Tag: rulership

William the Conqueror and his sons amazed continental contemporaries by the extent of their financial resources. Their financial resources were great not only because of England’s wealth, for certainly, taken as a whole, the kingdoms of France and Germany were much richer, but because the Anglo-Norman king was able to tax the resources of his realm to a degree far exceeding that of any ruler in Europe. Money was needed to support the king and his family, his central administration, his local representatives, and his military establishment. The relative effectiveness of English royal taxation inaugurated by William the Conqueror is an important key to the political history of the Middle Ages. It helps to account for the fact that as late as the fifteenth century the king of England was able to inflict crushing defeats upon French kings, who ruled a country with three times the population of England and whose landed, commercial, and industrial wealth, if we could estimate it precisely, would be even greater. In the Middle Ages, no less than in the twentieth century, wars cost money, and the power of any particular king was greatly dependent upon the comprehensiveness and efficiency of his taxation system. In this regard the Anglo-Norman king was at least a century ahead of the Capetian monarchy, and no German ruler of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries ever had any comparable command of the financial resources of his country.

The chief source of income of early medieval kings had been their own estates, and William naturally drew a substantial part of his income from the royal demesne, whose administration was the sheriffs responsibility. The law courts were also a lucrative source of income, but it was their clever and unrelenting use of the feudal possibilities for taxation that accounts for the great financial resources of the Anglo-Norman rulers. Like any other feudal lord, William enjoyed the prerogatives of relief, wardship, and the regular aids, and his treasury found that these old institutions could be made to produce great sums. Not only the lay vassals but also the bishoprics and abbeys that owed feudal obligations to the crown, were subjected to this kind of taxation. In addition to all these sources of royal income William inaugurated the practice of allowing his vassals the option of not sending their knights to serve in the feudal host on payment of a certain sum per knight’s fee; the practice came to be called scutage (literally, “shield money”) in the early twelfth century. William’s tenants-in-chief were glad to be freed of the burden of keeping their knights trained and equipped for war, and William preferred to use the income he obtained from scutage to hire mercenaries for his continental wars. Paradoxically, the same king who brought feudal institutions to their highest refinement and used them most effectively for enhancing royal power was the earliest to realize the inefficiency of the feudal method of raising armies. By feudal law the vassals were required to serve only forty days a year, which was a tremendous nuisance in a long campaign; the knights who were provided to his feudal host were not always adequately prepared and armed; it was advisable to leave most of the English army at home in case of another Scandinavian invasion, which threatened during most of the Conqueror’s reign; and William had the special problem of transporting the knights and horses across the channel, which was both expensive and risky. He preferred to hire mercenaries among the landless knights of Normandy, Flanders, and Brittany for his frontier campaigns against various French princes. The Anglo-Norman monarch’s envious continental enemies were not slow to realize the significance of this military innovation. A chief minister of the French king in the first half of the twelfth century referred to the English ruler as “that wealthy man, a marvelous buyer and collector of knights.” William initiated the slow substitution of mercenary forces for feudal armies, which is one of the central military developments of the High Middle Ages.

— The Civilization of the Middle Ages, Chapter 12

G’Kar:

…This time it is possible he could be wrong.

Michael Garibaldi:

Yeah, it’s possible. But you don’t follow an order because you know for sure it’s gonna work out. You do what you’re told! Because your C.O. has the moral authority that says, “You may not come back, but the cause is just and fair and necessary!”

— “Walkabout” – Babylon 5, Season 3 (1996)

…[The] king’s household was a cavalcade of carts and packhorses, stretching out for hundreds of yards as the court rumbled through the countryside. Everything was portable: finely dressed servants carried bed linen and precious plate, heavy pouches of coin, the valuable books [the king] enjoyed reading, and well-guarded caches of precious jewels. [The king]’s chapel could be unpacked by the roadside, as could his dining room. The great snaking caravan train moved twenty or so miles every day, churning up muddy roads and drawing openmouthed spectators as [the king] called on his subjects and enjoyed their generous hospitality.

