Skip to main content Accessibility help
×
Hostname: page-component-78c5997874-m6dg7 Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-09T07:41:42.950Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

4 - Rebels and Rituals: From Demonstrations of Enmity to Criminal Justice

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 January 2013

Gerd Althoff
Affiliation:
Westfälische Wilhelms-Universität Münster, Germany
Johannes Fried
Affiliation:
Johann Wolfgang Goethe-Universität Frankfurt
Patrick J. Geary
Affiliation:
University of Notre Dame, Indiana
Get access

Summary

Medieval kings faced many problems. The most persistent ones were the relations with the people they somewhat euphemistically called their “faithful ones” - fideles - the great princes or barons on whose consent the kings' capacity to act depended. The greater part of medieval historical writing deals with the feuds of these great men with each other, lesser nobles, or their kings. We, and in fact royal-minded contemporaries, call the last rebellions. The term rebellion carries the notion that feuding with the king was something quite different from regular noble warfare, that it was, indeed, illegitimate, a notion that the kings and their ecclesiastical propaganda staffs tried to drive home in many ways. Because they were the ones who put their ideas into writing, it is predominantly their views we read. The nobles who made war on their kings thought quite differently about it and claimed - justly or unjustly - that they were defending their rights against a king turned tyrant. How did the kings deal with these formidable rebels? They tried to fight them, to be sure, but it is generally believed that the kings also tried to make use of their supreme judicial authority and make the nobles account for their deeds in the royal law courts.

Heinrich Mitteis analyzed a number of notorious trials of mighty nobles dating from the tenth to the twelfth centuries and argued that procedurally they all ended in verdicts for contumacia, that is, verdicts for not having appeared in court. Mitteis assumed that all these noble defendants preferred not to stand trial, either because in headstrong defiance they refused to accept the king’s justice or because they knew their defense to be hopeless, thus admitting their guilt.

Type
Chapter
Information
Medieval Concepts of the Past
Ritual, Memory, Historiography
, pp. 89 - 110
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2002

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Save book to Kindle

To save this book to your Kindle, first ensure [email protected] is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about saving to your Kindle.

Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.

Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.

Available formats
×

Save book to Dropbox

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Dropbox.

Available formats
×

Save book to Google Drive

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.

Available formats
×