Message from @Old1812
Discord ID: 698293838732853358
So I'm kind of mixed, really.
My personal theology is influenced more strongly by the Patricians, I think.
Seems we are a lot closer than I first figured lol
I dunno, my job has me dealing with words a lot, so I think in terms of language.
Ironically I'm a lot like the philosophers I dislike in this- I want concise, declarative definitions even though such a thing might not even be possible.
Likewise, it's a nice surprise!
I wonder if the Democrats really will go ahead with Biden. Sure, he has the Black vote in his pocket, but he's lacking in almost every other area.
RIDIN WITH BIDEN NO MALARKEY
Capitalists will sell your country for profit.
Communists will sell you culture for...well nothing of value
Feudalists will save your people, culture, country, and lifestyle.
There's just one problem with feudalism and that's all of the little states fighting each other to solve the problems you need an empire like the HRE with the only difference that the Emperor is the only one who gets an army. This allows you to be strong together in forgein Policy and have everything decentralised in thousands of small states.
@Felix the Monarchist Thing is, a Catholic Emperor needs to respect the rights of his Protestant subjects, and vice versa
A big issue with feudalism is that it's too decentralized. Though it's nice people only have to care about their own community and don't even have to give a shit if the noble who lords over them speaks another language, being that insular allows for too much cultural drift tbqh
That insularity is even a regression from antiquity imo
In antiquity you had more well established trade networks, governance structures (as in having a government that does things and can enforce it), notions about nations etc. than during feudalism
Might've been dangerous if Europe had come under foreign domination
Because if people only mistakenly care about their narrow community they miss the big picture
> @Felix the Monarchist Thing is, a Catholic Emperor needs to respect the rights of his Protestant subjects, and vice versa
@Old1812 A protestant emperor should not be allowed. Concerning the rights, the Emperor shouldn't have anything to do with anything inside the country except for military matters. He is responsible for defending the country and diplomacy.
@Felix the Monarchist Not be allowed?
A protestant should have no right to rule. Ever heard about the sun and moon allegory?
Sorry, I haven't.
A protestant emperor if anythign would've been the saving grace of the HRE
Not having one actually went against historical precedent of emperors having disputes with the pope
The Papal pretensions to power are not borne out by Scripture or early church history
The papacy wouldn't even be in the position it is right now without the holy roman empire and a donation of land
Not to mention historically the church was organized under an emperor
Aka the roman emperor
Which is how orthodoxy kept it
I think it's fair to say the papacy usurped authority away from orthodoxy and not the other way around
Property ownership was probably more common in feudalism than is commonly assumed. At least early on.
Susan Reynolds wrote a very good, and very dense, book on it
Our understanding from feudalism largely comes from the libri feudorum, a lombardian book of the 12th century. It was an academic legal book at a time when the law was far more decentralized than it is now, too, with customary law playing as much of a role as other sources of law. So to infer what feudalism outside Lombardy and before the 12th century looked like from this book is not plausible.
Looking at my notes, nobody talked of fiefs before the 13th century, and then they were just one form of ownership anyway. Before that time, land held as full property was in fact more common than something resembling a fief.
"Vassi" may simply have meant any servant bound by an oath, and "fideles" were all who swore an oath to the king. In the 10th century, people were referred to as "vassals" even before they took any oath of fealty.
She also suggests that one reason why Southern France may have appeared so chaotic is because its system was simply too complex for others to understand. Mark Gregory Pegg supports that notion.
Tl;dr it's complicated. Feudalism was in a state of flux and does not lend itself as an ideal type.
At least in Germany I'm aware that private ownership wasn't common and most land was property of the emperor doled out as a Lehen to someone swearing an oath of loyalty to him who then had to provide money, troops and whatnot. Often those Lehen were then "subcontracted" so to speak. The only thing I'm not sure about this is at which points exactly laws were introduced to prevent serfs from leaving their land but the first traces of this had already happened in the late roman empire (with laws mandating sons follow their father's profession). Feudalism as such probably effectively came about as a synthesis of Germanic customs and Roman/Gaulish law
It didn't need to be explicitly written down when even documentation of kings and whatnot of the time were scarce
I'm not finished with Reynolds yet, arrived at High Medieval France last time. This image of the middle ages you describe seems to belong more to the late middle ages and the Rennaissance to Reformation.
The exact form of feudalism greatly depended on the local region
That too
Personally, I divide relatively strictly between high and late middle ages. At around 1200, the political system became centered more on the monarch, and the state administrations we know gradually emerged.