— The Plantagenets, Salvaging the Wreck

Perhaps one in six Englishmen in the late twelfth century [C.E.] was technically a clergyman. While most were not and never would be priests, there were plenty in minor orders or who had entered the Church for an education and left to work for lay masters. Many parish priests were poorly educated and barely literate. Their lives would not have differed much from those of ordinary peasants. But clerical status bestowed great advantage if one fell foul of the law. The Church demanded the right to discipline criminous clerks but punishments were considerably lighter under canon law than under the secular criminal code. The Church would neither inflict trial by ordeal nor mutilate or execute the guilty….

— The Plantagenets, Unholy War

Twelfth-century France was divided into loose and shifting territories that owed little or no allegiance to any central authority, ruled across large swaths by noblemen who were little more than warlords. As he watched his tenacious and cunning father grind his way through the conquest of Normandy, Henry would have learned that political survival was a game of forestalling shifts of power, managing volatile relations between one’s friends and enemies, and appealing to the right allies at the right time in order to further one’s territorial objectives. In such a bewildering business, only the most devious and adept players survived.

— The Plantagenets, Ambition

This first civilization came to be known as Sumer. By about the year 3000 [B.C.E.], a city called Uruk near the mouth of the Euphrates River, just inland of the head of the Persian Gulf, had eighty thousand residents. A thousand years later Iraq, the land along the Euphrates and its sister stream, the Tigris, would be named for this early metropolis of Uruk. Sharing the land of Sumer, about the size of [modern] Belgium, with a dozen other city-states, Uruk was not always the foremost among its rivals in the land. But for most of its existence, spanning the two millennia of the Sumerian world, Uruk was the greatest city on earth.

— Land Between The Rivers, Prologue

A dozen (small) cities in such a small area. Every square meter of arable land was claimed and constantly fought over. I do not see much of this in fantasy roleplaying campaigns.

[King] Jean II [of France], who succeeded his father, Philip VI, in August 1350 [C.E.], could have served Machiavelli as model for Anti-Prince. Impolitic and impetuous, he never made a wise choice between alternatives and seemed incapable of considering consequences of an action in advance. Though brave in battle, he was anything but a great captain. Without evil intent, he was to foster disaffection to the point of revolt and lose half his kingdom and his person to the enemy, thereby leaving his country leaderless to meet its darkest hour of the age. His subjects with surprising forbearance named him Jean le Bon (John the Good), using the surname, it has been supposed, in the sense of “prodigal” or “careless” or being a good fellow. Or it may have referred to Jean’s devotion to chivalric honor or to his alleged generosity to the poor, as illustrated by his once giving a purse to a servingmaid whose milk pails were knocked over by his greyhounds.

He came to the throne bent on taking the field to erase his father’s defeats of the past decade, and on the first day of his reign notified all the principal lords of the realm to hold themselves ready to appear at his summons when “the time should come.” The truce arranged after the fall of Calais and renewed during the Black Death was due to expire in April 1351. Inheriting an empty treasury, Jean had no money with which to pay an army, and could not move without first replenishing his funds and adapting his military resources. The need to learn something from the failures of Crecy and Calais was not lost on him, and he was groping with certain ideas for military reform.

His first act, however, within three months of becoming King, was to execute the Constable of France, Comte d’Eu, and sixteenth Comte de Guines, a second cousin of Enguerrand VII, a man of powerful connections and “so courteous and amiable in every way that he was beloved and admired by great lords, knights, ladies and damsels.” Captured by the English at Caen in 1345, D’Eu had been unable to raise the ransom fixed by King Edward. When it came to important captives, Edward never let himself be limited by the principle of chivalry that a knight’s ransom should not be placed at a figure that would ruin him or exceed his revenue for one year. After four years of captivity, Comte d’Eu regained his liberty, supposedly in exchange for ceding to Edward his strategic castle and county of Guines, adjoining Calais. On this suspicion, Jean had him beheaded upon his return to France without trial or public procedure of any kind. The King listened in silence to the pleas of D’Eu’s friends for his life, offering no reply except to swear that “he would never sleep so long as the Comte de Guines lived”; or according to another version replying in tears, “You shall have his body and we his head.”

Jean could have chosen no better way to alienate the nobility whose support he needed than to execute a noble of D’Eu’s rank and many friends without public explanation or trial by his peers. If D’Eu had indeed acted treasonably (the truth remains obscure), the King had every need to make plain the reasons for his act, but Jean was either too willful or too wooden-headed to understand the advisability of good public relations.

