Landsraad
The council of Great Houses built to keep the Emperor's authority in check.
The Great Convention that closed out the chaos of the Butlerian Jihad gave the reorganized Great Houses something they'd never had before: a shared political body capable of checking any single Emperor's ambitions. That balance of power held, more or less, for ten thousand years. On paper, the Landsraad could speak with one voice against Imperial or Guild overreach. It threw its combined military and economic weight behind the threat of resistance to the kind of tyranny the thinking machines once embodied. Real life rarely matched the charter. Private feuds ran deep, alliances shifted by the season, and plenty of Houses were happy to sell their vote to whoever paid best. None of that erased the fact that the Landsraad's mere existence was one of the few real limits on Imperial power. Paul Atreides understood that perfectly when he went looking for its recognition of his claim to the throne.
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