Copyright © 1990 Gruppo Editoriale Fiorentino.
Translation copyright © 2001 The Pennsylvania State University.
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 0-271-02102-0
Chapter One
His Majesty
Let there be one ruler, / one king, to whom the son of devious-devising Kronos / gives the scepter and right of judgment, to watch over his people.—ILIAD, 11:204-6
IN HIS SIETES PARTIDAS KING ALFONSO the Wise said that "emperadores et reyes son como comenzamiento et cabeza de los otros," "alma e cabeza, et ellos los membros" (emperors and kings are the birth and brain of humankind, soul and brain, and the others are the limbs). The state was like a human body, in which the king was the soul and brain; the subjects the limbs. In England, during the last agonizing days of sickness of King George V, a psychoanalyst observed the reaction of three of his patients. All exhibited worsening symptoms of physical and mental conditions. The night after the death of the sovereign, one dreamed he had shot at a man who resembled his father; another had depressing memories of the death of his own father; the third patient dreamed that his father was dead. In 1978, in New Guinea, 912 Americans testified to their attachment to the charismatic leader Jim Jones by committing collective suicide.
Since the world began, no community has failed to recognize a leader, a mediator between the community itself and heaven. Whether this leader was a priest or a warrior is a secondary matter. A. M. Hocart has justly observed that kings and bishops are but two branches of the same tree, and Géza Roheim, studying the divinity of kingship, wrote that this "is either an earth-born power projected into heaven, or the shadow of heaven upon earth." The idea of the divinity of kingship began in Egypt and developed into a complex political and religious system. "The main purpose of this cosmological speculation was to show that Egypt was primitively ruled by gods and that the unification of the two parts of Egypt was the realization of a divine plan." Egyptian influence on the evolution of kingship in classical times can be dated from the conquests of Alexander the Great, even though it developed much further in the Roman world. Hellenistic political thought elaborated the idea that the sovereign was the compassionate manifestation of God to humanity, the shepherd of his flock, father and benefactor, font of law, or better still the very personification of law. Since the sovereign was pater, any regicide was judged a parricide, in fact the greatest parricide. After the discovery of a conspiracy against Emperor Frederick II in March 1246, the guilty were judged on the basis of the Roman law Lex pompeia and treated as parricides, closed up in a leather sack (culleus), and cast into the sea.
"This sublime conception of kingship was destined to offset the danger that always besets the concentration of absolute power in the hands of a single man, while the king's divinization made such concentration bearable and acceptable to his subjects." Thus the very image of the sovereign stamped on the obverse of coins—in place of images of divinities, who were the celestial patrons shown on coins issued by the Greek cities—served to guarantee the purity of the metal.
The inheritance of Greek political thought was not, however, transmitted directly to the Roman republic. A cultural shift was accomplished at the end of the first century B.C., in the time of Julius Caesar, the patron of Cleopatra; Pompey, the conqueror of Jerusalem; and Anthony, the lover of the same Cleopatra in Alexandria. The deification of Caesar was a fundamental step in the development of the Roman cult of kingship. The divine immortality of Octavius, as divi filius (son of god), was recognized on his death, and in life he received the honors reserved for a divus. Asiatic cults entered the political life of the West through a Roman filter, leaving their mark as much on regional traditions as they did on the church liturgy of the High Middle Ages. The church fathers identified government with patria potestas and considered the emperor to be the guardian of the world. Fritz Kern writes that governments were thought of as miniature images of divine government. I would say, rather, that divine government was imagined through the model of the earthly one. Elements of the imperial cult were integrated into the Byzantine Empire in a religious syncretism that developed basically two features: the Stoic doctrine of providence (Providentia augusta) and the association of the ruler with the sun, a theme that appeared in Rome after the accession of Heliogabalus in 219. This was when the circle of solar rays was adopted, a Hellenistic symbol. After the conversion of Constantine, the diadem lost its rays, but it was still not abandoned. The solar heritage was not the only regal trait received from the past, however, since the West, well before the coronation of Louis the Plus (816), took from Israel a conception of kingship based chiefly on anointing. Thus Christian monarchy overlay and fused together different regal cults. "Christian thought of the Eastern Roman Empire was based upon Hellenistic political thought ... what appealed most forcibly to the imagination of Christian writers was the notion of divine monarchy." Eusebius of Caesarea, in De laudibus Constantini, gave these theories their Christian meaning, the monarch being Christ on earth. In De monarchia, Dante, referring to the king, spoke of his "necessity." Even the emperor's apotheosis (his deification on his death) was replicated. In 337, after Constantine's conversion to Christianity, the Roman mint struck a coin with the legend DIVUS CONSTANTINUS PATER AUGUSTORUM (divine Constantine, father of emperors), showing the emperor ascending the heavens riding in a solar chariot.
