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106-594: The Hungarian March ( Ungarische Mark or Ungarnmark ) or Neumark ("New March") was a brief frontier march established in the mid-eleventh century by the Emperor Henry III as a defence against the Kingdom of Hungary . It had only two known margraves before it was annexed to the March of Austria . The Hungarian march was founded by Henry III following his first campaign against Hungary in 1041. In 1043,

212-400: A brilliant warrior who secularized church lands for the purpose of providing precarias (or leases) for his followers, in return for their military service. Martel's military ambitions were becoming more expensive as it changed into a cavalry force, thus the need to maintain his followers through the despoiling of church lands. Responding to Brunner's thesis, Paul Fouracre theorizes that

318-620: A buffer to the Christian states to the north. The Upper March ( al-Tagr al-A'la ), centered on Zaragoza , faced the eastern Marca Hispanica and the western Pyrenees , and included the Distant or Farthest March ( al-Tagr al-Aqsa ). The Middle March ( al-Tagr al-Awsat ), centred on Toledo and later Medinaceli , faced the western Pyrenees and Asturias. The Lower March ( al-Tagr al-Adna ), centred on Mérida and later Badajoz , facing León and Portugal. These too would give rise to Kingdoms,

424-533: A consensus viewpoint is that England before the Conquest had commendation (which embodied some of the personal elements in feudalism) while William the Conqueror introduced a modified and stricter northern French feudalism to England incorporating (1086) oaths of loyalty to the king by all who held by feudal tenure, even the vassals of his principal vassals (holding by feudal tenure meant that vassals must provide

530-574: A depopulated border region. Such self-sufficient landholders would aid the counts in providing armed men in defense of the Frankish frontier . Aprisio grants (the first ones were in Septimania ) emanated directly from the Carolingian king, and they reinforced central loyalties, to counterbalance the local power exercised by powerful marcher counts. After some early setbacks, Emperor Louis

636-418: A feudal order not limited solely to the nobility. It is his radical notion that peasants were part of the feudal relationship that sets Bloch apart from his peers: while the vassal performed military service in exchange for the fief, the peasant performed physical labour in return for protection – both are a form of feudal relationship. According to Bloch, other elements of society can be seen in feudal terms; all

742-415: A feudal relationship with agreed obligations to one another. The vassal's principal obligation to the lord was to provide aid or military service. Using whatever equipment the vassal could obtain by virtue of the revenues from the fief, the vassal had to answer calls to military service by the lord. This security of military help was the primary reason the lord entered into the feudal relationship. In addition,

848-519: A few years later (1327) it passed into the hands of the family of Bourbon . The family of Armagnac held it from 1435 to 1477, when it reverted to the Bourbons, and in 1527 it was seized by King Francis I and became part of the domains of the French crown. It was divided into Haute-Marche (i.e. "Upper Marche") and Basse-Marche (i.e. "Lower Marche"), the estates of the former being in existence until

954-488: A formal political system by the people who lived during the Middle Ages. Since the publication of Elizabeth A. R. Brown 's "The Tyranny of a Construct" (1974) and Susan Reynolds 's Fiefs and Vassals (1994), there has been ongoing inconclusive discussion among medieval historians as to whether feudalism is a useful construct for understanding medieval society. The adjective feudal was in use by at least 1405, and

1060-465: A land grant in exchange for service was called a beneficium (Latin). Later, the term feudum , or feodum , began to replace beneficium in the documents. The first attested instance of this is from 984, although more primitive forms were seen up to one-hundred years earlier. The origin of the feudum and why it replaced beneficium has not been well established, but there are multiple theories, described below. The term "féodal"

1166-457: A lesser miles with armed retainers, who theoretically owed allegiance through a count to the emperor or, with less fealty , to his Carolingian and Ottonian successors. Such territory had a catlá ("castellan" or lord of the castle) in an area largely defined by a day's ride, and the region became known, like Castile at a later date, as "Catalunya". Counties in the Pyrenees that appeared in

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1272-440: A loanword from Persian . See Krajina and Military Frontier . The Chinese concept of March is called Fan (藩), referring to feudatory domains and petty kingdoms on the borderlands of the empire. In their initial development during the later Zhou dynasty , the commanderies ( jùn , 郡) functioned as marches, ranking below the dukes ' and kings ' original fiefs and below the more secure and populous counties ( xiàn ). As

1378-650: A long career as purely conventional designations under the Holy Roman Empire . In modern German, "Mark" denotes a piece of land that historically was a borderland, as in the following names: From the Carolingian period onwards the name marca begins to appear in Italy, first the Marca Fermana for the mountainous part of Picenum , the Marca Camerinese for the district farther north, including

1484-550: A means of political gain. For them "feudalism" meant seigneurial privileges and prerogatives. When the French Constituent Assembly abolished the "feudal regime" in August 1789, this is what was meant. Adam Smith used the term "feudal system" to describe a social and economic system defined by inherited social ranks, each of which possessed inherent social and economic privileges and obligations. In such

