So how the fuck does monarchical succession work...

Most of the common ones have been mentioned above, but sometimes the ruler can nominate a successor before they die.

My current setting is simply "first legitimate son or daughter" to make it nice and simple.

This also happened sometimes in the eastern roman empire.

Whoever has the biggest army and an even slightly relevant claim to the throne is the one who inherits.

Ok, be honest guys. How many of you know or were inspired to look this up from CK2?

Is that AT's Ice King?

Question, the entire point of these different laws is to be absolutely clear on who suceeds in the event of death.

Suppose the first legitimate born child is dead. Does it go to the next eldest child (who may be female), or the next eldest son?

Yeah, the king's brothers come after his children, and their children are after them in the line - so the youngest brother comes after his older brother's sons

So was passing over daughters to keep women from being sovereign, or something more politically situational i.e. the king's brother wants the throne the king has no son but a legitimate daughter so the brother tries to pass some decree with the backing of other nobility and authority of the church to change the succession?

The kingdom (maybe) has a succession law that establishes who is the new king when the king dies. This law is often based around the laws or traditions regarding normal inheritance in this culture or country, so it makes no sense for the king to decide that his daughter and not his brother will inherit the kingdom if women cannot inherit goods from the father. Unless the king is a powerful enough monarch to go against the customs of the land (but that's very rare).

If there's some sort of elective process to decide the successor, expect the high nobility to be very powerful and the royal power to be weak be it in paper or just de facto.

A lot of cultures didn't believe that a women was able to be a strong ruler. I'm pretty sure that in more than one country women were not able to posess land, so of course a female monarch was just a crazy idea.

If anything, the one trying to pass some decree with the help of nobles is the daughter, who cannot become a strong ruler by herself.

See above.
>It depends.

What system are you using? If absolute primogeniture, the next born child. If male-preference, the next born male; if none exist, then move on to the female children. If salic, then the next born male and if none then it starts going to the king's brothers.

Bear in mind most of this was enshrined into law, but was only as powerful as the will of the surviving nobles to enforce it.

I should point out that in some systems, the daughter CAN inherit provided she has no brothers. Otherwise, you wouldn't have had queens Victoria and Elisabeth.

Of course, Elisabeth would have lost control of the country had she ever married, so she just never did.

>but was only as powerful as the will of the surviving nobles to enforce it

Often those nobles refered to those laws to justify their own motivations, though. It wasn't hard because law didn't work like today, it was based on tradition and custom and so it depended a lot on mutual agreement. If everyone believes this person has the right to succeed, he has it.

Two main ways:

Primature: Eldest son gets first dibs, his children then get second dibs while the other children of the old king can't get to the throne until all the children of their older brother is dead.

Fraternal: The king dies, his eldest son gets to be king, when the eldest son dies, the second eldest son gets to be king, and the children of the eldest son have to wait until all the immediate children of the old king have become king and/or died.

The benefit of the first kind is that it turns any child after the first into a tradeable resource because marrying them off won't threaten the claim to the throne of the children of the eldest son of the first king, and thus can't lead to another kingdom usurping the throne via the marital network.

The downside is it incentivises the second eldest and later children of the first king to kill their elder siblings and their elder sibling's children to get to the throne.

The second system is a deliberate work around of the main problem of the first system - it removes that urge for the Nth inline little brother to kill his big brother, but at the cost of making it easy for a rival kingdom to marry into the line of descent and usurp the throne after the first king's children have all died.

It also has the problem of causing confusion in the line of succession in the second generation - does the oldest grandchild of the king get first dibs, or does the eldest child of the eldest child also go ahead of the child of the other brothers, even if he's younger than the eldest child of that generation?

Yes, it depends on the laws of the realm or sometimes the customs of dynasty (they're both intermingled). In another country, Elizabeth would've been skipped or allowed to reign ONLY if she marries and has a kid. Notice how other kingdoms/dynasties never had female rulers.

>Is everything divided up (roughly) equally amongst the sons? Gavelkind or Salic
This, BTW, is a terrible terrible system because it ends up fragmenting your holdings. See also: the Mongols.

>Notice how other kingdoms/dynasties never had female rulers.
Although they COULD have Queens-In-All-But-Name, such as say if the actual King was like two years old and his mother declared herself Regent.

