before there was a king, negotiated with the elites to maintain power. Yet, in Bosnia much of the power of the center was devolved to the elites over the course of the thirteenth to fifteenth centuries. In place of direct control, the king created for himself a sense of dynastic unity among the Kotromanići, who were the only family allowed to become kings, along with a sense of loyalty to the crown and the kingdom which enmeshed the nobility in its own preservation alongside their won. For Filipović then, “the nobility functioned as a cohesive force thus retaining their unity with the ruler, stubbornly defending the borders and territorial integrity of the Bosnian Kingdom from any external pressure.”14 Thus creating a Bosnian kingdom. Close kin to negotiated authority is shared authority, the second theme seen in this collection. In her now classic The King’s Other Body, Theresa Earenfight argued for the creation of the idea of collective monarchy encompassing not just the male ruler as monarch, but his wife also as monarch.15 Such ideas have been expanded, especially in Iberia, to focus on other members of the royal family who assist in the ruling of the polity as a whole, for instance in the work of Lucy Pick who argues for the utilization of ideas of networks of power in which women participated.16 Corporate rule, by a leading family, has also been put forward as a subject of consideration whether in regard to central or eastern Europe or elsewhere.17 In this volume, the idea of shared authority can be seen in several pieces, including those by Erin Jordan (who herself has written on corporate monarchy),18 Lois Huneycutt, and Simon Doubleday. Each of those authors expands on this idea in a particular way to demonstrate a diversity of means of ruling in medieval Europe. Jordan’s piece builds on similar themes to those developed by Orning regarding the interactions between rulers and their elites in collective decision making, though for Jordan this process is one that involves the corporate monarchy of both king and queen; or often just the queen herself. Jordan suggests that the negotiated rule which she suggests for the kingdom of Jerusalem was a component of attempting to deal with the “challenges encountered, most of which stemmed from the precariousness of their position and the volatility of the region.”19 To develop this argument, Jordan focuses on particular elements such as marriage and succession through which she analyzes events from the kingdom in the twelfth century. Her view of rulership in Jerusalem resonates well with the image elsewhere in this volume such as those from Orning, Huneycutt, and Lyon – once again demonstrating the broader types and styles of rulership throughout a broader medieval European world. Lois Huneycutt’s focus is on administrative queenship in the AngloNorman realm which highlights the ways in which queens worked on behalf of their realm and held official standing in a variety of circumstances. The queens focused on by Huneycutt held court and made decisions, planned campaigns, and ruled, all while managing their other duties. One crucially important point from this contribution is that the medieval authors found it much less surprising that these queens exercised administrative power than scholars have in the recent past, or even today. To further that observation, Huneycutt also deals with a brief history of the fields of Anglo-Norman and queenship studies to help us understand where some of the preconceptions have come from, and how they have been challenged by more recent scholarship; as well as highlighting the work that still needs to be done in incorporating administrative queenship into a normative view of medieval Europe. Simon Doubleday deploys a unique style in his chapter, focusing on the will and testament of a scribe and priest named Ecta. Ecta lived in the early eleventh century and worked under King Vermudo III of León, receiving his ultimately fatal wound at the same battle which killed his king. Ecta’s story, as outlined by Doubleday, includes the numerous layers of government that existed in medieval Iberia, particularly in the kingdom which he refers to as León-Galicia. Kings and queens participated in that governance and in the maintenance of land and authority. But so did bishops, abbots, and abbesses who all participated in the creation and enforcement of royal and other types of authority. Finally, Doubleday notes the nobles who also played a crucial role, even in defeat, being able to negotiate for their own power, and that of their kin. Doubleday’s piece is emblematic of the volume as a whole, making connections to so many of the themes noted in this introduction, and in the other chapters. The third theme is one of claims making and power. Seth Richardson helped to popularize the idea of claims making, for historians, in his work on Babylon where he argued that “The Crown’s claims to juridical power ought not to be taken at face value, especially with respect to the gaps between statute and practice.”20 For instance, in regard to Hammurabi’s famous law code, “virtually none of Hammurabi’s ‘laws’ found their way into the relevant contracts or legal processes where one might expect to find them.”21 This idea can be, and has been, used for medieval European polities as well. Alice Rio quite clearly states the conundrum as “kings behaved as if they controlled a big state; most people knew they lived under a small one.”22 In this volume, we see this in both Nathan Leidholm’s and Kirsi Salonen’s pieces, both of which use this idea of claims making implicitly. Leidholm’s focus is not on the imperial court, nor on the emperor, though those are the focus of nearly all work on Byzantine governance that makes its way to the larger public. The implicit claim here is that the Byzantine, or medieval Roman, government is all powerful and all knowing. Emperors set the tone for the empire and their reigns are markers of the empire’s prosperity or lack thereof. Instead of these typical models, Leidholm discusses the administrative apparatus that allows the imperial government in Constantinople to function. The governmental structure revealed relies almost entirely on a hierarchy of bureaucrats, often from elite families, who work for the good of their local, not necessarily imperial, government. The case studies he focuses on serve as an important corrective for the view of a Byzantine state which is still centered solely on the emperor and empire.23 Salonen, similarly, is dealing with an overarching polity that excels in grand claims making – the papacy. Though she does not explicitly engage with this terminology, Salonen leads with the very concept – “According to the autocratic idea of the Church, the popes possessed full powers (Lat. plenitudo potestatis) in all fields of ecclesiastical administration and justice, dogma, and theology.”24 Even the title of her piece and the concluding question mark serve to highlight the idea that the claims made by the papacy may not be entirely in line with the reality