Keeping it in the Family: Marriage, Inheritance, and Brotherly Love in Crusader Kings III

[Torngasuk]

verisimilitude
the quality of seeming true or of having the appearance of being real

Before we begin, I'd like to take a moment to explain my general design philosophy. Despite what it may sometimes seem, my goal is not, strictly speaking, to bring more historical accuracy to the game for its own sake: such fidelity would often be a happy byproduct of what I advocate, but it's not the end goal in and of itself. My grand design is to find ways to enrich the Crusader Kings gameplay experience and to bring a greater level of verisimilitude to the series by taking inspiration for new mechanics and events from historical research and studies. The mechanisms of the medieval period are, after all, what created the sandbox in which we play: any questions that we may have, they very likely hold the answers to.

Keeping it in the Family: Marriage, Inheritance, and Brotherly Love in Crusader Kings III

Ah, family. Can’t live with them, can’t live without them, except when you arrange the intervention of an anonymous archer on a grassy knoll. One of most integral elements of Crusader Kings II: the very foundation of our experience, you might say. The key ingredient of a winning formula that elevates us far above and beyond mere map-painting, Crusader Kings players being a species, after all, that derives more joy from finding elaborate means by which to marry your own sister than in imperial expansion. Last time, we examined the nature of plural homage and its potential implementation in Crusader Kings III. Given the paramount significance of family to the game, and the endless hours of entertainment it has provided us, today I’d like to address a few ways in which we might improve the overall familial experience in Crusader Kings III.

Alright, I admit it, more than a few. Brevity was never my strong suit.

The Son of His Father

When the eldest son of the lord, heir-presumptive to the fief, reached the age when he was made knight, he demanded a certain part of the domain and the seigniorial revenues, as he needed money for his pleasures, his friends, or for his appearance in tournaments. Sometimes he even demanded a formal partnership in the seigniorial power and the right to use the seal of the seigniory to legalize his acts: that is, his participation in the sovereignty as co-seignior and co-proprietor while awaiting the whole inheritance. There were fathers who consented to advance the inheritance, who benevolently gave the young cavalier domains, and even associated him with themselves in the government of the seigniory; others gave him money or land, but kept their seigniorial rights intact; still others objected to increasing their incomes at all and gave nothing. In that case the son, egged on by evil counselors, made open war on the father, and the whole fief was disturbed for several years. In this way is explained the long quarrel between the two lords of Beaujolais - Humbert III, the father, and Humbert IV, the son - at the end of the reign of Louis VII and at the beginning of that of Philip Augustus. We do not know the details of this family war; we only know from the arbitral act of the archbishop of Lyons, which terminated it in 1184, how great was the desolation in the country of Beaujolais and Lyonnais.

In this, we find a new archetype that is surprisingly seldom encountered in Crusader Kings II: the rebellious, wayward son. They were not uncommon in the middle ages: Henry II’s sons famously made war against him, and the future Louis XI rebelled (the Praguerie of 1440) and schemed against his father with the aid of several powerful magnates, for father and son were of profoundly opposite characters. Robert Curthose’s relationship with his father, William the Conqueror, was similarly turbulent. His ambition inflamed by marriage to a royal princess, the future Baldwin V of Flanders rebelled against his father.

In a reversal of the stereotype, out of jealously of his son, incited by his second wife, John II of Aragon seized his first wife’s kingdom of Navarre at the expense of their son and her heir, the prince Charles of Viana. Alfonso the Brave, king of Portugal, had his son’s mistress beheaded, leading the future Pedro the Just to raise his banners against his father. The Infante Don Sancho (IV) revolted against his father, Alfonso X of Castile, backed by by the rulers of Portugal and Aragon. You get the idea.

We’ve all done it at one point or another, perhaps even constantly: kept our heir, and probably the spare, at home in our court for decades, absent any titles or responsibility, so that we can ensure a smooth, untroubled succession. With this, that strategy would no longer be quite without risk: your son may seek support among your rivals or turbulent vassals to seize a portion of his inheritance by force, or scheme to install himself in a permanent position on your council and assume a portion of responsibility in governing the realm, or even perhaps the regency, if you are very old. Various forms of potential military conflict which do not necessarily result in losing your throne if you're defeated, but would definitely deal a heavy blow to your prestige. Your own son may become your greatest nemesis.

And this need not be limited to sons, either: brothers are equally applicable. The younger brother led astray by his evil councilors is a figure commonly encountered in medieval chronicles, a jealous sibling who repays his older brother's mercy and forgiveness with further scheming and rebellion. Murdering your brother is the sort of thing people tended to frown upon, but you couldn't be expected to keep him growing moldy around the house, either. This would add another inducement to either land your younger sons and brothers or see them set up as men of the cloth: their dissatisfaction would carrying the risk of manifesting itself in a more material, martial form than simply endless scheming and plotting.

