Facultad de Humanidades y CC de la Comunicación

During the 10th century, the title imperatorappears in some Hispanic and Anglo-Saxon charters in reference to the sovereigns of Asturias and León and those of the new kingdom of England. Alphonse III of Asturias and León and Oswald of Northumbria are often considered the initiators or inspirers of these peculiar phenomena. The first Hispanic “imperial charters” seem to date back to the time of Alphonse III, while Oswald is described as imperator totius Britanniaein the Vita sancti Columbaeby Adomnán of Iona. This article aims to review the actual relevance of these two figures in the later use of imperial terminology. On the one hand, the only Alphonse’s 'imperial charters' whose authenticity is beyond doubt date from the time of his son Ordoño II, while,on the other hand, the dominant image of Oswald in 10th-century Britain was not that of Adomnán, but that reported by Bede, in which the imperial title does not appear

In the documentation produced by the English monarchy during the tenth century the Latin title imperator surprisingly appears, but it is not the first time that this title has been associated with an insular king. In Adomnán of Iona's Vita sancti Columbae (c.700), St. Oswald king of Northumbria appears as totius Britanniae imperator. Oswald, one of seven kings—successively called bretwaldas in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle—who would have enjoyed a certain overlordship above other kingdoms of the island, could be the missing link connecting the use of the title imperator in the eighth and in the tenth centuries. Nevertheless, a closer view on the Oswald figure points out how he was remembered and worshipped more as a saint-overlord than as an emperor. Indeed, we can distinguish two different types of representation of the Northumbrian king’s authority: the first one proposed by Adomnán (emperor of Britain) and the second proposed by Bede (saint-overlord). In this article I show how the Bedian model had a greater diffusion than the Adomnán model in England in the following centuries, thanks to the cult of Oswald as a saint. This suggests that there was no direct link between the use of imperator in Adomnán and that in the tenth-century charters; they were two different manifestations of “imperiality.”