THE MEDIEVAL CONCEPT

The Middle Ages used a diverse group of words when speaking of the court of the kings. From the point of view of the history of concepts, it is of interest to distinguish carefully the span of social and political meanings and experiences that can be expressed by these words, paying particular attention to the rise of new meanings in old words or of neologisms. With a valid and historically coherent definition of the subject of this book in mind, these are, in general, valuable indicators of important changes. As Koselleck states, we can interpret human history in a restricted sense through the concepts of the past, even if the words that are related to these concepts are still in use today. This task requires a work of critical distancing which accompanies both the fundamental historicity and the sedimentation, which is evident in the vocabulary of a given society, of successive uses of a constellation of words. For such, the author reminds us, past uses of a concept should in some way be redefined by the historian.

While Latin predominated as the written language in the medieval west, texts resorted to several names for the court — curia, aula, palatium, schola — at the same time as the binominal of words was to emerge that was to take precedence over all these: cors/curtis. The formation of a synonym between ‘curia’ and ‘court’ is a first aspect deserving our attention.

The court of the kings during the medieval period was conceived to a large extent as a spatial entity. As an organism of variable dimension and complexity, moving in the physical space of the kingdom with the incessant removals of the monarch, from its beginnings the court also represented a particular, highly characteristic mode of life through this itinerance. Removals and stops of the royal retinue caused degrees of apprehension in the space of the kingdom and, simultaneously, structured events of court life. It is in this dual dimension that I shall analyse these. In relating the places visited by the monarchs of the late Middle Ages and, also, those where their stays were more prolonged, with the network of the diverse royal residences I found some indications of the process of a tendency towards setting down of roots of the Portuguese court in the physical space of the kingdom. This route of research led me not only to reflect upon the actual relationship existing between the court and the sites of its lifestyle, but also to consider the court as a relatively complex spatial universe. That is, a conceived, actual spatial universe with the concepts of the age (in particular the known territorial projection of medieval juridic pluralism) in mind, but a universe which establishes a specific connection having multiple aspects with the various places where the court moves for the creation of intermittent areas of supply and economic influence, and also of jurisdictional spheres which could temporarily transform the most modest of towns into the centre of the entire kingdom.

In this space defined by the presence of the king which we call ‘court’ the activities of those whom the modern age came to call ‘courtiers’, that is the men and women living permanently at court, developed. Although the word is new, in the thirteenth century the Partidas distinguished the permanent residents from those who were present at court for reasons other than those of ‘daily service’. The word ‘courtier’ found its first appearance in Portuguese in writings of the princes of the Aviz dynasty such as Duarte and the Infante Pedro, in Zurara's chronicles and in the fifteenth-century Portuguese translation of the pseudo-Aristotelian Segredo dos Segredos, while its semantic field was from the outset associated with a daily presence alongside the monarchs and in ‘court service’. ‘Court service’ as referred to by the sources of the age to a large extent comprised ritual activities.

As a result of the main lines of the study I have been outlining, I do not examine this specific way of life of the man at court in isolation. On the contrary, I have emphasised the narrow articulation existing among various juridical, bureaucratic, pragmatic, financial and ritual aspects of the duties and offices of the court. Court life did not solely comprise ceremonies. Having said this, ritual activity was prominent in spite of everything as something fundamental in ‘palace life’ as seen by the age, and remained the final redoubt of an effective performance of many court ‘offices’, since it was endowed with enormous importance.

The aim of this book is an in-depth study, on the scale of a small country, of an historic problem which on many occasions is dealt with in a generic or essentially theoretical manner: the emergence of a specific social form, that is the court in Europe, prior to the nineteenth century. It is an attempt which concentrates systematic research of sources upon a defined period (between 1300 and 1450) while at the same time resorting to the widest possible comparison of the phenomena being studied within the larger sphere of the existence of the medieval courts.

The sociologist Norbert Elias, to whom we are indebted for a fundamental contribution towards the definition and study of the court as a social form of the past, did not consider its existence exclusively in the form of an absolutist court, although he mentions the growing importance which it assumed during the modern period of European history (between the fifteenth and eighteenth centuries). Among the many passages of his writings which he dedicated to the problem, the book concerning the French court of Louis XIV, published for the first time in 1969, stands out, as do the important chapters on the emergence of the noble and royal courts during the medieval period contained within the ambitious construction of his work ‘on the process of civilisation’, which appeared in a number of versions across several decades (between 1930 and 1970).

We find a highly heterogeneous group of individuals surrounding the king and sharing the diverse modalities of his presence. Based to a large extent on prosopographic data, my research attempts to define this heterogeneity by combining the possible reconstruction of individual and group family lines with a necessary understanding of the configurations of the court as a particular social world. This was a question of isolating and identifying, as far as possible, the numerous individuals surrounding the Portuguese monarch, whose presence was shown through the performance of court duties and by their mention in contemporary lists of names, so making their presence indisputable. Examination of their biographies shows, more than anything, the variety of individuals in their social standing, as well as the specific, variable position that they occupied within the court.

To this general characteristic of the court must also be added another, no less important, which is related to the construction of hierarchies, and is an essential criterion of ordinance in the light of the concepts of the actual age. Viewed globally, the court was a social, hierarchic universe both at its interior and because of the verifiable articulation between its internal divisions and those of society at the end of the Middle Ages. By starting off from a vast group of biographical lines spanning almost two centuries, it was possible to confirm that the careers of the servants of the king played a part in these logics which lie beyond the individual and enclose him within the more or less consistent fabric of a group, characterised by distinct forms of being and behaving and marked by the global design of the actual positions which fell to each one.

When describing the festivities which the Infante Henry held in his city of Viseu during the first decade of the fifteenth century, the chronicler Zurara comments: ‘pareçia a algũus estramgeiros que per alli passauam que aquelle ajuntamento nom era senam corte de rre’. Thus he stressed the importance of the court as a mechanism that made apparent the grandeur and magnificence of the monarchs through the ‘ajuntamento’ or human concentration brought about by their presence. However, the chronicler referred also to a common process of imitation or repetition of this grandeur in the households of the great princes of the age. In order to understand this cultural and political process in the context of the societies of the end of the Middle Ages, I have found that it is useful to maintain a certain distinction between what would on the one hand be the king's household, on the other the royal court and, finally, the actual ‘court society’ as a human configuration and a specific field of social relationships.

As I believe I have proved in the first chapters of this book, the household of the monarch was merely one part of the medieval royal court; an essential part, without doubt, but one on which a restrictive study does not allow for an evaluation of the diversity of functions to which the medieval concept referred.

What are the overall characteristics of the presence of this group of men and women alongside the Portuguese monarchs who, as stated above, shared the same material and symbolic spaces? How were they integrated in these spaces, and what relationship did they build among themselves, and with the monarchs? In an attempt to answer these questions, medieval sources once again respond with a diverse panorama, so giving rise to further questions. In the first analysis, we find that this was a matter of a constant presence in some cases and of a more precarious duration in others; paid in some cases, in others not, according to the way in which the individuals (or even certain groups) made use of the complex group of roles and functions at court. In my opinion, the identification and study of these characteristic forms of participation are an indispensable, empirical basis for the study of the court as a social configuration of the past. In fact, whether it is theoretical proposals of the sociology of configuration which are adopted, the abstract perspective of the theory of systems, or the more restricted optic of the theory of social exchange, I believe it to be beyond doubt that the understanding of court society requires to be nurtured directly with the wealth resulting from the actual process of construction of historical sources, with new data and new theories arising which present a greater degree of coherence and explanatory capacity of the cultural reality of pre-modern societies in their variety and specificity.