Feudal Society: Post-Charlemagne Western Europe

with this topic of feudal society we are going to be looking at the history of western europe of this western civilization following the end of charlemagne&#39;s reign as king of the franks and what we are going to see is that western civilization or western europe goes into a crisis really in the 9th and 10th centuries because of a series of different groups of raiders that begin to cause trouble most importantly the vikings and in fact this year you&#39;re looking at a dragon head recovered from one of the viking ships that was excavated in the early 20th century but uh the point here will be that um primarily because of viking raiding activity but also some other groups there was a sense that europe was under siege and it it led to we will see the rise of something that this is called feudalism and that what we&#39;re going to do in this first video is look both at rating activities such as that by the vikings as well as what this feudalism was and how it was in direct response to this crisis in the next video as we continue looking at this feudal society we&#39;re going to explore a little bit more thoroughly what saudi was like given the prominence of the feudal contract we&#39;re also going to look in the second video related to this topic at how the rise of towns for the first time in a very long time in europe scrambled the uh political and social and economic scene in europe after the year one thousand so we are really just looking at the uh evolution of this western civilization following the death of charlemagne um as i already pointed out this here is a dragon head recovered from a viking ship that was buried as part of a funeral um and then was actually excavated the ship and everything inside of it there were no motors of these dragon heads that were found inside the ship um which as it turns out the vikings you will see if you&#39;re not already familiar with them were pretty fierce warriors and but they were also pagan non-christian at the time of their raiding activity and so all that is an important part of the story that we&#39;re going to get to in just a moment here uh before we do though i did want to uh point out that although charlemagne&#39;s empire as he was king of the franks you&#39;ll remember but as such he managed to create this large empire that was bigger than anything western europe would see for another thousand years on the other hand i also pointed out in our last video that charlemagne&#39;s control over different parts of the empire was pretty loose because it was dependent on his personal relationships uh with various other elites and he often had to travel around the empire to continually uh remind by these important people what they owed him and maybe even use violence against them to compel him back into loyalty and submission but the the incredible energy and ability of that man charlemagne of course went with him when he died and in 8 14 and after his death his empire was initially inherited by a son who wasn&#39;t really that capable or competent and then his grandchildren after his son&#39;s death um came to sort of square off each against each other for control of this vast kingdom and the grandchildren of charlemagne by a treaty agreement decided to uh they divided the empire charlemagne in three different pieces and you can see those divisions indicated here those divisions created in 843 and the western kingdom of what had been charlemagne&#39;s empire would be the nucleus of france as we go farther into the middle ages the eastern kingdom that was carved out of charlemagne&#39;s empire would one day become the nucleus for what we would call germany although that history is really really long in development but essentially it&#39;s the core of what becomes uh germany in many later centuries uh many centuries later i didn&#39;t mean to say and then there&#39;s this middle part the central kingdom here which i sometimes jokingly call dead meat because it becomes sort of a contested area between the eastern and western kingdoms really what this means though is that there is already even before the arrival of viking raiding activity there is already a fragmentation political fragmentation starting to occur and decentralization starting to occur as a result and so uh the unity such as it was that was established under charlemagne begins to um well maybe disintegrates a little bit too harsh of a word at least before the vikings arrive um but clearly begins to degrade let&#39;s put it that way and then on top of that division of charlemagne&#39;s empire and the growing sort of political complexity of western europe then on top of that in the 9th century you do get the arrival of these raiders that i&#39;ve already mentioned a few times here most importantly the vikings but there are actually also some other groups although they&#39;re not as key to the story i&#39;m going to tell in this video and the next for now but you can see on the map here these green arrows indicate rating activity undertaken by muslim groups right from their bases in mainly north africa you might remember from before that muslim conquerors were able to conquer the entirety of north africa and spain as well but uh you can also see these red lines indicate a group known as the magyars they became the nucleus of the hungarian people in eastern central eastern europe in this era but they caused a bit of problems as well for as you can see here central european regions but most importantly and most again important for the story i&#39;m going to tell you now we have this rating activity carried out by viking people and you can see the homeland of the vikings is indicated on the map here in this area of northern europe called scandinavia and the vikings well as you might be able to tell they got around they not only engage in radioactivity along the french what we now call the german coastlines as well as in the british isles they even managed to make their way into the mediterranean the south of france you can see here some of these viking raiders actually managed to move into what is now russia move all the way down the volga river and all the way down even into the black sea region at constantinople and if that isn&#39;t impressive enough the vikings also managed to discover iceland and settle that as well as greenland and apparently even in the 11th century uh north america itself they seemed to have established a colony there that did not survive so as you can probably tell the vikings not only got around they apparently knew what they were doing on the water in their boats they knew what they were doing at sea and the presence of these raiders from the sea caused a great deal of havoc as you probably have heard before for different places in particularly in western europe and so you can imagine that not only therefore has the empire of charlemagne broken up and there&#39;s not only fighting there for it that&#39;s encouraging between the different pieces but now on top of that you&#39;ve got this pressure that is being applied by this radiant activity it&#39;s not entirely clear why we get the rise of radiant activity outside of scandinavia at such a large level in the 9th century but there have been some very reasonable uh suggestions there&#39;s it&#39;s probably not really possible to definitively prove one factor or another as being the most important but it does seem likely that overpopulation in scandinavia was a factor of course scandinavia is a northern uh has a more northern climate and it doesn&#39;t support the larger population sizes that you might find farther south some have also pointed out that the kings in scandinavia were beginning in this period to centralize their authority more effectively and that perhaps uh some of this rating activity was a desire to establish a greater amount of independence because actually as you&#39;ll see although viking rating activity did not initially start as a colonization effort it does eventually come to include that the green areas here along scandinavia show the homeland of the vikings they&#39;re actually different groups of viking raiders those who came from this particular this western area scandinavia known as norway uh more characteristically became active in the british isles and in iceland and beyond uh the danes down here from what is now denmark were active in raiding england in particular but also the coast of france and western europe and swedish vikings directed their efforts often to the east like into russia and farther to the southeast down in the black sea region so there were different uh groups of viking raiders and they often moved in different directions from each other but as you can see from the point of view of many europeans it didn&#39;t really matter they just knew that these uh armed warriors were suddenly showing up on their shores and basically stealing stuff and perhaps in the process depending on the situation engaging in quite a bit of violence on the way especially this resistance the vikings were excellent at constructing ships that were quite flexible in that they were not only durable enough to ride the open seas in fact i already mentioned right that vikings discovering iceland and greenland and beyond but these vessels were also shallow enough that they could travel far up the rivers of europe and so if there&#39;s a town if there&#39;s a church if there&#39;s a monastery that&#39;s either built by the sea or by a river and many of them would have been for transportation reasons then they would have been significant targets for this kind of rating activity i&#39;m now explaining i wanted to point out that because of the the value that this western civilization placed in the next life we have seen that the world view of this western civilization was based on ideas like augustine&#39;s where this world doesn&#39;t ultimately matter the next one does well it turns out that since the monks in the monasteries were believed to live that kind of ideal in the best way possible a lot of people wealthy people would have donated land and wealth to monasteries and the church in general but particularly to monasteries over time so often what will happen is you&#39;ll find you know people uh with perhaps large amounts of land the aristocrats mainly if they&#39;re on their deathbed in order to i don&#39;t know so i suppose uh improve their chances at sort of being held in judgment