This chapter analyses the five steps in the itinerary of the royal accession of the kings of Navarra from the eleventh century to the fourteenth: the effects of the restoration of the kingdom of Navarra in 1134 with the investiture of García Ramírez, against the will of the Pope; Theobald I of Champagne’s oath, which took place some years after his accession to the throne in 1234; the reintroduction of the anointment with Theobald II in 1257; Joanna II and Philip III of Navarra’s oath and anointment in 1329; and Charles III’s self-coronation in 1390. The evolution of the Navarrese royal accession ceremonies emphasises two specific characteristics of Navarrese politics: resistance to ecclesiastical mediation and consensualism. Charles III’s majestic self-coronation should not be regarded thus as an isolated or exceptional ritual since it responds to the tradition of the other Iberian kingdoms in which the ceremony of self-coronation had been enacted, reflects the particular idiosyncrasy of the kingdom of Navarra and reacts to a particular need generated in a given context, reinforcing once more the idea of the malleability of the rituals and the power of the king’s agency.

The eighth chapter studies the possible occurrence of Frederick II’s self-coronation in the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem on Sunday, 17 March 1229, an event that remains shrouded in mystery. It is still difficult to discern the borders between reality and fiction, desire and its realisation, invention and propaganda. This chapter engages with the question of the extent to which we can affirm the historicity of Frederick II’s self-coronation. It addresses the crucial issue of the nature of this gesture, recognised as transgressive by posterity – but, importantly, not always by contemporaries – in the context of preconceived ideas about the relationship between the temporal and spiritual.It emphasises the provocative nature of Frederick’s ritual with the crown: an excommunicated king wearing the crown in the Holy Sepulchre, in the absence of the patriarch of Jerusalem, opposed by the military orders, eyed suspiciously by the aristocracy of Outremer and fighting off the armies of his former father-in-law in Sicily. It is natural that this gesture was received in the West with the opprobrium the emperor and his collaborators expected.

The ninth chapter focuses on the practice of self-coronation among medieval Castilian kings and its religious, political and ideological implications. It takes Alfonso XI of Castile’s self-knighting self-coronation (1332) as a central event, establishing its conceptual genealogy, significance and relevance, deploying Visigothic, Asturian, Leonese and Castilian chronicles as the main sources. The case of Alfonso XI deserves particular attention, as it throws some light on the debate on the allegedly secular kingship of Castilian kings. This chapter explores Alfonso XI’s motivations for designing these rituals, whether there were any precedents for this particular gesture in Castile and to what extent he was aware of the different rates at which the anointing and coronation ceremonies were introduced into his own kingdoms. It is actually possible to establish a ritual genealogy from Visigothic, Asturian and Leonese kingdoms to the kingdom of Castile, and from Wamba’s anointing in 672 to Alfonso XI’s self-coronation in 1332, in order to reflect on the precedents for this gesture.

The seventh chapter starts with an analysis of the different sources narrating Roger II of Sicily’s ritual coronation, performed on 25 December 1130. Roger sought for his monarchy the appearance of a legitimate kingdom, supported by the weight of tradition, that the Pope had restored with the consent of the princes and the people. The second part of the chapter moves to the interpretation of the image of Roger II being crowned by Christ, as depicted in the mosaic in the Martorana Church in Palermo, one of the strongest indications of the Christocentric evolution outlined in the previous chapters of the book, and a formidable example of symbolic self-coronation. Roger II’s respect for his Muslim Arab subjects, as well as his attempt to assimilate Arab and Byzantine cultural traditions, are at the root of his iconographic programme: the visual language could be understood by Arabs, Normans, Greeks and Latins. This supra-linguistic, multinational, multiethnic and multicultural form is a typical inheritance of the kingdom of Sicily, and would without doubt have inspired the universalist and imperial politics of Roger II’s grandson Frederick II, specifically at his majestic self-coronation in Jerusalem.

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.