In a standard medieval fantasy world, how would one go about reforming the monarchical system to institute a democracy?

>one
Might need a few

>because your character couldn't conceive of the idea
Why not? Democracy has always been at least an idea in most cultures.

Nohow. The vast majority people are morally unsound, filthy, superstitious and dumb, instituting democracy for them would be a deviously evil act. They would proceed to steal or vandalise everything that belongs to the upper class and promptly degrade into savagery. You need to wait until there is a substantially large class of reasonable people who gravitate towards moderation before instituting some very primitive and flawed form of democracy. Which then, if you're lucky, is going to evolve into proper democracy over several centuries.

Support rich merchants against aristocrats

You would need to teard down the old establishment by the roots. Someone may even claim that you would have to burn it down. Making the mother of all A bake Mete Ryalle, Karl, can't fret over every chicken.

That doesn't lead to a democracy in a medieval society. It would only create an oligarchic republic like Venice or Novgorod.

Democracy was a thing before the middle ages, you uneducated swine.

Not sure why you think the firearms are necessary. If anything, it's communication technologies that needs to be developed, I can't see democracy working on something larger than a city state using ordinary medieval level communications.

Once there's a strong middle class that can challenge the noblemen, transition from the feudal system should happen by itself.
Here's a better question - how do I keep absolute monarchy intact, with all the "englightened" ideas floating around and uppity merchants getting strange ideas about not needing me?

More people buy into ideas similar to Leviathan?

>51396153
>how do I keep absolute monarchy intact
Make the rulers not suck and have a North Korea-tier cult of personality surrounding them.

Enrich the soldiers and scorn all other men.

meant for

Because semi-advanced firearms allow Matthew the butcher's boy to easily kill Ser Gregor the Magnificent, the Earl of Fucksburg and at the same time put him on equal ground in combat to the nobility, who in the age of knights were an almost insurmountable opponent to the peasantry and common folk, but in the age of firearms can be killed just the same. Firearms are the great equaliser.

start off with an elective monarchy

that's an ochlocracy, not a democracy

sure, if it's easily producable on an industrial scale. Just having AK47s in your setting only ensures that those that can afford them can have them. They also have to have the infrastructure to make the resources as cheap as they are IRL and the production as fast as it is.

And at that point you can already shift the requirement from firearms to mass production of the best available personal weaponry. if every peasant can afford a suit of armour, it would be as effective.

For a long time firearms could only be provided by the upper class or government. Hell, one could even argue that professional armies are a result of firearms, because you couldn't expect peasants and lay-folk to be able to afford up to date firearms or firearms at all, along with shot and powder.

Nope, there was voting, promises an recognition of the remaining kingdoms of the continent. Even while being regarded as a dick move, its laws are abided by most travelers and adventurers.

>if every peasant can afford a suit of armour, it would be as effective.
And a warhorse and the training for it and so forth. The French revolution itself was possible because the people were armed with guns. In medieval times they would have been run down by cavalry and put to the sword.

>Hell, one could even argue that professional armies are a result of firearms, because you couldn't expect peasants and lay-folk to be able to afford up to date firearms or firearms at all, along with shot and powder.
Mate, the concept of total war was literally born from armed peasantry. The Frogs, after their revolution could afford to arm their population and mobilize their entire people for the war, since there was no nobility in charge that was afraid of rebellion, should the people be given arms. Guns gave birth to true conscript armies.

>And a warhorse and the training for it and so forth.
and a warhorse maybe, but that's full stop. Training and discipline was vital at the time of the french revolution too, firearms didn't change that, 10 soldiers were still more efective than 15 pesants. Equipment just was more similar, it's all about the availability of equipment.

10 soldiers were more effective than 15 peasants, but before that 10 soldiers would absolutely butcher the peasants. With guns, the 10 peasants can easily wage asymmetric war. Even better if they have rifles.

Yes but your argument is kind of weak, because as the other user brought up you already need a large scale of production. Most likely bringing along more value to your middle-class.

Once you have a middle-class of well educated people, and you have them gaining more and more importance in the world around them you have the foundations of a possible revolution.

Also for a country that got rid off the monarchy well before the French look at 1600's Netherlands after they lost William of Orange, or I think late medieval Iceland.
I'd say the French revolution is a terrible idea of the things required to gain democracy, because it failed in almost everything it tried to achieve and the country needed Napoleon (a fucking emperor for Christ's sake) to kick it back into overdrive.

Who do you think those soldiers were?

