In the Eastern half of the Empire, and especially from the time of Justinian I, the system of the Dominate evolved into autocratic absolutism.
The trilogy, as a whole, portrays the rise of Gastel Etzwane from common boy, to the autocrat The Anome, and finally, as a saviour of his world against the alien Asutra of the third book.
He was critical of the Russian autocracy and the centralized Russian state of his time, including the Russian liberals (Kadets) who supported a centralized state and opposed either federalism or national autonomy for the non-Russian peoples of the Russian Empire.
Arnold was by no means blind to the faults of Henry's government, but preferred an autocracy to the mob rule which Simon de Montfort, 6th Earl of Leicester countenanced in London.
With the Emancipation Reform of 1861 in Russia, Tsar Alexander II and the Russian autocracy put several new alterations into place to help advance Russia past its old traditions of bonded labor and into a more enlightened age similar to the other European nations.
At the apex of the pyramid stood the Emperor, sole ruler (autokrator) and divinely ordained, but beneath him a multitude of officials and court functionaries operated the administrative machinery of the Byzantine state.
Its main task was to distribute powers and functions among the Politburo, the Central Committee, and the Council of Ministers to hinder any attempts to create a one-man dominance over the Soviet political system by a Soviet leader, such as that seen under Joseph Stalin's rule.
Considered by former members and many neighbors to be a crank and an autocrat who insisted on unquestioning loyalty, Sandford—who had identified himself with the biblical Elijah and David—was convicted of manslaughter in 1911 and served seven years in a federal penitentiary.
He, like many other Georgian nobles who years earlier had plotted to overthrow the Russian hegemony, would make peace with the imperial autocracy, a change aided by liberal policies of the Russian viceroy Mikhail Semyonovich Vorontsov.
"Gustafs skål", literally Toast to Gustav, is a song written by Carl Michael Bellman as a salutation to Gustav III of Sweden, following the coup d'etat of 1772, which made himself an autocrat and ended the parliamentary age of liberty.