Marriages Spiritual and Temporal

In Crusader Kings II, the AI has been known to make some marital decisions that might be deemed unconventional, at best. Factors like the bride-to-be being hunchbacked, harelipped, possessed, or a drooling imbecile are often overlooked in the name of a prestigious alliance. A king in need of a wife, with no suitable women of age available, may take for himself a lowborn bride, grossly deformed, with no ancestors to speak of and bringing no alliance to the match. From both a historical and logical point of view, this is somewhat unlikely, to say the very least, and tends to result in certain traits cropping up among the great magnates of the realm with alarming frequency. Fortunately, history offers us a convenient means by which to resolve at least part of this dilemma.

An age-old and enduring tradition sees convents as dumping grounds for girls who were ugly, sickly, or otherwise unsuited for marriage. This tradition was very much alive in fifteenth-century Italy, among clergy and laity alike. "The man who has a misshapen or mutilated daughter gives her to Christ," the Florentine layman Franco Sacchetti commented sardonically, and he was echoed from the pulpit by the great Franciscan preacher Bernardino of Siena, who chastised his audience for this practice: "I have heard that if you have [a daughter] who is blind or lame or crippled, you at once place her in God's service: you put her in a convent." But it was not just physical deformities that led to the forced enclosure of young women: economic pressures too could lead parents to place their daughters in convents. No respectable marriage could be contracted without a dowry, and dowries rose sharply and steadily throughout the late Middle Ages, leading patrician men like Dante Alighieri to long for the good old days when the birth of a daughter didn't stir fear in her father. A family cursed with too many daughters faced hardship or even ruin, and the financial interests of the lineage sometimes dictated that one or more of the girls enter a nunnery as brides of Christ (who, oddly, commanded a far smaller dowry than a mortal husband.

Sometimes the pleasing and happy memory comes to me of your promise to avoid the genius of certain worldly men, who evidently caring for nothing other than this temporal life alone, and once they have, so to speak, a house full of sons and daughters, if one of them is missing a leg or an arm, or is deaf or blind, hunchbacked or leprous, or anything of this kind that makes him in some way less acceptable to the world, they offered this one to God with the exceedingly urgent will that he become a monk, although clearly not for God, but only to save themselves the trouble of education and feeding those children, or in order to favor their other children - not to mention those who are not lacking in bodily health or integrity of limbs, but who are half-men or half-alive, as we know by experience that this happens very often.

As the above examples indicate, the medieval nobility were disinclined to entrust the future of their dynasties to the likes of Charles the Bewitched, the 17th century Habsburg emperor best described as "short, lame, epileptic, senile and completely bald before 35, always on the verge of death but repeatedly baffling Christendom by continuing to live.”

Now, I wouldn’t say that anyone and everyone with a negative genetic trait should be banished to a monastery, because you do get the occasional Berenguer Ramon the Crooked or Inge the Hunchback (and this may very prove to be an interesting point of tension over inheritance), but I would propose events firing that see an above-average chance of children with substantial negative genetic traits being offered to the Church, with the chance increasing for those with multiple such traits or obvious imbeciles, and those same traits carrying hefty negative modifiers when it comes to marital negotiations.

It’s one thing to crown a king who turns out to be quite mad later on, after all: it’s another thing entirely to enthrone someone who will obviously never be capable of governing. The only person who would benefit from that arrangement would be the regent: the very integrity of the realm itself would otherwise be imperiled by such a ruler.

The Medieval Marriage Market

Now, the first of the above quotes briefly touched upon a topic that I’d like to talk about in greater detail, something that is perhaps one of the most important aspects of the marriage bargaining process unexplored in CK2: the dowry.

In May 1372 the count had already chosen as his future daughter-in-law little Bonne de Berri, the fourth and youngest daughter of the elegant Duke Jean of Berry, brother of the king of France. Whatever the child may have lacked in womanly charms was more than made up in a dowry of 100,000 gold francs and the explicit reservation of her rights as a future heiress or co-heiress to her father's vast possessions

Marriages among the elite involved the giving of dowry from the natal family and the husband's dowering of the bride to secure provision for her widowhood. Evergates's work on Champagne shows that these matters were being written into marriage contracts there from the late twelfth century, and with various qualifying provisions, thus a cash dowry of 6000 livres (of Provins) acquired by the Count of Rethel with his bride Jeanne in 1239 was to be refunded if he died childless, as happened 4 years later. This was a huge dowry by comparison with the 100 livres Evergates thought the typical expectation of a knight's daughter, or the 500 livres 'or more' of a baron's. In Gascony the daughter of the knight Alexander de la Pebree was given a 1000 livres tournois dowry in 1289, and the granddaughter of a doge of Venice had one of 3000 ducats in 1419. The dowry could be in cash or property - the cash value being estimated at ten times the annual revenue in mid-thirteenth-century Champagne.

