![]() So that is where we will start: how do you keep all of those scheming vassals happy?Īnd, as always, if you want to be my vassal, my levy and tax contribution rates are customary and reasonable you can pledge fealty via Patreon. No character has a ‘legitimacy’ score, instead what CKIII has to say about systems of generating legitimacy emerges from its systems, especially modifiers which interact with either vassal opinion. What is fascinating about CKIII is that one could easily argue that legitimacy is the central theme of the game, that most of the player’s efforts within a realm are focused on building their own legitimacy or undermining the legitimacy of others and yet ‘legitimacy’ is not a a single system or currency within the game. There is a degree of circularity here: subjects want their king to act like a ‘good king’ and so they are more ready to support a king that acts out (or performs) their understanding of what a good king looks like, which in turn confers legitimacy on the monarchy, which in turn defines for subsequent kings what being a good king looks like. In this case, we’re interested specifically in the social norms about kingship, since norms often differ based on one’s position in society (age, sex, social rank, etc.). Legitimacy in traditional monarchies – of the sort the player is running in this game – are in turn founded on social norms, collective standards of behavior (often unwritten). ![]() Legitimacy, for reasons we’ll get into, is the fundamental lifeblood of any ruling authority. As historians, we tend to approach this question through the concept of legitimacy, the degree to which a ruling authority (in this case a person) is perceived to be the rightful authority and thus obeyed not out of the fear of force but out of tradition and social pressure. ![]() In a sense this is the third leg of a the three-legged stool that is CKIII‘s understanding of power in a medieval polity: if power is personal, rather than institutional (leg one) and highly fragmented between many people (leg two), then how is power gained and kept within such systems. This week, we’re going to look at how CKIII understands power to be wielded and maintained within the system of fragmented, personalistic rule we’ve established in the previous weeks. In the last part (in two sections), we discussed how CKIII attempts to model decentralized political power in the fragmented polities of the medieval Mediterranean, with different mechanics to reflect the pressures that led to fragmentation both in the post-Carolingian West and the post- Rashidun East. This is the third part of a four part series ( I, IIa, IIb, III, IV) examining the historical assumptions behind the popular medieval grand strategy game Crusader Kings III, made by Paradox Interactive.
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