In the second half of the VIII - the beginning of the IX century. in the Frankish state, the process of feudal subjugation of the peasantry was intensively going on. Already under the Merovingians, precarious relations were widespread, now acquiring a hereditary character.
The peasant, having lost his land, turned to the master with a request to give him a plot of land (precaria, that is, a plot transferred at the request); for this, he promised to fulfill the established ". duties. The deal was formalized in writing: the landowner received a completed precarious letter from the peasant and issued him an old letter. but usually, after several generations, the peasant turned not only into a landowner, but also into a personally dependent.
Not only people deprived of land property fell into precarious dependence, but also small free landowners who sought to get rid of state duties by giving up their property, as well as to receive protection and patronage from the church or other landowner. The so-called "rewarded precarium" was also often used. The peasant who entered into land dependence, as in the second case, renounced his ownership of the transferred plot, but at the same time received for use an additional plot, usually not yet cultivated land.
The last two types of precaria served as a means of mobilizing the landed property of the peasants by the church and secular feudal lords.
The so-called commendation led to the loss of freedom. Helpless poor people entrusted themselves to the ecclesiastical institution or the secular masters, promising to obey and serve them as a servant to the master. Often people enslaved themselves for debts, pledging to perform slave duties. Unpaid debt turned them into hereditary slaves (serfs).
The feudal lords did not stop at forced conversion free people in serfs and dependents. This is stated in the capitularies of Charlemagne. In one of them we read: “If someone refuses to transfer his property to a bishop, abbot, count ... they look for an opportunity to condemn such a poor man and force him to go to war every time, so that he willy-nilly sell or give them his property” . The emperor warned bishops, abbots and counts not to "buy or seize by force the property of poor and weak people ... because of which the royal service suffers." This was the reason for the king's concern for the weak, defenseless people.
The transformation of free people into dependents and serfs caused great changes in the political structure. Previously, all communal peasants were obliged to perform state duties, to carry out military service. Now, having become feudal dependent, they had to serve first of all their master.
Immunity. The royal power did not resist the growth of the private power of the feudal lords; even contributed to it. The king gave ecclesiastical and secular feudal lords immunity letters, freeing their possessions from any interference of state employees. At the same time, judicial and administrative power over the population and all the funds that used to go to the state treasury passed into the hands of the immunists.
Immunity strengthened the right of feudal property. In the immune territory, the votchinnik was the only master. Wu had power not only over the dependent, but also over the free population living within its dominions. Charlemagne tried to use immunity as a tool for strengthening state power, making the immunists responsible for justice, maintaining order and the gathering of the militia. However, the extension of immunity gone for the benefit of only large feudal lords and was one from the premises the resulting political fragmentation.
Vassality. Vassalism had no less influence on the evolution of the early feudal Frankish state. By the end of the VIII - the beginning of the IX century. vassal-feudal relations were widely spread in the military organization and political structure. The army largely consisted of mounted warriors endowed with benefices; royal vassals were appointed to government posts. At first, this even strengthened the state system: vassals, connected with the king by conditional possessions and a personal oath, served more reliably than independent masters. But soon the vassals began to turn their benefices into hereditary possessions and refused to carry out permanent service for them. Ultimately, this led to the collapse of the former territorial judicial-administrative organization and its replacement by a multi-stage vassal-fief hierarchy. The king became the supreme suzerain over large feudal lords - his vassals, who in turn became lords over smaller vassals. Such a trend was already outlined under Charlemagne, but it received its final development half a century later.
Although the military profession turned into a monopoly of the feudal lords, the peasants nevertheless did not get rid of the hardships of war. They were forced to pay war tax and participate in campaigns as an auxiliary force. Charlemagne, taking care of the best equipment of his troops and increasing their combat effectiveness, carried out a military reform. Only wealthy people who had at least 4 mans (plots) of land were supposed to go on a campaign; peasants who owned 2 mansas had to equip one soldier together, those who had 1 mans - four of one, who owned at least some property - five of one. Thus, the old national militia was finished. The army acquired a feudal-knightly appearance.
Carolingian estate. Sources of the late VIII - early IX century. - The "Capitulary on the Estates", which was apparently published by Charlemagne, and the "Polyptic of the Abbe Irminon" (scribe book of the Saint-Germain monastery near Paris) - depict in detail a large feudal estate of that time.
The land on the estate was divided into master's and allotment. The lord's land (master's domain), scattered in separate plots between peasant allotments, was usually cultivated by dependent peasants with the help of their working cattle and equipment. Yard slaves also worked in the lord's economy. In addition to arable land, the master's domain included forests and meadows, which the peasants could use only for a special fee. Peasant plots (mansi), under which there was most of the land on the estate, included, in addition to arable chemli, certain shares of communal lands. They lay interspersed between the allotments of other holders and the master's plots. In the serf village, the communal rules regarding crop rotation and grazing were maintained, to which the lordly economy was also subordinate.
Economy of the VIII-IX centuries. in terms of its level, it already far exceeded the economy of the Franks of the time of the Salic Truth. The two-field gave way to the three-field. Improved cultivation of the land, and increased productivity, although it still did not exceed sam-two - sam-three .. Farming remained basically natural. As evidenced by the Capitulary of the Estates, the king's possessions, scattered over a large territory (mainly to the northeast of Paris), were supposed to provide the royal court with food, home crafts, and various supplies for military campaigns. In addition, food stocks were created in case of crop failure. In each estate, all branches of the economy developed - field cultivation, gardening, horticulture, cattle breeding, and various crafts. Cereals, legumes, oilseeds and fiber crops, millet, vegetables were sown in the fields; different varieties of fruit trees were planted in the orchards. Cattle and small livestock, horses, and various types of poultry were bred. At the same time, each estate produced handicrafts, from blacksmithing and weaving to needlework and jewelry. Peasants were also engaged in domestic crafts, as evidenced by peasant quitrent duties with handicrafts.
Categories of serfs and dependent population. Forms of rent. The largest group of dependent peasants were columns, which, in their legal status, differed significantly from the Roman columns. These were personally free peasants who were obliged to bear land duties - dues and corvee. The main category of personally dependent population was servos(slaves). Most of them had allotments and carried out corvée and quitrent duties (their dues often consisted of products of especially laborious home crafts). The rest of the serfs did not have allotments and constantly worked at the court and in the lordly economy, receiving the master's maintenance (yard servants, artisan slaves, etc.). Above the serfs in legal status were do you- semi-free peasants who had allotments and performed corvée and quitrent duties. A very small group was made up of the “free”, who lived within the boundaries of the estates and were, according to immunity, under the jurisdiction of the votchinnik. Their duties consisted mainly of taxes and various fees that came in favor of the lord of the estate.
Peasant manses (allots) were divided respectively into "free", "Lithuanian" and "servile" (slave). But it is characteristic that in most cases in the inventories of the 9th century. there is no longer any correspondence between the category of mans and holders. Free manses often belonged to litas and even slaves, while colones often owned litas and servile manses. This testifies to the leveling of the serf and dependent population, equally subjected to feudal exploitation.
In general, labor rent prevailed on the estates of the Carolingian period, and rent in products was in second place. Money rent still occupied an insignificant place. This is due to the dominance of natural economy, the weak development of commodity-money relations. Nevertheless, trade developed, although neither handicrafts nor products were specially produced for the market. Agriculture.
Major events in political history . The beginning of the Frankish state was laid by the conquest by Clovis I (481-511) of the Merovean family in 486 of the possessions of the Roman governor Siagrius in Gaul. Between 491 and 496 Clovis and his retinue were baptized in Reims, which became the site of the coronation of all French kings. In 496, Clovis subjugated the Ikolo who lived along the upper and middle Rhine, then the Eastern Franks in the lower Rhine, and in 507 expelled the Visigoths from Aquitaine. His successors conquered the Kingdom of Burgundy in 534, took Provence from the Ostrogoths in 536, then subjugated the Thuringians between the Weser and the Elbe and the Bavarians on the Danube.
Merovingian power soon waned. Those who reigned after Dagobert I (629-639) received the nickname "lazy kings" because they stopped administering state affairs. The real power passed into the hands of the mayors - the main officials of the kingdom, who from the beginning of the 8th century. threatened by the expansion of the Arabs from Spain.
In 732, Major Charles Martel (715-741), having defeated the Arabs at Poitiers, saved the kingdom of the Franks from destruction.
In 751, his son Pepin the Short (751-768), with the support of the Frankish nobility and the Pope, deposed Childeric III, the last Merovingian on the Frankish throne, became the first king of the Carolingian dynasty and strengthened the central power.
Charles I the Great (768-814) in 774 conquered the Lombard kingdom, in 802 - part of Spain from the Pyrenees to the river. Ebro, in 772-802. - Saxony, in 803 - the Avar Khaganate and in 800 was crowned with the imperial crown in Rome. This event was perceived by contemporaries as an act of restoration of the Western Roman Empire.
Under Louis I the Pious (814-840), imperial power weakened. In 843 his sons concluded the Treaty of Verdun on the division of the Empire into three kingdoms: the West Frankish, the Kingdom of Lothair and the East Frankish. This ended the history of the Frankish state.
The concept of "the genesis of feudalism" implies the folding of the foundations of the feudal system, which form the two main classes of feudal society: feudal lords (large landowners) and feudal-dependent peasants (farmers without ownership of their plots). In practice, the genesis of feudalism was the process of the formation of large feudal landed property through the redistribution various kinds ancient land ownership - some lost it and turned into feudal-dependent peasants, others multiplied and became feudal lords.
Only freely alienable private property can be transferred from one owner to another (be the object of redistribution). Therefore, the starting point of the genesis of feudalism is the widespread distribution of the latter. In the barbarian kingdoms, it was formally marked by the emergence of private ownership of arable plots among the conquering community members.
From that moment on, the agricultural community turned into a neighboring one. In it, on the rights of private property, each community member owned an arable plot, and uncultivated lands (almenda) remained in collective ownership. The neighboring community is the third form of the community after consanguinity and agriculture.
It is believed that the classical version of the genesis of feudalism took place in the Frankish kingdom, where the redistribution of landed property took place in two stages. On the first - the Franks, having conquered Gaul, occupied the lands in various circumstances left by the autochthonous population. On the second - in the course of the beneficiary reform - the property of the Franks themselves (churches, nobility, community members) became the object of redistribution.
The appearance of the allod among the Franks. The most important result of the first stage of the land redistribution was the spread of free peasant property in Gaul. The Franks preferred to settle on empty lands. If there were not enough of them, they took away part of the land from the local residents. But the conquest did not destroy the small peasant property of the Ico-Roman possessors. Its specific gravity even increased due to the slaves and columns, which turned into free owners as a result of the death or flight of their masters.
Among the Franks themselves, the Salic Truth (a code of customary law written at the beginning of the 6th century) recorded the agricultural community in the last stage of existence, when arable plots were no longer subject to redistribution, but were inherited through the male line. Daughters could not inherit land, because upon marriage, land as a dowry could go to a stranger who was not a member of this community.
The allotment, which was privately owned, was called by the Franks allod. The appearance of the allod and, accordingly, the neighboring community is recorded in the second half of the 6th century. edicts of kings Chilperic I and Childebert II, who changed the order of inheritance of land provided for by the Salic truth, allowing it to be transferred through the female line, i.e., legitimized the unlimited freedom of a community member to dispose of land.
Loss of allods and freedom by the community. The property was difficult to maintain, since agriculture was unproductive and very unstable. Not only natural disasters, but also more or less significant climate fluctuations easily ruined individual farms. Peasants to avoid starvation were forced to sell or mortgage the land. In addition, the duties of a free man threatened the economy - participation in a military campaign could for a long time tear a man away from the land, the full cultivation of which was beyond the power of women and children. Someone renounced the ownership of his allotment in favor of another person in order to keep it for certain payments as a holding, free from the duties of a full franc.
