Who decided the Monarchy for countries, like the certain family that are royals and when did it happen?
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So say you have a group of 100 people. The goal of those people is to go out and gather baseballs. At first, everyone’s just scrambling around looking for baseballs. At the end of the day, you can trade in your baseballs for a meal, but the meal becomes better and larger based on how many balls you can trade. Some people are just better at collecting baseballs early on, whether that’s a result of luck or talent, and these people can offer some of their good food to people that didn’t get any balls, on the condition that the person works with the provider to gather balls for a share of the final meal. Over time, teams widen to get more balls and eat better food, just shared between the group. People begin to realize that not all of the people need to be running around collecting baseballs. Some might be good at organizing who goes where to maximize the efficiency of the team, some might have Golden tongues and can mediate conversations with other teams to form alliances. Eventually, the groups naturally become larger and larger, and less and less people have to physically go out and collect balls, while more people can perform other duties like organizing the teams (military leadership) and forming new alliances (political leadership). You obviously also need one leader or a group to divide up the food fairly. The leader that attracted the best team of military and political leaders will also naturally draw the most people under their support, because they get better food than the smaller alliances. Over time, a central authority emerges that coordinates a positive relationship with military leaders (knights) and political leaders (vassals). The people support that person as long as they keep getting fed and know that they have a superior military to defend their livelihoods. The first monarch in a dynasty almost always is a very successful military and political leader that can work in both spheres to create the largest “government” while securing the welfare of the working class.
Edit: added missing sentence
They almost always started with a warlord naming himself king after conquering a region and in turn his friends and relatives would be the new class of nobles. And his most powerful/influential descendants would be the head of the monarchy.
Usually, there was a war at some point and the victor declared themselves the monarch over everything afterwards and their friends around them agreed because they would get wealthy from it. They then decided how the monarchy should be passed down when a monarch dies and over time you usually end up with a royal family from this because the monarchy was most often passed down to their children. For smaller places, a larger ruler (eg. emperor over a king/prince) could give out pieces of land as a reward for something instead of there being a war. The big exception would be the Holy See (Vatican City) where the pope is elected monarch instead of the monarchy passing through a family.
In most cases there was a war where people slaughtered each other and the victor declared himself king. Then he collected spoil and demanded tribute. The rich got richer and the poor got poorer.
The essence of a monarchy is that the ones who *can* decide to make it a monarchy are the only ones who *do* decide to make it a monarchy.
You’re probably used to thinking of government as something decided by the entire population of a country. Picture instead having a much smaller group of people who have a monopoly on military power and using it to establish the government they prefer.
The military control then means economic control- it’s useful to note that the word “Lord” ultimately derives from an Old English word for “Loaf”, as in loaf of bread. The guy who could make sure that bread wound up on the table was in charge. Anybody messes with the bread distribution system? Chop chop.
Fighting. Wars. If you have a bigger group of men ready to fight for you (and the rewards that you give them make them feel that they have all they need to be happy) and your men kill all the men in the place you are in, the leader of the winning group can say to everyone he is the leader, the king, and all his men will agree and support and fight for him. No one is left or willing to say he is not the leader.
That leader might have children, and all the children of the fighting men still agree that the leader’s child will be leader in his dad’s place. That happens with all the children as time goes by.
Better to r/askhistorians.
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