Titles and ranks of Safehold

lyonheart wrote:Could the terms have been left in the language memory of the reprogrammed Adams and Eves?

Hi, that would be my guess as well. Bedard and her team wouldn't have selected a vocabulary to include in the colonists' reprogramming, because that would have been entirely unnecessary. They'd just have focused on leaving out those words and concepts that were dangerous to her and Langhorne's plan, i.e. any concepts and words that had to do with advanced technology. As such, the colonists would have retained the words such as 'duke' etc.

Come to think of it, political terms such as titles etc. involves concepts which require a knowledge of historical events and developments to make sense of. And since Langhorne and Bedard wanted the colonists to believe that all of creation started at the moment they woke up as Adams and Eves, we know they (the colonists) didn't retain any knowledge of their past or of humanity's true history.

As such, terms such as 'king', 'duke' and 'earl' would be nothing more than meaningless noises, if their language did retain those terms.

The most likely explanation would be that the Safeholdians came up with terms of their own for concepts they had developed for themselves, and Mr Weber is simply using terms WE can make sense of to translate the Safeholdians' terms and concepts.

The Safeholdian conceptual equivalent of 'duke' would likely involve something like this: 'the man (or woman) who is the military leader of the group of people living in a specific region and who identify with each other on the basis of kinship, regular contact, cultural and dialectal similarities, shared history and political association.'

Understand that that concept would have developed only after a certain period of time, during which such tribal groups would have become differentiated on the basis of those identifiers I listed (and others). Since we know virtually nothing about the history of the various kingdoms between the moment of 'creation' and the Merlin era, we cannot tell what historical events might have led to such associations to have taken place, but we can reasonably assume that once the Safeholdians did start to split into separate, self-identified communities of various sizes, they would have needed terms to describe the various political roles that such communities needed in order to BE organized and thriving.

They might have taken those terms from the Writ, but since we do not know the actual content thereof, we can't know whether they did so or not.

Or they might have taken existing terms such as 'mayor', 'clerk', 'constable' etc. (i.e. terms of leadership positions that would have been necessary right from the start of the settlement), and applied them to newly-developed MILITARY and POLITICAL positions. As time passed and the original single language of the colonists changed and diversified into new dialects (and later new languages), the pronunciation of those terms would have changed and diversified as well, with one pronunciation being used for the term's original meaning (i.e. 'constable') and the other for the newer meaning (i.e. 'leader of warband'/'baron' or whatever).

Or maybe there is an explanation I haven't thought of as yet.

They spread from the temple lands, where presumably the families of the Angels were located.

Annachie wrote:They spread from the temple lands, where presumably the families of the Angels were located.

Annachie, the original settlements of Adams & Eves were distributed throughout Safehold. Remember that Alexandria and Tellesberg were already established even before Langhorne's death, which happened shortly after the 'Day of Creation'.

Had humanity been concentrated in only the Temple Lands at first, and then over time spread from there, it's highly unlikely that they would have settled so much of Safehold within such a short period of time (only 8 or 9 centuries), given the level of technology they had before the Merlin era. Galleys simply cannot transport large numbers of colonists.

However, if they spread out from a number of distributed nodes, then it wouldn't have taken so long for humans to spread throughout the major island realms.

Such a distributed original settlement would also have led to a faster diversification of local cultures, languages and traditions/customs, because although contact between local settlements would have been relatively easy and frequent, the same would not have been true for most of Safehold's history between settlements that were located distantly from each other. Regular contact between such distant locations would have become commonplace only after the development of the galleon, as galleys aren't really all that suited to oceanic travel.

SWM wrote:

Hank Plantagenet wrote:I realize this thread is over a year old. My apologies if bumping it is against the culture here. I figured it was as good a place as any to ask my question about the nobility structure.

We have in the noble ranks--

Knight
Baronet
Baron
Earl
Duke
Grand Duke
Prince
King
Emperor

(and their female equivalents, of course)

What happened to the intermediate ranks of viscount and marquis? The title of marquis/ marquess/ margrave descends (on earth at least!!) from nobility who have a feudal estate that is on a border, in the "march lands" (that are even present on Safehold), and the responsibility to defend that border.

Viscount and Marquis were not really traditional. Viscount did not exist everywhere, and often it was not a hereditary title. Marquis was originally the equivalent of a Count--the difference is that his land was called "March" instead of a "County", and was on the borders of the country (also called the marchlands). Marquis did not get added to the British peerage titles until long after the Middle Ages.

True, and yet it is the system that seems to have been eventually settled upon in most systems of nobility. Even the Japanese, who copied the British during the Meiji restoration, had 5 grades of nobles from duke to baron. If we are going on strictly a British system, I do not believe the Grand Duke title exists in the UK.

It just seems to me that with 5 classes of nobility instead of three (if we leave out the knights and baronets), there is less of a yawning chasm between the ranks, and more opportunity for more political subtleties in rank ordering the nobility.

Hank Plantagenet wrote: If we are going on strictly a British system, I do not believe the Grand Duke title exists in the UK.

'Grand Duke'/'Archduke' are terms that were used more in central and eastern Europe. The equivalent rank in western and southern Europe (and the western German lands) was/is 'Prince'.

hanuman wrote:

Hank Plantagenet wrote: If we are going on strictly a British system, I do not believe the Grand Duke title exists in the UK.

'Grand Duke'/'Archduke' are terms that were used more in central and eastern Europe. The equivalent rank in western and southern Europe (and the western German lands) was/is 'Prince'.

Generally Grand Duke is a notch above Prince and is generally the ruler of a territory physically isolated from the royal house to which he owes nominal direct fealty. The fall of the original royal house casts these adrift as this is not a national link but a feudal relationship (i.e. personal not national relation to the crown).
Luxemburg is a typical example with fealty originally owed to the Holy Roman Empire and the Netherlands.

Um hanuman, I didn't mention the Adams and Eve's

AirTech wrote:

hanuman wrote:
'Grand Duke'/'Archduke' are terms that were used more in central and eastern Europe. The equivalent rank in western and southern Europe (and the western German lands) was/is 'Prince'.

Generally Grand Duke is a notch above Prince and is generally the ruler of a territory physically isolated from the royal house to which he owes nominal direct fealty. The fall of the original royal house casts these adrift as this is not a national link but a feudal relationship (i.e. personal not national relation to the crown).
Luxemburg is a typical example with fealty originally owed to the Holy Roman Empire and the Netherlands.

I'll not argue your point re the relative ranking of the two titles, but a Principality such as Liechtenstein originally had the same kind of direct personal relationship with the crown as Grand Duchies did. There were no level of fealty between the ruler of a Principality and the monarch, unlike lesser titles.

Good discussion. I guess that perhaps it all comes down to Mr. Weber's preference not to have viscounts and marquesses in his series.