On his book Blood Royal: Dynastic Politics in Medieval Europe
Cover Interview of November 18, 2020
In a nutshell
Most countries in medieval Europe were monarchies, ruled by
a royal or imperial family, a dynasty, so politics at the top level was shaped
by the births, marriages, and deaths of the members of that family, and by
competition and cooperation within the dynasty. This is no surprise to anyone
who knows a little bit about the history of the period and any account of a
medieval reign will discuss such things. However, I had never come across a
book that analyzed this fundamental feature of the medieval world in a
systematic and thematic way, although there are such studies for other periods,
notably Jeroen Duindam, Dynasties: A Global History of Power, 1300-1800 (Cambridge
University Press, 2016). A distinctive feature of the book is its wide scope,
since it covers the whole medieval period (500-1500) and deals with most of
Europe, namely Latin Christendom and the Byzantine empire. By the year 1100
Latin Christendom, that part of the world recognizing the authority of the
pope, covered western, northern, and central Europe (I exclude the East Slavs
because of my own linguistic limitations).
The dynasty was not only a biological unit but also a
political or ideological one. Family structures varied across time and place, most notably between systems such as that of the Merovingian kings of the
Franks (c. 500-751) or the Irish royal dynasties, where kings had many sexual partners and all the
children were eligible for rule, and the system that, with the backing of the Church, came to
predominate in most parts of Europe, where kings were expected to have one wife at a time, could
dissolve the marriage only in very specific circumstances and a sharper line was drawn between
legitimate and illegitimate children. Succession practices were very different in the two
systems and the former tended to produce high levels of competition and
violence within the dynasty but meant that dynasties rarely died out
biologically, the latter having less intra-dynastic violence but being more
vulnerable to biological extinction.
My book concentrates on the second, predominant system, and
does so in two ways, which give the book its two-part structure. In part one,
“The Life Cycle,” I investigate the whole process of family reproduction,
starting with “Choosing a Bride”, then pursuing such themes as “Waiting for
Sons to be Born” and “Waiting for Fathers to Die”, ending, naturally enough,
with “Royal Mortality”: life expectancy, the frequency of violent death, choice
of burial place and forms of commemoration. Part two is titled “A Sense of Dynasty”
and discusses ways that ruling families expressed their identity, through such
visual cues as heraldry, newly invented in the twelfth century, choice of
personal names, or the graphic family tree, and how they shored themselves up
in this unstable political world through the supposed guidance of astrology and
prophecy.
[T]he Holocaust transformed our whole way of thinking about war and heroism. War is no longer a proving ground for heroism in the same way it used to be. Instead, war now is something that we must avoid at all costs—because genocides often take place under the cover of war. We are no longer all potential soldiers (though we are that too), but we are all potential victims of the traumas war creates. This, at least, is one important development in the way Western populations envision war, even if it does not always predominate in the thinking of our political leaders.Carolyn J. Dean, Interview of February 01, 2011
The dominant premise in evolution and economics is that a person is being loyal to natural law if he or she attends to self’s interest and welfare before being concerned with the needs and demands of family or community. The public does not realize that this statement is not an established scientific principle but an ethical preference. Nonetheless, this belief has created a moral confusion among North Americans and Europeans because the evolution of our species was accompanied by the disposition to worry about kin and the collectives to which one belongs.Jerome Kagan, Interview of September 17, 2009
In a nutshell
Most countries in medieval Europe were monarchies, ruled by a royal or imperial family, a dynasty, so politics at the top level was shaped by the births, marriages, and deaths of the members of that family, and by competition and cooperation within the dynasty. This is no surprise to anyone who knows a little bit about the history of the period and any account of a medieval reign will discuss such things. However, I had never come across a book that analyzed this fundamental feature of the medieval world in a systematic and thematic way, although there are such studies for other periods, notably Jeroen Duindam, Dynasties: A Global History of Power, 1300-1800 (Cambridge University Press, 2016). A distinctive feature of the book is its wide scope, since it covers the whole medieval period (500-1500) and deals with most of Europe, namely Latin Christendom and the Byzantine empire. By the year 1100 Latin Christendom, that part of the world recognizing the authority of the pope, covered western, northern, and central Europe (I exclude the East Slavs because of my own linguistic limitations).
The dynasty was not only a biological unit but also a political or ideological one. Family structures varied across time and place, most notably between systems such as that of the Merovingian kings of the Franks (c. 500-751) or the Irish royal dynasties, where kings had many sexual partners and all the children were eligible for rule, and the system that, with the backing of the Church, came to predominate in most parts of Europe, where kings were expected to have one wife at a time, could dissolve the marriage only in very specific circumstances and a sharper line was drawn between legitimate and illegitimate children. Succession practices were very different in the two systems and the former tended to produce high levels of competition and violence within the dynasty but meant that dynasties rarely died out biologically, the latter having less intra-dynastic violence but being more vulnerable to biological extinction.
My book concentrates on the second, predominant system, and does so in two ways, which give the book its two-part structure. In part one, “The Life Cycle,” I investigate the whole process of family reproduction, starting with “Choosing a Bride”, then pursuing such themes as “Waiting for Sons to be Born” and “Waiting for Fathers to Die”, ending, naturally enough, with “Royal Mortality”: life expectancy, the frequency of violent death, choice of burial place and forms of commemoration. Part two is titled “A Sense of Dynasty” and discusses ways that ruling families expressed their identity, through such visual cues as heraldry, newly invented in the twelfth century, choice of personal names, or the graphic family tree, and how they shored themselves up in this unstable political world through the supposed guidance of astrology and prophecy.