1590-603: A part of Umbria , and the Marca Anconitana for the former Pentapolis ( Ancona ). In 1080, the marca Anconitana was given in investiture to Robert Guiscard by Pope Gregory VII , to whom the Countess Matilda ceded the marches of Camerino and Fermo . In 1105, the Emperor Henry IV invested Werner with the whole territory of the three marches, under the name of the March of Ancona . It

1696-515: A provision that was later extended to various parts of Italian kingdom following the invasion by French troops. In the Kingdom of Naples , Joachim Murat abolished feudalism with the law of 2 August 1806, then implemented with a law of 1 September 1806 and a royal decree of 3 December 1808. In the Kingdom of Sicily the abolishing law was issued by the Sicilian Parliament on 10 August 1812. In Piedmont feudalism ceased by virtue of

1802-598: A quarter of the farmland in France and provided most of the income of the large landowners. The majority refused to pay and in 1793 the obligation was cancelled. Thus the peasants got their land free, and also no longer paid the tithe to the church. In the Kingdom of France , following the French Revolution, feudalism was abolished with a decree of 11 August 1789 by the Constituent Assembly ,

1908-427: A separate fief about the middle of the 10th century when William III, duke of Aquitaine , gave it to one of his vassals named Boso , who took the title of count . In the 12th century it passed to the family of Lusignan , sometimes also counts of Angoulême , until the death of the childless Count Hugh in 1303, when it was seized by King Philip IV . In 1316 it was made an appanage for his youngest son Charles and

2014-573: A set of reciprocal legal and military obligations of the warrior nobility based on the key concepts of lords, vassals, and fiefs. In broad terms a lord was a noble who held land, a vassal was a person granted possession of the land by the lord, and the land was known as a fief. In exchange for the use of the fief and protection by the lord, the vassal provided some sort of service to the lord. There were many varieties of feudal land tenure , consisting of military and non-military service. The obligations and corresponding rights between lord and vassal concerning

2120-523: A system, wealth derived from agriculture, which was arranged not according to market forces but on the basis of customary labour services owed by serfs to landowning nobles. Heinrich Brunner , in his The Equestrian Service and the Beginnings of the Feudal System (1887), maintained that Charles Martel laid the foundation for feudalism during the 8th century. Brunner believed Martel to be

2226-403: Is appointed by the king (from 802), the appointment settles on the heirs of a strong count (Sunifred) and the appointment becomes a formality, until the position is declared hereditary (897) and then the count declares independence (by Borrell II in 985). At each stage the de facto situation precedes the de jure assertion, which merely regularizes an existing fact of life. This is feudalism in

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2332-505: Is feudalism?", 1944; translated in English as Feudalism ). His classic definition of feudalism is widely accepted today among medieval scholars, though questioned both by those who view the concept in wider terms and by those who find insufficient uniformity in noble exchanges to support such a model. Although Georges Duby was never formally a student in the circle of scholars around Marc Bloch and Lucien Febvre , that came to be known as

2438-571: Is now a part of Årjäng Municipality . In the Middle Ages the area was called Nordmarkerna and was a part of Dalsland and not of Värmland. The name of the Anglo-Saxon kingdom in the midlands of England was Mercia . The name "Mercia" comes from the Old English for "boundary folk", and the traditional interpretation was that the kingdom originated along the frontier between the Welsh and

2544-475: Is often referred to as a feudal society , echoing Bloch's usage. Outside its European context, the concept of feudalism can be extended to analogous social structures in other regions, most often in discussions of feudal Japan under the shoguns , and sometimes in discussions of the Zagwe dynasty in medieval Ethiopia , which had some feudal characteristics (sometimes called "semifeudal"). Some have taken

2650-565: Is that early forms of 'fief' include feo , feu , feuz , feuum and others, the plurality of forms strongly suggesting origins from a loanword . The first use of these terms is in Languedoc , one of the least Germanic areas of Europe and bordering Al-Andalus (Muslim Spain). Further, the earliest use of feuum (as a replacement for beneficium ) can be dated to 899, the same year a Muslim base at Fraxinetum ( La Garde-Freinet ) in Provence

2756-536: The Führerprinzip . In 1974, the American historian Elizabeth A. R. Brown rejected the label feudalism as an anachronism that imparts a false sense of uniformity to the concept. Having noted the current use of many, often contradictory, definitions of feudalism , she argued that the word is only a construct with no basis in medieval reality, an invention of modern historians read back "tyrannically" into

2862-660: The Annales school , Duby was an exponent of the Annaliste tradition. In a published version of his 1952 doctoral thesis entitled La société aux XIe et XIIe siècles dans la région mâconnaise ( Society in the 11th and 12th centuries in the Mâconnais region ), and working from the extensive documentary sources surviving from the Burgundian monastery of Cluny , as well as the dioceses of Mâcon and Dijon , Duby excavated

