Das said:Muscovite succession was a family affair, and it didn't get fixed completely until the family died out (actually, even after that we still had the Pseudo-Demetrii) and the smaller and less quarrelsome Koshkiny-Zakharyiny (boyars rather than princes) took over. All that anyone could try to do until then was to limit the familial appanages as much as possible and kill/imprison all nearby relatives in brutal ways, usually preemptively. Though, I suppose the fact that this was actually doable would speak for it no longer being a Mandala state. The earlier Rurikid principalities definitely were closer, but tended to devolve and disintegrate in place of having dynastic shifts, though those happened too.
More or less. Malay states seem prior to Islam to be perennially vulnerable to dynastic squabbles, inter dynastic squabbles and every Johny come lately in perdition.
Das said:Actually, Masada, what about the Greek city-states? Sure, their struggles with overpopulation more or less defined their history from what we know, but the impossibility of establishing any large empires seems to be spot on. And what really reminded me of this was the fact that many cities technically moved around in their immediate vicinity for economic purposes, more or less as you described; though it is pure semantics to some extent, perhaps it would be more correct to say that the driving factor of Greek history was not so much overpopulation as poor agriculture and chronic food deficits even by Ancient standards. On the other hand, personal factors matter very little for once (although, Syracuse's empire is a Mandala state if I've ever seen one...). "Greek individualism" indeed.
Greek city-states do have Mandala like traits; you can really see it in the severe difficulty that anyone had in holding onto control after a victory; you could almost infer that any centralizing tendency would be met in short order by a stronger decentralizing tenancy reinforced by things like geography for instance.
Overpopulation isn't quite correct as you've seen, it's carrying capacity seems to have been lower than its population, but it worked around that through the establishment of colonies.
It's a midway between a Mandala anti-Europe and Europe itself.
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More intelligent conversation is welcome!