Even the idea of the king as animate law was introduced in the new religion. The iconography of the traditio legis (e.g., in the Ambrosian ciborium) refers frequently to this kind of royal worship. In Bertand de la Tour's sermon in memory of Charles of Calabria (the son of King Robert of Naples) we can read that "iste dominus Karolus fuit fedelissimus deo, dei etiam vicarius" (this lord Charles was most faithful to God, whose vicar he was). It was not until English constitutional thought of the fourteenth century that a different concept of the king appeared, as subordinate to natural law: "the king is under God and the law, for it is the law which makes the king." In his political treatises, Sir John Fortescue (1394-ca. 1476) quoted Saint Thomas Aquinas: "Rex datur propter regnum, et non regnum propter regem" (the king is given to the realm, not the realm to the king), to affirm the distinction between a "dominium regale" (royal dominion) and a "dominium politicum et regale" (political and royal dominion), the second only applicable to England.
Dante's image of pope and emperor as "two suns" is well known, and the solar cult always remained tied to kingship. In fact, one of the appellations of the Roman emperor was Sol invictus (unconquered sun). Reflecting the same meaning, the coronation mantle of the emperor Henry II was spangled with stars. We could add that a solar chariot transported Alexander the Great to heaven, that one of the versions of the death of Romulus repeated the same legend, and that the Christos-Helios was presented with the same chariot in the mosaic of the Giulii mausoleum (Fig. 1; it is now located under the Confessional of St. Peter in the Vatican). The solar chariot was also used for Christ by Bishop Rabbula. Saint Francis of Assisi made his ascent to heaven in a similar chariot, at least as depicted in the images left to us by Giotto (Fig. 2) and by Taddeo Gaddi, based on the tale of Bartolomeo de Rinonico in De conformitate vitae beati Francisci ad vitam Domini Jesu. Even if western Christendom did not accept the solar cult for its own kings, one must admit that a hundred years before Louis XIV, who called himself the "Sun King," Cosimo I de' Medici as grand duke of Tuscany played with the assonance of his own name with "cosmos." The duke also thought the battle of Montemurlo (where his adversaries were defeated) was a personal "resurrection," which allowed him to assume the zodiacal sign of Capricorn, the same sign used by Caesar Augustus.
Even without resorting to deification, Byzantium knew Caesaro-papism. What distinguished the Christian Byzantine emperors from their Hellenistic and Roman predecessors, who had already recognized the sacredness of kingship, were the priestly characteristics inherited from the tradition of divination. The kings of western Christianity, who were weaker with regard to the papacy, tended to adopt the binomial rex sacerdos, focusing on the assimilation of sacred and profane, when they did not aspire directly to sainthood, for themselves or their ancestors, as with Saint Louis (Fig. 3). It seems unlikely that the Carolingians had to seek further for the supernatural powers attributed to them—which the Frankish reges criniti (long-haired kings) had possessed earlier—than the unction they received from the church, to which they had submitted. "The ecclesiastical revolution under the early Carolingians had created a theoretical structure of kingship." It was precisely to attenuate this submission that they developed the idea of the "Regnum Davidicum." In the Holy Roman Empire, Otto III wanted to call himself Servus apostolorum, with reference to Saints Peter and Paul: "The emperor associated his government with that of the pope, the successor precisely of Peter and Paul." As a tenth-century Ordo for the imperial coronation prescribed: "The prayer finished, the elect proceeds to the choir of Saint Gregory with the cardinals, arch-presbyters, and archdeacons who have assisted him during the office of anointing, and after having clothed him with the amice, alb, and girdle, they bring him to the sacristy before the pope, who makes him a priest and gives him the tunic and dalmatic." For France, Villette emphasized approvingly that "Charles the Bald never entered a church without his dalmatic, to show that in church he was a member of the clergy, and outside of church he struck with his sword as a king." A page noted with regard to Louis XVI that "every day the king attended Mass.... When the king was in the lower part of the chapel, he was presented with the corpse to kiss it," and, he added, "it was one of the prerogatives of royalty, since the king was considered to be a subdeacon."
