In former times, the assembly of nobles elected each new king from among a recently deceased king's sons but this had led to civil wars so it was decided to choose a successor while the father still reigned. King Penda had pressured parliament to choose his eldest son, Cerdic, as a precedent for primogeniture.
Cerdic had then persuaded Penda that any prince but himself who had too much power might try for more. Consequently, Torric is promised only a single planetary system in the conquered Terran Empire whereas some lower ranking males expect more.
Flandry argues that it is Torric's duty to work for Scotha by becoming king. Any chieftain's power rests on his supporters. Since Penda will not live long and since Cerdic is disliked, someone else with a claim to the throne can use the remaining time to build support for himself and to win over Cerdic's supporters. Fratricide is unthinkable but retirement to the governance of a planetary system would suffice... Torric does not want to bribe Cerdic's faction but his friend can handle such matters for him...
Flandry now has both the Chief of Intelligence and Cerdic's younger brother working against Cerdic!
4 comments:
Hi, Paul!
AND, while Torric and Nartheof thought they were only undermining Cerdic, they were ALSO, unbeknownst to them, subverting Frithian rule. They were thinking in too short sighted a way to see how what they were doing or agreeing to let Flandry do was wrecking Scotha.
Sean
Incidentally, this switch from selecting a king from the royal kindred to strict male-line primogeniture is one of the markers for the transition from late Dark Age/Early Medieval Europe to the high medieval period.
Countries which didn't make that transition tended to go under, because they were both prone to civil war and more vulnerable to outside intervention in their dynastic succession disputes.
Eg., England screwed Norway royally by using exactly that trick, as is noted in Poul's MOTHER OF KINGS: one of the sons of Harald Fairhair had been fostered at the English court (and had become a Christian). The English king sent him back to Norway... where, as an undoubted son of Harald, he was just as entitled to the throne, which produced endless trouble, not least for Erik Bloodaxe and his wife, Gudrun the Witch-Queen.
The Church backed the switch to primogeniture and the nobility fell in line because the same process also benefited them, by enabling them to keep their inheritances undivided.
Mr Stirling,
We can learn some European history from futuristic space opera.
Paul.
Dear Mr. Stirling,
I remember that example you cited, how Haakon Aethelstan's Foster was able to oust Erik Blood-ax and become King of Norway, precisely because he had as good a claim to the kingship as Erik. And because Haakon I was both able and popular, he remained king despite all the attempts of Erik and his sons to wrest back the kingship till he died 27 years later.
A strictly hereditary succession (whether thru the male line alone or a daughter if a king had no sons) had many advantages: an orderly succession, a drastic lessening of civil wars, a greater increase of plain old SECURITY for everybody, etc.
Sean
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