2968-763: The Inca Empire , in the pre-Columbian era , as 'tributary' societies . In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, J. Horace Round and Frederic William Maitland , both historians of medieval Britain, arrived at different conclusions about the character of Anglo-Saxon English society before the Norman Conquest in 1066. Round argued that the Normans had brought feudalism with them to England, while Maitland contended that its fundamentals were already in place in Britain before 1066. The debate continues today, but

3074-525: The Julian March because of its positioning and as an act of defiance against the hated Austro-Hungarian empire. Marche were repeated on a miniature level, fringing many of the small territorial states of pre- Risorgimento Italy with a ring of smaller dependencies on their borders, which represent territorial marche on a small scale. A map of the Duchy of Mantua in 1702 (Braudel 1984, fig 26) reveals

3180-510: The Old English word mearc and Frankish marka , as well as Old Norse mǫrk meaning "borderland, forest", and derived from merki "boundary, sign", denoting a borderland between two centres of power. In Old English, "mark" meant "boundary" or "sign of a boundary", and the meaning only later evolved to encompass "sign" in general, "impression" and "trace". The Anglo-Saxon kingdom of Mercia took its name from West Saxon mearc "marches", which in this instance referred explicitly to

3286-694: The Sponheimer Count Siegfried. The centre of the march was Siegfried's castle of villa Stilevrida (Stillfried in present-day Angern an der March ). According to Koch (1986, 133), the Hungarian march disappeared with Siegfried's death in 1065. Documents only name him with the title marchio (margrave) between 1045 and 1048, however; thereafter he is only titled comes (count) in the Puster Valley , which he may have received as compensation for losing his march. The Hungarian march

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3392-724: The Taifas of Zaragoza , Toledo , and Badajoz . Denmark means "the march of the Danes ". In Norse , "mark" meant "borderlands" and "forest"; in present-day Norwegian and Swedish it has acquired the meaning "ground", while in Danish it has come to mean "field" or "grassland". Markland was the Norse name of an area in North America discovered by Norwegian Vikings . The forests surrounding Norwegian cities are called "Marka" –

3498-458: The gyepű was not controlled by a Marquess. The Gyepű was a strip of land that was specially fortified or made impassable, while gyepűelve was the mostly uninhabited or sparsely inhabited land beyond it. The gyepűelve is much more comparable to modern buffer zones than traditional European marches. Portions of the gyepű were usually guarded by tribes who had joined the Hungarian nation and were granted special rights for their services at

3604-647: The territorial state . This form of statehood, identified with the Holy Roman Empire , is described as the most complete form of medieval rule, completing conventional feudal structure of lordship and vassalage with the personal association among the nobility. But the applicability of this concept to cases outside of the Holy Roman Empire has been questioned, as by Susan Reynolds. The concept has also been questioned and superseded in German historiography because of its bias and reductionism towards legitimating

3710-457: The "narrow, technical, legal sense of the word." A broader definition, as described in Marc Bloch 's Feudal Society (1939), includes not only the obligations of the warrior nobility but the obligations of all three estates of the realm : the nobility, the clergy , and those who lived off their labour, most directly the peasantry , which was bound by a system of manorialism . This order

3816-459: The 10th century it was common to value land in monetary terms but to pay for it with objects of equivalent value, such as arms, clothing, horses or food. This was known as feos , a term that took on the general meaning of paying for something in lieu of money. This meaning was then applied to land itself, in which land was used to pay for fealty, such as to a vassal. Thus the old word feos meaning movable property would have changed to feus , meaning

3922-679: The 16th-century basis or incorporate what, in a Marxist view, must surely be superficial or irrelevant features from it. Even when one restricts oneself to Europe and to feudalism in its narrow sense it is extremely doubtful whether feudo-vassalic institutions formed a coherent bundle of institutions or concepts that were structurally separate from other institutions and concepts of the time. The term feudal has also been applied to non-Western societies, in which institutions and attitudes similar to those of medieval Europe are perceived to have prevailed (see Examples of feudalism ). Japan has been extensively studied in this regard. Karl Friday notes that in

4028-602: The 17th century. From 1470 until the Revolution the province was under the jurisdiction of the parlement of Paris. Several communes of France are named similarly: The Germanic tribes that Romans called Marcomanni , who battled the Romans in the 1st and 2nd centuries, were simply the "men of the borderlands". Marches were territorial organisations created as borderlands in the Carolingian Empire and had

4134-712: The 1850s. Slavery in Romania was abolished in 1856. Russia finally abolished serfdom in 1861. More recently in Scotland, on 28 November 2004, the Abolition of Feudal Tenure etc. (Scotland) Act 2000 entered into full force putting an end to what was left of the Scottish feudal system. The last feudal regime, that of the island of Sark , was abolished in December 2008, when the first democratic elections were held for

