The Making of a Court Society: Kings and Nobles in Late Medieval Portugal (review)

Costa Gomes aims to show how the medieval Portuguese court was organized, who comprised its permanent and transient members, and what ties bound nobles to the ruler. Rather than seeing the court exclusively in terms of its bureaucratic responsibilities and the rise of central state authority, Costa Gomes shows us a personal and a functional network. The private life of the court (what historians have been inclined to dismiss as "boudoir history") must be considered in conjunction with public administration. Noble personnel served the king by reason of family status, personal accomplishment, and administrative responsibility; the conventional distinction between retrograde aristocracy and progressive administrative kingship is a distortion of the actual form of late medieval government. The Portuguese nobility and the king were intertwined, "mutually engendered" in the author's words, not opposed.

The court was not merely an entourage; nor, on the other hand, was it merely the nucleus of a future ("modern") state. It was a peculiar but dynamic and flexible institution in itself. In her overall conception of the court's significance, Costa Gomes adopts Elias' notion of a "court society," in which the court is an expression of power, culture, and ceremony.¹ The originality of Costa Gomes' work is to demonstrate, by prospographical and genealogical research on 118 families, how nobles were affiliated with the court, what they did there, and what their concepts and functions of service were. A work of painstaking social history, The Making of a Court Society gives a conclusive and detailed picture of the organization of a medieval court and the role of nobles as royal officers, companions, and courtiers.

There is little in English on medieval Portugal, but the significance of this book goes beyond providing information about the late medieval aristocracy in that realm. Portugal is an example of a European phenomenon with certain peculiarities shared with other Iberian states, and certain unique qualities of its own. Costa Gomes describes the provisioning of the court, its peregrinations among different palaces and other stopping points, and its divisions and forms of service to the king's body and his government.

The court had a ceremonial aspect. The constant movement of the king through Portugal was not due to the economic difficulties of establishing such a large burden of consumers in one place, but to make visible the political importance of the king, his words and gestures organized and manipulated according to ritualized practice. Nevertheless, however important the royal presence, late medieval Portugal was not a theater state in which public ceremony was identical with the substance of power. Again, Costa Gomes is concerned to avoid seeing the court as either entirely performative or coldly bureaucratic. In the late Middle Ages, ceremonial and administrative roles not only overlapped; they were manifestations of the same exercise of authority.