Wouldn't a lot depend on what they could be capricious or accumulate wealth?

To wit:

If, on most planets, the Charter they have with the Imperium that establishes rights and responsibilities and who governs what, puts most things not related to interstellar trade, defence, and permissions for recruiting for the Imperial forces, as well as some quarantine aspects, the worse nature of nobles would fall in those areas (rake off from trade, from defence operations/procurements, from recruiting drives, and such like.

Any corruption in other aspects of economy or regular life would then fall to local governments.

That being said, if this was the case, the group I shall call "small trade Imperium" would perhaps find it hard to justify the number and layers of nobility some books have attributed to a sector. In many places, there would not be enough trade to pay for all that oversight.

If you were following "big trade Imperium", then the rake off could be quite substantial and fund a lot of oversight (a lot of tiers of nobility).

As a pro-trade entity (I believe), the Imperium would want to encourage trade and rake offs would have to be modest to not deter trade or encourage black markets. That said, the only way you can justify (I think) nobles who only deal in a limited range of areas mostly off-planet driven would be to have a high trade volume (or perhaps a lower volume of ludicrously expensive stuff).

Now, where does the Noble have his estate? Are lands set aside as part of Charters to create these estates on the planet even though the work being overseen is mostly downport/highport/between systems?

Or do we imagine that on many worlds, the Charters allow various other on-planet governance tasks (beyond the seemingly trivial aspect of embassy/consul)?

---

In real history and in fantasy systems like Harn, you see the King having some estates personally, many of which are managed by a Sherrif or Castellan or Seneshal type of individual, and the same pattern happens in as you move down the list of noble levels. Maybe 20% or 30% of the total number of fiefs could be directly or indirectly tied to the king, and another 20-30% to the Dukes and Counts directly or by vassals. When you get to the lowest level, fiefs for knights, most would be small and the knight might only hold one. If he held more, he might get a different title.

In Traveller, a Knight or Baron might represent a planet. A Marquis might cover a great planet or several smaller ones. A Count could be responsible for a subsector, a Duke for a sector, and the Archduke for a domain, but from the top down, there is overlap. Domain covers sectors, sectors cover subsectors, etc. But that overlap is in overall responsibility, whereas on the ground, the Sector Duke may well not do any particular things with any subsectors or planets. He works at a higher level. he has vassals who owe him fealty and a rake off at every level through the sector.

There's no mention of sherrifs or the like in Traveller (that I recall): Equivalent-ish to a Knight, but really just being an estate manager for a fief in the name of a higher level noble. Barons, Marquis, Counts, Dukes, and the Archduke could have Sherrifs. That's how real world medieval stuff worked in many places.

So you might visit a fief belonging to Duke Dinglethorpe and find the Fief was being run by Sherrif Laws on behalf of the Duke.

I have no idea if there is that sort of servitor in the Imperium. But it makes some sense.

But in the real world, dividing up a land mass into direct and indirect holdings of a noble heirarchy meant all the land (more or less) was owned by someone. In the Imperium, that's not as obvious if all they get is a swatch of land to plunk a few fiefs on because the locals perform all local functions of governance that don't touch the spaceports.

TomB

On Tue, Jun 2, 2020 at 10:18 PM Phil Pugliese - philpugliese at yahoo.com (via tml list) <xxxxxx@simplelists.com> wrote:

There still is the matter of the Imperial Charter for that world.
It is so paramount that there are actually worlds in the Imp part of the SolRim that have elected Solomani Party members to govern them!
If the new nobles receive an actual fief then they will rule that but it won't be granted by summary aggrandizement.
It'll look more like a vast estate in which the definition of 'vast' is very subjective.
There is also the issue of the position of the subsector & sector governments.
The nobility won't last long if they behave like capricious autocrats & neither would the 3I.

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On Tuesday, June 2, 2020, 05:36:50 PM MST, David Johnson <xxxxxx@zarthani.net> wrote:

James Catchpole <xxxxxx@simplelists.com> wrote:

> Secondly, the relationship between the Imperial nobility and the member worlds has always appeared a little hazy to me, but one thing that was repeated over and over was that the TI almost never interfered with individual member worlds, who got to govern themselves as they wished.

Have to admit to similar haziness here.

So what about all those marquises and barons "ruling" (portions of) individual worlds?

If I'm the popularly-elected leader of a high-pop world and the subsector duchess--or her uncle, the Imperial Warrant-brandishing archduke--decides to enfeoff a new marquis for my planet, do I now take direction from the marquis?

Was I supposed to be taking direction from the local count already?

Why is that duchess in charge of my planet anyway? Nobody here voted for her!

And why are there Imperial dreadnoughts in orbit? And where did these Imperial Marines come from? Hey. . . .

Cheers,

David
--
"For initial naming, a Social Standing of 11 allows the use of Sir, denoting hereditary knighthood; a Social Standing of 12 allows use of Baron, or prefixing von to the character’s surname." - ~Book 1: Characters and Combat~

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