4240-515: The 21st century historians of Japan rarely invoke feudalism; instead of looking at similarities, specialists attempting comparative analysis concentrate on fundamental differences. Ultimately, critics say, the many ways the term feudalism has been used have deprived it of specific meaning, leading some historians and political theorists to reject it as a useful concept for understanding society. Historian Richard Abels notes that "Western civilization and world civilization textbooks now shy away from

4346-462: The 9th and 10th centuries receded and gave way to a new feudal order wherein independent aristocratic knights wielded power over peasant communities through strong-arm tactics and threats of violence. In 1939, the Austrian historian Theodor Mayer subordinated the feudal state as secondary to his concept of a Personenverbandsstaat (personal interdependency state), understanding it in contrast to

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4452-506: The 9th century, in addition to the County of Barcelona , included Cerdanya , Girona and Urgell . Communications were arduous, and the power centre was far away. Primitive feudal entities developed, self-sufficient and agrarian, each ruled by a small hereditary military elite. The sequence in the County of Barcelona exhibits a pattern that emerges similarly in marches everywhere: the count

4558-710: The Anglo-Saxon invaders, although P. Hunter Blair has argued an alternative interpretation that they emerged along the frontier between the Kingdom of Northumbria and the inhabitants of the River Trent valley. Latinizing the Anglo-Saxon term mearc , the border areas between England and Wales were collectively known as the Welsh Marches ( marchia Wallia ), while the native Welsh lands to the west were considered Wales Proper ( pura Wallia ). The Norman lords in

4664-589: The Enlightenment wrote about feudalism to denigrate the antiquated system of the Ancien Régime , or French monarchy. This was the Age of Enlightenment , when writers valued reason and the Middle Ages were viewed as the " Dark Ages ". Enlightenment authors generally mocked and ridiculed anything from the "Dark Ages" including feudalism, projecting its negative characteristics on the current French monarchy as

4770-517: The French Revolution, on just one night of 4 August 1789, France abolished the long-lasting remnants of the feudal order. It announced, "The National Assembly abolishes the feudal system entirely." Lefebvre explains: Without debate the Assembly enthusiastically adopted equality of taxation and redemption of all manorial rights except for those involving personal servitude—which were to be abolished without indemnification. Other proposals followed with

4876-670: The Hungarian king Samuel Aba was forced to sign a peace treaty whereby he gave up the land between the Leitha and Fischa rivers with a line from the Fischa delta to Strachotín in Moravia representing the new border. Henry created a new march in this territory for the eldest son of the Babenberg Margrave Adalbert of Austria . When Liutpold died within days of his confirmation at Ingelheim , Henry replaced him with

4982-563: The Kingdom of Hungary and was controlled by a Count or Countess. In addition to the Carolingian Marca Hispanica , Iberia was home to several marches set up by the native states. The future kingdoms of Portugal and Castile were founded as marcher counties intended to protect the Kingdom of León from the Cordoban Emirate , to the south and east respectively. Likewise, Córdoba set up its own marches as

5088-458: The Latin of the Frankish laws. One theory about the origin of fehu was proposed by Johan Hendrik Caspar Kern in 1870, being supported by, amongst others, William Stubbs and Marc Bloch . Kern derived the word from a putative Frankish term *fehu-ôd , in which *fehu means "cattle" and -ôd means "goods", implying "a movable object of value". Bloch explains that by the beginning of

5194-616: The Pious ventured beyond the province of Septimania and eventually took Barcelona from the Moorish emir in 801. Thus he established a foothold in the borderland between the Franks and the Moors. The Carolingian "Hispanic Marches" ( Marca Hispanica ) became a buffer zone ruled by a number of feudal lords, among them the count of Barcelona . It had its own outlying territories, each ruled by

5300-569: The Welsh Marches were to become the new Marcher Lords . The title Earl of March is at least two distinct feudal titles : one in the northern marches, as an alternative title for the Earl of Dunbar (c. 1290 in the Peerage of Scotland ); and one, that was held by the family of Mortimer (1328 in the Peerage of England ), in the west Welsh Marches . The Scottish Marches is a term for

5406-679: The Western European societies commonly described as feudal. The word feudal comes from the medieval Latin feudālis , the adjectival form of feudum 'fee, feud', first attested in a charter of Charles the Fat in 884, which is related to Old French fé, fié, Provençal feo, feu, fieu, and Italian fio . The ultimate origin of feudālis is unclear. It may come from a Germanic word, perhaps fehu or *fehôd , but these words are not attested in this meaning in Germanic sources, or even in

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5512-580: The aspects of life were centred on "lordship", and so we can speak usefully of a feudal church structure, a feudal courtly (and anti-courtly) literature, and a feudal economy. In contradistinction to Bloch, the Belgian historian François Louis Ganshof defined feudalism from a narrow legal and military perspective, arguing that feudal relationships existed only within the medieval nobility itself. Ganshof articulated this concept in Qu'est-ce que la féodalité? ("What

