Where Did the European Monarchy Come from?

That the contest for supremacy between the two universalistic powers, the papacy and the empire, in the end weakened both and thereby strengthened the monarchies has often been noted in modern historiography.

But that the monarchies existed in the first place has not been properly explained. Seen from the perspective of nineteenth-century nationalism, a kingdom existed because the nation that it contained existed. The sovereign kingdom has therefore most often been seen as a natural and primordial political unit, as a consequence of the nation itself. The problem with projecting this assumption back to the early Middle Ages seems to be that there were plenty of ambitious chiefs or kings operating at different geographic levels, some of which developed into high medieval kingdoms and others not. The territorial control exercised by these men was not overwhelming. In most local areas, magnates or peasant communities would possess more power. There was not necessarily a fundamental difference between the magnate who acknowledged and obeyed the king from time to time, when he could not avoid it, and the king who acknowledged and obeyed an emperor from time to time, when he could not avoid it. The king was simply the most powerful person at a certain geographical level. Under such circumstances, the king was not a territorial sovereign, but a situational and contextual commander of men. The transformation to a territorial kingship entailing a homogenous territorial dominion was a development that had much to do with legal developments in the central Middle Ages but little with preexisting ethnicities. Modern historical maps misrepresent early medieval reality when they depict early medieval political units with uniform colors and sharp borders with other units. A potential, but not practical alternative would be to paint the map in watercolor with decreasing intensity from the center outward.

Beginning with the civil law renaissance in the twelfth century, kingship became increasingly identified with jurisdiction, with a certain law code operating in a certain territory of which the king was the guarantee of justice. This led to promulgation of large written codes of positive law in Sicily (1231), Denmark (1241), Aragon (1247), Castile (1265), and Norway (12 74).^[1614] Not all kingdoms codified their secular laws in the thirteenth century. England followed a slightly different path of legal development, and France and Germany had a much more fragmented jurisdiction, but the general principle everywhere identified political dominion with jurisdiction—with a certain body of law valid in a certain territory with a certain prince as the guarantor of justice. The king was never seen as an arbitrary source of law, but as the guardian of justice, and provisioned with an institutional apparatus that made protection possible (typically with institutionalized high courts). Now, the historical maps of the modern historical atlas make more sense because the law was equally valid in all localities of the dominion. If special rules applied to certain provinces, this was made equally explicit, and provincial assemblies, etc., would possess charters documenting the special privileges. Even accounting for specific privileges granted to specific areas, the extension of dominion was made much clearer. The area, either locality, province, or kingdom, had attained specific jurisdiction. A map truly representative of this situation would still have to be more complicated than most modern historical atlases, because each kingdom would typically have different colors applied to different provinces, but at least the coloring of each patch would be of uniform intensity. Legal developments therefore contributed to the containment of the empire, as the various kingdoms on the periphery obtained their own well-defined law codes and jurisdictional institutions that were not subject to the jurisdictional institutions of the emperor.

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Source: Bang Peter F., Bayly C.A., Scheidel Walter (eds.). The Oxford World History of Empire. Volume Two: The History of Empires. Oxford University Press,2020. — 1352 p.. 2020

Where Did the European Monarchy Come from?

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