Tag: rulership

“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)

Balin:

Don’t mind him, laddie. Thorin has more cause than most to hate orcs. After the dragon took the Lonely Mountain, King Thror tried to reclaim the ancient dwarf kingdom of Moria. But our enemy had got there first. Moria had been taken by legions of orcs, led by the most vile of all their race: Azog the Defiler. The giant Gundabad orc had sworn to wipe out the line of Durin.

He began by beheading the King. Thrain, Thorin’s father, was driven mad by grief. He went missing—taken prisoner or killed, we did not know. We were leaderless. Defeat and death were upon us.

That is when I saw him: a young dwarf prince facing down the Pale Orc. He stood alone against this terrible foe; his armour rent, wielding nothing but an oaken branch as a shield! Azog the Defiler learned that day that the line of Durin would not be so easily broken.

Our forces rallied and drove the orcs back. Our enemy had been defeated, but there was no feast. No song that night, for our dead were beyond the count of grief. We few had survived.

And I thought to myself then: there is one I could follow. There is one I could call King.

— “The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey” (2012)

…Amber is a golden-colored gemstone made from fossilized tree resin, and its beauty has attracted the attention of rock collectors and jewelry makers since the Neolithic period (10,000 to 2,000 [BCE]).

It was apparently associated with Sun worship and spirituality in some societies, and Professor Czebreszuk believes the Mycenaeans must have valued amber primarily as a symbol of the Earth’s solar companion. He states:

"Already in the Neolithic in Central Europe, we have disc-shaped artifacts with radial decorations that clearly point to the Sun. Amber probably also comes to the south as a solar material. And the Sun is power, it is the most important celestial body, so it is also a heavenly body, it is also heaven. And all these symbols together gather into one beam, which made it such an important raw material."

Wearing an amber necklace or other type of jewelry would have signified that a person was blessed by the Sun, which would have acted as a justification for their aristocratic status in the class-conscious Mycenaean society.

In Bronze Age societies in general, the elites thought of themselves as a separate and distinct group that had more in common with elites in other societies than they did with average citizens in their own. Consequently, Professor Czebreszuk explains, they remained in contact with each other and traded with each other over long distances. Amber would have been exchanged across this trade network, ensuring that elites would have exclusive access to this coveted gemstone.

— Ancient Mycenaeans Wore Amber Jewelry to Symbolize Their Elite Status – Ancient Origins

Although the process is obscure, the result is quite clear. By 987 [C.E.] the soldiers of the West Frankish state were arranged in a feudal hierarchy bound together by oaths of vassalage. The king was at the top of the feudal pyramid: the suzerain of the land. A few dukes and counts were his direct vassals. They in turn had their vassals, rear vassals, and rear rear vassals. At the bottom of the pyramid was the simple knight with just enough land and peasant labor to support him, his family, and his horses. Now this structure was not all embracing by 987; in fact, it never was. As late as the latter part of the twelfth century the count of Dreux surrendered large allodial holdings to the count of Champagne and received them back as fiefs. A recent study has shown that large allodial estates persisted throughout the Middle Ages in the region around Bordeaux. But in comparison with the total area of the country these exceptions were of slight importance, and the principle beloved by feudal lawyers—no land without a lord—became essentially true. Thus all land was someone’s fief and every landholder except the king was someone’s vassal. The soldiers, the knights, held the land of France, and they were bound together by the feudal system.

— Mediaeval Society, pp. 16-17

The origins of feudal institutions may be found in both Roman and German life. According to Tacitus, when a German war chief planned a campaign, he gathered about him a group of picked warriors which was called his comitatus. These men swore absolute fidelity and obedience to the chief in return for arms, food, clothing, and a share in the plunder. The German chieftains who set themselves up as kings in the Roman Empire had similar bands of sworn followers. The Frankish kings called the comitatus a truste and its members antrustiones. The Saxon kings were surrounded by bands of thanes. Thus the practice of a warrior binding himself by an oath to follow a chief in war was well established among the Germanic peoples. The Romans had a somewhat similar institution, the clientela. When a Roman freed a slave, the freedman usually remained a dependent of his former master, a cliens. Poor freemen might seek the protection of a senator by becoming his clients. In the latter years of the Roman Empire in the West the comitatus and the clientele tended to become merged into one institution. The great Roman nobles hired bands of German warriors to serve as their bodyguards. These warriors were known as bucellarii. Now the Roman senator may well have thought of his bucellarii as soldier-clients, but the Germans were more likely to consider themselves members of a comitatus. The bucellarii played an extremely important part in the wars of the fifth century [C.E.]: a large part of Belisarius‘ army was composed of his bucellarii. It seems clear that we have in these various Roman, German, and Romano-German institutions the prototype of the relationship between lord and vassal.