Bavaria was the most powerful and flourishing of the German states, and the Wittelsbachs the wealthiest of the three families - the others being the Hapsburgs and the Luxemburgs - which at different times occupied the imperial throne. A Wittelsbach alliance was so desirable that Bernabo Visconti married no fewer than four of his children to scions of that house. Taddea, the second of these, bringing a dowry of 100,000 gold ducats, married Duke Stephen III of Bavaria, who, though he ruled jointly with two brothers, possessed every quality of the autocrat to excess. Reckless, prodigal, ostentatious, amorous, restless without a tournament or a war, he was well suited to a Visconti daughter, and when she died after twelve years of marriage, her sister Maddalena, with another dowry of 100,000 ducats, took her place.

As tools of alliance formation, dowries were negotiated according to the wealth and ambitions of the contracting families. The constable Archambaud VII of Bourbon gave the largest known dowry (36,000L) for his daughter Margaret's marriage to Thibaut IV, clearly an advantageous match for a lord of Bourbon.

Within Champagne the wealthiest families provided dowries in the range of 5,000L-6000L, yielding about 500L-600L annually, about twenty times the revenue of an average fief (26L) in the mid-thirteenth century. Margaret of Dampierre gave a 6000L dowry, payable in five annual installments, for her daughter Jeanne's marriage to Hugh III, count of Rethel; Hugh's brother and successor, Manasses, gave his own daughter Felicity 5,000L in marriage to the son of Jean III of Thourotte, vice-regent of Champagne. Gaucher III of Chatillon was able to give his sister Alix a dowry of 8000L by selling the lordship of Pierrefonds, which he had just acquired by collateral inheritance. Thibaut IV provided his three-year old daughter Blanche a dowry of 5,000L revenue and 3000 marks of silver for her projected marriage to the son of Odo II, county of Burgundy. This was about what Marie of Garlande, widowed countess of Grandpre, gave her daughter Alix in marriage to Jean of Joinville, son of the seneschal Simon of Joinville.

Unlike some other topics that I’ve covered, I’ve not yet come across a definitive point of reference or even single comprehensive quote on the subject of dowries among the medieval aristocracy, the bulk of studies focusing on its ramifications for the more modestly-endowed middle and lower classes, so I’m afraid I’ve had to flood you with a range of more restricted quotes to illustrate my point.

The concept of the dowry valued as a multiple of your annual income before expenses is a good one, in my opinion, as is the idea that the amount on offer should increase significantly if the bride is marrying into a higher-ranked and much more prestigious dynasty. If you’re going to make an extremely advantageous match with someone much more powerful than you, then you’re going to have to make up the difference in your comparative benefits from your treasury. And if you’re a ruler renowned for your wealth and overflowing coffers, then a very generous dowry indeed might be called for.

Conversely, I would offer a modest dowry discount if the marriage offer is coming from a ruler of a higher tier, and a further discount for those rulers of modest rank who hold high offices or status in their realm: a five-province count who is the marshal, master of the horse, and regent of his kingdom, and brother-in-law to another monarch, is closer in rank to a king than a humble one-province count with no other titles to his name, obviously.

With this system, arranging a marriage for your daughter is no longer so simple as ensuring that the potential husband or his father is amenable to the match: you also have to be able to afford it, especially if you’re trying to marry high above your status to climb the medieval social ladder, and if strapped for cash, decide which of your daughters will be the one to marry, which will have to wait years for a husband, and which will be consigned to a nunnery, which in fact still required a dowry, but one far smaller than a husband would demand.

This would add an extra layer of strategy to arranging marriages for the player’s daughters, and give them another substantial expense for their treasury, which is often full to the brim with little of interest to spend it on beyond mercenaries and buildings, and by that same token also offer a means of restoring the player’s financial health, if they choose to marry into a wealthy dynasty instead of marrying for claims.