On the other hand, there were mechanisms capable of effectively protecting the rights of small owners. Family ties were broken. Others have not yet appeared. It was difficult for the peasants to resist the magnates who encroached on their allotments, persons in positions of power, and simply robbers. I had to pay off, seek protection from strong people. The payment for patronage was the ownership of the land, which the peasant conceded to his patron.
In parallel with the loss of ownership of their land plots, small direct producers lost their personal freedom, fell into judicial dependence on private individuals, who, one way or another, provided them with security and protection from arbitrariness on the part of third parties.
This is how the transformation of free peasants into feudal dependents took place. The consequence of this process was the weakening of the Merovingian dynasty and the weakening of the military power of the Frankish state, in which the free Frank was the main figure - both a farmer and a warrior.
Formation of a class of large landowners. The acquisition of land was only the first part of the task facing those who formed the stratum of the feudal lords. Property had to be preserved, protected from the encroachments of competitors, ensured its inheritance, organized its processing by the labor of the peasants and the exploitation of these peasants.
The solution of these problems required special legal properties from feudal landed property, which took shape as it passed through three stages in its evolution. Three forms of feudal land ownership corresponded to them: allod - full unconditional private property, benefices - conditional and urgent property, feud - conditional and hereditary property.
Under the Merovingians, the genesis of feudalism was spontaneous and slow, large-scale feudal property appeared in the form of an allod. The first feudal lords were royal entourage, awarded with large allotments, and representatives of the Ico-Roman elite, who managed to keep their villas. The main trend in the relationship of major allodists with royalty and with each other was rivalry. Ordinary Franks suffered from the arbitrariness of the newly minted elite. A dangerous enemy appeared on the southern borders of the kingdom - the Arabs. All this taken together destabilized the social situation to such an extent that maintaining a high status turned into a difficult problem to solve. He was provided only by the personal qualities and luck of the magnate, depended on market circumstances. Instability and uncertainty about the future did not suit society as a whole and the elite in the first place.
Under the Carolingians (751-840), the genesis of feudalism was sharply accelerated by the policy of the state. Allod was replaced by beneficiation, conditional fixed-term land ownership. The beneficiary received it on the condition of carrying military service king and only for the duration of this service. His rights to land were limited, but nothing threatened them - they were guaranteed by the state. The principal aspect of the beneficiary reform was the establishment of hierarchical relations based on mutual obligations between the feudal lords, which contributed to their consolidation as a class. The land fund for beneficiaries was created by the Carolingians through the secularization of part of the church property and the confiscation of allods from the rebellious magnates.
The beneficiary reform initiated by Charles Martell was subjectively aimed at strengthening royalty and the creation of a strong knightly army, which was to replace the declining foot militia of the free Franks. But objectively, it made it easier for the emerging feudal elite to enslave free community members. The beneficiaries became the main pillar of the royal power, which acted primarily in their interests.
The beneficiaries sought to keep their beneficiaries in their family, passing them by inheritance. By the end of the ninth century this trend has become irreversible. The Kersian capitulary of 877 legalized the heredity of the beneficiary, which thus turned into a feud - conditional hereditary land ownership.
In parallel, personal seigneurial-vassal relations were established between the feudal lords. The beneficiary brought to the one from whom he received the land, a personal oath of allegiance - homage (lit. - transformation into a person). The one who became the master was called "seigneur", the subject - "vassal". A large vassal, in turn, granted benefices and became a lord for his vassals, who, in relation to his master, became rearvassals. The Mersen capitulary of 843 introduced the obligatory nature of personal vassal relations between feudal lords. This is how the hierarchical structure of the ruling class took shape. Within the hierarchy, the rule "the vassal of my vassal is not my vassal" was established.
Main social institutions feudal society. The feudal subjugation of the peasantry was economic, personal and judicial, which was achieved by special mechanisms.
The land dependence of the peasants on the feudal lords was established with the help of precarious transactions. The precarium was the land that the farmer received into possession and use for certain duties from a large landowner. Often, the peasant actually did not receive any land - he simply agreed to turn his allod into a precarium in order to avoid harassment or, conversely, to receive protection from the person with whom the deal was concluded. There were three types of precaria: 1) given, when a landless peasant received an allotment; 2) with a reward, when a small-land peasant received an addition to his former allodial allotment in exchange for renunciation of property; 3) returned, when the peasant agreed to turn his full-fledged allod into a precarium.
Personal dependence was established with the help of the so-called commendation and patronage, when a free person gave up part of his freedom and rights in favor of a patron.
Judicial dependence was established through immunity (a ban on officials of the king from entering the land of a given feudal lord to carry out a trial). Having received an immunity letter, the feudal lord had to carry out legal proceedings in his possessions himself.
The peasants paid rent to the feudal lords (payments and duties for land, personal and judicial dependence) of three types: various works on the feudal lord), natural (products of the peasant economy), monetary.
The community of the Germans went through three stages in its development: consanguineous, agricultural, neighborly, which, as the main social structure in the 9th-11th centuries. was suppressed and forced out by the land seigneury (patrimony).
The land seigneury was an organization based on the feudal lands complex, within which relations between the feudal lord and his dependent peasants were formalized. The land of the patrimony was divided into three categories: domain (lord's), which was cultivated by the peasants, allotments of the peasants, on which they ran their own economy, and almenda (natural lands), where the master's and peasant cattle were grazing together, hay was harvested, brushwood was collected, etc. .
Early feudal monarchy. The huge multinational Carolingian state was a classic early feudal monarchy, the main historical mission of which was to optimize and accelerate the genesis of feudalism. The strength of the central government in the context of the geographical, economic and ethnic disunity of the country was ensured by the conscious support of the kings and emperors by the feudal lords. This is explained by the fact that the class of feudal lords was just being formed, had not yet gained strength, was solving the difficult task of enslaving the peasants who had not yet lost the ability to resist, and was in need of a state. But this did not last long. As soon as the genesis of feudalism entered its final phase, and the lords felt that they could independently manage the peasantry, the weakening of imperial power and decentralization began, which grew into feudal fragmentation.
A classic example of an early feudal society in the territory of the Western Roman Empire conquered by the Germanic tribes was the society of the Franks, in which the decomposition of the primitive communal system was accelerated as a result of the influence of the Roman order.
1. Frankish state under the Merovingians
Origin of the Franks. Formation of the Frankish kingdom
In historical monuments, the name of the Franks appeared starting from the 3rd century, and Roman writers called many Germanic tribes Franks, which bore various names. Apparently, the Franks represented a new, very extensive tribal association, which included in its composition a number of Germanic tribes that merged or mixed during the migrations. The Franks split into two large branches - the seaside, or salic, Franks (from the Latin word "salum", which means sea), who lived at the mouth of the Rhine, and the coastal, or Ripuarian, Franks (from the Latin word "ripa", which means coast) who lived south along the banks of the Rhine and Meuse. The Franks repeatedly crossed the Rhine, raiding Roman possessions in Gaul or settling there in the position of allies of Rome.
In the 5th century the Franks captured a significant part of the territory of the Roman Empire, namely North-Eastern Gaul. At the head of the Frankish possessions were the leaders of the former tribes. Of the leaders of the Franks, Merovei is known, under which the Franks fought against Attila in the Catalaunian fields (451) and on whose behalf the name of the Merovingian royal family came. The son and successor of Merovei was the leader Childeric, whose grave was found near Tournai. The son and heir of Childeric was the most prominent representative of the Merovingian family - King Clovis (481-511).
Having become the king of the Salic Franks, Clovis, together with other leaders who acted like him, in the interests of the Frankish nobility, undertook the conquest of vast areas of Gaul. In 486, the Franks captured the Soissons region (the last Roman possession in Gaul), and later the territory between the Seine and the Loire. At the end of the 5th century the Franks inflicted a severe defeat on the Germanic tribe of the Alemanni (Alamans) and partially forced them out of Gaul back across the Rhine.
In 496, Clovis was baptized, having accepted Christianity along with 3 thousand of his warriors. Baptism was a clever political move on the part of Clovis. He was baptized according to the rite adopted by the Western (Roman) Church. The Germanic tribes moving from the Black Sea region - the Ostrogoths and Visigoths, as well as the Vandals and Burgundians - were, from the point of view of the Roman Church, heretics, since they were Arians who denied some of its dogmas.
At the beginning of the VI century. Frankish squads opposed the Visigoths, who owned all of southern Gaul. At the same time, the great benefits that flowed from the baptism of Clovis affected. All the clergy of the Western Christian Church, who lived beyond the Loire, took his side, and many cities and fortified points that served as the seat of this clergy immediately opened the gates to the Franks. In the decisive battle of Poitiers (507), the Franks won a complete victory over the Visigoths, whose dominance from then on was limited only to the borders of Spain.
Thus, as a result of the conquests, a large Frankish state was created, which covered almost all of the former Roman Gaul. Under the sons of Clovis, Burgundy was annexed to the Frankish kingdom.
The reasons for such rapid successes of the Franks, who still had very strong community ties, was that they settled in North-Eastern Gaul in compact masses, without dissolving among the local population (like the Visigoths, for example). Moving deep into Gaul, the Franks did not break ties with their former homeland and all the time drew new forces for conquest there. At the same time, the kings and the Frankish nobility were often content with the vast lands of the former imperial fiscus, without entering into conflicts with the local Gallo-Roman population. Finally, the clergy provided Clovis with constant support during the conquests.
"Salic truth" and its meaning
The most important information about the social system of the Franks is reported by the so-called "Salic Truth" - a record of the ancient judicial customs of the Franks, which is believed to have been made under Clovis. This law book examines in detail various cases from the life of the Franks and lists fines for a wide variety of crimes, ranging from the theft of a chicken to a ransom for killing a person. Therefore, according to the "Salic Truth" it is possible to restore the true picture of the life of the Salic Franks. The Ripuarian Franks, the Burgundians, the Anglo-Saxons, and other Germanic tribes also had such judicial codes - Pravda.
The time for recording and editing this ordinary (from the word custom) folk law is the 6th-9th centuries, that is, the time when the tribal system of the Germanic tribes had already completely decomposed, private ownership of land appeared and classes and the state arose. To protect private property, it was necessary to firmly fix those judicial penalties that were to be applied to persons who violated the right to this property. Firm fixation also required such new social relations that arose from tribal relations, such as territorial, or neighboring, communal peasant ties, the ability for a person to renounce kinship, the subordination of free Franks to the king and his officials, etc.
The Salic Truth was divided into titles (chapters), and each title, in turn, into paragraphs. A large number of titles were devoted to determining the fines that had to be paid for all sorts of thefts. But the “Salic Truth” took into account the most diverse aspects of the life of the Franks, so there were also such titles in it: “On murders or if someone steals someone else’s wife”, “On if someone grabs a free woman by the hand, by the brush or by the finger”, “About quadrupeds, if they kill a man”, “About a servant in witchcraft”, etc.
In the title "On Insult with Words" punishments for insult were determined. The title "On Mutilation" stated: "If someone plucks out another's eye, he is awarded 62 1/2 solidi"; “If he tears off his nose, he is awarded for payment ... 45 solidi”; “If the ear is torn off, 15 solidi are awarded,” etc. (The solidus was a Roman monetary unit. According to the 6th century, it was believed that 3 solidi was equal to the cost of a “healthy, sighted and horned” cow.)
Of particular interest in Salic Pravda are, of course, titles, on the basis of which one can judge the economic system of the Franks and the social and political relations that existed among them.
