I'm actually less familiar with the history of medieval Britain than that of medieval continental Europe and was keeping in mind the Holy Roman Empire, France, Spain, and Russia through different points in history as the primary inspirations for what I was saying there. The division of power between kings and the nobles under them applies under essentially all monarchies of any real size. You can have small absolute monarchies, to be fair, but New Mahallo comes out of a larger monarchy and inherits its structure, and sure as hell has never had Arawn be in a situation to become an absolute monarch in the first place.
Those places were all
completely different, though. The HRE isn't even really relevant since it wasn't a unitary state - the individual German states, which had different power structures among them, are more important to the question of monarchical primacy than the often-figurehead position of the Emperor, whose powers were circumscribed precisely because he was
not the ruler of most of the land. Spain and Russia didn't even
exist as such until the 16th century; the monarch's powers in Castille were not even the same as the monarch's powers in (the predecessor states) Leon or Asturias or Galicia, much less in Aragon.
The primary point of disagreement here was on when we should be acting. I want to act in a couple of turns because I feel the cost of such an action without preparation and information is potentially disastrously high, though I agree the benefit of unseating the DeVilles at some point is very high - just not that it's a quick and easy action. Therefore, the difference between the argument you are presenting and the one mushroom presented is quite important. If all we're assuming here is that they won't lose power of their own volition absent external shocks, that actually helps my argument quite a bit - other external actors exist to give some of those shocks, we may be giving short-term shocks in the meantime, and ultimately I do seek to reap the benefits of unseating the DeVilles without running headfirst into unknown but potentially disastrous consequences.
If all you really mean to be arguing is that we should spend a little time - weeks, not months - getting to understand the political balance of the country before upending it, I do not think there is actually any substantive disagreement between the three of us. Certainly I did not interpret mightymushroom as saying, as you seem to have, that we need to behead them all by lunchtime tomorrow. However, we should
start planning our upending immediately, and we should take opportunities to curtail their powers as they come, especially when those opportunities offer us plausible deniability. Your argument has given me and probably mightymushroom the impression that what you meant was "we should bide our time indefinitely in order to avoid upsetting the big scary bear" - in no small part because preliminary planning and information-gathering is exactly
what we both want to do that you seem to be arguing against doing.
Who exactly do you think isn't doing things for their own reasons, and thus wouldn't be a good candidate for executing and seizing the assets of?
Why would my list of people to execute and foreclose upon have to have an end, just because it has an order?
You explicitly said otherwise, and your tone was certainly that we needed to deal with this growing cancer now rather than later:
It is not that they have not just gained more power; it is that they will continue to gain more power until they are acted upon, so, right now, they are the weakest they can be expected to be for the foreseeable future, barring some catastrophe.
I admit I phrased this badly and should more precisely have said "will not lose power until they are acted upon". However, quite frankly, I do
suspect they will continue to gain more power, since they seem to be shrewd operators. I do not in any way claim that they will grow in power at a constant rate or will never experience plateaus, and I don't know how to help you if you got that impression, since none of the actual words I wrote necessitate it. On the other hand, I do think that they are a growing cancer we need to deal with
now rather than later, before people get too used to de'Ville rule - but "
now" doesn't mean "yesterday", just "promptly as opportunities arise and without distraction". I'm not recommending going off half-cocked either, and I don't know why you and Powder both seem to think I am given that I've tried to be quite clear about plans being medium- to long-term.
I would agree that we can't make a lot of assumptions about how exactly the crown works, but we do have a lot of clues that this is a heavily decentralized system. For one thing, the explicit religion proscription against large, powerful realms ruled by a single monarch speaks to both underlying ideas about how power should work and generations of intentionally breaking apart powerful crowns.
It does, but it doesn't necessarily speak to ideas about how powerful kings should be within their realms, as opposed to ideas about how far those realms should stretch. I take it the opposite way you seem to - smaller realms are usually more centralized, and the very fact that a monarch controlling a lot of land is seen as dangerously powerful could imply that monarchs are expected to have substantial immediate control over their land.
For another, the existence and influence of the De'Villes in the first place seems to suggest that it is possible for non-kings to become extremely powerful and influential; even if being in an impoverished and foreign land helps with that, you wouldn't expect hardliner Imperials to thrive at such a thing if it simply wasn't done elsewhere. Finally, we have the crusade- individual petty lords and even religious figures had enough muscle and initiative to challenge most of the monarchs in what was formerly a unified kingdom. That probably wouldn't happen under an absolute monarchy or the aftermath of such a system.
On top of that, heavily centralized systems like that tend to be shit anyway, so even if we had the option to strangle every threat to our power in its crib, we probably couldn't afford to without getting skullfucked by orcs.
I started to reply to this part, but then I stopped, because I realised we have totally different definitions of what we're talking about here. I'm not looking for an autocratic Tsardom (although I would call it a modern myth that such a centralized system is in some practical way inferior). What I want to know - and I'm not even saying anything about what I think the system IS, only that we don't have enough information yet - is whether this is a system where members of the court traditionally serve at the pleasure of the King, or vice versa. Both have existed in human history and several people, including you, are operating under the assumption that it's the latter.
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Topic: (SG) Petty Kingdom of New Mahallo: Reign of King Arawn (Read 20231 times)