Home Trending Latest threads New posts Developer diaries

Viceroys, Regents, Lords Lieutenants, Governors

Jump to latest Follow Reply
  • We have updated our Community Code of Conduct. Please read through the new rules for the forum that are an integral part of Paradox Interactive’s User Agreement.
Crusader Kings II 69866 Bug Reports 19707 User Modifications 10588 Suggestions 5969 Tech Support 6361 After Action Reports
RedRooster81

RedRooster81

Modding Paladin
55 Badges
Feb 16, 2010
5.683
43
  • Stellaris
  • Europa Universalis IV: Mandate of Heaven
  • Europa Universalis IV: Rule Britannia
  • Europa Universalis 4: Emperor
  • 500k Club
  • Mount & Blade: Warband
  • Crusader Kings II
  • Surviving Mars: Digital Deluxe Edition
  • Europa Universalis IV
  • Europa Universalis III Complete
  • Rome Gold
I have thought about the historical cases of kings having more than one kingdom and how this should be modeled. In the English case, the important titles for long after the Norman conquest were not the kingdom of England but the Duchy of Normandy, the County of Anjou and so forth. Henry II appointed his sons to govern the disparate territories of his "empire" (and using disinheritance as a constant threat against disloyalty) and later the Prince of Wales gained some authority as regent over the Welsh principalities, as also the Lord Lieutenant of Ireland did in his jurisdiction.

There are similar instances of appointing trusted men or family members to rule over lands distant from the monarch himself. Aragon employed viceroys rather early in their Mediterranean empire, and the Habsburgs later built on this model, appointing in the sixteenth century viceroys in the Netherlands and in the Americas. But the idea was medieval in origin, someone who held the place of the king (the literal meaning of "lieutenant") and received many of the same dignities as the monarch himself.

So to my question, should there not be a way to appoint lieutenants or viceroys over your secondary kingdoms? In my way of thinking this would not be mandatory, but it should improve relations with your vassals in that kingdom (provided the choice of viceroy is worthwhile) at the expense of losing some control and revenue. There could be certain rules, such as requiring that the kingdom to receive a viceroy not be contiguous with the primary kingdom or that the center of the secondary kingdom be a certain distance from the capital, to cover cases like Wales for England.
 
Definitely an interesting idea. The only practical problems I can think of are how these new offices would interact with the king titles system and how realm sovereignty operates in-game. In CK1, of course, if the ‘King of England and Wales’ granted his heir sovereignty over Wales, the son would then become an independent king (and then do all kinds of crazy stuff without you being able to stop him). The three-tier system was too rigid to have subordinate governors.

I expect there will be more subtlety in the CK2 system – haven’t the devs said that in amalgamated realms, the different crowns will keep different sets of laws? That might create the space necessary for these “2 ½ tier” titles.

Ideally I would like to see some choices in how you deal with secondary kingdoms. To take Britain as an example, Wales and Scotland got very different treatment. From 1601 Scotland was ruled by the English crown but had a fair amount of legal autonomy (i.e. no direct English rule). Whereas Wales was more or less annexed to become a part of England, subject to its laws etc. It effectively ceased to be a sovereign unit – the English king didn’t really consider himself to be “King of Wales” as well, he just considered Wales to be an extension of England.

In game terms, then, it would be cool to distinguish between loose personal unions where the realms keep separate laws, and tighter unions where the lands are effectively merged into one realm. If a King title has been subordinated like this (so no longer exists in-game), it would make room for the lesser ‘Governor’ equivalent to appear in its stead – allowing the King of England to appoint the Prince of Wales and Lord Lieutenant of Ireland – without sacrificing the sovereignty of the original primary king title.

Not sure if this kind of relationship was reflected outside Britain – though my vague understanding of Spanish history would place Leon and Castille as effectively ‘merged’ under Castille, whereas Aragon was retained in a looser personal union.
 