by god and being found worthy uh they might decide to donate a certain amount of land or wealth right to a monastery but what this means is even though the monasteries were pledged to remain poor they actually received collectively a great deal of wealth over time for these kinds of donations in fact eventually we&#39;ll see the church became the biggest landowner in europe but it&#39;s not just land that is donated to these monasteries they also get a lot of like gold and silver plate and so what i&#39;m leading to here is that from the point of view of these viking raiders these monasteries in particular are really easy targets because you know they show up in force usually there could be several you know 40 50 sometimes of these viking raiders in one of these ships they show up you know obviously unannounced uh upper river maybe uh it&#39;s a monastery monasteries by the way were deliberately built in remote areas that was part of their plan to to reject this life this world in any case uh you know and contemplation for the next so you know they land unannounced at a monastery in the middle of nowhere and there&#39;s all this gold and silver plate and there&#39;s no one really there to defend it you just basically got a bunch of i don&#39;t know people with bad haircuts basically uh you know who aren&#39;t trying to fight as soldiers and although there was sometimes resistance particularly when these attacks um became more and more notorious um but you know these armed groups of 40 to 50 viking soldiers were more than capable of handing for the most part any armed resistance like provided by monasteries not to mention even that of very small towns so um that&#39;s why i&#39;m calling them here hit and run attacks because the vikings could land they could plunder and then they would just leave and as you can see that would have made things quite difficult for the greater aristocracy and certainly for the kings of western europe in terms of how to combat this situation this map kind of might look a little weird at first it&#39;s it&#39;s transparent in the sense that the oceans just blend right in the background but hopefully you can make out what we&#39;re looking at here this is europe of course um the mainland here mainly in the gray color uh you can see scandinavia up here and this is the homeland of the viking people uh where vikings came from from these scandinavian areas and the areas in green are areas that experienced viking activity but without any sort of settlement or colonization but you can see that the areas in red and then also orange and yellow did experience more than just rating they also did experience the establishment of first it was normally rating bases but eventually trading bases as well and even permanent settlements so the the typical sort of you know thought that westerners have in historical memory about vikings is they are basically these fierce warriors who showed up and you know plundered and killed and then left and they wreaked all this havoc on western civilization and there is some aspect of truth to that story but it&#39;s much more complicated than that than just that um what what often happened for example is vikings maybe don&#39;t want to have to sail on a large ocean journey you know very frequently in order to engage in rating in one particular season so for example in england&#39;s case maybe what happens is uh a group of armed warriors uh viking warriors they decide to establish uh a rating base in england and the idea was that they could then uh basically winter over at that rating base in england making it a heck of a lot easier you see to engage in their activities when the weather turned uh better warmer than it would otherwise be the only problem with that is it death certainly made radiant activity and say england a lot easier for those viking groups but it also for the first time would have given english rulers a target to attack right you could now fight back a lot more effectively with those kinds of rating bases but but those rating bases were more than just rating bases they many of them became permanent settlements you get actual colonizers from scandinavia arriving in not just england but in a variety of other places for example just since i&#39;m on the british isles the red and yellow colors indicate places where there was viking settlement you can see that areas of ireland as well experienced viking settlement uh iceland certainly and parts of green line experienced the settlement although when the vikings arrived in iceland the only people they found there were a few crazy irish monks who had managed somehow to find their way out to that remote location other than that the place was kind of theirs for the taking not so much the case in that regard with the british isles or with france for that matter normandy we&#39;re going to see here in just a minute uh was colonized settled by norsemen or viking raiders and even though it&#39;s not a major part of our story in this class it&#39;s also true that there was a great deal of viking settlement here in the east and it played a role it appears in the establishment of a more centralized russian state so um this is not just about raiding activity reality is the vikings do also act as colonizers as time goes by they act as merchants you can say actually it&#39;s one of my images i really enjoy just because it&#39;s like the archetypal i think example what a viking should look like you know from the uh point of view of western historical memory he was basically this big warrior just scaring the people scaring the monks maybe around uh but the reality is again that a lot of the vikings who went abroad from scandinavia eventually were not really just warriors that were colonized the merchants in fact in ireland just to take an example of this a lot of the towns in ireland that began to not only get founded but increase in size do so because of viking activity so you could say that to some extent vikings have gotten a bad rap historically from the point of view of western civilization um although having said that i wouldn&#39;t want to neglect the fact that there was certainly raiding activity and there were numerous churches monasteries and towns that had become much more fortified in this period some monasteries literally just picked up shop and moved their location to a place as far away from the water as they could imagine here you see a a a close-up map of that area of northern france where the vikings would settle down eventually and i wanted to draw particular attention to it because um as we will see in a future video it becomes really important for later medieval history this uh norse or viking settlement in normandy um the the settlement that actually occurred in normandy it illustrated that the most effective way normally for dealing with the viking threat was to convert the viking groups to the christian religion and so the way this played out in the case of normandy was the king of that western part of the frankish empire that western frankish king decided that it was in his best interests to offer to viking raiders there the right to settle in normandy but on the basis first of a willingness for those norsemen to or vikings to convert to the christian religion which in fact they did here in fact is a later medieval depiction of this viking name rolo who as per this arrangement i&#39;m describing did in fact agree to convert to christianity and he was therefore given the right by the king the western frankish king to settle in this area of northern france that then became known as normandy and you can see that settlement in normandy and that agreement to settle enormously and convert christianity occurred in the year 911 normandy is a a place name that refers to the fact that norsemen or northmen settled there right that&#39;s another name for the vikings they&#39;re from the north and that they can call them northmen they became known as norsemen and so the normans are these northmen who settled in normandy and of course normandy becomes a very important political region of france since 9 11 since that year um in fact the viking rollo not only became christian he was then recognized as being the duke of normandy and we&#39;re going to talk about a later duke of normandy you&#39;ll see in a future video is pretty important in 1066 but more on that at a later time what&#39;s interesting though is that once the once rollo and his friends settle down in what becomes known as normandy they essentially became assimilated fully assimilated really within western civilization like even to the point where over time they began to speak the french language and therefore not speaking in other words any longer their own northern germanic language if if you&#39;re not familiar with this about the vikings they were um germanic groups and but they&#39;re they&#39;re sort of i don&#39;t know how you not dialect maybe but the branch of germanic languages spoken by scandinavian people said to be the northern germanic branch so it&#39;s a little more distant for example from germanic people like the goss than other germanic people in mainland europe central europe would have spoken um the language by the way which brings me to another point actually might be worth making before we proceed here which is that if i can go back to this map for just one moment we saw already here that the empire of charlemagne divided in 843 as it turns out over time the language that people spoke in this western frankish kingdom uh became what we would call medieval french and if you look at that french language that early medieval french language it&#39;s quite clearly an evolution of the latin language right that was spoken there in fact the fact that franks would essentially come to speak uh a derivation of latin over time shows how dense the settlement and control you see of the roman empire had been in gaul for many centuries but by contrast if you go out here to the eastern frankish kingdom the language spoken by the franks there remained fundamentally german and in fact the language that becomes dominant in this region in more modern centuries is what we call the modern german language so it&#39;s really actually in the 9th and 10th centuries where we see the emergence of a medieval form of french an emergence of a medieval form of german but of course now i&#39;m pointing out that scandinavians from up here farther north who speak their