As has happened with other barbarians in history, the first three generations of Seljuqs made splendid rulers. Neither Tughril Beg nor his son, Alp Arslan, could read or write. But they were great fighters and, being men of simple minds unwarped by laws and traditions, they administered justice with common sense, without fear or favour.
— Soldiers of Fortune, p. 28
Throughout the period of Abbasid glory in Baghdad (750-861 [C.E.]), the priceless oriental trade from India and China to Byzantium and Europe has passed up the Persian Gulf and through Baghdad to northern Syria. But the administration of Ibn Tulun in Egypt was so just and conditions in Iraq were so chaotic, that the merchants who handled the oriental trade decided to switch their route from the Persian Gulf to the Red Sea and Egypt. This was the beginning of the rise of Egypt and the decline of Iraq.
— Soldiers of Fortune, p. 24
The great Persian Empire of the fifth to third centuries [B.C.E.] was almost the by-product of the search for security by the Persians of Fars. As they moved from nomadism to settled agriculture, the Persians, along with the Medes and other groups on the Iranian plateau, sought to control as much land as possible on the perimeters of their settlements. In this quest for land, water, protection, and order, the quality of leadership within each group played a decisive role in that group’s success. For protection lay in numbers, and numbers were possible only through loose confederations between groups who were natural rivals. By their very nature, these confederations could retain their cohesiveness only through a strong leader exhibiting a charismatic personality. It was this environment that produced the most remarkable leader in Iranian history, [Cyrus the Great.]
On ascending the throne around 559 [B.C.E.], Cyrus began to build his empire. In 550 [B.C.E.], he wooed as much as conquered the Medes under his principles of conquest. First, persuasion and accommodation would take precedence over brute force. Second, the vanquished would never be humiliated. With a deft political touch, Cyrus granted the captured king of the Medes all reverence due his position and preserved intact Media’s existing military and administrative organizations along with the people who managed them. Avoiding needless reprisals against the subjugated, Cyrus created partners rather than adversaries in the expanding Persian Empire.
As a tribute to his politics and pragmatism, Cyrus’s empire was not only large, it was stable because the Persians realized what had never occurred to the Assyrians and the other imperialist powers of that age: that national interest does not have to express itself solely in vindictiveness, that it is not necessarily impaired by respect for lesser national interests, and that tolerance pays off.
— The Iranians, p. 17
In the years immediately following foundation, a [Christian] military order [like the Knights Templar] consisted of a small group of brethren under the leadership of a master. At this stage little governmental machinery was needed. As property and recruits were gained, it became the norm to establish subordinate convents, both in frontier regions and elsewhere. If expansion was considerable, an intermediate tier of government between convents and the order’s headquarters was soon needed, as it became difficult for masters to supervise distant convents. Also, a system was needed by which resources and recruits could easily be channelled to frontier regions from other convents. Orders which fought on several fronts also required a military leader in each district. They adopted the practice of grouping the convents of a region into what were called provinces or priories. Although there were variations in detail, the leading orders adopted a three-tier system of administration.
The comparatively mild character of Turkish slavery was due to the fact that slaves were not valued primarily for the economic usefulness of their labor. Slaves were used instead to satisfy the desire of upstart Ottoman notables (often slaves themselves) to accumulate a large household of attendants, thus attesting to their own personal greatness. Moreover, since a numerous, well-equipped, and loyal slave household helped to assure a great man’s personal safety, precautionary considerations impelled every Turkish magnate to treat his slaves with at least a modicum of generosity and kindness.
Slaves in Ottoman society, therefore, were primarily personal servants and bodyguards. Slave women also regularly played the role of concubine, and mothered the heirs of the Turkish ruling class. The great dignitaries directed the affairs of Ottoman society, especially statecraft and war, through their slave households. This meant that slaves managed important facets of Ottoman life. In particular, the imperial slave household administered the secular side of the sultan’s government, and constituted the backbone of the sultan’s field army.
Individuals who survived capture and the hardships of transport to the urban slave markets entered a strange, rich, wonderful new world. They migrated from remote, isolated, and often poverty-stricken villages to the metropolitan center of Ottoman civilization itself. The new style of life which opened to their eyes, with all its pomp and luxury, sophistication and scope, had wide appeal. This is not surprising, for the slave career among the Turks was sometimes extremely advantageous. The most powerful and wealthy men of the empire were slaves of the imperial household. Slaves commanded the Ottoman armies, governed the provinces, and framed the policy of the Ottoman state. Rise to the pinnacle of the Ottoman power structure was always unusual, of course; yet in the households of the great, even the humblest slave enjoyed, if only as a spectator, a richly variegated experience of the great world.
