Petitioning and Power Relations in Pre-Modern Eurasia

Petitioning was the main route by which the agency of subjects engaged the authority of rulers. Most studies explore it as a practice for sending requests to central and local representatives of state power in empires, kingdoms, and city-states. Yet the practice occurs in other fields of power, for example, in medieval papal governance, seigneurial regimes and other types of lordship, e.g., queens...