FROM THE MANUSCRIPTS OF FREDERICK ENGELS

DECAY OF FEUDALISM AND RISE OF NATIONAL STATES

While the savage battles of the reigning feudal nobility filled the Middle Ages with their clamour, the silent work of the oppressed classes undermined the feudal system throughout Western Europe and created conditions in which ever less room was left for the feudal lord. True, the gentry still carried on as of old in the countryside, tormenting their serfs, leading a life of plenty on their sweat, riding down their crops and raping their wives and daughters. But towns and cities had sprung up all about them: in Italy, in Southern France, and along the Rhine they were the old Roman municipalities risen from their ashes; elsewhere, notably in inner Germany, they were newly founded. Sheltered by walls and moats, they were fortresses more formidable than the strongholds of the nobility, because they could only be taken by a large host. Behind the walls and moats, incorporated in guilds and on a small enough scale, developed the crafts of the Middle Ages. The first capital was being accumulated, and gradually there arose the need in commerce with other towns and with the rest of the world, and with it the means to protect that commerce.

In the fifteenth century the townsmen were already more indispensable to society than the feudal nobility. True, agriculture remained the occupation of the bulk of the people, and, thus, the principal branch of production. But the few free peasants who had here and there survived the encroachments of the nobility, were conclusive proof that in agriculture the main thing was not in the indolence and extortions of the nobility, but in the toil of the peasant. Furthermore, the requirements of the nobility itself had also multiplied and changed, so that the towns had become indispensable even to it; were not its only instruments of production, its armour and weapons, obtained in the towns? Domestic fabrics, furnishings and ornaments, Italian silks, Braban-tine lace, northern furs, Arabian perfumes, Levantine fruit and Indian spices—everything, barring soap—was bought by the nobility in towns. A certain world trade had developed; the Italians navigated the Mediterranean and the Atlantic coast up to Flanders, and the Hanseatic towns held sway over the North and Baltic Seas against mounting Dutch and English competition. Land communications were maintained between the northern and southern centres of sea traffic; the roads serving them passed across Germany. While the nobility became ever more superfluous and ever more of an impediment to development, the burghers became a class which embodied the further progress of production and commerce, of education, and of social and political institutions.

All these advances made by production and exchange were, indeed, by present day standards, of a very limited nature. Production was confined exclusively to the guilds, thus retaining its feudal character, and trade to the European seas; it did not extend beyond the Levantine sea ports, where Far Eastern products were bartered. But the guilds, petty and limited though they were, and with them the guildsmen, sufficed in reshaping feudal society, and at least continued in motion, while the nobility stagnated.

Furthermore, the burgherdom had money—a powerful weapon against feudalism. There was scarcely any room for money in a model feudal farm of the early Middle Ages. The lord obtained all he needed from his serfs, either in the form of labour, or as ready produce; the women spun and wove flax and wool, and produced the clothing; the men tilled the fields; the children tended the lord's cattle, and gathered the fruits of the forest, birds' nests and straw; besides, the entire family had still to turn in grain, fruit, eggs, butter, cheese, fowl, domestic animals, and countless other things. Every feudal manor was self-sufficient; even military dues were demanded in kind; commerce and barter were non-existent, and money was superfluous. Europe had fallen to so low a level, it had begun so completely all over again, that money at the time had less of a social than a purely political function: it served to pay taxes, and was principally obtained through highway robbery.

But all that changed. Money again became a common medium of exchange, and its bulk, therefore, multiplied substantially; even the gentry could no longer do without it, and since they had little or nothing to sell, and since highway robberies had also become far from easy, they were compelled to resort to the urban usurer. Long before the new field-pieces shot breaches in the knightly castle walls, these had already been undermined by money; indeed, gunpowder was, so to say, only an executor in the service of money. Money was the great political leveller in the hands of the burgherdom. Wherever personal relations were superceded by money relations, wherever natural duties gave way to money payments, there bourgeois relations took the place of feudal relations. True, the old brutal natural economy in the countryside mostly remained in force; but entire districts had already appeared where, as in Holland, Belgium and the lower Rhine, the peasants paid their lords' money instead of corvees and gavel, where lord and vassal had already made the first and decisive step towards changing into landowner and tenant, and where, consequently, the political institutions of feudalism were losing their social basis in the countryside as well.

