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The People and Its King: A Theory of Royal Power in the Thirteenth-Century Castilian Kingdom
The author discusses the royal power theory as it was developed and accepted in the Castilian Kingdom of the mid-thirteenth–early fourteenth centuries. The central figure of the chapter is the king of Castile and Leon Alfonso X the Wise (1252–1284). Claiming his rights not only to the throne of Castile but also to the Holy Roman Empire, Alfonso X developed a new conception of the royal power. Within it, a king was not only a vicar of God in his kingdom but also the head, heart and soul of the people. The latter, in turn, was depicted as a body which had not only a head and heart but also a soul. The author stresses that Castilian lawyers and theologians, having a goal to describe the bodily relations between a king and a people, invented the concept of the people’s soul. For exposing it, they used two principal kinds of sources: the Augustinian tradition in theology, which stated that the people are a rational multitude united by love to the common thing, and Muslim (Arab) commentaries on Plato and Aristotle’s philosophical works. In the tactical perspective, Alfonso X lost his game because as a result, he had to derogate his laws. However, strategically, he won, as his legislation was actively used by Modern Spanish monarchs.
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