The Black Widow

And, of course, if we’re talking about how marriages are negotiated and financed, we can’t very well leave aside the subject of what happens after they end. Let’s take it from the top: when was the last time you forgot that your mother existed? In reality, you might wish that you could, but you’re unlikely to misplace her entirely. In Crusader Kings II, this is a startlingly common occurrence, and in fact is the very phenomenon which inspired this project. As a ruler, your wife already offers little more than a stat boost, a convenient method by which to obtain sons or an alliance, and occasional event fodder. Once you die and assume the crown as your son, she all but ceases to exist as far as relevance to your life.

I would propose a solution to this interactive void that would further serve a distinctly useful purpose as it pertains to gameplay, not just for mothers, but for all those women widowed by war, disease, murder, or being kicked in the head by a horse or gored by a boar: a period of mourning. Have you ever had a son or courtier die and then proceed to immediately be bombarded with marriage offers for his widow? The AI pounces on unmarried women of age with all the predatory aspects of a cheetah running down a gazelle, especially landed ones.

Chances are, if a woman of noble lineage and in possession of vast tracts of land loses her husband, she’ll be married again before you even realize she was on the market, even if she would have fit perfectly into your marital-territorial ambitions. I would propose a one year period of mourning for noblewomen who lose their husbands, during which their future can be organized.

Canonists' discussions of the remarriage of widows during the period of mourning were not just academic speculations. Secular law in the thirteenth century continued to impose penalties and disabilities on widows who remarried within the prescribed year of mourning, as canonists were well aware. The laws of the Latin Kingdom of Jerusalem, for example, mandated a mourning period that must elapse before a widow (but not a widower) could remarry. Similar provisions appeared in civil laws elsewhere.

Henry III's death at twenty-five (22 July 1274) opened a new chapter in the county's history. Since his son Thibaut had died a year earlier in a tragic accident, his widow Blanche of Artois became regent for their one-year-old daughter Jeanne. Although maternal regencies were well known in Champagne - regent countesses had ruled for thirty-eight of the ninety-two years (41 percent) since Marie's first regency in 1181 - this was the first regency for an heiress.

In the event that the widow has a young child who has inherited the throne, then assuming that she is deemed capable, she would be a prime candidate to assume the regency, in which case she may not marry to avoid the appearance or possibility of her new husband ruling the realm through her, or quite the opposite, she may marry again to gain the support of a powerful vassal for her son or daughter.

If in possession of a more lustful and ambitious nature, then she may instead take a lover in place of a husband. If a regency is not required, then there are other options we may consider: a particularly pious woman may choose to take the vows and enter into a nunnery, particularly if she is at an advanced age. This was a popular choice for many noblewomen who found themselves in such circumstances.

If she is younger, and still of a child-bearing age, then remarriage is a distinct possibility. Anne of Kiev, mother of our own Philip I of 1066, remarried to Raoul IV of Valois. Adelaide of Maurienne married Matthew of Montmorency after the death of Louis VI. Adeliza of Louvain remarried to William d'Aubigny after Henry I's death. Isabella of Angouleme remarried to Hugh X of Lusignan. Isabella of Valois married Charles, Duke of Orleans after Richard II's death. The Empress Matilda, of course, married Geoffrey V, Count of Anjou, after the death of Henry V, Holy Roman Emperor. Maria of Brabant, empress to Otto IV, remarried to William I, Count of Holland. Constance of Aragon was first queen of Hungary, and then Holy Roman Empress.

And, of course, many queens, duchesses, and countesses were themselves already on their second or third marriage. Below the royal level, remarriage was quite common among the aristocracy for both men and women. And regardless of which course she chooses, or even if she should choose to retain her relative independence, the queen mother, or ducal mother, or whatever other title she may hold, may also take an interest in the raising of her grandchildren, and petition her children to permit her to assume responsibility for their education and upbringing. The major upside of all this is to better organize the remarriage of widows, especially as they pertain to the player, who would have a year's period in which to take note of an interesting marital opportunity before the woman in question is off the market again.

Everyone's Relative

Of enormous importance when discussing medieval marriage in general and dynastic marriage in particular is the concept of consanguinity. According to the doctrine of the Christian Church in this period, people could not marry who were related within a certain consanguineous degree, meaning that they shared too much blood to marry and produce children. The medieval period pre-1215 was an especially interesting time in the history of consanguinity legislation because during this era the church stretched consanguinity to seven degrees, an increase from the four that was common in the late Roman world, and the degrees were calculated in a new manner. Instead of siblings being related in two degrees, as was held previously, the new method of calculation made siblings related in the first degree. This may at first appear to be a small change, but in fact it was enormous. The original method, and the one returned to after the Fourth Lateran Council in 1215, was to count connections between people; thus, for siblings, one degree up to the shared parent, and one degree down to the sibling, for a total of two degrees. For first cousins, a more likely target for marriage than siblings, it was one degree up to your parent, another degree up to your grandparent, a degree down to your uncle/aunt, and a degree down to your cousin, resulting in a relationship of four degrees.

