Historical Duke/Margrave Dynamic

[vonGenf]

Sure, if you're re-organizing your realm. But if you've just conquered a new stronghold or a townsland, it effectively isn't 'you' that's doing the promoting - another Duke gets to decide who goes there and then you promote them.

It'd be like Edward III conquering more of the Aquitaine and then the Duke of Norfolk getting to decide who the Duke of the Aquitaine was.

No, that's my point about duchies not being geography based. There doesn't need to be a Duchy of Aquitaine. There needs to be a Count of Bordelais and a Count of Bayonne and a Count of Angoulême, because the land needs to be ruled, and all these Counts must owe allegiance to a Duke, but this Duke could very well be the Duke of Norfolk or Suffolk or Southsoutheastfolk. It doesn't matter.

If the King of England want to name the Count of Bordeaux Duke of Aquitaine, he can do that. If the King of England wants to name the count of Northumberland Duke of Aquitaine, he can also do that, but what he does is he gives the title of Duke of Aquitaine to the Count of Northumberland, so at first the Duchy of Aquitaine is composed of a single region, Northumberland. Then he orders the Counts of Bordeaux, Bayonne and Angoulême to travel to England and swear allegiance to the Duke of Aquitaine. At some point in the future, he may even sell/give Northumberland to someone else. At no point is the Duke of Norfolk allowed a say in this.

[Scarlett]

If the King of England wants to name the count of Northumberland Duke of Aquitaine, he can also do that,

But he would never have done that for the same reason that Richard I was (despite his popularity in Hollywood) a pretty poor King -- medieval politics were local. The Earl of Northumberland would not have lasted a month as the Duke of Norfolk, much less the Duke of Aquitaine, because not only did you have the general problem of his domain(s) being hundreds of miles apart, you had pretty severe cultural differences between the Scots-Yorkshiremen of Northumberland and Norfolk and even more difference between the Gascon/Guyenne French and the more Frankish French of Northern and Eastern France.

You could certainly have a non-contiguous domain and Edward III managed to rule the Aquitaine from England, though he did spend quite a bit of time there. Richard (effectively the Duke of Aquitaine under his father) so preferred France to England that he spent most of his time there until going on crusade and England fell apart because he wasn't around to stop John from mucking things up (they're men...they're men in tights...)

It's too simple to define Duchies as purely geographic. I'd probably define them in descending order as:

- Cultural
- Geographic
- Political

If you were a peasant or a minor nobleman and you stepped across the border from Cornwall to Salisbury or Kent from Essex or York from Lancaster, you would notice in a hundred little ways. Anybody with a big enough army could certainly issue a proclamation to the contrary, but it would take a long time and a lot of struggle (such as the integration of the Normans into Saxon England) before people really accepted it.

[vonGenf]

They are neither cultural nor geographical. Maybe they became cultural in the late middle ages, but certainly not at first. They are familial possessions, sources of revenues and loyal soldiers.

If you were a peasant and crossed the traditional boundary between Cornwall and Devon, you would certainly notice. However, it is worth nothing that the family estates of the Dukes of Devonshire is located in Derby, on the other side of England. The Duke of Cornwall, on the other hand, has always been the Prince of Wales, who resides in London (and probably has resided at court for most of history). That doesn't affect the peasants of Cornwall or Devon at all.

Most duchies were non-contiguous - just look at this (admittedly late-period) map of the HRE:

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/7/7d/Holy_Roman_Empire_1648.svg

[Scarlett]

They are familial possessions, sources of revenues and loyal soldiers.

This is only the case when the holder also has a higher title (such as the Prince of Wales). If you were the King or the heir, then you could hold both Northumberland and Norfolk or (as Henry II did) the Aquitaine and England ... but even he needed a lot of help to do it and was constantly fighting wars with his wife (the Duchess of Aquitaine) or his kids (Dukes of Aquitaine and Brittany).

Your example of Cornwall is non-traditional for that reason and didn't come about until the High Medieval era under Edward III. Prior to that, the Earls of Cornwall were generally also local lords in Cornwall, with one major exception being the super-rich Richard of Cornwall who also happened to be King on the continent. The HRE is also not a great example because the politics of the Empire were very unique to the Empire and also greatly subject to the Pope's influence. The HRE was at the same time both less local (since everybody was nominally part of this huge Empire) but also more local (as the politics were dominated by in-fighting between the different cultural and political blocs).