own different type of germanic languages some of them settle in normandy which is right here and when they do they become so assimilated that they start to speak french within a relatively short period of time within a few generations and so that means basically what you get in northern france with rollo and his friends eventually what you get out of that are french-speaking vikings in fact as time goes by don&#39;t even really think of them as vikings anymore because or descended from vikings because they become so assimilated in this way so this wasn&#39;t the only place where these kinds of agreements were reached but definitely assimilation like this through usually facilitated by christian conversions was a really key part of how the viking threat was brought to effectively and by the 11th century now that was the long-term development though convergent of christianity and assimilation does work but it&#39;s not like any sort of solution in you know 870 or something like this or the even the early 900s so often it seems what happened where viking writing was especially intense like in france was it forced kings there to decentralize their authority because as i&#39;ve already pointed out these attacks are often occurring at relatively remote locations but they&#39;re hit-and-run attacks they show up uh they hit the place then they&#39;re gone by the time the king even hears that such an attack had taken place it might be weeks or even more later on not to mention the time it would then take as well to send his own soldiers out there to do something about it because there wouldn&#39;t be something to do about it by that point so what the kings of western europe particularly the western frankish king realized is that he would need to decentralize power and authority in his realm in order basically to empower uh local strongmen basically warrior aristocrats so that they would be in a position to respond more locally to this kind to this kind of violence and so what i&#39;m describing here is what leads directly to what is often called broadly just feudalism technically speaking a lot of medieval historians don&#39;t like the term feudalism with an ism on the end of it because it kind of implies that it&#39;s this totally agreed upon system that you know people in all the different corners of europe agreed on precisely and and the way it worked in say france is exactly the way it works in germany it was never quite so regular organized so sometimes medieval started shy away from feudalism but um i think it&#39;s it it&#39;s a term that has entered such common you know parlance that i think it&#39;s okay to use it myself as long as it&#39;s qualified and explained but to be a little more precise about it here what feudalism really is describing are feudal contracts that are established in this 9th century between the at first the kings and their greater nobility but then also feudal contracts established between those greater nobility and the lesser nobility feudal contracts were essentially legal arrangements by which the superior in the contract say the king for example would grant land and other powers as well to one of his nobility and then as part of that feudal contract the inferior would then owe not just loyalty but also as we will see military service so i&#39;m going to explain this in a little more detail because it&#39;s actually really important for medieval history here though you can see a king establishing a feudal contract with a nobleman and what you&#39;re looking at here is the ceremony of homage homage was this practice where the inferior in the fetal contract in this image the guy on the left there would put his hands inside that of the superior of the fetal contract in this case the king to the right and it&#39;s sort of a way of symbolically pledging that this knowledgemen you see is going to remain loyal and dutiful to the superior in the feudal contract that guy in the middle there is just noting that kind of legally basically acting as a notary that this agreement is in fact being established let me give you a little more detail about the fetal contract like i said it&#39;s actually really important for understanding how many people were europe worked the superior in this feudal contract i&#39;m telling you about was called the lord and the inferior in the contract was called the vassal the first stage of this feudal development evolution is typically the king looks to make many of the powerful strongmen or nobility in his realm into vassals so fred in the first sort of stage you could say the lord is going to be the king and the vassals are going to be the most powerful of the nobility but then the vassals to the king the direct vassals to the king will turn around and establish the same kind of contract with nobility who aren&#39;t quite as wealthy or powerful as they are so what that can lead to is a situation where maybe a powerful nobleman is not only a vassal in this case to the king but also a lord to the lesser nobility who become his vassals so it might sound a little confusing i&#39;m going to show you a few slides that hopefully will make it more clear if it does sound confusing to you so far what i&#39;ve got here on this slide is just a little bit more information about what each side owed the other in the feudal contract and let&#39;s talk first about what the lord owed the vassal so the lord the superior in the feudal contract would owe a number of things to the vassal most importantly he owes justice to the vassal which means that he doesn&#39;t have the right to mistreat the vessel he asked that he has to act toward that vassal and what is regarded as a legal and traditional way can&#39;t abuse the vessel um but the lord also guarantees protection for the vassal meaning that you know let&#39;s say somebody&#39;s a nobleman but suddenly a few other nobility are ganging up on him and threatening to take over his lands well in that case the vassal can turn to the lord and ask for military protection so this is actually a real um perk you could say that the vassal gets out of agreeing to these fetal contracts is the protection it can come with but the most important thing that the lord would provide to the vassal and certainly the thing that the vassal most desires out of the arrangement was a land grant and the land grant was called a thief it&#39;s one of these jargon terms for the middle ages that well a lot of medieval terms seem to be jargon but this is one of the ones that&#39;s most important the thief the fifa is usually a grain of land sometimes it can just be like uh like a horse and armor but normally it&#39;s a grain of land and certainly when a king is establishing a field contract with an a very powerful nobleman at that level it&#39;s always going to be the fifa grant of land when that land or that thief is granted the vassal the idea is that the vassal can now utilize that land in order to be a more effective uh i guess you would say agent of the king in that region of a kingdom so the the grant of land empowers the vassal it gives the it gives the vassal you know control the food and the resources produced on that land on the vassal by the way as you&#39;ll see he doesn&#39;t actually grow the food on the land or harvest the resources that&#39;s something that common people do that&#39;s something we want to worry about the next video but the vassal is expected once he has that land grant to use the resources in order to provide defense for that area so this is what i was talking about when i said that the kings like especially the king of the western franks was forced in the face of these sustained viking raids to decentralize authority in other words to establish vassals would then be in a position where they can better defend locally against those hit and run attacks if you look though at the other side of the slide and you see what the vassal owed in return to the lord you can see of course the vassal doesn&#39;t just get stuff the vassal has to provide things in return in fact each side of the feudal contract has obligations at the top there is something that was very important for the lord in these feudal contracts which is to say the vassal had to agree to provide military service at least once a year and typically that service when it was provided would last about a month or 40 days or so see the lords did not at this point have a large standing army that would be way beyond the financial means of kings in the early middle ages instead they would just raise their armies basically when they needed them and if a king has established these feudal contracts with all the various powerful mobility within the realm then they are all personally personally they are all required as vassals to give him military service for about 40 days a year so the king therefore for about 40 days out of the year can put together a pretty impressive size army this is by the way why the powerful vassals of the king need to have their own feudal contracts because they need to support other basically knights who will have military service owed to them so that when the great vassals of the king show up for military service they bring with them their own vassals as well right this is how medieval kings could at least once a year raise an army that for the most powerful kings would typically be somewhere maybe as high as eight to ten thousand soldiers i mean really small course by modern standards but from medieval for the medieval period that&#39;s a pretty large-sized army you can see that the vassal also had a pledge undyne loyalty to the lord that was what we saw being promised in that homage ceremony on the previous slide and theoretically if a vassal violated the fetal contract by being disloyal to the lord then theoretically the feudal contract was null and void and the lord had the right to take the land grant back but often what would happen is if a vassal really is being disloyal to the lord they don&#39;t want to give the land back and in that case the lord has to actually use force to get it back and they may or may not be able to accomplish it depending on the situation theoretically by the way if the lord doesn&#39;t provide justice toward the vassal or doesn&#39;t give the protection that the vassal is owed then the vassal also has the right to void the arrangement but theoretically the grant of land returns to the lord and you can see there lastly that the vassal was also