of practice. And yet, the papacy, as detailed by Salonen created an entire bureaucratic apparatus as if they did, in fact, control the entirety of Christendom. That apparatus was handled through four separate fora and Salonen notes case studies of material that was handled in each of them; instances which actuated the papal claims to dominance in Christian society. Finally, it is important to note the success of the claims making by the papacy, as Salonen does, with their persistence throughout time as well as the appropriation of papal bureaucracy by growing nation-states in the late Middle Ages. Two of the papers in this collection represent a different approach to looking at medieval rulership and that is a closer look at the sources themselves. Though all scholars utilize primary sources, and we have moved away from the Rankean idea of sources equal facts, approaching the topic solely through this source or that rather than constructing a model made from a concatenation of sources is still an interesting way of examining what the sources said, rather than what we think happened. In this volume, utilizing different methodologies, both Alex Feldman and myself engage in that technique. Feldman’s piece is an in-depth analysis of the vast array of sources, in Greek, Latin, Arabic, and Hebrew which tell us about the little-known polity of Khazaria. He organizes his subject around multiple themes (such as the conversion to Judaism), but he starts, and is constantly enmeshing the reader in the source base to see what the sources actually say about the topic at hand as a way of stripping away the accretion of assumption that a topic as fascinating as a medieval Jewish kingdom of steppe nomads has created. In so doing, Feldman presents an in-depth analysis of the source material to give the reader a breakdown of what we can, and cannot, know about the Khazars, their conversion, and their governmental structure. In so doing, he offers a unique take on the placement of the Khazars in a wider lens of medieval European rulership. My own piece, “Kyivan Rus: A Complicated Kingdom” puts the spotlight on three particular sources, the Povest’ vremennykh let, the Chronicle of Novgorod, and the Russkaia Pravda. The first two of those are annalistic and the third is a law code and, interestingly, all three portray rulership differently in regard to medieval Rus’. The first source, known as the PVL, portrays the elite power structure of the ruling Volodimerovichi family as if it is the only governance in the entire kingdom. The second is focused, understandably, on what is going on in Novgorod and deals in detail with offices and organizations, such as the veche, which rarely appear in the PVL. Finally, the law code goes to an even deeper level mentioning, often off-handedly, offices and individuals who never appear in either of the other sources. This kind of source-specific approach is a way to present the problems inherent when we focus on one kind of source, or even one level of rulership. The last category of contributions is based around an organizational methodology demonstrating the way rulers and rulership were structured over the changing time scale of the high Middle Ages. Each of these pieces focuses on what we can know about the subject, given the source base – as the source-focused contributions do – but has organized the material in such a way that the reader gets a sense of what kind of rulership was operational at different moments throughout the medieval history of the polity. Paul Knoll’s work on Poland and Kiril Petkov’s on Bulgaria exemplify this idea. Paul Knoll walks through the thin source material for medieval Poland, before beginning a chronological tour through the earliest Piast polity, its eleventh- and early twelfth-century progression, the internal shifts which happened after 1138 resulting in multiple polities all being ruled by members of the Piast family, and then the progress toward reunification of the kingdom in the fourteenth century. As one sees throughout the process, the members of the Piast family are the primary rulers, no matter if the polity is centralized or decentralized, and they work in conjunction with ecclesiastical leaders and with their neighbors to create stability in the region. Rulership in Poland, as described here, is very much afamily affair. Kirik Petkov’s “Rulership and Governance of Medieval Bulgaria” follows a similar path to Knoll’s contribution. He begins by raising the issue of source, specifically the lack thereof, for anything covering the early part of Bulgarian history internal to the polity dealing with rulership. Within that rubric though, which does change over time, Petkov deals with the waxing and waning of Bulgarian rulership structures, as well as other factors. In particular, he focuses on the relations that the Bulgarians had with their neighbors, whether those be steppe polities, the papacy, the Byzantine, or the Frankish/German Empire. Each of those presents both a threat and an opportunity to the Bulgarian rulers to appropriate new ideas and technologies, some intimately connected to ruling such as coinage.
The rulers also used those same neighbors as foils to react against in creating their own identity as a Bulgarian polity and then projecting that identity more broadly. Petkov’s Bulgarian kingdom is situated very clearly as one among many polities in its region, interacting with, and reacting to, its neighbors. Finally, it is worth highlighting the contribution of Edward Schoolman as distinct from any single one of these categories as he deals with most of them in his contribution on early medieval Italy. The first part of his article covers an organizational schema that is similar to what we have seen in our last theme, looking at how different cities and regions organized their power structures and changed over time, specifically via a lens of looking at the source record that has been preserved. But he also includes a case study that combined ecclesiastical, royal/imperial, and local power to highlight the negotiated power structures which were omnipresent not just in the Italian peninsula but, as we have seen, throughout medieval Europe.
Though the earliest chronological contribution, Schoolman’s piece acts as a nice cap on the totality of the practices demonstrated in this volume. All of these contributions are, of course, interrelated, and the themes delineated here could be rearranged to include other pieces or set in different ways. The purpose of such an organization is merely to highlight the connectedness of rule in medieval Europe, as the volume does as a whole; rather than focusing on modern nation states read back into the past, or a falsified version of “medieval Europe” that only covers the West. Each of these pieces presents a fascinating look at the way rulership looks in one particular area but taken together they further our understanding of how medieval Europe was ruled – as a whole and and not just in its parts.
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