I enjoyed reading your response. I'm a bit less familiar with the English case than the Iberian one, but it was a similar challenge under the Plantagenets, ruling from Northumbria to the Gascony. A modder could manipulate the tier system in creative ways to do what you suggested for Britain, with the localisation files retaining the title "king" or "queen" for the fourth-tier title. So "England" would be a fourth-tier title, then Wales, Ireland, etc. would be third-tier titles. Just speculation at this point, but Clausewitz allows and rewards a lot of creativity.

In CK1, I experimented with making certain ducal titles into republics, so this might be a way to go, if you want to be able to appoint a Lord Lieutenant of Ireland.

Castile was a whole amalgam of regal titles by the fifteenth century, primarily Leon and Castile. In Aragon there was a lot more provincial and municipal autonomy, and the Crown of Aragon was composed of the three principalities of Aragon (where the customs and language most strongly resembled Castile), Catalonia (which faced the Mediterranean and was centered at Barcelona), and Valencia, which retained a lot of Moorish qualities. Then there were kingdoms of Mallorca, of Sardinia, of Sicily and of Naples all still attached to the Crown but more loosely, the further east you went. And then the Duchy of Athens. If not ruled directly by a member of the royal family, these principalities had viceroys appointed by the monarch in Zaragoza. In this way, the Crown of Aragon resembled Venice a bit later.

My assumption is that you will have to deal with your vassals in each kingdom (and even duchy) separately. So if you do rule a realm like the Crown of Aragon, you sit at court in Zaragoza, but need to address the concerns and desires of people all over the Mediterranean, so having a kind of vice-king for each of these kingdoms should make governing such a smattering of peoples and cultures and languages much easier. In and of itself, this will be a limit to how big you can grow your realm, and a big advance forward from CK1.
 
RedRooster81 said:
My assumption is that you will have to deal with your vassals in each kingdom (and even duchy) separately. So if you do rule a realm like the Crown of Aragon, you sit at court in Zaragoza, but need to address the concerns and desires of people all over the Mediterranean, so having a kind of vice-king for each of these kingdoms should make governing such a smattering of peoples and cultures and languages much easier. In and of itself, this will be a limit to how big you can grow your realm, and a big advance forward from CK1.
Click to expand...

The Kings of Aragon had no capital city, like most of the Medieval rulers, except for France. Paris was their seat because the Capetians were Counts of Paris before being Kings of France. Before that, the Kings of the Franks had no regular seat either.

That is an issue hard to represent. Nobles used to have a seat, but kings didn't. Castille was a clear example: the king had a palace in every important town, as well as lots of castles. They spent more time in Toledo, though, after it was conquered. The same in Aragon, the kings spent more time in Barcelona (not in Zaragoza), but still, it was not the capital because there was no such thing. Even in the XIVth Century, with the Royal Chancery set in Barcelona, and the Royal Palace in Barcelona effectively made the permanent seat of the Crown, there was still no official capital city.

Besides, Barcelona was some kind of city-state on its own, with its Council of the Hundred ruling the town usually in opposition to the king.

Which makes me wonder how will city-states work in this game.

But I agree: the issue of the viceroys is important. The difference is that, while in Aragon, these viceroys were members of the royal family with official public offices (Liutenant General, Viceroy, General Governor, were some of the names used in the XIV-XVth Centuries), Angevin England used nobility titles, not public, but private. When Henry II made Richard Duke of Aquitaine, he effectively lost control over the Aquitaine, and he only kept his son's loyalty as long as it lasted. The same with Geoffrey made Duke of Brittany, or John made Lord of Ireland.

The French popularides the appanage, the cession of a title, with its land holdings, to lesser children of the family. This is somehting you can do perfectly in CK1, and it would represent Henry's choice of action. But viceroys in an Aragonese way, I don't think so.

But what of the Byzantine governorships? In Byzantium, public offices were very much alive still, so what about appointing strategoi who still pay you their taxes and whose title you can take away, and even if you don't, the title is not inherited?
 
