prince
Article
prince is a recurring person in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 3 times across 3 issues between May 24, 2021 and September 02, 2022. The archive places it in contexts such as “The sage was put in prison for attempting to assassinate the prince”; “It wasn’t that Serbia assassinated the Prince and German diplomats decided”; “my brother the Prince lets me use this spare palace”. It most often appears alongside China, Middle East, 1793.
Metadata
- Category: People
- Mention count: 3
- Issue count: 3
- First seen: May 24, 2021
- Last seen: September 02, 2022
Appears In
Related Pages
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- China (2 shared issues)
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- Middle East (2 shared issues)
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- 1793 (1 shared issues)
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- 1821 (1 shared issues)
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- 1847 (1 shared issues)
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- 1928 Kellogg-Briand Peace Pact (1 shared issues)
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- 500 million and not one more (1 shared issues)
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- A Manifesto of the Lord Protector of the Commonwealth (1 shared issues)
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- Abbasid Caliphate (1 shared issues)
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- Addendum 4: De-colonization (1 shared issues)
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- Addendum 5: Present (1 shared issues)
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- Afghanistan (1 shared issues)
External Links
Source Context
Recovered passages from the original issue text. When the raw archive preserved outbound links inside the source passage, they are listed directly under the quote.
Scheherazade's stories are set in an idealized Middle East. The sultans are always wise and just, the princes are always strong and handsome, and almost a full half of viziers are non-evil. Named characters are always so beautiful and skilled and virtuous that it sometimes gets used it as a plot device - a character is separated from his family member or lover, so he wanders into a caravanserai and asks for news of someone who is excessively beautiful and skilled and virtuous. "Oh yes," says one of the merchants, "I talked to a traveler from Cairo who said he encountered the most beautiful and skilled and virtuous person he'd ever seen in a garden there, he couldn't shut up about them for days" - and now you know your long-lost brother must be in Cairo. In one case, a woman went searching for her long-lost son, tasted some pomegranate jam in Damascus, and immediately (and correctly!) concluded that only her son could make pomegranate jam that good. She demanded to know where the merchant had gotten the jam, and the trail led to a happy reunion.
It's actually worse than this, because the stories usually contain other stories. You'll be telling a story to the sultan, and the main character will encounter his sultan and start telling him a story, and the main character of that story will encounter her sultan and have to tell him a story, and so on. I think the worst offender is The Fisherman's Tale, where Scheherazade tells a story about a fisherman and a genie, in which the genie tells the fisherman a story about a king and a vizier, in which the vizier tells the king a story about a prince and an ogre, in which the prince tells the ogre a story about his past travels. The recursion does stop there, and we eventually get to hear the end of the fisherman/genie story (the genie, the fisherman, and the sultan to whom the fisherman tells his story end up saving a prince who was turned to stone after his wife cheated on him with a black man). But it's touch-and-go for a while, and you start to worry that one of these stories will have a branching factor > 1, and you'll just keep getting into deeper and deeper frame stories forever. Maybe this is how the Abbasid Caliphate fell.
Diversity: Including Greeks, Arabs, Persians, Indians, Moroccans (always sorcerers), suspiciously Arabic-seeming Chinese, and blacks. This last group is mostly found as slaves, which felt anachronistic until I looked it up and learned more about the massive slave trade between East Africa and the medieval Middle East. In one story, when a prince is declaring his love to a princess, he says "I am your slave, your black slave", as a hyperbolic declaration of servitude. Of course, the author is very concerned about the excessive masculinity of black slaves, especially the fact that your wife is probably cheating on you with one. When one adulterer is late to a meeting with her slave beau, he swears "an oath by the valor and honor of blackamoor men (and don't think that our manliness is like the poor manliness of white men)" to ignore her from then on unless she is more timely. I have no idea how much of this is filtered through the layers of translators, or what he meant by "white men" in that sentence. Elsewhere in diversity: Jews are usually doctors or merchants, but everyone's a merchant so this isn't so remarkable. The one time a Christian appears in the stories I read, he's a drunkard - which wasn't the stereotype I was expecting, but which I guess makes sense under the circumstances.
Well, let me ask you a question. Why didn't the death of Princess Diana in France because of a car chase with a paparazzo cause Italy to go to war with Canada?
If you find that question confusing, you might, with a little poking at it, start to also wonder why the death of an Austro-Hungarian Prince, in Serbia, at the hands of an anarchist, caused Germany and the US to battle each other in World War I, and when Germany lost, for the allies to humble and punish Germany above all. And that question can lead back to the question of what changed, between World War I, and now, and that, according to H&S, leads right back to the Pact, and the history of the outlawry movement.
Within our modern framework, none of this makes sense. It wasn’t that Serbia assassinated the Prince and German diplomats decided this was a good excuse to conquer Europe, while everyone else reacted with horror that they could think such a thing. It was a good excuse to conquer Europe, but leaders of countries in Europe took many things to be good excuses to conquer Europe, and Europe generally went along with that, because the rules were fair. It was just a natural chain reaction to the fact that countries used war as a tool of diplomacy. Within the old frame, we can see that the Allies treated Germany not as a villain, but as a defeated foe, and before the Pact, when you defeated your foe in war, you made them pay tribute in territory, concessions, and money.
“Actually,” said the Bishop, “my brother the Prince lets me use this spare palace of his and its well-stocked wine cellar. If I refused, he would just give it to someone else, or leave it empty. I’m not stealing church resources, and there’s no way to divert the resources to help the poor. And I am secure in my faith, and won’t be turned to hedonism by a glass of wine here and there. So what’s wrong with me enjoying myself a little?”