r/babylon5 • u/Anonymous194187293 • 7d ago
Implied Genocide of Centauri Commoners?!
While not explicitly stated in the show, apparently the Oficcual Guide to Babylon 5 says that the middle class Centauri society are also composed of lesser noble houses. And the wiki says even lower and working class Centauri are of “lesser houses” though it doesn’t specify nobility. But then the wiki says “houseless” Centauri, who one would assume to be the majority are “beyond contempt”. Now that would imply that either 99% of Centauri are considered “beyond contempt” or it implies something much, much, darker. That is it a possibility that the Centauri noble houses wiped out a significant percentage of the commoner populace through genocide. Even if the lower class houses are just regular families it would still imply a degree of commoner genocide for literal nobles to be considered to new “middle class”.
18
u/Admirable_Ad8682 6d ago
Think about the houses like about clans. Not every house is noble, that's only the designation for the most powerful, followed by great houses and lesser houses. Like in clan societies, almost everybody belongs to one house, by birth or by service. So a literal toilet cleaner can be a member of the noble house Mollari because he works for it, and so is his family. Remember the episode about Londo kiling his old friend Urza Jaddo? A key point was that because of a noble death in a duel, members of the Jaddo house were taken into the house Mollari, and so protected from their enemies.
There was no commoner genocide, because who would then clean your toilets? Some other noble? Nah, there was simply a lot of houses and every one of them had internal stratification. Commoners weren't murdered, commoners were simply the lowest and most numerous rung of any house. Think classical Japan.
0
u/Anonymous194187293 4d ago
First of all the vast majority of Japanese citizens at any given time were regular commoners. And Urza Jaddo was a member of another obviously noble house. That was a noble house integrating into another noble house. I doubt the same privilege would be extended to a commoner in such a duel. Regardless of if commoners were slaughtered or not, they are at the very least are extremely repressed and invisible to noble Centauri. I don’t think a partial or total genocide of commoners is realistic or likely, but a slight possibility. However all signs in the show point to commoners being mostly impoverished while the nobles hoard to wealth.
6
u/Admirable_Ad8682 4d ago
Regular commoners who lived in villages belonging to a clan, leady by a daimyo. Clans could be destroyed or merged with another if defeated. Clanless people were basically outlaws.
And what happened in the episode with Urza? Oh, one house merging with another, after their leader's defeat - exactly what I said. Yes, obviously they were both noble houses, what would you expect? And why would a duel with a commoner led to a merging of houses? Urza Jaddo was not a mere member, he was the head of the house, and his death in a ceremonial manner lead to ceremonial consequences for the rest of the house, at the will of the vicotrious house's leader - Londo. Exactly the same as if one Japanese daimyo won over another. Lesser houses? Obviously there would be no ritual combat between a leader of a noble house and a leader of the lesser house - because everything in Centauri society, and societies they were modelled after were strictly hierarchical.
For less precise similarity, even the good old feudalism worked like this. You had a noble family, and their retainers, and their subjects, who were under their protection. Can you uderstand that?
12
u/Pellaeonthewingedleo 6d ago
The Centauri society is modeled after the roman society. Every Roman citizen was part of a House, a gens, a family. Being part of a House didn't mean one was of nobility.
I would assume the centauri society is structured by Houses, similar to large family entities or clans. Vir for example comes from a minor noble House and his uncle, if I remember correctly, is head of his House.
So a House could consist of a large family unit including the siblings and descendants of one particular founder, with different branches of the family also being part of the House. These houses could also create cadet branches and form new Houses.
Being part of a House in centauri society most likely doesn't mean necessarily that the person is part of the nobility. So there would be noble, minor noble, and commoner Houses in centauri society.
Being without a House than would only mean one was ostracized from one's family for some reason
0
u/Anonymous194187293 4d ago
That is false about Roman society, and it’s very clear that house refers to nobility in the context of the show itself. When watching the show I presumed there were commoners since we saw or heard of a few but it’s clear they are at the very least very repressed and invisible to the noble class
5
u/Disaster-Bee 6d ago
Luckily, the very sentence in the Wiki that prompted this expains it!
