this post was submitted on 14 Jul 2023
57 points (96.7% liked)
Asklemmy
43918 readers
1758 users here now
A loosely moderated place to ask open-ended questions
If your post meets the following criteria, it's welcome here!
- Open-ended question
- Not offensive: at this point, we do not have the bandwidth to moderate overtly political discussions. Assume best intent and be excellent to each other.
- Not regarding using or support for Lemmy: context, see the list of support communities and tools for finding communities below
- Not ad nauseam inducing: please make sure it is a question that would be new to most members
- An actual topic of discussion
Looking for support?
Looking for a community?
- Lemmyverse: community search
- sub.rehab: maps old subreddits to fediverse options, marks official as such
- [email protected]: a community for finding communities
~Icon~ ~by~ ~@Double_[email protected]~
founded 5 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
So a monarch that can't appoint their own heir really isn't much of a monarch. The point of being a monarch is not being beholden to any rules.
This is just an oligarchy with rules that don't benefit 3/4th of the participants--which is as odd as it sounds.
After all, the point of 4-5 year terms in modern democracies is that you don't have to wait your whole life to take over.
It's an interesting concept, but coming to this arangement--and maintaining it in perpetuity--must have been an extremely extrordinary set of circumstances.
It was. I don't want to spoil my own lore, but this is the solution they found to prevent mutual extermination through civil wars.
You may want to read up about the Roman Empire's experiment with tetrarchy (rule by four emperors), which was in part an attempt to prevent civil wars.
Great!
Is the monarch required to be sacrificed or put in harms was every so often?
That would kinda mimic the Aztec Festival of Toxcatl, where an impersonator of the god Tezcatlipoca was sacrificed every year after being treated like a god for the year. The god-man was usually selected from royal families. He had religous function and was provided for in specific ways (eg a harem) but he wasn't a monarch.
No, there is no human sacrifice (in that specific nation at least). But it is an organized imperialistic-spartan-like society and need to keep peace inside the borders at all cost.
That’s only for absolute monarchies, though.
Not really. Absolute monarchy is not the only kind of monarchy. There are also constitutional monarchies and various in-between. Even absolute monarchies usually are defined by some rules (e.g. succession of power in hereditary monarchies).