typically in a feudal contract required to once in a while when called upon by the lord to give that lord advice and that would typically mean that the vassal actually has to physically travel to where the lord lives you know to the lord&#39;s castle and and there participate in a council or giving advice to the lord that&#39;s a really interesting feature of the field contract i&#39;m not going to dwell on it too much right now but we&#39;re going to come back to that in later lectures it becomes really important for european politics as time goes by so here i&#39;ve got uh a slider to trying in my own way to illustrate uh what kind of political hierarchy i guess you could say is created uh by this by this proliferation of feudal contracts that first began in france but then began to spread into other countries in europe as well at the top in theory anyway of these arrangements i&#39;ve been describing would be the king so these are like supposed to be kings of two different realms in europe in the let&#39;s say 9th century and so each of these arrows represents a feudal contract so let&#39;s say over here this guy the king would say is the king of the western francs he is going to establish feudal contracts with each of the most powerful of the nobility in the realm but then those greater nobility are going to turn around and create their own fetal contracts in other words get their own vassals because they need to do it because typically they&#39;re going to get a lan a land grant from the king that&#39;s really really big it&#39;s not something that can practically work just with their own people and so it&#39;s in their interest to farm someone that land out to other vassals who then owe them military service but you can see that one thing i&#39;ve tried it well there&#39;s two things actually about my little uh chart here that i would draw your attention to one of them is notice i write down here 95 of society would have been commoners and they don&#39;t participate in the system at all you would never find just a random like commoner or farmer or someone like that participating in a fetal contract it&#39;s absurd because the the nobility that participated in feudal contracts did so because they were fighting men and they could provide this military service i described you to the king and as we&#39;ll see in the next video in this era your average farmer isn&#39;t gonna be able to just you know take a weapon and be effective in battle it doesn&#39;t work that way in the middle ages so uh this therefore this feudal hierarchy i&#39;m sort of describing to you here does not involve the commoners that excludes 95 of society but another point about this chart i wanted to make too is that the it&#39;s not just the uh what you might call the secular people the non-religious leaders who are being engaged in feudal contracts powerful figures in the church also would have agreed a field contract say with the king and these powerful religious figures also would have agreed to feudal contracts with their own uh vassals so that&#39;s why i put in here a bishop right it&#39;s very very common to see bishops being bound to a king by a feudal contract here on the left side i put at the bottom of this chart here and abbott and abbott was the leader of a monastery and so it might seem weird though that churchmen would be engaged in feudal contracts because that would it seems require them to provide military service for about 40 days out of the year in actual practice most church men wouldn&#39;t actually personally do that kind of fighting but they would be required to provide knights and warriors who would do that fighting to fulfill the military part of the contract having said that there are some examples of churchmen who actually do personally provide military service and i&#39;ve always thought there&#39;s nothing more medieval than the idea of a bishop out there in a battlefield bashing someone&#39;s brains out with a mace right that isn&#39;t medieval europe for you i don&#39;t know what is okay that&#39;s obviously kind of a joke of my part but it&#39;s kind of true um one other chart i was going to show you again something i made up is uh i wanted to point out how although in theory the system of feudal contracts could seemingly work to bring more social political order to europe in this age of um viking rating in reality what happens over time is it gets really really messy and complicated because the kings well well let&#39;s just look at this chart and i&#39;ll show you what i mean let&#39;s look at for example this guy right here this noble right here this nobleman as you could see here has a feudal contract with two different kings which totally can happen so let&#39;s say this guy&#39;s got a land grant from this king he&#39;s got a land craft from this king because of the feudal contract he&#39;s pledged undyne loyalty to this guy but also undyne loyalty to this guy so now the question is what does that noble do if these two kings go to war with each other right and they each call on that nobleman to perform military service clearly he&#39;s got to make a choice this can get really complicated i mean typically i think that no one&#39;s going to try to basically gamble and guess to go with the guy he thinks is going to win but whoever he fights again is going to declare the fetal contract null and void and feel that they have a just cause to take the land grant the thief back from that nobleman you can see another sort of situation that created this nobleman here he doesn&#39;t have a direct feudal contract to either king but he does have a feudal contract with two different nobility so let&#39;s say these two kings go to war they call him the feudal contracts of these greater nobility to each fight on their side and they show up but then these two noblemen each call on this guy right to show up in the army to march off the battle so you get the same situation again so it can be um fairly confusing and another uh point i might make here is if one of the greater nobility have enough feudal contracts like say let&#39;s go back to this nobleman here again as you can see he&#39;s got a field contract with two different kings well what if the land grant that this nobleman gets from this king over here on the left side what if that adds so significantly to his wealth and his power that it makes him as strong as this other king what if this nobleman has three or four different feudal contracts all of which give him a land grant that make him more powerful than the king might you not in that situation have you know a circumstance where the nobleman is so powerful he starts to thwart the will of the king maybe even be disloyal so the king claims that the feudal contract is now null and void which theoretically it is but it&#39;s not going to really mean much unless the king is strong enough to take the original thief back for the nobleman maybe he&#39;s not anymore so this is one of the risks that kings run when they begin to engage the greater nobility of fetal contracts is it sets up a system basically where over time the nobility made through a variety of different contracts gained more land and more power than the king himself possesses the only reason why kings in the 9th century would have agreed to this kind of feudal contract would be because they felt they had no choice right because of the rating activity that i described before let me also point out before we finish with this that the feudal contract that a king established with the nobleman or bishop or whatever it is would typically be inherited by the eldest son of that vassal so if a nobleman dies then that let&#39;s say the eldest son inherits the fetal contract as well as the thief the land grant but a lot of this as we have seen is already a typical germanic society a lot of this is based on personal relationships here maybe this nobleman really had a lot of appreciation as for this king because he actually knew him and fought with him right over many years there&#39;s an actual personal affinity there for this guy but what if he dies the sun takes over and you know maybe the sun grows up he&#39;s 20 years old he takes over he&#39;s got the uh he&#39;s now the vassal but he doesn&#39;t know this king from adam in fact he doesn&#39;t like the king so often there&#39;s a sketchy situation that develops when a vassal dies and maybe another person takes over the feudal contract what if that individual proves not to be loyalty or loyal or reliable so there&#39;s all kinds of problems that could come out of this feudal contract that bound the king to the greater nobility and in turn bound the greater nobility of lesser nobility maybe one last point i&#39;ll make about this is that since the feudal contract became a defining feature of political relationships in the 9th century in western like say in france in western europe well the king does not have a fetal contract with this lesser known woman down here so there is no personal tie between this guy down here and the king at the top and that might also run the risk that these lesser nobility are not as inclined to see toward loyalty to the monarchy and yet it becomes again a really dominant feature of the european political scene the area where the feudal contract first originated is in this area of france where where the viking arena was particularly intense but it gradually spread into germany here labeled the holy roman empire let&#39;s not worry about that right now it&#39;s essentially that eastern kingdom um as it evolved over time after charlemagne&#39;s empire broke up um but the feudal contract got him uh it was brought into northern italy it was eventually brought into england so the field contract does begin to spread through a lot of different places in europe and what we&#39;re going to do in the next video is look a little bit more closely at what that fetal contract means uh for society and we&#39;re going to also pay more attention in the next video to what the situation is with commoners in this period

