Image of the King

It is interesting to see how the winning king, or the conqueror, the commander in chief, shifts in view of how he wants to be represented in war. In previous chapters, we saw that having the head of a beheaded king symbolized that the king and army had defeated the city/state/kingdom, and it makes sense because it shows that they were able to take “the head” of the kingdom, rendering the conquered region helpless and open for control by the winning king and army. Sure, in this case, why wouldn’t the king want to be associated with the defeat of the losing king? It would show that this king is powerful and he is in control of his kingdom and that he is not to be messed with. However, according to Bahrani, later on, even the king didn’t perform the final blow to the head to the other king (you would think that it would be “head on head”), or demonstrating his ability to determine the life or death of the other. Apparently, it was up to the king’s army to do so instead of the king himself, and the author tries to mitigate our puzzlement by explaining it in terms that we may be able to understand.

The author plays into our puzzlement, posing the same question that we had above- wouldn’t it seem better that the king be portrayed as someone who personally defeats his enemy? The author mentions that while it SEEMS true that portraying the king as someone who personally decides the fate of his enemies, it is actually counterintuitive because the real image that the king wants to present is “expressing his prowess and virility by hunting lions or wild horses, not by torturing or executing prisoners of war” (Bahrani 213). In an effort to build a kingdom, the king must not be presented to be one of oppressive rule, violence, and total bloodshed because that would not demonstrate any type of good leadership. Instead, a good alternative to that was to have the army do it and to have the army dish out the torture, the violence, and the executions.

However, the king still had the ultimate rule, of course. He was the one who commanded the army to do it, but the king was just not personally involved with the actual killing and torturing any longer to help boost his popularity and his image. Therefore, the king had incredible military power, and it conjures up memories of what Mann defined as the main sources of power, and military power is one of them. Like said by Bahrani, “the military had become a weapon in the hand of the king. Yet the weapons of the war machine are both destructive and productive. They destroy, obviously, but they also produce victory and absolute power” (Bahrani 213). This is definitely true, and in this sense, it really promoted the king’s image of overall power and leadership and less of the bloodshed and fear that would have been conveyed if he was personally deciding the fates of the lives of enemies.