I think you have it backwards: they became less cultural toward the end of the Middle Ages as duke-doms were created willy-nilly, particularly in the Renaissance, to reward sycophants. If you made a list of all of the Duchies in Western Europe circa 1289, you would have a pretty good list of the various cultural groups. That's not to say that they weren't also familial possessions, but most Duchies changed families at least a few times during the Middle ages, but the character of the Duchy itself would not necessarily change with it. France is a great example of this: you've got Normandy, Brittany, and Anjou all next to each other, and you'd have a hard time finding three less similar cultures all kinda-sorta called "French." This is still true today, though a lot less so, though the Bretons are still pretty distinct. They're a classic example because they were the only hold-outs in all Western Europe to never have been conquered by barbarians -- so "Breton," or "Romano-British" was far more a cultural and political construct than a familial one. Bretagne was largely independent of France for much of the middle ages despite not being much of an economic or military power. The people were just different, and if you were the Duke of Normandy or even the King of France you weren't too thrilled at the prospect of putting up with tons of unrest by occupying Brittany, particularly because you already had all the nice champagne and bordeaux.

Part of this topic is confused because a BM "Duchy" is less like a historical duchy and more like a CK2 duchy -- it's the political entity bigger than a county but smaller than a kingdom. In BM the local culture does not impact us very much and even a totally opposite religion can be purged by a new lord in a fairly short time span. So our duchies are not bound the same way and can be re-drawn a lot more easily than a medieval duchy. Shoot, a lot of those medieval borders still hold, at least culturally: the Aquitaine has always been a different flavor of French from Anjou or Champagne and York and Cornwall or York have always been very different from London (even if the Duke of Cornwall is the heir - ask any Cornishman whether he thinks the Duke of Cornwall has got the first thing to do with Cornwall and he'll tell you no, assuming you can understand his accent).

[vonGenf]

This is only the case when the holder also has a higher title (such as the Prince of Wales). If you were the King or the heir, then you could hold both Northumberland and Norfolk or (as Henry II did) the Aquitaine and England ... but even he needed a lot of help to do it and was constantly fighting wars with his wife (the Duchess of Aquitaine) or his kids (Dukes of Aquitaine and Brittany).

One problem with relying on historical precedent is that history is so much different to BM in that respect. I tend to look at history and just ignore that the same person held multiple duchies/earldom/kingdom, and treat Charles, Duke of Cornwall as a different person than Charles, Prince of Wales in my parallel.

Your example of Cornwall is non-traditional for that reason and didn't come about until the High Medieval era under Edward III. Prior to that, the Earls of Cornwall were generally also local lords in Cornwall, with one major exception being the super-rich Richard of Cornwall who also happened to be King on the continent. The HRE is also not a great example because the politics of the Empire were very unique to the Empire and also greatly subject to the Pope's influence. The HRE was at the same time both less local (since everybody was nominally part of this huge Empire) but also more local (as the politics were dominated by in-fighting between the different cultural and political blocs).

But the HRE was half of the area/period that BM is supposed to be based on. You can't ignore it as a special case!

I think you have it backwards: they became less cultural toward the end of the Middle Ages as duke-doms were created willy-nilly, particularly in the Renaissance, to reward sycophants. If you made a list of all of the Duchies in Western Europe circa 1289, you would have a pretty good list of the various cultural groups.

OT: do you know if it's possible to get such a list? I'd be interested to see that.

That's not to say that they weren't also familial possessions, but most Duchies changed families at least a few times during the Middle ages, but the character of the Duchy itself would not necessarily change with it. France is a great example of this: you've got Normandy, Brittany, and Anjou all next to each other, and you'd have a hard time finding three less similar cultures all kinda-sorta called "French." This is still true today, though a lot less so, though the Bretons are still pretty distinct. They're a classic example because they were the only hold-outs in all Western Europe to never have been conquered by barbarians -- so "Breton," or "Romano-British" was far more a cultural and political construct than a familial one. Bretagne was largely independent of France for much of the middle ages despite not being much of an economic or military power. The people were just different, and if you were the Duke of Normandy or even the King of France you weren't too thrilled at the prospect of putting up with tons of unrest by occupying Brittany, particularly because you already had all the nice champagne and bordeaux.

Part of this topic is confused because a BM "Duchy" is less like a historical duchy and more like a CK2 duchy -- it's the political entity bigger than a county but smaller than a kingdom. In BM the local culture does not impact us very much and even a totally opposite religion can be purged by a new lord in a fairly short time span. So our duchies are not bound the same way and can be re-drawn a lot more easily than a medieval duchy. Shoot, a lot of those medieval borders still hold, at least culturally: the Aquitaine has always been a different flavor of French from Anjou or Champagne and York and Cornwall or York have always been very different from London (even if the Duke of Cornwall is the heir - ask any Cornishman whether he thinks the Duke of Cornwall has got the first thing to do with Cornwall and he'll tell you no, assuming you can understand his accent).

