Chapter 37 - Kim Bergqvist
Kings and Nobles on the Fringe of Christendom: A comparative perspective on Monarchy and Aristocracy in the European Middle Ages
This chapter on the relationship between kingship and nobility focuses on the kingdoms of Castile-León and Sweden during the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. Though the cases studied demonstrate structural similarities, they also display the cohesion among European nobilities in general in the period, when formation as a social and political class was still in process. The need for magnates to seek new means to exert influence beyond the local sphere was a preoccupation felt in many European realms. The recurrent periods of royal minority in Sweden and Castile were times when the nobility had the opportunity to implement their own political agendas, and rebellions broke out at times when the reasonable limits of monarchical authority were perceived to have been overstepped. While often seen as disruptive, rebellious movements and aristocratic revolts in medieval Europe sometimes contributed to stressing the importance of representation and in some contexts to the shaping of the idea of a community of the realm. In the end, the distance between these two cases and the distinctive character of the respective historiographies allows for the discovery of previously unfamiliar parallels between them.
By Kim Bergqvist
Kim Bergqvist
Kim Bergqvist (b. 1986) is a PhD candidate in the Department of History at Stockholm University. He currently teaches at DIS Stockholm. His research is centred on political, cultural, and comparative history, medieval history writing, and the history of gender and emotions, with a particular focus on the high and late Middle Ages in Scandinavia and the Iberian Peninsula. His work has appeared in The Medieval Chronicle.
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Related Chapters
Manuela Santos Silva: Regal Power and the Royal Family in a Thirteenth-Century Iberian Legislative Programme (See Chapter 5)
Emily Ward: Child kings and guardianship in North-Western Europe c.1050-c.1250 (See Chapter 32)
Cathleen Sarti: Deposition of Monarchs in Northern Kingdoms (See Chapter 34)
Joanne Paul with Valerie Schutte: The Tudor Monarchy of Counsel and the Growth of Reason of State (See Chapter 39)