5618-440: The authority and powers held by feudal lords , overlords , and nobles , and preferred the idea of autocratic rule where a king and one royal court held almost all the power. Feudal nobles regardless of ethnicity generally thought of themselves as arbiters of a politically free system, so this often puzzled them before the fall of most feudal laws. Most of the military aspects of feudalism effectively ended by about 1500. This

5724-514: The border regions on both sides of the border between England and Scotland. From the Norman conquest of England until the reign of King James VI of Scotland , who also became King James I of England , border clashes were common and the monarchs of both countries relied on Marcher Lords to defend the frontier areas known as the Marches. They were hand-picked for their suitability for the challenges

5830-613: The borders, such as the Székelys , Pechenegs and Cumans . A ban on settlement north of Niš by the Byzantine Empire in the twelfth century helped to establish uninhabited marchland between the empire's territory and Hungary. The Hungarian gyepű originates from the Turkish yapi meaning palisade . During the 17th and 18th centuries these borderlands were called Markland in the area of Transylvania that bordered with

5936-437: The church itself held power over the land with its own precarias . The most commonly utilized precarias was the gifting of land to the church, done for various spiritual and legal purposes. Although Charles Martel did indeed utilize precaria for his own purposes, and even drove some of the bishops out of the church and placed his own laymen in their seats, Fouracre discounts Martel's role in creating political change, that it

6042-416: The commanderies formed the front lines between the major states , however, their military strength and strategic importance were typically much greater than the counties'. Over time, however, the commanderies were eventually developed into regular provinces and then discontinued entirely during the Tang dynasty reforms. The European concept of marches applies just as well to the fief of Matsumae clan on

6148-405: The complex social and economic relationships among the individuals and institutions of the Mâconnais region and charted a profound shift in the social structures of medieval society around the year 1000. He argued that in early 11th century, governing institutions—particularly comital courts established under the Carolingian monarchy—that had represented public justice and order in Burgundy during

6254-444: The death of its author Thomas Madox , in 1727. In 1771, in his book The History of Manchester , John Whitaker first introduced the word "feudalism" and the notion of the feudal pyramid. Another theory by Alauddin Samarrai suggests an Arabic origin, from fuyū (the plural of fay , which literally means "the returned", and was used especially for 'land that has been conquered from enemies that did not fight'). Samarrai's theory

6360-402: The early ninth century, Charlemagne issued his new kind of land grant, the aprisio , which redisposed land belonging to the Imperial fisc in deserted areas, and included special rights and immunities that resulted in a range of independence of action. Historians interpret the aprisio both as the basis of feudalism and in economic and military terms as a mechanism to entice settlers to

6466-424: The edicts of 7 March, and 19 July 1797 issued by Charles Emmanuel IV , although in the Kingdom of Sardinia , specifically on the island of Sardinia , feudalism was abolished only with an edict of 5 August 1848. In the Kingdom of Lombardy–Venetia , feudalism was abolished with the law of 5 December 1861 n.º 342 were all feudal bonds abolished. The system lingered on in parts of Central and Eastern Europe as late as

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6572-439: The election of a local parliament and the appointment of a government. The "revolution" is a consequence of the juridical intervention of the European Parliament , which declared the local constitutional system as contrary to human rights , and, following a series of legal battles, imposed parliamentary democracy . The phrase "feudal society" as defined by Marc Bloch offers a wider definition than Ganshof's and includes within

6678-507: The exact opposite: landed property. Archibald Ross Lewis proposes that the origin of 'fief' is not feudum (or feodum ), but rather foderum , the earliest attested use being in Vita Hludovici (840) by Astronomus. In that text is a passage about Louis the Pious that says annona militaris quas vulgo foderum vocant , which can be translated as "Louis forbade that military provender (which they popularly call "fodder") be furnished." Initially in medieval Latin European documents,

6784-403: The feudal structure not only the warrior aristocracy bound by vassalage, but also the peasantry bound by manorialism, and the estates of the Church. Thus the feudal order embraces society from top to bottom, though the "powerful and well-differentiated social group of the urban classes" came to occupy a distinct position to some extent outside the classic feudal hierarchy. The idea of feudalism

6890-509: The feudalism analogy further, seeing feudalism (or traces of it) in places as diverse as Spring and Autumn period China, ancient Egypt , the Parthian Empire , India until the Mughal dynasty and the Antebellum South and Jim Crow laws in the American South . The term feudalism has also been applied—often pejoratively—to non-Western societies where institutions and attitudes similar to those in medieval Europe are perceived to prevail. Some historians and political theorists believe that

6996-401: The fief form the basis of the feudal relationship. Before a lord could grant land (a fief ) to someone, he had to make that person a vassal. This was done at a formal and symbolic ceremony called a commendation ceremony , which was composed of the two-part act of homage and oath of fealty . During homage, the lord and vassal entered into a contract in which the vassal promised to fight for