His next act made matters worse. He gave the office of Constable to his relative and favorite, Charles d’Espagne, who was said to be the object of the King’s “dishonest affection,” and to have persuaded Jean to murder Comte d’Eu so that he himself might have his office. Besides the prestige of military command second to the King, the Constableship had lucrative perquisites attached to the business of assembling the armed forces. Bestowal of the post on Charles d’Espagne, who was unpopular in the usual way of kings’ favorites, added fury to the nobles’ dismay at a time when the King had reason enough to fear their separatist tendencies. The episode was a divisive opening of the reign at a time when it most needed unity.

Jean’s father, too, had been “ung bien hastif horns” (a very hasty man), and intermarriage for centuries with first cousins had left the Valois unstable. Jean retained Philip’s uneasiness about the legitimacy of his claim to the crown and Philip’s readiness, not without cause, to suspect treachery. In his capacity for sudden vindictiveness, he took after his mother, the lame Queen, who, despite her piety and good works, was called “a very cruel lady, for whomever she held in hate, he was dead without mercy.” She was credited with having prodded her husband to the act that so appalled his time—the execution in 1343 of fifteen Breton lords who were his prisoners.

— A Distant Mirror, Chapter 6

…More hoofbeats as the prince and Sir Manfred came up, and the attendants. Several of them were swearing in amazement [at the scene where Princess Sita—not part of the hunting party—had just killed a wild boar from horseback]; one gave an involuntary shout of “Shabash!” and then they were all crying it.

All but the prince. “Sita, what the devil do you think you’re doing here?” he began.

“Excuse me, Your Highness,” Henri said. “It appears that your sister is here saving my life. A thousand thanks,” he continued, with a sweeping bow made less graceful as he winced and rubbed his elbow.

Sita looked down at him from the saddle, her eyebrows raised against a smile gone cool and considering. “You are welcome, Monsieur le Vicomte,” she said. “My apologies also, if I have shocked you.”

Henri grinned. “Au contraire, Princess Sita. Let me say at once that my prince will not be in the least shocked. In fact, I think I may say that he would heartily approve.”

“Good spear,” Sir Manfred said quietly. “And a very fortunate one, Your Highness.”

The party all looked up as the file of Bikaner Horse troopers pulled up on lathered horses. Their commander saluted and took a long look at the little tableau. When he nodded to Sita again, the iron mask of control over anger had turned to wary respect.

“Good spear, Kunwari,” he said. “And I would pay thirty gold mohurs for that horse! Kunwar,” he added to Charles. “If there is fault, it is mine—I took my men in the wrong direction when the princess’s horse…bolted.”

Charles snorted, and Sita looked offended at the notion any horse could run away with her. Henri bent to check the legs of his own mount; uninjured, except for a bad fright and some bruises, he thought. That gave him an unobtrusive chance to study Prince Charles’s face, which was scowling as the heir to the Lion Throne saw one of the troopers gray-faced and cradling an arm.

“You, sowar,” he said. “Are you injured?”

The trooper looked as though the attention from on high was more painful than the arm. “It is nothing, Kunwar, ” he murmured. “A clean break—my horse shied—it will heal.”

Charles turned to his sister. “It might have been his neck!” he snapped.

Sita flushed. “I am sorry,” she said; then repeated it in Hindi to the horse-soldier.

“It is nothing, Kunwari,” the trooper demurred. He looked at the dead boar, and at the spot where the royal family’s guest had lain. “Good spear! And the arm is nothing; I have eaten your salt; it is my karman to shed blood for your House.”

“And rajadharma not to make men risk their lives without need!” Charles said crisply, and called over his shoulder for a surgeon.

Sir Manfred had dismounted; he murmured in [Henri’s] ear: “Rajadharma; ruler’s duty.”

The prince went on: “What is your name, sowar?”

The man drew himself erect: “Burubu Ram, Kunwar.”

“Where did you break that?”

He nodded when the officer described the location; he knew this hunting park as well as most knew their front gardens.

“Miles, at a gallop, with a broken arm?”

The Rajput officer coughed discreetly: “He would not return, Kunwar. Please forgive the indiscipline.” The words were apologetic, but the tone rang with pride.

