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This chapter examines the destructive effects of the oppressive policies of French colonialism on royal power. It stresses that authority demands loyalty, which is expressed through willing participation in different forms of ritual service. It shows that a royal context emphasizes indigenous understandings of the past, and uses the example of young king Tsiaraso Rachidy IV to highlight the potential of youth to make history.

This chapter explains much about the political history of West Francia from 888 to 987. To those historians whose interests have concentrated on the development of central institutions of government, the period is a depressing morass of failures and rebellions, lit only by occasional flashes of royal initiative. Examination of the decline of the West Frankish monarchy entails its subdivision into different aspects, in the discussion of which no attempt will be made to do justice to the energy and devotion with which tenth-century kings struggled against formidable odds. The first pillar on which royal power rested was the demesne, that bundle of rights and lands which provided income, devoted followers, and patronage for its royal owner. The demesne of the Robertians was quite distinct from that of the Carolingians. This chapter also discusses how Viking, Saracen, and Magyar raids triggered the militarization of West Frankish society as a whole.

As a result of their diplomatic exchanges, the Roman and Sasanian courts began to display an increasingly similar visual culture of power beginning in the late third century. How and why did a global visual culture of kingship grow between Rome and Sasanian Iran in the sixth and seventh centuries? A diverse group of objects and structures offer evidence of this phenomenon. Some of these visual elements, such as royal insignia, were almost legalistically determined within and between the two cultures. Indicative of the processes that led to the emergence of a global aristocratic visual culture, the majority of the evidence comes directly from the highest echelons of the aristocracy and from the court centers. This chapter discusses insignia as cross-cultural mediators and sites of competition, the link between clothing and hierarchy, the privileged place of red footwear in both cultures, investiture as a site of competition, and global ornament and royal identity in the sixth and seventh centuries.

The ritual restatement of authority so necessary to the maintenance of kingship represents a common thread in Southeast Asian history. The phrase “theater state” effectively deployed by Clifford Geertz in relation to Bali is eminently applicable even in places where Europeans condescendingly equated the “king” to one of their own provincial mayors. Whether in these enhanced chiefdoms or in larger courts like those of Java or Burma, ceremonial life was “an assertion of spiritual power.” In this performance of power, women were indispensable, usually in supporting roles but at times as directors and lead actors. Notwithstanding regional differences in language, culture, and historical experience, “palace women” across Southeast Asia can be considered in terms of the enactment of royal status, which, by separating a ruler from his subjects, justified and maintained the rationale on which kingship rested. This chapter looks at women and the performance of power in early modern Southeast Asia. It discusses the purpose of royal polygyny, women's roles at royal courts and in the enactment of royal power, women's theatrical performances, and life cycle rituals.

This chapter focuses on one of Lope de Vega's most puzzling political plays—El villano en su rincon. The play revolves around the fearsome character of royal power; its uncompromising demands for obedience; its unquestionable enactments of justice; its control of its subjects through a ceremonial of fear; and its inescapable presence in the ubiquitous icons, emblems, and regalia of the charismatic king. The various studies that exist have focused on its confrontation of king and peasant-philosopher in a way that fails to do justice to the complexity of its engagement with the problematics of royal power. They have seen the play as a kind of ritual, a static enactment of power, or, in Marcel Bataillon's words, a “political mass”—“a Mass of power that is a court ceremonial”—a “morality play dedicated to the glory of the monarchy,” and a “lesson in monarchical devotion.”

The past fifteen years have seen many French medieval historians move away from intensive regional studies and return to rather more traditional forms of political history. In part this is because by now most regions have scholarly studies for the period up to about 1200. However, the change of focus also marks a desire to tackle again the old question of the rise of the French monarchy, this time exploiting the numismatic, demographic and diplomatic techniques that have been developed in the past half century, in order to give new depth to our understanding of the political structures. What follows is a brief resume of the book's reactions to some of the work produced since 1985. For tenth-century studies of royal power, the most significant contribution has been the argument of K. F. Werner that the agreement between Eudes and Charles the Simple in 987 established a ‘Robertian wall’ across northern France.

This chapter refers to the American founders as the first in the world to create a powerful, unitary, independent chief executive officer in the context of a system where the bulk of governing authority would be held by the legislative branch. It reviews the principal device of the constitutional framers in allocating large swaths of traditionally royal power to Congress rather than the president. It also mentions the requirement for advance congressional authorization and approval for many of the most significant powers of the state, such as taxation and coercion. The chapter discusses how the presidency has seemed to metastasize as Congress has ceased effectively to function in recent decades. It points out the dangers of a unilateral executive under the unconventional presidency of Donald Trump, which seemed more severe compared to more circumspect occupants of the office.

This chapter talks about Richard Pipes' publication of a sweeping and influential reinterpretation of pre-Soviet Russian political culture. It analyses Pipes' central idea that Muscovite Rus´ was a patrimonial state and the tsar or great prince exercised power that is comparable to that of the possessor of dominium in Roman law. It also details how Pipes traced the growth of the actual power of the monarch and the gradual narrowing of the boundaries of possible action for all classes. The chapter explains why no class or social group was able to limit the excessive growth of royal power. It discusses the ideology of royal absolutism in Russia that was worked out by clergymen who felt that the interests of religion and church were best served by a monarchy with no limits to its power.

