https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sun_and_moon_allegory

I'm not getting into yet another Catholic debate, not right now at least.

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.

That would be true for france, but it took more then 200 years before that happend to the low countries

I'm a bit france-centric on this, yeah

Tho a great example of this centralisation tendency is the Flemish uprising of 1302

And the war that came form that event

Flanders always was one of Fances most independend minded vassals

It was a central region but it's also because many of the best books are about it.

Do you have any book-suggestions for some other regions?

If it ever gets translated I would recomend the book "De bourgondiërs" (the bourgondians)

It's extreemly popular in Flanders and the Netherlands

100.000+ books sold

So I think they will eventualy translate it

Nice

I know that feeling with Vlad Tepesz. All the good books are Romanian. English is mostly sensationalist crap

Yeah it's fair to say that medieval Europe was fairly heterogeneous, though I'd say aptchwork is part of a feudal society

Idk if one should call for example the hansa feudal or something that could only exist in the context of feudalism

Because clearly it doesn't fit in with the whole vassal system and whatnot

I'd say the latter

Imo the way how cities fit into feudalism is one of the most fascinating things about it

I’d say the Hanseatic league was a transitional oddity between feudalism and more modern mercantilism