What makes a king, ruler, or emperor successful?
>>1373748
The geography
/thread
Knowing enough about every facet of rulership to effectively oversee people who are much more talented than you and can do a better job.
There are five broad categories a kings deeds and accomplishments can be placed under to define whether he was a success or failure. The first is stability, the lands under a successful king should be stable, peaceful and lacking strife. Wealth is another, a successful king should have a lot of wealth at his disposal. Bringing improvement and reform to the kingdom is another mark of a successful king. Power is a crucial trait to any king, a successful king has power, influence, and domination over his kingdom. And lasting, a successful king should ensure a clean succession of his kingdom.
>>1373780
Fuck off Jared diamond
>>1373748
Being a ruthless son of a bitch generally.
>>1373780
Freshman polisci pls go
>>1373748
>croatia de jure hungarian
REEEEEEE
>>1373748
Nice grossly over simplified map OP
>>1373849
>Being this retarded
Literally luck.
One's own efforts don't mean shit if mongols, the plague or major drought happens to hit out of nowhere.
>>1373748
What game is this from?
>>1373849
This is a mod for Total War Attila
>>1373874
Its extremely obvious
>>1373874
>can't recognize the Attila map
Someone get this celthead outta here
>>1373883
>Attila
>Medieval Kingdoms
Why should anyone be able to see that?
I figured that it was some kind of Total War, but I am with that guy anyway.
>>1373879
Didn't know this was /v/
>>1373748
Either acting so benevolent that the people love you or acting as a tyrant so the people fear you. Though there will always be factors that you can't control
>>1373878
Well, one I'm not a career birdwatcher with a side interest in history, *I* got my BS in Archaeology from a top 25 Anth uni standing side by side with Harvard (we even sniped their instructors), am working towards a master of museum and public admin and am filing applications for philosophy of and comparative religion PhD programs.
As an undergrad I spent a lot of time in class undermining your assertions, all of which were graded highly, focused on ways in which you cherry pick your narrative, and de-emphasize the role of individual actors in Anthro analyses, with the Mesoamerican conquest as my case study.
Take your pop anth and shove it up your ass, Jared.
>>1373748
That looks like a nice time to be alive and a traveler in Europe.
>>1373748
Correct me if you believe my thesis to be retarded, but I believe that what unites all rulers that are considered to be succesful is their ability to unite others behind them.
The biggest contrast we can see in this is when looking at France and Germany, both remnants of the Carolingian empire. What we see is that a rapid succession of talented French kings manages to unite the country, focus power in Paris and set the stage for the nation to become the most prominent power in Europe for centuries to come. On the other hand, German rulers could not capitalize on the work of Otto the Okay and descended into infighting and irrelevance... until the succesful leader Bismarck managed to rally them all behind him. Even Hitler could be called succesful in the sense that he managed to mobilize all Germans behind him.
Succesful leaders can direct, or even embody, the volonté générale. Whether it's through fear, kindness or simply being an examplary knight/warrior does not matter. Before you can become a conqueror, you must be a unifier. Genghis Khan wouldn't have gotten one step into China without uniting all the Mongol tribes first, and the faillure of his successors to keep the Mongol tribes united is why his empire collapsed quite quickly. It came and it went.
tl;dr: Regardless of political ideology, succesful leaders unite their people.
>>1374167
Plenty of rulers were successful as conquerors, plenty of rulers were successful as maintainers.