The new method of calculating consanguinity was based on degrees to a common ancestor, which resulted in a one-degree relationship for siblings (a common ancestor is one generation back) and two degrees for a cousin (a common ancestor is two generations back). When this concept was applied to seven generations of ancestor, it expanded the pool of consanguineous relations to anyone with whom one shared a great-great-great-great-great-grandparent. In the medieval world, in which dynastic marriages had occurred between the royal houses of many kingdoms at least once, this greatly limited potential mates. This is one of the reasons it is exceedingly rare to get multiple marriages between two royal houses in close temporal proximity to one another. The unwieldiness of this consanguinity policy is what eventually led to its downfall and reversal at the Fourth Lateran Council, not to mention that the royal families of Europe were all too related to intermarry by those rules

And now we come upon my white whale. Confused yet? Pretty much everyone else was at the time, too. Even the lawyers. I favor dynastic outmarriage, especially when certain dynasties may have acquired for themselves high titles and great fame, to the point where the most prestigious marriages available to them are with their own relatives, which serves only to encourage Habsburg-style inbreeding centuries before such a thing would even be considered permissible.

Obviously, the more extreme interpretation of consanguinity would be crippling and a major annoyance from a gameplay perspective, but I think we could settle for a comfortable middle ground of prohibiting marriages between any two Christian characters who share a common ancestor within two generations. So, in short, you could not marry your son to your brother’s daughter, for they would share grandparents, nor marry your sister to her uncle. By this method, it would also require longer term strategic planning to breed titles into your dynasty, requiring several further generations before, say, the descendants of your brother could be married back into your line, and would hopefully substantially reduce the rate of appearance of negative genetic traits obtained due to inbreeding.

Regents for Life

His uncle Sancho García, count of Castile, who had aspired to control the regency, took advantage of the minority to seize lands between the Cea and the Pisuerga rivers, thus laying the basis for a long controversy between León and Castile.

Louis IX, better known by the name of Saint Louis, was only eleven years of age when his father died; and the regency of the kingdom was contested betwixt his mother, queen Blanche, and his uncle Philip, the son of Philip Augustus and Agnes de Meranie, whose marriage the church had refused to sanction.

The testament dictated by Gaston II before leaving for his last campaign in Andalusia gives a measure of the trust and respect in which he held his wife: Alienor was to be regent and guardian of young Gaston until he was fourteen - his legal majority. Furthermore, she was to continue and administer his private property until he was twenty-one. It was an arrangement fraught with opportunities for disputes and endless lawsuits between the Countess Dowager and the young Count, but nothing of the sort ensued: Alienor managed not only to pay off the considerable debts incurred by her husband, but to acquire new seigniories. The accounts she rendered in 1351 to Gaston III were received without demur.

King Emeric died in September 1204. Shortly before, on 26 August, he had hsi three-year-old son, Ladislaus III, crowned king and appointed his brotehr, Duke Andrew, as regent. Andrew seems to have inherited the restless nature of Duke Almos, who was his great-great-grandfather. Although he had been given a large sm of money by Bela III for the purpose of leading a crusade to the Holy Land, he instead turned against his brother from whom he secured the cession of Croatia and Dalmatia. On two occasions he even revolted against Emeric in order to acquire the royal crown. As soon as he became regent, Andrew began to regard himself as king and counted his regnal years from Emeric's death. It is by no means surprising, therefore, that Emeric's widow, Constance of Aragon, felt insecure and fled with her son to Austria. The child king died on 7 May 1205. After he had been buried at Szekesfehervar, Andrew had himself crowned king on 29 May.

Roger I, great count of Calabria and Sicily, died at Mileto in Calabria on 22 June 1101, and the county was left to his two sons, Simon and Roger, under teh regency of his wife Adelasia (Adelaide). The elder son Simon first succeeded his father at the age of eight or nine, but died on 28 September 1105. Then, his brother Roger II took over the position at the age of nine or ten. The regency of Adelasia continued until 1113, when she left Sicily for Jerusalem.

We’ve briefly brushed the edges of the topic of inheritance as we touched on its peripheral aspects, but now I'd like to take the time to review one of its more significant considerations that I consider worthy of discussion: the regency. Far from their current status, I would elevate the regent of a realm to something well above merely a minor title with a handful of associated events: a regent should be able to hire and fire councilors, to appoint his own partisans to high offices, to reward his relatives with wealth and patronage and advantageous marriages, to rule the realm in all but name.