By 1158, France existed as a kingdom in the sense that all its great princes acknowledged they held their honours in fief of Louis VII. There was a clear difference in the practical meaning of the princes' fidelity to Louis IV and that accorded to Louis VII: though twelfth-century princes were far from consistent in carrying out their feudal obligations, they did recognize that they had some; their homage implied more than simple goodwill and because their principalities had territorial definition, as their tenth-century predecessors' had not, Louis's feudal overlordship also had territorial expression. In 1163, when Raymond of Toulouse wrote to the king, asking approval for the marriage he had arranged between his son and the heiress to Albon (the Dauphine), he remarked that the union would assist in extending Louis's lordship over new lands. For him therefore, Louis was suzerain over all his vassals' possessions. If this conclusion was not accepted without qualification elsewhere, its appearance was still a significant development for royal power. The rise of the French monarchy was in a real sense superstructural.

An introductory section gives broad consideration to the relationship between gifts and royal authority in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The significance of gift-exchange is then considered through the analysis two key royal ceremonial events: the New Year festival and royal progresses. Each is shown to offer subjects the opportunity to compete for favour, and for the monarch to exercise carefully calculated beneficence. Both Henry VIII and Elizabeth I endeavoured to display generosity in gift-exchange. They also tried to avoid gift-givers binding them to specific reciprocation. Courtiers and ministers competed to give, and were in their turn wooed by the offerings of suitors and lesser men. The gifts offered at the Court were not only things of material value: counsel could in principle become the most precious offering of all. Differing monarchical attitudes to gifts and rewards are explored in the final section.

This introductory chapter provides an overview of ancient Egypt's investment in three distinct, yet interdependent, historical areas during the third millennium BCE. These include death, and imagined life after death; power, via public displays of social capital for eternity; and apotheosis, specifically the processes of deification of certain dead. The book demonstrates that the dead were initially mobilized, near the end of the Old Kingdom, as a direct means of subverting royal power in ancient Egypt. Confronting this potential threat to power, the new kings of the Middle Kingdom coopted cults to distinguished and deified dead, enveloping them into official royal building campaigns as a way of appropriating their influence. As a result, Middle Kingdom kingship was intimately tied to the temples, and the king emphasized his closeness to the gods as a way of displaying political capital.

This chapter investigates “power,” first as a larger concept and then situated within the historical context in which the Egyptian king was the sole ideological benefactor of mortuary access. This role was a primary means through which the king in the Old Kingdom constructed and maintained his power. The king had knowledge of the gods and had access to the spells of transfiguration, which aided in admittance into the divine Hereafter. His role, then, as mortuary benefactor, gave him power—that is, as long as the elites recognized him in this role. Power is, after all, a negotiation between parties and was not vertical in Egypt. Though the power of the inhabitants of ancient Egypt existed only as long as they acted as a group, they had agency in the negotiation of royal power. Thus, in some instances, when the inhabitants of Egypt mobilized the dead to act as divine mediators and mortuary benefactors in place of the king, they were in essence renegotiating and redefining royal power.

This chapter explains the ensuing politico-religious situation brought about by gallican ways of thinking after Henri IV converted to Catholicism. The nature of royal power and its authority over church and religious matters had always been a controversial issue. There had never been a group with a modern, secular, political, and forward outlook that clarified this matter. The new Bourbon dynasty discouraged any disputes on this subject, and instead attempted to establish its right to rule over France. The passion of the earlier religious wars had not easily settled: claims that Henry IV's conversion was fake and that he remained an enemy of the Church persisted.

James I and Charles I continued the Tudor traditions of royal progress and New Year as occasions for gift-exchange. But neither set of ceremonial moments occupied such a central place in their political life. James wished to be seen as the magnanimous monarch, showering his servants with rewards, sometimes showing gestures of beneficence to others such as the London élites. In the second half of the reign the reality of royal indebtedness undercut such behaviour. While Charles perforce recognized the danger of liberality, the culture of gifting in the Court continued much as before. In one area—the collection of art—the king deviated sharply from his predecessors. This gave new opportunities to compete for royal favour through the gift, and identified the king closely with a coterie of connoisseurs.

The death of the still-young Charles IX in 1574 was greeted by very different responses from the two religious camps. For the Protestants, his lonely and painful end – he was spitting blood! – mirrored his life as a tyrant who perverted royal authority. Catholics viewed him as a worthy monarch who fought to defend the true religion, and who in doing so sacrificed his life for his subjects. They promoted a viewpoint that sacralised him personally beyond most of his predecessors, whose super-sacrality was more institutional than personal. After his death, the Malcontents gained considerable influence, but by 1576 the Estates General of Blois marginalised them and called for the monarchy to defend Catholicism, thus reopening the return of civil war. It also showed the need for a strong (absolutist) monarchy to deal with revolt.