Angevin Empire”
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Maria Paula Rey THE VOCABULARY OF EMPIRE: GERALD OF WALES AND THE “ANGEVIN EMPIRE” MA Thesis in Late Antique, Medieval and Early Modern Studies Central European University Budapest May 2019 CEU eTD Collection THE VOCABULARY OF EMPIRE: GERALD OF WALES AND THE “ANGEVIN EMPIRE” by Maria Paula Rey (Argentina) Thesis submitted to the Department of Medieval Studies, Central European University, Budapest, in partial fulfillment of the requirements of the Master of Arts degree in Late Antique, Medieval and Early Modern Studies. Accepted in conformance with the standards of the CEU. ____________________________________________ Chair, Examination Committee ____________________________________________ Thesis Supervisor ____________________________________________ Examiner ____________________________________________ Examiner CEU eTD Collection Budapest May 2019 THE VOCABULARY OF EMPIRE: GERALD OF WALES AND THE “ANGEVIN EMPIRE” by Maria Paula Rey (Argentina) Thesis submitted to the Department of Medieval Studies, Central European University, Budapest, in partial fulfillment of the requirements of the Master of Arts degree in Late Antique, Medieval and Early Modern Studies. Accepted in conformance with the standards of the CEU. ____________________________________________ External Reader CEU eTD Collection Budapest May 2019 THE VOCABULARY OF EMPIRE: GERALD OF WALES AND THE “ANGEVIN EMPIRE” by Maria Paula Rey (Argentina) Thesis submitted to the Department of Medieval Studies, Central European University, Budapest, in partial fulfillment of the requirements of the Master of Arts degree in Late Antique, Medieval and Early Modern Studies. Accepted in conformance with the standards of the CEU. ____________________________________________ External Supervisor Budapest CEU eTD Collection May 2019 I, the undersigned, Maria Paula Rey, candidate for the MA degree in Late Antique, Medieval and Early Modern Studies, declare herewith that the present thesis is exclusively my own work, based on my research and only such external information as properly credited in notes and bibliography. I declare that no unidentified and illegitimate use was made of the work of others, and no part of the thesis infringes on any person’s or institution’s copyright. I also declare that no part of the thesis has been submitted in this form to any other institution of higher education for an academic degree. Budapest, 16 May 2019 _____________________ Signature CEU eTD Collection Abstract Since the late nineteenth century, historiography has applied the expression “Angevin Empire” to Henry II’s assemblage of lands, later inherited by his sons Richard and John. Since the 1960s, however, the expression has been largely debated. Many historians consider the use of the concept of empire as anachronistic or not consistent with the documentation. Recent works on the ‘Angevin Empire’ show how the emphasis today is on the semantics of the concept of ‘empire’ and on the need to reassess the language of the sources with a more critical approach. My research aims to establish whether there is or not an association between the Angevin Kings and imperial vocabulary, by focusing on Gerald of Wales’s late work De Principis Instructione. By analysing the imperial vocabulary he uses and also the alternative terminology applied when he is referring to the territories or power of the Angevin rulers, I intend to see if the vocabulary is in fact channelling imperial ideas about them. CEU eTD Collection i Acknowledgements I would like to express my gratitude to a number of people. First, to my supervisor Gábor Klaniczay, for his patience, guidance and help. Second, to Eszter Tímar, for her support and constant encouragement. I would also like to thank the people at the Department of Medieval Studies for giving me the opportunity to study with them. Last, I need to thank my family, because without them none of this would have been possible. To my mum, my dad and my sister. To my life partner Julián and to my dear Honey. You are my reason for everything. CEU eTD Collection ii Table of contents Introduction ................................................................................................................................ 1 Chapter 1: The “Angevin Empire” and historiography ............................................................. 4 Introduction ............................................................................................................................ 4 The debate on the “Angevin Empire” .................................................................................... 6 The “Angevin Empire” in present-day historiography ........................................................ 14 Conclusion ........................................................................................................................... 16 Chapter 2: The concept of empire in the Middle Ages. A historical and semantic overview . 17 Introduction .......................................................................................................................... 17 Imperium during Roman times ............................................................................................ 18 The concept of empire from the early Middle Ages to the twelfth century ......................... 22 Other concepts of empire: Spain and the British Isles ......................................................... 31 Conclusion: a semantic map of imperium in the central Middle Ages ................................ 36 Chapter 3: Gerald of Wales and the “Angevin Empire” .......................................................... 39 Why Gerald of Wales? ......................................................................................................... 39 A brief account of Gerald’s biographical background and works ....................................... 41 Gerald of Wales’s conceptualization of the Angevin dominions ........................................ 51 The imperial vocabulary in Book 1 ................................................................................. 52 Imperium and the Angevins: Books 2 and 3 .................................................................... 56 The “alternative vocabulary”: terra, regnum, terrae transmarinae..................................... 63 CEU eTD Collection Conclusion ........................................................................................................................... 67 Conclusion ............................................................................................................................... 68 Bibliography ............................................................................................................................ 71 Primary Sources ................................................................................................................... 71 Secondary Literature ............................................................................................................ 71 iii Appendices ............................................................................................................................... 80 CEU eTD Collection iv List of Abbreviations De Principis Gerald of Wales Instruction for a Rule (De Principis Instructione), edited and translated by Robert Bartlett. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018. Autobiography The Autobiography of Gerald of Wales, edited by H.E. Butler. Woodbridge: The Boydell Press, 2005 [1937]. Topographia Topographia Hibernica. In Giraldi Cambrensis Opera 8/5, edited by J.F. Dimock. London, 1867. Expugnatio Expugnatio Hibernica. In Giraldi Cambrensis Opera 8/5, edited by J.F. Dimock. London, 1867. CEU eTD Collection v Introduction This thesis deals with a debate that has long been present in the field of medieval British and French studies: the accuracy or not of the expression “Angevin Empire”. Coined in the late nineteenth century by the British historian Kate Norgate, the idea of an “Angevin Empire” survived in the historiography of the twentieth century to the point that it became a common term. This expression is usually used to define the territorial possessions ruled by Henry II and his heirs, which extended from the Anglo-Scottish border to the Pyrenees, including England, the Duchy of Normandy, Anjou, Maine, Touraine and the vast territories of the Duchy of Aquitaine, between the years 1154-1224.1 The cases in which imperium appears in administrative sources related to the Angevins are debatable: neither Henry II nor his heirs ever used the concept to describe their dominions and it cannot be sure that they ever thought of them as a unified political and territorial entity. 2 However, the word imperium or even the display of imperial imagery seems to appear more frequently in narrative accounts, although the conclusion that can be drawn from these cases is highly debatable.3 There is a tension between the historiographical usage of “empire” and the language of the sources: our idea of what an “empire” is does not automatically equal the medieval understanding of imperium. That is why, to a large extent, historians who have either sustained or contested the idea of an “Angevin Empire” have been debating or applying 1 Cf. Daniel Power, “Angevin (Plantagenet) Empire,” The Encyclopedia of Empire, ed. John CEU eTD Collection MacKenzie (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2016). The date of the extinction of the Angevin Empire might differ from one author to the other. Generally, most historians acknowledge its end in 1224, when under the reign of