The equivalent of Zherneau in Siddarmark?

Early Siddarmark may have started like the Venitian Republic.

Wealthy people holding the right to vote, electing among them the ones who would have the right to rule.

From what David Weber has said, that's correct with the minor correction that apparently there were several such city-states that formed the Siddarmark Republic.

For that matter, property requirements to vote and hold public office was somewhat common in Ancient Greece.

For that matter, to be a Roman Senator required wealth.

Xuan-Wu wrote:Early Siddarmark may have started like the Venitian Republic.

Wealthy people holding the right to vote, electing among them the ones who would have the right to rule.

DrakBibliophile wrote:

Xuan-Wu wrote:Early Siddarmark may have started like the Venitian Republic.

Wealthy people holding the right to vote, electing among them the ones who would have the right to rule.

From what David Weber has said, that's correct with the minor correction that apparently there were several such city-states that formed the Siddarmark Republic.

For that matter, property requirements to vote and hold public office was somewhat common in Ancient Greece.

For that matter, to be a Roman Senator required wealth.

Property requirements to vote were a matter of course early in the U.S., too. (I'm sure plenty of politicians dream of restoring them.)

If you can picture classical Greece or Renaissance Italy uniting as federal representative democracies - with the property and social requirements for office of those eras, which may make us cringe at using 'democracy' there - you'd probably have a pretty good picture of the birth of Siddarmark.

The question I've got is what motivated that unification. City-states are classically prickly about their independence. They usually lose it only when (1) they get strong-armed or outright conquering into abandoning it (Greece under Athens or Macedonia, for instance), or (2) threatened badly by outside forces so that they must unite or die. Proto-Siddarmark was too far from other early Safehold states to be threatened, and there doesn't seem to have been strong-arming involved.

My best guesses are that either they were remarkably farsighted and saw early Harchong and/or Desnair as long-term threats if they didn't combine (and expand) - in effect, they could be threatened far in advance - or that the Republic grew very gradually out of trade agreements, canal maintenance arrangements, etc. That could be a bit like the growth of the European Union, if that ever gets to the point that you can call it a state and if you discount the role of threats from outside in its case.

Again, if you want to suspect actions of one of Shan-wei's "arrows" there, providing that kind of foresight or setting the basis for the Republic in early treaty arrangements may be more likely than a closer equivalent to the Brethren.

I think more like Venice than Greece. A heavy percentage of the population in Greece was enslaved whereas I don't think that was true for Venice.

Venice was also exceptional for its durability, lasting from the waning days of the Wastern Roman Empire to the Napoleonic era, a time frame of over a thousand years.

Don

n7axw wrote:I think more like Venice than Greece. A heavy percentage of the population in Greece was enslaved whereas I don't think that was true for Venice.

Well... I'd have to check and see about serfdom or slavery in the Venetian hinterland - maybe someone around here knows better already. Slavery tends not to get much use in cities. There, the wealthier class gets to use desperation and subsistence wages instead. (Or ambition and adequate but could-be-better wages in nicer times and places.)

Venice was also exceptional for its durability, lasting from the waning days of the Wastern Roman Empire to the Napoleonic era, a time frame of over a thousand years.

Don

If you count more-or-less classical Greece from the Bronze Age (before Homer, anyway) through to Roman domination, they had quite a fair stretch too. You wouldn't have comparable continuity of government with Venice though.

But yeah, sheer historical era will make Venice a closer counterpart to Siddarmark. Greek city states tended to come together against the invader a bit more than Italian ones though, so they may be a closer counterpart in that respect. And Greek city states and Greece itself tended to be much more self-sufficient than Venice ever tried to be, and would be more like Siddarmark in that respect. Neither Greece nor Siddarmark spurn trade, by any means, but Venice lived on it.

Wait a sec... I think the answer might be alot simpler than everyone thinks.

There was a one off line - thought by Alvarez I think - where it's mentioned that the aristocrats of Desnair, Dohlar, and Harchong are aristocrats because they had ancestors who were designated by the Archangels themselves as the rulers of such and such lands.

IOW, the Archangels created the aristocracies for certain mainland nations. And then for some reason, they didn't do the same for Siddarmark. So Siddarmark grew up out of the original enclave governments (which were possibly small town democracies), while those other nations had those governments supplanted by the Angel commanded aristocratic system.

