The iconic image of the knight on horseback represents just one facet of the horse’s imprint on legal, political, and social systems developing in medieval Iberian society. This chapter argues that historical and bodily relations with horses shaped the negotiation of social status and the administration of territory during the dynamic periods of peace, conflict, and negotiation among Iberian kingdoms in the tenth to fifteenth centuries. Defining the set of practices, ideals, and institutional hierarchies making up an Iberian "culture of the horse” brings to light a fundamental tension in which the horse served as both an agent of control and a means to disrupt power relations.

This chapter analyses the five steps in the itinerary of the royal accession of the kings of Navarra from the eleventh century to the fourteenth: the effects of the restoration of the kingdom of Navarra in 1134 with the investiture of García Ramírez, against the will of the Pope; Theobald I of Champagne’s oath, which took place some years after his accession to the throne in 1234; the reintroduction of the anointment with Theobald II in 1257; Joanna II and Philip III of Navarra’s oath and anointment in 1329; and Charles III’s self-coronation in 1390. The evolution of the Navarrese royal accession ceremonies emphasises two specific characteristics of Navarrese politics: resistance to ecclesiastical mediation and consensualism. Charles III’s majestic self-coronation should not be regarded thus as an isolated or exceptional ritual since it responds to the tradition of the other Iberian kingdoms in which the ceremony of self-coronation had been enacted, reflects the particular idiosyncrasy of the kingdom of Navarra and reacts to a particular need generated in a given context, reinforcing once more the idea of the malleability of the rituals and the power of the king’s agency.