Killing Kings: Patterns of Regicide in Europe, 600 – 1800 AD

Frühmittelalterliche Studien, 2019

, King Erik V Klipping of Denmark was found dead in a hunting lodge with fifty-six wounds in his body. Despite much discussion, we still do not know who committed the crime, or what the murderers' motives were. This is actually the most interesting aspect of the event; unlike in previous cases of regicide, the men who killed Erik did not come forward to replace him with another king. In this sense, the murder in 1286 marks the beginning of a new epoch. Some twenty-two cases of regicide preceded the death of Erik in the Scandinavian countries; afterwards however, it was followed by only one. Murder was apparently no longer an accepted way of changing the ruler of a country. The same was the case in the rest of Europe. There has been no great scholarly interest in royal murders as a phenomenon. The murders that did occur have often, of course, been discussed, but few attempts have been made to discuss the background and frequency of regicides, or to explain its decline in the High and Later Middle Ages 2. The following article will address these problems and explore acts of regicide as a means of understanding the character of monarchy in Western Christendom in the Middle Ages and the Early Modern Period, compared to other civilisations, with Byzantium as the main example of the latter. Two recent contributions give what appear to be radically different pictures of the frequency of regicide in this area. In the concluding chapter of an anthology on the subject, John Morrill observes that regicide was rare in Europe between 1300 and 1800: 1 Thanks to Axel Müller who invited me to give the first presentation of the following as a keynote lecture

On the Cultural History of Collective Violence from Late Antiquity to the Confessional Age / Zur Kulturgeschichte der kollektiven Gewalt von der Spätantike bis zum konfessionellen Zeitalter, 2000

The late antique and early medieval literary sources mention an almost uncountable number of violent acts, among which a majority is attributed to people of an elevated social rank. The present essay aims at analysing the political significance and functions of physical violence, and more particularly manslaughter and murder, as a means to remove enemies or opponents. The prominence of violent conflicts fought out between high-ranking men in early medieval legends and myths of origins confirms to what extent this behaviour must have been regarded as highly significant. This paper will refer to selected examples dating between the sixth and seventh century to show that the use of physical violence had a strong impact on elitarian group formation and stabilization, which means that this type of violence was a crucial factor contributing to the processes of group dynamics. This becomes most evident where violence was used in public, as in some most prominent cases that took place in imperial or royal palaces. These acts ostentatiously committed in public by military leaders were overt claims to power and leadership, as is particularly obvious in cases in which a warlord publicly killed his rival by his own hand.

The Cambridge World History of Violence, ed. Richard W. Kaeuper and Harriet Zurndorfer, vol. 2 of The Cambridge World History of Violence, 4 vols. (Cambridge University Press: Cambridge), 2020

This chapter discusses violence associated with the exercise of lordship and the culture of nobility in Europe from ca. 500-1500. For most of the twentieth century, historians argued that lordly violence rose and fell in inverse proportion to the power of ‘sovereign’ rulers, such as kings and emperors. It is now recognized that aristocrats in general and lords in particular played roles in medieval societies and polities that made their use of violence not just tolerable but also necessary. The practice of ‘feud’ has also come in for reassessment, increasingly understood not as anarchic or usurpatory, but re-envisaged as rule-based and self-limiting. Yet, if seigneurial violence now appears much more socially productive and politically intelligible to historians, it is important to realize that the exercise and experience of seigneurial violence varied a great deal according to social position and context. Aristocratic women were less likely than aristocratic men to be involved in such conflicts, and non-aristocrats, of both sexes, bore the brunt of the violence. This essay proceeds chronologically, examining changes in the ideas and practices that shaped how lords and nobles used violence in different regions.

2016

This text is the conclusions to the sessions of the symposium on The Collapse of Kingdoms in Early Medieval Europe, held in Salamanca on the 22nd-23rd of October 2015. The contributions are published in a Special Issue of Reti Medievali Rivista (The collapse of the early medieval European kingdoms (8th-9th centuries), ed. by Iñaki Martín Viso, Reti Medievali. Rivista, 17, 2 (2016)). This short article presents reflections drawn from the essays collected in this special issue as well as from the debates of the Salamanca symposium where they originated. It does not purport to represent the authors’ ideas beyond what is strictly necessary for my argument. Firstly, I make a critical review of how political collapse is addressed in the different contributions, within a comparative perspective. Secondly, I suggest some theoretical approaches than can contribute to develop a comparative perspective on the endings of the early medieval kingdoms, based upon the notions of complexity, scale and agency.

2017

Romanian Journal of Population Studies, 2013

This study deals with a neglected topic -homicide rates in Old Kingdom Romania at the end of the 19 th Century and the first years of the 20 th Century. Starting from demographic and medical statistics that included information about the causes of death, we shall reveal what was a probable evolution of homicide rates both at a national level and for some of the most important cities as well. The data will be compared with that from other European countries/regions. Furthermore, homicides will also be examined in relation with other causes of death affecting the Romanian society.

The European Legacy: Toward New Paradigms, 2017

This deeply researched history of royalty and monarchical government in France and England over the course of a crucial century is vital reading for all historians of politics, political thought, religion, or culture ,1587 to 1688. Sacral kingship was revived in this period. The book connects the rise of intense and divisive religious belief to the rise of political violence and regicide.

This short study is a first attempt to apply some tools which have been adopted for the analysis of temporal dynamics in the Late Medieval Period to the early medieval world. The study is also inspired by the recent works of KOKKONEN/SUNDELL (2012), who inspected if primogeniture influenced the durability of reigns in Europe in the period between 1000 and 1800 CE, and of BLAYDES/CHANEY (2013), who analysed for a big sample of polities the dynamics of ruler change for medieval Europe and the Islamic world before 1500 CE. The aim of the present study is more modest and does not include the creation of elaborate mathematical models as did KOKKONEN/SUNDELL and BLAYDES/CHANEY. With several statistical tools, a smaller sample of polities in the period 0-800 CE is inspected with regard to the sequence and duration of reigns, differentiated along the qualification if a reign was initiated “violently” or “non-violently”. Thereby, the general durability of reigns, the possible persistency of periods of frequent violent ruler-change and the temporal dynamics of these “games of thrones”, which not only affected rulers and dynasties as well as courts and nobilities, but also entire societies and polities, across longer periods of time will be illustrated. Differences and commonalities of polities from various regions of the early medieval world will become visible. At the same time, the value of such quantitative analyses for research on a period for which source evidence is often characterised as insufficient for such attempts will be highlighted.

Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient, 2008

Sanctioned killing in Ancient Egypt has been a much debated theme. So far, however, the perspective on this subject matter has been too broad, static, and limited in scope. Supported by a large body of inscriptional evidence dating to the Middle Kingdom, this paper argues that during this period the grounds for sanctioned killing and its practices were more wide-ranging than has often been supposed. Le thème de l'homicide sanctionné dans l'Égypte ancienne a fait l'objet de nombreux débats. Toutefois, jusqu'à présent l'approche a été trop générale, statique et limitée. Fondée sur l'étude de nombreuses inscriptions datant du Moyen Empire, cette contribution suggère que durant cette période les principes subordonnés aux pratiques de l'homicide sanctionné étaient plus variés qu'on ne l'avait cru auparavant.

Journal of Social History 44, no. 1 (2010): 288-90.