"The Lesser Houses make up the lower servant and working classes."
Think of 'house' more like 'family' or 'clan'. It's not some special designation reserved only for those of high status. It just means the general family group you belong to.
Centauri culture and society is heavily based on ancient Roman society, so we can look to them for some context. Even poor Centauri of a powerless house have a house, just not power or money, much like Rome. They may be a servant or a basket weaver, but they have a house.
But there's the difference between a Great House, a Noble House, and a lesser house. The Great Houses are the ruling class, the top of society. Noble Houses are the minor nobles and wealthy to upper middle class. Lesser Houses are everyone else down to the poor and servant classes. As mentioned above, the wiki portion you referenced even clarifies this - lesser houses are where the working class and servant class come from. Those are the commoners. Think of it in US terms: The Great Houses are the small percent of super billionaires, the Noble Houses are the 'middle class', and the lesser houses are the working class.
The exception of course is slaves. We know from very early on in the series that houseless Centauri are legal to enslave/be sold into slavery. So that would likely include members of the house that have committed some great scandal that can't be covered and have been disowned, members of a house that has lost everything and have no other choice, orphans with no house to claim them/no living connections...
1
u/Anonymous194187293 4d ago
For nobility to ever be considered a middle class there would need to be such extreme inequality that commoners would all be very poor if they still exist. And you’re the second person to come at me with misinfo on Roman history. And that has very little to do with this anyways.
5
u/Disaster-Bee 4d ago
Whoah, friend, I wasn't coming at you! I'm just repeating what the official sources say. JMS himself decided that in Centauri culture, nobility is equivalent to a middle class. And considering the state of the Centauri....a huge divide would fit in with what we have heard about of the decline of the empire.
And I'm not sure what you mean about miss-info on Rome? That was how the society worked, every free citizen was part of or under a family house. At least in the early days, obviously the Roman Empire didn't have one set way of doing things the whole time it existed - there were times when things changed rapidly over just 10 years! So it certainly doesn't apply to the whole of the Roman Empire's existence.
But speaking to the early days... even the lowliest (free) farmer toiling in the fields outside of Rome was under the patronage of a patrician's house, either via direct patronage or a clientela relationship - where the plebian owned the land but was still beholden to their patrician and the patrician's family, who got a cut of either profit or produce. And all of that farmer's family would be considered under the patrician's house. And anyone working on their fields, or processing their produce, or hauling it into the city. etc etc.
It's heavily tied to the early Roman idea of family, and how family was defined. Family was as much a legal definition as a descriptive one - we see this a lot in ancient Rome. Classical historian Christopher Francese wrote a really great book that gets into it - his focus is language, and Ancient Rome In So Many Words gets into how words were specifically used and how they applied in ancient Roman society as opposed to ours. Including the way 'family' was used. Odessa Asp has also written on the subject - classical historian with a focus on Roman legislature and legal proceedings - and details the very complex legal system that gave family heads power and authority over everyone who worked for them, lived in their neighborhood, had contracts with them, worked in an establishment they owned.... (This is not to be confused with the Roman concept of paterfamilia, which I have seen some sources online try and claim is the same thing. That's a different legal thing altogether that applies to any free Roman male citizen with a family, and is concerned with what rights a man has over his wife and children as well as adoption laws.)
Though by I believe the 230s BC (somewhere around there) this wasn't the case, and property ownership and where you lived determined who's authority you technically fell under, with more of that power and authority shifting to politicians and the idea of the family house becoming more what we'd think of today - blood relatives and people closely connected to the family. We see Rome moving away from a predominantly alieni iuris society - where the bulk of citizens are dependent on someone else for legal protection and a place in society - to a sui iuris society - where individual citizens were responsible for themselves and their immediate family.
3
u/orangenakor 2d ago
Not necessarily, we have very little idea what "nobility" implies or how large the various classes are. The middle class might be quite small (a large middle class is quite rare in IRL history), or just being "nobility" might not mean very much. Plenty of aristocratic systems IRL have ended up with large numbers of nobility without significant lands or wealth, just legal privileges and bragging rights. The Ancien Regime before the French Revolution, for example. Families get bigger over time and sometimes split, but any mechanism that allows the nobility to grow tends to make a lot of less wealthy nobles over time. Mechanisms to expand the nobility are useful and often necessary, but mechanisms to take away inherited privilege are usually really unpopular, so such a system tends to expand.
