“Every Inch a King”. Kings and Kingship in the Ancient and Medieval Worlds

Abstract

The chapters in this book focus on legitimacy, propaganda and political ideology issues and reveal how they interrelate-so that kingship is shown to be a nexus of ideas and representations which connect earthly concerns of legitimacy and power with the larger concerns of man's place in the cosmos. The book emphasises the centrality of the Middle Eastern and Iranian perspective on kingship, which so often is ignored or incidental in comparative studies of this nature, as also stresses the continuities between the ancient and medieval worlds, generally treated separately. Kingship was concerned with constraint of the ruler, and the consent of the ruled. In the late medieval period this relationship between ruler and ruled had been imagined in various ways. The late sixteenth-century French political philosopher, Jean Bodin, developed the theory of the divine right of kings in order to justify the king’s absolute authority. Keywords:ancient world; kingship; medieval world