The economy of the Franks according to the "Salic truth"
According to the Salic Pravda, the economy of the Franks was at a much higher level than the economy of the Germans, described by Tacitus. The productive forces of society by this time had significantly developed and grown. Animal husbandry undoubtedly played an important role in it. The Salic Pravda established in unusual detail what fine should be paid for the theft of a pig, for a one-year-old piglet, for a pig stolen together with a piglet, for a suckling pig separately, for a pig stolen from a locked barn, etc. truth” considered all cases of theft of large horned animals, theft of sheep, theft of goats, cases of horse theft.
Fines were set for stolen poultry (hens, roosters, geese), which indicated the development of poultry farming. There were titles that spoke about the theft of bees and hives from the apiary, about damage and theft of fruit trees from the garden ( The Franks already knew how to graft fruit trees by cuttings.), about stealing grapes from a vineyard. Penalties were determined for the theft of a wide variety of fishing tackle, boats, hunting dogs, birds and animals tamed for hunting, etc. This means that the Frank economy had a wide variety of industries - animal husbandry, beekeeping, gardening, and viticulture. At the same time, such branches of economic life as hunting and fishing have not lost their significance. Livestock, poultry, bees, garden trees, vineyards, as well as boats, fishing boats, etc., were already the private property of the Franks.
Agriculture played the main role in the economy of the Franks, according to Salic Pravda. In addition to grain crops, the Franks sowed flax and planted vegetable gardens, planting beans, peas, lentils and turnips.
Plowing at that time was carried out on bulls, the Franks were well acquainted with both the plow and the harrow. Damage to the harvest and damage to the plowed field were punishable by fines. The resulting harvest from the fields was taken away by the Franks on carts to which horses were harnessed. The harvests of grain were quite plentiful, for the grain was already stacked in barns or rigs, and there were outbuildings at the house of every free Frankish peasant. The Franks made extensive use of water mills.
The Mark community of the Franks
"Salic Truth" also provides an answer to the most important question for determining the social system of the Franks, who owned the land - the main means of production in that era. The manor land, according to the Salic Pravda, was already in the individual ownership of each franc. This is indicated by high fines paid by all persons who in one way or another spoiled and destroyed fences or penetrated with the aim of stealing into other people's yards. On the contrary, the meadows and forests continued to be collectively owned and used by the entire peasant community. The herds that belonged to the peasants of neighboring villages were still grazing in common meadows, and every peasant could take any tree from the forest, including a felled one, if it had a mark that it had been cut down more than a year ago.
As for arable land, it was not yet private property, since the entire peasant community as a whole retained the supreme rights to this land. But arable land was no longer redistributed and was in the hereditary use of each individual peasant. The supreme rights of the community to arable land were expressed in the fact that none of the members of the community had the right to sell their land, and if a peasant died without leaving behind his sons (who inherited the plot of land that he cultivated during his lifetime), this land was returned to the community and fell into the hands of "neighbors", i.e., all its members. But each communal peasant had his own plot of land for the time of plowing, sowing and ripening of grain, he fenced it and passed it on to his sons by inheritance. Land could not be inherited by a woman.
The community that existed at that time was no longer the tribal community that Caesar and Tacitus once described. New productive forces demanded new production relations. The tribal community was replaced by the neighboring community, which, using the ancient Germanic name, Engels called the brand. A village that owned certain lands no longer consisted of relatives. A significant part of the inhabitants of this village still continued to remain connected with tribal relations, but at the same time, strangers already lived in the village, immigrants from other places, people who settled in this village either by agreement with other community members, or in accordance with the royal charter.
In the title "On Settlers", "Salicheskaya Pravda" established that any person could settle in a foreign village if none of its inhabitants protested against it. But if there was at least one person who opposed this, the settler could not settle in such a village. Further, the procedure for eviction and punishment (in the form of a fine) of such a migrant, whom the community did not want to accept as its members, “neighbors”, and who moved into the village without permission, was considered. At the same time, the “Salicheskaya Pravda” stated that “if no protest is presented to the resettled person within 12 months, he must remain inviolable, like other neighbors.”
The settler remained inviolable even if he had a corresponding letter from the king. On the contrary, anyone who dared to protest against such a charter had to pay a huge fine of 200 solidi. On the one hand, this indicated the gradual transformation of the community from a tribal to a neighboring, or territorial, community. On the other hand, this testified to the strengthening of royal power and the allocation of a special layer that towered over ordinary, free community members and enjoyed certain privileges.
Disintegration of tribal relations. The emergence of property and social inequality in Frankish society
Of course, this does not mean that tribal relations no longer played any role in the society of the Franks. Tribal ties, tribal remnants were still very strong, but more and more they were replaced by new social ties. The Franks still continued to have such customs as paying money for the murder of a person to his relatives, inheriting property (except land) on the maternal side, paying part of the ransom (wergeld) for the murder for his insolvent relative, etc.
At the same time, "Salicheskaya Pravda" recorded both the possibility of transferring property to a non-relative, and the possibility of voluntary withdrawal from the tribal union, the so-called "renunciation of kinship." Title 60 discussed in detail the procedure associated with this, which, apparently, had already become common in Frankish society. That person who wished to renounce kinship had to appear at a meeting of judges elected by the people, break three branches over his head there, measuring a cubit, scatter them in four directions and say that he renounces the inheritance and from all accounts with his relatives. And if later one of his relatives was killed or died, the person who renounced kinship should not have participated either in the inheritance or in receiving the wergeld, and the inheritance of this person himself went to the treasury.
Who benefited from leaving the clan? Of course, the richest and most powerful people who were under the direct patronage of the king, who did not want to help their less wealthy relatives and were not interested in receiving their small inheritance. There were already such people in Frankish society.
The property inequality among the members of the community is described in one of the most important titles for the characterization of the social system of the Franks, the title of "Salic Truth", entitled "About a handful of land." If someone takes the life of a person, this title says, and, having given all the property, you will not be able to pay what is due according to the law, he must present 12 relatives who will swear that neither on earth nor under the earth he has more than that that they have already been given. Then he must enter his house, pick up a handful of earth from its four corners, stand on the threshold, facing inside the house, and throw this earth with his left hand over his shoulder at his father and brothers.
If the father and brothers have already paid, then he should throw the same land on his three closest relatives by mother and father. “Then, in [one] shirt, without a belt, without shoes, with a stake in his hand, he must jump over the wattle fence, and these three [maternal relatives] must pay half of what is not enough to pay the vira followed by law. The same should be done by the other three, who are relatives on the father's side. If one of them is too poor to pay the share falling on him, he must, in turn, throw a handful of land on one of the more prosperous, so that he pays everything according to the law. The stratification of free francs into poor and rich is also indicated by titles about debt and methods of its repayment, about loans and their recovery from the debtor, etc.
There is no doubt that Frankish society at the beginning of the VI century. already disintegrated into several distinct layers. The bulk of Frankish society at that time consisted of free Frankish peasants who lived in neighboring communities and among whom numerous remnants of the tribal system were still preserved. The independent and full position of the free Frankish peasant is indicated by the high wergeld, which was paid for him in the event of his murder. This wergeld, according to the Salic Pravda, was equal to 200 solidi and was in the nature of a ransom, and not a punishment, since it was also paid in case of an accidental murder, and if a person died from a blow or bite of any domestic animal (in the latter case, iergeld, as usually paid by the owner of the animal in half the amount). So, the direct producers of material goods, i.e., free Frankish peasants, at the beginning of the 6th century. still enjoyed more rights.
At the same time, a layer of new service nobility formed in Frankish society, whose special privileged position was emphasized by a much larger wergeld than that paid for a simple free franc. “Salicheskaya Pravda” does not say a word about the former tribal nobility, which also indicates the already completed disintegration of tribal relations. Part of this tribal nobility died out, part was destroyed by the risen kings, who were afraid of rivals, and part joined the ranks of the service nobility that surrounded the kings.
For a representative of the nobility who was in the service of the king, a triple wergeld was paid, that is, 600 solidi. Thus, the life of a count - a royal official or the life of a royal warrior was already much more expensive than the life of a simple Frankish peasant, which testified to the deep social stratification of Frankish society. Wergeld, paid for the murder of a representative of the service nobility, was tripled a second time (that is, it reached 1,800 solidi) if the murder was committed at a time when the murdered was in the royal service (during a campaign, etc.).
The third layer in the society of the Franks was made up of semi-free, the so-called litas, as well as freedmen, that is, former slaves set free. For semi-freemen and freedmen, only half the wergeld of a simple free franc, that is, 100 solidi, was paid, which emphasized their inferior position in Frank society. As for the slave, it was no longer the wergeld that was paid for his murder, but simply a fine.
So, tribal ties in Frankish society disappeared, giving way to new social relations, the relations of the emerging feudal society. The beginning process of the feudalization of Frankish society was most clearly reflected in the opposition of the free Frankish peasantry to the service and military nobility. This nobility gradually turned into a class of large landowners - feudal lords, for it was the Frankish nobility, who was in the service of the king, who, when seizing Roman territory, received large land holdings already on the rights of private property. The existence in Frankish society (along with the free peasant community) of large estates that were in the hands of the Frankish and surviving Gallo-Roman nobility is evidenced by the chronicles (chronicles) of that time, as well as all those titles of the Salic Truth, which speak of the master's servants or yard servants - slaves (vine growers, blacksmiths, carpenters, grooms, swineherds and even goldsmiths), who served the vast master's economy.
The political structure of Frankish society. Rise of royalty
Profound changes in the field of socio-economic relations of Frankish society led to changes in its political system. On the example of Clovis, one can easily trace how the former power of the military leader of the tribe turned already at the end of the 5th century. into hereditary royalty. A wonderful story has been preserved by one chronicler (chronicler), Gregory of Tours (6th century), which characterized this transformation in a visual form.
Once, says Gregory of Tours, even during the struggle for the city of Soissons, the Franks captured rich booty in one of the Christian churches. Among the captured booty there was also a valuable bowl of amazing size and beauty. The bishop of the Reims church asked Clovis to return this cup, which was considered sacred, to the church. Clovis, who wished to live in peace with the Christian Church, agreed, but added that in Soissons there should still be a division of the booty between them by his soldiers, and that if he received a cup during the division of the booty, he would give it to the bishop.
Then the chronicler tells that in response to the request of the king addressed to them to give him a bowl to transfer to her church, the warriors answered: “Do whatever you please, for no one can oppose your power.” The story of the chronicler thus testifies to the greatly increased authority of royal power. But among the warriors, memories of the times when the king stood only a little higher than his warriors were still alive, he was obliged to share the booty with them by lot, and at the end of the campaign he often turned from a military leader into an ordinary representative of the tribal nobility. That is why one of the warriors, as it is said later in the chronicle, did not agree with the rest of the warriors, raised the ax and cut the cup, saying: “You will not get anything from this, except what is due to you by lot.”
The king was silent this time, took the spoiled cup and handed it over to the messenger of the bishop. However, as follows from the story of Gregory of Tours, Clovis' "meekness and patience" were feigned. After a year, he ordered his entire army to assemble and inspected the weapons. Approaching during the inspection to the recalcitrant warrior, Clovis declared that the weapon of this warrior was kept in disarray by him, and, having pulled out the ax from the warrior, threw it on the ground, and then chopped off his head. “So,” he said, “you did with the cup in Soissons,” and when he died, he ordered the rest to go home, “inspiring great fear in himself.” So, in a clash with a warrior who was trying to defend the previous order of dividing the spoils between the members of the squad and its leader, Clovis emerged victorious, affirming the principle of the king's exclusive position in relation to the members of the squad that served him.
By the end of his reign, Clovis, a cunning, cruel and treacherous man, no longer had rivals in the face of other representatives of the nobility. He sought sole power by any means. Having conquered Gaul and received huge land wealth in his hands, Clovis destroyed the other leaders of the tribe who stood in his way.