Mothers and uncles should be the primary and default candidates to assume the regency, followed by other near relatives, unless none are available, powerful vassals being unlikely to have the young king’s best interests at heart. Becoming the regent should grant you access to unparalleled power and influence, but also place you in the position of being judged once your underage liege comes of age.

A worthy regent may be showered with honor upon the child-king's assuming his majority, while a wicked one may be imprisoned and punished for his misdeeds. A powerful and ambitious regent may prolong the regency until the age of twenty-one, or further should the child suffer a convenient "accident," and be succeeded by one even younger. An incapable regent might see bandits and famine plaguing the land, and the realm's vassals running rampant and flagrantly disregarding royal authority. A regent might even rule as a outright tyrant: we need only look at the example of Isabella, She-Wolf of France and Roger Mortimer, who seized control of the realm as regents until they were overthrown by her son, the young Edward III.

This would, I admit, take something away from the gameplay experience of the player as a small child, or if you find yourself imprisoned, but on the other hand, that would seem to be eminently logical. Three-year old children have a relatively limited grasp of statecraft, and we’re a few centuries too early for your capos to smuggle a cellphone into your cell so you can run your empire from prison. A regency, generally speaking, means something has gone very wrong, and it would be interesting, I think, to offer players another form of potential setback to work they way back from.

Quality of Life and Death Improvements

From a retrospective point of view, causes of death in Crusader Kings II can be somewhat inscrutable, even at the best of times. Uncle Angus was killed in battle against one of his bannermen, but...why? If not too much of a strain on resources, I would contemplate including not just the name of the opposing general when someone has died in battle, but also the battle itself and the war to which it belonged. Thus, uncle Angus died in the Battle of Durham against Serlo II, Duke of York in the Third Anglo-Scottish War, etc. This would make it far easier to understand what has befallen one’s relatives, especially more distant ones, when you happen to notice that they’re no longer counted among the living, and whether or not they are in need of avenging.

Similarly, it would be of some convenience if the interface would show us not just our deceased wives, but also those whose marriages were dissolved or found themselves abducted as concubines of some mighty-thewed viking conqueror, perhaps with a broken ring to indicate the termination of the most holy union. In this way, we could still see the mothers of our children without having first to descend to the son’s profile and then ascend to the mother’s to check on her status.

Should I find that one of my relatives has been imprisoned and is being held for ransom, and I am fond of him, even if he is outside of my immediate feudal pyramid and not a member of my court, I should like the opportunity to purchase his freedom. The same would apply in reverse: if I am in dire traits, cast into the oubliette, and lack the funds to obtain my own liberation, then it would be most welcome if one of my loving relatives made the arrangements on my behalf, out of nothing more than familial affection, and of course in return for a favor and a pledge of my armies in their own time of need.

 

[Human666]

These are good suggestions. I think imbeciles should also have permenant regencies.

 

[Andrzej I]

Once again, an absolutely brilliant work. I hope the dev team can take some inspiration from the post and implement some of these flavorful proposals.

This would add another inducement to either land your younger sons and brothers

I'll admit here, though, I've never been fond of the 'unlanded sons' penalty that primogeniture and all bring, especially when your sons outnumber the number of titles you hold! I know some mods have added a modifier 'estates' to the system (with a malus to tax income for the liege, I think it was), allowing you to 'land' your son without giving away an entire barony or county, and I hope this might be implemented in CK3 so that mere modest counts can 'land' their children without having to give away all of their titles (or their only title, as the case may be!).

The major upside of all this is to better organize the remarriage of widows, especially as they pertain to the player, who would have a year's period in which to take note of an interesting marital opportunity before the woman in question is off the market again.

I think we could settle for a comfortable middle ground of prohibiting marriages between any two Christian characters who share a common ancestor within two generations. So, in short, you could not marry your son to your brother’s daughter, for they would share grandparents, nor marry your sister to her uncle.

But sir! Consider your prior words!

Crusader Kings players being a species, after all, that derives more joy from finding elaborate means by which to marry your own sister than in imperial expansion.

Would you deny these pitiable creatures their modest delights?

Jokes aside, I'd lean away from strict prohibition and instead allow one to break the rules (be it the one-year mourning or consanguinity) at penalty instead. Probably a significant piety malus, perhaps waived if one is able to come to agreements with one's religious head (as the Pope was occasionally known to turn a blind eye to things). For AI, perhaps more lustful or ambitious characters would be inclined to skirt the rules as well (more for the topic of widows than of consanguinity).

