Of Crowns and Kings

[marycatelli]

One thing you seldom see variety in fantasy kingdoms is in the royal succession.  Nevermind the preeminence of kingdoms in fantasy, they all practice primogeniture.  Nice, neat, orderly succession by primogeniture, at that.  Which, in real life, is generally a sign of a constitutional monarchy where the nominal sovereign is a figurehead.  The writers do have a point in that more complex succession can complicate stories.  If that's not what the story is about, it can cause it to lose focus.  OTOH, succession issues not only offer possibilities, they make a good backdrop of chaos.

For one thing -- are the laws of succession known?  A lot of kingdoms have been ruled by customary law.  The king succeeds because no one remembers a time when succession went otherwise.  But when a king claims that this one or that one is just a happenstance -- or worse, all the usual stuff is not possible, for one reason or another -- trouble ensues.  What do you do when no one remembers a time when a king had a living daughter but no living son?  And let's not go into what happens when two kingdoms with different laws get joined. . . .

Even with primogeniture, you still get interesting convolutions.  For obvious reasons, the heir has to be legitimate, and generally the marriage has to be approved by someone.  The king, perhaps, or whatever Parliament equivalent the kingdom has.  The more formal the process, the easier it is to establish that the approval has been granted -- unless someone claims the t's have not be crossed, or the i's dotted.  On the other hand, the harder it is to get through it, even when someone does approve.  On the third hand, a simpler process makes it easier to make up a fraudulent approval.

Then, there's a requirement for equal marriages in a good number of places that practiced this.  The dynasts must marry someone from a royal or reigning house for the children to be eligible.  Casts quite a damper on love matches if the woman is a commoner and the marriage would have to be morganatic.  Great Britain never had any such requirements, but Queen Victoria rather shocked her German cousins by her willingness to let her descendents marry the offspring of morganatic marriages.  (And even worse when she consented to her daughter's marriage to a subject.)

Would be even worse if you were trying to keep a royal line alive in secret.  Trying to wrangle all those marriages over all those generations. . . . Russian imperial succession had a requirement for equal marriages.  It also allowed for female succession after the total extinction of all male dynasts.  Such have been the vicissitudes of the Russian Imperial House that people seriously put forth that such extinction has occurred and a woman is entitled to the Imperial throne.

Not that this still doesn't make life simpler than other techniques.  There is the technique when the king selects the heir.  If the process to select is long and convoluted, the king may not dot all the i's.  If it's simple, someone can fake it.  And if the king just doesn't - Peter the Great lay down the law that the Tsar chose his successor, and then he didn't.  His wife ended up on the throne, such was the confusion.  In China, the Empress Wu had a great deal of authority after her husband died because he did not properly select his heir; she went through two puppet child-kings before she, too, usurped the throne and ruled in her own right.  And in polygamous societies, the competition of wives could be fierce; Bathsheba went to a great deal of trouble to get Solomon on the throne.  (For one thing, the position of power in such societies was not queen-consort but queen-mother.)

Then there's election.  Especially prone to chaos if the field of candidates was wide open and the electors not well defined.  In Rome anyone could be emperor, if he got enough support from the Senate, the army, or the people, in some combination.  So -- a great many someones tried.  The dynasties of the Byzantium helped stabilize that part of the empire.  In Scandinavia, when the kingdoms were small, the king's sons (including those from concubines) were brought before the freeholders, who "hailed" one, but as the kingdoms grew larger, such a gathering would have been impractical -- if the nobles, even, would stand it.  They ended up preserving the hailing as a formality -- though it might be interesting, a story where one day, they refused.  Ethiopia had a rule that everyone in the dynasty was eligible for selection; .  The Holy Roman Empire may have been none of those three things, but the Electors were well-defined, and the pool of candidates small; it managed to last.  Still, periods between emperors could be uncomfortably long.

And then there's coronation.

Even in history, the coronation has been held to confer a mystical privilege.  One technique Roman emperors used to try to control succession was to crown junior emperors, who had no power but succeeded in the seniority of their crowning.  Of course, that meant if you wanted to get one out of the succession, you pretty much had to kill him.  Various Holy Roman Emperors had their sons crowned, to encourage their election.  King Henry II tried to copy this; it did not work well; the Young King revolted.

And this without the magical possibilities in fantasy.

Lots of possibilities in succession.  Seriously underused.

Comments

[benbenberi.livejournal.com]

That's a good summary.

And just because one of the principles is in use doesn't mean the others are not -- it was not uncommon to pile them on, to ensure the legitimacy/effectiveness of a succession.

