Free The Dictator's Handbook by Bruce Bueno de Mesquita Page A

there is still the issue of fending off competitors for the dead leader’s job. Ambitious challengers still need to grab control of the state apparatus, reward supporters, and eliminate rivals. To resolve this issue, the Ottomans, who ruled what is today’s Turkey from 1299 until 1923, eventually instituted the law of fratricide. 5
    When the sultan died, the succession depended upon who could capture control of the state and reward his coalition. In practice this meant grabbing the treasury and paying off the army. Succession became a battle of survival of the fittest to see which son would become the next sultan. Each of the sultan’s sons governed a province of his own. When the sultan died, the sons raced back to the capital, Constantinople, in an attempt to seize the treasury and pay the army for its loyalty. The result could often be civil war, as rival brothers each used their provincial forces to achieve sole, total control of the state. The sultan could have already shown favor to one son over others simply by giving him a province to govern that was closer to the capital, thereby favoring that son even from the grave.
    Ottoman succession could be bloody. Unsuccessful brothers were typically killed. Mehmet II (1429–1481) institutionalized this practice with the fratricide law, under which all unsuccessful male heirs were strangled with a silk cord. A century later, Mehmet III allegedly killed nineteen brothers, two sons, and fifteen slaves who were pregnant by his own father, thereby eliminating all present and future potential rivals. By the middle of the seventeenth century this practice was replaced by the kinder, gentler practice of locking all male relatives in the Fourth Court of the Topkapi Palace—quite literally the original Golden Cage. With relatives like this, it is perhaps no wonder why Shakespeare’s Hamlet or Robert Graves’s Claudius chose to feign madness.
    The general dilemma of succession is hardly unique to the Ottomans. England’s King Richard the Lionheart died in 1199. Since
Richard had no direct heirs, at least three people had a strong claim to the English throne following his death. Richard’s father was the previous king, Henry II, meaning that succession could be claimed by Henry II’s wife, Eleanor of Aquitaine, then nearing eighty years old; by Henry’s eldest surviving son, John; or by Henry’s eldest—but deceased—son Geoffrey’s eldest surviving male child (himself but eleven years old), Arthur.
    Eleanor was too pragmatic to put herself at risk for the crown, especially given her advanced years. She understood the likely consequences for her if she pushed her claim. Being the loving mother and grandmother that she surely must have been, she stepped aside, leaving John and Arthur to fight it out. Or, more precisely, she looked at who was likely to win and threw her support in that direction, allowing herself to change directions as the winds of fortune switched from time to time.
    Would-be autocrats must be prepared to kill all comers—even members of the immediate family. The Ottomans formalized this while the English merely relied on the tradition of doing in their rivals. Murder seems to be a favored solution under the extreme conditions of fear and insecurity that accompany monarchic and autocratic successions. What did John do? Even after assuming the crown he continued to fear Arthur’s quest for power, a quest that grew more intense as the boy aged into his teenage years. Finally, in 1203, John had Arthur taken prisoner and murdered. Some rumors suggested that he killed his nephew personally. With Arthur out of the way, no one stood as a further threat to John’s crown—not until the nobles rose up against him, promulgating Magna Carta, twelve years later.
    Inheritance holds a number of advantages for leaders and their supporters alike. Paying off the right people is the essence of good