When describing the festivities which the Infante Henry held in his city of Viseu during the first decade of the fifteenth century, the chronicler Zurara comments: ‘pareçia a algũus estramgeiros que per alli passauam que aquelle ajuntamento nom era senam corte de rre’. Thus he stressed the importance of the court as a mechanism that made apparent the grandeur and magnificence of the monarchs through the ‘ajuntamento’ or human concentration brought about by their presence. However, the chronicler referred also to a common process of imitation or repetition of this grandeur in the households of the great princes of the age. In order to understand this cultural and political process in the context of the societies of the end of the Middle Ages, I have found that it is useful to maintain a certain distinction between what would on the one hand be the king's household, on the other the royal court and, finally, the actual ‘court society’ as a human configuration and a specific field of social relationships.

As I believe I have proved in the first chapters of this book, the household of the monarch was merely one part of the medieval royal court; an essential part, without doubt, but one on which a restrictive study does not allow for an evaluation of the diversity of functions to which the medieval concept referred.