 

[Ten_Tacles]

Regents being an actual danger to the realm would be very fun, from an outside perspective.
Perhaps, to make this palpable to the player, give them a big warning "Possible Regency on Inheritance!", or the ability to switch to a different landed family member permanently/during the regency, or possibly even the regent themself.

 

[vandevere]

Jokes aside, I'd lean away from strict prohibition and instead allow one to break the rules (be it the one-year mourning or consanguinity) at penalty instead. Probably a significant piety malus, perhaps waived if one is able to come to agreements with one's religious head (as the Pope was occasionally known to turn a blind eye to things). For AI, perhaps more lustful or ambitious characters would be inclined to skirt the rules as well (more for the topic of widows than of consanguinity).

Consanguinity can, however, bite you in the butt. what I would like is a warning, if I am marrying one of my sons off to a woman who is in the "Forbidden Degrees of Consanguinity". It was apparently a thing in that Popes were constantly being asked to allow specific marriages within those forbidden degrees.

It could be made a Game Rule, so those who like to live dangerously can continue to do so, while leaving those of us who don't free to be cautious...

 

[Andrzej I]

Consanguinity can, however, bite you in the butt. what I would like is a warning, if I am marrying one of my sons off to a woman who is in the "Forbidden Degrees of Consanguinity". It was apparently a thing in that Popes were constantly being asked to allow specific marriages within those forbidden degrees.

It could be made a Game Rule, so those who like to live dangerously can continue to do so, while leaving those of us who don't free to be cautious...

I don't see why not to include that in general - some manner of "are you sure?" pop-up before applying penalties. All I mean to argue against is any hard banning of the very option to marry within forbidden degrees.

 

[Torngasuk]

Once again, an absolutely brilliant work. I hope the dev team can take some inspiration from the post and implement some of these flavorful proposals.

Thank you - I'm glad you liked it. I have every intention of continuing: I have rough sketches of about a dozen more topics in the works. Feudal misbehavior (incest included!) and its consequences are next on the menu.

I'll admit here, though, I've never been fond of the 'unlanded sons' penalty that primogeniture and all bring, especially when your sons outnumber the number of titles you hold! I know some mods have added a modifier 'estates' to the system (with a malus to tax income for the liege, I think it was), allowing you to 'land' your son without giving away an entire barony or county, and I hope this might be implemented in CK3 so that mere modest counts can 'land' their children without having to give away all of their titles (or their only title, as the case may be!).

I had similar thoughts when I started out writing this one, and I definitely don't care for it as a general opinion modifier. The idea is primarily for cases where the player is obviously holding out on their sons, deliberately hoarding titles that they could be granting to their children (mainly the eldest son, who quite reasonably wants to establish a household of his own). Your son wouldn't object to your territorial penury, but he would take umbrage with you sitting on a nice county (subsidiary, of course - I am anything but an advocate for gavelkind) or barony that could be his. There are a few factors which would serve, I think, to help balance it out, as well. A slight reduction in overall fertility and average lifespan, both of which I've found to be slightly above what would be expected: shorter lives in particular so that you're not still generating sons on your fourth wife well into your seventies (an age-based gradual reduction in fertility would also help nicely here). Second, to touch briefly on one of those very topics I intend to cover in much greater detail in the near future, I'd genuinely like to see players and the AI sending more of their sons into a life in the Church (and more incentives to do so - but more on that in the future). And even if you are lacking in available holdings yourself, there are always heiresses available for marriage: one of a number of reasons I favor the mechanics of widowhood and consanguinity is making more heiresses readily available to the player.

And this one is more nebulous, I admit, but even with the elevation of baronies to provinces, I would endorse an increase in the number of counties on the map, because many seemingly modest counts in fact held a number of subsidiary titles of near-equal standing. To harp, for a moment, on a favorite subject of mine, it's only because of CK2's superabundance of dukes and duchies that we don't think of counts and earls as being the primary magnates of the realm. This was particularly prevalent in France, where a count may also possess numerous further holdings as a hereditary viscount: "comté de Foix el des vicomtes do Béarn, Marsan, Gabardan, Nebouzan et Lautrec," for example. Marsan and Bearn being preexisting provinces in CK2, of course, but not alone among the Pyrenean titulary (and this wasn't even their peak!). The more counties, the more titles to marry into, as well. I wasn't planning to go on quite this much on this subject when I started, but here we are, I suppose. I'm not opposed to the estate solution, I should probably make clear, but now that we have actual cadet dynasties being implemented in the game, I feel an urge to encourage their creation whenever possible.

