What kind of power did absolute monarchs typically have? Could

Less power than any President of a liberal democracy, actually.

>>3025765
Every Kingdom was pretty much different.
Look at Brittan's Queen almost no power.
But most kings depended on loyalty of Most of the Nobility to maintain Power.

>>3025765
The power of an absolute monarch was rarely absolute. Even if they could theoretically do anything, they were constrained by tradition, etiquette, competing power blocks within the nobility, etc. In practice, if a monarch wanted anything done, he had to have allies at court.

>>3025765
he has to constantly save face and make himself out to be wise and just or he wont be able to rule smoothly or might even be the victim of assassination. Kings need nobles behind them because the world back then was extremely decentralized and your power came from your alliances, you dont want to start being a hedonistic fuck or youre bound to cause problems. Obviously there have been shitty hedonistic kings and emperors and dictators, but youll find most meet a bloody end.

It was based on a complicated system. Each year a monarch would be given a certain number of command points and certain actions would cost a specific amount. At the end of every 3rd year the nobles would get together and re-balance the point costs of various actions.

A monarch could sometimes earn additional command points if he could fulfill quests which were issued by the various houses and put on a quest board.

Sometimes they would be penalized command points if there were more than X peasant revolts in a certain time frame.

The exact rules varied from country to country. Sometimes you could store up your command points between each year, while in places like Germany any unspent command points at the end of the year were just wasted. In kingdoms where the new monarch inherited the unspent command points from the previous monarch there were a lot of assassinations.

>>3025765

The problem with being a despot is that you have no opposition party to blame for your inevitable short-comings.

>>3026683
The Jews?

>>3025765
All the power apparently, but if you acted completely retarded, people would suspect you.

>>3026683
Simple. You blame other nations.