It's impossible to know the prevalence of medieval suicides. First for the usual reasons--lack of records, lack of solid demographics, etc--but also because the religious and social stigma attached to suicide, the people who killed themselves, and their families who had to deal with public shame in the midst of private sadness. That said, we have an absolutely epic study on the subject. Alexander Murray only made it through two of a planned three-volume Suicide in the Middle Ages (and his editor evidently gave up after one), but "just" those two are incredibly comprehensive and eye-opening.

Murray found a few outright mentions of suicide in various town or monastic chronicles. A man sentenced to sit in the stocks overnight is found dead in the morning, having stabbed himself. A 12th century monk and prior of Le Dale monastery named Henry fell in love with a local woman and, officially absent from his house to earn money for it, moved in with her. When his affair was discovered and he was forced to return to the convent, "Taking guidance from the Devil he got into a hot bath and opened veins in both arms; and by way of spontaneous, or rather foolish, death he put an end to life."

There are literary and legendary sources, too. Boccaccio's Fiammetta describes a woman deciding to kill herself by jumping from a tower, because the people who find her body won't be able to tell whether it was suicide or an accident. Accounts of saints miracles include a fair amount (Murray found 80, although in the scheme of the number of miracle stories for the entire Middle Ages this is not stupendous) of attempted suicides that were interrupted through saintly intervention with the divine.

But overall, Murray notices two things in his sources. First, the need for secrecy and privacy on the part of people who sought to kill themselves. A traveler who drops back from the group; a nun who barricades herself into a room for "private prayer" but slips out the window.

Second, OP had asked about rulers. The higher up the social scale, the more the outright mentions of suicide in chronicles and letters fade into what he calls "whispers." Often these don't appear at all in the sources closest to the person--closest chronologically and socially. One example of this in operation is the possible attempted suicide of Henry IV, 11th (mostly) century Holy Roman Emperor. A lot of chronicles discuss his wars with the pope and his own son. But it is only one account, by known opponent Bernold of Constance, who includes this detail:

He betook himself to a castle and there remained without any regal trappings. He was in a state of extreme dejection and, as they say, he tried to give himself over to death, but was prevented by his men and could not bring his wish to effect.

(nb: I'm using Murray's translations and they are rather colorful at times.)

The modern reader observes recognizable-to-us circumstances of suicide. The medieval angle shows the theme of secrecy on all sides. First, only Bernold mentions (is willing to mention?) this story. And even he, dedicated anti-Henry partisan as his chronicle makes clear, couches the story in "they say" (aiunt). Second, the lack of other references to the story means that "morti traderi voluit" in Bernold's use is probably not a euphemism for 'withdrawal from the world with the net effect of suicide' but rather an actual attempted suicide--generally we would see some claim to sudden piety in an ascetic withdrawal from regal life. Third, if the story is true and Henry attempted suicide in some way, he was discovered and stopped.

But if suicide was the subject of whispers and shame, that made it all the more salacious for rumors. With more proof that the Middle Ages were a bad time to be named Henry, the death of 13C German king Henry Hohenstaufen (the title denoting him as son of the emperor) shows this link between suicide and the stuff of infama. Thomas Tuscus recounts the circumstances of his death:

Seeing himself let down and betrayed by his father, Henry threw himself, as some say, from the castle and thus killed himself by the fall, while others say he was strangled in prison on his father's orders.

Both of these traditions were evidently strong. Although Dante himself did not assign H.H. a place in "the seventh abyss of Minos" in Inferno Canto 13, commentator Benvenuto da Imola debated with himself whether H.H. should be there. "But others write," says Benvenuto. "If this is true."

There was good reason for supporters and family members to camouflage suicide in the Middle Ages. It's generally a given that suicide was a mortal sin, people who killed themselves could not be buried in consecrated ground, etc etc. The nature of scholastic theology necessarily preserves a counterargument tradition (since scholastic theologians typically worked by setting out the two sides of a premise and then resolving the problem), and there are 'slippages' elsewhere. And even Dante, who as noted earlier places the "violent against themselves" solidly in Hell, can have famously violently-against-himself Cato the Younger guard the entrance to Purgatory. We can see here, possibly, the emotional difficulties surrounding suicide as a mortal sin requiring the damnation of its victims.

But there were also concrete earthly factors in play. Murray finds various laws permitting the "ravage" (destruction) of the house of the person who killed themselves--the house that their family probably still needed to live in. Legally, suicide could mean a forfeiture of property.