Destroying the leaders, as well as many of his noble relatives for fear that they would not take away his royal power, Clovis extended it to all of Gaul. And then, having gathered his close associates, he said to them: "Woe to me, for I have remained as a wanderer among strangers and have no relatives who could give me help if a misfortune happened." “But he said this,” the chronicler wrote, “not because he grieved for their death, but out of cunning, hoping that he could not accidentally find one more of his relatives in order to take his life.” In this way, Clovis became the sole king of the Franks.
The Salic Truth testifies to the increased importance of royal power. According to the data available in it, the royal court was the highest authority. In the regions, the king ruled through his officials - counts and their assistants. The tribal people's assembly no longer existed. It was replaced by military reviews, convened and conducted by the king. These are the so-called "March fields". True, in the villages and hundreds (unification of several villages) the people's court (mallus) was still preserved, but gradually this court began to be headed by the count. All "objects that belonged to the king", according to "Salicheskaya Pravda", were protected by a triple fine. Representatives of the church were also in a privileged position. The life of a priest was guarded by a triple wergeld (600 solidi), and if someone took the life of a bishop, he had to pay an even larger wergeld - 900 solidi. Robbery and burning of churches and chapels were punished with high fines. The growth of state power required its consecration with the help of the church, so the Frankish kings multiplied and protected church privileges.
So, the political system of the Franks was characterized by the growth and strengthening of royal power. This was facilitated by the king's warriors, his officials, his entourage and representatives of the church, that is, the emerging layer of large landowners-feudal lords, who needed royal power to protect their newly emerged possessions and to expand them. The growth of royal power was also facilitated by those prosperous and wealthy peasants who separated from the free community members, from whom a layer of small and medium feudal lords subsequently grew.
Frankish society in the VI-VII centuries.
An analysis of the Salic Pravda shows that both Roman and Frankish social order played an important role in the development of Frankish society after the conquest of the territory of Gaul by the Franks. On the one hand, the Franks ensured the more rapid destruction of slaveholding remnants. “Ancient slavery has disappeared, ruined, impoverished free people have disappeared,” wrote Engels, “those who despised labor as a slave occupation. Between the Roman column and the new serf stood a free Frankish peasant" ( F. Engels, The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State, pp. 160-161.). On the other hand, not only the final dissolution of tribal relations among the Franks, but also the rapid disappearance of their communal ownership of arable land must be largely attributed to the influence of the Roman social order. By the end of the VI century. it has already turned from a hereditary possession into a complete, freely alienable landed property (allod) of the Frankish peasant.
The very resettlement of the Franks on Roman territory tore and could not but break alliances based on consanguinity. Constant movements mixed tribes and clans among themselves, unions of small rural communities arose, which still continued to own land in common. However, this communal, collective ownership of arable land, forests and meadows was not the only form of ownership among the Franks. Along with it, in the community itself, there was an individual property of the Franks that arose long before the resettlement for a personal plot of land, livestock, weapons, a house and household utensils.
On the territory conquered by the Franks, the private landed property of the Gallo-Romans, preserved from antiquity, continued to exist. In the process of conquering Roman territory, large-scale private ownership of the land of the Frankish king, his warriors, servants and associates arose and established itself. The coexistence of different types of property did not last long, and the communal form of ownership of arable land, which corresponded to a lower level of productive forces, gave way to allod.
The edict of King Chilperic (second half of the 6th century), which established, in a change to the Salic Truth, the inheritance of land not only by the sons, but also by the daughters of the deceased, and in no case by his neighbors, shows that this process took place very quickly.
The appearance of a land allod among the Frankish peasant was of the utmost importance. The transformation of communal ownership of arable land into private ownership, i.e., the transformation of this land into a commodity, meant that the emergence and development of large-scale landownership, associated not only with the conquest of new territories and the seizure of free land, but also with the loss by the peasant of the right of ownership to cultivated land, it became a matter of time.
Thus, as a result of the interaction of socio-economic processes that took place in ancient German society and in the late Roman Empire, Frankish society entered the period of early feudalism.
Immediately after the death of Clovis, the early feudal Frankish state was fragmented into the inheritances of his four sons, then united for a short time and then again fragmented into parts. Only the great-grandson of Clovis Chlothar II and the great-great-grandson Dagobert I managed to achieve a longer unification of the territory of the state in one hand at the beginning of the 7th century. But the power of the Merovingian royal family in Frankish society was based on the fact that they had a large land fund created as a result of the conquests of Clovis and his successors, and this land fund during the 6th and especially the 7th centuries. melted continuously. The Merovingians with a generous hand handed out awards to their warriors, and to their service people, and to the church. As a result of the continuous land grants of the Merovingians, the real basis of their power was greatly reduced. Representatives of other, larger and richer landowning families gained strength in society.
In this regard, the kings from the Merovingian clan were pushed into the background and received the nickname "lazy", and the actual power in the kingdom was in the hands of individual people from the landowning nobility, the so-called major-houses (major-houses were originally called the senior rulers of the royal court, who were in charge of the palace housekeeping and palace servants).
Over time, the mayordoms concentrated in their hands all the military and administrative power in the kingdom and became its de facto rulers. “The king,” the chronicler wrote, “had to be content with just one title and, sitting on the throne with long hair and a loose beard, was only one semblance of a sovereign, listened to the ambassadors who came from everywhere and gave them parting, as if on his own behalf, answers , memorized in advance and dictated to him ... The management of the state and everything that needed to be done or arranged in internal or external affairs, all this lay in the care of the mayor's house. At the end of the 7th and at the beginning of the 8th century. especially strengthened the mayordoms, who came out of the rich noble family of the Carolingians, who laid the foundation for a new dynasty on the throne of the Frankish kings - the Carolingian dynasty (VIII-X centuries).
2. Empire of Charlemagne
Formation of the Carolingian Empire.
In 715. Charles Martell, who ruled until 741, became the mayor of the Frankish state. Charles Martell made a series of campaigns across the Rhine to Thuringia and Alemannia, which became independent again under the “lazy” kings of the Merovingians, and subjugated both areas to his power. He again annexed Frisia, or Friesland (the country of the Frisian tribe) to the Frankish state, and forced the Saxons and Bavarians to pay tribute to him again.
At the beginning of the 8th century the Franks had to face the Arabs, who penetrated from the Iberian Peninsula into Southern Gaul in order to tear it away from the Frankish state. Charles Martell hastily gathered military detachments to repulse the Arabs, as the Arab light cavalry moved forward very quickly (along the old Roman road, which led from the south to Poitiers, Tours, Orleans and Paris). The Franks met the Arabs at Poitiers (732) and won a decisive victory, forcing them to turn back.
After the death of Charles Martell, his son Pepin the Short, so named for his small stature, became the mayor. Under Pepin, the Arabs were finally expelled from Gaul. In the regions beyond the Rhine, Pepin intensively carried out the Christianization of the Germanic tribes, seeking to reinforce the power of arms with church sermons. In 751, Pepin the Short imprisoned the last Merovingian in a monastery and became king of the Franks. Before that, Pepin sent an embassy to the Pope with the question, is it good that the Frankish state is ruled by kings who do not have real royal power? To which the pope replied: "It is better to call the king of the one who has power, rather than the one who lives without having royal power." After that, the pope crowned Pepin the Short. For this service, Pepin helped the pope fight the state of the Lombards and, having conquered the Ravenna region that they had previously captured in Italy, handed it over to the pope. The transfer of the Ravenna region was the beginning secular power papacy.
In 768 Pepin the Short died. Power passed to his son, Charlemagne (768 - 814), who, as a result of a number of wars, managed to create a very large empire. These wars were waged by Charles). The Great, like his predecessors, in the interests of large landowners-feudal lords, one of the brightest representatives of which he himself was, and were due to the desire of large Frankish landowners to seize new lands and to forcibly enslave the peasants who still retained their freedom .
In total, under Charles, more than 50 military campaigns were made, half of them he led himself. Charles was very active in his military and administrative enterprises, skillful in the field of diplomacy and extremely cruel in relation to the Frankish masses and to the population of the lands he conquered.
The first war launched by Charlemagne was the war with the German tribe of the Saxons (772), which occupied the entire territory of Lower Germany (from the Rhine to the Elbe). The Saxons and this time were still at the last stage of the primitive communal system. In a long and stubborn struggle with the Frankish feudal lords, who seized their lands and brought them enslavement, the Saxons put up staunch resistance and showed great courage. For 33 years, Charlemagne fought for the subjugation of the free Saxon peasants. With fire and sword, he planted Christianity among the Saxons, believing that the conquest should be consolidated by the Christianization of the Saxons, who adhered to pre-Christian cults. The subjugation of the Saxons was completed only in 804, when the nobility of the Saxons took the side of the Frankish feudal lords in the struggle against their own people.
Simultaneously with the Saxon wars, Charles, at the request of the pope, and also in his own interests, since he feared the strengthening of the Lombards, undertook two campaigns against them. Having defeated the Lombards who lived in northern Italy in the Po Valley, Charlemagne put on himself the iron crown of the Lombard kings and began to be called the king of the Franks and Lombards (774). However, Charles did not give the captured Lombard regions to the Pope.
Karl undertook a campaign against the German tribe of the Bavarians, depriving them of their independence. Military campaigns under Charlemagne were also directed against the nomadic tribe of Avars, who lived at that time in Pannonia. Having destroyed their main fortress (791), Karl seized huge booty in the palace of the Avar kagan (khan). Having defeated the Avars, Karl created a special border region - the Pannonskuvd brand.
Border clashes under Charlemagne also occurred with the tribes of the Western Slavs, whose settlements were located on the eastern borders of his empire. But the resistance of the Slavic tribes did not allow Charlemagne to include their territories in the empire. He was even forced to enter into alliances with the Slavic nobility against common enemies (for example, with encouragement against the Saxons or with the Slovenes from Horutania against the nomads of the Avars) and limited himself to building fortresses on the Slavic border and collecting tribute from the Slavic population living near it.
Charlemagne made a number of military campaigns beyond the Pyrenees (778-812). On the territory conquered beyond the Pyrenees, a border region was created - the Spanish brand.
So, as a result of long aggressive wars waged by the mayors and kings from the Carolingian family, a vast state was created, in size only slightly inferior to the former Western Roman Empire.
And then Charles decided to declare himself emperor. In 800, Pope Leo III, interested in spreading the influence of the Roman Church in all the lands conquered by the Franks, and therefore in direct alliance with Charlemagne, crowned him with the imperial crown.
The emerging empire enjoyed great influence in the international affairs of its time. The kings of Galicia and Asturias recognized the supreme power of the emperor. On friendly terms with him were the kings of Scotland and the leaders of the Irish tribes. Even the distant Caliph of Baghdad, Harun-ar-Rashid, who sought to rely on an alliance with the empire of Charlemagne in the fight against Byzantium and the Caliphate of Cordoba in Spain, sent rich gifts to Charles.
At the beginning of the ninth century The empire of Charlemagne had to face for the first time a serious danger in the face of the Norman pirates. The Normans, as the Scandinavian tribes that inhabited Scandinavia and Jutland were called at that time, included in their composition the ancestors of modern Norwegians, Swedes and Danes. In connection with what happened in the VIII and IX centuries. among the Scandinavian tribes, by the process of the decomposition of tribal relations, the sharp separation of the nobility and the strengthening of the role of military leaders and their squads, these leaders began to undertake distant sea voyages for the purpose of trade and robbery. Later, these pirate campaigns became a real disaster for the population. Western Europe.
Approval of feudal ownership of land in Frankish society in the VIII-IX centuries.
The basis of changes in the social system of the Franks in the VIII and IX centuries. there was a complete revolution in the relations of land ownership: the ruin of the mass of the free Frankish peasantry and the simultaneous growth of the property of large landowners due to the absorption of small peasant property. Feudal land ownership originated and began to develop among the Franks as early as the 6th century. However, under the Merovingians, it did not play a leading role in the social system. The main cell of the Frankish society in this period was a free peasant community - the brand.
