A vast motorcade of gleaming limousines ferried the entourage of King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia to Buckingham Palace for the state banquet at the start of his official three-day tour. Five jumbo jets kitted out to the height of luxury were used to airlift the King’s entourage to Britain. In addition to his 23-strong group of all-male personal advisers, which includes 13 members of the Saudi royal family, there were 30 officials ranging from cabinet ministers to economists and specialists in British affairs. The octogenarian King was also believed to have brought a handful of wives and 100 servants to attend to his personal needs, including a ‘travelling clinic’. (Colin Brown, The Independent, October 2007)
Monarchs like to travel. When they travel, they do so in style - a perk of the job, surely. But why do monarchs travel at all when they have comfortable and secure palaces to meet both their daily requirements and the needs of state? Monarchs travel because they must. They travel to meet fellow kings or leaders and to play their role on the international stage; they travel in order to witness the internal workings of their kingdom and to play an equally important role in the dramas of domestic policy; they travel to show themselves to their subjects as manifestations of power and control or to boost their popularity. Many modern heads of state even go so far as to ‘press the flesh’ of their admirers - shaking hands and offering pleasantries - in a convivial manner that would have been alien to the majority of absolute rulers of past societies.
In the Achaemenid period, the Persian Great Kings travelled extensively to fulfil the needs of national and international diplomacy, to fulfil religious or cultural duties, to lead armies into battle, and to participate in the lives of their subjects (Briant 1988). They were usually accompanied on their journeys by the majority of the court as well as by a huge military force. In effect, when the Great King journeyed across the Empire, the state itself was in transit: ‘as goes the royal house, so goes the Empire’ (Briant 2002: 415; see also Thucydides 1.129).
Greek treatises on the Persians often refer to ‘the land of the king’. That is how the Greeks conceived of the Persian Empire. This chapter elaborates on that notion and explores the Great King’s relationship with his lands. It will examine his journeys around the Empire and it will explore his symbolic rapport with, and practical use of, nature. The chapter will also look at the way in which the royal court en masse was integrated into the lands of the Empire and the way in which tribal identity and nomadic migration patterns remained embedded within royal systems of governance. In addition it will ask about the practicalities of moving the court around the Empire. How did it travel? Where was it accommodated and how was it fed?
World History