As well, under Emperor Frederick II the royal court itself was presented as a twin of the church. The body of imperial functionaries was considered in the same way as a religious order: the order of justice.
At Bologna, in the coronation ceremony for Charles V, the young emperor took off his royal clothing to put on the almice and mozzetta of a canon of St. Peter's ("recipitur a Canonicis in Canonicum S. Petri"). He sang with the clergy; then, taking off the vestments of a canon, he put on the sandals and tunic of a deacon and over this a sumptuous cope; then he put on royal clothing again to receive anointing;. He served as a deacon in the pontifical Mass offered by Clement VII, and then returned to sit on his own throne, where he sat with his own imperial garments ("Quo facto redit ad suum sugestum, ubi riassumit insignia sua imperialia, et sedet"). When, in Florence, Grand Duke Cosimo III de' Medici was admitted among the Lateran canons (1700), he had Carlo Maratta paint his portrait wearing a surplus and their three-cornered hat, and twenty years later he was pictured again wearing the vestments of Saint Joseph. In the Palazzo Pitti there were numerous small chapels and devotional altars, which the Hapsburg-Lorraine and the Savoy dynasties gradually dismantled. Much the same was true of the Alcázar in Madrid.
Another imperial appellation was pius. Romans in the republican period[ continued to call the priest celebrating certain rites that had been among the duties of their kings Rex sacrorum. In the imperial period Augustus became Pontifex maximus, at the same time supreme head of the state and of its religion, and was deified on his death. In 310 Constantine embraced Christianity, which became the new religion of state. From that moment on, the emperor was a Christomimètes, assuming, by this means, new priestly characteristics. A large coin minted at Aix-la-Chapelle under Charlemagne had as a motto "XC:VINCIT:XC:REGNAT—KAROLUS MAGNUS IMPERAT" (Christ triumphs, Christ reigns, Charles the Great rules). For King Alfonso X the Wise, the kings of Castile were "Vicars of God, each one in his own kingdom, placed over the people to keep them in justice and truth." But I think no king appeared in the guise of the Father omnipotent so much as John II of Castile presumed to do during the feast celebrated in his honor at Valladolid in May of 1428.
In Byzantium the emperor of the East sat under a ciborium whose vault was frescoed with a sky studded with stars (curiously, Claude Villette saw in the similar ciborium above the high altar where the Corpus Domini was kept "the sacred womb of the Virgin mother of our Savior"). The throne resembled a chariot or at least had legs representing lions to symbolize cosmic movement? When he left the imperial palace for a procession, the emperor walked under an umbrella, another reference to the vault of heaven, and he was surrounded by torches, which referred to solar flames.
In one of those "logical instabilities" that Saussure speaks of, if the throne referred to the movement of the stars, the king instead was immobile. In this case the emphasis was placed on his resemblance to an idol. I will speak further of the immobility of the central figures in the Roman triumph, and of the sovereign's face painted red like the statue of Jove, but he also presented himself as a marble image of divinity. He was distant and mute, and silence had to be strictly observed around him? At the Byzantine court, on the appearance of the emperor in the audience chamber, the basilica, or the consistory, appropriate officials (the silentiarii) imposed silence. J. G. Frazer, in The Golden Bough, says that in ancient Japan the Mikado was obliged to sit on his throne every morning for several hours with a crown on his head. He was supposed to remain immobile like a statue for the whole time, without moving hands or feet. Only in this way could he assure the tranquillity of the empire over which he reigned. Not only this, "such a holiness was ascribed to all parts of his body, that he dared to cut off neither his hair, nor his beard, nor his nails."
The long hair of the Frankish kings (reges criniti, as Gregory of Tours referred to it) was related to the same need.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from THE KING'S BODY by Sergio Bertelli. Copyright © 1990 by Gruppo Editoriale Fiorentino. Excerpted by permission. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.