with this topic of feudal society we are going to be looking at the history of western europe of this western civilization following the end of charlemagne&amp;#39;s reign as king of the franks and what we are going to see is that western civilization or western europe goes into a crisis really in the 9th and 10th centuries because of a series of different groups of raiders that begin to cause trouble most importantly the vikings and in fact this year you&amp;#39;re looking at a dragon head recovered from one of the viking ships that was excavated in the early 20th century but uh the point here will be that um primarily because of viking raiding activity but also some other groups there was a sense that europe was under siege and it it led to we will see the rise of something that this is called feudalism and that what we&amp;#39;re going to do in this first video is look both at rating activities such as that by the vikings as well as what this feudalism was and how it was in direct response to this crisis in the next video as we continue looking at this feudal society we&amp;#39;re going to explore a little bit more thoroughly what saudi was like given the prominence of the feudal contract we&amp;#39;re also going to look in the second video related to this topic at how the rise of towns for the first time in a very long time in europe scrambled the uh political and social and economic scene in europe after the year one thousand so we are really just looking at the uh evolution of this western civilization following the death of charlemagne um as i already pointed out this here is a dragon head recovered from a viking ship that was buried as part of a funeral um and then was actually excavated the ship and everything inside of it there were no motors of these dragon heads that were found inside the ship um which as it turns out the vikings you will see if you&amp;#39;re not already familiar with them were pretty fierce warriors and but they were also pagan non-christian at the time of their raiding activity and so all that is an important part of the story that we&amp;#39;re going to get to in just a moment here uh before we do though i did want to uh point out that although charlemagne&amp;#39;s empire as he was king of the franks you&amp;#39;ll remember but as such he managed to create this large empire that was bigger than anything western europe would see for another thousand years on the other hand i also pointed out in our last video that charlemagne&amp;#39;s control over different parts of the empire was pretty loose because it was dependent on his personal relationships uh with various other elites and he often had to travel around the empire to continually uh remind by these important people what they owed him and maybe even use violence against them to compel him back into loyalty and submission but the the incredible energy and ability of that man charlemagne of course went with him when he died and in 8 14 and after his death his empire was initially inherited by a son who wasn&amp;#39;t really that capable or competent and then his grandchildren after his son&amp;#39;s death um came to sort of square off each against each other for control of this vast kingdom and the grandchildren of charlemagne by a treaty agreement decided to uh they divided the empire charlemagne in three different pieces and you can see those divisions indicated here those divisions created in 843 and the western kingdom of what had been charlemagne&amp;#39;s empire would be the nucleus of france as we go farther into the middle ages the eastern kingdom that was carved out of charlemagne&amp;#39;s empire would one day become the nucleus for what we would call germany although that history is really really long in development but essentially it&amp;#39;s the core of what becomes uh germany in many later centuries uh many centuries later i didn&amp;#39;t mean to say and then there&amp;#39;s this middle part the central kingdom here which i sometimes jokingly call dead meat because it becomes sort of a contested area between the eastern and western kingdoms really what this means though is that there is already even before the arrival of viking raiding activity there is already a fragmentation political fragmentation starting to occur and decentralization starting to occur as a result and so uh the unity such as it was that was established under charlemagne begins to um well maybe disintegrates a little bit too harsh of a word at least before the vikings arrive um but clearly begins to degrade let&amp;#39;s put it that way and then on top of that division of charlemagne&amp;#39;s empire and the growing sort of political complexity of western europe then on top of that in the 9th century you do get the arrival of these raiders that i&amp;#39;ve already mentioned a few times here most importantly the vikings but there are actually also some other groups although they&amp;#39;re not as key to the story i&amp;#39;m going to tell in this video and the next for now but you can see on the map here these green arrows indicate rating activity undertaken by muslim groups right from their bases in mainly north africa you might remember from before that muslim conquerors were able to conquer the entirety of north africa and spain as well but uh you can also see these red lines indicate a group known as the magyars they became the nucleus of the hungarian people in eastern central eastern europe in this era but they caused a bit of problems as well for as you can see here central european regions but most importantly and most again important for the story i&amp;#39;m going to tell you now we have this rating activity carried out by viking people and you can see the homeland of the vikings is indicated on the map here in this area of northern europe called scandinavia and the vikings well as you might be able to tell they got around they not only engage in radioactivity along the french what we now call the german coastlines as well as in the british isles they even managed to make their way into the mediterranean the south of france you can see here some of these viking raiders actually managed to move into what is now russia move all the way down the volga river and all the way down even into the black sea region at constantinople and if that isn&amp;#39;t impressive enough the vikings also managed to discover iceland and settle that as well as greenland and apparently even in the 11th century uh north america itself they seemed to have established a colony there that did not survive so as you can probably tell the vikings not only got around they apparently knew what they were doing on the water in their boats they knew what they were doing at sea and the presence of these raiders from the sea caused a great deal of havoc as you probably have heard before for different places in particularly in western europe and so you can imagine that not only therefore has the empire of charlemagne broken up and there&amp;#39;s not only fighting there for it that&amp;#39;s encouraging between the different pieces but now on top of that you&amp;#39;ve got this pressure that is being applied by this radiant activity it&amp;#39;s not entirely clear why we get the rise of radiant activity outside of scandinavia at such a large level in the 9th century but there have been some very reasonable uh suggestions there&amp;#39;s it&amp;#39;s probably not really possible to definitively prove one factor or another as being the most important but it does seem likely that overpopulation in scandinavia was a factor of course scandinavia is a northern uh has a more northern climate and it doesn&amp;#39;t support the larger population sizes that you might find farther south some have also pointed out that the kings in scandinavia were beginning in this period to centralize their authority more effectively and that perhaps uh some of this rating activity was a desire to establish a greater amount of independence because actually as you&amp;#39;ll see although viking rating activity did not initially start as a colonization effort it does eventually come to include that the green areas here along scandinavia show the homeland of the vikings they&amp;#39;re actually different groups of viking raiders those who came from this particular this western area scandinavia known as norway uh more characteristically became active in the british isles and in iceland and beyond uh the danes down here from what is now denmark were active in raiding england in particular but also the coast of france and western europe and swedish vikings directed their efforts often to the east like into russia and farther to the southeast down in the black sea region so there were different uh groups of viking raiders and they often moved in different directions from each other but as you can see from the point of view of many europeans it didn&amp;#39;t really matter they just knew that these uh armed warriors were suddenly showing up on their shores and basically stealing stuff and perhaps in the process depending on the situation engaging in quite a bit of violence on the way especially this resistance the vikings were excellent at constructing ships that were quite flexible in that they were not only durable enough to ride the open seas in fact i already mentioned right that vikings discovering iceland and greenland and beyond but these vessels were also shallow enough that they could travel far up the rivers of europe and so if there&amp;#39;s a town if there&amp;#39;s a church if there&amp;#39;s a monastery that&amp;#39;s either built by the sea or by a river and many of them would have been for transportation reasons then they would have been significant targets for this kind of rating activity i&amp;#39;m now explaining i wanted to point out that because of the the value that this western civilization placed in the next life we have seen that the world view of this western civilization was based on ideas like augustine&amp;#39;s where this world doesn&amp;#39;t ultimately matter the next one does well it turns out that since the monks in the monasteries were believed to live that kind of ideal in the best way possible a lot of people wealthy people would have donated land and wealth to monasteries and the church in general but particularly to monasteries over time so often what will happen is you&amp;#39;ll find you know people uh with perhaps large amounts of land the aristocrats mainly if they&amp;#39;re on their deathbed in order to i don&amp;#39;t know so i suppose uh improve their chances at sort of being held in judgment by god and being found worthy uh they might decide to donate a certain amount of land or wealth right to a monastery but what this means is even though the monasteries were pledged to remain poor they actually received collectively a great deal of wealth over time for these