Or say you're the Imperial Consort Wu Zetian and you just marry the son of your previous husband when the first idiot dies, while actually running the Chinese Empire for 30 years.

Cutting daughters out of inheritance was mainly to assuage your sons, who are going to be the ones with military experience leading the armies, probably, and who you want supporting you until you die.

Daughters allowed in nominal succession is literally twice as many claims. You make that shit illegal citing law going back centuries to when your people were dirt farmers living in Germania and people still wage war to install female claimants, though.

It's not a matter of terrible or not, the king is not playing a Paradox game and he will not play with as next son after dying. If it's customary to divide his holdings, he will probably do it with gusto as it's probably what all fathers do with their possesions too. He probably also wants all his sons to get what they deserve, which means a part of the land if that's the tradition.

Hello le CK2 player, that's not how it worked in reality. They were appanages, with autonomy, but still had empire-wide institutions like the yam system, with the Yuan dynasty as the suzerain, with their paper money used everywhere. Property was also respected, with princes in China owning property in the Ilkhanate, etc.

I'd say that being a woman back then was probably shitty but I realize these are nobles so it doesn't apply to 90% of the population, and they're fucking pampered from birth to death for the most part.

Right, but 50 years down the line, that results in your kingdom being four smaller kingdoms who are all at war with each other.

And you've all just been noticed by France.

Well, relatively pampered. People shit in the corridors of Versailles.

What was the one that goes to the Kings Brothers Son or something? It goes horitzontal across the family as well as down?

I think the House of Saudi Arabia do that.

Yes, also this is very important. Although I'm sure we could find some weird monarchy or dynasty, somewhere in time and space, that didn't even allow women to be regents alone.

I think that the point of this thread should just be that OP can do whatever he wants as long as he keeps it coherent.

He could even have a kingdom where males inherit first but the female line is the one that counts, so it's the grandsons of the current king (sons of his daughters) the ones who inherit. Or a kingdom where females have priority because the concept of monarchy has nothing to do with the european one and it makes more sense for a women to be in charge in this cosmovision that doesn't have to be matriarchal at all.

While a number of the other posts in this thread address a variety of ways that succession has been handled from time to time and from place to place, there's an underlying question that really needs to be addressed before figuring out which applies in your case:

How powerful is your monarch? How did he acquire that power? Did he use that power in such a way that other influential parties have a particular expectation about how it will be handed over?

Any law or custom that would restrict the means by which the monarch passes on his rule is a limit on his power. The nobles who supported the king in his rise to power may expect to have a say in selecting and grooming the king's replacement, which suggests that the king serves at the pleasure of his underlings.

Securing an orderly succession is nearly as important a task for a sovereign as securing the borders of his holdings. Perhaps even more important. If a neighboring polity were to raid from time to time, taking cattle and other plunder from time to time, this is nowhere near as grave a threat as civil war upon the death of the monarch.

If succession is going to be a key factor in an upcoming RPG campaign, it would probably be useful to have the outgoing monarch give some indication of a preferred heir that is not to the liking of influential people below him. Whatever the law or custom is, however personally powerful the old monarch was in life, without some means of securing the consent of the governed a new monarch's rise to power is super risky.

Under such a system, power tends to aggregate at the clan / familial level rather than the individual. So while you may have three dozen subdivisions therein, this chunk of land all belongs to Clan MacLachlann, and an assault on the holdings of any of the members will bring the whole lot down on you. Leadership at that clan level was also more likely to be decided on merit rather than birth; so while it is more fractious, fickle, and contested, it prevents some syphilitic imbecile from holding power for decades solely on merit of his bloodline.

>matrilineal patriarchy

An actual thing. There've been several cultures where you traced family, clan, and holdings down the female line, but the men held the functional day-to-day power.

DESIGNATED
SHITTING
CORRIDORS

I figure a matrilinear succession really makes the most sense, simply because there is usually less doubt who someone's mother is than who their father is.

I have some vague notes for a setting in which only women can own land, because they believe in gender roles in which women are passive, still and represent rationality and stability, whereas men are active, mobile and represent passion and creativity. So, because land doesn't move and is stable, owning and administering it is woman's work. Men own caravans, horses, herds and ships.