In the 15th and 16th centuries [C.E.], the energy and formidability of the Ottoman polity, the vigor of its officials, and the valor of it soldiers depended upon massive enslavement of peasant sons drawn from the fringes of the territories under Ottoman influence. Simple peasant boys, once drafted into the imperial household, were systematically trained for the tasks of defending, extending, and governing one of the world’s greatest empires, all on behalf of a monarch half-slave himself.
A career open to talents—wide open—regularly tended to project men of unusual abilities to the top of the official ladder; and so long as authority within the Ottoman state continued to be wielded by men who well remembered their peasant childhood, the bias of officials’ actions and inactions tended to show a modicum of sympathy for the peasantry whence they, as individuals, had sprung.
This meant, in particular, that the high officials of the Ottoman Empire exhibited a general will to enforce legal limits upon the goods and services a Muslim landholder could require from the peasants living on the lands granted to him in return for military service with the sultan’s army. A built-in tension between the sultan’s slave officials and the Muslim cavalrymen and fief holders resulted. It was from such a balance that both the sultan’s personal power and the welfare of the Balkan peasantries under the sultan’s administration proceeded. As long as this balanced tension was maintained, the Ottoman polity remained formidable.
— Europe’s Steppe Frontier: 1500-1800, pp. 27-32
The Great King was the center of court. He was surrounded by an elaborate ritual, which provided him with all the mystery of the oriental potentate. This was a conscious technique of government—a method of structuring charisma into the office and role of kingship so as to enhance the power of the state, and, in part, to protect the function of kingship within the political system from the individual quirks and weaknesses of any given king.
European monarchs of later times often compelled their nobles to be at court, where they could be watched and controlled directly. So also, perhaps, the Great King made court politics of enough importance to limit the autonomy of satraps and other governing officers. When a nobility must spend its time at court husbanding and advancing its political clout, it lacks the time to build strong power bases in the countryside. That such a system sometimes leads to excesses, including murder and violent attempts to grab the throne, does not mean that, in the main, it did not work most of the time as a method of keeping power and the powerful where they could be manipulated by the central authority.
The substantive power of the Persian monarchy lay in its control over patronage and finances. All of the high officers of the court and in the provinces served at the king’s will, and most of the bureaucracy down to apparently quite low levels were financially hostage to the royal treasury. Not only did the king do the appointing of high political and military officials, he also fired them frequently. Such regular changes in the upper levels of government prevented opportunities for officials to gather too much power into their own hand by the long-term exercise of a single office. Another form of protection for the government was for the king to appoint his kinsmen to office whenever possible—a good tribal method of rule.
— The Cambridge Ancient History, volume IV, pp. 81-82
Who was included in the ancient elite? Its members and size varied, of course, from place to place and time to time, but it always included government officials, priests, and army officers. In the great cities of the Hellenistic empires, wealthy merchants and businessmen were marginal members of the ruling class, or hoped to be. They were literate, rich, and powerful, and generally were accepted into the elite. The most important group within the ruling class was the landlords, whose role as suppliers of food was essential. In the ancient Near East not much was needed in the way of shelter or clothing; with a secure food supply the land could support a large population. Some of the subjects of the pharoahs might live miserably but they survived as long as the food supply was maintained. Landlords were essential in preindustrial society, and as the dominant group within the elite they set the tone of the ruling class.
Emphasis mine.
The people who initially got control of economic resources immediately monopolized them. They could do anything they wanted thereafter provided that they remained a relatively homogenous and peaceful group. By and large they did remain homogenous and peaceful among themselves. They decided how to divide up the power, how to divide up the wealth, who should be king, and which family should become the royal dynasty. The instability in these societies usually came from external invasions by new peoples, who at various times pushed into these wealthy lands and gained control. Their control usually collapsed or was overthrown a few generations later by the old native aristocracy or by later invaders. But all invaders perpetuated the existing social structure, taking over the prerogatives of the old aristocracy.
If the feudal world had to be summed up in just three words, they would be strong, stronger, strongest. Obedience was extracted not by a pledge, or trust, or loyalty, but as the result of raw fear of the punishment that disobedience could bring. To tell a noble that you were not afraid of him was a personal insult and frequently led to a challenge. Fear was the fountainhead of government control throughout the world. Rulers wanted to be feared, not loved.
— Dungeon, Fire, and Sword, p. 33
Author’s emphasis in italics. Mine in bold.