kinds of donations in fact eventually we&amp;#39;ll see the church became the biggest landowner in europe but it&amp;#39;s not just land that is donated to these monasteries they also get a lot of like gold and silver plate and so what i&amp;#39;m leading to here is that from the point of view of these viking raiders these monasteries in particular are really easy targets because you know they show up in force usually there could be several you know 40 50 sometimes of these viking raiders in one of these ships they show up you know obviously unannounced uh upper river maybe uh it&amp;#39;s a monastery monasteries by the way were deliberately built in remote areas that was part of their plan to to reject this life this world in any case uh you know and contemplation for the next so you know they land unannounced at a monastery in the middle of nowhere and there&amp;#39;s all this gold and silver plate and there&amp;#39;s no one really there to defend it you just basically got a bunch of i don&amp;#39;t know people with bad haircuts basically uh you know who aren&amp;#39;t trying to fight as soldiers and although there was sometimes resistance particularly when these attacks um became more and more notorious um but you know these armed groups of 40 to 50 viking soldiers were more than capable of handing for the most part any armed resistance like provided by monasteries not to mention even that of very small towns so um that&amp;#39;s why i&amp;#39;m calling them here hit and run attacks because the vikings could land they could plunder and then they would just leave and as you can see that would have made things quite difficult for the greater aristocracy and certainly for the kings of western europe in terms of how to combat this situation this map kind of might look a little weird at first it&amp;#39;s it&amp;#39;s transparent in the sense that the oceans just blend right in the background but hopefully you can make out what we&amp;#39;re looking at here this is europe of course um the mainland here mainly in the gray color uh you can see scandinavia up here and this is the homeland of the viking people uh where vikings came from from these scandinavian areas and the areas in green are areas that experienced viking activity but without any sort of settlement or colonization but you can see that the areas in red and then also orange and yellow did experience more than just rating they also did experience the establishment of first it was normally rating bases but eventually trading bases as well and even permanent settlements so the the typical sort of you know thought that westerners have in historical memory about vikings is they are basically these fierce warriors who showed up and you know plundered and killed and then left and they wreaked all this havoc on western civilization and there is some aspect of truth to that story but it&amp;#39;s much more complicated than that than just that um what what often happened for example is vikings maybe don&amp;#39;t want to have to sail on a large ocean journey you know very frequently in order to engage in rating in one particular season so for example in england&amp;#39;s case maybe what happens is uh a group of armed warriors uh viking warriors they decide to establish uh a rating base in england and the idea was that they could then uh basically winter over at that rating base in england making it a heck of a lot easier you see to engage in their activities when the weather turned uh better warmer than it would otherwise be the only problem with that is it death certainly made radiant activity and say england a lot easier for those viking groups but it also for the first time would have given english rulers a target to attack right you could now fight back a lot more effectively with those kinds of rating bases but but those rating bases were more than just rating bases they many of them became permanent settlements you get actual colonizers from scandinavia arriving in not just england but in a variety of other places for example just since i&amp;#39;m on the british isles the red and yellow colors indicate places where there was viking settlement you can see that areas of ireland as well experienced viking settlement uh iceland certainly and parts of green line experienced the settlement although when the vikings arrived in iceland the only people they found there were a few crazy irish monks who had managed somehow to find their way out to that remote location other than that the place was kind of theirs for the taking not so much the case in that regard with the british isles or with france for that matter normandy we&amp;#39;re going to see here in just a minute uh was colonized settled by norsemen or viking raiders and even though it&amp;#39;s not a major part of our story in this class it&amp;#39;s also true that there was a great deal of viking settlement here in the east and it played a role it appears in the establishment of a more centralized russian state so um this is not just about raiding activity reality is the vikings do also act as colonizers as time goes by they act as merchants you can say actually it&amp;#39;s one of my images i really enjoy just because it&amp;#39;s like the archetypal i think example what a viking should look like you know from the uh point of view of western historical memory he was basically this big warrior just scaring the people scaring the monks maybe around uh but the reality is again that a lot of the vikings who went abroad from scandinavia eventually were not really just warriors that were colonized the merchants in fact in ireland just to take an example of this a lot of the towns in ireland that began to not only get founded but increase in size do so because of viking activity so you could say that to some extent vikings have gotten a bad rap historically from the point of view of western civilization um although having said that i wouldn&amp;#39;t want to neglect the fact that there was certainly raiding activity and there were numerous churches monasteries and towns that had become much more fortified in this period some monasteries literally just picked up shop and moved their location to a place as far away from the water as they could imagine here you see a a a close-up map of that area of northern france where the vikings would settle down eventually and i wanted to draw particular attention to it because um as we will see in a future video it becomes really important for later medieval history this uh norse or viking settlement in normandy um the the settlement that actually occurred in normandy it illustrated that the most effective way normally for dealing with the viking threat was to convert the viking groups to the christian religion and so the way this played out in the case of normandy was the king of that western part of the frankish empire that western frankish king decided that it was in his best interests to offer to viking raiders there the right to settle in normandy but on the basis first of a willingness for those norsemen to or vikings to convert to the christian religion which in fact they did here in fact is a later medieval depiction of this viking name rolo who as per this arrangement i&amp;#39;m describing did in fact agree to convert to christianity and he was therefore given the right by the king the western frankish king to settle in this area of northern france that then became known as normandy and you can see that settlement in normandy and that agreement to settle enormously and convert christianity occurred in the year 911 normandy is a a place name that refers to the fact that norsemen or northmen settled there right that&amp;#39;s another name for the vikings they&amp;#39;re from the north and that they can call them northmen they became known as norsemen and so the normans are these northmen who settled in normandy and of course normandy becomes a very important political region of france since 9 11 since that year um in fact the viking rollo not only became christian he was then recognized as being the duke of normandy and we&amp;#39;re going to talk about a later duke of normandy you&amp;#39;ll see in a future video is pretty important in 1066 but more on that at a later time what&amp;#39;s interesting though is that once the once rollo and his friends settle down in what becomes known as normandy they essentially became assimilated fully assimilated really within western civilization like even to the point where over time they began to speak the french language and therefore not speaking in other words any longer their own northern germanic language if if you&amp;#39;re not familiar with this about the vikings they were um germanic groups and but they&amp;#39;re they&amp;#39;re sort of i don&amp;#39;t know how you not dialect maybe but the branch of germanic languages spoken by scandinavian people said to be the northern germanic branch so it&amp;#39;s a little more distant for example from germanic people like the goss than other germanic people in mainland europe central europe would have spoken um the language by the way which brings me to another point actually might be worth making before we proceed here which is that if i can go back to this map for just one moment we saw already here that the empire of charlemagne divided in 843 as it turns out over time the language that people spoke in this western frankish kingdom uh became what we would call medieval french and if you look at that french language that early medieval french language it&amp;#39;s quite clearly an evolution of the latin language right that was spoken there in fact the fact that franks would essentially come to speak uh a derivation of latin over time shows how dense the settlement and control you see of the roman empire had been in gaul for many centuries but by contrast if you go out here to the eastern frankish kingdom the language spoken by the franks there remained fundamentally german and in fact the language that becomes dominant in this region in more modern centuries is what we call the modern german language so it&amp;#39;s really actually in the 9th and 10th centuries where we see the emergence of a medieval form of french an emergence of a medieval form of german but of course now i&amp;#39;m pointing out that scandinavians from up here farther north who speak their own different type of germanic languages some of them settle in normandy which is right here and when they do they become so assimilated