Suicide Kings: the Problem with Hereditary Succession
Some people yearn for a strong man to lead them - but they never think about what happens afterward. The first installment of Quotial Studies
Quotial Studies 1
In a monarchy one of two things are sure to happen, both of them bad. The first is that you won't have enough heirs. The second is that you will.
Lately, some extreme political right-wingers have been calling for an end to the American republic. The New Yorker profiled one last month, a blogger named Curtis Yarvin ,who says he is very smart. He thinks that kings make better rulers than elected representatives because they are motivated to pass on healthy nations to their heirs.
Thomas Paine pointed out how astonishingly stupid that argument is….in 1776.
“Kings succeed each other not as rationals but as animals.” Paine wrote in Common Sense. Monarchy changes with the temper of every succeeding individual, is subject to vice and virtue, ignorance and wisdom…every quality, good and bad. In short, we cannot conceive a more ridiculous figure of government than hereditary succession.”
Paine could just as easily written that it’s hard to conceive of a more obscene method of transferring power. That’s the point of this installment of Quotial Studies.
History gives us six thousand years of case studies of governments where one person held nearly unchecked power. The record of the passing on of that power is ghastly. Kingdoms generally take one of two paths to making a monarch. One method is to lock-in an official legally-recognized heir. The second is to produce as many potential ones as possible. Either way, the process produces ghastly games of thrones. The good news – I mean this only in terms of reading this article – is that the stories are macabre and terrifying.
Fact: Autocrats rarely die peacefully.
The Roman Empire is often cited as the go-to model for successful one-person rule. For the person doing the ruling, not so much. A comparison: in the 244-year history of the United States, 45 men (and no women) have been President. Four were assassinated. Over the first 244 years of the Roman Empire, 19 men served as emperor. Ten died by poisoning, assassination, or forced suicide. The percentage of peaceful deaths for sitting or former US Presidents is 91%. For the first Roman Emperors it was 47%. The bottom line is that concentrating power in the hands of one person simply creates too much incentive for others to take power into their own hands.
Fact: Some kings had grotesquely enormous lower jaws.
To head off a free-for-all, Roman Emperors designated official heirs. What made the strategy work were ancient Rome’s comparatively lax laws about marriage, divorce, and adoption. When biology did not oblige a ruler with sons, he adopted one. Julius Caesar, for example, adopted his nephew, Octavian. Octavian, in turn, took the name Augustus, made himself the first emperor, and adopted his 46-year-old step-son, Tiberius, to succeed him.1
It took Christianity to turn hereditary succession into full-blown disaster. That’s because the Catholic Church in Europe made the fatal mistake (from a certain point of view, that is) of making marriage a holy union between man and woman that only death could put asunder.
No longer could kings easily swap out infertile wives for newer models. Divorce went straight into the moat. Remember the agonies that Britons went through while their king, Henry VIII, ran through six wives trying to get a male heir? What most people don’t realize is that Henry already had a son, Henry Ftizroy, a bastard he had with a lady-in-waiting to his first wife, Catherine of Aragorn.
But Henry VIII’s illegitimate son never stood a chance. By his era, the laws of Christian marriage imposed precedence of the products of sanctified marriages over bastards/adoptees. The checkdown gave succession first to the younger brothers of monarchs, then to their legitimate children, then to the children of royal sisters, and on to more distant blood relatives.
European reliance on noble bloodlines had the unintended effect of spilling a great deal of noble blood. The hierarchy of sanctioned succession created an entrenched hereditary aristocracy. Branches from the original royal trees became“Houses” which rooted themselves into the body politic. Since those houses all could claim some right to the throne, bloody civil wars of succession inevitably broke out among them.
Power being the motivator that it is, however, one European noble house innovated a technique to quell family feuds. It worked fabulously. Until it didn’t. Like, really didn’t.
The House was called the Habsburgs, after a castle that one of its patriarchs built in what is now Switzerland but was then associated with Austria. “Bella gerant alii, tu felix Austria nube!” was the family motto: “Let others wage wars: you, happy Austria, marry!” For 700 years, the Habsburgs pruned their family tree to a minimum by marrying first cousins to each other – and, occasionally, uncles to nieces.
Incest proved to be a solid instrument for putting and keeping Habsburgs on European thrones. By 1500, Habsburgs ruled the Holy Roman Empire, other bits of Germany, much of what is now Belgium, the Czech Republic, and Spain. On the other hand, incest is also an even better engine for passing down physical deformities. The “Habsburg Chin” – an ginormous-ly extended lower jaw started showing up centuries before the word “genetics” did.
The Habsburg Jaw, like the family’s empire, grew with each passing generation. By the 1600s, some members of the family had lower jaws too heavy to close; they hung open rudely, with the reek of food, unable to be properly-chewed or digested adding to their unpleasantness. You’d think that might have persuaded even people who didn’t know about recessive traits to expand their dating pool. But the Habsburgs were distracted by the matter of keeping control of the New World. Somewhere in the time the Habsburgs got control of the Spanish throne, the country had managed to claim everything in the Western hemisphere south of the Carolinas. That made the Spanish king ruler of a dominion second only to Genghis Khan’s at the time. So Spanish Habsburgs kept intermarrying until the infant who would become Charles II, born in 1661, became the product of the nine of 11 incestuous marriages. The last was between Charles’s 44-year-old father and the father’s 14-year-old niece.
Poor Charles II. Against the odds – more than half of his siblings died before six – he survived just about every ailment that could afflict a child. Then came the worst blow of all; he became king. With the sudden death of Charles’s father, the ruler of the largest empire since the Mongols was now a four--year-old with leg braces, a jaw the size and shape of a ski lift, and zero prospect of living to father kids of his own. “He has a ravenous stomach and swallows all he eats whole for neither jaw stands so much out that his two rows of teeth cannot meet,” a British ambassador to the Spanish Court reported back home. Other European nations foresaw a power vacuum; they circled around Spain’s possessions like vultures.
