The demons loosed in 1559–1561 transformed the French monarchy and hastened the arrival of a new rhetoric of politics, soon to be built around “the State” [l’Estat]. Practical political crises, such as the capture of John II, had often accelerated rapid changes in practice, theory, and justification, and I would argue did so precisely in that order. John’s capture led to the most fundamental change in the history of the French monarchy – permanent taxation – and, under his son Charles V, to a new monarchical discourse seeking to legitimize it. Permanent taxation required both a theoretical foundation and a public justification: that Charles V’s subjects rankled at this innovation is obvious from the events of 1380–1382. Charles V’s new discourse emphasized the “chose publique” of the kingdom of France; the “bien de la chose publique” lasted for nearly two centuries as the monarchy’s key justificatory phrase. After rampant rhetorical confusion between the 1560s and the 1590s, the neologism “bien de l’Estat” permanently took its place, as French (and other) monarchs sought to convince their subjects that the State was the new form of the res publica.

Charles V’s early death endangered the monarchical system he created, because his adolescent son faced massive urban rebellions, focused on the unpopular indirect taxes Charles V had created. Not long after the monarchy surmounted that challenge, Charles VI’s descent into madness led to a civil war between the Orléans and Burgundy branches of the family. The civil war necessitated a renewed series of theoretical justifications for monarchical power. The concurrent debates about papal v. conciliar supremacy had particular resonance in France because of Jean Gerson’s key role both in French political life and in the debates within the Church.Writers such as Jean de Terrevermeille, who transformed the “Salic Law” from a rarely cited myth into a largely accepted “fundamental law,” and Christine de Pizan, who created an explicitly French metaphor of the body politic, would have a determining influence on the next two centuries of French political discourse. The political prominence of multiple women placed gender at the center of French politics in this period, a pattern that repeated in the transition to the new vocabulary of State, after 1560.

This chapter discusses queens regnant and empresses regnant, women ruling in their own right. It is based on a provisional list of 27 cases. The earliest (in the frame of this book) are in Byzantium, Irene (797-802) and the sisters Zoe and Theodora in the eleventh century. The title of the latter is clearly seen as hereditary right, even though it seems that only slight efforts were made to ensure biological continuity of the dynasty. In contrast, the earliest western European case of a queen regnant, Urraca of Leon-Castile, shows how persistently her father sought to obtain a male heir, although he was willing to see her as his successor when he was left without one. The cluster of twelfth-century cases, Urraca, Melisende of Jerusalem and (ultimately unsuccessfully) Matilda. of England are analysed, and the issue of misogyny in the sources discussed. Female sovereigns are much more common in the Mediterranean and Iberian realms than further north. Though they are rarer in the thirteenth century than in the twelfth, fourteenth or fifteenth, this seems to have been purely circumstantial. The one explicit attempt to exclude women from succession, in late medieval France, is the result of one specific political crisis.