that they start to speak french within a relatively short period of time within a few generations and so that means basically what you get in northern france with rollo and his friends eventually what you get out of that are french-speaking vikings in fact as time goes by don&amp;#39;t even really think of them as vikings anymore because or descended from vikings because they become so assimilated in this way so this wasn&amp;#39;t the only place where these kinds of agreements were reached but definitely assimilation like this through usually facilitated by christian conversions was a really key part of how the viking threat was brought to effectively and by the 11th century now that was the long-term development though convergent of christianity and assimilation does work but it&amp;#39;s not like any sort of solution in you know 870 or something like this or the even the early 900s so often it seems what happened where viking writing was especially intense like in france was it forced kings there to decentralize their authority because as i&amp;#39;ve already pointed out these attacks are often occurring at relatively remote locations but they&amp;#39;re hit-and-run attacks they show up uh they hit the place then they&amp;#39;re gone by the time the king even hears that such an attack had taken place it might be weeks or even more later on not to mention the time it would then take as well to send his own soldiers out there to do something about it because there wouldn&amp;#39;t be something to do about it by that point so what the kings of western europe particularly the western frankish king realized is that he would need to decentralize power and authority in his realm in order basically to empower uh local strongmen basically warrior aristocrats so that they would be in a position to respond more locally to this kind to this kind of violence and so what i&amp;#39;m describing here is what leads directly to what is often called broadly just feudalism technically speaking a lot of medieval historians don&amp;#39;t like the term feudalism with an ism on the end of it because it kind of implies that it&amp;#39;s this totally agreed upon system that you know people in all the different corners of europe agreed on precisely and and the way it worked in say france is exactly the way it works in germany it was never quite so regular organized so sometimes medieval started shy away from feudalism but um i think it&amp;#39;s it it&amp;#39;s a term that has entered such common you know parlance that i think it&amp;#39;s okay to use it myself as long as it&amp;#39;s qualified and explained but to be a little more precise about it here what feudalism really is describing are feudal contracts that are established in this 9th century between the at first the kings and their greater nobility but then also feudal contracts established between those greater nobility and the lesser nobility feudal contracts were essentially legal arrangements by which the superior in the contract say the king for example would grant land and other powers as well to one of his nobility and then as part of that feudal contract the inferior would then owe not just loyalty but also as we will see military service so i&amp;#39;m going to explain this in a little more detail because it&amp;#39;s actually really important for medieval history here though you can see a king establishing a feudal contract with a nobleman and what you&amp;#39;re looking at here is the ceremony of homage homage was this practice where the inferior in the fetal contract in this image the guy on the left there would put his hands inside that of the superior of the fetal contract in this case the king to the right and it&amp;#39;s sort of a way of symbolically pledging that this knowledgemen you see is going to remain loyal and dutiful to the superior in the feudal contract that guy in the middle there is just noting that kind of legally basically acting as a notary that this agreement is in fact being established let me give you a little more detail about the fetal contract like i said it&amp;#39;s actually really important for understanding how many people were europe worked the superior in this feudal contract i&amp;#39;m telling you about was called the lord and the inferior in the contract was called the vassal the first stage of this feudal development evolution is typically the king looks to make many of the powerful strongmen or nobility in his realm into vassals so fred in the first sort of stage you could say the lord is going to be the king and the vassals are going to be the most powerful of the nobility but then the vassals to the king the direct vassals to the king will turn around and establish the same kind of contract with nobility who aren&amp;#39;t quite as wealthy or powerful as they are so what that can lead to is a situation where maybe a powerful nobleman is not only a vassal in this case to the king but also a lord to the lesser nobility who become his vassals so it might sound a little confusing i&amp;#39;m going to show you a few slides that hopefully will make it more clear if it does sound confusing to you so far what i&amp;#39;ve got here on this slide is just a little bit more information about what each side owed the other in the feudal contract and let&amp;#39;s talk first about what the lord owed the vassal so the lord the superior in the feudal contract would owe a number of things to the vassal most importantly he owes justice to the vassal which means that he doesn&amp;#39;t have the right to mistreat the vessel he asked that he has to act toward that vassal and what is regarded as a legal and traditional way can&amp;#39;t abuse the vessel um but the lord also guarantees protection for the vassal meaning that you know let&amp;#39;s say somebody&amp;#39;s a nobleman but suddenly a few other nobility are ganging up on him and threatening to take over his lands well in that case the vassal can turn to the lord and ask for military protection so this is actually a real um perk you could say that the vassal gets out of agreeing to these fetal contracts is the protection it can come with but the most important thing that the lord would provide to the vassal and certainly the thing that the vassal most desires out of the arrangement was a land grant and the land grant was called a thief it&amp;#39;s one of these jargon terms for the middle ages that well a lot of medieval terms seem to be jargon but this is one of the ones that&amp;#39;s most important the thief the fifa is usually a grain of land sometimes it can just be like uh like a horse and armor but normally it&amp;#39;s a grain of land and certainly when a king is establishing a field contract with an a very powerful nobleman at that level it&amp;#39;s always going to be the fifa grant of land when that land or that thief is granted the vassal the idea is that the vassal can now utilize that land in order to be a more effective uh i guess you would say agent of the king in that region of a kingdom so the the grant of land empowers the vassal it gives the it gives the vassal you know control the food and the resources produced on that land on the vassal by the way as you&amp;#39;ll see he doesn&amp;#39;t actually grow the food on the land or harvest the resources that&amp;#39;s something that common people do that&amp;#39;s something we want to worry about the next video but the vassal is expected once he has that land grant to use the resources in order to provide defense for that area so this is what i was talking about when i said that the kings like especially the king of the western franks was forced in the face of these sustained viking raids to decentralize authority in other words to establish vassals would then be in a position where they can better defend locally against those hit and run attacks if you look though at the other side of the slide and you see what the vassal owed in return to the lord you can see of course the vassal doesn&amp;#39;t just get stuff the vassal has to provide things in return in fact each side of the feudal contract has obligations at the top there is something that was very important for the lord in these feudal contracts which is to say the vassal had to agree to provide military service at least once a year and typically that service when it was provided would last about a month or 40 days or so see the lords did not at this point have a large standing army that would be way beyond the financial means of kings in the early middle ages instead they would just raise their armies basically when they needed them and if a king has established these feudal contracts with all the various powerful mobility within the realm then they are all personally personally they are all required as vassals to give him military service for about 40 days a year so the king therefore for about 40 days out of the year can put together a pretty impressive size army this is by the way why the powerful vassals of the king need to have their own feudal contracts because they need to support other basically knights who will have military service owed to them so that when the great vassals of the king show up for military service they bring with them their own vassals as well right this is how medieval kings could at least once a year raise an army that for the most powerful kings would typically be somewhere maybe as high as eight to ten thousand soldiers i mean really small course by modern standards but from medieval for the medieval period that&amp;#39;s a pretty large-sized army you can see that the vassal also had a pledge undyne loyalty to the lord that was what we saw being promised in that homage ceremony on the previous slide and theoretically if a vassal violated the fetal contract by being disloyal to the lord then theoretically the feudal contract was null and void and the lord had the right to take the land grant back but often what would happen is if a vassal really is being disloyal to the lord they don&amp;#39;t want to give the land back and in that case the lord has to actually use force to get it back and they may or may not be able to accomplish it depending on the situation theoretically by the way if the lord doesn&amp;#39;t provide justice toward the vassal or doesn&amp;#39;t give the protection that the vassal is owed then the vassal also has the right to void the arrangement but theoretically the grant of land returns to the lord and you can see there