Word.ws English Dictionary

deditio

deditio noun: in medieval Europe, an act of ritualized submission and request for mercy, performed before a monarch or other feudal lord.

Noun

deditio

  1. (historical) In medieval Europe, an act of ritualized submission and request for mercy, performed before a monarch or other feudal lord.
    • A deditio implied a clear duty for the victorious party to treat his former enemy leniently, and the conditions for surrender were often arranged in advance.2002, Sverre Bagge, Kings, Politics, and the Right Order of the World in German Historiography c. 950–1150, page 164
    • The ritual of deditio was ostentatiously emotional, with tears of contrition both signalling submission and calculated to encourage a formal pardon from a king who risked losing face by failing to show clemency.2016, Peter H. Wilson, The Holy Roman Empire, Penguin, published 2017, page 617

Origin of deditio

From Latin dēditiō.

Questions about deditio

What does deditio mean?
Deditio means in medieval Europe, an act of ritualized submission and request for mercy, performed before a monarch or other feudal lord.
What part of speech is deditio?
Deditio is a noun.

Words near deditio in the dictionary

  1. dedisperse
  2. dedispersed
  3. dedisperses
  4. dedispersing
  5. dedispersion
  6. deditio
  7. dedition
  8. deditions
  9. Dediu
  10. Dedman
  11. Dedmans

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: deditio (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws reformatted the entry and added links. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.

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