Germanic Kingship

Germanic kingship refers to customs and practices surrounding kings among the pre-Christianized Germanic tribes of the Migration period (c. AD 300–700) and the kingdoms of the Early Middle Ages (c. AD 700–1000). Nearly all of the scholarship around this theory has been debunked and shown to be anachronistic in recent decades. The title of king (Proto-Germanic:*kuningaz) is in origin that of the leader elected as sacral and military leader from out of a noble family, usually considered of divine ancestry, in the pre-Christianization period.

The Germanic monarchies were originally pre-Christianized, but their contact, during the Völkerwanderung or Migration Period, with the Roman Empire and the Christian Church greatly altered their structure and developed into the feudal monarchy of the High Middle Ages.

The term barbarian kingdom is used in the context of those Germanic rulers who after AD 476 and during the 6th century ruled territories formerly part of the Western Roman Empire, especially the Barbarian kings of Italy. In the same context, Germanic law is also derisively termed leges barbarorum "barbarian law" etc.

The English term is derived from the Anglo-Saxon cyning, which in turn is derived from the Common Germanic *kuningaz. The Common Germanic term was borrowed into Estonian and Finnish at an early time, surviving in these languages as .

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