Children have been integral to kingship for as long as there have been kings, if not as rulers themselves then as kings-in-waiting, heirs to the throne, conduits for aristocratic discontent or members of royal households being raised at court. Recent scholarship has emphasised the importance of viewing royal courts and households as ‘all-age’ institutions rather than exclusively adult environments.Footnote ¹ Conversely, role-playing kingship has long formed a recognisable part of childhood play. Folkloric and historical traditions have exploited these confluences between monarchy’s incorporation of children and children’s games of kingship. Herodotus revealed the regal birth of King Cyrus II ‘the Great’ (d. c. 529 B.C.) through the story of village children playing king. When the boys chose the ten-year-old Cyrus – who had been raised by shepherds ever since his grandfather had ordered his death as an infant – from among their number to rule them, he did the job too well, offended the son of a prominent noble and thus revealed his true royal nature at court.Footnote ² Boy kings are to be expected wherever dynasties place value on blood-right to rule, but different monarchies have incorporated children in distinct ways, meaning children’s experiences of rule have varied. Over time, the practical realities of a child’s succession, early years of kingship and progression to maturity can change. Contemporary attitudes towards child rulership also fluctuate. Sometimes such shifts occur gradually, in line with other political developments; at other moments, immediate responses to kingdom-specific circumstances demand more rapid change. Later chapters will argue for the evolution of child kingship over the period c. 1050 to c. 1250. The present chapter compares pre- and post-1050 examples of child rulership to stress two interrelated points which distinguish children’s experiences in the central Middle Ages from earlier centuries.

First, contextualising the experiences of child rulers through the lens of longer-term trends reveals the greater political stability of a child’s rule between the eleventh and thirteenth centuries. Certain characteristics and stereotypes habitually associated with child kingship, such as violent attempts to remove children from their thrones and domineering, regicidal uncles, were less common in the central medieval period than earlier, especially in north-western Europe. Royal children faced less direct competition at their succession than child claimants in past centuries. Boy kings were now increasingly likely to make it through their childhood and early reign alive. Their reigns were not cut short prematurely through assassination or deposition, political tactics regularly witnessed in the preceding period. The second point is connected to the first and helps, in part, to explain it. The greater political stability of child kingship during the central Middle Ages was due to a combination of structural societal, cultural, political and legal developments which influenced both the conceptual framework of medieval rulership and the practicalities of a boy sitting on the throne. Many of these changes likewise facilitated the succession of aristocratic and noble children to their inheritances. Other shifts were unique to royal cases, especially the amplified status of anointing. These wider changes influenced the attitudes of ruling elites towards child kingship. From the eleventh century onwards, and certainly by the thirteenth century, there was less open hostility to a child’s rule, both at moments of succession and during periods of minority. Princes and other magnates, for the most part, now directed their time and resources towards opposing the guardians of young kings and those responsible for governing the realm rather than attempting to remove and replace child rulers.Footnote ³

Previous explanations for the apparent shift in dynastic and noble investment in child kingship have centred on primogeniture’s establishment as the predominant dynastic principle across medieval Europe. According to this picture, multiple inheritance claims between generations diminished as the ruling elite increasingly accepted primogenital hereditary succession. The frequency of royal minorities therefore increased, except in kingdoms where an elective aspect held greater sway for royal succession.Footnote ⁴ There are several problems with emphasising primogeniture’s widespread influence in isolation. First, extensive scrutiny of these ideas at an aristocratic level has long revealed serious flaws in such a model.Footnote ⁵ Secondly, elective and hereditary principles were not always in opposition.Footnote ⁶ Finally, within the more specific context of child kingship, Offergeld has comprehensively impugned any direct relationship between primogeniture’s spread and the likelihood of a child ruler.Footnote ⁷ This simplistic paradigm does not account for the dominance of hereditary principles in early medieval dynasties, such as the Merovingians. It also risks overemphasising royal adherence to exact rules of inheritance in north-western Europe in the eleventh and twelfth centuries.

Changing cultural attitudes towards violence, evolving practices of succession and inheritance, and shifting ideas around marriage, illegitimacy and queenship all fundamentally altered the court environments into which royal children were born, the political context within which they succeeded, and the practicalities and precarities of their early experiences of rulership. This chapter examines violence, succession and queenship in turn before, in the fourth and final section, arguing for the need to revise claims of Germany’s exceptional ‘rejection’ of child kingship. Of necessity, much of what follows in this chapter is indebted to scholars working on the earlier Middle Ages. I compare characterisations and examples drawn from this scholarship with pertinent cases between the eleventh and thirteenth centuries. The eight case studies at the centre of this book sometimes feature here, but they are not the sole focus since more detailed examination of these follows in Parts II and III.