7102-461: The highly profitable rights of justice, etc. (what Georges Duby called collectively the " seigneurie banale " ). Power in this period became more personal. This "fragmentation of powers" was not, however, systematic throughout France, and in certain counties (such as Flanders , Normandy , Anjou , Toulouse ), counts were able to maintain control of their lands into the 12th century or later. Thus, in some regions (like Normandy and Flanders ),

7208-520: The historical record. Supporters of Brown have suggested that the term should be expunged from history textbooks and lectures on medieval history entirely. In Fiefs and Vassals: The Medieval Evidence Reinterpreted (1994), Susan Reynolds expanded upon Brown's original thesis. Although some contemporaries questioned Reynolds's methodology, other historians have supported it and her argument. Reynolds argues: Too many models of feudalism used for comparisons, even by Marxists, are still either constructed on

7314-402: The holding of land in exchange for service or labour. The classic definition, by François Louis Ganshof (1944), describes a set of reciprocal legal and military obligations of the warrior nobility and revolved around the key concepts of lords , vassals , and fiefs . A broader definition, as described by Marc Bloch (1939), includes not only the obligations of the warrior nobility but

7420-535: The independent, though socially and economically dependent arc of small territories from the principality of Castiglione in the northwest across the south to the duchy of Mirandola southeast of Mantua : the lords of Bozolo , Sabioneta , Dosolo , Guastalla , the count of Novellare . In medieval Hungary the system of gyepű and gyepűelve , effective until the mid-13th century, can be considered as marches even though in its organisation it shows major differences from Western European feudal marches. For one thing,

7526-451: The larger landscape. Some counts aspired to the characteristically Frankish (Germanic) title " Margrave of the Hispanic March", a "margrave" being a graf ("count") of the march. The early history of Andorra provides a fairly typical career of another such march county, the only modern survivor in the Pyrenees of the Hispanic Marches. The province of France called Marche ( Occitan : la Marcha ), sometimes Marche Limousine ,

7632-476: The late 19th century, when the Ainu came under Japanese control, and Ezo was renamed Hokkaidō, and annexed to Japan. Feudalism Feudalism , also known as the feudal system , was a combination of legal, economic, military, cultural, and political customs that flourished in medieval Europe from the 9th to 15th centuries. Broadly defined, it was a way of structuring society around relationships derived from

7738-416: The lord at his command, whilst the lord agreed to protect the vassal from external forces. Fealty comes from the Latin fidelitas and denotes the fidelity owed by a vassal to his feudal lord. "Fealty" also refers to an oath that more explicitly reinforces the commitments of the vassal made during homage; such an oath follows homage. Once the commendation ceremony was complete, the lord and vassal were in

7844-482: The lord for criminal offences, including capital punishment in some cases. Concerning the king's feudal court, such deliberation could include the question of declaring war. These are examples of feudalism ; depending on the period of time and location in Europe, feudal customs and practices varied. In its origin, the feudal grant of land had been seen in terms of a personal bond between lord and vassal, but with time and

7950-604: The marches were given the power to terminate indictments. In later years, wardens of the Irish marches took Irish tenants. Marquis , marchese and margrave ( Markgraf ) all had their origins in feudal lords who held trusted positions in the borderlands. The English title was a foreign importation from France, tested out tentatively in 1385 by Richard II , but not naturalized until the mid-15th century, and now more often spelled " marquess ". The specific subdivisions of Armenia are each called marz, մարզ (pl. "marzer, մարզեր"),

8056-510: The marches. For example, the forests surrounding Oslo are called Nordmarka , Østmarka and Vestmarka  – i.e. the northern, eastern and western marches. In Norway, there are – or have been – the counties: In Finland, mark occurs in the following placenames in Satakunta : In Värmland in Sweden , Nordmark Hundred was the frontier area near the border to Norway. Almost all of it

8162-474: The middle of the 18th century, as a result of works such as Montesquieu 's De L'Esprit des Lois (1748; published in English as The Spirit of Law ), and Henri de Boulainvilliers 's Histoire des anciens Parlements de France (1737; published in English as An Historical Account of the Ancient Parliaments of France or States-General of the Kingdom , 1739). In the 18th century, writers of

8268-409: The name of his earldom for several reasons: Welsh marches referred to several counties, whereby the title signified superiority compared to usual single county-based earldoms. Mercia was an ancient kingdom. His wife's ancestors had been Counts of La Marche and Angouleme in France. In Ireland , a hybrid system of marches existed which was condemned as barbaric at the time. The Irish marches constituted

8374-415: The noun feudalism was in use by the end of the 18th century, paralleling the French féodalité . According to a classic definition by François Louis Ganshof (1944), feudalism describes a set of reciprocal legal and military obligations of the warrior nobility that revolved around the key concepts of lords , vassals and fiefs , though Ganshof himself noted that his treatment was only related to

8480-456: The obligations of all three estates of the realm : the nobility, the clergy , and the peasantry , all of whom were bound by a system of manorialism ; this is sometimes referred to as a "feudal society". Although it is derived from the Latin word feodum or feudum (fief), which was used during the Medieval period, the term feudalism and the system it describes were not conceived of as