Charles’s life became a doomed race to sire an heir. Somehow, he made it past puberty and married a French princess when both were in their teens– but she died childless a decade later. He married another woman specifically selected for fertility. Nothing. He might have been neutered by the measles, smallpox, rickets — all of which he had. Or, it could have just been the genetic fallout from having his mother who was also his first cousin. Whatever the cause, Charles could not hide his impotence from his enemies. In desperation, he took to sleeping at the tomb of his father hoping some of the virility that led dad to have 30 (mostly illegitimate) children would rub off. There are reports that, when that failed, he had the father’s body disinterred and slept with it.
Charles’s autopsy records that, when he died at the age of 38, in 1700, “his heart was the size of a peppercorn, his lungs corroded; his intestines rotten and gangrenous; he had a single testicle black as coal and his head was full of water.” The War of the Spanish Succession, began almost as soon he was buried, and ripped Europe apart for the next 14 years. More than a million soldiers died in battle or from disease. Spain was never a world power again.
Fact: Many royal brothers lived in terror of silk. And other things.
Most of the world’s kingdoms suffered from the opposite problem of too few heirs. Unburdened by monogamy, emperors and sultans in Asia and elsewhere dealt with succession by fathering many potential heirs with multiple women. That had to have been a better set of sleeping arrangements for a young monarch than playing Big Spoon to the mummy of one’s father. Here’s how it usually went down.
Rulers sequestered their consorts in a Harem.2 The women would wait until selected by one of the eunuchs who guarded to serve the Sultan. Eunuchs – men castrated as boys and turned into high-status slaves – were essential to the polygamous system. In theory, they prevented any fertile man from entering the Harem, thus ensuring that all children born there were sons and daughters of the sultan. In practice, when Charles II-like situations arose, the eunuchs could exercise discretion and smuggle in fertile men — let’s call them donors — among the women in order to generate pregnancies.
The good news is that system reliably produced crops of royal brothers. The bad news is … that the system reliably produced crops of royal brothers. Every Sultan’s death gave birth to potentially deadly sibling rivalry.
Some monarchies dealt with that problem by legalizing fratricide. The Ottoman Empire, the Turkish-led group of warriors who conquered Constantinople was one. In the 1450s, their Sultan issued the following proclamation:“
The majority of [legal advisers] have declared that those of my illustrious children and grandchildren who shall ascend the throne shall have the right to execute their brothers.
Over the next two centuries, that Law of Fratricide contributed to making the Ottoman Empire infamous for cruelty. Imagine a place where fathers brought sons into the world with full knowledge that he was dooming all but one of them to die at virtually the same time. Imagine living as a younger sibling knowing that every step toward adulthood brought you closer to death at the hands of your big brother.
Most societies have an absolute taboo against shedding royal blood. That’s why the method by which the Ottoman Sultan dispatched his male siblings was by having them strangled with silken cords.
The Ottoman epidemic of fratricide reached its peak with a sultan named Mehmed III. His first act, in 1595, was ordering the killing of all 19 of his brothers. Disappointingly, Mehmed couldn’t even be honest about his ruthlessness. He lied to his brothers telling them they had been summoned for ritual circumcision. (Ottomans underwent circumcision as adolescents.) And he selected deaf mutes to conduct the executions so that no one would hear about the horror of strangling boys as young as 11.
Neither Mehmed III nor future Ottoman rulers were ever the same. Mehmed, himself died at the age of 37, possibly from alcoholism. The 13-year-old son who took his place did away with fratricide, probably because he feared assassination from allies of the mothers of his rivals. From then and for the next 200 years, Sultans dealt with their brothers by isolating and locking them in well-appointed individual prisons known as kafes– Turkish for cages. When a sitting Sultan went made or died young, the palace was able to decant a new one from his cage. But, these were rulers with no experience of anything or anyone in the wider world — meaning that the true rulers of the empire were shadowy advisors. No wonder that, by the 19th-century, the Ottoman Empire became known as the sick man of Europe.
What are we to make of men like Curtis Yarvin and their professed longing for such horrors? The record of hereditary succession is so rancid that one suspects that their ardor for absolute monarchy can come from only one source. Namely, that they have no experience of living under absolute monarchy. It’s the political science equivalent of being an anti-vaxxer. Only a person with no experience of polio can reject getting vaccinated. Only a person who hasn’t lived through a feudal war of succession or suffered an idiot grandchild to rule over him can reject Common Sense. Thomas Paine’s, that is.
This is not to say that it is surprising to see callow people despair of democracy. They are not wrong to note that politicians are often inept, cowardly, and corrupt. They simply fail to grasp that the grass elsewhere is not — and cannot be — greener. Or to put it in Winston Churchill’s words:
“Democracy is indeed the worst form of Government – except for all those other forms of governments that have been tried from time to time.”
At the height of Roman rule from 94 ACE and 180 CE, all emperors, including the celebrated Trajan, Hadrian, and Marcus Aurelius were adopted. That only ended when Aurelius passed the throne to his biological son, Commodus, a man so execrable Joaquin Phoenix in the movie Gladiator.
Bonus facts: Harem comes from the Arabic, haram, “forbidden.” Royals sons were allowed to pay supervised visits to their mothers in the Harem but oher “intact” men forbidden from entering it. Also, the word unicorn and eunuch are linked for interesting reasons. And, finally, I used to have a book describing the history and process of creating eunuchs until it was flung out a window in horror by a male student of mine who inadvertently started to read it.