Hi friends!

It’s been too long! This month’s newsletter is a big one — so big, it’s split into two parts. It covers a topic I’ve been eager to write about for ages, and which has only seemed more relevant as these wild weeks wear on… with our political landscape looking so extraordinarily unpredictable (Biden is out! LePen is thwarted again! Kamala is brat!), now’s the time to talk about succession. The process, that is, not the TV series. Although I’m confident the Roys will make an appearance eventually.

But first, the really huge news!

Samuel’s 2nd feature film, Went Up the Hill, is having its glorious World Premiere at Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF) in September! He’s been working on it for over 4 years (!), alongside a bunch of wickedly talented collaborators including co-writer Jory Anast, DOP Tyson Perkins, Editor Dany Cooper and the producing dynamos at Causeway Films, Samantha Jennings & Kristina Ceyton. Plus it stars Vicky Krieps and Dacre Montgomery giving career-best performances (yes I’m extremely biased, but it’s also true). I’m so proud of him and his team, and cannot wait to see it with a full audience for the first time! Hopefully it won’t be too long until everyone outside Canada can see it too.

And now, onto history’s Emperors, Sultans, Queens, usurpers and many, many fail-sons…

Succession in the Age of Empire

A King bypasses his male relatives and names his daughter heir to the throne, inadventently plunging the realm into civil war.

An old and increasingly feeble ruler refuses to stand aside, convinced he alone can face down a terrible enemy.

A retired leader returns to the fray, convinced only he can safe the dynasty from his incompetant replacement.

If those scenarios sound familiar, it’s because crises of succession are everywhere in our politics, culture, and hit HBO series. From the Oval Office to the Disney board room to the Red Keep of Westeros, we’re witnessing the turmoil and upheavel that so often comes with the transfer of power from one generation to the next.

For most of history, succession to the highest political offices — Emperor, King, Caliph, Pharaoh, Tsar or Sultan — was hereditary, passing between members of a ruling family. When the process was successful, the realm was infused with fresh(ish) blood and new ideas, without ever upsetting the status quo. If it was handled poorly, the result was bloodshed, chaos, revolution, or even the complete collapse of the state.

Our systems may have changed, but the considerations — and consequences — have not. Over the past two hundred years, most of the world’s hereditary monarchies have been dethroned, dismantled or de-fanged, and the survivors reduced to powerless ceremonial figureheads like the the British and Japanese royals (“But aren’t they interesting?” asks Hilary Mantel. “Aren’t they pretty to look at?”). We are supposed to believe that sovereignty today rests with the people, and that power can be transferred via the ballot box. Even autocrats play along: Vladimir Putin holds elections, and Xi Jinping must be re-appointed by the National People’s Congress.

Yet the old way of doing things has never quite left us. It’s too wrapped up in our culture, our property rights, and our sense of familial duty. Political dynasties dominate our parties on the left (The Trudeaus in Canada), right (The LaPens in France) and centre (The Nehru–Gandhis in India). Even in vibrant democracies, voters will readily sign off on it: earlier this year, the term-limited Indonesian President Joko Widodo entrenched his family’s hold on executive power by installing his 36-year-old son as his successor’s Vice-President. We rage at the media barons, money men and movie stars who funnel power and wealth to their children… and yet in our fantasies we cheer for true-blooded aristocrats, rightful heirs, and The Return of the King.

Over the next two newsletters I’m going to explore how states in the pre-modern world handled the volatile issue of succession. I’m going to stick to Europe, Asia and North Africa, and look in detail at five examples: the Mongol Khanate, Europes’s Medieval Catholic monarchies, the Ottoman Empire, the Roman Principate, and Imperial China. Be warned: succession is a nasty and immoral business, and pretty much everyone I’m discussing was an unrepentant war criminal who makes Logan Roy look positively cuddly by comparison.

Of course this is a newsletter, not a full-blown thesis (and only half as long), so there will inevitably be generalisations and simplifications — send me a message if you’d like any more details or sources! Much of my research for this piece has been drawn from the excellent In the Shadow of the Gods: The Emperor in World History by Dominic Lieven.