Of course, the development of private ownership of land in those days inevitably led to the growth of large-scale landownership, but at first this process proceeded relatively slowly. Feudal ownership of land became dominant only as a result of the agrarian revolution in the 8th and 9th centuries. On this occasion, Engels wrote: "... before the free Franks could become someone else's settlers, they had to somehow lose the allod they received during the occupation of the land, their own class of landless free Franks had to form" ( F. Engels, The Frankish period, K. Marx and F. Engels, Works, vol. XVI, part I, p. 397.).
As a result of the low level of development of the productive forces, the small peasant often found himself unable to retain the allotment he had just received as his property. The small peasant's inability to expand his farm, the extremely imperfect agricultural technique, and therefore the extreme helplessness of the direct producer in the face of all sorts of natural disasters steadily drew him to ruin. At the same time, the unceasing process of internal decomposition of the community itself also led to the separation of wealthy peasants from among the free community members, who gradually took over the lands of their impoverished neighbors and turned into small and medium feudal owners.
Thus, as a result of economic changes, the free Frankish peasant lost his landed property and fell into complete economic dependence both on large landowners (combatants, officials of the king, dignitaries of the church, etc.) and on smaller feudal lords. This process of loss of their land by the peasants was accelerated by a number of reasons; internecine wars of the Frankish nobility and long military service, for a long time tearing the peasants away from their economy, often into the hottest hole; burdensome taxes, which fell heavily on the peasants as state power increased, and unbearable fines for various kinds of misconduct; forced contributions to the church and direct violence from large landowners.
The difficult situation of the Frankish peasants led to the fact that in the VIII and IX centuries. the practice of so-called precariae has become widespread. The precarium, already known to Roman law, acquired its name from the Latin word “preces”, which means “request”, and even under the Merovingians meant the transfer by a large landowner of a piece of land to a landless peasant for use or possession. For the received land, the peasant was obliged to bear a number of duties in favor of its owner. Such was the first, earliest form of the medieval precarium.
Another form, most common in the 8th and 9th centuries, was the following: a peasant, seeing that he was unable to keep his land for himself, “gave” it to a powerful neighbor, and especially often to the church, since the danger of losing land most often consisted for him it is precisely in the presence of such a powerful neighbor. Then the peasant received this land back, but not as his own property, but as a lifetime, sometimes hereditary holding, and again carried certain duties in favor of the landowner. For this, the latter guarded his household.
There were collections of so-called formulas (i.e., samples of legal acts) that formalized such transfers of land. Here is one of the answers of the abbess of the women's monastery to a request for land in the precarium. “To the sweetest woman such and such I am, abbess such and such. Since it is known that you own your property in such and such a district, recently behind the monastery of St. Maria approved and for this she asked us and the named monastery to give [you] a precarium, then with this letter they approved you so that while you are alive, you would own and keep this land in use, but would not have the right to any there was no way to alienate it, and if she decided to do this, she would immediately lose the land ... "
Sometimes the precarist received, in addition to his former land given to him as a precaria, an additional piece of land. This was the third form of precaria, serving mainly the church to attract small proprietors, turn them into precarists and use them work force on uncultivated lands. It is quite clear that both the second and third forms of precaria contributed to the growth of large landownership.
Thus, the precarium was a form of land relations which, in cases where it linked representatives of two antagonistic classes, led simultaneously to the loss by the free Frankish peasant of his land ownership and to the growth of feudal land ownership.
Within the ruling class of landowners at that time, special land relations also developed in connection with the spread of the so-called beneficiaries introduced under Charles Martell after the battle with the Arabs at Poitiers (the Latin word “beneficiura” literally meant “good deed”). The essence of the beneficiation was as follows: land ownership was transferred to one or another person not in full ownership, as was the case under the Merovingians. The person who received the benefices had to carry out military service in favor of the one who gave him this land. In this way, a layer of service people was formed, who were obliged to carry out military service for the land they received. If the beneficiary refused to perform military service, he also lost the beneficiaries. If the beneficiary or the grantor of the beneficiary died, the latter returned to his owner or his heirs. Thus, a beneficiary could not be inherited by the person who received it, and was only a lifelong and conditional land ownership.
Karl Martel received the land he needed for the distribution of beneficiaries by confiscating part of the church property in his favor (this was the so-called secularization, or the transfer of church land into the hands of secular power). Of course, the church was very unhappy with this, despite the fact that it is in all the conquered areas. received new lands and new privileges. Therefore, the successor of Charles Martel, Pepin the Short, although he did not return the selected lands to the church, nevertheless obliged the beneficiaries to pay certain contributions in its favor.
The introduction of beneficiaries, which were distributed along with the peasants who sat on the granted land, led to a further increase in the dependence of the peasants on the landowner and to an increase in their exploitation.
In addition, military power was gradually concentrated in the hands of the ruling class. From now on, large landowners could use the weapons they had in their hands not only against external enemies, but also against their own peasants, forcing them to bear all sorts of duties for the benefit of the landowners.
Enslavement of the Frankish peasantry
The growth of large-scale landownership at the expense of free peasants, who lost the right to own land, was accompanied by their enslavement. The ruined small owner was often compelled not only to hand over his land to the big landowner, but also to become personally dependent on him, that is, to lose his freedom.
“To my lord brother such and such,” it was written in bondage letters on behalf of the peasant. - Everyone knows that extreme poverty and heavy worries have befallen me and I have absolutely nothing to live and dress with. Therefore, at my request, in my greatest need, you did not refuse to give me from your money so much solidus; and I have nothing to pay these solids. Therefore, I asked you to make and approve the enslavement of my free personality so that from now on you will have complete freedom to do with me everything that you are authorized to do with your natural slaves, namely, to sell, barter, punish.
Free peasants could become dependent on a large feudal lord on more favorable terms, without losing their personal freedom at first and becoming, as it were, under the patronage of a large landowner (the so-called commendation, from the Latin word "commendatio" - "I entrust myself"). But it is quite clear that the commandment of a peasant, as well as his transformation into a precarist of some large landowner, led to the same consequences, i.e., to the transformation of this free peasant, as well as his offspring, into serfs.
The state played an active role in this process. This is evidenced by a number of decrees of Charlemagne and his immediate successors. In his decrees (capitulary, from the Latin word “caput” - “head” or “head”, since each decree was divided into chapters), Charles ordered the managers to monitor free peasants living on royal estates, to collect fines from the peasants in favor of the royal court and judge them. In 818-820. decrees were issued attaching all taxpayers to the land, that is, depriving them of the right to freely move from one plot to another. The Carolingians ordered the peasants to sue large landowners and submit to their authority. Finally, in the capitulary of 847, it was directly prescribed that every still free person, i.e., first of all, a peasant, should find a seigneur (master). So the state actively contributed to the establishment of feudal relations in Frankish society.
The feudal estate and its economic life
The result of the revolution in land relations that took place in the 8th and 9th centuries was the final assertion of the landed property of the ruling class. The place of the former free peasant community-mark was taken by a feudal estate with special economic orders inherent in it. What these orders were can be seen from the so-called “Capitulare de villis”, compiled around 800 on the orders of Charlemagne and was an instruction to the administrators of the royal estates. From this capitulary, as well as from other sources of the 9th century, in particular from the so-called “Polyptics of the Abbot Irminon” (i.e., the scribe book of the monastery of Saint-Germain, located in the suburbs of Paris), it is clear that the feudal estate was divided into two parts : a manor estate with a manor's land and a village with allotments of dependent peasants.
The lordly part, or master's land, was called a domain (from the Latin word "dominus" - master's). The domain consisted of a manor's estate with a house and outbuildings, and from a manor's arable land. The mill and the church also depended on the owner of the estate. Domain (master's) arable land was scattered among the peasant plots, that is, there was a so-called striped land, which was necessarily accompanied by a forced crop rotation associated with the practice of open fields after harvest. Everyone had to sow the same thing in a given field and harvest the field at the same time as their neighbors, otherwise the cattle released into the field could destroy the crops not harvested by their owner. The lordly land was cultivated by the hands of peasants who were obliged to work on corvee with their equipment. In addition to arable land, the domain also included forests, meadows and wastelands.
Peasant land, or land of "holding", since the peasants were not its owners, but, as it were, "held" it from the owner of the land - the owner of this estate, was divided into allotments (mansi). Each manse included a peasant yard with a house and outbuildings, a vegetable garden and arable land, scattered in strips with other peasant and landowner lands. In addition, the peasant had the right to use communal pastures and forests.
Thus, unlike a slave who had neither a house, nor a farm, nor property, nor a family, a peasant who worked on the land of a feudal lord had his own house, family, and household. The existence, along with feudal property, of the peasant's property for farming and agricultural implements created a certain interest in the producers of material goods, feudal society, in their work and was a direct stimulus for the development of productive forces in the epoch of feudalism.
The productive forces of society in the VIII and IX centuries. extremely slowly, but growing all the time. There was an improvement in farming techniques, more effective methods soil cultivation, the forest was cleared for arable land and virgin lands were raised. Relog and two-field gradually gave way to three-field.
Lower-quality types of cereals (oats, barley, rye) were sown mainly in the economically backward parts of the empire (east of the Rhine), while in its central and western regions, qualitatively higher types (wheat, etc.) were increasingly used. From garden crops, legumes, radishes and turnips were bred. From fruit trees - apple, pear and plum. Medicinal herbs and hops needed in the manufacture of beer were planted in the gardens. Viticulture developed in the southern parts of the empire. From industrial crops, flax was sown, which was used to make clothes and linseed oil.
As for agricultural tools, it should be noted that at the end of the 9th century. plows became widespread: a small light plow for working stony or root soils, which only cut the earth into long furrows, and a heavy wheeled plow with an iron share, which, when plowing, not only cut, but also turned the earth over. The harrow, which at that time was a triangular wooden frame with iron teeth, was used mainly in the cultivation of vegetable gardens. The harrowing of the fields was carried out with the help of a heavy wooden log, which was dragged along the plowed field, breaking up the clods of earth. The farm used scythes, sickles, two-pronged pitchforks and rakes.
The grain was cleaned of straw, winnowed with a shovel in the wind, sifted through sieves woven from flexible rods, and finally threshed with simple sticks or wooden flails. The soiling of the fields, as a rule, was carried out irregularly. It is clear that with such a low agricultural technique, the yields were usually extremely low (1 1/2 itself or 2 itself). The peasant economy was dominated by small livestock (sheep, pigs and goats). There were few horses and cows.
The entire economy of a large estate was natural in nature, i.e. the main task of every estate was to satisfy its own needs, and not to produce for sale on the market. The peasants who worked on the estates were obliged to supply the master's court (royal, count, monastery, etc.) with food and provide the owner of the estate, his family and numerous retinue with everything necessary. The craft at that time was not yet separated from agriculture, and the peasants were engaged in it along with arable farming. Only surplus products were sold.
Here is what was said about such a household in the “Capitulary on Estates” (chapter 62): “Let our managers annually, by the Nativity of the Lord, separately, clearly and in order notify us of all our income, so that we can know what and how much we have under separate articles. , exactly ... how much hay, how much firewood and torches, how much tesu ... how many vegetables, how much millet and millet, how much wool, flax and hemp, how many fruits from trees, how many nuts and nuts ... how much from gardens, how much from turnip ridges, how many from fishponds, how many skins, how many furs and horns, how much honey and wax, how much tallow, fats and soap, how much berry wine, boiled wine, honey - drinks and vinegar, how much beer, grape wine, new grain and old, how many chickens, eggs and geese, how many from fishermen, blacksmiths, gunsmiths and shoemakers ... how many from turners and saddlers, how many from locksmiths, from iron and lead mines, how many from heavy people, how many foals and fillies.