Royal Children and Violence

Whereas murder and deposition were unexceptional fortunes for child rulers across the earlier Middle Ages, children were highly unlikely to encounter a similarly violent end between the eleventh and thirteenth centuries, especially after inauguration. Violence against child heirs and boy kings appears most dramatically as a feature of Merovingian political life in the sixth and seventh centuries.Footnote ⁸ Gregory of Tours chillingly recounts how Childebert and Chlothar assassinated their two nephews, sons of Chlodomer (d. 524), along with the boys’ servants and tutors. Jealousy at the attention lavished on the children motivated their uncles, as did fear that the boys might claim a share in royal power in future.Footnote ⁹ A century later, Sigibert II’s great-grandmother, Brunhild, tried to promote his royal claim after his father’s death in 613. Brunhild’s campaign failed and, later that year, Chlothar II of Neustria executed her and the eleven-year-old boy.Footnote ¹⁰ The assassination of kings and princes as children or adolescents was also relatively common in England between the seventh and tenth centuries. Many of these boys and youths were subsequently venerated as innocent martyrs and saints.Footnote ¹¹ The latest and most well-known case is the murder of the adolescent Edward, son of Edgar and his consort Æthelflæd, in 978.Footnote ¹²

There are indications that violence towards child rulers was already becoming less politically and culturally acceptable from the later tenth century, both in England and elsewhere. Levi Roach has suggested that Edward’s death was taken so seriously during Æthelred’s reign because of the growth of ideas about the God-given nature of royal authority.Footnote ¹³ Æthelred himself was accepted as king in 978 after his half-brother’s death, when he was no more than twelve years old and may have been a couple of years younger. Around the same time in Germany, the archbishops of Ravenna and Mainz crowned the three-year-old Otto III at Aachen on Christmas Day 983. Shortly after the ceremony, when the German princes received the news that Emperor Otto II had died in Rome, Henry, duke of Bavaria, took custody of the new infant king. Conflicting accounts make it hard to decipher whether the Bavarian duke forcibly captured Otto or whether the boy was entrusted to him. Either way, Henry undoubtedly used his guardianship of the child to political advantage. It is less certain whether he ever advocated for Otto’s deposition. In the first half of 984, several princes supported the duke’s claim to royal authority, but Henry likely aspired, at most, to some form of co-rulership along a Byzantine model.Footnote ¹⁴ There is no evidence that the duke or any of the ruling elite intended to murder, maim or blind this boy king to undermine his claim or remove him from the throne.

The move away from the mutilation or murder of boy kings and child heirs cannot be attributed solely to a decline in violence against anointed rulers.Footnote ¹⁵ Assassination plots directed against English kings were still common throughout the twelfth century, with attempts on Henry I’s life in 1118 and Stephen’s in 1149, along with several attempted assassinations of Henry II.Footnote ¹⁶ The German ruler Philip of Swabia was assassinated in 1208. Yet none of the boy kings at the centre of this book faced any such attempts on their lives during their childhood, as far as is possible to tell from the surviving evidence.Footnote ¹⁷ The development and wider circulation of chivalric ideals which condemned the killing or maiming of members of the aristocracy had an important role in altering acceptable practices and norms of violence between the eleventh and thirteenth centuries.Footnote ¹⁸ Shifting cultural attitudes towards children may also have played some part, although we must avoid the temptation to view this within a neat teleology of increasing sentimentality and compassion. There was no novel, cohesive desire to protect all children. Any decline in violence only benefited restrictively conceived cohorts of royal offspring.

Violence of course persisted, and boys and girls considered to be outside the royal line – which was becoming far more carefully curated, as we will see – could pay a severe price, even in the thirteenth century. In Scotland, the MacWilliams, a competing dynastic line which had intermittently but consistently challenged the kings of Scots from the 1170s, came to a horrifically violent end when its sole surviving representative, a new-born girl, was murdered at Forfar in 1230.Footnote ¹⁹ Elsewhere across north-western Europe, practices of murdering or mutilating royal children for political purposes seem to have dwindled by the thirteenth century. These tactics were more prolonged in some southern kingdoms due, in part, to the prevalent influence of Byzantium.Footnote ²⁰ When Henry VI arrived in Palermo in 1194 to claim the Sicilian throne from its twelve-year-old regulus William III, he imprisoned the boy’s mother, Sybilla, who had been governing the kingdom for her son. William himself may have been blinded or even castrated, although the exact nature of his punishment has been much debated.Footnote ²¹ Several decades later, the penalty of death fell on another claimant to the Sicilian throne, the sixteen-year-old Conradin, Frederick II’s grandson. Conradin’s fate was implemented with a legal meticulousness not afforded to the MacWilliam baby. Charles of Anjou had the youth executed in October 1268, after Conradin’s defeat at the battle of Tagliacozzo.Footnote ²² Conradin suffered an adult punishment for treason, beheaded for having the temerity to try to assert what he and his supporters perceived to be his dynastic right to claim his father’s and grandfather’s inheritance. Killing and mutilating boy kings or the children of anointed rulers was often a morally dubious political strategy from the perspective of the Church and in the eyes of many monastic chroniclers. At moments when royal murder became a more frequent element of political life, as in fifteenth-century England, royal children likewise became more prominent targets for violent attacks.Footnote ²³ On the whole, however, as we move from the early to the central Middle Ages, there was less resort to this tactic than before.