I. Within the Hollow Crow

Shakespeare’s Histories loom large when we talk about succession - his loose-knit cycle of eight plays covering the Lancaster usurpation and the War of the Roses not only shape our perception of English history to this day, they cast a long shadow across our fictional battles for power, right up to George R.R. Martin’s Games of Thrones. Curiously, in many ways the inciting incident for the entire saga comes years before the first play, Richard II, even begins. The ailing and decrepit King Edward III had the ideal heir in his eldest son Edward, Prince of Wales (known as The Black Prince): he was a successful military commander, popular with the masses, “the model of chivalry”, and suitably married with a young son of his own.

Then the Black Prince suddenly died following a bout of dysentery, one year before his father, and the crown instead passed to his 10-year old son. This boy-king, Richard II, reigned for a disastrous 22 years, until he was deposed and killed by his cousin Henry Bolingbroke — arguably the first blow in the decades-spanning civil war that erupted between England’s royal houses. As the walls close in around King Richard, Shakespeare gives his protagonist an agonising speech:

Death is the final word in every succession crisis. The monarch, their court, and their country ignore the impact of old age, illness, war, political violence and simple bad luck at their peril. They can’t hold death off forever; and the only insurance policy against chaos is a succession plan.

So what exactly does a successful succession look like?

I’d argue that there are two clear goals for every succession, and they apply whether you’re handing over a world-spanning empire or a small business:

1. Stability: The clear, peaceful and undisputed transfer of power in accordance with generally accepted local customs.

2. Competence: Transfer of power to a competent, high-caliber ruler.

The transition between rulers is the most vulnerable and volatile period in the lifecycle of any state. In a democracy, we rely on our rules-based system to safeguard the peaceful transfer of power, and the wisdom of the electorate (and/or political party machinery) to deliver the competent new ruler. Sometimes the system works… and sometimes it’s January 6 in the USA.

In a hereditary monarchy, the goals of stability and competence are often at odds. Under the English system, 10-year-old Richard was clearly next-in-line for the throne. He was crowned without issue or insurrection. But he had no qualifications beyond his birth; no accomplishments and inadequate training. His youth guaranteed that he would be dominated by advisors for much of his reign. His uncles and cousins believed they could do a better job — and eventually they decided to prove it. On the other hand, the Roman and Ottoman systems kept the door ajar for more experienced successors to take command… but in doing so, paid for it with frequent bloodshed. No model for succession has yet managed to strike the perfect balance. But then no policy, no matter how ingenious, can survive a run of bad luck.

II. The Conqueror’s Conundrum

In the era before the industrial revolution, there was no military force in Eurasia as consistently fearsome as the Steppe Nomads. Ranging across over 8,000km of grassland from Hungary in the west to Manchuria in the east, the tribes that called the great steppe home were a persistent threat to the sedentary civilisations of Europe, Asia and North Africa for millennia. Attacking at lightning speed on horseback with composite bows, their war-bands frequently brought Rome, China, India and Persia to ruin. Some even formed mighty empires of their own — most famously the Xiongnu, the Huns, and, of course, the Mongols.

Yet while it was common for nomadic dynasties to usurp sedentary empires (e.g. the Manchus in China, the Turks in Anatolia), none of the nomadic empires centred on the steppe endured for more than a few generations before fracturing. One glaring weakness? These states never quite resolved the issue of succession.

Succession isn’t just a matter of realpolitik; like any other type of inheritance, it’s rooted in prevailing cultural norms. When Genghis Khan launched his campaign of global conquest in 1206, the norm for Mongol society was that property was held by the family as a whole — all members had a claim to the spoils. There was no set legal framework for inheritance; instead, it was common for a leader either to split their property equally between their children, or to will their property to the youngest child (based on the belief that the youngest, unlike their older siblings, hadn’t yet had the opportunity to accrue a following and riches).

This makes good sense when applied to a household, and it resembles how most of our families handle inheritance today: an equal split or allocation based on the needs of the individuals. However it was an awkward fit if the goal was to keep the newly-won Empire together. So Genghis Khan came up with a fix: he divided his conquests into parts, granting each of his sons huge swathes of land and impressive titles, but anointed his third son Ogodei the ‘Great Khan’ — and with it, centralised political control.

A new tradition was established following Genghis’ death in 1227: a mourning period was declared, military operations ceased, and a regent took temporary command until all Mongol leaders could be assembled for a kurultai council to officially select the successor. Genghis was so revered by his commanders that his deathbed wishes were followed with barely a whiff of instability (although older brother Tolui may have attempted to delay the kurultai to buy himself time to thwart Ogodei’s ascension). Ogodei became the Great Khan, and reached an accomodation with his siblings.

