An argument can perhaps be made that all monarchies, no matter how absolute or authoritarian, cannot function without the consent of their subjects, whether tacit or active; proclaim that they act for the welfare (however defined) of their subjects; agree to abide by rules or laws that reflect social norms (whether they actually do abide by them or not); and are vulnerable to popular dissatisfaction. I was aware of the potential for such a general argument when I wrote Byzantine Republic and so deliberately set a specific threshold for “republican monarchies” in the Roman tradition, a threshold defined by the following four criteria: (a) a robust conception of the public interest and public property to which the monarch is subordinated in normative texts issued both by the monarchy itself and its elites; (b) a conception of a legally- or ethnically-defined populace whose material wellbeing forms the sole legitimating factor for the operation of government, even if that populace lacks formal institutions by which to take direct political action itself; (c) historical instances of popular intervention in the sphere of politics that were accepted by elites as legitimate, indeed often as constitutive of their own power and positions; and (d) documented continuity between that polity and the ancient Roman res publica, coupled with awareness of that continuity.