If it is not profitable for the common good that authority should be retained, it ought to be relinquished. - Barbara W. Tuchman

To put on the garment of legitimacy is the first aim of every coup.

Vainglory, however, no matter how much medieval Christianity insisted it was a sin, is a motor of mankind, no more eradicable than sex. As long as combat was desirable as the source of honor and glory, the knight had no wish to share it with the commoner, even for the sake of success.

That conflict between the reach for the divine and the lure of earthly things was to be the central problem of the Middle Ages.