Succession and Inheritance

It had become far easier by the central medieval period to place a child on the throne than to depose one. Infancy and childhood had regularly hindered the succession of young boys before the eleventh century because their immature age had eclipsed all other factors such as their birth position, their father’s kingship or their mother’s status. Carolingian society seems to have viewed a child’s succession with especial suspicion and concern.Footnote ²⁴ Charles the Simple (b. 879), youngest son of Louis the Stammerer (846–79), was twice passed over at moments of royal succession. The immediate political and military necessity for a king who could both fight against and negotiate with Vikings made Charles’s infancy pivotal in denying him the throne in both cases. At the death of his eighteen-year-old half-brother Carloman II, king of West Francia, in 884, the five-year-old Charles was pushed aside in favour of his cousin, Charles the Fat, who was in his mid-forties. When the elder Charles was deposed in 887, the nobility again turned to competing adult contenders rather than the young boy. That Charles the Simple did not become a focal point for such factional politics until he reached adolescence several years later demonstrates the significant role his youth played in twice denying him the throne.Footnote ²⁵ In East Francia, by contrast, the six-year-old Louis ‘the Child’ succeeded to his father’s throne unchallenged in 900.

A marked preference for fraternal succession in certain earlier medieval dynasties also meant that royal children were not necessarily considered the most appropriate candidates to succeed their fathers. The West Saxon royal family habitually relied on the throne passing between brothers during the ninth and tenth centuries. A king’s son needed to have left childhood behind to be accepted within the cohort of æthelings, adult princes of the royal kin.Footnote ²⁶ When Æthelred I died in 871, the throne passed to his younger brother, Alfred, much as Æthelred himself had succeeded another brother, Æthelberht, in 865. Alfred had extensive experience of governing and had proven himself militarily capable, not least in helping to defeat Vikings at Ashdown in 870. Although Æthelred I had left two infant sons, Æthelwold and Æthelhelm, there was little contemporary expectation that either of them should directly succeed their father to the West Saxon throne. Alfred’s nephews did not contest his succession, nor did the political elite fracture in support of the children. It was only after Alfred’s death in 899 that Æthelwold – now in the prime of his adulthood – displayed greater eagerness to assert a royal claim when he rebelled against Alfred’s son, Edward.Footnote ²⁷

Youth alone was less convincing an argument for circumventing a child’s claim to the throne in the central Middle Ages, as notions of inheritance and royal succession shifted towards filial succession favouring the eldest son. Arthur of Brittany’s (1187–1203) young age did little to constrain contemporary views that he was a serious claimant to the English kingship after Richard’s death in 1199, and there was a swell of support for Arthur’s right to inherit the Plantagenet territories of Anjou, Maine and the Touraine.Footnote ²⁸ John was still able to bypass his twelve-year-old nephew, son of John’s elder brother Geoffrey, in the royal succession, but factors other than Arthur’s age proved far more pivotal.Footnote ²⁹ There is little documentary evidence that Arthur ever intended to claim the throne. If he had, both the boy’s absence from England and his uncle’s coronation and anointing would have made it far harder to combat John’s immediate assertion of kingship. Intra-familial competition for the thrones of north-western Europe did not disappear entirely over the central medieval period, but cases which pitted young boys against tried and tested men with avid political support were far rarer. Relatives still served as nuclei for magnate discontent, but male kin usually deemed their greatest chance of power lay in increasing their control over royal government rather than replacing the child as king.Footnote ³⁰ This was less true in the Iberian kingdoms, where paternal uncles posed a greater dynastic challenge to boy rulers. Ferdinand, abbot of Montearagón and brother of Peter II, king of Aragon (r. 1196–1213), attempted to claim the throne of his young nephew, James I, after the five-year-old succeeded his father in 1213.Footnote ³¹ In late thirteenth-century Castile, Sancho IV’s claim to the throne was recognised over the claims of his two infant nephews.Footnote ³²