To what extent feudalism was already undermined and inwardly torn by money in the late fifteenth century, is mirrored strikingly in the thirst for gold that reigned at the time in Western Europe. The Portuguese sought gold along the African coast, in India, and in the entire Far East; gold was the magic word that drove the Spanish across the Atlantic Ocean to America; gold was the first thing the white man asked about when he set foot on newly discovered soil. And this craving for distant voyages and adventures in quest of gold, however much it materialized at first in feudal and semi-feudal forms, was at root already incompatible with feudalism, whose groundwork rested upon agriculture, and whose conquests were essentially directed at acquiring land. Moreover, seafaring was a distinctly bourgeois occupation, which has left its anti-feudal imprint also upon all the modern navies.

In the 15th century feudalism was thus in complete decay throughout Western Europe. Towns with anti-feudal interests, with their own laws and an armed burgherdom, had wedged themselves into feudal regions everywhere, and had made the feudal lords dependent upon them partly socially, through money, and here and there even politically. Even in such localities where particularly favourable conditions had contributed to the progress of agriculture, the old feudal bonds had begun to slacken under the effect of money; only in newly conquered lands, such as Germany's possessions east of the Elbe, or in otherwise backward areas remote from the trade routes, the nobility thrived on as of old. Everywhere—in town and village—there were more and more people who above all demanded a stop to the perpetual and senseless wars, to the lordly feuds that perpetuated domestic war even when an alien foe was in the land, and to that state of uninterrupted, senseless devastation 'that had lasted throughout the Middle Ages. Still too weak to assert their will, these elements found strong support on the topmost rung of the entire feudal system—royal power itself. And that is where the study of social conditions leads us to conditions of state, and where we pass from economical spheres to politics.

New nationalities gradually developed from the confusion of peoples of the earliest Middle Ages, a process under which the victor is known to have been assimilated by the defeated in most of the former Roman provinces, i.e., the Germanic lord by the peasant and townsman. The modern nationalities are thus also a product of the oppressed classes. How fusion took place here and division there, is shown graphically in Menke's map of central Lorraine.(1) One has only to follow the dividing line between Romance and German names to discover that it coincides, in the main, with the border between the French and German tongues, existent for a hundred years in Belgium and Lower Lorraine. There is a narrow disputed zone here and there, where the two languages fight for precedence; but on the whole it is well established what is to be German, and what Romance. The old lower Franconian and high German form of most of the names on the map show, however, that they belong to the ninth, or, at the latest, to the tenth century, and that the border between them was already essentially drawn towards the end of the Carolingian period. On the Romance side, particularly near the language border, there are mixed names made up of a German name and a Re mance geographical designation; for instance, west of the Maas near Verdun: Eppone curtis, Rotfridi curtis, Ingolini curtis, Teudegisilo villa, the Ippecourt of today, Recourt la Creux, Amblainecourt sur Aire, Thierville. Those were feudal Franconian country-seats, small German colonies on Romance territory, which sooner or later became Romanized. In the towns, and in some rural localities, there were stronger German colonies, which retained their language for a longer period; one such colony, for instance, produced the "Ludwigslied" (2) late in the ninth century; but the oaths of the kings and the great in A. D. 842, in which the Romance is already Franconia's official language, prove that a great many of the Franconian lords were Romanized even earlier. Once the language groups were bordered off (save the later wars of conquest and extermination, such as were fought with the Elbe Slavs) (3), it was natural that they should serve as a basis for the formation of states, and that nationalities begin to develop into nations. The rapid collapse of the mixed state of Lorraine shows how vigorous this spontaneous process was as early as the ninth century. True, all through the Middle Ages the language borders by no means coincided with state borders, yet every nationality, excluding Italy perhaps, was represented in a specific major European state, and the tendency to create national states, which came to the fore ever more clearly and consciously, constitutes one of the most essential levers of progress in the Middle Ages.

In each of these mediaeval states the king represented the top rung of the whole feudal hierarchy, a supreme head indispensable to the vassals, and yet one against whom they were in a permanent state of rebellion. The principal relationship in feudal economy, that of land tenure by certain personal services and tributes, gave no lack of grounds for controversies even in its original, most simple shape, particularly where so many were interested in finding pretexts for quarrels. How true must this have been, then, for the late Middle Ages, when the relations of tenure in all countries formed a confusing tangle of conceded, withdrawn, renewed, forfeited, altered and otherwise stipulated rights and duties? Charles the Bold, for instance, was the Emperor's feoffee for a part of his lands, and the French king's feoffee for another part; on the other hand, the king of France, his feoffor, was simultaneously the feoffee of Charles the Bold, his own vassal, for certain regions. How could conflicts be avoided? Hence that century-long alternation of the vassals' attraction to the royal centre, which alone could protect them against external foes and against each other, and of their repulsion from that centre, into which that attraction inevitably and perpetually changed; hence that continuous struggle between royalty and vassals, whose tedious uproar drowned out everything else during that lengthy period when robbery was the only source of income worthy of free men; hence that endless, ever renewed succession of treason, assassination, poison, conspiracy and all the other possible abominations, which underlay the poetical notion of knighthood and yet were no obstacle to speaking of honour and loyalty.

