What the exam asks
Every question on this topic tests the theme of Governance (GOV) and asks you to connect a specific historical example to one of two overarching processes:
- Consolidating power: How rulers centralized control over populations and resources (taking power away from traditional hereditary nobles) through bureaucratic elites, military professionals, and tax/tribute collection.
- Legitimizing rule: How rulers projected authority and justified their right to rule through religion, art, and monumental architecture.
You do not need to memorize every single illustrative example in the Course and Exam Description (CED)—multiple-choice stimuli provide the context needed to connect unfamiliar examples to broader historical developments—but knowing one or two examples per category gives you specific evidence to deploy in short answers and essays.
Core ideas
1. Bureaucratic elites and military professionals
Historically, monarchs relied on feudal or hereditary aristocrats for soldiers and local governance, which meant those nobles could easily rebel. Between 1450 and 1750, rulers sidelined traditional elites by recruiting civil bureaucrats and professional soldiers who owed their loyalty and salaries directly to the central state.
- Ottoman devshirme: The sultan’s agents levied Christian boys from the Balkans, converted them to Islam, and educated them. The brightest became civil administrators (scribes, viziers) and the strongest joined the Janissaries, an elite, salaried gunpowder infantry loyal only to the sultan.
- Salaried samurai in Tokugawa Japan: Under the Tokugawa shogunate (established 1603), the shogun ended feudal warfare and forced the daimyo (landowning lords) to spend every other year in the capital, Edo (alternate attendance). Cut off from active combat, independent warrior samurai were transformed into salaried civil bureaucrats and administrators.
- Other key systems: China continued the civil service examination system (scholar-gentry) under the Ming and Qing, while the Safavids created a corps of enslaved soldiers (ghulams) from Christian populations in the Caucasus to counterbalance tribal Qizilbash warriors.
2. Religious ideas
Rulers aligned themselves with sacred authority so that rebellion against the state felt like rebellion against the cosmos or God.
- European divine right of kings: Monarchs such as Louis XIV of France argued that kings received their authority directly from God and were accountable to no earthly parliament or church.
- Mexica (Aztec) practice of human sacrifice: Mexica rulers claimed that the patron deity Huitzilopochtli required human blood to keep the sun moving across the sky, justifying continuous military expansion to capture prisoners for public ritual sacrifice in Tenochtitlan.
- Songhai promotion of Islam: Askia the Great (Askia Mohammad I) made a grand pilgrimage to Mecca, gained the title Caliph of the Sudan, built mosques, and funded Islamic schools in Timbuktu to win the backing of urban Muslim merchants and scholars (ulama).
- Safavid Twelver Shi’ism: Shah Ismail declared Twelver Shi’ism the compulsory state religion, claiming descent from the Twelve Imams to unify his realm and distinguish it from the Sunni Ottomans.