Pervivencia y transformación de la concepción y práctica del poder en el reino de León (siglos X y XI)

Abstract

In the same line as his last works, the author deepens here in the transformations happening mostly in the practical exercise of the power throughout the Early Middle Ages centuries. By means of the analysis of documents, he exposes the effective demand made by the kings of his authority as holders of the potestas publica, in the line of the Roman-Visigoth tradition included in the Liber Iudiciorum. The political-military tensions of the final decades of the X Century and first of the XI Century are going to contribute to the transformation of the political structure which is shown in the proliferation of political links of a private and contractual nature which are being spread in the relations amongst the nobility, including the kings in this term and which keeps a perfect structural coherence with the advance of the new social relations of submission which are being established between the nobility and the peasantry. But transformation does not imply the extinction of the old public conception of the power. And the analysis of the documentation of the first decades of the XI Century, as well as the study of the regulations passed by the kings of the Navarra dynasty aimed to reorganize the administration of the kingdom, allow us to unveil the underlying survival of the old political conception of the potestas regia like substratum and support of the reaffirmation of the regal authority that breaks through as of the central decades of the XI Century.