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POWER LEGITIMACY IN XV-XVI CENTURY WALACHIA – POLITICAL IDEOLOGY AND SOCIAL REALITIES
Abstract
The concept of legitimacy belongs to our common set of notions which are frequently encountered in numerous studies of political ideology and power. Still, we believe that it needs to be better circumscribed and defined. Legitimacy seems to refer to the legal, official and recognized rules to which circumscribes each attribute of the political power. The hierarchical, arbitrary character of the power relations may be hidden and even denied by their presentation as being legitimate. Our hypothesis is that far from being a simple attribute of power, legitimacy had to be dynamically obtained, maintained, denied to the rivals, and this reality was accurate not only in the cases of opened conflict, but also in the continuous process of the competition for social power. The concept of legitimacy underlines the procesual character of this phenomena and allowed us to analyze the way in which legitimacy was built in specific contexts and how it's accepted or rejected in the social competition. We also had to consider the diverse character of political legitimation and the importance of the manner in which different social groups took part at its creation, propagation or rejection. One of the most significant conclusions was that the prince's participation at the life of the Church and the permanent reporting to its values and sources represented the most powerful modality of gaining and maintaining legitimacy. The Bible was also the most authorized source of models that could and had to be followed. It is a reality of the epoch, a mechanism which functioned successfully also in Occidental and Byzantine Europe.
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