The Capetian succession in medieval France, frex, was initially a complicated amalgam of hereditary (but contestable) claim + election by the peers, buttressed by the possibility of military force. By extraordinary luck, after Hugh Capet they managed to go almost 300 years of unbroken father-to-eldest son inheritance, with the son always being an adult at the time -- a statistical anomaly that was taken as proof of divine favor (typically, a propertied dynasty in Western Europe endured no more than 2 or 3 generations without a female succession, a minor succession, or a failure of the bloodline altogether), and justified the mystical powers conferred by coronation. Plus the kings had their sons crowned during their lifetime, to prevent the existence of any interregnum (this was what Henry II was trying to copy, but the effective rule in England was usually succession by right of conquest, nand he had bad luck with his sons.) When the dynastic stability in France was broken in the 14c, it fell to the lawyers to devise new justifications for one party or the other (e.g. the invention of the "Salic Law" barring female inheritance, and the increasingly elaborate ceremonial surrounding the royal funeral as a transitional ritual.)

One of my favorite alternative rules of succession was that of the Ottoman Turks: the law of fratricide. From the 1300s through most of the 1500s, the rule for the Ottomans was that all the Sultan's sons by any of his wives or concubines were equally crown-worthy -- the succession would actually go to whichever of the sons was able to seize and hold actual control of the govt and the armies. Once one of the sons was able to make himself sultan, his first duty was to execute every one of his brothers, down to the babies. This ensured that the potential sultans were all *highly* motivated, and the winner was always an experienced adult with a real following, and generally the strongest and smartest of the lot. The downside was, obviously, civil war every few years. In the late 16c the morality of obligatory fratricide came into question, and the law was changed to one of strict seniority, coupled with the confinement of all a sultan's sons within the palace for life. The result of this was an end to the slaughter of innocents, but a precipitous decline in the quality of sultan -- the office now went to men who had spent their entire lives in confinement, plotting to assassinate their elder brothers and avoid assassination by the younger, with no experience of the real world at all; and power inevitably shifted to the civil service, the prime ministers, and the royal mothers.

the laws of succession

[marycatelli]

Of course, the problem with piling them on is that they are more likely to conflict. Then one has to give.

One notes that in England, Henry II claimed the throne through the maternal line -- while his mother was still alive. And then Henry VII also succeeded, claiming it because of his mother -- while his mother was still alive. It looked like the English had installed the Salic law but only for the actual succession of reigning queens.

Then Queen Mary succeeded her brother and despite the vigor with which she was opposed, no one objected "But she's a woman." Indeed Lady Jane Grey, put forth as a substitute, was obviously also a woman.

fraticide

[marycatelli]

The Turks, OTOH, survived only because they were very, very, very lucky: they never lost a sultan between the time in which he had seized the throne and the time in which he had heirs of his own. (Maybe they had sons already, but if I were as ruthless as they had to be, I don't think I would risk leaving nephews alive.)

Re: fraticide

[benbenberi.livejournal.com]

Yep. Luck is always a critical factor. The Ottomans were lucky. The Capetians were lucky, until they weren't.

Re: fraticide

[marycatelli]

And when they weren't -- then you, the writer, are lucky because you can exploit the conflict to the limit. 0:)

[coraa.livejournal.com]

This is fascinating and fodder for many stories. (And I'm startled that the word 'morgantic' existed and I didn't know it -- I would have expected to run across it before now!)

[marycatelli]

Glad you liked it.

(Even builds vocabulary. How cool.)

[jryson.livejournal.com]

There is a question of how much power the monarch has. To me, "constitutional monarchy" is something of a contradiction of terms. The monarch is either a MONarch or not. Power sharing schemes are fine, but I don't like the term "monarchy." But the more power an hereditary sovereign has, the more people will have an interest in succession, and the more turmoil they will be willing to cause, to get their pretender in.

In Britain, succession seems to be no biggie. Diana got queened and dequeened easily enough. But the British monarchy is pretty much just a PR job, with few political futures involved. Actually, Britain is more like a republic that has a mascot.

[asakiyume.livejournal.com]

One of the most bizarre conversations I ever had was with a guy from Saudi Arabia who didn't understand why, in the news, they were always talking about what the prime minister was doing instead of what the queen was doing. I thought he was pulling my leg, but as the conversation went on, it seemed like he really did think she was an absolute monarch and why the heck give the prime minister so much airtime. He seemed genuinely surprised when I said she was just a head of state and not the political head of the country.

[jryson.livejournal.com]

Right, Head of State(King, queen, or premiere) vs. Head of Government(PM or president)

In the U.S., the president is both. When Nixon resigned, there was speculation in other countries as to what would happen when both the head of state and head of government changed at the same time. They were used to seeing one or the other change, like the PM changing after a no-confidence vote, or a throne changing at the passing of a sovereign. Theory was that when one changed, the other would stabilize the nation. Of course, we were used to it, as we change every four or eight years anyway, plus death-in-office changes.