Such an estate was the main cell of Frankish society under the Carolingians, which means that in the empire of Charlemagne, a large number of economically closed little worlds, not connected with each other economically and independently satisfying their needs with products produced within a given economy.
The plight of the peasants and their struggle with the feudal lords
The feudally dependent peasants were subjected to cruel exploitation by the feudal lords. The forms of peasant dependence in the era of feudalism were extremely diverse. It was, as Marx points out, "... unfreedom, which can be mitigated from serfdom with corvée labor to a simple quitrent obligation" ( K. Marx, Capital, vol. III, Gospolitizdat, 1955, p. 803.). Along with the surviving remnants of the free peasantry (especially in the eastern and northern regions of the empire), in the Frankish state of the VIII-IX centuries. there were peasants who depended on the feudal lord only in a judicial respect. However, there were very few such peasants.
The bulk of the feudally dependent peasantry were serfs, over whose person the feudal lords had the right of ownership, albeit an incomplete one (that is, they did not have the right to kill them). The serfs depended on the feudal lord both personally, and in terms of land, and judicially, and paid him heavy feudal rent. It was expressed in the form of various duties - labour-service (corvée), grocery (natural dues) and monetary (monetary dues). The dominant form of rent under the Carolingians, apparently, was labor rent. But at the same time there was rent in kind and partly in cash.
As a personally dependent person, the serf was obliged to give to the feudal lord when he inherited his land allotment, the best head of cattle; was obliged to pay for the right to marry a woman who did not belong to his master, and to make additional payments imposed on him by the feudal lord at will.
As a land-dependent serf, he was obliged to pay dues and work on corvee. This is how the duties of serfs were portrayed in the ninth century. in "The Politics of the Abbot Irminon". From only one peasant allotment (and there were several thousand such allotments in the monastery economy), the monastery of Saint-Germain received annually: half a bull or 4 rams “for military affairs”; 4 denarii ( Denarius = approximately 1/10 g of gold.) total taxation; 5 mods ( Modium = about 250 liters.) grains for horse feed; 100 clefts and 100 fringes not from the master's forest; 6 hens with eggs and after 2 years for the third - a one-year-old sheep. The holders of this allotment were also obliged to plow the monastery field for winter and spring crops three days a week and to perform various manual works for the monastery.
For the resolution of all disputes, the peasant was obliged to apply to the local court, headed by the feudal lord himself or his clerk. It is clear that in all cases the feudal lord resolved disputes in his favor.
In addition, the landowner usually still had the right to collect all sorts of duties - road, ferry, bridge, etc. The position of the working masses became even more difficult as a result of natural disasters, which they then did not know how to deal with, as well as endless feudal strife that ruined the peasant economy.
The cruel feudal exploitation caused a sharp class struggle between the peasants and the feudal lords. The fact that this struggle was widespread is also evidenced by the royal capitularies, who ordered severe punishment of the rebels, and the reports of medieval chroniclers. From these capitularies and chronicles we learn that at the end of the 8th century. in the village of Selt, which belonged to the Bishop of Reims, an uprising of dependent peasants took place. In 821, a "conspiracy" of serfs arose in Flanders. In 841-842. there was a so-called "Stelling" uprising (which means literally "Children of the ancient law") in the region of the Saxons, when free Saxon peasants entered into a struggle both with their own and with the Frankish nobility, who brought them enslavement. In 848, free peasants came out, fighting against enslavement in the Mainz bishopric. A second uprising broke out in the same place in 866. Other movements directed against feudal oppression and exploitation are also known. All these uprisings took place mainly in the ninth century, when a revolution in agrarian relations was completed and the process of enslaving the peasants assumed the widest dimensions.
These uprisings against the ruling class could not win in that historical situation, when the established feudal mode of production had all the conditions for its further development. However, the importance of the early anti-feudal movements of the peasants was very great. These movements were of a progressive character, for their result was a certain limitation of the cruel exploitation of the working people and the creation of more tolerable conditions for their existence. Thus, these movements contributed to the more rapid development of the productive forces of feudal society. The more time the peasant devoted to his own economy, the more he became interested in improving agricultural technology and in raising the productivity of his labor, the faster did feudal society as a whole develop.
Internal organization of the ruling class of feudal lords
Land relations that existed within the class of feudal lords underlay its military-political organization. Beneficiary, as a rule, was connected with relations of vassalage, when a free person who received beneficiaries from a large landowner was called his vassal (from the Latin word "vassus" - servant) and was obliged to serve military service for him. Entry into vassal relations was secured by a certain ceremony. Upon receiving a benefice, a free person announced that he was becoming a vassal of one or another master (seigneur), and the seigneur took an oath of allegiance from him. This ceremony was later called homage (from the Latin word "homo" - a person, since the oath of allegiance contained the words: "I become your person").
In contrast to the relations established between the peasant and the feudal lord, vassal relations did not go beyond the limits of the same ruling class. Vassality consolidated the feudal hierarchy, i.e., the subordination of smaller landowners to larger ones, and larger ones to the largest ones, while the personal dependence of the peasant on the feudal lord led to the enslavement of the peasants.
The administrative structure of the empire
The years of the reign of the first Carolingians include a temporary strengthening of the central state power, the main and determining reason for which, of course, cannot be seen in the "outstanding abilities" of the Carolingians and, in particular, in the "state talent" of Charlemagne. In fact, some strengthening of the central state apparatus under the Carolingians was caused by the most profound changes in the field of social relations.
The class of landowners-feudal lords in this period needed such a central authority that would ensure to it the fastest subjugation of the class of peasants who fought against enslavement, and at the same time would pursue a broad policy of conquest, bringing new lands and new serfs to the big landowners. Thus, changes in the forms of the feudal state were due to fundamental changes in the position of the peasantry and its struggle against the ruling class. The center of administration of the Carolingian Empire became for a time the imperial court with its officials - the chancellor, archcapellan and count palatine. The chancellor acted as secretary to the emperor and custodian of the state seal. The archchaplain controlled the Frankish clergy, and the count palatine was like the former mayor, in charge of the palace economy and administration.
With the help of the royal capitularies, Charlemagne sought to resolve various issues of governing a vast state. Capitularies were issued by Charlemagne on the advice of large landowners, who twice a year gathered for this purpose in the royal palace.
The empire was divided into regions. The border regions were called marks. The marks were well fortified and served both for defense and as springboards for further captures. At the head of each region were counts, and at the head of the marks - margraves. To control the activities of the counts, Charles sent special sovereign envoys to the region.
Strengthening the state apparatus of the empire, which was especially necessary for the ruling class in the era of fundamental social changes that took place in Frankish society, and aimed at oppressing and enslaving the masses, Charlemagne carried out a judicial reform, abolishing the previously existing obligation of the population to attend district court sessions. Elected positions of judges from among the people were abolished. The judges became state officials, who received a salary and judged under the chairmanship of the count. Military reform was also carried out. Charlemagne stopped demanding military service from the peasants (by this time, for the most part, they had already gone bankrupt and were completely dependent on the feudal lords). Basic military force became royal beneficiaries.
Strengthening the political power of the feudal lords
The assertion of feudal ownership of land led to an increase in political power landowners over the working population who sat on their lands. The Merovingians also contributed to the expansion of the private power of large landowners, providing them with so-called immunity rights.
Under the Carolingians, immunity was further developed. The name immunity comes from the Latin word "immunitas", which in translation into Russian means "immunity" of a person, his liberation from something.
The essence of immunity was that the territory of the landowner of the immunist (i.e., the person who received the immunity letter) was exempted by the king from visiting royal officials to perform judicial, administrative, police, fiscal or any other duties. The duty to perform these functions was transferred to the immunist himself, whose private power thus grew greatly. Sometimes the king transferred to the benefit of the immunist all the proceeds that until that time had gone to the benefit of the royal treasury (taxes, court fines, etc.). A large landowner turned out to be a kind of sovereign in relation to the population living on his lands.
The royal power in this way, as it were, itself contributed to the transformation of large landowners into people independent of the king. But this was, of course, only because of her weakness. Immunity, as the sum of the political rights of the feudal lord in relation to the economically dependent peasant, grew and developed independently of the will of kings and emperors. The large landowners, who had received full economic power over the peasant population of their estates, sought to make this population also politically dependent. They arbitrarily carried out court and reprisals on their estates, created their own armed detachments and did not allow royal officials to enter their domains. The central government turned out to be powerless in the fight against such tendencies of large landowners and was forced to formalize the already established relations with the help of immunity letters.
Under the Carolingians, immunity became a ubiquitous phenomenon and turned into one of the powerful means of enslaving the peasantry. Immunity rights extended to wider territories, and the immunists themselves gained even more power. The Immunist now convened court meetings, held trials, searched for criminals, collected fines and duties in his favor, etc.
“At the request of the bishop of such and such,” the kings wrote in their letters, “... we granted him this boon, which consists in the fact that within the estates of the church of this bishop ... not a single sovereign official shall enter to hear judicial cases or the recovery of any judicial fines, but the bishop himself and his successor, in the name of God, by virtue of complete immunity, let them have all the aforementioned rights ... And everything that the treasury could receive there from free or not free and other people, living on the lands ... of the church, let them forever enter the lamps of the aforementioned church.
Finally, in order to ensure the recruitment of free settlers on the lands of large landowners for military service, the Carolingians transferred to these landowners administrative rights over all free settlers on their estates, that is, as if they appointed seigneurs for these previously free people in the legal sense. Thus, significant changes took place in the political position of the people who settled on the lands of a large landowner, that is, peasants and other free people. Previously, these persons were legally equal with the owner of the estate, although they were economically dependent on him. Now they have become people subordinate to the landowner and legally.
The expansion and strengthening of immunity, which in the hands of the ruling class was an instrument of non-economic coercion of the masses of the exploited peasantry, contributed to the process of its further enslavement and intensification of feudal exploitation. "Economic subjugation received political sanction" ( F. Engels, The Frankish period, K. Marx and F. Engels, Works, vol. XVI, part D, pp. 403 .. .). The peasant, who had previously lost the right to own his ancestral land, now lost his personal freedom as well. The private power of the immunist acquired a kind of state character, and the estate of the immunist turned, as it were, into a small state.
The internal weakness of the Carolingian empire and its rapid collapse
The empire of Charlemagne, which arose as a result of wars of conquest, like other similar empires of the ancient and medieval eras, did not have its own economic base and was a temporary and unstable military-administrative association. It was extremely diverse both from the point of view of the ethnic (tribal) composition of the Carolingian Empire, and from the point of view of its socio-economic development. In a number of areas, tribal features have long been erased. The Germanic tribes that conquered these areas adopted not only the provincial dialects of the Latin language, but also the social order characteristic of the late Roman Empire. The embryos of feudal relations that arose in it (large landownership combined with small farming, subsistence farming, colonies and patrocinium) contributed to the more rapid development of feudalism in such areas of the Carolingian state as Aquitaine, Septimania and Provence. Significantly more backward in terms of the level of development of feudal relations were the regions east of the Rhine. Such areas were Bavaria, Saxony, Alemannia, Thuringia and Frisia, where the development of feudalism was slow and where a large number of tribal remnants were preserved.
Finally, there were areas in the Carolingian Empire in which Romanesque and Germanic elements proved to be ethnically mixed. The interaction of the socio-economic orders that existed among the indigenous Romano-Gallic population with the socio-economic orders that existed among the newcomer Germanic tribes (Franks and Burgundians) led to the development of feudalism in its most classical forms. These areas were those parts of the empire that were, as it were, at the junction between the Romanesque and Germanic worlds, that is, North-Eastern and Central Gaul, as well as Burgundy.