As a king you aren't dividing your possessions among your children you are the leader of a group of people. All that you accomplish by splitting the kingdom is making it weaker. If you're a count or something you can go ahead and do that because it makes no difference in the grand scheme of things since they are still all under the same ultimate ruler, but as a king you can't just do that and expect the people to continue to do as well as they used to. 2 or 3 generations of splitting your kingdom evenly will just result in even the greatest empire splitting into tons of fragmented republics that are loosely allied with each other constantly bickering and infighting until someone shows up and steamrolls them while they're preoccupied with trying to steal their second cousins holdings. If you want to give your sons stuff as a king just appoint the non-inheriting ones to important positions, give them positions as generals or make them a duke or something, just don't fracture a kingdom because john will not be happy that luke gets to be a king and he doesn't.

What's the justification for ultimogeniture? Inheritance based on last-born son sounds like a quick way for baby brothers to get offed in the crib.

Apparently it's brother to brother, yes. It probably has a lot to do with clanic respect towards the eldest members of the family.

Apparently the king can choose his heir though.

Usually, the oldest legitimate son takes the mantle. If he isn't able, then a regent is appointed to rule for him until he is able or dies.

There were also elective monarchies, like early Rome. A king could be sort of democratically elected, then rule for life like a despot. Weird, uh?

It doesn't really make much sense on the kingdom level, but when we're talking about a family farm or something, it's pretty logical.

The youngest son stays healthiest the longer, so he's going to stay behind on family farm taking care of his elderly parents and he gets rewarded with the farm. The older sons have had more time to establish themselves in the world anyway, so when their parents finally grow too old to support them, it's easier for older sons to seek new opportunities than it is for the youngest son.

In the Mongol case it was the fact that the heartlands they inherited were shitty compared to China, Central Asia, and Persia. It wasn't "this baby gets to be in charge of everything". That baby got to be Khan of Mongolia. Lots of sheep, little tribute.

Can a grandson be a successor under any circumstance besides the father being dead, or not related to the king by blood?

I know, that's why I presented it as an example of coherent succession law. I don't know any monarchy in any part of the world that did this, though.

>There were also elective monarchies, like early Rome. A king could be sort of democratically elected, then rule for life like a despot. Weird, uh?

That's one of those "let's not have a civil war by all agreeing which of us is the strongest and would win" traditions.

>splitting the kingdom

Stop right there, CK2 memer, that never happened. The Carolingian Empire disintegrated in a series of -civil wars-, the triparte division was an attempt to prevent that outcome in the first place.

>As a king you aren't dividing your possessions among your children you are the leader of a group of people.

But that's wrong, motherfucker. If the laws and customs of the land allow or even oblige you to divide it, you are dividing you possesions. You probably conquered those lands so they don't even belong to your family, only to you (not all laws of succession allowed the father to give lands that he inherited from his own father). And those conquered peoples probably prefer a different ruler, not a distant king.

>So how the fuck does monarchical succession work? Just noticed I don't know shit about this and it's going to become the main focus of my campaign soon.

The underlying concept you probably want is "Legitimacy". Succession works by legitimacy.

In various forms of government, legitimacy may be determined by blood, by anointment, by election, by proving grounds, by inheritance, by gift, by popular will, by lottery, and by other means. Regardless of specific form, a ruler needs it to rule - without legitimacy, you wind up like in the Monty Python sketch: "Imagine if I called myself emperor just because some moistened bint lobbed a scimitar at me, they'd put me away" and nobody gives a fuck about your commands.

"Monarchy" usually suggests that the King, to a large extent, is considered the owner of the land, although there have often been elective and semi-elective monarchies where the nobles get together and pick a Head Noble from among their number, and such a King may be little more than a tiebreaker for internal nobility arguments.

If the King owns it, he can to some degree choose a successor, and if the nobles run it by committee, they can appoint one, but if this is an old monarchy, there's probably an established tradition of "how we usually do it" (such as the eldest son, or not picking the same noble house twice in a row) that's going to cause upsets if the new choice diverges from this.

So I suggest you do your worldbuilding by asking: "Who created this kingdom and what succession did they have?" if the monarchy is young. For example, if it was created by conquest, the first warlord-king might have left it to whoever of his children could raise the largest army in ten years. If it's older, it's probably been through a civil war as a result of unclear succession, and then a rule was made up to keep it clear after that (likely a rule which just HAPPENED to say that the winner of the civil war was retroactively in the right). What rule was that?