lastly that the vassal was also typically in a feudal contract required to once in a while when called upon by the lord to give that lord advice and that would typically mean that the vassal actually has to physically travel to where the lord lives you know to the lord&amp;#39;s castle and and there participate in a council or giving advice to the lord that&amp;#39;s a really interesting feature of the field contract i&amp;#39;m not going to dwell on it too much right now but we&amp;#39;re going to come back to that in later lectures it becomes really important for european politics as time goes by so here i&amp;#39;ve got uh a slider to trying in my own way to illustrate uh what kind of political hierarchy i guess you could say is created uh by this by this proliferation of feudal contracts that first began in france but then began to spread into other countries in europe as well at the top in theory anyway of these arrangements i&amp;#39;ve been describing would be the king so these are like supposed to be kings of two different realms in europe in the let&amp;#39;s say 9th century and so each of these arrows represents a feudal contract so let&amp;#39;s say over here this guy the king would say is the king of the western francs he is going to establish feudal contracts with each of the most powerful of the nobility in the realm but then those greater nobility are going to turn around and create their own fetal contracts in other words get their own vassals because they need to do it because typically they&amp;#39;re going to get a lan a land grant from the king that&amp;#39;s really really big it&amp;#39;s not something that can practically work just with their own people and so it&amp;#39;s in their interest to farm someone that land out to other vassals who then owe them military service but you can see that one thing i&amp;#39;ve tried it well there&amp;#39;s two things actually about my little uh chart here that i would draw your attention to one of them is notice i write down here 95 of society would have been commoners and they don&amp;#39;t participate in the system at all you would never find just a random like commoner or farmer or someone like that participating in a fetal contract it&amp;#39;s absurd because the the nobility that participated in feudal contracts did so because they were fighting men and they could provide this military service i described you to the king and as we&amp;#39;ll see in the next video in this era your average farmer isn&amp;#39;t gonna be able to just you know take a weapon and be effective in battle it doesn&amp;#39;t work that way in the middle ages so uh this therefore this feudal hierarchy i&amp;#39;m sort of describing to you here does not involve the commoners that excludes 95 of society but another point about this chart i wanted to make too is that the it&amp;#39;s not just the uh what you might call the secular people the non-religious leaders who are being engaged in feudal contracts powerful figures in the church also would have agreed a field contract say with the king and these powerful religious figures also would have agreed to feudal contracts with their own uh vassals so that&amp;#39;s why i put in here a bishop right it&amp;#39;s very very common to see bishops being bound to a king by a feudal contract here on the left side i put at the bottom of this chart here and abbott and abbott was the leader of a monastery and so it might seem weird though that churchmen would be engaged in feudal contracts because that would it seems require them to provide military service for about 40 days out of the year in actual practice most church men wouldn&amp;#39;t actually personally do that kind of fighting but they would be required to provide knights and warriors who would do that fighting to fulfill the military part of the contract having said that there are some examples of churchmen who actually do personally provide military service and i&amp;#39;ve always thought there&amp;#39;s nothing more medieval than the idea of a bishop out there in a battlefield bashing someone&amp;#39;s brains out with a mace right that isn&amp;#39;t medieval europe for you i don&amp;#39;t know what is okay that&amp;#39;s obviously kind of a joke of my part but it&amp;#39;s kind of true um one other chart i was going to show you again something i made up is uh i wanted to point out how although in theory the system of feudal contracts could seemingly work to bring more social political order to europe in this age of um viking rating in reality what happens over time is it gets really really messy and complicated because the kings well well let&amp;#39;s just look at this chart and i&amp;#39;ll show you what i mean let&amp;#39;s look at for example this guy right here this noble right here this nobleman as you could see here has a feudal contract with two different kings which totally can happen so let&amp;#39;s say this guy&amp;#39;s got a land grant from this king he&amp;#39;s got a land craft from this king because of the feudal contract he&amp;#39;s pledged undyne loyalty to this guy but also undyne loyalty to this guy so now the question is what does that noble do if these two kings go to war with each other right and they each call on that nobleman to perform military service clearly he&amp;#39;s got to make a choice this can get really complicated i mean typically i think that no one&amp;#39;s going to try to basically gamble and guess to go with the guy he thinks is going to win but whoever he fights again is going to declare the fetal contract null and void and feel that they have a just cause to take the land grant the thief back from that nobleman you can see another sort of situation that created this nobleman here he doesn&amp;#39;t have a direct feudal contract to either king but he does have a feudal contract with two different nobility so let&amp;#39;s say these two kings go to war they call him the feudal contracts of these greater nobility to each fight on their side and they show up but then these two noblemen each call on this guy right to show up in the army to march off the battle so you get the same situation again so it can be um fairly confusing and another uh point i might make here is if one of the greater nobility have enough feudal contracts like say let&amp;#39;s go back to this nobleman here again as you can see he&amp;#39;s got a field contract with two different kings well what if the land grant that this nobleman gets from this king over here on the left side what if that adds so significantly to his wealth and his power that it makes him as strong as this other king what if this nobleman has three or four different feudal contracts all of which give him a land grant that make him more powerful than the king might you not in that situation have you know a circumstance where the nobleman is so powerful he starts to thwart the will of the king maybe even be disloyal so the king claims that the feudal contract is now null and void which theoretically it is but it&amp;#39;s not going to really mean much unless the king is strong enough to take the original thief back for the nobleman maybe he&amp;#39;s not anymore so this is one of the risks that kings run when they begin to engage the greater nobility of fetal contracts is it sets up a system basically where over time the nobility made through a variety of different contracts gained more land and more power than the king himself possesses the only reason why kings in the 9th century would have agreed to this kind of feudal contract would be because they felt they had no choice right because of the rating activity that i described before let me also point out before we finish with this that the feudal contract that a king established with the nobleman or bishop or whatever it is would typically be inherited by the eldest son of that vassal so if a nobleman dies then that let&amp;#39;s say the eldest son inherits the fetal contract as well as the thief the land grant but a lot of this as we have seen is already a typical germanic society a lot of this is based on personal relationships here maybe this nobleman really had a lot of appreciation as for this king because he actually knew him and fought with him right over many years there&amp;#39;s an actual personal affinity there for this guy but what if he dies the sun takes over and you know maybe the sun grows up he&amp;#39;s 20 years old he takes over he&amp;#39;s got the uh he&amp;#39;s now the vassal but he doesn&amp;#39;t know this king from adam in fact he doesn&amp;#39;t like the king so often there&amp;#39;s a sketchy situation that develops when a vassal dies and maybe another person takes over the feudal contract what if that individual proves not to be loyalty or loyal or reliable so there&amp;#39;s all kinds of problems that could come out of this feudal contract that bound the king to the greater nobility and in turn bound the greater nobility of lesser nobility maybe one last point i&amp;#39;ll make about this is that since the feudal contract became a defining feature of political relationships in the 9th century in western like say in france in western europe well the king does not have a fetal contract with this lesser known woman down here so there is no personal tie between this guy down here and the king at the top and that might also run the risk that these lesser nobility are not as inclined to see toward loyalty to the monarchy and yet it becomes again a really dominant feature of the european political scene the area where the feudal contract first originated is in this area of france where where the viking arena was particularly intense but it gradually spread into germany here labeled the holy roman empire let&amp;#39;s not worry about that right now it&amp;#39;s essentially that eastern kingdom um as it evolved over time after charlemagne&amp;#39;s empire broke up um but the feudal contract got him uh it was brought into northern italy it was eventually brought into england so the field contract does begin to spread through a lot of different places in europe and what we&amp;#39;re going to do in the next video is look a little bit more closely at what that fetal contract means uh for society and we&amp;#39;re going to also pay more attention in the next video to what the situation is with commoners in this period

Transcript for:Feudal Society: Post-Charlemagne Western Europe

Transcript for:
Feudal Society: Post-Charlemagne Western Europe