Provincial agency and the list of Christian kings in the thirteenth-century ‘Roman provincial’

Abstract

What made a king in High Medieval Europe? Such a question – which has many, many components – exercises medievalists. Beyond the question of how individual rulers secured their rule is the broader one of how was kingship recognised? How were kings different from dukes? Who decided when someone was a king and their realm a kingdom? These are complicated questions. A suspiciously simple (but potentially no less valuable for that) answer is that a true kingdom was included on the master-list of all the Christian kings in Europe. Such a list did exist, copied across Europe from the early thirteenth century onwards. It was in the Provinciale Romanum – the ‘Roman provincial’.