Rethinking Sacred Monarchy from a Spanish Perspective

Abstract

ABSTRACT In histories on kingship, Spain seems to live up to its reputation of being different. Whereas sacred monarchy, as epitomized by the thaumaturgical English and French rulers, was the ideal of premodern kingship, Spanish monarchs were, as historian Teófilo Ruiz bluntly put it, “unsacred.” Critics countered that Iberian monarchs were sacred, they just manifested sacrality differently, not with miracles but with ceremonies. Modern historians and anthropologists have seen sacrality as a source of power based on evidence from royal propaganda and political theology, which they consider representative of a premodern worldview. Surveying rulers from antiquity to their present, Christian as well as non-Christian, in Europe, across the Mediterranean, and beyond, writers of all persuasions saw claims to miraculous powers and divinity as one answer to a question rulers faced everywhere: What should be the role of religion as an instrument of authority? From this broad perspective, Spanish difference was not a diversion from an ideal but a local answer to this question, just as sacred kingship, rather than a universal model, was another answer limited to Northern Europe. Ultimately, these observations support Carlo Ginzburg’s assertion that the encounter between different cultural traditions can open “a profound and unexpected viewpoint on reality.”