Part 9 — What Actually Makes a Ruler “Great”

Part 9 of the series “Legitimacy and the Limits of War”

The Greatest of the “Greats”

Step back from war entirely and a complementary pattern appears in the rulers history actually remembers well. Strip away the pure conquerors — Alexander, Genghis Khan, Frederick, the later self-aggrandizing claims of Napoleon and Louis XIV — and the self-promoting megalomaniacs, and you are left with rulers whose title “the Great” was granted by posterity, by historians, or by their own subjects for institutional, civic, and structural achievement. That set includes Alfred of Wessex, Casimir III of Poland, Akbar of the Mughals, Ashoka of the Mauryans, Sejong of Korea, and, in their institutional rather than military aspects, Justinian of Byzantium, and Peter and Catherine of Russia. Their non-military legacies rest on four recurring strategies, and those strategies are simply legitimacy-building written into peacetime governance.

The first is codifying law to replace caprice. These rulers earned their standing by ending arbitrary, localized rule and binding both the state and the population to written law. Casimir III of Poland, known as the “King of the Peasants,” unified Poland’s regional legal traditions into the Statutes of Wiślica and Piotrków around 1347, protecting poor farmers and merchants against noble abuse. Alfred the Great authored the Doom Book, weaving Anglo-Saxon law together with Christian and Mosaic principles and enforcing equal judicial treatment for commoner and noble alike. Justinian ordered the compilation of the Corpus Juris Civilis, the Body of Civil Law, which distilled centuries of Roman jurisprudence and became the structural foundation of modern civil law across Europe. Ashoka inscribed his edicts on rock and pillar across South Asia, making public duty, animal welfare, and state morality permanent public law.

The second is the democratization of knowledge. These rulers broke the monopolies on literacy that religious elites or restrictive languages had held, in order to raise the human capital of their whole societies. Sejong the Great of Korea personally commissioned and promulgated Hangul, the Korean alphabet, in 1446, to replace Chinese characters so that peasants and the lower classes, who could never spend years mastering Chinese script, could become literate and petition the court directly. Alfred directed the translation of major Latin works into Old English so that freeborn young men could learn to read in their own tongue rather than depend on Latin-speaking clergy. Akbar established a translation bureau, the Maktab Khana, to render Sanskrit, Greek, and Persian works into accessible vernaculars, and founded academies open to both Muslims and Hindus.

The third is the institutionalization of pluralism. Rather than force religious or ideological uniformity, these rulers built frameworks to absorb, protect, and profit from diverse populations. Akbar abolished the jizya, the tax on non-Muslims, sponsored interfaith debate, appointed Hindu generals and ministers to top posts, and promoted a doctrine of universal tolerance, sulh-i-kul. Cyrus the Great built the satrapy system that let conquered nations keep their customs, languages, and religions, a principle inscribed on the Cyrus Cylinder. Catherine the Great issued her edict of religious toleration in 1773, protecting Muslim and minority communities in order to stabilize and integrate newly acquired borderlands.

The fourth is durable public infrastructure. These rulers shifted spending away from temporary war mobilization toward lasting civil works that lowered the cost of daily life, improved public health, and sped up trade. Herod the Great, controversial as a political figure, earned his epithet through sheer engineering — the deep-water port city of Caesarea Maritima, the fortress of Masada, and aqueducts that reshaped Judean trade. Ashoka paved interstate roads, planted shade trees, dug public wells at regular intervals, and founded some of the earliest documented state-funded hospitals for both humans and animals. Casimir III, of whom it was said that he “found a Poland made of wood and left it made of stone,” built more than fifty fortified castles, reorganized the salt mines at Wieliczka to supply a third of the state treasury, and founded the University of Kraków.

Line them up and the through-line is unmistakable. Alfred unified education and law and gave his people mass native-language literacy and a common legal code. Sejong reformed language and science, inventing Hangul and commissioning public agricultural manuals and rain gauges. Akbar practiced pluralistic statecraft, abolishing religious taxation and institutionalizing multi-ethnic government. Casimir standardized Polish law, built a national university, and raised stone fortifications. Ashoka built a kind of welfare-state empire with public healthcare and a codified ethic of non-violent governance. Stripped of conquest and vanity, the common denominator of a non-warlord “Great” is institutional architecture: each took a fragile, fragmented, or autocratic realm and built systems — in law, literacy, infrastructure, and administration — that let the state function predictably without depending on the physical presence of the ruler.

Which brings the whole argument full circle. Structural legacy is not built by crushing enemies; it is built by lowering friction for the governed. When a ruler concentrates on the rights, stability, and capabilities of ordinary people, the policies look remarkably consistent across four thousand years: written, predictable law so the powerful cannot abuse the weak at whim; access to literacy and knowledge so the population does not depend on a corrupt gatekeeping class; institutionalized tolerance so people need not choose between their identity and their survival; and durable infrastructure that lets daily life and commerce thrive without harassment. A conqueror can command compliance at the point of a sword for a few years. It takes a leader genuinely committed to the well-being and rights of the people to build something that outlasts him. This is the chokehold’s second half made permanent — the aid that follows control, extended across generations, until it stops being aid and becomes simply a functioning state.

To read the other articles in this series, please go to the list “Legitimacy and the Limits of War.”