Oh, and the Out Islands grew aristocracies by imitating the most successful (at the time) mainland nations, possibly with Church encouragement. And because they apparently were unified by conquest too.

evilauthor wrote:Wait a sec... I think the answer might be alot simpler than everyone thinks.

There was a one off line - thought by Alvarez I think - where it's mentioned that the aristocrats of Desnair, Dohlar, and Harchong are aristocrats because they had ancestors who were designated by the Archangels themselves as the rulers of such and such lands.

IOW, the Archangels created the aristocracies for certain mainland nations. And then for some reason, they didn't do the same for Siddarmark. So Siddarmark grew up out of the original enclave governments (which were possibly small town democracies), while those other nations had those governments supplanted by the Angel commanded aristocratic system.

Oh, and the Out Islands grew aristocracies by imitating the most successful (at the time) mainland nations, possibly with Church encouragement. And because they apparently were unified by conquest too.

How much reason have we to suppose that those aren't myths used to justify the rule of those aristocrats? It smells awfully like a made-up legend, like the supposed genealogies of early modern royalty back to biblical patriarchs as the basis for the divine right of kings.

To the extent that feudalism existed in Italy outside Sicily [a Norman kingdom], which wasn't much at all below the upper political levels, it looked a lot more like 15th-century England than 19-century Russia. The peasantry wasn't notably unfree. OTOH, slavery wasn't much less common in Venice than it had been at the height of the Roman Republic, and of no more account when it came to politics. 'slavery doesn't get much use in cities' may have been accurate in the 19-century US, but a lot of things about US slavery were downright weird compared to historical norms.

You're rather exaggerating the continuity between Classical and Bronze-Age Greece - understandably, given how prone Classical and Hellenistic Greeks were to doing so. There isn't really even linguistic continuity across that whole period, let alone cultural; there's certainly not political continuity even though some Bronze Age sites were occupied in 400BC. Rome is a better comparison, and even if you count the Principate [which you probably can, since it was the Republic with a permanent military dictator], it lasted only about 800 years against Venice's 1000+.

To get back to the original topic, the idea that 'republic' and 'aristocracy' are mutually exclusive is a peculiarly American... ummm... conceit. [And the founders of the US were, when you look at them, ruthlessly aristocratic, if you hew to the original sense of the Greek.] When the term finally widened to include the notion of a system of government, that system was simply anything not a monarchy, and historically republics have indeed been ruled by aristocracies far more often than not. Rome, the Netherlands, Venice, Genoa, Florence, even England during the Commonwealth. The only significant exception was the radical democracy of classical Athens - which wasn't really anything we'd regard as democratic today, given the extremely narrow definition of demos - and that was put down as a menace to public order as soon as the Spartans could pull together the naval power to do it.

Any aristocracy is easier in practice to move into and out of than most of their members like to admit. The relative fluidity seen in Siddarmark and Charis may highlight their kinship with the Dutch Republic, and that does provide a guide to Siddarmark's likely path had the current unpleasantness not erupted, but it doesn't exclude them from the ranks of the world's aristocrats.

Yet, that is. It seems clear that both states were evolving in the direction of something that modern British subjects, at least, would be pretty comfortable with. It also seems clear that in Charis that movement was the result of the influence of the Brethren working deep behind the scenes. Chisholm, to the extent that it was moving in the same direction, would most likely be a simple case of diffusion: the Tayts, seeing the possibilities of a strong Commons as manifest in their neighbours, promoted things that could only stand them in good stead in their struggle with their own aristocracy. The real question is Siddarmark. Personally, I see no need to posit a Shan-Weian influence in the formation of the Republic. It's a pattern that arises naturally enough, from the evidence we have, particularly in merchant societies, and that same merchant orientation seems to encourage fluid aristocracies [it's not easy to stay at the top of the heap when you can lose the family shirt between one day and the next]. The recent trends to greater openness, and the rise of Reformist sympathies, that were so troubling in Zion, could be an equally natural result of the strong ties with Charis and needn't indicate any sub rosa influences.

JeffEngel wrote:

n7axw wrote:I think more like Venice than Greece. A heavy percentage of the population in Greece was enslaved whereas I don't think that was true for Venice.

Well... I'd have to check and see about serfdom or slavery in the Venetian hinterland - maybe someone around here knows better already. Slavery tends not to get much use in cities. There, the wealthier class gets to use desperation and subsistence wages instead. (Or ambition and adequate but could-be-better wages in nicer times and places.)

Venice was also exceptional for its durability, lasting from the waning days of the Wastern Roman Empire to the Napoleonic era, a time frame of over a thousand years.

