The Power of Weakness: Machiavelli Revisited - German Historical ...

to this ceremonial ode, the future king performs an act of humiliation
before gaining access to the mount (and thus the stone). He has to
give his horse to one of his subjects, a keeper of the mount, before
bending down so that his subject can mount the horse from the future
king’s back. 10 We might speak here of a mock deal, rather than a
fight. However, the motif is the same: the ritual obliges the future
ruler to act in a subordinate role.
2. Sexual Intercourse and Ritual Bath: The Kings of Donegal
The next example might be called one of the most unsettling cases of
a medieval European inauguration ritual: the royal bath preceded by
sexual intercourse between the future ruler and a horse. (See
Illustration 1.) A ritual of this sort is described in the late twelfth century
by the well-known author Gerald of Wales in his report on the
inauguration of the kings of Donegal:
A new and outlandish way of confirming kingship and dominion.
. . . There is in the northern and farther part of Ulster,
namely in Kenelcunill, a certain people which is accustomed to
appoint its king with a rite altogether outlandish and abominable.
When the whole people of that land has been gathered
together in one place, a white mare is brought forward into the
10 Dillon, ‘The Inauguration of O’Conor’, 189, 197.
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The Power of Weakness
Illustration 1. Detail from Giraldus Cambrensis, Topographia Hiberniae, MS 700
National Library of Ireland (c.1200). Property of the Board of the National
Library of Ireland. Reproduced with permission.