Last edited:
The town of Barcelona can be represented as a barony, within the County of Barcelona. That should not be a problem. I imagine that some administrative functions can work like republics in CK1, as in the Byzantine case. In CK1, the only way to model a royal administration that did not involve alienating the royal domain was to create archbishoprics, because once the officeholder was elected to the papacy his fiefdom would return to the king. What I am imagining is a way to name secular governors, similar to EU Rome: in which you named a dux to rule over Sicily for instance who could be replaced at your will provided he had a minimum level of loyalty.

A good question is whether laws will exist allowing for the prince who has sovereignty over a republican entity like a town can appoint whomever he wants at will or not. That would model a royal bureaucracy that is not feudal in nature, closer to the Byzantine or even Aragonese than the French case, as you indicated. This sort of thing comes down to game mechanics, but I think that ideally there would be a way to model kingdoms and empires that have both feudal and non-feudal components.
 
In the English case, the important titles for long after the Norman conquest were not the kingdom of England but the Duchy of Normandy, the County of Anjou and so forth.
Click to expand...

This was not necessarily the case. It was for William the Conqueror who divided his lands between his sons Robert and William Rufus. Robert, as eldest, got Normandy. Rufus got England, but he was William's favourite son so there is argument for the kingdom taking precident. I think though that any preferment of Normandy over England was purely cultural - it was the motherland.
This did not last very long though. Henry II made his eldest son, also a Henry, King of England as well - a system that never really caught on. Few today know this though because the Young King Henry died before his time.

Ideally I would like to see some choices in how you deal with secondary kingdoms. To take Britain as an example, Wales and Scotland got very different treatment. From 1601 Scotland was ruled by the English crown but had a fair amount of legal autonomy (i.e. no direct English rule). Whereas Wales was more or less annexed to become a part of England, subject to its laws etc. It effectively ceased to be a sovereign unit – the English king didn’t really consider himself to be “King of Wales” as well, he just considered Wales to be an extension of England.
Click to expand...

Wales was made an official part of England by Henry VIII when Welsh law was totally replaced by English law. Scotland always and still does have its own law.
An interesting thing about Welsh law in the middle ages: When Edward I conquered Wales he decreed that the English settlers he encouraged into his fortified towns (Conwy, Caernarfon, Harlech, etc) were to keep English law and the native Welsh Welsh law. So it was more blood and culture than land which mattered.

In the game though I believe each realm will keep its own law system so you might lose some lands and keep others because of the different succession laws.

I think there are two issues to the suggestion:
1. What will these governors look like? like a duke? What powers will they have and what powers will the player/character keep?
2. Feudalism makes this difficult. Many positions like duchies and counties were originally non-hereditary but became so over time. The main reason the Catholic Church insituted celebacy for its clegy was to stop parishes and bishoprics becoming hereditary. This was even the case in the Byzantine Empire; it just happened later than the rest of europe. Land was given to nobles (low and high) on the condition that it would return to the state after the noble died but this usually did not happen in practice.
 
In my way of thinking, viceroys or governors would administrate a secondary kingdom or duchy respectively. You could replace them at your discretion, as I said before. Arguably, you could simply use archbishops to accomplish the same thing if you have Crown Investiture, but I want to simulate having a nascent royal administration that is non-feudal. Outside of the core areas where feudalism early took root (namely northern France, the HRE), there were important non-feudal administrations. I already mentioned Iberia and Britain, but also Hungary by the time of the Angevins and of course the Byzantine Empire and later the Ottomans.
 
RedRooster81 said:
In my way of thinking, viceroys or governors would administrate a secondary kingdom or duchy respectively. You could replace them at your discretion, as I said before. Arguably, you could simply use archbishops to accomplish the same thing if you have Crown Investiture, but I want to simulate having a nascent royal administration that is non-feudal. Outside of the core areas where feudalism early took root (namely northern France, the HRE), there were important non-feudal administrations. I already mentioned Iberia and Britain, but also Hungary by the time of the Angevins and of course the Byzantine Empire and later the Ottomans.
Click to expand...

There should be a clear drawback in doing so, though... otherwise, in game terms, it would be far too tempting to give all his territories to "governors", knowing that they will be just a form of "weaker vassals" that we can withdraw when we don't like them anymore, that is to say, the wildest dream of any CK I ruler (personally I tried to settle it with a "divide et impera" strategy, for example).