Jokes aside, I'd lean away from strict prohibition and instead allow one to break the rules (be it the one-year mourning or consanguinity) at penalty instead. Probably a significant piety malus, perhaps waived if one is able to come to agreements with one's religious head (as the Pope was occasionally known to turn a blind eye to things). For AI, perhaps more lustful or ambitious characters would be inclined to skirt the rules as well (more for the topic of widows than of consanguinity).

This is one aspect that I'd gone back and forth on a bit: the mourning period I'm right there with you on, and could very easily see that brought to an early end by certain circumstances, with a piety and perhaps prestige penalty, as you mentioned. That one exists primarily for the player's convenience, so I'm more concerned with leashing the AI than I am in limiting the player's ability to violate the norms of widowhood. Consanguinity I'm of a mind to be slightly more restrictive with. You are right, as is @vandevere, that the Pope often granted special dispensation for marriages within the forbidden degrees of consanguinity. There is, however, an important addendum to this: Papal permission was sought for matches as distantly related as, let's say, marriage to the third cousin of your previous spouse. First cousin or avunculate marriages, which are all that I would be inclined to restrict, were much, much rarer.

Thus, I'm left with a dilemma. I could argue in favor of requiring papal dispensation for such a close match, in which case I'm advocating the implementation of a fairly widespread medieval phenomenon in the sole context in which it would almost never be used, which I'm philosophically disinclined to do. A game rule is another answer, but I try not base my arguments solely on their implementation: that's a solution that essentially doubles the amount of work on the part of the developers, and if I'm trying to convince them that a feature is worth including in the game, then I would rather not approach it from the angle that I have this idea, but I can't figure out how best it should be implemented, so we should do it two different ways. I don't want anyone to get the wrong idea - I love game rules, and have carefully adjusted them to provide a highly personalized experience in CK2, and would be personally fine with having consanguinity permitted or disallowed as such - but I feel it's best not to rely on them as a foundation for major features in the sequel. At the very least, if I'm to go all in with something, I'd like it to be the best possible implementation that I can conceive, the option which offers the most interesting and compelling gameplay experience.

I could get onboard with being able to break the limitations of cousin-cousin/uncle-niece consanguinity for a penalty, if we proceed on the assumption that any more distant relations have automatically sought and acquired the requisite dispensation, provided that the penalties are sufficiently harsh that the AI will look upon such a match with great distaste, and almost never initiate them itself. The promotion of dynastic outmarriage and interesting inheritance strategy and patterns are my ultimate goals with this, and I'll generally count myself satisfied as long as we'd be able to establish the rules of consanguinity as a norm not easily circumvented.

 

[Andrzej I]

The idea is primarily for cases where the player is obviously holding out on their sons, deliberately hoarding titles that they could be granting to their children (mainly the eldest son, who quite reasonably wants to establish a household of his own).

Oh trust me, I definitely want the proposal you've made to be implemented! Sons, especially ambitious sons, ought to gather people to their cause. I'm just not fond of having to hand out counties or baronies to sons, especially when you're not even of a kingly rank. I find it unfortunate to have to face the dilemma between unlanding another house or keeping my son unlanded, something that was not likely a dilemma in the time - instead, they'd likely partition out land, I imagine, to something perhaps sub-baronial. Mind, I speak in instances when one does not have a plethora of holdings to disperse, as if one has more than a couple holdings, having a nudge to part with them is not too unreasonable.

And this one is more nebulous, I admit, but even with the elevation of baronies to provinces, I would endorse an increase in the number of counties on the map, because many seemingly modest counts in fact held a number of subsidiary titles of near-equal standing.

Well, in total, I'm unsure how the number of holdings changed. I do know that, as you said, baronies will now be displayed on map. I'm unsure if that means much for the amount of territory able to be handed out, however, which ties into my remark above. Having the option for some representation of sub-baronial lands ("estates") would help alleviate the problem.

There is, however, an important addendum to this: Papal permission was sought for matches as distantly related as, let's say, marriage to the third cousin of your previous spouse. First cousin or avunculate marriages, which are all that I would be inclined to restrict, were much, much rarer.

All very true points! Still, if I want to play Jean V d'Armagnac, why will you deny me so?

 

[Torngasuk]

All very true points! Still, if I want to play Jean V d'Armagnac, why will you deny me so?

I would never dream of such thing! The very man himself will be featured prominently next time, this I assure you. Incest is, after all, relative. The propensity for unlanding existing dynasties, too, which is another important point that you've reminded me of.

 

[Dreadlord]

I especially loved your pitch about regencies and all around great suggestions. I hope devs will include the ideas that will fit in with their general game play design.