There were no economic ties between the tribes and nationalities united in the empire of Charlemagne by purely violent means. That is why historical development went on not within the boundaries of the empire as a whole, but within the boundaries of individual nationalities and tribes, or their more or less related compounds. The natural tendency of tribes and nationalities, subjugated by force of arms, to liberation from the rule of the conquerors, the undivided dominance of natural economy in feudal estates, the disintegration of Frankish society into a number of economically closed worlds, the continuous growth of the power of large landowners in the localities and the impotence of the central government - all this did inevitable political collapse of the empire.
And indeed, after the death of Charlemagne (814), the empire was first divided among his heirs, and then finally broke up into three parts. This disintegration was formalized by the Treaty of Verdun, concluded between the grandchildren of Charlemagne in 843. One of these grandsons, Charles the Bald, received under the Treaty of Verdun possessions to the west of the Rhine - the West Frankish state (that is, the future France). Another grandson, Louis the German, received possessions east of the Rhine - the East Frankish state (that is, the future Germany). And the eldest grandson - Lothar received a strip of land along the left bank of the Rhine (future Lorraine) and Northern Italy.
Feudal-church culture
In the feudal society that replaced the slave-owning society, a new, feudal culture arose. The bearer of feudal culture in the early Middle Ages was the church.
Religion in feudal society was one of the powerful means of establishing and maintaining the class rule of the exploiters. Promising heavenly bliss as a reward for earthly suffering, the Church by all means distracted the masses from the struggle against the feudal lords, justified feudal exploitation and persistently tried to educate the working people in the spirit of complete obedience to their masters. The influence of the church affected with all its force the spiritual culture of medieval society. “... the feudal organization of the church,” wrote Engels, “consecrated the secular feudal state system with religion. The clergy were also the only educated class. From this it followed by itself that church dogma was the starting point and the basis of all thinking. Jurisprudence, natural science, philosophy - all the content of these sciences was brought into line with the teachings of the church "( F. Engels, Legal socialism, K. Marx and F. Engels, Works, vol. XVI, part I, p. 295.).
The disintegration of feudal society into a number of economically and politically closed little worlds and the widespread rupture of trade, political and cultural ties that existed in the slave-owning society led to the absence of any broad education in the 6th-10th centuries. All the schools that existed at that time (episcopal and monastic) were in the hands of the clergy. The Church determined their program and selected the composition of their students. The main task of the church at the same time was to educate church ministers who were able to influence the masses of the people with their preaching and protect the existing order intact.
From its ministers, the church demanded, in fact, very little - knowledge of prayers, the ability to read the Gospel in Latin, even if not understanding everything that was read, and familiarity with the order of church services. Persons whose knowledge went beyond the limits of such a program appeared in Western European Society VI-X centuries the rarest exceptions.
In creating schools, the church could not do without some of the elements of secular education that feudal society inherited from ancient world. By adapting these elements of secular education to its own needs, the church became their unwitting "custodian". The ancient disciplines taught in church schools were called the "seven liberal arts", which meant: grammar, rhetoric and dialectics (the so-called trivium - "three paths of knowledge", or the first stage of learning), and arithmetic, geometry, astronomy and music ( the so-called quadrivium - "four paths of knowledge", or the second stage of learning). An attempt to bring together the elements of education inherited from antiquity dates back to the 5th century. and was undertaken by Marcianus Capella. The division of the "liberal arts" into trivium and quadrivium was carried out already in the 6th century. Boethius and Cassiodorus - the last representatives of ancient education.
But the "free arts" of the Middle Ages were a very distant resemblance to what was taught in ancient schools, for representatives of church education claimed that any knowledge is useful only if it helps to better assimilate church teachings. Rhetoric at that time was considered as a subject that helped to competently draw up documents necessary for the church and state. Dialectic (as formal logic was then called) was wholly subordinate to theology and served the representatives of the Church only to fight heretics in disputes. Music was needed during worship, astronomy was used to determine the timing of the onset of various church holidays and for all kinds of predictions.
The astronomical and geographical representations of that time testify to the extreme ignorance of the clergy. The students of church schools were taught that in the extreme east there is paradise, that the earth is like a wheel, that the ocean flows around it on all sides, and that Jerusalem is in its center. The doctrine of the sphericity of the earth was categorically rejected, because the representatives of the church argued that it was impossible to imagine that people on the opposite side of the earth would move upside down.
All information preserved from antiquity that could prompt students to strive for knowledge based on experience was carefully hushed up. Ancient authors deliberately distorted. The monks often destroyed the unique texts on the ancient manuscripts that were in the monastic libraries, and then used the parchment “purified” in this way and expensive to record the monastic chronicles. Genuine knowledge about nature was replaced by superstitious nonsense.
Education, monopolized by the Western Christian Church, was of a very primitive nature. The Church was not, and could not be, interested in preserving all the ancient heritage inherited by the Middle Ages and, forced to turn to the latter, tried to use it only for its own purposes.
"Carolingian Revival"
The so-called "Carolingian revival" further strengthened the position of the church in the field of spiritual culture and education. Some revival of the activities of the clergy and representatives of the imperial authorities in the organization of church schools in the second half of the VIII and at the beginning of the IX century. was associated with the most profound socio-economic changes in the life of society, that is, with a complete revolution in land ownership relations, which led to the strengthening of secular and spiritual feudal lords and to the enslavement of the peasants.
The role of the church in these conditions became more and more important. That is why, while strengthening church authority by creating a layer of literate clerics, the Carolingians left the entire monopoly on education in the hands of the church and in no way changed the orders that existed before. The literate people they needed to work in the state apparatus, the Carolingians drew from church schools.
The tasks facing these schools were clearly and briefly defined by the most prominent figure in the "Carolingian Renaissance" - Alcuin (about 735-804), a pupil of the York School. In one of his letters to Charlemagne, Alcuin wrote: "I work hard on many things in order to educate many for the benefit of God's holy church and to adorn your imperial power." In his capitularies, Charlemagne demanded from the monks the obligatory organization of monastic schools for teaching clerics - reading, counting, writing and singing, since shepherds who are obliged to instruct the people must be able to read and understand "holy scripture". Charlemagne attracted a number of persons capable of heading church schools from Italy, where the clergy had more high level education. So, Charlemagne brought out Peter of Lebanon, Paul the Deacon, Leidard and Theodulf.
Paying great attention to church schools, Charlemagne believed that the laity should be taught only the "truths" of religion and the "creed". For those who refused to study the "creed", Charlemagne prescribed a number of church punishments (fasting, etc.). Royal envoys and earls were obliged to supervise the implementation of these orders.
Thus, both in the capitularies of Charlemagne and in the resolutions of the church councils that met during his reign, it was not about raising the general educational level and raising the culture in all strata of feudal society, but only about teaching a certain circle of people capable of influencing the people with their preaching. masses. Theology was still considered the "crown of education". Indeed, "... our glorious, taught wisdom of the Lord surpasses all the wisdom of academic science," Alcuin wrote, referring to Plato's Academy. It is clear that with such a formulation of the question, there could not have been any real revival of the "free arts" of antiquity.
Textbooks, compiled in the form of dialogues between a teacher and a student, testify to the extremely low level of education at that time. An example of such a manual is a dialogue written by Alcuin for the son of Charlemagne - Pepin:
“P and n and n. What is a letter? - A l to at and n. Guardian of History. P and p and n. What is a word? - A l to at and n. Traitor of the soul ... P and p and n. Who does the person look like? - A l to at and n. To the ball. - P and p and n. How is the person placed? - A l to at and n. Like a lamp in the wind ... P and p and n. What is a head? - A l to at and n. The top of the body.- P and p and n. What is a body? - A l to at and n. The dwelling of the soul ... P and p and n. What is winter? - A l to at and n. Summer exile. P and p and n. What is spring? - A l to at and n. Painter of the earth, etc.
All the literature of the Carolingian period was purely imitative, mainly Christian literature of the first centuries of our era. This can be seen from the works of Alcuin himself, and from the works of his student - the biographer of Charlemagne - Eingard. However, the manuscripts improved significantly during this time. A writing reform was carried out, as a result of which a clear letter (Carolingian minuscule) was established everywhere, which served as the basis for the modern outline of Latin letters. The scribes decorated the manuscripts with miniatures (small pictures) on biblical themes.
Along with church works, Carolingian scribes also copied books of ancient authors (poets, philosophers, lawyers and politicians), which contributed to the preservation of these manuscripts.
It is necessary to mention the construction that took place under Charlemagne. In an effort to increase the importance of imperial power and the church, he ordered the construction of palaces and cathedrals in Aachen and other points of his state. In their architecture, the buildings resembled the style of Byzantine buildings in Ravenna.
Construction equipment in the West at that time was extremely imperfect. By order of Charlemagne, marble columns were often used in the construction of buildings, which were taken out of Italy as a whole. At the same time, ancient monuments of art were barbarously destroyed. However, most of the buildings erected under Charles were wooden and therefore died very quickly.
The "Carolingian Renaissance" was very short-lived. The rapid collapse of the empire could not but affect the field of culture. Modern chroniclers, recording the miserable state of education in the period following the collapse of the empire, have noted that the kingdom of the Franks has become an arena of unrest and war, that internecine strife is seething everywhere, and that the study of "both the sacred scripture and the liberal arts" is completely neglected.
Thus, the actual picture of church activity in the field of spiritual culture in the early Middle Ages indicates that the monopoly on education, seized by the church at the earliest stage of development of feudal society, led to very deplorable results. “From antiquity to the inheritance,” wrote Engels, “were Euclid and solar system Ptolemy, from the Arabs - the decimal number system, the beginnings of algebra, the modern inscription of numbers and alchemy - the Christian Middle Ages left nothing "( F. Engels, Dialectics of Nature, Gospolitizdat, 1955, p. 5.).
The church saw one of its main tasks in keeping the masses in a state of extreme ignorance and thereby contributing to their more complete enslavement.
The then dominant feudal-church culture had a pronounced class character.
Folk art in the early Middle Ages
“The thoughts of the ruling class,” Marx and Engels pointed out, “are the dominant thoughts in every epoch. This means that the class which represents the dominant material force of society is at the same time its dominant spiritual force. K. Marx and F. Engels, German Ideology, Soch., vol. 3, ed. 2, p. 45.). But this does not mean that, being the dominant one, this culture is the only one.
Just as the teachings of the church, which justified and defended feudal exploitation, were opposed by heretical anti-feudal teachings of the people, so the spiritual culture of the ruling class was opposed by the spiritual creativity of the masses: fairy-tale epic epics, songs, music, dances and dramatic action.
The richness of folk art is primarily evidenced by the fact that the original basis of the largest epic works of the Western European Middle Ages were folk tales. These folk tales were preserved with the greatest completeness in the northern and northwestern regions of Europe, where the development of feudal relations took place relatively slowly and where a significant stratum of the free peasantry existed for a long time.
The epic works of the Burgundian and Frankish society - the Nibelungenlied and the "heroic poems", in particular the Song of Roland, survived only in the form of later works, in which the original folk tales underwent an appropriate processing in the interests of the ruling class. However, formed on the basis of a folk epic that poeticized the struggle of Charlemagne with the Arabs, the “Song of Roland” bears the features of a powerful popular influence. It is expressed in those parts of this poem that speak of love for "sweet France", of hatred for enemies who encroach on her freedom, and where all feudal lords who betray the interests of the motherland for the sake of personal interests are condemned.
a huge role in the national creativity V-X centuries, music and poetry undoubtedly played. The most widespread in Frankish society were folk songs and epics, all kinds of comic and satirical songs.
The masses of the people for a very long time adhered to pre-Christian customs, made sacrifices to the former deities, combined pre-Christian religious rites with Christian ones, and “defiled” Christian churches with folk songs and dances. In the VI century. in the south of Gaul, there were cases when the people, interrupting the church service, proclaimed: “Saint Martial, pray for us, and we will dance for you!” After which a round dance was arranged in the church and folk dances began.