— Mediaeval Society, pp. 12-13

News of [Prince] Elphin’s astounding prowess in the battle with the cattle raiders spread quickly throughout the six cantrefs. His kinsmen greeted him respectfully when they saw him and told one another once and again about the uncanny change in the king’s son.

He was bold, they said, and brave; the soul of an ancient hero—perhaps the very one whose torc he now wore—animated him. The lumbering Cuall, formerly one of Elphin’s harshest detractors, became overnight his greatest advocate.

Elphin enjoyed the praise and his increased status in the clan but did not make too much of it, preferring to minimize his role in the remarkable series of events that seemed to be clustering around him since his discovery of the babe in the weir. And Hafgan [the druid], whose prophecy had foreseen the change, appeared to view the young man in a different light. Clan members saw the two talking together frequently….

With no shortage of eager volunteers, work [on Elphin’s house] was progressing quickly: timbers were cut, shaped, and erected around the perimeter of the excavated hole and connected with beams and rafters; walls of split logs had been lashed into place and the chinks were being filled with clay; soon reed thatch would be laid and trimmed for the roof….

…Then there came the sound of hammering. Elphin looked back toward his house where Cuall, having prepared the heads of the two raiders slain by Elphin’s spear by dipping them in cedar oil, was now nailing them to the doorposts of his nearly-finished house. “This is a warrior’s house,” he said, stepping back to admire his handiwork. “Now everyone will know it.”

“A warrior’s house,” muttered Elphin, shaking his head. “It was luck, not a warrior’s skill that felled those two.”

“Do not mock the faith of simple men,” replied Hafgan. “Luck in battle is a thing of power, for whatever men believe they will follow.” He paused and pointed at Cuall. “I spoke of the future. There is yours.”

“Cuall?”

“And men like him. A battlechief must have a warband.”

“A warband! Hafgan, we have not maintained a warband since before my grandfather was a boy. With the garrison at Caer Seiont there has been no need.”

“Times change, Elphin. Needs change….”

The druid turned and walked away. Elphin watched him go, and then went back to inspect his house. Cuall was lingering nearby, and Elphin realized with some surprise that the man waited for a look or sign of recognition from him. He stopped and studied the heads nailed to his doorposts and then directed his gaze to Cuall.

“I am honored by your thoughtfulness,” he said and watched a huge grin break like sunrise across Cuall’s crag of a face.

“A man should have renown among his people.”

“You have earned the hero’s portion often enough yourself, Cuall. And I have heard your name lauded around the feast table more times than I can count.”

Elphin was amazed at the impact of his words. The hulking Cuall grinned foolishly, and his cheeks colored like a maid’s when her clumsy flirtation is discovered.

“I would fight at your side anytime,” said Cuall earnestly.

“I am going to raise a warband, Cuall. I will need your help.”

“My life is yours, Sire.” Cuall touched his forehead with the back of his hand.

“I accept your service,” Elphin replied seriously. The two men gazed at one another and Cuall stepped close, taking Elphin in a fierce hug. Then, suddenly embarrassed, he turned and hurried away.

“You will make a good king.”

Elphin turned to see [his recently-wed wife] Rhonwyn watching him from the doorway. “You saw?”

She nodded. “I saw a future lord winning support. More, I saw a man putting aside the hurt of the past and reconciling a former enemy, raising him to friendship without rancor or guile.”

“It is not in me to hurt him. Besides, he is the best warrior in the clan. I will need his help.”

“And that is why you will be a good king. Small men do not hesitate to repay hurt for hurt….”

— Taliesin, Chapter 13

I have previously posted about how plate armor should be much more expensive than listed in most RPG equipment lists. While this will make its acquisition by Player Characters more difficult, it is neither the sole nor primary reason they should rarely have it: ownership would be restricted by any organized government to trusted individuals. In a word, loyalty. Men-at-arms who have sworn to serve that government and not act contrary to it.

PCs must earn such trust, and give oaths of loyalty, before being granted access to such critical military technology.

There are other ways for PCs to achieve “heavy armor” equivalency—say, wearing two “medium” armors atop one another—but that has (and should have) obvious disadvantages.

Auda Abu Tayi:

I carry twenty-three great wounds, all got in battle. Seventy-five men have I killed with my own hands in battle. I scatter, I burn my enemies’ tents. I take away their flocks and herds. The Turks pay me a golden treasure, yet I am poor, because I am a river to my people!