Perhaps inevitably, a system reliant on respecting a dead man’s wishes and ongoing familial harmony couldn’t last. After Ogodei’s death in 1241 the Empire quickly fell into civil war, with competing branches of the family all vying for the Khanate. The mourning period quickly became a burden — it extended the period of political uncertainty (sometimes lasting years) and endangered ongoing military operations. The news of Ogodei’s death ended the Mongol’s unbroken run of conquests in eastern Europe, as senior commanders had to rush back to imperial capital Karakorum for the kurultai. By 1260, these divisions had become official: the Empire split into the Yuan Dynasty (ruling over Mongolia and a conquered China), the Golden Horde (Russia), the Chagatai Khanate (Central Asia) and the Ilkhanate (Middle East). In the decades that followed, these Mongol Khanates would sub-divide further, until most vanished altogether.

Across the century of Mongol dominance over Eurasia, no consistent model of succession ever took root. Some branches of the family followed the ancient practice of sub-dividing their lands and titles between their children; others passed their property along to individual sons or brothers; and others simply fought it out. Despite their superiority in battle and a plethora of experienced leaders, without a charismatic central authority like Genghis holding it all together, the Mongols floundered.

The Mongols confronted a dilemma common to history’s conquerers: how to translate military success and popular leadership into a durable and stable political system. Many a famed conqueror fell at this hurdle; Alexander the Great botched it, dying young and leaving his commanders to fight for the scraps; Napoleon created an enduring legal code, but left only a shell of an Imperial legacy. Some were lucky enough to be followed by a natural-born administrator; Cyrus the Great’s legacy in Persia might have been short-lived if he wasn’t succeeded (after a short, chaotic interval) by Darius; Julius Caesar had the charisma and military prowess, but it took a political animal like Augustus to make Rome an Empire.

By failing to codify a system of succession, instead relying on a hodge-podge of personal preferences, group-think and local norms, the Mongols left themselves vulnerable every time death called on a Khan. Monarchies that created rituals, codes and traditions to re-enforce the authority of the ruling dynasty tended to last a little bit longer.

III. The Sacred Bloodline

If the Mongol system of succession devolved into a vibes-based free-for-all, out on the western periphery of Eurasia the back-water states of Catholic Europe devised a system of intricate rules that prized dynastic certainty above all else. But our familiarity with the European model, which has endured to this day (in an admittedly hollowed-out form), shouldn’t distract from how fundamentally strange it is.

The first tenet of the European system was male primogeniture: the oldest son inherited everything. The second tenet was that kingdoms were the personal property of the dynasty, and were automatically inherited by the next-in-line.

On the face of it, this creates a clarity that the Mongols lacked; the oldest son is always the heir, and the heir inherits the kingdom. But as any Tudor could tell you, those seemingly-simple edicts are just one failed marriage away from disaster. A Catholic King or Queen was not, after all, the final authority on matters of marriage and family planning: the Pope was. And Catholic dogma decreed that there was to be no divorce, and even Kings were expected to be monogamous. Illegitimate children were excluded from any inheritance.

With adoption, ethical non-monogamy, and trips to the harem all banned by the Church, all it took was one infertile prince or early death for the pool of potential heirs to dry up. Another complication was the class system. Unlike an Chinese Emperor, who acknowledged no peer, Catholic Monarchs were surrounded by neighbouring royal houses with whom they frequently fought — and intermarried. Initially, marriage between royals was seen as a win-win — it helped cement alliances with foreign princes and kept the so-called sacred bloodlines pure.

But a “pure” bloodline is rarely a healthy one. The most infamous European inbreeders were the Habsburgs, who made it common practice from the 15th century onwards to marry their cousins and other close relatives as a means of knitting together the Austrian and Spanish branches of the royal family. And the Habsburgs were remarkably unified by the anarchic standards of early-modern Europe — but over the years their incest-exacerbated health issues multiplied to include deformities, mental retardation, epilepsy and infertility. The male line died out altogether in the 18th century.