Adult relatives less frequently displaced the claims of young boys from the eleventh century, but children were still passed over, on occasion, at moments of royal succession. In such cases, however, youth was not always the root cause for the child’s exclusion. In England, young age was less decisive in discounting Edgar Ætheling (b. c. 1052) from the succession in both January and October 1066 than other factors such as Earl Harold’s oath-breaking and dwindling magnate commitment in the face of Duke William’s military victory.Footnote ³³ A few decades later, when Duncan II, king of Scots, was murdered in 1094, he left an infant son, William fitz Duncan (d. 1151x4). Although William’s infancy undoubtedly prevented him from mounting an immediate campaign for the Scottish kingship, he would have faced an uphill battle even as an adult contender. Duncan II had had to drive out his own uncle, Donald III, to become king and then barely held the throne a year before a local magnate killed him. There is little evidence that William’s contemporaries ever considered him a serious contender for the royal succession, even later in his life, and he unwaveringly supported his uncle, David I, as king. Only the Orkneyinga Saga, written more than a century afterwards and likely influenced by the later uprisings of William’s descendants, suggests that members of the Scottish political community saw William as a potential royal contender during his lifetime.Footnote ³⁴ Male primogeniture was not yet as important for succession to the Scottish kingship at the end of the twelfth century as it was to become a century later. Moreover, the tenacity of dynastic challenges to the kings of Scots through to 1230 reveals a pervasive ambiguity regarding which branch of the broadly conceived royal family held the strongest primogenital claim to the kingship.Footnote ³⁵

Royal children in north-western Europe also encountered fewer competing succession claims from their half- or step-siblings from the mid-eleventh century, as well as facing fewer contenders from among their adult kin. Partible inheritance which divided the regnum among brothers had been a regular occurrence before the central Middle Ages, especially among the Carolingian rulers and the East and West Saxon kings. In summer 957, two years after King Eadred’s death, the English kingdom was divided between his nephews. Eadwig (c. 940–59), then aged around sixteen or seventeen, served as king in Wessex and his younger brother, Edgar (943x4–75), as king in Mercia and Northumbria.Footnote ³⁶ Similar partitions of the English realm occurred into the eleventh century, although often such provisions did not last very long. Partible arrangements or multiple kingships were becoming less politically appealing, and were no longer considered a viable option, especially in Germany and France.Footnote ³⁷ There seems to have been little appetite among the political elite for kings to divide their realms as they had done formerly, although composite territories could still be treated differently. The suggestion by Alfonso X of Castile and León (r. 1252–84) that he might partition his kingdom led his son Sancho to gather the realm’s leading men, who transferred authority to the prince and essentially deposed Alfonso as king, leaving him the royal title alone.Footnote ³⁸ While this example comes from the Iberian kingdoms, where the partible inheritance of royal domains was still common across the eleventh and twelfth centuries, it is a further indication of shifting political opinion even there by the later thirteenth century.

Child rulers were never the option of last resort, accepted solely in the absence of other royal contenders. Moments when a kingdom’s elite deliberately turned to a child to avert further political disruption or to eschew alternative ways of managing the realm warn against over-exaggerating political hostility towards child rulership. Child claimants, when backed by powerful elites, could present a serious challenge to adult kings whose political support was less stable, even in the earlier Middle Ages. In eighth-century Northumbria, King Aldfrith died leaving his eight-year-old son Osred with a claim to the kingship. Although Eadwulf, an adult challenger, initially gained the throne in 704x5, a faction supported by Bishop Wilfrid rallied behind the boy and deposed Eadwulf within two months of his accession. Osred then ruled Northumbria until he was killed in 716.Footnote ³⁹ Four centuries later, an infant girl offered the Aragonese nobility a means of overturning her uncle’s deathbed wish to leave the kingdom to military orders while also avoiding rule by Castile. After King Alfonso’s death in 1134, his brother, the monk Ramiro, had been brought out of his monastery and married to Agnes, daughter of the duke of Aquitaine and countess of Toulouse. Their daughter, Petronilla, was born in 1136, and a year later, the infant’s marriage to Count Ramon Berenguer IV of Barcelona legitimised her spouse to rule Aragon in her stead.Footnote ⁴⁰ A final example shows how, by the later end of our period, royal children could even be accepted as rulers in absentia, before setting foot in the kingdom they were designated to rule. In January 1284, the Scottish political community recognised the young Margaret (1282x3–90), often called the ‘Maid of Norway’, as Alexander III’s rightful heir. She was accepted as ruler of Scotland after Alexander’s death but died en route to the kingdom in 1290.Footnote ⁴¹ Some of the cases I have just cited raise additional issues because they involve royal girls. Although girls are not the focus of the following chapters, these examples further reinforce the fact that infants and young children were more than simply political tools ripe for adult exploitation. Children could be the focal point of hope for a ruling elite, symbols of royal and dynastic continuity, and synonymous with aspirations for a kingdom’s peace and stability.