You wouldn't say those soldiers were... lower class citizens too?

VIVE

Why would you want to replace a good ruling system with a cancerous one like democracy?

>After they lost William of Orange
>Im-fucking-plying
William was never anything more than Steward (Stadhouder) and certainly not a king, the same title that remained in use for the rest of the Republic. He did hold the title "Prince of Orange", but that title was unrelated entirely to the Dutch Republic. Also
>Democracy
>Im-fucking-plying
It was ruled by a number of noble families from the various provinces. In fact, it got so bad that in 1798 the Dutchmen that actually liked democracy (the newly formed patriot group) practically welcomed the French invasion with open arms.

>because it failed in almost everything it tried to achieve
Such as? No really, what wasn't achieved by the time Amiens was signed? Hell, even if you look at the Restoration, it still only happened under the condition that the Charter of 1814 was accepted (Charles X tried to repeal it, guess how that turned out).
>and the country needed Napoleon (a fucking emperor for Christ's sake) to kick it back into overdrive.
1. He only became emperor after the War of the Third Coalition (violating the aforementioned Treaty of Amiens) was signed.
2. He became an emperor under conditions that respected popular sovereignity, which was the entire point behind the French Revolution: replacing the arbitrary reign of the Ancien Régime with one reliant on popular sovereignity and respecting the social contract. Initially deposing of the monarch was never its intention (which is why Louis XVI was decapitated in 1793 and not 1789).
3. Napoleon reasoned himself to be much like a Roman dictator more than an ancien regime king. With that in mind, how is France needing Napoleon contrary to the revolution, especially when so many of its greatest thinkers (among whom Montesquieu and Rousseau) were directly inspired by the Roman Republic?

Apply yourself.

Become a monarch, to end the monarchy.

Well the way it was done in the actual medieval world went something like this:
>Be wealthy merchant city
>Institute some form of republic to run the city.
>Use wealth to do provide useful services to the king
>Use services as leverage to bargain with king for greater autonomy
>If king does not cooperate band with other cities against king to gain autonomy by force
>Be autonomous city-state running on democratic principles

that would be crossbows actualy, by the time guns were getting popular knights were well on their way out

What's wrong with letting your players do dangerous experiments with explosives to try and make a gun? And then blow themselves up in the process through a series of math skill checks that takes place over several years in game?

Because it very rarely plays out like that.

Magic, or a printing press. A successful democracy requires an educated populace, not a shit-ton of ignorant and illiterate peasants.

There are a good amount of people commenting on the merchant class, that is bourgeois, aspect of the end of feudalism without mentioning either the dispossession of the peasant laborer and the attendant social struggles regarding the dual nature of that dispossession, or as one sage put it "free in a double sense": free from feudal obligations and then made into free labor. There were peasant revolts and war, and indeed the English Peasant Revolt and the German Peasants' War among others, and as a rule occur before the bourgeois revolutions of their respective nations.

Even in the bourgeois revolution de force, the French Revolution, the democratic and liberatory element owes more to its distinct proletarian element, the sans culottes, than to the bourgeois, due to the bourgeois need to make these cross-class alliances against the final fetters of the feudal system.

This speaks to the general penetration of a fashionable historiography meant, as is the practice, to downplay and dismiss the particular role of the proletariat and its political aims in the emancipatory gains of the modern era, to forget that it was the betrayal of this proletarian element that led to the buffoon Napoleon and his even more farcical successor because the bourgeois preferred the continuation of feudal fetters to common emancipation, and indeed do so to deny that this emancipation may we'll go further.

Basically, OP, it's the peasants.

Rome, the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, England, Sweden, and France all attemptet it with varying degrees of success, and democracy wasn't always as important as simply getting rid of the King or limiting his power.

In Rome you were only eligible to be elected into the Senate if your father had been a member of the Senate, making them effectively the aristocracy.

Poland-Lithuania decided to go "fuck all" and implement one of the worst systems ever by giving every single nobleman the right to veto absolutely everything.

England decided to proclaim themself a republic and then elect a new King, only this time giving him the title Lord Protector instead.

Sweden attempted to do something similar to England but kept the King around mostly so that no one would try to become Lord Protector.

And France's revolution ended up pretty much the same way the English one had before; with them now being a self-proclaimed republic but ruled by a man who was a monarch in all but title.

On the contrary, how would one do the reverse? Reforming a democracy into a monarchical system?