[His tribesmen cheer.]

— “Lawrence of Arabia” (1962)

“Your fief is increased from five hundred koku to three thousand. You will have control within twenty ri.” A ri was a measure of distance that approximated one mile. “As a further token of my affection, when I return to Yedo I will send you two horses, twenty silk kimonos, one suit of armor, two swords, and enough arms to equip a further hundred samurai which you will recruit. When war comes you will immediately join my personal staff as a hatamoto.” Yabu was feeling expansive: a hatamoto was a special personal retainer of a daimyo who had the right of access to his lord and could wear swords in the presence of his lord….

— Shōgun, Chapter 6

Emphasis mine.

More than two decades passed between the meeting of Sulla and Orobazus [in 96 B.C.E.] and the next diplomatic contact between Rome and Parthia. Ancient states did not maintain permanent embassies in each other’s capitals or feel the need to be in constant touch, and instead sent ambassadors only when there was something that they wished to say. Preoccupied with bitter internal strife and with enemies and friends closer to their territory, neither the Romans nor Parthians chose to seek out the other.

— Rome and Persia, pp. 63

…Since generosity is one of the marks of true nobility, supporting a large household brings status to the lord of the household. The lord will maintain as many people as he can feed, far more than necessary to do the actual work….

The most important members of this crowd are the retainers and officials of noble rank. In medieval society, there was absolutely no shame attached to performing the most menial services for a person of higher rank—to the contrary, it was an honor to be chosen for the task. Likewise, having retainers of noble blood increases the status of the castle’s lord. It is the goal of powerful lords to have as many noble retainers as possible, even for such mundane jobs as falconmaster. Exactly how many castle officials will be noble-born depends of course, on the castle-holder’s wealth and reputation….

Among the ranks of common-born servants in the castle there is a further distinction—between servitors, who have a certain amount of respect and position, and the crowd of peasant servants who do the actual daily labor. The servitors have a craft to offer, such as blacksmithing, cookery, or hunting technique. These skilled laborers hold their positions by hereditary right, passing the job down to their sons or daughters as long as they have heirs. Servitors are generally proud of their position and very loyal to their lord if he’s any kind of a decent man at all.

The servants, recruited from the peasantry on the manor, are treated like valuable farm animals. Kicks and curses are their daily lot from those above them in the hierarchy. They sleep wherever they can find a spot usually on the floor or on a table in the lord’s hall, or out in the stables. For wages, they receive food, one suit of clothes a year, and a few small coins at Christmas. Yet, odd though it seems to modern minds, being a servant in a castle is a sought-after job. Since status demands that the lord have more servants than are necessary for the work, no single servant works more than three or four hours a day—a much better lot than breaking one’s back on the farm. Servants are also assured of getting enough to eat, which is not the case for other peasants.

— Who Lives In That Castle?, Dragon Magazine, issue 80

My first magazine excerpt, and from the first issue of Dragon Magazine I ever owned.

Judge Fenton:

[gestures to the large map hanging on the wall]

Here you are: the Oklahoma and Indian Territory, the Year of Our Lord 1889. Nineteen marshals. I was authorized sixty when I came here; told the President even that was not half enough.

Nineteen marshals—and one court—to cover nearly 70,000 square miles! A happy hunting ground filled with bushwackers, horse thieves, whiskey peddlers, counterfeiters, hide peelers, marauders that’ll kill ya for a hatband!

— “Hang ‘Em High” (1968)

What was the “system of noble combat?” It rested on a basic legal idea very alien to the modern mind: the idea that there was an intimate connection between high social status and the right to do violence. As [historian Jonathan] Dewald writes, the pre-eighteenth-century nobility had “habits of violence, public and private.” More than that, they had as a matter of law privileges of violence. Nobles were marked off from their social inferiors not just by their titles, not just by their dress, not just by their wealth, but also by their privileges, symbolic or real, of inflicting violence on others. Historically these privileges of public and private violence included “high justice” (the privilege of sentencing dependents to death), the privilege of hunting, the privilege of thrashing inferiors, and the complex privilege that goes by the name of “the right to bear arms.” The character of these privileges varied over the centuries, but from the central Middle Ages onward the symbolism of the law of noble status was consistently a symbolism of the “right of the stronger,” as the medievalist Wolfgang Schild has put it. Noble status was largely defined and displayed by the right, whether or not exercised, to commit violent acts.

