Introduction
The word “state” is not medieval: the word “status” did not assume that meaning until the end of the 15th century. The concept, however, had currency in the 13th century behind such words as populus[1] , corona[2] , regnum[3] , civitates et regna[4] , or respublica[5]. Accordingly, historians can chart the birth of state authorities at that time only with the benefit of hindsight. Their analysis will have to be developed with contemporary tools, such as Max Weber's partial definition according to which “a state is a human community that successfully claims the monopoly of the legitimate use of physical force”. Such a situation was not to be found in the Middle Ages but historiography traditionally considers the trend - observable from the 12th century onwards - whereby legislative, military, juridical and executive functions got gathered in the hands of some kings as the genesis of modern statehood. These monarchies from the Latin West had to both emancipate themselves from the supra-state authorities represented by the papacy and the Holy Roman Empire and reinforce their power locally at the expenses of centrifugal forces, be they temporal or ecclesiastical.
The sovereigns were fully aware of their having to fight on those two fronts and some framed in their own terms their political conceptions. They would at times benefit from the input of forces favouring the evolutions in progress but they also had to confront thinkers putting forward alternative versions of state building. These theories were woven into political treaties; they also underpinned acts issued by Royal chanceries as well as the representations of monarchic power exhibited in symbolic systems or historiography. State theories did not systematically precede institutions and practices: it was not unusual for a sovereign to seek to make freshly introduced innovations permanent through their institutionalisation to which they would later find justifications. In order to take into account the diversity of situations set against a mainly Christian background, the case of France, where a well-rehearsed state building process had reputedly started very early, is scrutinised alongside that of Castille[6]. The comparison is more closely drawn between the long reigns of two strong monarchs which followed upon each other in the second half of the 13th century.