For once, there should be a time limitation for recalling or changing the governors, like it happened in Rome : for example, we could say that we can't touch to the governor's assignment for 5 years (o 10, or 3, or 1.... we can discuss on the limit). Some (most) of those titles could even be life-spawn, but just not hereditaries.

Secondly, the possibility of governors claiming themselves as the rightful owner of a certain title (hence gaining the claim), and pressing the king to recognize it (and thus make him a regular, hereditary vassal, or an independent ruler), should be implemented : maybe rarer at the Kingdom level (since being a Vice-Roy should be enough honour even for an ambitious character) but not infrequent at a Duchy level (Governors), and almost the rule at lower levels (Lieutenants, if concerned). Personal traits and ambition could have an influence on it (so that we could prefer a less skilled but modest courtier to fill the role to a clever but ambitious one).

Thirdly, removing a governor should have an influence (mostly negative ; but if the governor is, e.g., a cruel inept, why not ? , that could even be positive) on that region's stability and productivity.

And, of course, the whole "governor" thing should be possible only by approving a certain law (a "Royal Administration" law, like the "Crown Investiture" law, but for governors), which would greatly upset our "regular", feudal, old-fashioned vassals.

Concerning the names :

Vice-roy --> Secondary Kingdom level
Governor --> Duchy level
Lord Lieutenant --> County (and barony) level.
 
Last edited:
Xain, that fleshes out some details in a good way. I was thinking mostly in terms of viceroys, less in terms of giving appointed positions further down the hierarchy, but I could see this involving say, a marquis appointed over a border region at the king's pleasure. And what to do with recently conquered territory, especially a lot of it in a short period of time, when you don't exactly want to invest feudalism lock, stock, and barrel but have more direct authority over that little chunk of North Africa that now owes you annual tribute. It should cause the need for some new laws, for sure, a new way of looking at things.

So say you are king of Scotland, Ireland, and Portugal. Now you can reasonably be expected to attend to duties in Scotland (your main title) and keep your vassals in Ireland happy without too much difficulty, but you can send your brother or uncle or heir to live in Lisbon, as a representative of royal power there, to oversee the meetings of the estates, to act quickly to smooth things over when there is a crisis. There should be a rather stiff tax penalty for starters and like in Rome you need to watch his popularity (both too high and too low) but overall you should expect that he will be loyal, both for being of the same dynasty and because of the great prestige such a position represented--although if things get bad enough and there is a succession crisis at home, then maybe the viceroy could claim the throne for himself as a pragmatic move by the estates. It could also be the kind of position that is not de facto heritable but traditionally belongs to a certain family within your realm. If something like this does not appear in the vanilla game, it is something I would be interested in modding in, so thank you for your helpful comments.
 
The vice-roy's territory should be inheritly destalised though. Events should pop-up on occassion from dissatisfied vassals who are appealing against the vice-roy. The choice should be annoying the vassal or straining relations between you and your vice-roy.
 
Emperor Basil said:
The vice-roy's territory should be inheritly destalised though. Events should pop-up on occassion from dissatisfied vassals who are appealing against the vice-roy. The choice should be annoying the vassal or straining relations between you and your vice-roy.
Click to expand...

I don't think that it should be an inherently antagonistic relationship. Just like being monarch, it should involve balancing the different forces in the viceroyalty and not changing too many laws or raising too many taxes or troop levies. So imagine if you are left in charge of England while the king has been crowned in France and now rules from Paris. Yeah there could be a lot of complaints, but I think that it could go either way. The danger if you are the king in such a situation is for your viceroy to get too popular, by marrying the daughter of a local duke, keeping taxes low, etc. He could then imagine declaring independence. On the other hand, he could be overthrown, and your vassals there could either call for a new viceroy to be sent, declare one of their dukes viceroy, or declare independence outright. I guess we'll see how this idea might work once the game is released.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Top Bottom
Back