‘Emperor in his own Kingdom’

Abstract

Feudal suzerainty was not, and could not be, completely effective unless reinforced by the wider authority of a sovereign kingship, recognised and accepted in all France. The Capetian rulers could not hope to draw out the full implications of their undoubted suzerainty without asserting their higher status as the possessors of the crown of France. This, however, presented certain difficulties, always liable to arise in a political and social structure of the kind existing in mediaeval western Europe. The king might thus, for instance, come under the suzerainty of one of his own subjects; he might, again, become subject to the wider sovereignty of the Emperor; yet again, he could be subordinate to the spiritual authority of God, in the person of the Pope, His vicar on earth (and that subordination had certain secular consequences). It would be too much to claim that the Capetians always saw these three possibilities as active dangers. But it is certainly true that many of their policies tended to destroy them, and that, whether of set purpose or not, the kings of France ended by removing all three.