It's not entirely unhistorical to redraw a Duchy's borders. The Duchy of Burgundy is historically centered on Dijon, and when the Dukes of Burgundy came in possession of what is now Belgium that did not mean the culture of Flanders was unified with that of Dijon, but the whole area was certainly refered to as "Burgundy", and the local barons in Flanders owed allegiance to the Duke of Burgundy.

[BardicNerd]

But the HRE was half of the area/period that BM is supposed to be based on. You can't ignore it as a special case!

Really, you could consider nearly everything in Europe a special case -- different areas and traditions did things differently.  The fact that there are special cases does not make them less valid or subject to being ignored, it just means that Europe was not a monolithic culture, and BM should not be as well.

[Scarlett]

You can't ignore it as a special case!

You can't ignore it but it doesn't lend itself to the cursory level of depth that most BM players want in their medieval history. An HRE Duke was very different than a French Duke or an English Duke. He was quite possibly a Prince-Bishop instead of a Duke (something you didn't see in England and France very much at all) and he was probably a heck of a lot more independent than an English Duke while also having less freedom than you'd imagine for a semi-independent lord of that rank: the HRE for much of the middle ages was kind of like BM is in that the minute anybody rocked the boat too much, the whole Empire would come crashing down on them. You got left alone a lot of the time to do what you wanted so long as what you wanted didn't piss off too many people.

The easiest way I can think of to illustrate this is that your average person who knows just a few things about the middle ages has probably heard of Richard the Lionhearted, Henry V, a Louis or two, and maybe one or more Dukes out of Shakespeare. You know why Shakespeare didn't write about German politics? Because they were so busy carefully needling one another over electoral politics that you didn't have huge changes in large swaths of land like the Hundred Years War, or if you did, it was in places like Bohemia where you had the larger entity (HRE) absorbing a smaller one rather than two countries of relatively similar size and power going at it. How many HRE Emperors can you name after 1066? You know why? It's not because you don't know more than most people about medieval stuff just by virtue of having this conversation. It's because they just don't have as many far-reaching stories as the French, English, and even Spanish magnates do. There are some major exceptions, like Frederick the Great, and this picture got completely changed around in the 17th-19th centuries..it's not a reflection of German culture as boring. it's a reflection of the fact that 100 lesser lords with the Pope breathing down their necks, even if they had big fancy titles, were all so constrained in what they could hope to accomplish that a guy like Richard the Lionhearted would've pissed off so many people in such a short time that he never would've been allowed to amount to anything. Who knows, maybe that means it's a better system!

OT: do you know if it's possible to get such a list? I'd be interested to see that.

http://www.gamersgate.com/DD-CK2/crusader-kings-ii

They are pretty close, and if you check out some of the mods you can get very close, at least for Western Europe. I have no idea if, like, the Timurids or the Russians are correct, because I don't know jack about them.

It's not entirely unhistorical to redraw a Duchy's borders. The Duchy of Burgundy is historically centered on Dijon, and when the Dukes of Burgundy came in possession of what is now Belgium that did not mean the culture of Flanders was unified with that of Dijon, but the whole area was certainly refered to as "Burgundy", and the local barons in Flanders owed allegiance to the Duke of Burgundy.

You are actually talking about the Kingdom of Burgundy, not the Duchy of Burgundy. Burgundy is also a bit unique in that it had once covered a much larger area than just the Duchy centered on Dijon. It was a major piece of the Frankish Empire during the Dark Ages, so they had cultural influence on that whole region -- but not enough to persist as an entity for more than 60 years or so. When Flanders came under Burgundian rule it was still very much culturally Flemish (or Dutch, depending on whose toes you want to step on) and the borders of "Flanders" did not change during this period even though it was nominally part of Burgundy. This ties in to your earlier distinction: it's more like the same dude was Duke of Burgundy and Count of Flanders and less like Flanders suddenly joined the Duchy of Burgundy. The truly "Burgundian" entity around Dijon did not change much and is also still pretty Burgundian to this day. Also, the Flemish Counts of Flanders were descended directly from Charlemagne through Judith Martel (whose English King husband Æthelwulf died without having an heir via Judith, whose subsequent marriage to his son Æthelbald was annulled by the Pope for being creepy, and who eloped with a woodsman in Flanders that became Count Baldwin Ironarm who is actually the model for Cathay) - so both Burgundy and Flanders were part of the same Dark Ages Kingdom even though there wasn't a heck of a lot in the way of culture or civilization during that time.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kingdom_of_Burgundy