“Very well,” Charles said, and looked at the trooper again. “You are given six months sick leave, with pay. Before you return to your home…your family hold land?”

“Han, Kunwa.” Yes, Imperial Prince. “Thirty acres, northwest of Bikaner on the new Essmeet Canal—a grant to my father for twenty-five years’ service. I am heir to the holding.”

“The Smith Canal…Good. Surgeon, see to this man’s arm.”

His comrades helped him dismount, and the doctor began to probe it gently, then to prepare a splint. That sort of medicine was always available on the hunting field.

“Sowar Burubu Ram, before you go on sick leave, you may select one horse and its tack from the Imperial stud; that is my sister’s gift to you.” He looked up and shifted to English for a moment: “You’re paying for it out of your allowance, by the way, Sita.” In Hindi once more: “Also, if you have a younger brother who would care to enlist in the Guards, I will furnish his mount.”

The trooper grinned despite his pain. Imperial cavalry regiments were raised on the sillidar system; the Raj provided weapons and ammunition, but the trooper found his own horse and its fodder and gear out of his stipend, replacing the mount as needed unless it was lost in battle. It ensured the cavalry a better class of recruit than the infantry units, but the initial expense could be heavy for a middling-prosperous yeoman, and prohibitive for more than one son.

Sita swung down out of the saddle. She unfastened the long jewel-hilted hunting knife from her belt and tucked it into the injured man’s sash.

“A keepsake from your princess, sowar,” she said. “And if you have a sister who wishes a position in the household, it will be given.”

The trooper started to salute, winced, and gave a dignified salaam as he spoke his thanks. Then he walked off, accompanied by comrades who helped him toward the roadway and damned him for a lucky dog in genial whispers, swearing that they’d gladly break both arms for the favor he’d been given….

— The Peshawar Lancers, Chapter5

The carriage came around a bend in the road and approached the spot where [Sir] Sparhawk and [his Styric teacher] Sephrenia waited. [Queen] Ehlana was talking animatedly to Oscagne and Emban, but she broke off suddenly, her eyes wide. “Sephrenia?” she gasped. “It is! It’s Sephrenia.” Royal dignity went out the window as she scrambled down from the carriage.

“Brace yourself,” Sparhawk cautioned with a gentle smile. Ehlana ran to them, threw her arms around Sephrenia’s neck and kissed her, weeping for joy.

The queen’s tears were not the only ones shed that afternoon. Even the hard-bitten Church Knights were misty-eyed for the most part. [Sir] Kalten went even further and wept openly as he knelt to receive Sephrenia’s blessing.

“The Styric woman has a special significance, Sparhawk-Knight?” Engessa asked curiously.

“A very special significance, Atan Engessa,” Sparhawk replied, watching his friends clustered around the small woman. “She touches our hearts in a profound way. We’d probably take the world apart if she asked us to.”

“That’s a very great authority, Sparhawk-Knight.” Engessa said it with some approval. Engessa respected authority.

“It is indeed, my friend,” Sparhawk agreed….

— Domes of Fire, Chapter16

In all this [Tokugawa Ieyasu] revealed the attitude to which he ever afterwards adhered through life. He wielded two weapons of reasonableness and force. And when he could use the former he did, for he gained his point with less expenditure and effort. But he knew this would be useless unless backed by force, and none had it readier at all times than he. Tokutomi observes that “his militarism was diplomatic, and his diplomacy was militaristic.” Nobody in the Empire valued armaments more or took more care of them. He took so much care of them that he never used them rashly, and unless driven to it by unavoidable necessity. Others in this age, of course, used these two methods also. But perhaps none made so few failures as he did, and that owing to his extraordinary patience and self-control.

— Shogun, Chapter 3

The Sumerians invented kingship, priesthood, diplomacy, law, and war. They gave the West its founding stories: the opposition of darkness and light at the Beginning; the Flood, with its ark and dove and surviving patriarch; the tower of Babel; the distant ancestors of Odysseus and Hercules. The Sumerians established the outlines of our political, legal, and temporal structures too, with the first kings and assemblies, the first written laws, the first legal contracts, and the sexagesimal system of counting that regulates the hours and seconds of our days.

