10 - Peter IV of Aragon’s Self-Coronation

Summary

The tenth chapter explores the practice of self-coronation in the kingdom of Aragon. It centres on Peter the Ceremonious’ self-coronation in Zaragoza (1336), where the king implemented a conscious triple strategy to ensure that his ceremony, performed previously by his father, King Alfonso IV the Benign (1328), would not remain an isolated gesture but would become tradition. First, he constructed an autobiographical historical account that would serve as the primary version of the event. Second, he fixed the rites of self-coronation by writing a new ceremonial. Third, he propagated an iconographic tradition through images of himself in miniatures, seals and coins – and, above all, of his gesture of self-coronation. Historiography, liturgy and iconography are brought into play by the king so as to perpetuate the memory of his self-coronation and thus ensure, through repetition, its transformation from an isolated event into a consolidated practice and part of inherited tradition. The chapter finishes with an analysis of the successive self-coronations performed by Peter’s successors.