Really, you could consider nearly everything in Europe a special case

They had different implementations of the same basic medieval parts. You could re-create those parts (as CK2 does a pretty decent job of doing) but it would be too complex for your average BM player, plus you'd really need succession since that was a big driver of politics. When we talk about medieval history as it has any relevance to BM, I try to use boundaries that exclude implementations that were too unique to generalize about for BM. BM is centered around the landed noble with some religious influence (but nothing like the Pope). That makes France and England the most obvious candidates: land changed hands a lot, the church was a factor but nowhere near as big a factor as it was in the HRE, you didn't have Moors conquering the place to make it entirely about religious war. But even when you had different "cultures" (like Burgundian and Flemish, for example) you had a lot of overlap. The Bretons and the Cornish, for example, were much closer than the Bretons and the Occitans in Toulouse. Burgundian and Flemish could both be traced back to the Franks and so even if they thought Normans talked funny, they weren't going to be at each other's throats in the same way that Saxons and Normans were.

[vonGenf]

You are actually talking about the Kingdom of Burgundy, not the Duchy of Burgundy. Burgundy is also a bit unique in that it had once covered a much larger area than just the Duchy centered on Dijon. It was a major piece of the Frankish Empire during the Dark Ages, so they had cultural influence on that whole region -- but not enough to persist as an entity for more than 60 years or so.

Actually, I am talking about the Duchy, especially the times when it was ruled by the Valois, which is the period they refer to as the "failed proposal to create a third Kingdom of Burgundy" on wikipedia. It is generally seen as important and independent enough to be equivalent to a Kingdom, but they never actually claimed the title.

[Scarlett]

It is generally seen as important and independent enough to be equivalent to a Kingdom, but they never actually claimed the title.

The semantic disconnect here is that the entity the Valois had by this point was a de facto Kingdom of Burgundy. They were "Dukes of Burgundy" in the same way that William of Toulouse during the 1st Crusade was the "Count of Toulouse" even though his actual power was greater than most Dukes - he was one of the richest and most powerful lords on the whole trip. That didn't mean that the County of Toulouse had changed: it just meant that the guy ruling it also controlled a huge other area next door.

There were several good reasons to do this. It let people with higher ranks feel less threatened by you because they could tell themselves that they were superior even if you had more power.

The Valois did not re-draw the borders of the Duchy of Burgundy - they possessed a Burgundian state that probably would've lasted longer had not Duke Charles wanted to make himself a King. Before them and after them, the Duchy of Burgundy was pretty much the same, the big exception being the pre-Medieval borders which did change quite a lot:

6th century Burgundian Kingdom: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Map_Burgundian_Kingdom_2_EN.png
9th/10th century Burgundy - notice the County of Burgundy is the German portion whereas the future "Duchy of Burgundy" doesn't even include the county: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Karte_Hoch_und_Niederburgund_EN.png
Medieval Burgundy - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Map_Kingdom_Arelat_EN.png
Valois Burgundian State - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Karte_Haus_Burgund_4_EN.png

Burgundy is really confusing because it could mean several different things over nearly 900 years. What you're suggesting is also illustrated here pretty well in that you had divisions between French Burgundy and German Burgundy that are also still around today and those divisions came about because you had some Dukes of Burgundy who were either allied to or subject to (if not a direct part of) the French Crown while you had Upper and Lower Burgundy that were more German and part of HRE politics. This type of confusion is what you get when you take what had been one cultural and political entity and try to re-draw it: a big ugly mess for hundreds of years. But the re-drawing happened on a level above what I'd consider the Duchy of Burgundy. Duke of Burgundy was a very prestigious title, so it's not like you're taking a bit hit by doubling or tripling your territory and still having that be your primary mode of address.

Another analogy would be the Prince of Wales. As you pointed out, they are usually also the Dukes of Cornwall and of course heirs to the English Crown. But that doesn't change the cultural or political borders of Wales. It changes the domain of the guy who happens to rule in Wales.

Real changes in Duke-tier fiefdoms were pretty uncommon precisely because they were cultural as much as geographical. It makes sense, too, because even if you went around poaching land from other nobles, you really needed legitimacy. It wasn't enough for Edward III to beat France on the field and have total military control of most of the country: he needed to make the argument that he was the rightful heir due to some 700-year-old Frankish law that excluded women from the line of inheritance.  He had to make the case that he wasn't some English guy coming in and taking over: he'd actually been French all along, and not just that, but more French than the other guy!