Children’s claims to kingship had not received wholehearted endorsement throughout the earlier Middle Ages. During the central medieval period, the eldest son of an anointed king and queen came to have a position as lawful and rightful heir to the throne which was less contested. It became commonplace for the king’s eldest son to be raised in awareness that the royal title was his birthright. The child’s education proceeded in the full expectation that he would succeed his father on the throne.Footnote ⁴² The lineal descent of the Capetian dynasty is the classic, though in many ways anomalous, example from among the kingdoms of north-western Europe. The French throne passed from father to eldest surviving son in an unbroken sequence from Hugh Capet’s succession in 987 through to 1316.Footnote ⁴³ Even though patterns of succession in other kingdoms of north-western Europe look less consistent by comparison, greater emphasis on a child’s birth position, notions of the eldest son’s right to inherit his father’s patrimony and the preference for filial over fraternal succession had become more significant aspects of royal succession over the central Middle Ages than in earlier centuries. Changing ideas about the office of queenship played a similarly important role in consolidating more widespread acceptance of royal children as rulers.

Queenship, Marriage and Illegitimacy

Disputed successions involving the competing claims of multiple children fathered by the same king but with different mothers had been an especially fractious feature of early medieval polities. When Edgar, king of the English, died in 975, he was survived by two sons, both born during his reign and both still children. The royal court divided, each faction siding with a different boy.Footnote ⁴⁴ Some supported Edward, Edgar’s eldest son, who was likely in his early to mid-teens when his father died. His mother was Edgar’s first spouse, Æthelflæd. Others backed the younger son Æthelred, born between 966 and 969 to Edgar’s third spouse, Ælfthryth. Æthelflæd’s status as Edgar’s consort is less certain than that of Ælfthryth, who was anointed and crowned as queen at Bath in 973, but possibly also in an earlier ceremony around the time of her marriage in 964.Footnote ⁴⁵ His mother’s status undoubtedly added weight to Æthelred’s case, making him the son of an anointed king and an anointed queen. Elsewhere, maternal lineage was already having an impact in circumventing eldest sons’ claims to the kingship, as in the early Ottonian case of Thankmar, son of Henry I of East Francia (r. 919–36).Footnote ⁴⁶ In tenth-century England, however, Ælfthryth’s queenly status was not enough, ultimately, to prevent the acceptance, coronation and consecration of Æthelflæd’s son Edward.Footnote ⁴⁷

A generation later, a similar situation arose following Cnut’s death in 1035, although the two sons he left competing for the throne were both adult men. The eldest, Harold Harefoot (d. 1040), whose mother Ælfgifu of Northampton came from a powerful Mercian family, was ultimately successful, though did not live long to enjoy his achievement.Footnote ⁴⁸ In the brief few years of his reign, Harold faced challenges not only from his half-brother Harthacnut (d. 1042), Cnut’s son with his second consort Queen Emma, but also, uniquely, from Emma’s two sons from her first marriage to King Æthelred.Footnote ⁴⁹ This was an exceptional case, which pitted against each other children with the same mother whose fathers were successive kings. Harthacnut was Emma’s youngest son, but he may have had a slight edge over her children with Æthelred in terms of their mother’s anointed status at the time of their births. Debates regarding the nature of Emma’s royal inaugurations alongside her two husbands centre around which ceremony incorporated her consecration. Elisabeth van Houts, building on Pauline Stafford’s analysis of surviving liturgical evidence, has suggested that Emma’s sole consecration as queen was in July 1017 and that she had only been crowned, not anointed, at the earlier ceremony with Æthelred in 1002.Footnote ⁵⁰ It is hard to assert with certainty how the 1002 ceremony was conducted, but, regardless of when Emma’s anointing took place, Harold Harefoot’s ascent to the throne in 1035 confirms that a mother’s identity as anointed queen was not yet necessary to prove her son’s throneworthiness.