8586-782: The oppression of feudal subjects with a holistic integration of political and economic life of the sort lacking under industrial capitalism. He also took it as a paradigm for understanding the power-relationships between capitalists and wage-labourers in his own time: "in pre-capitalist systems it was obvious that most people did not control their own destiny—under feudalism, for instance, serfs had to work for their lords. Capitalism seems different because people are in theory free to work for themselves or for others as they choose. Yet most workers have as little control over their lives as feudal serfs." Some later Marxist theorists (e.g. Eric Wolf ) have applied this label to include non-European societies, grouping feudalism together with imperial China and

8692-400: The order coming before capitalism . For Marx, what defined feudalism was the power of the ruling class (the aristocracy ) in their control of arable land, leading to a class society based upon the exploitation of the peasants who farm these lands, typically under serfdom and principally by means of labour, produce and money rents. He deemed feudalism a 'democracy of unfreedom', juxtaposing

8798-496: The quota of knights required by the king or a money payment in substitution). In the 20th century, two outstanding historians offered still more widely differing perspectives. The French historian Marc Bloch , arguably the most influential 20th-century medieval historian, approached feudalism not so much from a legal and military point of view but from a sociological one, presenting in Feudal Society (1939; English 1961)

8904-462: The responsibilities presented. Patrick Dunbar, 8th Earl of Dunbar , a descendant of the Earls of Northumbria was recognized in the end of the 13th century to use the name March as his earldom in Scotland, otherwise known as Dunbar, Lothian, and Northumbrian border. Roger Mortimer, 1st Earl of March , Regent of England together with Isabella of France during the minority of her son, Edward III ,

9010-412: The same period or later: Counties and duchies began to break down into smaller holdings as castellans and lesser seigneurs took control of local lands, and (as comital families had done before them) lesser lords usurped/privatized a wide range of prerogatives and rights of the state, including travel dues, market dues, fees for using woodlands, obligations, use the lord's mill and, most importantly,

9116-434: The same success: the equality of legal punishment, admission of all to public office, abolition of venality in office, conversion of the tithe into payments subject to redemption, freedom of worship, prohibition of plural holding of benefices ... Privileges of provinces and towns were offered as a last sacrifice. Originally the peasants were supposed to pay for the release of seigneurial dues; these dues affected more than

9222-568: The southern tip of Hokkaidō which was at Japan's northern border with the Ainu people of Hokkaidō , known as Ezo at the time. In 1590, this land was granted to the Kakizaki clan, who took the name Matsumae from then on. The Lords of Matsumae, as they are sometimes called, were exempt from owing rice to the shōgun in tribute, and from the sankin-kōtai system established by Tokugawa Ieyasu , under which most lords ( daimyōs ) had to spend half

9328-465: The term feudalism has been deprived of specific meaning by the many ways it has been used, leading them to reject it as a useful concept for understanding society. The applicability of the term feudalism has also been questioned in the context of some Central and Eastern European countries, such as Poland and Lithuania, with scholars observing that the medieval political and economic structure of those countries bears some, but not all, resemblances to

9434-464: The territory between English and Irish-dominated lands, which appeared as soon as the English did and were called by King John to be fortified. By the 14th century, they had become defined as the land between The Pale and the rest of Ireland. Local Anglo-Irish and Gaelic chieftains who acted as powerful spokespeople were recognised by the Crown and given a degree of independence. Uniquely, the keepers of

9540-489: The territory came to encompass the social, political, judicial, and economic spheres. These acquired powers significantly diminished unitary power in these empires. However, once the infrastructure to maintain unitary power was re-established—as with the European monarchies—feudalism began to yield to this new power structure and eventually disappeared. The classic François Louis Ganshof version of feudalism describes

9646-715: The territory's position on the Anglo-Saxon frontier with the Romano-British to the west. During the Frankish Carolingian dynasty , usage of the word spread throughout Europe. The name "Denmark" preserves the Old Norse cognates merki ("boundary") mǫrk ("wood", "forest") up to the present. Following the Anschluss , the Nazi German government revived the old name "Ostmark" for Austria. In

9752-518: The transformation of fiefs into hereditary holdings, the nature of the system came to be seen as a form of "politics of land" (an expression used by the historian Marc Bloch ). The 11th century in France saw what has been called by historians a " feudal revolution " or "mutation" and a "fragmentation of powers" (Bloch) that was unlike the development of feudalism in England or Italy or in Germany in

9858-440: The vassal could have other obligations to his lord, such as attendance at his court, whether manorial , baronial, both termed court baron , or at the king's court. It could also involve the vassal providing "counsel", so that if the lord faced a major decision he would summon all his vassals and hold a council. At the level of the manor this might be a fairly mundane matter of agricultural policy, but also included sentencing by