Later medieval England had a unique system wherein coroners were responsible for investigating 'violent' or unexpected deaths (accidents, murders, etc). Sometimes they had to deal with determining whether or not a dead person had committed suicide. Around 1280, coroner-author Philippe de Beaumanoir laid out the stakes. Upon the death of one of his tenants, a lord had claimed it was suicide and thus her property reverted to him. Her heirs had sued to get the property back, claiming his "presumptions" were (a) wrong and (b) even if they were right, presumptions weren't strong enough to be evidence of suicide. Notably, the judge ruled in the lord's favor because one of the 'presumptions' was the dead woman's threat to do something to shame her friends.

This case, then, links the material effect of suicide--loss of property--with the social, the shame of being related to someone who killed themselves. One thing the records cannot tell us is the link between shame and guilt. Was it a matter of, in a culture increasingly focused on social order and purity, the survivors being tarnished by the sin of someone they were related to? Or was there an element of guilt, that they should have been able to stop it happening? This is something medieval people preferred not to share with their readers.

One of my first posts on AskHistorians a few years ago was about this subject, although the question was about suicide among the medieval poor.

• What were the medieval suicide rates among the poor?

Post is copied below:

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Among my collection of medieval reference books are two large tomes that weigh heavier on me than they do the shelves they sit on. I refer to Suicide in the Middle Ages by Alexander Murray. These books are magisterial in their comprehensive approach to the subject of suicide in the middle ages: it reads like Murray himself has read every obscure source court document in England, France, Germany between 1000 and 1400.

If anyone of the 7+ billion people on planet earth could calculate the self annihilation of peasants in the middle ages it would be Murray. He cannot, and in his books he details not just acts of suicide but the mores of the societies where he finds and, importantly, doesn't find records to aid such a terrible calculus.

From his introduction to the first book we meet the Premonstratension canon Prior Henry, one of 6 canons sent into the 'wild country between Derby and Nottingham [England]' to aid in the realignment and reinvestment of a struggling monastery. Over the next few years the canons find themselves in equal dire straights: it's impossible to support the number of people there....legally. So, Henry, in the wilderness far from authority and scrutiny, turns to counterfeit coining. No one knew outside the walls of the monastery. No one knew as well that Henry had begun to see a local girl. Except once the canons were recalled - all except Prior Henry who elected to stay behind - the local priest who knew of these affairs reported Henry to his abbot. And the mother-house recalled Henry. When he didn't return as ordered they sent out men to retrieve him and he was brought back by force to the mother abbey.

Our account ends: 'Henry's heart was smitten by melancholy. Taking guidance from the Devil he got into a hot bath and opened veins in both arms; and in this way of his own free will, nay free folly, ended his life'.

This account comes from Thomas of Muskham in a chronicle of local abbeys in the early 13th century. Murray continues:

Thomas bestows on Henry's death seven contemptuous words: 'spontanea quin potius stulta morte vitam finivit' (literally: 'by a spontaneous or rather, foolish, death he put an end to his life'). These words were almost certainly the only epitaph Henry had in his own generation or any other. His body, found dead in the bath, would normally have been disposed of in an unmarked grave without ceremony or public prayer, outside any churchyard.

The lovelorn, the heartsick, the failures, the criminals. Shame for the community and shame for the family are for Murray the reasons why records are often mute on the subject of suicides, often in ambivalent language.

In Dante's suicide canto in Inferno, the poet ends by referring to a Florentine suicide whom Dante keeps studiously anonymous. The anonymity puzzled commentators, and Boccaccio, commenting on the passage in c.1370, suggests one reason why Dante kept the name quiet may have been 'through regard for surviving relations, who may perhaps be men of honour; and therefore Dante does not wish to stain them with the disgrace of such a shameful death.'

And although Murray finds many records, for all classes in society, they date by and large from after 1300 when we see the hitherto development of comprehensive law and the rule of scribes and legal paper begin to tally souls. The peasant ranks low on the tally sheets, making rarer appearances. And Murray affords them tremendous space for their stories to be told when he finds them. But we can only guess at the numbers and sources of their shame.

Reading:

• Suicide in the Middle Ages: Volume 1: The Violent Against Themselves, Alexander Murray (Oxford, 1998)

• Suicide in the Middle Ages: Volume 2: The Curse on Self-Murder, Alexander Murray (Oxford, 2000)