Contested royal successions which pitted children’s claims against each other are rarer in the following centuries and largely absent from the kingdoms of England, Scotland, France and Germany after the mid-eleventh century. Procreational providence played a significant part since it was entirely out of a ruler’s control how soon into sexually active life they would have children, how many sexual partners it would take before they had a son, or indeed whether they would ever have a male child. Kings did not stop fathering sons by multiple women but, over the central medieval period, there were more restrictions on which boys were seen to have a claim to kingship.Footnote ⁵¹ King John had at least seven children in addition to his two sons and three daughters with Queen Isabella of Angoulême (c. 1188–1246), but only Isabella’s sons, Henry and Richard, were deemed eligible to ascend the English throne in 1216.Footnote ⁵² All John’s other children appear to have been born before 1200 and must have been adolescents or young adults by the time of their father’s death. Although they were several years older than the nine-year-old Henry and seven-year-old Richard, and some of their mothers were noblewomen from prominent families, no one viewed John’s bastard sons as rallying points for court factions. Even during the turbulent period of baronial warfare and civil war between 1215 and 1217, these young men did not become outlets for magnate discontent or possible contenders to the throne.

Changing marital practices, or the decline in polygamy at a royal level,Footnote ⁵³ only go part of the way to explaining a shift which focused political support behind a single child rather than multiple competing siblings. Sara McDougall has demonstrated that efforts to exclude ‘illegitimate’ children from royal succession in north-western Europe were far more complex and protracted than once thought. Canon law definitions of legitimate marriage began to influence ideas of inheritance only from the later twelfth century, and it was over the thirteenth century that kingship became more resolutely associated with ideas of legitimate birth.Footnote ⁵⁴ Prior to the thirteenth century, lineage, both paternal and maternal, mattered more than marital status. Regal status on both their paternal and maternal sides supported children’s dynastic claims to royal rule, even eclipsing earlier criticism their parents’ marriage may have attracted. Vehement denunciation of Agnes of Poitou’s marriage to the German ruler Henry III never affected their son Henry IV’s claim to the throne.Footnote ⁵⁵ It is no coincidence that, from the mid-eleventh century, nearly all kings who acceded to their thrones as children were the sons of two inaugurated rulers, both father and mother. Malcolm IV, king of Scots, is the exception from among the eight cases at the centre of this study. His father died rex designatus in 1152, not yet inaugurated king of Scots. His mother, Ada de Warenne (c. 1123–78), was never a royal consort or inaugurated queen, although she had been first lady of the Scottish kingdom since her marriage to Earl Henry in 1139 and she played an important role at Malcolm’s court.Footnote ⁵⁶ Kings of Scots only began to seek coronation from the first half of the thirteenth century and did not receive papal recognition of their right to royal unction for another century, so the status and identity of Scottish royal children were far less tightly bound to their mother’s inauguration and consecration.Footnote ⁵⁷

In the case of queenship, we can trace the shift from earlier to central Middle Ages with greater chronological precision. Over the ninth, tenth and early eleventh centuries, political elites across north-western Europe had not, as yet, consistently accepted that an inaugurated queen’s children had the strongest right to rule. Nor had the queen’s anointed status prevented magnates from uniting around alternative candidates with less regal maternal lineage. The office of queenship developed significantly between the ninth and eleventh centuries, with adjustments to the queen’s role and status in one kingdom often influencing comparable changes in other realms.Footnote ⁵⁸ Adelheid, Otto I’s consort, had received imperial consecration in Rome with her husband in 962, as had Theophanu with Otto II a decade later, but the first royal inauguration ceremony for a queen in the German realm was Cunigunde’s in 1002.Footnote ⁵⁹ It was only after this date, and then only for the next two and a half centuries, that marriage, anointing and coronation became more consistently entwined with the office of queenship in Germany, in addition to imperial consecration.Footnote ⁶⁰ In France, Anne of Kyiv (c. 1024–75?), Philip I’s mother, was the first queen of the Capetian dynasty to celebrate her marriage and coronation at Reims cathedral. The location chosen for the Pentecost 1051 ceremony drew on a long tradition of royal inaugurations under the West Frankish kings and queens and was becoming ever more important to Capetian royal identity. This was a significant dynastic investment in queenly status.Footnote ⁶¹

Developing ideas of the office of queenship combined with changing social and cultural attitudes towards marriage and illegitimacy to restrict the cohort of children deemed eligible for royal rule. As the office of queenship became further entrenched, interwoven ever more closely with marriage, coronation and consecration, the maternal status of an anointed queen’s sons was enhanced accordingly, placing them closer to the throne than any half-siblings their father might conceive with other women.Footnote ⁶² Louis VII, king of France (r. 1137–80), had three wives, like King Edgar, but all three women were crowned and anointed queens. Divorce or death marked the clear termination of their sexual relationships with the king. Only Louis’s third wife, Queen Adela of Champagne (d. 1206), bore the king his much-awaited son and heir, the future Philip II. There is no indication that Louis would have satisfied his desire for a son to succeed him by turning to a woman other than his anointed consort. By the later twelfth century, in the eyes of rulers and the political elite, only a wife and anointed regina could provide the king with his male heir. At around the same time, perceived slights against royal women which deprived them of their full regal status began to cause acute familial concern.Footnote ⁶³

