What did the first member of the royal family do to become royalty?

I don’t know but I’m pretty sure it involved an act of unspeakable violence.

Gives us a hint on how to address a question like this. There are probably little kids world wide currently springing this one on their parents.

@HP
I Googled:
How did the British royal family start?

I got:

The Royal Family started with William the Conqueror, the Norman Duke who crossed the channel to dominate England. He wasn’t the first King to reign in Britain but he established the roots of the modern royals.

Now I am interested in the first royal before: William the Conqueror… Or even sooner to the first? Where did the concept of royalty come from?

Our current Royal lineage traces back to the Norman Invasion (1066) with William the Conqueror, err…conquering.

But they are not all related, which is why the line is split into houses of the same FAMILY. Elizabeth for example is the latest from the current House of Windsor.

In general, in Europe, you wait for the Roman Empire to decline and fall, and the Dark Ages to descend, and then you start asserting yourself as the local warlord, and defeating rivals and amassing loyal warrior followers, and when you think you and your warriors can take on anyone within a greater distance than anyone is willing or able to march an army that can reasonably take you on, you call yourself king.

Also note that there were also many kings around the world even back into pre-history.

@RedDeerGuy1 – William the Conqueror was late to the game. He had to go wipe out King Harald in the Battle of Hastings to become King of England. Harald was also not the first. Nor even was Arthur.

Warlords became royalty by killing all the rivals.

Well, there were kings in the Bible. Ancient Egypt had its pharaohs, Assyria its kings. Sumer was even older. You’re going to have to go way back, thousands of years. I believe the ancient Asian empires are older still.

I haven’t studied the subject, but my guess as to the likeliest origin would be village chiefs and tribal elders. Banding together to form alliances for protection and trade would lead to consolidating authority. In Europe, the Church was organized hierarchically before there was much of a political structure, so maybe the secular authorities used it as a model.

In civilizations where the king or emperor was revered as a god—and that would include Japan into the 20th century—you might declare your lineage to derive by direct descent from a god such as the sun. Your culture’s mythology would supply the necessary narrative.

Vanquished all comers. He was the leader of the pack and no one questioned him.

Right, he declared himself King.

They claim the modern line is from William the conqueror, but I think that’s just some bullshit to make being conquered less embarrassing. England had Kings, then the Viking kicked their asses and made themselves kings, and the old powers just kinda married their way back in to make things look clean, then this Viking descended French dude William clobbers them all, makes himself king, and the old powers just marry back in, a new identity forms and life goes on. The throne has also been won in blood a handful of times since then, but since they all have some William blood, they were all somehow legitimate I guess, and the line counts as unbroken.

When did royalty become associated with divinity? I dunno. I should check around the world to see how common that belief was.

@Smashley
Well, the divine right of kings is right out of the bible (romans 13), but really, rulers all throughout the world and history have claimed divine support, or outright styled themselves gods, to justify their authority. Common power play.

Romans 13 enjoins obedience to legitimate civil authorities regardless of the form of government and does not specifically mention kingship (the Roman Empire technically did not have a king per se in the time of Paul). The “divine right of kings” is a theory used to justify the kind of absolute monarchy that arose in the early modern period of European history as feudalism was replaced by the state.

I see that we’re all mostly just talking off the top of our heads, so I shall do likewise.

The notion of a king differs from that of a warlord or chieftain in that the king has a kind of legal or religious sanction that a mere strongman does not. We can see this in the earliest civilizations of which we have records. The Pharaohs of Egypt held power not only through the military power of their armies and the economic power of their slaves, but through the legitimacy conferred on them by the priesthood.

The Old Testament relates that after being led by “judges” who emerged or were called by God to deal with particular crises after they arrived in the Promised Land, the Israelites asked the last such leader, Samuel to anoint a king like neighboring peoples had. Samuel warned them of the dangers of kings, but the people insisted, so Samuel anointed Saul the first king of Israel.

Judging from linguistic evidence, Indo-European peoples seem to have had a notion of kingship before they invaded the Mediterranean world and continued into Europe. I don’t know how much their concepts of kingship were influenced by earlier civilizations. They established petty kingdoms, tribal chiefdoms, and city states in the Bronze Age and early Iron age before the rise of Persian Empire with their despotic rulers. The Persians fell before Alexander, who failed to establish a legitimate line of succession.

Rome had kings in its early days, but the Romans ditched kingship and established the Republic, which eventually became the Empire, which was eventually overrun by Germanic barbarians, who retained those earlier Indo-European notions of kingship. That brings us to the Anglo-Saxon invaders of Britain, who established more of those petty kingdoms that would eventually be united into a single kingdom of England, which the aforementioned William conquered in 1066, but not before taking steps to legitimate his claim to the throne.

The direct lineal descendants of William the Conqueror lasted less than a century before dying out. You can use Wikipedia to learn who has held the crown of England (and later the crown of the UK) since then and how they got it.

Nearly all places have been ruled either tribally or by a monarch. Tribes are usually family extensions, so conquering other families leads naturally to a monarchy. Notable exceptions were the Greek democracies and the Roman republic.

Elvis was named “King” by newspaper reporters.

The person who first anointed Elvis Presley with the royal title in question was Robert Johnson. In a lengthy article about Memphis’s favorite son in the Press-Scimitar on May 4, 1956, Johnson branded Elvis, “the fledgling king of rock ’n’ roll.”