It's not unusual for kings to have the power to designate their successor while they still live. Whether or not their designated heir will actually survive to inherit is in question, but it happened not infrequently.

The oldest brothers got time to become something and gain prestige and goods when the father was alive. The youngest probably didn't, he could even be still a teenager. It makes more sense if we consider that it's not supposed to be a custom for world-emperors but for everyone.

The Ilkhanate of Persia and Yuan China were both ruled by toluids, sons of the 4th son of Genghis. The lands dominated by Golden Horde (first son descendants) and the khanate of Chagatai (second son) were complete shit compared to what the descendants of the 4th son inherited.

I'll say it's more common for the grandson than (for example) the brother to inherit.

Another rule I don't think I've seen in this thread is succession by seniority of blood: you declare a specific ancestor (usually the founder) and say that the eldest descendant in direct line (or often direct male line) from that guy is next.
Over time this will tend to a large number of descendants and the throne passing from senile 85yearold to near-senile 80yearold, at which point the younger members of the blood royal start grumbling and it's probably time to pick a new and more recent king as the ancestry measuring point. Maybe even counting from the current one, if he's done enough stuff to get called "the Great".

Variant: succession by strength of blood. Whoever can trace the *most* lines of direct descent from the founder to themself is first in line for the throne. So if your father and mother are both direct descendants of the Founder, you're ahead of a guy who's a direct descendant by his father but whose mother is a peasant. Something like this was practiced in Egypt, which led to a lot of brother-sister marriages to keep the bloodline "pure". Works best when combined with bans on overly close incest.

>Can a grandson be a successor under any circumstance besides the father being dead, or not related to the king by blood?

The king declares "my sons are fucking whores, in both senses of the phrase, and I hereby cut them out of succession in favor of the next generation".

>Central Asia at the height of the silk road
>Kievan Rus', the node connecting the Baltic and Black seas via the Volga route, encircling all of European maritime trade
>Complete shit

Understood, I was throwing weight behind your argument. And yeah, it mostly applies to tribal / clannic groups; matrilineality doesn't seem to lead to autocracy, for whatever (hotly contested) reason.

Father could be insane I guess, but he'd still likely be the nominal king.

The king only having daughters might work, if it's more palatable for the grandson to be king than whoever the boy's father is, though this isn't guaranteed

Good post, but I'll add that if you're worlbuilding and want to give your kingdom this rules, one of the first questions you have to ask yourself is who inherits the farm once the farmer dies. Often the awnser to who inherits the kingdom when the king dies (or the county, or whatever) will be intimately related unless the nobility is formed by strangers.

>If it's older, it's probably been through a civil war as a result of unclear succession, and then a rule was made up to keep it clear after that (likely a rule which just HAPPENED to say that the winner of the civil war was retroactively in the right). What rule was that?

I think this is an underemphasised aspect of succession. Often succession rules are worked out the hard way over time.

Original king declares "oldest son", a couple of successions happen that way.

Then a king dies with no son and there's civil war between the faction for the king's nephew and the faction for the king's daughter. The latter wins, and the new rule becomes "oldest child, but males before females".

A while later King Healthfreak the First lives to 108 and all his children die before him. New civil war erupts between his nephew and his grandson (or rather, his nephew and his grandson's regent). The former wins, and the rule gets worked out to "oldest son, then oldest daughter, then oldest nephew, then oldest niece, then oldest grandsons, then oldest granddaughter".

Then the nephew dies without any children, nephews, or nieces and there's nearly another civil war to work out whether his brother is ahead of his uncle, but since the kingdom is still half ruined by the last war ten years ago, they instead reach a compromise that the uncle will rule for now and the brother will be next in line instead of the uncle's sons, and the rules are kludged a bit more to reflect this.

Compared to China and the middle east? Yes, they were not so great. You yourself mention the silk road, guess who controlled the longest section Kublai, Hulagu or the family of Chagatai. The difference is even laughable if you take into account the ports in the indian ocean.

I'll only add to you both the most important tl;dr: Succession laws and customs are fluid and change with time, like all laws and customs.

1) "China" is pretty misleading, Kublai basically inherited the former Jin Dynasty. The south was the more prosperous part of China at this time.

2) Hulagu was Mongke's brother and the Middle East was in the process of being conquered when the Khagan died and civil war broke out. This still fits the principle of elders = priority land.