The French, meanwhile, took the notion of male primogeniture to its greatest extreme: the Salic Law. When King Louis X died in 1316, followed immediately by his infant son, his young daughter was initially declared the heir. But Louis’ ambitious younger brother Philip snatched the crown, and had his usurpation rubber-stamped by a convention of the Estates-General in 1317. This assembly of aristocrats decreed “women do not succeed in the kingdom of France”. This decision was later justified by invoking the Salic Law, an ancient (and inconsistently applied) Frankish Code, which suddenly became a core constitutional principle. The Salic Law not only prevented women inheriting the throne, it prohibited succession passing through a woman. For instance, not only would a King’s daughter be ineligible to succeed, but her sons’ claims would also be extinguished.

Admittedly there was a good reason to worry about having too many distant relatives with claims to the throne bumming around the continent. The family trees of European royal houses were so entwined that was a clear and present danger that if a King died without a direct heir, his fiefdom could end up being passed along to the prince of another country altogether. That’s how Holy Roman Emperor Charles V ended up with a Empire that encompassed Spain, Italy, Austria, the Netherlands and the Americas— he inherited it in bits and pieces from helpful deceased relatives. Similarly, England’s Henry V justified his invasion of France by declaring that he was the rightful heir to the throne — even if it was through the female line.

This complex system might have kept the genealogists and family-tree cartographers of Europe employed, but it had two glaring weaknesses.

The first is that the supposed stability of the European model ultimately hinged on a dream scenario in which the King lived to a ripe old age, leaving behind a well-trained and competent heir. This was rarely the case. In the warrior-king culture of medieval Europe, a monarch was liable to get himself killed on an ill-advised military adventure, leaving behind no heir (like the crusading Richard the Lionheart, whose far-more-capable mother ran England while was away) or a literal child (like Henry V, who died during a second campaign in France, leaving the throne to an 8-month old ). And that’s if disease or poor dieting didn’t finish them off early. England was particularly prone to civil wars between competing factions of uncles, regents and advisors who sought to dominate a young heir, or saw a chance to advance their own dubious claims to the throne. The French fared better (pre-guillotine), owing less to the Salic Law and more to an exceptionally lucky fertility streak.

The second is that male primogeniture is a dreadful way of selecting high quality rulers. A competant King in Europe circa 1400 was almost as rare as a lottery jackpot; the state was far more likely to end up crowning a spoiled, indolent and inbred brat with a god complex. This would be less of an issue if a medieval king was a figurehead, like his modern counterparts. Unfortunately, he was often expected to lead armies, dispense justice, and formulate policy. Perhaps it’s no surprise that the continent was perenially at war with itself.

There was one unexpected side-effect of Europe's patriarchal, rules-based approach to succession. Despite all the policies explicitly devised to bar women from the throne, by the 17th century Queens and Empresses had become relatively commonplace. Many have gone down in history as among their nations’ finest sovereigns: Isabella I of Spain, Elizabeth I of England, Maria Theresa of Austria & Hungary, and Catherine the Great of Russia. This shift had less to do with any sudden burst of enlightenment on the part of the European aristocracy, and everything to do with rapidly thinning royal bloodlines which made it all-but-impossible to find suitable male heirs anywhere on the convoluted family tree. The King’s daughter was begrudgingly preferred to a foreign fourth-cousin, particularly once the precedent of female rule was established. But male primogeniture has endured right into the 21st century: it was only in 2013 that the UK Bill of Rights and Act of Settlement was amended to allow an older daughter to inherit the crown ahead of her younger brother — long after the monarchy had lost its power.

IV. The Trouble with Brothers

If the European desire for dynastic certainty often resulted in child kings, inbreeding, and spiralling violence, the Ottoman Empire chose to get the bloodletting out of the way early. In 1479, Sultan Mehmed II, the triumphant conqueror of Constantinople, decreed:

As horrifying as it sounds, Mehmed was earnestly trying to address the single greatest source of instability during succession crises: brothers. With apologies to all the brothers out there… brothers are always trouble. They’re frequently rivals to both the reigning monarch and the monarch’s children (“I was next in line,” purrs Scar in The Lion King, “until the little hairball was born”), and the first contact for anyone plotting regime change. Brothers also inconveniently spawn whole new branches of the family tree who can pose a threat to imperial stability. With Mehmed’s edict, the informal and opportunistic global practice of royal brother-murder became Imperial policy.