It is plain that in this general chaos royal power was the progressive element. It represented order in confusion, and the budding nation as opposed to dismemberment into rebellious vassal states. All the revolutionary elements taking shape under the feudalistic surface gravitated just as much towards royalty as the latter gravitated towards them. The alliance of royalty and burgherdom dates back to the tenth century; often interrupted by conflicts, because nothing pursued its course consistently in the Middle Ages, it was each time more firmly and vigorously renewed, until it helped royalty to its final victory, and royalty, by way of thanks, subjugated and plundered its ally.

Kings, like burghers, found a mighty support in the rising Estate of jurists. With the re-discovery of Roman law there developed a division of labour between the clergy, those legal advisers of feudal times, and the lay jurists. The new jurists were above all an essentially bourgeois Estate; and, moreover, the justice they studied, advanced and applied, was essentially anti-feudal and, in a certain respect, bourgeois. Roman law is so much the classical juridical expression of the living conditions and collisions in ia society exclusively ruled by private property, that all later legislation was unable to improve upon it in any substantial way. Mediaeval burgher ownership, however, was still strongly hemmed in by feudal limitations, and, for instance, consisted mostly of privileges. Roman law, therefore, was in this far ahead of the bourgeois relations of the time. But all further historical development of bourgeois ownership could only, as was the case, advance towards pure private ownership. This development was bound to find a mighty lever in Roman law, which contained in ready form everything that the burgherdom of the late Middle Ages still unconsciously sought.

True, in many cases Roman law offered a pretext for greater oppression of the peasants by the nobility. This was so, for instance, whenever peasants could not produce written proof of their freedom from otherwise customary tributes, but that does not alter the case. The nobility would have found such pretexts, and did find them day in and day out, without Roman law. At any rate, it was an enormous advance that a law was enforced which had no idea of feudal relations and fully anticipated modern private ownership.

We have seen how the feudal nobility became economically superfluous, and even obstructive, in late mediaeval society, and how, even politically, it stood in the way of urban development, and the development of national states, which were then only possible in the form of monarchies. But for all that it had been sustained by its monopoly in warcraft; no wars could be waged, no battles fought, without it. This, too, was to change: the final step was to be made to show the feudal nobles that the period of their social and political domination had come to an end, that they were no longer needed in their capacity of knights, not even in the battle-field.

To fight the feudal system with a feudal army, in which the soldiers were bound more closely to their direct suzerains than to the royal army command, was obviously to move in a vicious circle and not come off the spot. Ever since the early 14th century the kings strove to do away with such feudal hosts, and create their own armies. The proportion of recruited troops and mercenaries in the royal armies grew steadily from then on. At first they were mostly foot-soldiers, the scum of the towns and escaped serfs, Lombards, Genoese, Germans, Belgians, etc., employed in capturing towns and for garrison duty, and at first scarcely useful in open battle. But late in the Middle Ages we also find horsemen who go into the pay of alien princes with their who-knows-how assembled followings, and thereby presage the inevitable doom of feudal warcraft.

At the same time the basic condition for a war-worthy infantry took shape in the towns, and among free peasants wherever such were available or had newly appeared. Until then the knights with their mounted retinue were not just the kernel, but the army itself; the accompanying mob of serf foot-soldiers did not count, and appeared to be on hand in the open field simply for purposes of flight or plunder. As long as feudalism was in its zenith until the end of the 13th century, it was the cavalry that fought and decided all battles. But from then on things change, and, indeed, simultaneously in various places. The gradual disappearance of serfdom in England created a numerous class of free peasants, yeomen or tenants, who provided the raw material for a new infantry conversant in the use of bow and arrow, the English national weapon of that day. The introduction of archers, who always fought on foot, whether or not mounted on the march, caused a marked change in the tactics of the English army. From the 14th century the. English knights preferred to fight on foot wherever the terrain and other conditions were conducive. Behind the archers, who opened battle and wrought confusion in enemy ranks, a compact phalanx of dismounted knights waited for the enemy attack or for a suitable moment to attack themselves, while only a part of them remained on horseback to render support with flank assaults. The succession of English victories in France at that time reposed principally on this revival of the defensive element in the army; and are mostly just as much defensive battles with an offensive impact as were those of Wellington in Spain and Belgium. After the French adopted new tactics—possibly, after mercenary Italian crossbowmen in their host filled the place of the English bowmen—the English victories ceased.