…All the Princedoms of which we have record have been governed in one of two ways: Either by a sole Prince, all others being his servants permitted by his grace and favor to assist in governing the kingdom as his ministers; Or else, by a Prince with his Barons who hold their rank, not by the favor of a superior Lord, but by antiquity of blood, and who have States and subjects of their own who recognize them as their rulers and entertain for them a natural affection. States governed by a sole Prince and by his servants vest in him a more complete authority; because throughout the land none but he is recognized as sovereign, and if obedience be yielded to any others, it is yielded as to his ministers and officers for whom personally no special love is felt.
Of these two forms of government we have examples in our own days in the Turk and the King of France. The whole Turkish empire is governed by a sole Prince, all others being his slaves. Dividing his kingdom into sandjaks, he sends thither different governors whom his shifts and changes at his pleasure. The King of France, on the other hand, is surrounded by a multitude of nobles of ancient descent, each acknowledged and loved by subjects of his own, and each asserting a precedence in rank of which the King can deprive him only at his peril.
He, therefore, who considers the different character of these two States, will perceive that it would be difficult to gain possession of that of the Turk, but that once won it might be easily held. The obstacles to its conquest are that the invader cannot be called in by a native nobility, nor expect his enterprise to be aided by the defection of those whom the sovereign has around him. And this for the various reasons already given, namely, that all being slaves and under obligations they are not easily corrupted, or if corrupted can render little assistance, being unable, as I have already explained, to carry the people with them. Whoever, therefore, attacks the Turk must reckon on finding a unite people, and must trust rather to his own strength than to divisions on the other side. But were his adversary once overcome and defeated in the field, so that he could not repair his armies, no cause for anxiety would remain, except in the family of the Prince; which being extirpated, there would be none else to fear; for since all beside are without credit with the people, the invader, as before his victory he had nothing to hope from them, so after he has nothing to dread.
— The Prince, p. 16
The monasteries of 10th and 11th century Europe [C.E.] were not simply communities of devout men and women living a life given over to corporate prayer and worship. Envisaged by monastic teachers as arks of salvation in a flood of worldly perils, they remained an integral part of the society which brought them into being. The Castilian monasteries were repositories of dynastic tradition, mausoleums, powerhouses of loyalty to the comital family. Links between the landed aristocracy and the monasteries were thus extremely close. Noblemen looked to the monastic houses of which they were the often very generous patrons for diverse reciprocal services and expressions of gratitude. The provision of hospitality was one of these. A patron would expect to be put up (with all his human and animal retinue), and probably in some style, in “his” monastery as in some sort of private hotel. The hospitality sought might be permanent. The active career of an aristocratic warrior might be as short as that of a 20th century footballer, and he had to have somewhere to spend what might be a long retirement. It is probably correct to envisage the monasteries of this period as containing more than a few incapacitated or elderly knights among the community. Assured of comfort and security, surrounded by fellows of their social rank to some of whom they might be related, ideally placed to receive news and gossip, they must have spent their declining years in an agreeable way.
— The Quest for El Cid, pp. 66-67
Emphasis mine.
The Ayoubids had introduced…a feudal system that dominated Egypt…for six hundred years and vitally affected the social conditions, arts, literature, and material aspect of Cairo…. Slavery in the East is no disgrace; on the contrary, the relationship ranks far above mere hired service. The slave is regarded almost as a son.
— Soldiers of Fortune, p. 43
So gorgeous was the spectacle on the May morning of 1910 [C.E.] when nine kings rode in the funeral of Edward VII of England that the crowd, waiting in hushed and black-clad awe, could not keep back gasps of admiration. In scarlet and blue and green and purple, three by three the sovereigns rode through the palace gates, with plumed helmets, gold braid, crimson sashes, and jeweled orders flashing in the sun. After them came five heirs apparent, forty more imperial or royal highnesses, seven queens—four dowager and three regnant—and a scattering of special ambassadors from uncrowned countries. Together they represented seventy nations in the greatest assemblage of royalty and rank ever gathered in one place and, of its kind, the last. The muffled tongue of Big Ben tolled nine by the clock as the cortège left the palace, but on history’s clock it was sunset, and the sun of the old world was setting in a dying blaze of splendor never to be seen again.
— The Guns of August, p. 1
Standing, from left to right: King Haakan VII of Norway, King Ferdinand of Bulgaria, King Manoel of Portugal, Kaiser Wilhelm II of Germany, King George I of Greece, King Albert of the Belgians. Seated, from left to right: King Alfonso XIII of Spain, King George V of England, King Frederik VIII of Denmark.
The photograph is not from The Guns of August. I failed to record what book I found it in. Imagine if it was a color photograph.
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