I would have thought with your name you'd give serious consideration to Emperor Karl Culinane.



I loathed him and his obnoxious brat son, but at least the little turd won the war. Rohan, even by the standards of people who worshipped the ground he walked on, was a crap leader when his "kingdom" was invaded, and failed and almost lost, except for his fortuitous death allowing the (marginally) competant people a chance to do their thing.
As a ruler, he mostly lucked out in having people come to his rescue because of family loyalty and had an awful lot of political dilemmas he was fortuitously able to resolve with a knife fight. His entire program of rule was an obnoxious power grab intended to take power from the individual princes and place it all in the hands of the High Prince. THe difference between him and Roelstra was his assertion that he was sensitive and didn't like it. The vast majority of his success came from the fact that he was the son of a badass who made their homeland secure, had a capable soldier for a brother-in-law who could do the heavy lifting for him until it was time for Rohan to win the war in a contrived duel, and a machiavellian aunt who set him up with an incredibly fortuitous marriage. And the aberrant and unrealistic zoology (WTF do that many dragons EAT, and in sufficient quantities to be able to fly, no less; and assuming they consume an appropriate number of herd animals, where does he get off forbidding anyone to kill them, just because he thinks they're pretty? ) of their world just happens to work in a way that makes him exponentially richer than any other ruler.

It didn't help that Melanie Rawn had possibly the worst grasp of military or governmental concepts of any author I have ever read. The bit where she has a group of doctors prove more deadly in battle than trained soldiers because of their exquisite knowledge of anatomy was utterly ridiculous, her feminist assertions that women were every bit as capable as men at being medieval soldiers - and rubbed in by having female soldiers featured prominently, and the way everyone but the selfish and greedy fell over backward to admire a hypocrite who preaches an ideal and looks down on his peers for their scholastic shortcomings and general inferiority to his idealistic awesomeness, while he goes about accumulating power and offing people who get in his way.

Rawn is a gifted writer (or seemed that way when I was an adolescent) but she has no freaking clue what to write about, or how the world works. She's like the anti-Brandon Sanderson.