Similarly, early in the 14th century the infantry of the Flandrian towns ventured—and often with success—to oppose the French knights in open battle, and Emperor Albrecht's attempt to betray the free (reichsfreie) Swiss peasants to the Archduke of Austria, that is, himself, gave impetus to the formation of the first modern infantry of European fame. In the triumphs of the Swiss over the Austrians, and, notably, over the Burgundians, armoured knights—mounted or otherwise—suffered a final setback at the hands of foot-soldiers, the feudal host at the hands of a budding modern army, knights at the hands of townsmen and free peasants. And the Swiss, in confirmation of the bourgeois nature of their first independent republic in Europe, instantly turned their war fame into silver. All their political considerations evaporated; the cantons turned into recruitment centres soliciting mercenaries for the highest bidder. Elsewhere, too, and particularly in Germany, the drums beat lustily for recruits, but the cynicism of a government, whose sole purpose appeared to be the sale of its countrymen, remained unmatched until the German princes surpassed it in the days of the moat profound national degradation.

Then, also in the 14th century, gunpowder and artillery were introduced to Europe through Spain by the Arabs. Until the end of the Middle Ages firearms remained unimportant, and conceivably so, since the bows of the English bowmen at Crecy shot just as far and possibly surer— though, perhaps, with less effect—than the smooth-bored guns of the infantrymen at Waterloo. The field-piece was also still in its infancy; the heavy guns, meanwhile, had repeatedly knocked breaches into the walls of knightly castles, and forecast to the feudal nobility that gunpowder sealed the fate of its reign.

The spread of the art of printing, the revived study of antique literature, the entire cultural movement, which gained strength and became ever more universal since 1450 —all this was propitious to the bourgeoisie and to royalty in their fight against feudalism.

The cumulative effect of all these causes, which took on from year to year through their mounting reciprocal action upon each other that drove them increasingly in the same direction, decided the victory over feudalism in the latter half of the fifteenth century if not as yet for the burgherdom, then for monarchy. Everywhere in Europe, including the outlying regions that had not gone through the stage of feudalism, royal power all at once obtained the upper hand.

On the Iberian Peninsula two local Romance groups combined in a Spanish kingdom and the Provencal-speaking Aragon state was overpowered by the Castilian literary tongue; the third group unified its language area, excluding Galicia, into the kingdom of Portugal, the Iberian Holland, turned its back upon the hinterland, and affirmed its right to a separate existence through its maritime activities.

In France Louis XI succeeded at last, after the fall of the Burgundian buffer state, (4) in establishing national unity, personified in royal power over an as yet limited area of France, to an extent that his successor was able to interfere in Italian affairs, and this unity was only once briefly jeopardized by the Reformation. (5)

England had at last given up its quixotic wars of conquest in France, which would have bled it white in the long run; its feudal nobility sought to make up for them in its Wars of the Roses, and got more than it bargained for. It exterminated itself and brought the house of Tudor to the throne, whose power surpassed that of all its predecessors and successors. The Scandinavian countries were long since unified, Poland, with its as yet unweakened monarchy, approached its zenith after unification with Lithuania, and even in Russia the overthrow of the appanaged princes and the liberation from the Tatar yoke went hand in hand and were finally sealed by Ivan III. In all Europe there were only two countries—Italy and Germany—where royalty and the national unity that was then impossible without it, either did not exist at all, or existed on paper only.

NOTES:

(1) Spruner-Menke, Hand-Atlas fiir die Geschichte des Mittelalters und der neueren Zeit, 3. Aufl., Gotha 1874, Karte No. 32.—Note by Engels.

(2) Ludwigslied—A legend of the West-Franconian king, Louis III (of the Carolingian dynasty), and of his victory over the Normans in 881, recorded in the Rhine-Franconian dialect.—Ed.

(3) Elbe Slavs—Slav tribes and nationalities east of the Elbe; conquered by German feudal lords (X-XIV centuries) in a most brutal manner, including total extermination of some Slav tribes; the survivors were turned into serfs and forcibly Germanized.—Ed.

(4) The Duchy of Burgundy—broke up after the death of Charles the Bold in 1477; a large part of Burgundian possessions became part of the kingdom of France, and the rest (the Netherlands, etc.) fell into the hands of the Hapsburgs.—Ed.

(5) Engels refers to the movement of the Huguenots, the French Calvinists who advocated a religious reformation. The movement was suppressed in the so-called Huguenot (religious) Wars (1562-94).—Ed.