As a historical nerd, it does make me laugh a little that the Orlesians are depicted as such a centralized polity and the Fereldans are depicted as a far more disparate and decentralized, when in historical Capetian France and England, the two kingdoms were swapped, with the French monarch often feuding and grappling with powerful nobility. In comparison, the Kingdom of England was far more centralized.
Our image of the autocratic, absolute French monarch really only has its evidence during the reign of King Louis XIV. While the Capetians utilized ancient tradition (starting from the first Christian Merovingian king Clovis I) in order to take the position as the most Christian King, their authority often was minimized to a far smaller demense, and they often contended with powerful semi-autonomous vassals. It took centuries of bloody conflict and centralization efforts to get to Versailles, and this progress ebbed and flowed over the period.
