“Unveiling the Crown: The Surprising Truth Behind a Medieval Monarch’s Real Power!”
Third, they needed military power, essentially ‘muscle’ to defend their status as rulers and possessions. Very often, their own position as ruler was the result of a successful invasion or civil war.
Fourth, their power tended to derive from religion. European monarchs needed the backing of the church, and especially the Pope, to claim that it was God’s will if they wore a crown.
In all, if you think about it, this is not terribly different from how rulers today tend to get in power and keep it, albeit, to an extent at least, nixing the ancestry requirement.
But in mediaeval times, three out of four sources of legitimacy and power depended upon external actors to a monarch’s inner circle: the clergy, the landed aristocracy, and the military – the latter two closely intertwined.
Thus, a monarch – even before the Magna Carta – could not go about his or her reigning business without the support of these powerful forces.
As such, the necessary cooperation between the monarch and the barons or similar ruling class was sometimes formalised via a ‘coronation oath’, a practice common in England. The King would swear it at this coronation, and use this oath as a sort of ‘mission statement’, spelling out the general principles to which he would abide.
William the Conqueror’s oath, for example, promised
‘To maintain the Church of God and all Christian people in true peace; to prohibit all orders of men from committing injustice and oppression, and to enjoin the observance of equity and mercy in all judgments’