The Sumerians wrote the first epics and constructed the first monumental buildings. They invented the wheel, the sailing boat, the dome, and the arch. They were the first people to cast, rivet, and solder metals. They were the first to develop mathematics, calculating the hypotenuse of a right triangle two thousand years before Pythagoras and enabling extraordinary achievements in civil engineering. Compiling methodical lists of plants and animals, the Sumerians were the first people to apply rational order to our knowledge of the natural world.

The Sumerians wrote down almost everything they knew, much of it on disposable clay tablets that have survived the millennia. Some thirty-nine centuries after the last of the Sumerians died, another inventive and curious people, the Victorians of the nineteenth century [C.E.], initiated a remarkable period of foreign exploration in Iraq. Thanks to this colorful and dramatic intellectual adventure, which began in the 1840s, today we can follow the course of Sumerian lawsuits, track Sumerian inventories, and study the terms of Sumerian marriages, wills, and loans. We read the overtures of Sumer’s diplomats. We follow in detail the provisioning of Sumer’s armies and the triumphs or disasters of their expeditions. We know intimately the pleadings of Sumerian students for more money from their fathers, and the pleadings of their fathers for more diligence from their sons. We track the transactions of Sumerian merchants in copper or onions. We admire the complex and perfect calculations of Sumerian engineers.

— Land Between The Rivers, Prologue

“Give as few orders as possible,” [Duke Leto Atreides] had told him once…. “Once you’ve given orders on a subject, you must always give orders on that subject.”

— Dune, Book Three, Chapter 3

“Why all the secrecy, Bishop? And the white smoke?”

“The Church is more often good theater these days than good religion. The secrecy originated in this century. Before the collapse of the papal states, the cardinals used to vote in St. John Lateran and live in the Lateran Palace. Each day they would walk down the street to the basilica of St. John Lateran for their day’s work and chat with the populace…. Even when the conclave was moved up to the Sistine Chapel, there was little attempt to keep the events secret. Everyone knew at the end of the day what the count was and who had voted for whom. The secrecy was imposed to protect the cardinals from the Roman emperor, that is to say, the Austrian emperor, whose ambassador had vetoed an election in 1903.”

“There isn’t an Austrian emperor anymore,” I said.

“You’ve noticed?”

— White Smoke, p. 71

The book is historical fiction but the historical fact is true.

No one knew better than Alexander [the Great] that heroic temperaments such as his own were subject to excesses: as he was excessively brave and extravagantly generous, he was excessively vengeful and extravagantly passionate when thwarted.

— The Gates of Hell, Chapter 1

“I want you to know, all of you, that we stand on holy ground,” he continued. “Many years ago, in this very place fewer than two hundred warriors led by Arthur, Dux Bellorum of Britain, met the massed warbands of Saecsen, Jute, and Picti under the leadership of the wily marauder Baldulf. Though greatly outnumbered, the valiant British not only stood against the foemen, but also put a far superior enemy to flight. The cost was fearful. When the battle was over fewer than eighty Britons remained standing.

“The blood of the defenders hallowed this ground, and out of recognition for the sacrifice of those brave dead, Arthur gave this land to one of his battlechiefs with the expressed stipulation that it should be held in perpetuity for the defense and support of the sovereignty of Britain. The link forged that day long ago has held fast; the chain remains unbroken—to this day and to this hour. Through the many storms and gales of adversity, the ducal fiefdom of Morven has remained steadfast and loyal—not to the temporal monarchy, which is all too often invested in weak and fallible men—but to something higher and purer: the True Sovereignty of Britain.

— Avalon: the Return of King Arthur, Chapter 22

The word “hostage” has negative connotations of a captive being held against their will and with a loss of freedom. The samurai understood that hostage-taking was a political move and a way of forming close familial bonds. As a hostage under both the Oda and the Imagawa, [Tokugawa] Ieyasu was treated as a family member, well cared for and properly educated with the expectation that he—and in turn the Matsudaira/Tokugawa clan—would be a future close ally of the Imagawa. In a way, this bears comparison to a form of Stockholm Syndrome, a condition in which hostages develop a psychological bond with their captors during captivity. As a long-term [(ten years)] hostage, Ieyasu took part in the 1560 [C.E.] battle between the Imagawa and the Oda at Okehazama in the invading Imagawa forces. In this battle, 25,000 Imagawa soldiers were defeated in a surprise attack by an estimated 2,500 Oda samurai. Luckily, Ieyasu had been leading a supply mission to nearby Odaka Castle when the Oda attacked. With the death of Imagawa Yoshimoto, Ieyasu was at last free. Upon his return home to Okazaki Castle he soon allied himself with Oda Nobunaga, who had indirectly brought about his freedom.