This policy would never have worked in Europe — without those pesky brothers, most royal lines would have gone extinct after a generation or two. But the Ottoman Sultans weren’t restricted by Christian laws around marriage and monogamy. In fact, most Sultans didn’t marry at all: instead, they had relationships the concubines who lived in the royal palace harem. If one of these women bore the Sultan a son, she was banished from his bed (and from having any further children) and transformed from mistress to mother. Mother and son would then be sent to a distant province, where the young boy would assume the post of governor and learn how to rule, and his mother would run his household.

As a result, a Sultan was likely to have multiple heirs, each to different mothers, who were raised and educated independently and given ample opportunity to prove themselves as leaders. Each son had an equal claim to the throne — there was no primogeniture or ranking attached to their birth. When the Sultan died, the strongest (or most cunning) son was expected to win the throne, and put his rivals to death to ensure there were no legitimate challengers to his rule.

The dangers created by this policy are obvious. Whereas the European system aimed to reduce the chances of civil war following the death of a King, the Ottoman system openly invited it. Stability was sacrificed in favour of a process that was likely to end with a competant and ruthless Sultan on the throne.

An example of this system working almost exactly as intended came a generation after Mehmed II. Sultan Bayazid II was in his sixties, and hoped to settle the succession issue while he was still alive and retire. His eldest son, Ahmed, was the powerful governor of Anatolia; his middle son Korkut was an accomplished scholar and poet, and the youngest son Selim was military veteran of campaigns in Caucasus. When Selim caught wind of his father’s plan to abdicate in favour of Ahmed, he rebelled alongside of coalition of frontier nobles, local elites, and Sunni religious leaders. It was a bloody campaign, but Selim ultimately triumphed with the help of the Janissaries, the Ottoman’s elite slave military class, who determined Selim was best suited to face the twin external threats of the Safavids in Iran and Mamluks in Egypt. Sultan Selim I’s subsequent victories proved them right.

On assuming the throne, Selim had his brothers (and possibly his father) killed. Even the Janissaries lobbied to spare the scholarly and devout Prince Korkut, but Selim refused to take the risk. Whereas royal princes in Europe could escape dynastic politics altogether by joining the clergy or formally renouncing their birthright, an Ottoman prince could never truly be de-fanged, and could easily be the locus for a future revolt.

Not every Sultan was as unsentimental as Selim ‘the Grim’. The first chip in the wall came from Sultan Suleyman ‘the Magnificent’, who fell in love with the slave concubine Hurrem and married her; he refused to have children with any other woman, and put his other heirs to death to protect her favourite sons. Future Sultans gave only select heirs the crucial leadership training that had once been mandatory for all sons, reducing the talent pool. By the 17th century, brothers were regularly put under house arrest in ‘the cages’ (i.e. hidden away in a luxurious corner of the harem in Istanbul) rather than murdered.

As Mehmed II would surely have foreseen, these men were suddenly back in play as potential successors: and indeed, sometimes a brother who’d been living in “the cages” for decades suddenly found himself declared Sultan. This might have been the worst of all possible outcomes: it resulted in Sultans who were both old and inexperienced. Unsurprisingly, at this point the Empire had already entered its long period of decline. A few enterprising Sultans in later centuries tried to resurrect the glory days by reviving the old policies (and hence murderering all their siblings), but it didn’t transform them into a Selim or a Suleyman; clearly, the moment had passed. It’s nonetheless remarkable that this murderous system, a work of cold calculation, worked at all… and coincided with the height of Ottoman power.

Succession, it seems, is a cruel game.

The crises faced by Selim and Suleyman also reveal three of the great power-players in any succession struggle: the army, the faith, and royal women. Those are what I’ll be exploring next time in Part Two, covering the Roman Empire and Imperial China.

Odds & Ends

• A fascinating discovery from Indonesia: a cave painting on the Island of Sulawesi that might just be the world’s oldest known piece of visual storytelling! The images, painted in the limestone caves of Maros-Pangkep, depict three human-animal hybrids interacting with a wild pig. They’ve been dated as at least 51,200 years old.

• YouTube essayist extraordinaire Lindsay Ellis has returned after a long hiatus with a superb deep-dive into the break-up of the Beatles, the death of John Lennon, and the enduring vilification of Yoko Ono. It’s a well-researched and empathetic watch for anyone who loves the Beatles, and a great follow-up to Peter Jackson’s Get Back doco series.

And that’s all from me this week, thanks for reading! I’ll be writing from my holiday in Europe to conclude this succession behemoth very soon…