The Art of a Reigning Queen as Dynastic Propaganda in Twelfth-Century Spain

Abstract

Recent studies of queenship have allowed us to look closely at various aspects of the life of a ruler's consort, from patronage to reputation to commemoration, with a focus on the queens who were wives or mothers of kings.This study, however, will focus on Urraca of Leon-Castile (reigned 1109-26) to examine the unusual role of a reigning queen, that is, the king's daughter and heir to his throne, whose position carried a greater dynastic weight than did a queen consort's.1 The latter, although far from powerless, wielded authority only because she was married to a king or, in the case of regents and widows, was the mother of a king. 2 These women married into the royal line, whereas reigning queens were of the royal line.In the central Middle Ages, reigning queens were a brief anomaly of the twelfth century, a not-altogether-successful experiment from the point of view of their courts and their heirs.Matilda of England (d.1167), Melisende of Jerusalem (d.1161), and Urraca of Leon-Castile (d.1126) inherited their kingdoms from their fathers.3 All had turbulent reigns, brought on by parallel situations: the kings, lacking legitimate sons, named daughters as heirs to the throne, but pow-I am grateful to James D'Emilio and Judith Golden for their comments on a prior version of this article, and to the anonymous Speculum readers, whose suggestions were most helpful.Much of this study was written with the support of a Getty Postdoctoral Fellowship in Spain in 2002-3.All translations are my own.1 Theresa M. Vann, "The Theory and Practice of Medieval Castilian Queenship," in Queens, Regents and Potentates, ed.Theresa M. Vann, Women of Power 1 (Dallas, Tex., 1993), pp.125-47, esp.p. 146, points out that according to the law in thirteenth-century Castile-Leon (both the Especulo and the Siete partidas of Alfonso X), a queen derived honor from her husband the king and exercised power through him: "Her most important role was the preservation of the king's lineage."This is a key difference between a queen consort and a queen regnant: the latter worked to preserve her own lineage.2 Eleanor of Aquitaine (d.1204), perhaps the best known of all medieval queens, demonstrates that a queen consort could indeed wield significant power.However, her role differed from that of a queen regnant, and thus her political strategies and patronage were also different.For Elednor's role as patron, see George T. Beech, "The Eleanor of Aquitaine Vase, William IX of Aquitaine, and Muslim Spain," Gesta 32 (1993), 3-10; Madeline H. Caviness, "Anchoress, Abbess, and Queen: Donors and Patrons or Intercessors and Matrons?" in The Cultural Patronage of Medieval Women, ed.June Hall McCash (Athens, Ga., 1996), pp.105-54; Nurith Kenaan-Kedar, "Alienor d'Aquitaine conduite en captivite: Les peintures murales commemoratives de Sainte-Radegonde de Chinon," Cahiers de civilisation medievale 41 (1998), 317-30; and the studies in Eleanor of Aquitaine: Lord and Lady, ed.Bonnie Wheeler and John Carmi Parsons (New York, 2003).See also the classic study edited by William W. Kibler, Eleanor of Aquitaine: Patron and Politician, Symposia in the Arts and the Humanities 3 (Austin, Tex., 1976).3 Although brief mention of the similar circumstances surrounding these three reigning queens has been made by several authors, including Bernard F. Reilly, Richard Fletcher, and Marjorie Chibnall, no study has yet undertaken a systematic comparison. 1134Speculum 80 (2005) ' See the studies in Pauline Stafford, Queens, Concubines, and Dowagers: The King's Wife in the Early Middle Ages (Athens, Ga.., 1983; repr.London, 1998); John Carmi Parsons, ed., Medieval Queenship (New York, 1993); and Anne J. Duggan, ed., Queens and Queenship in Medieval Europe (Woodbridge, Eng., 1997).Duggan's excellent introduction points out (pp. xx-xxi) that "while the position of a queen-or empress-consort was fairly well defined in custom and in law, that of the queen regnant presented conceptual and legal difficulties.Queenship had been constructed as a status complementary to that of the male ruler, not powerless . . .but not in itself the source of power.A queen regnant was therefore anomalous and in the usual run of events exceptional."See also Maria Jesus Fuente Perez, Reinas medievales en los reinos hispdnicos (Madrid, 2003), the first synthetic attempt to look at Iberian queens across the Middle Ages.Although overly dependent on epics and later chronicles rather than contemporary documentation, it makes a significant contribution to the field.The Salic law preventing female inheritance of the throne in France was not applied before the fourteenth century.For a complete discussion, see Katherine Fischer Drew, The Laws of the Salian Franks (Philadelphia, 1991).7 The extensive and growing bibliography on medieval female patronage includes Constance H. Berman, "Women as Donors and Patrons to Southern French Monasteries in the Twelfth and Thirteenth Centuries," in The Worlds of Medieval Women: Creativity, Influence, Imagination, ed.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 20 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.