ABSTRACT
In medieval Europe, representatives of monarchy and aristocracy vied for supremacy, often in open conflict. Nevertheless, their relationship was also one of interdependence and, occasionally, symbiosis. During the high Middle Ages (the eleventh through to the thirteenth century), the rights of kings, supported by the Church, came to signify something more than being the first among equals of the great landholders of a region. Kings increasingly challenged nobles’ rights to taxation and jurisdiction by displacing lordly local power through centralization and institutions of statecraft. 2 Thus, magnates’ influence was curtailed by the growing sphere of royal authority, and the powerful lords sought new ways of participating in the practice of power and politics. The king’s authority in the medieval period was founded upon his ability to control military resources and means of violence, amass economic assets, and exert legal and symbolic authority. The secular aristocracy of these realms was indispensable to the king’s exercise of power, both because of the lack of a monarchical institutional basis on a local level before the late Middle Ages, and not least because any major military operation by the crown depended on the cooperation of nobles and the contribution of their hosts of soldiers to the war effort. 3 This gave nobles the opportunity to exert their influence on the king and his policies – unduly in the opinion of some. In times of regal minorities, some advanced from positions as councillors of the king to regents, essentially governing the realm in the absence of an adult king. This led repeatedly to civil strife – after the regency of Tyrgils Knutsson for King Birger Magnusson of Sweden 1290–1304, in the years following the election of the young king Magnus Eriksson (c.1319–22), and during the minority of the Castilian kings Fernando IV (1295–1301) and Alfonso XI (1312–25) – a fact that has left numerous traces in the historiography of the period.
