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2 results

  • 10 - Peter IV of Aragon’s Self-Coronation

  • from Part III - Convention
  • Jaume Aurell, Universidad de Navarra, Spain
  • Book:
    Medieval Self-Coronations
    Published online:
    20 May 2020
    Print publication:
    11 June 2020, pp 242-273

  • Summary

    The tenth chapter explores the practice of self-coronation in the kingdom of Aragon. It centres on Peter the Ceremonious’ self-coronation in Zaragoza (1336), where the king implemented a conscious triple strategy to ensure that his ceremony, performed previously by his father, King Alfonso IV the Benign (1328), would not remain an isolated gesture but would become tradition. First, he constructed an autobiographical historical account that would serve as the primary version of the event. Second, he fixed the rites of self-coronation by writing a new ceremonial. Third, he propagated an iconographic tradition through images of himself in miniatures, seals and coins – and, above all, of his gesture of self-coronation. Historiography, liturgy and iconography are brought into play by the king so as to perpetuate the memory of his self-coronation and thus ensure, through repetition, its transformation from an isolated event into a consolidated practice and part of inherited tradition. The chapter finishes with an analysis of the successive self-coronations performed by Peter’s successors.

Medieval Self-Coronations
  • The History and Symbolism of a Ritual
  • Jaume Aurell
  • Published online:
    20 May 2020
    Print publication:
    11 June 2020
  • Based on narrative, iconographical, and liturgical sources, this is the first systematic study to trace the story of the ritual of royal self-coronations from Ancient Persia to the present. Exposing as myth the idea that Napoleon's act of self-coronation in 1804 was the first extraordinary event to break the secular tradition of kings being crowned by bishops, Jaume Aurell vividly demonstrates that self-coronations were not as transgressive or unconventional as has been imagined. Drawing on numerous examples of royal self-coronations, with a particular focus on European Kings of the Middle Ages, including Frederic II of Germany (1229), Alphonse XI of Castile (1328), Peter IV of Aragon (1332) and Charles III of Navarra (1390), Aurell draws on history, anthropology, ritual studies, liturgy and art history to explore royal self-coronations as privileged sites at which the frontiers and limits between the temporal and spiritual, politics and religion, tradition and innovation are encountered.