The significance of this association between the office of queenship and royal children’s legitimacy is especially pronounced in England by the latter end of the central Middle Ages. Louise Wilkinson has linked John’s divorce of his first wife, Isabella of Gloucester, with the ruler’s desire for heirs born of a legitimate wife and queen consort rather than a consanguineous marriage.Footnote ⁶⁴ That the English chancery continued to address Isabella of Angoulême as regina not only after John’s death but even after her remarriage to Hugh de Lusignan in 1221 heightened political tensions reinforces Wilkinson’s suggestion.Footnote ⁶⁵ Anything less than the preservation of Isabella’s full regal status risked a corresponding diminishment of her young son’s position on the throne. Changing ideas around marriage, maternal status and queenship over the central medieval period gradually made the cohort of ‘throneworthy’ royal children far more limited than throughout much of the earlier Middle Ages. Interconnected developments in inheritance and royal succession further endorsed these children’s claims to kingship.

Child Kingship: A German sonderweg?

Preventing a king’s eldest, legitimate son from succeeding to his father’s throne, even if he was still a child, had become harder over the central Middle Ages. At first glance, Germany appears to present a serious exception to this norm. After Conrad III’s death in February 1152, his seven-year-old son, later known as Frederick of Rothenburg, was passed over as king in favour of Conrad’s nephew, Frederick Barbarossa.Footnote ⁶⁶ In 1198, the German princes elected and crowned Philip of Swabia as king rather than his four-year-old nephew, the future Frederick II, who was the son of the previous ruler, Emperor Henry VI.Footnote ⁶⁷ Finally, during the 1250s and 1260s, Frederick II’s young grandson, Conradin, similarly failed to secure the German throne after the death of his father, Conrad IV (r. 1237–54).

The myth of Germany’s distinctive political and constitutional development (Sonderweg) during the central Middle Ages emphasised the predominance of an elective principle in German royal succession, of which the ‘rejection’ of child rulership formed a crucial strand. John Gillingham first challenged the general acceptance of German kingship’s elective character, showing that election had not yet replaced hereditary principles as the guiding tenet of royal succession in the twelfth century or even by the early thirteenth.Footnote ⁶⁸ Timothy Reuter further eroded the role of princely election in the Sonderweg myth by demonstrating that differences in royal succession between Germany, France and England were far less dramatic than often presented. It was not until 1291 that, in Reuter’s words, ‘an adult son of a just-deceased ruler was passed over for the succession in Germany’ for the first time.Footnote ⁶⁹ Despite decisive rebuffs of elective kingship’s widespread acceptance before 1250, an underlying implication remains that the hesitancy to incorporate children within German kingship was something inherently different. Reuter, for example, in noting that the elective aspect of German succession appeared only when there was no ‘normal’ heir, thereby consigned children to a category of royal abnormality for which there is little contemporary evidence or comparative exemplar.Footnote ⁷⁰

The cases of Frederick of Rothenburg, Frederick II and Conradin can, however, be explained in other ways than simply a forthright exclusion of children from royal succession in the Empire. Chroniclers in the Empire and as far afield as Constantinople and Hamāh (Syria) recognised Barbarossa’s succession in 1152 as highly unusual precisely because it bypassed the young boy’s claims, depriving him of his father’s inheritance.Footnote ⁷¹ The official justification of Barbarossa’s ascent to the throne, as recounted by the new king’s uncle, Otto of Freising, claimed that Conrad III wanted Barbarossa to succeed him because he despaired that his son, the parvulus Frederick, would ever be raised as king. Even Otto recognised Frederick’s age as only one motive alongside other, more enigmatic ‘private and public reasons’ for Conrad’s actions.Footnote ⁷² The author also qualified his statement that the political community had unanimously preferred Barbarossa to the young Frederick with the ambiguous ut dictum est (as it is said).Footnote ⁷³