9964-472: The vassal/feudal system was an effective tool for ducal and comital control, linking vassals to their lords; but in other regions, the system led to significant confusion, all the more so as vassals could and frequently did pledge themselves to two or more lords. In response to this, the idea of a "liege lord" was developed (where the obligations to one lord are regarded as superior) in the 12th century. Around this time, rich, "middle-class" commoners chafed at

10070-407: The west by Poitou. It embraced the greater part of the modern département of Creuse , a considerable part of the northern Haute-Vienne , and a fragment of Indre , up to Saint-Benoît-du-Sault . Its area was about 1,900 square miles (4,900 km ) its capital was Charroux and later Guéret , and among its other principal towns were Dorat , Bellac and Confolens . Marche first appeared as

10176-667: The year at court (in the capital of Edo ). By guarding the border, rather than conquering or colonizing Ezo, the Matsumae, in essence, made the majority of the island an Ainu reservation. This also meant that Ezo, and the Kurile Islands beyond, were left essentially open to Russian colonization. However, the Russians never did colonize Ezo, and the marches were officially eliminated during the Meiji Restoration in

10282-603: Was a usurper who had deposed, and allegedly arranged the murder of, King Edward II. He was created an earl in September 1328 at the height of his de facto rule. His wife was Joan de Geneville, 2nd Baroness Geneville , whose mother, Jeanne of Lusignan was one of the heiresses of the French Counts of La Marche and Angouleme . His family, Mortimer Lords of Wigmore , had been border lords and leaders of defenders of Welsh marches for centuries. He selected March as

10388-513: Was afterwards once more recovered by the Church and governed by papal legates as part of the Papal States . The Marche became part of the Kingdom of Italy in 1860. After Italian unification in the 1860s, Austria-Hungary still controlled territory Italian nationalists still claimed as part of Italy . One of these territories was Austrian Littoral , which Italian nationalists began to call

10494-686: Was called the "new march" because it was a "new" eastern march — a sort of extension of Austria. During the reign of Adalbert's younger son Margrave Ernest of Austria , the new march was indeed united to the old march, Austria proper. Marches Marches gave rise to the titles marquess (masculine) or marchioness (feminine). The word "march" derives ultimately from a Proto-Indo-European root * mereg- , meaning "edge, boundary". The root * mereg- produced Latin margo ("margin"), Old Irish mruig ("borderland"), Welsh bro ("region, border, valley") and Persian and Armenian marz ("borderland"). The Proto-Germanic *marko gave rise to

10600-641: Was established. It is possible, Samarrai says, that French scribes, writing in Latin, attempted to transliterate the Arabic word fuyū (the plural of fay ), which was used by the Muslim invaders and occupiers at the time, resulting in a plurality of forms – feo, feu, feuz, feuum and others—from which eventually feudum derived. Samarrai, however, also advises to handle this theory with care, as Medieval and Early Modern Muslim scribes often used etymologically "fanciful roots" to support outlandish claims that something

10706-501: Was first used in 17th-century French legal treatises (1614) and translated into English legal treatises as an adjective, such as "feodal government". In the 18th century, Adam Smith , seeking to describe economic systems, effectively coined the forms "feudal government" and "feudal system" in his book The Wealth of Nations (1776). The phrase "feudal system" appeared in 1736, in Baronia Anglica , published nine years after

10812-429: Was of Arabian or Muslim origin. Feudalism, in its various forms, usually emerged as a result of the decentralization of an empire: such as in the Carolingian Empire in the 9th century AD, which lacked the bureaucratic infrastructure necessary to support cavalry without allocating land to these mounted troops. Mounted soldiers began to secure a system of hereditary rule over their allocated land and their power over

10918-521: Was originally a small border district between the Duchy of Aquitaine and the domains of the Frankish kings in central France, partly of Limousin and partly of Poitou . Its area was increased during the 13th century and remained the same until the French Revolution . Marche was bounded on the north by Berry , on the east by Bourbonnais and Auvergne ; on the south by Limousin itself and on

11024-575: Was partly since the military shifted from armies consisting of the nobility to professional fighters thus reducing the nobility's claim on power, but also because the Black Death reduced the nobility's hold over the lower classes. Vestiges of the feudal system hung on in France until the French Revolution of the 1790s. Even when the original feudal relationships had disappeared, there were many institutional remnants of feudalism left in place. Historian Georges Lefebvre explains how at an early stage of

11130-417: Was simply a military move in order to have control in the region by hording land through tenancies, and expelling the bishops who he did not agree with, but it did not specifically create feudalism.   Karl Marx also uses the term in the 19th century in his analysis of society's economic and political development, describing feudalism (or more usually feudal society or the feudal mode of production ) as

11236-491: Was unknown and the system it describes was not conceived of as a formal political system by the people living in the medieval period. This section describes the history of the idea of feudalism, how the concept originated among scholars and thinkers, how it changed over time, and modern debates about its use. The concept of a feudal state or period, in the sense of either a regime or a period dominated by lords who possess financial or social power and prestige, became widely held in

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