Before you had censuses or lots of highways or standing armies, how would you even draw borders? You'd go around finding groups of people who talked and acted more or less the same and bunch them together under some name. If your boss was strong enough and there weren't many other power centers you could get away with one name for a huge area (King of the Franks!) but once all that fell apart and you actually had local economies rather than barbarians running around in the woods, suddenly Burgundian Franks were different enough from Savoyard Franks or Orleans Franks that anybody who spent enough time traveling around could start drawing lines between one group and the next. Military conquest might re-draw those lines a lot but if you look at all the counties in France and Europe in 1187 or 1289 their names will sound familiar because the basic cultural entities are still there.

Even in 2012, Connecticut could invade Rhode Island and get away with it long before Anjou could invade Brittany and get away with it.

[vonGenf]

Another analogy would be the Prince of Wales. As you pointed out, they are usually also the Dukes of Cornwall and of course heirs to the English Crown. But that doesn't change the cultural or political borders of Wales. It changes the domain of the guy who happens to rule in Wales.

And that is, in turn, exactly what I mean when I say that duchies should be seen as personal and not territorial. The Prince of Wales is the Prince of Wales, not the Prince of Wales. If for some reason he decided that Cornwall was enough and to give Wales to some other guy, the other guy would most probably be only the Count of Wales, unless the other guy was really really cool.

There were duchies whose title expired, that didn't necessarily destroy the cultural unity of the people living on the land.

[Scarlett]

To what end, though? I think your point is more properly that the title of Duke was more personal than territorial, and that became the case toward the end of the Middle Ages as "realm" started to give way to "country." The whole idea that "England" was this central identity to the nobles under Henry V was a pretty revolutionary one, and as it took root, it supplanted some (but not all) of the local-ness of medieval titles.

I don't know that you can make a general statement about what would happen if you un-Duked somebody, though. The Dukes of Aquitaine were pretty much retired once France finally took it back because the Kings held it as their personal title. Had they wanted to dole out lesser titles, they could have made Dukes of Bordeaux, Dukes of Poitou, and Dukes of Gascony, but they probably would not have made a Count of Aquitaine. Wales would probably not be a county or a Duchy because it had been a Kingdom for such a long time that it showed a weird kind of respect to the Welsh for the English to keep it as a more important entity than, say, Norfolk.

Titles expiring didn't start happening with any regularity until the Renaissance and was just a side-effect of the centralization process. If you made me King of France in 1200 the first thing I'd want to do is to reduce the number of magnates I had to deal with, but I couldn't get away with it. In 1500 or 1600 I would have a much better shot at doing so.

It's also just very difficult to generalize about this. For much of the middle ages, The Duke of Norfolk is very much the Duke of Norfolk just as the Duke of Brittany gets the underline treatment. Towards the end, you'd hand out the title to whomever helped you become King and they may not have ever been to Norfolk in their lives, which is what I think you're pointing out ... but that was a shift in how people looked at these titles and a symptom of the ascendancy of central rulers. Henry II may have ruled the largest empire since Roman times but if you measured his actual control over it, even a pretty terrible King like Henry VIII exercised more direct influence over England than did Henry II.

[vonGenf]

It's also just very difficult to generalize about this. For much of the middle ages, The Duke of Norfolk is very much the Duke of Norfolk just as the Duke of Brittany gets the underline treatment. Towards the end, you'd hand out the title to whomever helped you become King and they may not have ever been to Norfolk in their lives, which is what I think you're pointing out ... but that was a shift in how people looked at these titles and a symptom of the ascendancy of central rulers.

Well, the first duchy in the Peerage of England was only created in 1337. There was no such thing as an early middle ages Duke of Norfolk, so yes in that sense I am basing myself on a late middle-age picture.

We're left with Charlemagne's lands as a special case, and pre-1337 England not having any Dukes..... yes, I think that only leaves Brittany as a model. I think it's a pretty reductionist one.

[Scarlett]

Prior to 1337, an English Earl was equivalent to a Duke. In 1337 they implemented separation of cities from duchies, and...

[vonGenf]

Prior to 1337, an English Earl was equivalent to a Duke. In 1337 they implemented separation of cities from duchies, and...

Ah, well, we are not talking about the same thing then. I agree with what you say when you talk about Earls; only I would tend to identify Earls with region Lords in BM (Counts and Margraves).

[Scarlett]

That became true after 1337 (and is one reason this topic is so difficult to discuss).

Prior to 1337, in England you only had two titles below King that were really at all important: Earl and Baron. In France you had Duc, Marquis, Comte, Vicomte, and Baron.

Most of the pre-1337 Earldoms ended up becoming Dukedoms while new Earldoms created post-1337 were more like counts.