The Historical Afterlife of Two Capetian Co- Kings Who

Chapter 7 The Historical Afterlife of Two Capetian Co- Kings Who Predeceased Their Fathers William Chester Jordan One of the Capetians’ greatest successes was the smooth and largely unchal- lenged transfers of authority after Hugh Capet until the accession of Philip II Augustus. Every king after Hugh down to and including Philip II had two cor- onations, one as the king’s eldest son and while his father lived, the other after the older man died. This system, co-kingship or associative kingship, has been well- studied by a number of scholars, including notably Andrew Lewis, who have been interested in determining its roots and parallels in other royal and aristocratic traditions of inheritance.1 What it attempted to do was to assure that no king’s death left a power vacuum, since the new king would already be a reigning and anointed monarch. Of course, to what extent any junior king had responsibilities depended on the senior king’s personality, on his health, and on the political conditions in the interval between the son’s accession and his father’s demise. But it is pretty clear that the Capetians were luckier in this respect than several other dynasties that sporadically practiced associative kingship contemporary with them or later on. For example, in the twelfth century Henry II of England’s son, Henry the Young King, was willful, resentful, peevish, stupid, and altogether charming. These are my words, but they mirror W. L. Warren’s in his magisterial 1973 biography of Henry II: “He [the Young King] was gracious, benign, affable, courteous, the soul of liberality and generosity. Unfortunately he was also shal- low, vain, careless, high- hoped, incompetent, improvident, and irresponsible.”2 His rebellion against his father while he was co- king achieved little politically and, his charm notwithstanding, the man was a major generator of distress for the Angevin Empire. He died of dysentery while engaged in another rebellion against his father, after having been forgiven for his first one. 1 Andrew Lewis, Royal Succession in Capetian France (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1981). An early version of this article was presented at the 45th Annual International Congress on Medieval Studies at Western Michigan University, Kalamazoo, MI, on 15 May 2010. 2 W. L. Warren, Henry II (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1973), 580. © Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2018 | DOI 10.1163/9789004368002_009 The Historical Afterlife of Two Capetian Co-Kings 115 To move to another and later example, in the fifteenth century, Ivan III the Great, the grand prince of Muscovy, following the death of his own son, also named Ivan, designated this Ivan’s son as heir in 1491. Seven years later he had the sixteen- year old boy, Dmitry Ivanovich by name, consecrated in an elaborate ceremony, proclaiming him tsar (caesar).3 But there is no evidence that, either in the time when Dmitry Ivanovich was heir designate or while he was co- tsar with Ivan the Great, the older man let him exercise any significant authority. Rather, the bitter adolescent had to play third or fourth fiddle to an uncle and other intimate minions of the senior tsar. The boy and his equally bitter mother chafed and began to conspire against Ivan III. Three years after the most ostentatious coronation ever seen to that time in Muscovy, Dmitry was stripped of his title and thrown into prison where he died a miserable death, allegedly by strangulation, after seven years’ incarceration. His mother was poisoned.4 The absence of the Capetians’ luck elsewhere, as the cases in England and Muscovy suggest, may help explain the inconsistent or non- practice of associative kingship in a number of royal, princely and aristocratic lineages, in addi- tion to those mentioned, as well as the desire in other polities to privilege the elective or designative principle instead of going over to strict primogeniture. Election and designation, after all, whatever their problems and complica- tions, provided a means to bypass a potential primogenitary heir who was fee- bleminded, insane, alcoholic, heretical, criminal, unnaturally lazy, cripplingly disabled, too young for direct rule, or had a demonstrated history of gross immorality according to contemporary standards.5 The hope, when a junior king was nominated and anointed in France, was that he would outlive his father. Twice, however, in the history of the Capetian succession before Philip II, fate trumped hope. The first case is that of Robert II the Pious’s junior king, named Hugh, who was associated with his father from 1017 to 1026, the date of Hugh’s death. Robert II ruled from 996 until 1031. A year or so after young Hugh’s death, Robert associated his eldest living son, Henry, with him. It is this Henry whom we now know as Henry I, and in 1059, the year before he died, he in turn associated his son, who is known in 3 George Majeska, “The Moscow Coronation of 1498 Reconsidered,” Jahrbücher für Geschichte Osteuropas, 26 (1978), 353– 61. 4 Prince A.M. Kurbsky’s History of Ivan IV, ed. and trans. J.L.I. Fennell (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1965), 169. 5 Gilles Lecuppre, “Ordre capétien et confusion germanique. La Competition royale dans les sources françaises au XIIIe siècle,” in Convaincre et persuader: Communication et propaganda aux XIIe et XIIIe siècles, ed. Martin Aurell (Poitiers: Université de Poitiers, 2007), 513–31. .

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