[Historian Johan] Huizinga’s “noble combat” was prominent among these symbolically charged privileges. High status was partly defined by the privilege of doing violence not only to inferiors but also between equals, and aristocracy, as one medievalist has said, with a shade of exaggeration, was based “first and foremost on the capacity to assert oneself in and through combat.” In that sense, engaging in combat was closely akin to such acts as sentencing one’s dependents to death: it was a resonant marker of high status rich in the symbolism of “the right of the stronger.”

— The Verdict of Battle, pp. 141

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

Romans loved spectacle. The same was true of most societies in the ancient world, and, whatever else Hollywood has got wrong, the fondness of historical epics for grand processions, parades, and casts of thousands reflects something of this reality. Important events in the life of a community or leader were marked publicly and choreographed with great care, usually following well-established traditions. Thus, when for the first time a representative of the Parthian king met a representative of the Roman Republic, the occasion had to be marked by a ceremony where discussions were held in plain view, even if some or most of the real negotiation happened behind the scenes. A willingness to bargain in public was seen as a sign of good faith.

— Rome and Persia, p. 25

But there were other men, too, men of a kind Walsingham had already begun cultivating during his time in France, men who lived deeper in the shadows, men who could be bought and sold and flattered into betrayal, men who, out of desperation or vanity or a longing to believe in their own importance—or, the cooler ones, out of simple businesslike calculation of what they possessed and what someone else would be willing to pay for—were prepared to undertake more shadowy tasks.

Some of these were simple enough transactions for a neophyte spymaster. Ambassador Walsingham once sought to bribe one of the French Ambassador’s men for news from Spain, a commonplace enough transaction: a good many hangers-on about the courts of Europe were the beneficiaries of such “pensions” from foreign princes. But even in those early days, Walsingham set afoot some more elaborate and dangerous games. There was a charade aimed at neutralizing the intrigues in France of a worrisome Irishman, Maurice Fitzgibbon, the former Archbishop of Casel; Walsingham sought out for the job a certain Captain Thomas, a mercenary who had fought for the King of France in the civil wars, an Irish émigré himself, a man presumed to be a good Catholic, and known to be well connected in the French Court. The deposed Archbishop was plainly seeking the help of the Guises for an Irish rebellion against their Protestant English rulers; Thomas offered his services to Casel in the convincing role of supportive fellow countryman. He then brilliantly poisoned the well, arranging an audience for Casel with the Cardinal of Lorraine, to which he ostentatiously accompanied the Archbishop. “Two days after,” Walsingham reported, recounting the tale with obvious satisfaction to Burghley, “the Captain was sent for by the Cardinal; and being demanded, what manner of man the Archbishop was, of what estimation in his country, answered to every point as I required him. Since that time, I learn, that the Cardinal maketh not that account of the Archbishop that he looked for at his hands.” So much for the Archbishop and his dreams of glory.

These kinds of services did not come for free; this was new territory, and it was a fight to get the Captain the reward Walsingham had promised him….

Sometimes Walsingham probably paid such men out of his own pocket and hoped to be reimbursed later, or not even that; any great gentleman maintained a household establishment of servants and messengers and secretaries and clerks, and the line between private and public duties was ever blurred. In France he had had an Italian servant, Jacobo Manucci, who kept working for him for years afterward, doing curious little jobs, keeping in touch with other Italians in Paris, and Milan, and the Azores, traveling to odd places—once to Constantinople, even….

But for the rougher and darker stuff there was no substitute for cash on the barrelhead, and men hungry enough or low enough to do what the more genteel neither would nor could. It was all well and good to rely on merchants and travelers for casual news, but when he wanted specific information about an Irish adventurer seeking Spanish help for an invasion and rebellion, Walsingham sought out a man to pose as a merchant, provided him with a ship and a cargo of corn, and dispatched him to Portugal: not a cheap enterprise. When it came to a scheme to kidnap the papal legate as he traveled to France by sea and interrogate him about papal plots, Walsingham thought that Huguenot pirates might do; in the end, he dropped that idea, but his reading of the men required for the task was right enough.

And though any Englishman abroad might pose as a malcontent Catholic refugee, an easy enough disguise, and thereby hope to work his way into the confidences of the Spanish and French and Italian and English-émigré circles, it was also easy enough to get killed in the process, and in ignoble enough ways that appealed to few idealists or well-born. A man named Best, in Walsingham’s service, befriended the Spanish Ambassador’s secretary in Paris under such a pretense; one night a suspiciously staged fracas erupted outside the embassy, and when the man went out into the street to investigate he was killed, the perpetrators vanishing into the night.

— Her Majesty’s Spymaster, Chapter 6

Emphases mine.