Don

If you count more-or-less classical Greece from the Bronze Age (before Homer, anyway) through to Roman domination, they had quite a fair stretch too. You wouldn't have comparable continuity of government with Venice though.

But yeah, sheer historical era will make Venice a closer counterpart to Siddarmark. Greek city states tended to come together against the invader a bit more than Italian ones though, so they may be a closer counterpart in that respect. And Greek city states and Greece itself tended to be much more self-sufficient than Venice ever tried to be, and would be more like Siddarmark in that respect. Neither Greece nor Siddarmark spurn trade, by any means, but Venice lived on it.

Louis R wrote:To get back to the original topic, the idea that 'republic' and 'aristocracy' are mutually exclusive is a peculiarly American... ummm... conceit. [And the founders of the US were, when you look at them, ruthlessly aristocratic, if you hew to the original sense of the Greek.] When the term finally widened to include the notion of a system of government, that system was simply anything not a monarchy, and historically republics have indeed been ruled by aristocracies far more often than not. Rome, the Netherlands, Venice, Genoa, Florence, even England during the Commonwealth. The only significant exception was the radical democracy of classical Athens - which wasn't really anything we'd regard as democratic today, given the extremely narrow definition of demos - and that was put down as a menace to public order as soon as the Spartans could pull together the naval power to do it.

It may be less a conceit than varying use of the terms. (I hope, at least.) I hope and expect that no one is supposing that a hereditary class distinction with legal and political implications exists only in the company of a hereditary monarchy. But there's still use of 'republic' to contrast with the first and use of it to contrast with the second.

Any aristocracy is easier in practice to move into and out of than most of their members like to admit. The relative fluidity seen in Siddarmark and Charis may highlight their kinship with the Dutch Republic, and that does provide a guide to Siddarmark's likely path had the current unpleasantness not erupted, but it doesn't exclude them from the ranks of the world's aristocrats.

Well - you get into differing uses of 'aristocracy' there too. I hadn't wanted to bring in the Dutch Republic just because the out of proportion influence of Holland there doesn't seem to have a counterpart in Siddarmark. Otherwise, yes, it's better than Venice and much better than Greece.

Yet, that is. It seems clear that both states were evolving in the direction of something that modern British subjects, at least, would be pretty comfortable with. It also seems clear that in Charis that movement was the result of the influence of the Brethren working deep behind the scenes. Chisholm, to the extent that it was moving in the same direction, would most likely be a simple case of diffusion: the Tayts, seeing the possibilities of a strong Commons as manifest in their neighbours, promoted things that could only stand them in good stead in their struggle with their own aristocracy.

You wouldn't suppose that it wasn't independently arrived at, to use the commons against the aristocracy? It seems so classic that it would plausibly occur to Chisholm's monarchy without having to have an example of it nearby.

The real question is Siddarmark. Personally, I see no need to posit a Shan-Weian influence in the formation of the Republic. It's a pattern that arises naturally enough, from the evidence we have, particularly in merchant societies, and that same merchant orientation seems to encourage fluid aristocracies [it's not easy to stay at the top of the heap when you can lose the family shirt between one day and the next]. The recent trends to greater openness, and the rise of Reformist sympathies, that were so troubling in Zion, could be an equally natural result of the strong ties with Charis and needn't indicate any sub rosa influences.

I suppose we could still make a distinction - a spectrum, really - with aristocracies with fairly stiff requirements to get in and a lot of reluctance to admit it ever happens on one end, and on the other... societies in which the political class is so open, diffuse, and without formal recognition that there's no use calling the aristocracies at all. Siddarmark and Charis are both of them further to the democratic/republican/populist end of that spectrum than (e.g.) Harchong or even Chisholm, but still a long, long way less far along in that direction than most places we're living in.

IIRC, the important thing in Siddarmark was marriage outside one's station to the point, where a fairly major portion of the population was related which provides for upward mobility and pressure to enlarge the franchise.

Another example of that happens in the honorverse with Erewhon established by gang bosses where strong social custom discouraged "inbreeding" to the point where a majority of the population had connections with the leading families.

I think Venice was another example of this pattern.

Restricted aristocracies, on the other hand are concerned about purity of blood and marrying within one's class. The most severe example of that was the Spanish hidalgos, although European aristocracies tended along this pattern with the predictable results of cousins marrying cousins with a resulting decline in health and capability over generations.

Don