Turning to Frederick II’s failure to claim the German throne in 1198 reveals another case, similar to that of Arthur of Brittany, in which a child’s geographical distance from the realm helped negate earlier recognition from the political elite that he should succeed as king. The infant Frederick was far from the action in Palermo in 1198, and papal opposition to the uniting of Sicily and the empire under one ruler further complicated the situation. As soon as Frederick travelled north of the Alps in 1212, the adolescent boy was able to assert his claim, the princes accepted him, and he was crowned. By contrast, at Conrad IV’s death in southern Italy in May 1254, even the fact that his two-year-old son Conradin was present in Germany failed to help the boy’s cause. This final example of an infant’s exclusion from the German kingship falls within a highly turbulent political situation in the 1240s and 1250s, which saw the papal depositions of the adult rulers Frederick II and Conrad IV as well as the election of various competing ‘anti-kings’. There is little space here to expand on the minutiae of papal, imperial and princely politics in these years, but it is important to note that Conrad had maintained little more than a titular hold on the German kingship for much of his reign.Footnote ⁷⁴ He had been beaten in battle twice by successive opponents elected by factions of the German political elite and had died excommunicate. As the son of a twice defeated, deposed and excommunicated king, Conradin would have been an unattractive prospect for princely support in 1254 regardless of his age. Nevertheless, despite all these various obstacles to Conradin’s kingship, eight years later, when he was ten years old, at least some of the German princes considered the child enough of a viable royal candidate that they tried to further his claim, albeit unsuccessfully. The boy still managed, with the support of his mother, Elisabeth of Bavaria, Görz and Tirol, and others, to assert titular claims to the thrones of Jerusalem and Sicily and to gain recognition of his dynastic right to the duchy of Swabia.Footnote ⁷⁵

It was not inevitable that increasing reliance on elective principles would eliminate royal children’s claims, either in the Empire or elsewhere. In Germany, the struggles for the throne between 1198 and 1257, which saw multiple competing candidates and concurrent ‘elected’ rulers, played an important role in shifting norms of succession. Nonetheless, even by the mid-thirteenth century there was still no widespread expectation that these norms necessitated children’s exclusion. Frederick II staunchly relied on the German princes’ accepting child kingship. He secured his eldest son Henry (VII)’s election in 1220 and coronation in 1222, at the ages of nine and eleven respectively, and then, in 1237, the election of his second son, the nine-year-old Conrad IV. After Frederick deposed Henry (VII) in July 1235, the emperor took custody of Henry’s two sons with Margaret of Babenberg. By removing his infant grandsons from Germany, Frederick hoped to prevent any of the princes rallying around them as alternative candidates to Conrad. Frederick’s actions acknowledged, once again, the important role children played in royal succession and their incorporation within contemporary practices and conceptions of kingship. However much, then, it may look like Germany’s approach to child kingship took a different path than other kingdoms over the central Middle Ages, this was certainly not the case.

Previous studies of child kingship have principally focused on boy kings between the fifth and tenth centuries. Conclusions drawn from Merovingian, Lombard, West Saxon, Carolingian or Ottonian examples have then been adopted and applied to later centuries indiscriminately, despite cautions from scholars who have shown that a ‘one-size-fits-all’ model does not work for child rulership even in the earlier period.Footnote ⁷⁶ The later eleventh century is already widely recognised as marking an important shift in western political practices, with the century and a half after 1070 singled out as a period of marked transformation in rulership and royal authority.Footnote ⁷⁷ Although historians have paid far less attention to what such transformations meant for children, many of the structural political, legal, social and cultural changes over this dynamic period altered how royal children were integrated within the practical and conceptual framework of rulership.

It is far harder to pinpoint precisely how and why attitudes towards child kingship were shifting. Change did not take place at the same pace in the kingdoms of England, Scotland, France and Germany, and not all aspects of the larger picture painted in this chapter are found consistently in all four realms. It was only in the mid-thirteenth century that representatives of the Scottish king waged a campaign at the royal curia to secure royal anointing and, even then, their efforts were not rewarded. Germany was the sole realm to exclude a king’s eldest, legitimate son from inheriting his father’s throne. These are meaningful differences, but they should not be exaggerated, especially when modern nationalism still underpins much of the former historiographical embellishment by which political difference becomes national exceptionalism. The lack of royal anointing in the Scottish realm did not inhibit the enthusiastic acceptance of child rulership, nor did twelfth-century cases in which the German princes disregarded children’s claims prevent the political community accepting boys as rulers in the thirteenth century. The discussion here suggests that change was incremental rather than abrupt and that it was rooted in broader developments such as increasing secular investment in defining concepts of marriage and legitimacy, the heightened importance of filial succession and prioritisation of a child’s birth order, and a more widespread eschewal of politically violent strategies for deposing anointed children. The intersection of childhood and rulership has a long history, but shifting political, social and legal cultures from the eleventh century eroded many political reservations concerning child kingship, encouraged the unreserved recognition of boy kings and brought greater political stability to periods when a child was on the throne. This more positive impression of child rulership likewise appears within writing and artwork at the same time.