John’s Court in a Comparative Context
How did John’s court compare to those of other rulers in his own period and with earlier and later courts? Variation in the quality and quantity of sources makes precision difficult. Nonetheless, what we know about court culture in other European countries in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries suggests that many aspects of court culture were similar across a wide range of territories. Indeed, one can even find similarities with Byzantine and Islamic courts. The evidence also indicates a great deal of continuity across the long historic arc of court culture in Western Europe. However, this continuity was combined with gradual but cumulatively radical change, so that by the early modern period, courts had become much larger and more complex, and very different in other respects as well.