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Old 04-07-2023, 09:42 AM   #1
Michael Thayne
 
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Default The dynamics of long-lasting, durable royal dynasties

I have a fantasy setting I've been working on world-building for some time now, and I thought it would be interesting if you had a ruling dynasty that claims to have been on the throne for dozens of generations. But to make this a little more plausible, I decided it would help if the dynasty used a relatively inclusive definition of who counts as a member of the dynasty (as opposed to a mere cadet branch): every legitimate son of a prince of the dynasty is themselves a prince, unless they renounce their royal status (which maybe they have to do to, say, enter the priesthood or something).

The world-building quandary this presents for me is that if the wealth and status of princes allows them to have an above-average number of children, over dozens of generations the royal family could grow quite large thanks to the power of exponential growth. This is more likely to happen in polygynous societies but in a fantasy setting it could also happen if, say, better access to magical healing gives royals a lower mortality rate. And as I understand it, in the real world some royal families do get quite large. In researching this I found a quote from a Saudi princess claiming the Saudi royal family has 15,000 members. The Thai royal family is also quite large from what I understand. In an extreme case, in the Islamic tradition the surname "Sayyid" indicates descent from Muhammad, and by some estimates there are millions of Sayyids in the world.

Of course a royal family can't actually grow exponentially. Eventually, you reach a point where the average wealth of a distant relation of the king is no longer sufficient to result in an above-average number of children. The exact details of how that happens depends on things like the details of a society's inheritance law, but it is bound to happen eventually. Less-wealthy people who theoretically ought to have royal status might struggle to pay for the scribes, engravers, lawyers, or whatever they need to maintain proof of royal status. Alternatively, private family records might not count for much if palace scribes don't think you're important enough to include in official palace records. Oh, and I almost forgot, there's the small (sometimes not small) matter of people getting killed in intra-family intrigues.

But I'm not sure how to work out the asymptotic royal family size under my assumptions. FWIW I'm envisioning a country with a population roughly the size of Egypt's at the height of the Roman Empire, one that does not have parchment (meaning long-term record keeping means either engraving or constantly recopying fragile papyri, both of which are expensive).
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Old 04-07-2023, 11:44 AM   #2
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Default Re: The dynamics of long-lasting, durable royal dynasties

Minor point, but parchment was in use at least as far back as papyrus paper. Papyrus was popular in Egypt and neighboring regions because it was cheaper than parchment until the late Roman Republic (AFAICT this had to do with papyrus only growing in a limited geographic area, while the livestock from which parchment is derived can be raised many places.) There's also good old clay tablets, much easier than engraving on rocks.
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Old 04-07-2023, 11:45 AM   #3
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Default Re: The dynamics of long-lasting, durable royal dynasties

You need a country with strong laws and where the monopoly of violence is solidly in the royal families hands. It is very unlikely to happen in any early society short of magic. Any large early society need strong delegation due to communication problems, it was basically what made the roman empire ungovernable by one man.

You also need inheritance laws and traditions that are both flexible to get that occasional idiot to never sit the throne, the occasional childless king to get an out by picking a capable successor and not have a civil war when he is dead. Likely it won't happen in an early state type.

Don't see it happening unless you have something odd happening like an unusual talent for magic, a magical artifact of some kind or just possibly some very extreme religious with god kings built into it. Favor of a literal god or other being of great power could work in a fantasy setting.

Last edited by exalted; 04-07-2023 at 11:50 AM.
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Old 04-07-2023, 11:56 AM   #4
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Default Re: The dynamics of long-lasting, durable royal dynasties

Having an extremely large pool of candidates for royalty doesn't really contribute to stability, as it produces a large number of people who are thinking "I could be the one sitting on that throne".

Your key problem here is that dozens of generations means a government that has remained stable for hundreds of years (at twenty years a generation and two dozen generations, nearly 500 years), and governments remaining stable for that long mostly doesn't happen regardless of the government type.
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Old 04-07-2023, 12:10 PM   #5
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Default Re: The dynamics of long-lasting, durable royal dynasties

Or perhaps this government's been stable for a couple of centuries, long enough that even the old gaffers don't have childhood stories of a time when things were different, and there's nobody to notice that the "ancient records" are largely fictional. Heck, the current royal family almost certainly believes every word of it, and why wouldn't they?