— The Samurai Castle Master, Chapter 4

[Rodrigo of Vivar spares the lives of two Moorish emirs he captured earlier that day. One is profoundly impressed by this.]

Yusuf al-Mu’taman:

Among our people, we have a word for a warrior with the vision to be just and the courage to be merciful. We call such a man, “El Cid.”

I, al-Mu’taman, Emir of Zaragossa, pledge eternal friendship to the Cid of Vivar and allegiance to his sovereign lord, King Ferdinand of Castile. May Allah strike the eyes from my head and the flesh from my bones if I break this pledge. In the name of Allah!

— “El Cid” (1961)

By around 1585 [C.E.], the growing power of [Japan’s] militaristic monks, the Ikko Ikki and the Shingon sect’s warrior priests of the Negoro-ji Temple in Kii Province…was becoming a concern for the Toyotomi [clan]. The Negoro-ji had been established around 1087, and at its peak during the Muromachi period (approximately 1335-1573), some 2,700 temples graced the spacious complex. They had been throwing their weight around in the political arena for some time now. and in particular their support of Tokugawa leyasu against [Toyotomi Hideyoshi] in the Battle of Komaki Nagakute the previous year had earned them his great displeasure. That the Toyotomi clan had recently taken their gates and various structures for use in Hidenaga’s castle gave them cause for greater offence.

Having watched Nobunaga before him struggle with the protracted sieges against the militant monks of the Hongan-ji Temple, and not wanting to have the same experiences himself. Hideyoshi launched a preemptive attack of Negoro-ji Temple, Having first attacked other local warrior-monk temples. Hideyoshi’s forces approached the Negoro-ji Temple from two directions. Many of the monks quickly fled to nearby Ota Castle and Hideyoshi ordered the temples razed. Any remaining Buddhist monks fleeing the flames were cut down. Hideyoshi then turned his attentions to Ota Castle, and built dams on three sides of the castle to divert the rivers and allow heavy rains to flood the castle. Those trapped on the hill by the rising waters soon succumbed to hunger, and the samurai, monks and peasants inside finally surrendered. In a last-ditch effort, some fifty warrior monks made a final suicidal charge against Hideyoshi’s forces. All were destroyed….

— The Samurai Castle Master, Chapter 3

2,700 temples! Spacious, indeed—even if most of them were merely (small) shrines.

“Listen, Omi-san, the battle will begin in a few days. You’ve served me loyally. On the last battlefield, after my victory, I’ll appoint you Overlord of Izu, and make your line of the Kasigi hereditary daimyos again.”

“So sorry, Sire, please excuse me, but I don’t deserve such honor,” Omi said.

“You’re young but you show great promise, beyond your years. Your grandfather was very like you, very clever, but he had no patience….”

“May I ask what you mean by patience, Sire?” Omi said, instinctively feeling that Toranaga wanted the question to be asked….

“Patience means restraining yourself. There are seven emotions, neh? Joy, anger, anxiety, adoration, grief, fear, and hate. If a man doesn’t give way to these, he’s patient. I’m not as strong as I might be but I’m patient. Understand?”

“Yes, Sire. Very clearly.”

“Patience is very necessary in a leader.”

“Yes.”

— Shōgun, Chapter 61

Author’s emphasis is in italics. Mine is in bold.

John Matheson:

I know you said it wasn’t a problem getting me here, and I hate to contradict a superior officer, but I suspect my status as a telepath did…come up.

Matthew Gideon:

John, you know what causes most problems? Ambiguity. Not knowing which decision is the right one. You’re the best First Officer I’ve ever served with, and I consider you a friend.

So there was no ambiguity, and no problem.

— “War Zone” – Crusade (1999)