In a fantasy roleplay campaign world, most people are rogues. 😀

Equating the value of money between two very different eras is strictly speaking impossible, since along with overall inflation the relative worth of different items alters considerably from one era to another: In sixteenth-century England, for example, a printed book like Foxe’s Acts and Monuments could cost as much as a good horse. But as a very rough guide, an Elizabethan pound can be taken to be the equivalent of £250 or $400 in modern terms.

Perhaps a better sense of how the Elizabethans themselves gauged the value of money may be had by reference to a few contemporary benchmarks. A farm laborer earned £5 a year; a school headmaster or a shipmaster £20; a large landholding lord, or a lawyer at the pinnacle of his profession, £1,000. A pound would buy a cow, a plain cloth coat, or a gun; £150 kept the young Earl of Oxford, an extravagant fop, supplied with clothing for a year; £10,000 bought a great London mansion.

A crown was an English silver coin worth a quarter of a pound; more loosely, the term could refer to any of a number of similar continental coins, such as the French écu, that all had about the same value as an English crown.

A mark was a unit of account equal to two-thirds of a pound.

— Her Majesty’s Spymaster, Preface

Gift exchange is said to revolve around three obligations: the obligation to give, the obligation to receive, and the obligation to repay. If people do not give, no relationship can happen; the refusal to take a gift is the equivalent of refusing the relationship; and once something has been received a form of repayment deemed socially acceptable is absolutely necessary. Moreover, gifts to powerful forces must be an important sacrifice by those giving them; trivial things that will not be missed are not enough. It seems reasonable to conclude that things like metalwork or parts of human bodies deposited in the right places and with due care were gifts to the powers of the world, however these were conceived.

— Magic: A History, pp. 223-24

The earliest cities were probably independent political units of the kind the Greeks called a polis, which we awkwardly translate as “city-state.” Although this kind of polity nourished for thousands of years and gave the world many of its most creative minds, it has now almost wholly vanished.

The polis ruled enough land around it to feed its folk and, whether republic or monarchy, ran its affairs as an independent nation. Every native dweller regarded himself as a citizen of Larsa, or Tyre, or Athens, or Rome as the case might be and looked upon everyone else as a foreigner. He would fight like a fiend to defend his city but would seldom join forces with the people of another polis for defense against a common foe. Since groups of city-states were always divided among themselves by murderous hatreds, a strong outsider was likely to conquer them sooner or later, one by one.

The first cities were organized along the same lines as the peasant societies whence they had sprung. People were grouped into families, clans, and tribes, and each tribe had its own section of the city. Usually the city had a king, who might be a high priest who left the fighting to someone else or who might be a general who left religion to someone else. Or he might combine the military and religious functions.

Power shifted back and forth among the leading groups: the king and his supporters; the senate, a gathering of the heads of the richest families; the priesthood; and the assembly, a gathering of all the armed men. Poor men, women, and slaves, having neither wealth, supernatural powers, nor armed might, did not count for much. Sometimes the senate got rid of the king, or at least reduced him to purely ritual functions, and ran the resulting “republic” to suit itself.

Government was rather loose and informal. No ruler could afford to be very tyrannical, because it was too easy for his subjects to flee to a neighboring polis. The earliest kings dressed and lived much like their subjects. A visitor to a small polis was not surprised to find His Majesty thatching or painting his own palace, while the queen wove him a royal robe on her own loom and screamed at the royal children when they got out of hand.

When a polis grew large and powerful, its government usually became more autocratic and centralized. Then the king might set out to conquer his neighbors. In Iraq, for nearly 2,000 years, one ambitious king after another founded a short-lived empire. Such conquerors had an advantage peculiar to Iraq, which is mostly semi-desert and needs irrigation to flourish.

In early Sumerian times, irrigation was on a small scale; each polis dug its own canals regardless of what its neighbor was doing. When kings conquered large empires, however, they put all the canals under one management, because this was more efficient and enabled the land to support more people. This larger taxable population furnished the king with additional wealth and power and made it easier for him to extend his conquests still further. Since circumstances favored large-scale organization, as fast as one of these watershed empires fell, another arose in its place.

— Great Cities of the Ancient World, Chapter 1

[Publius] Decius Mus [was an early] Roman [Republic consul] who, when faced with an impossible battle, vowed himself (according to an old ritual of human sacrifice) to the infernal gods, along with whoever he killed and who killed him. He then charged the enemy line singlehanded and opened a hole the Roman Army under the other consul (Rome in those days sometimes took the field with both presidents) then used to defeat the enemy.

— Legions of Hell, General Glossary

Now that is patriotism.