Actually, I doubt most Americans are even aware of the two concepts. He's just the president; and head, not of the government, but of only one branch of it.

[marycatelli]

In the death-in-office, we often had less warning. Roosevelt was vacationing in the Adirondacks when he got the news that McKinley was shot; went careening down the roads by stage coach and got the news at the railway that he was President.

And when they woke up Truman and sent him to the White House, he thought the other Roosevelt had changed some plans. During WWII no less.

Yeah, I think they should have realized we could handle it.

[marycatelli]

Everyone thinks the form of government he's familiar with is normal. One reason gulging down a lot of primary sources is so important.

When I was a little girl, I once read a news story about Elizabeth II and asked my mother, in great wonder, whether there really were kings and queens now and not just once upon a time.

[asakiyume.livejournal.com]

I was disappointed when I first saw her and she looked like my grandmother. I wanted her in ermine and robes. (My grandmother never wears ermine and robes)

Maybe if I get my grandmother some ermine and robes, Queen Elizabeth will start dressing the part a little more?

[marycatelli]

Maybe you should get her to sit for her portrait. 'cause kings and queens generally wore that kind of a stuff for portraits and state occasions.

semantic drift

[marycatelli]

You're trying to work out the logic from the root of the word. Semantic drift will get you every time. . . .

Consider "morganatic" -- if you deduced it came from a term for "morning" you would be right, but if you tried to work out its meaning from it, you wouldn't have much luck.

Among the Germans, a man settled property on his wife the morning after their wedding night -- the "morning gift". It was widespread in at least the early Middle Ages. Property laws evolved thereafter. But when they were devised marriages where the wife's children could not inherit titles and the like, such marriages would be termed "marriages with only the morning gift and no other inheritance" -- morganatic marriages.

[marycatelli]

Diana never made it to queen. Only to princess. And out again.

And in Britain, the king doesn't indeed have much power. It means that you can have an orderly succession. All the laws don't do much good if there is serious power in the throne.

[asakiyume.livejournal.com]

In an (unpublished) novel I wrote, the king in a particular realm gets elected based on merit, but certain families tend to monopolize the throne.

In the short story that I just got published (yay! first!), one kingdom has lots and lots of princes who have to vie for power and the favor of the current king--no primogeniture there.

So yeah! I think succession is fascinating!

[marycatelli]

Well, there is the advantage that if certain families monopolize it, you've cut down on the candidates. OTOH, they had few candidates in Scotland, and succession still tended to be bloody. (In Scotland, the heir had to be twenty-five. The scene in Macbeth where Malcolm is named heir is impossible. This meant that kings were seldom succeeded by their own sons -- which gives you an idea how short their lives were.)

Cool about your story. In that situation, you've got everything under control as far as the war is concerned, until the king dies without getting the selection done.

[asakiyume.livejournal.com]

In that situation, you've got everything under control as far as the war is concerned, until the king dies without getting the selection done.

Yeah, and what if that happens while the war is in progress? Because it's not as if the other possible heirs haven't been plotting and scheming in the meantime. I don't want to think about it too hard because I have about three other things I'd like to do first, but there are lots of ways I'd like to expand that story, one day.

[marycatelli]

You've certainly built in a lot of handy potential.

[asakiyume.livejournal.com]

I like a world that feels like there's more going on in it than is contained in the story... of course, that can be a problem if readers feel like they don't get enough of what they want to have or too much stuff is brought up and just dropped or not explained...

I was hoping to find something of yours online, but the first hits when I googled your name were at Amazon and this journal, which leads me to believe that you're in actual hold-them-in-your-hands books rather than in bytes-and-pixels media.

...but I'd love to be pointed to something online, if there is such a something.

[marycatelli]

Well, for in the hand stuff there is Warrior Wisewoman editted by Rody James.

And for online, let me see. . . .

Yup, Weird Tales celebrated Talk Like a Pirate Day with my very own The Drunken Mermaids

[asakiyume.livejournal.com]

Yesss! *heads over to read*

[asakiyume.livejournal.com]

Wonderful! I loved your use of traditional songs, and I thought it was a neat little piece of blackmail that got Colin off the islet. I liked that there were old-crone mermaids, too. It reminded me of a collection of Hans Christian Andersen we had when I was a kid in which the sea witch from "The Little Mermaid" is done as a cronish mermaid.

[marycatelli]

Glad you like it!

I had a lot of fun with those sea shanties.