The same way almost every monarchy has been overthrown, have it be unstable and suggest an alternative.
>Empire is slowly declining for various reasons
>Fights a pointless war
>Gets its shit pushed in, lots of peasants die, military humiliated, loses a ton of land
>Some educated non-Aristocrats (probably bourgeois) start spreading the idea of doing away with kings
>Attempts to limit the power of the shitty emperor (eg. senate or council of local leaders having actual political power) are shot down
>People riot and are butchered by the empire for doing it
>People say fuck it and grab their weapons and proceed to butcher everyone in their path

>implying all medieval societies must be monarchies by definition

lol

Doesn't take too much, military coup will do the job pretty quickly.

In a standard medieval fantasy world modern representative liberal democracy just would not work. Ancient elitist democracy where only "citizens" get a vote could, howeverm but only in a city-state.

They said democracy, not gay marriage.

Though the latter can be legalized by the former, so seeing the bigger picture is required

Elitist democracy is still a democracy.
After all giving vote to everyone would runin the system, given the majority is made out of poor bastards with no education or any idea of political responsibility

Realize that Machiavelli's The Prince is a satirical work that when taken seriously leads to the people overthrowing the monarchy

Yeah, except Greek/Roman deocracy, where only wealthy male land owners that were born as citizens or get citizenship through militay service have a vote have very little to do with a modern idea of democracy.

First you put some limit on the authority of the king through a constitution. Next you develop a bureaucracy to help administer the land. You introduce a democratic parliament to advise the king. You gradually turn the duties of the aristocracy over to the bureaucracy and increase the power of the parliament. Eventually the whole system turns into a constitutional monarchy, where the king is just a figurehead and the aristocracy is a relic of the past. The final, short step is to abolish the monarchy and aristocracy altogether.

>or get citizenship through militay service
Literally nothing wrong with this. Literally nothing.
In fact, not only was this what Rousseau imagined (hence the Levée en Masse), but I'd say that a lot of the flaws of modern democracy could be solved by reintroducing conscription as a requirement for active citizenship.

>The French revolution itself was possible because the people were armed with guns

Bullshit.

As soon as the 11th century, nobility was such a small percentage of the population that most of the military was made of commoners.
Not only untrained serfs, mind you, but trained militia recruited among the freemen or even full-time men-at-arms.

Back then, they could take down a knight, if only because of numbers and because that full-plate armor wasn't worn every hour of every fucking day by nobles.

They didn't because they had no real reason :

- the serfs were too poor, too uneducated and too ill-equipped to ever stand a chance at organizing a successful uprising more than a few months.
If they did revolt, it was to run away and turn into bandits or flock to the cities as unskilled labor, which wasn't always a better life.

- freemen had a hard life but they could provide for their families when harvest wasn't too bad.
They couldn't, however, organize themselves well enough to stop a raiding party of mounted noblemen to burn their fields and farms.
And that's what they would be facing if their village ever made a attempt at an organized revolt.
What good is self-governance if you are going to starve next winter ?

- burgers were dependant on trade and that means they needed to travel across the lands that surrounded their cities.
As long as the population was nearly entirely made of peasants living outside of cities, that meant the nobles had a essentially limitless amount of troops to lay a mobile siege against the rebellious cities... while the burgers had very limited manpower to hope to break said siege.
And after a few months/years, they wouldn't even have had money (or food) to pay said manpower.

Since most people lived outside the towns and barely scrapped a living working in the fields, they wouldn't think about revolting because life alone was enough of a struggle.
Once food was (usually) more easy to produce, cities could grow... and organize.

Everything remains exactly the same, only instead of a King or Queen inheriting the throne, the nobility and merchant/middle class vote on who will be King or Queen.

>implying the Roman Empire wasn't a democracy before they chose to elect emperors.

It starts with people becoming independent from their liege's financial support. The moment lesser nobility and the commoners have a good income, they start becoming more educated, and when they become more educated they become more involved in politics, and once they are involved they will demand more personal rights and laws that protect those rights, which leads to the formation of an opposition of royalty and finally the constitutional exclusion of royalty as they are not an elected representative of the population.

>Literally nothing wrong with this.
Except conscripted army in most countries is a shitfest that have litle to do with building a citizen out of a conscript. If anything it most times makes them worse as citizens.

Just because third world shitholes do it wrong doesn't mean it can't be done right.

I don´t think the product of the Magnacarta would be considered democracy today...

hence +one civil war

Yeah, one country that managed to pull it right vs entire world that didn't. I'd say it's the good arguement against the idea.