Of course, you're still going to need some of the correcting methods above, in order to ensure that your dynasty doesn't get swapped out because some congenital idiot inherited the throne.
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Old 04-07-2023, 12:15 PM   #6
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Default Re: The dynamics of long-lasting, durable royal dynasties

The house of capet did 341 years in France by far the longest in France with 15 kings. Which seems fairly impressive when you look at the few other nations in pre-modern times on a quick wiki search (most dynasties seems to get about 3 kings :D) and a few of those were very weak kings. It also seems pretty much to say that you won't likely get twice that time and twice that amount of kings.

Could possibly work with a japanese style emperor who is the cermonial head of state revered as a living god but with little actual power during most reigns of warlords. Enough cultural/traditional reverence for the ruling family to always be at the top even if sometimes they have no or little actual power.

Last edited by exalted; 04-07-2023 at 12:34 PM.
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Old 04-07-2023, 12:31 PM   #7
Michael Thayne
 
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Default Re: The dynamics of long-lasting, durable royal dynasties

Quote:
Originally Posted by Dalillama View Post
Minor point, but parchment was in use at least as far back as papyrus paper. Papyrus was popular in Egypt and neighboring regions because it was cheaper than parchment until the late Roman Republic (AFAICT this had to do with papyrus only growing in a limited geographic area, while the livestock from which parchment is derived can be raised many places.) There's also good old clay tablets, much easier than engraving on rocks.
I don't know of any references to parchment being used prior to about 500 B.C., whereas parchment goes much further back.

As for clay tablets, my impression is that they were mainly used as an erasable writing medium—sometimes fired on purpose, but more often fired by accident when a building burned down. I may be wrong about that though.

Quote:
Originally Posted by Anthony View Post
Having an extremely large pool of candidates for royalty doesn't really contribute to stability, as it produces a large number of people who are thinking "I could be the one sitting on that throne".

Your key problem here is that dozens of generations means a government that has remained stable for hundreds of years (at twenty years a generation and two dozen generations, nearly 500 years), and governments remaining stable for that long mostly doesn't happen regardless of the government type.
A large pool of candidates may not make for stability but it can make for an illusion of stability as the royal family gets to brag about how many centuries they sat on the throne. Long runs of a single dynasty on the throne may be rare even then, but they do happen. Hugh Capet and his male-line descendants managed to rule France for over 800 years. The Imperial Family of Japan has verifiably ruled the country since at least the 6th century, and traditionally claimed their rule went back even further.

What I am fuzzy on is the details of how these families evolved over time. I would not be entirely surprised if political instability was one factory checking the size of these families, but I suspect there were other factors as well. I've had some trouble finding good information there.
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Old 04-07-2023, 12:35 PM   #8
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Default Re: The dynamics of long-lasting, durable royal dynasties

The easy way to make a royal dynasty stable is to make it ceremonial or otherwise irrelevant, because then there's no real motivation to replace it.
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Old 04-07-2023, 01:10 PM   #9
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Default Re: The dynamics of long-lasting, durable royal dynasties

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Originally Posted by Michael Thayne View Post
Hugh Capet and his male-line descendants managed to rule France for over 800 years.
You need to be very generous with dynastic lines to put the house of Valois and the Bourbons as part of Capet rule of France. 7 times great grandson for Charles X and grandson or cousin for Philip VI. But sure if you go that remote eventually pretty much every noble of a nation will be related enough :) Could work with each noble ascending the throne adopting the royal house.
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Old 04-07-2023, 03:47 PM   #10
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Default Re: The dynamics of long-lasting, durable royal dynasties

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You need to be very generous with dynastic lines to put the house of Valois and the Bourbons as part of Capet rule of France. 7 times great grandson for Charles X and grandson or cousin for Philip VI. But sure if you go that remote eventually pretty much every noble of a nation will be related enough :) Could work with each noble ascending the throne adopting the royal house.
"Male-line descendants" and "descendants" are two very different things. If you have perfectly average reproductive success, your number of descendants will double every generation (at least until your descendants start marrying each other), but your number of male-line descendants will on average be stuck at 1 (with a lot of room for random variation around that number of course).
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