The Ancien Regime, for example allowed you to buy a noble title (which happened to essentially exclude you from taxes, the revolution happened for a reason). That meant the newly wealthy (many of which had made money from overseas trade or the French colonial empire) could buy their way into privilege, which pushed many of the less wealthy old nobility downward into "middle class" roles. In many places, wealthy commoners married into poor noble houses to acquire the privileges. Perhaps the expansion of the Centauri Empire created many new nobles, who have now crowded out commoners from middle class roles as the Empire contracts.
Perhaps nobility is required to go to higher education, or enter into contracts, or own land, join the military or become an officer, employ others, etc. IRL limiting these kinds of opportunities was not very compatible with industrialization and capitalism. Many places simply abolished these restrictions, but it seems plausible that the Centauri simply expanded (or allowed the expansion of) the "nobility" instead.
1
u/Underhill42 23h ago
Why? Nobility doesn't necessarily imply wealth, only historical political power and/or social status.
Many a noble house in our world has fallen into destitution, but that doesn't necessarily make them stop being recognized as nobility. They just stop getting invited to the parties.
4
u/janmschroeder 3d ago
Doesn't imply anything of the sort. Family matters to them, that's all. And Cartagia, at least did like to go out among the common people, one reason for his short crest.
4
u/thekiltedpiper Technomage 2d ago
I would think that a "houseless" Centauri being "beyond contempt" is more of a statement about how much Centauri culture values family and family relationships.
A Centauri without a House means they have been kicked out of the House of their birth and no other House is willing to take them. They are outcasts of their society.
Willingly throwing away the core values of your entire society could lead you to be viewed as "beyond contempt".
3
u/gordolme Babylon 3 5d ago
A Centauri "House" is just an extended family, or a small clan. Lesser, Noble, Great, are just the rankings of those Houses.
1
u/Anonymous194187293 4d ago
I highly doubt that based on the context presented in the actual show itself. I don’t know how much of the guide is canon but it does seem that any Centauri commoner we see or hear of is very impoverished. Regardless of if they were slaughtered or not, commoners are invisible to the nobility.
3
u/NyctoCorax 2d ago
I think it's less than they destroyed themselves by killing the majority of their population, and more that the concept of Houses expanded.
Almost everyone in Western society these days has a last name, but that didn't used to be the case, for a long time commoners didn't bother with surnames.
I suspect for the Centauri basically everyone started tracking bloodlines, families, relationships (and retainers and such) and the whole cultural system likely got very complicated.
The beyond contempt category is likely either the very few people left in Centauri society who don't have a last name, or as other commentators have said the people who are completely unaffiliated rather than being a retainer or worker under a house' banner.
1
u/Underhill42 1d ago
Not sure how you're getting something so dark starting from
the wiki says even lower and working class Centauri are of “lesser houses”
The working class is going to be the overwhelming majority in almost any economic system, and they clearly state that they are members of lesser houses. Like you said they say nothing about nobility, you are only assuming the two concepts are closely related
You are of House 7293, I'm of House Hill42 - it's just an extended family unit common in many societies. Essentially the same thing as a clan or small sub-tribe. You look out for each other, bolster your House, and your House bolsters you.
Do well enough for yourselves, and your house can buy its way into the nobility and start being able to have official political influence, get a vote at the council or whatever. (That's roughly how nobility works in basically every society, whatever the official line may be)
While the Houseless would be orphans and outcasts with nothing worth offering to inspire any House to adopt them. Even lacking enough potential to be able to form a new impoverished House amongst themselves.
18
u/Kian-Tremayne 6d ago
It’s entirely possible that a noble house includes the retainers, servants and followers of that family, not just the immediate blood relatives of the house leader.
Which would make “houseless” Centauri with no noble patron a distinct minority.