You don't, democracy is the result of centuries of ongoing reform. Attempting to force democracy (or indeed any modern ideology) on a feudal nation will result in an atomist dictatorship (see: Russia, China, pretty much all of post-colonial Africa, Afghanistan, Iraq etc...)

cont>
On a more hopeful note: Plague, coffee, military discontent and external support have all been factors in getting the ball rolling

There's also Finland and Israel, meaning that all first world democracies that tried it have done it right. The countries where it doesn't work have bigger problems (like, you know, North Korea).

Perhaps not entirely coincidentally Switzerland, Finland and Israel are three of the few western countries where you can be a patriot and anti-immigration without being literally Hitler.

>male land owners that were born as citizens
That's exactly what voters were considered in the U.S. when it was founded.

The magna Carta was the result of a civil war so thats where the confusion comes from.

conscription is disgusting and anathema to liberty. Die for the state or else.

I'm not much for conscription either, but I don't think I would a system similar to the one in Starship Troopers where military service is voluntary but a requirement if you want to be able to vote.

Essentially, if you want to be able to impact the future of the nation you have to be willing to give you life to protect it.

Why though?

>My political opinions lean more and more to Anarchy (philosophically understood, meaning abolition of control not whiskered men with bombs) – or to ‘unconstitutional’ Monarchy. I would arrest anybody who uses the word State (in any sense other than the inanimate realm of England and its inhabitants, a thing that has neither power, rights nor mind); and after a chance of recantation, execute them if they remained obstinate! If we could get back to personal names, it would do a lot of good. Government is an abstract noun meaning the art and process of governing and it should be an offence to write it with a capital G or so as to refer to people. If people were in the habit of referring to ‘King George’s council, Winston and his gang’, it would go a long way to clearing thought, and reducing the frightful landslide into Theyocracy. Anyway the proper study of Man is anything but Man; and the most improper job of any man, even saints (who at any rate were at least unwilling to take it on), is bossing other men. Not one in a million is fit for it, and least of all those who seek the opportunity. And at least it is done only to a small group of men who know who their master is.

>The mediævals were only too right in taking nolo efiscopari as the best reason a man could give to others for making him a bishop. Give me a king whose chief interest in life is stamps, railways, or race-horses; and who has the power to sack his Vizier (or whatever you care to call him) if he does not like the cut of his trousers. And so on down the line. But, of course, the fatal weakness of all that – after all only the fatal weakness of all good natural things in a bad corrupt unnatural world – is that it works and has worked only when all the world is messing along in the same good old inefficient human way. The quarrelsome, conceited Greeks managed to pull it off against Xerxes; but the abominable chemists and engineers have put such a power into Xerxes’ hands, and all ant-communities, that decent folk don’t seem to have a chance. We are all trying to do the Alexander-touch – and, as history teaches, that orientalized Alexander and all his generals. The poor boob fancied (or liked people to fancy) he was the son of Dionysus, and died of drink. The Greece that was worth saving from Persia perished anyway; and became a kind of Vichy-Hellas, or Fighting-Hellas (which did not fight), talking about Hellenic honour and culture and thriving on the sale of the early equivalent of dirty postcards. But the special horror of the present world is that the whole damned thing is in one bag. There is nowhere to fly to. Even the unlucky little Samoyedes, I suspect, have tinned food and the village loudspeaker telling Stalin’s bed-time stories about Democracy and the wicked Fascists who eat babies and steal sledge-dogs. There is only one bright spot and that is the growing habit of disgruntled men of dynamiting factories and power-stations; I hope that, encouraged now as ‘patriotism’, may remain a habit! But it won’t do any good, if it is not universal.

>Well, cheers and all that to you dearest son. We were born in a dark age out of due time (for us). But there is this comfort: otherwise we should not know, or so much love, what we do love. I imagine the fish out of water is the only fish to have an inkling of water. Also we have still small swords to use. ‘I will not bow before the Iron Crown, nor cast my own small golden sceptre down.’ Have at the Ores, with winged words, hildenǣddran (war-adders), biting darts – but make sure of the mark, before shooting.

Actually the theme of a campaign I'm part of rn. We plan on starting a civil war between the main government which is run by the church and the many unpleased Lords of the land. After both sides have depleted themselves we plan to rally the people behind us as then will be fed up with both sides. And with the help one of the more powerful Lords who supports our plans were going to overthrow the old government and the rebellious Lords. A rough plan rn but we think it's probably the best way.

Industrial revolution or its magical equivalent

Thesaurus pants over here isn't even making a good point. Undergrad detected.