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PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   2320 thread views

Friday Fun Thread for June 6, 2025

Be advised: this thread is not for serious in-depth discussion of weighty topics (we have a link for that), this thread is not for anything Culture War related. This thread is for Fun. You got jokes? Share 'em. You got silly questions? Ask 'em.

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every time the King of Castille dies there's a civil war for succession in this period.

It's kind of crazy how unstable the house of Trastamara was compared to the Jimenez and Ivrea dynasties. The previous dynasties had plenty of minor succession struggles and an unfortunate tendency to keep breaking apart and reuniting the kingdoms, but rarely anything that broke down the kingdom's ability to resist external threats. My theory is that Reconquista/Crusader kingdoms generally had far more flexible customs of succession (note how much more often you had queens ruling in Iberia/Jerusalem than in the older Western kingdoms) - a necessary adaptation to frontier rule, where you needed a monarch to fight off Muslim threats, but one that became very troublesome once you either ~finished the Reconquista and no longer had that threat compelling unity, or when things started to go badly in the frontier struggle as they did for Jerusalem.

I think it's because Henry II (the first Trastamara) was technically a bastard. Makes it pretty hard to uphold the divine right of kings when you usurped the throne from your half-brother.

From my limited reading on the Wars of the Roses, this was also a factor there - Henry IV's usurpation of the throne meant that all the various cadet branches of the Plantagenets felt they had some kind of a claim.

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