The Catholic Church treated the musical and poetic creativity of the people sharply negatively. Seeing in such creativity a manifestation of “pagan”, “sinful”, “not corresponding to the Christian spirit” folk activity, the church persistently sought its prohibition and severely persecuted the direct spokesmen and bearers of the musical culture of the people - folk singers and dancers (mimes and histrions).
Numerous church decrees directed against folk singers and actors have been preserved. Folk art, which these singers and actors represented, had a pronounced anti-feudal character and was dangerous to the ruling class. Therefore, the church tirelessly pursued him. That is why Alcuin declared that "a man who lets histrions, mimes and dancers into his house does not know what a large crowd of unclean spirits follows them." Charlemagne, in turn, persecuted these persons, referring them to the number of "dishonored", and categorically forbade the representatives of the clergy to keep "falcons, hawks, packs of dogs and buffoons" with them. The same spirit was imbued with numerous resolutions of church councils. However, the vitality of folk song and folk dramatic art proved irresistible.
Folk art also existed in the field of fine and applied arts, despite the fact that the latter were completely subordinated to the interests of the church and the talent of folk craftsmen was placed at the service of the ruling class of feudal lords. Various artistically made objects have been preserved that served to decorate church buildings or were used during church services (richly ornamented bells; shrines that served to store relics, decorated with carved items made of wood or bone; various church utensils - bowls, crosses and candlesticks made of precious metals; cast bronze church gates, etc.).
Unknown, but skillful craftsmen who created these objects, undoubtedly, strived for the fullest possible satisfaction of church tastes and did not go beyond the limits of biblical traditions in their work. However, the images themselves in a number of cases bore traces of folk influence, which was expressed in a realistic interpretation of human figures, in the use of folk ornaments and in the image of various really existing or fabulous animals.
The influence of folk art also affected the execution of miniatures, all kinds of headpieces and capital letters that adorned church manuscripts. Miniatures were usually colored, as well as capital letters, which were often depicted either in the form of fish or animals, then in the form of all kinds of birds (storks with a snake in their beak, peacocks, roosters, ducks), then in the form of special combinations of leaves, rosettes, etc. "Animal ornamentation" has been preserved in folk art since the distant prehistoric past. The folk ornament in the form of ribbon braid was also widely used in monastic manuscripts. Patterned fabrics (carpets, church bedspreads) in the same way testified that the influence of folk art did not remain without a trace for this branch of applied art.
A classic example of the formation of a medieval economy is considered Frankish State - the first large political and socio-economic association in Europe. This kingdom was created by the Germanic tribes of the Salic Franks, led by the king Khdodvigom I from the Merovingian clan in 486 on the territory of the former Roman province - Northern Gaul (modern France). In the V-VII centuries. Not. here the Merovingian dynasty ruled, which annexed the tribes of the Alemanni, Visigoths and Franks to the kingdom. From the end of the 7th to the middle of the 9th century. in power was the Carolingian dynasty, during which, before the Frankish state, the territories of all Western and part of Central Europe (modern territories of France, Germany, Italy) were annexed.
In the V-VI centuries. in the Frankish kingdom, the land of each village belonged to the collective of its inhabitants, small free landowners, who constituted the neighboring community - brand. The main production unit of the Frankish community was an individual family farm.
Buildings and household plots were privately owned, which were inherited. Plots of arable land could also be hereditary, but only the collective of the community could freely dispose of them. Forests, wastelands, swamps, roads, indivisible pastures were also in communal ownership. This hindered the development of individual family farms, which expanded their land plots at the expense of those members of the community who died in wars, died from diseases, epidemics, left their nadish, and the like. The dualism between collective property and parcel (individual) farms.
at the end of the 6th century. the brand began to lose its meaning, and individual family farms won the right to private family property (anode) to land plots and were given the opportunity to alienate (sell, exchange, bequeath, donate) without the permission of the community (brands).
This opened the way to deepening property and social differentiation, final collapse communities, became a prerequisite for the growth of large feudal property, especially the growth of land holdings and wealth of kings, nobility, combatants.
In the VIII-IX centuries. The Frankish state experienced a complex evolution of agrarian relations. A decisive role in this was played by the strengthening of the role of the state in economic life and constant wars. This prompted King Charles Martel (714-751) to carry out military and agrarian reform. The basis of the army instead of the people's militia was on a permanent basis warrior-knights, whose service became one of the most prestigious in the state. Ownership of the land was retained by the lord, who gave it and could take it away in case of refusal to serve or treason. During the reign of the Carolingian dynasty (since 751), which was founded by the son of Charles Martel Pepin Short, the granting of beneficiaries became a system, and vassalage became hereditary.
At the same time, the Martell reform created the conditions for the final disintegration of the community, limiting the rights and obligations of its members: freed them from prestigious military service, participation in courts, and local government.
during the IX-X centuries. beneficiary has acquired features feud (lemu) - the main form of hereditary land ownership of the Middle Ages. The king, in order to exercise the functions of state power in his possessions, granted the feudal lords (counts, margraves) essentially unlimited rights: fiscal, judicial-administrative and others regarding the population that lived in this territory. Such actions of the king were called immunity and actually formalized non-economic coercion of the peasantry.
The Frankish state received the greatest strength under the son of Pepin the Short Carp Large (768-814). It was during his reign that the feudal patrimony became the basis of the economic organization of Frankish society - seigneur. It was small (several tens of households), medium (with 3-4 hundreds of households) and large (several hundred hectares and more than 3-4 thousand peasant households). The land in the patrimony was divided into two parts - county or domain (up to 30% of the area of the seigneury) and the peasant, which was in their use and consisted of put on. Peasant farms included a yard with a house, buildings, an arable plot, sometimes with a garden and a vineyard. The peasants also enjoyed the indivisible communal forests and pastures of the feudal patrimony.
The arable lands of the domain and peasant plots were interspersed, so forced crop rotation reigned. Peasants performed regular corvée 2-3 times a week.
Simultaneously with the growth of large landownership, a feudally dependent peasantry was formed. During the Carolingian era, it consisted of three groups: columns(free peasants who are in land dependence; servos(dependent both personally and on land, essentially slaves) and litas(occupied an intermediate position, being under the patronage of the feudal lord and holding the allotment in hereditary use). Gradually, the difference between the groups was erased and the peasants merged into a single mass of dependents, paid dues and served corvee.
The state of dependent peasants through heavy taxes, debts, natural disasters, illnesses, the natural nature of farms, which led to their ruin, was also replenished by free soldiers and small landowners. The feudal lords were not interested in driving the peasants from the land that was for them the only source existence. Even having lost their alol, the peasants took land from the feudal lords for use on the terms of performing certain duties. Therefore, they have become widely used, known since Roman times, precarious agreements - agreements on conditional land holding, which the large owner transferred for temporary use to the peasant, for which he had to perform corvée or pay dues. Was three types of precarities:
The landless peasant received all the land from the owner;
The peasant gave his own land to a large landowner and received it on the terms of working off corvée and dues, while receiving protection and necessary assistance if necessary;
By giving land, the peasant received in return a large area of land.
As for agricultural production, it was two-fold in the Frankish state. They grew rye, wheat, oats, barley, legumes, and flax. The fields were plowed 2-3 times, harrowed, weeded crops. The use of water mills began and cattle breeding developed.
Handicraft work was combined with agricultural work, the economy itself was natural. All products, with a few exceptions, were consumed within the patrimony, periodically selling only the surplus, and buying what was not produced in the patrimony. However, trade did not have a significant effect on general level economic life.
So, during the V-IX centuries. in the Frankish state, a classical form of feudal service land tenure and seignioral-peasant relations was formed. The basis of the feudal system was the estate-seigneur - a closed subsistence economy, the owner of which (seigneur) had full power in his territory. This situation inevitably led to a weakening of royal power. Among the nobility, tendencies towards political independence intensified. The internecine wars escalated considerably. new king Louis the Pious (814-840), son of Charlemagne - failed to maintain the integrity of the Frankish Empire in 843, according to the Verdun agreement, it broke up into the West Frankish (territory of France) and East Frankish (territory of Germany) kingdoms.
The collapse of the large Frankish state was evidence of the completion of the process of its feudalization. New European countries were formed (France, Germany), which in essence were sovereign states, represented a system of estates. Feudalization is the transformation of alodu into content; the disappearance of free community members and the emergence of a dependent and serf peasantry; the formation of feudal ownership of land and the emergence of a ruling class of feudal lords, landowners-warriors.
Economic thought of the Frankish state
The concept of economic opinion Frankish state give literary sources and state documents of this era. In the literature of the early Middle Ages, under the influence of Christianity, ideas were expressed about the equality of people before God, about work as a single source of existence, about the need to share the results of labor with the poor, and the desire for wealth was defined as a vice and proof of the absence of true faith.
IN government documents reflected the attitude of their authors to the process of disintegration of the rural community and the emergence of feudal relations. In the oldest of them - records of the old common law of the tribe of the Salic (northern) Franks, which was made by order of the king Clovis (481-511), and subsequently supplemented and reshaped by his followers - the equal right of all community members to the land of the rural community is recognized, the equality of all free francs before the law, the inviolability of community property is confirmed. At the same time, the collection contains articles that dealt with property stratification and the protection of individual private property. In particular, movable and immovable property were separated. Movables could be pledged and bequeathed to the closest of relatives. Real estate reflected the various rights of individual ownership over the supreme rights of society to all land.
Theft of property was punishable by fines. Slaves were considered the property of the master, and therefore only appropriate compensation had to be paid for their murder by an outsider.
The "Salic Truth" was streamlined during the period of decomposition of the communal economy of the Salic Franks and the emergence of new socio-economic relations, but after the decline of the Frankish state (GX century), it lost its practical significance.
An important source of feudal economic thought is also the so-called "economic regulations" "Capitulary of Villas" ("Law on estates"), which at the beginning of GH Art. issued by the King of the Franks Doctor Big (742-814). This document gives an idea of the organization and management of the fiefdom. It no longer even mentions communal land ownership, but recognizes the monopoly right of seniors to land property. The entire land of the votchina was owned by its owner (votchinnik), and the majority of the population of the votchina were enslaved peasants who were obliged to perform various duties and pay dues in kind to the owners of the land. This law recognizes subsistence farming as an ideal form of economic relations and recommends that everything necessary be created on the feudal estate so as not to depend on the market, sell only surpluses, and buy products that were not produced in the estate, collect dues in kind and create food reserves.
The Capitulary of the Villas recorded the victory of classical feudal social relations in the state of the Franks.
Send your good work in the knowledge base is simple. Use the form below
Students, graduate students, young scientists who use the knowledge base in their studies and work will be very grateful to you.
Introduction
The Middle Ages as an epoch and feudalism as a social formation did not coincide completely, only in general terms. First of all, this is explained by the unevenness of historical development, its asynchrony not only in different regions and countries, but even often in different regions of the same country.
At the origins of the Middle Ages and feudalism in Europe, there really were two social systems, two around the world. The first is ancient, slave-owning, already Christian and highly developed for its time; in addition to the Greeks and Romans, the Celts of Gaul, the inhabitants of the Iberian Peninsula, and, to one degree or another, the tribes of the Northern Balkans and Britain were drawn into it. Another, more extensive, was the world of the barbarians: tribal, pagan, with its own unique appearance, which did not yet know the class system. The cultural gap between them was huge, seemingly insurmountable. But in the Middle Ages, when the formation and development of feudalism engulfed the entire continent, when ties were established and strengthened, the mutual influence of various ethnic groups, events, phenomena and institutions expanded, these differences gradually smoothed out.
It was in the Middle Ages that the peoples inhabiting our continent entered the pan-European arena as independent political forces. The space of Europe was more and more "saturated" in comparison with antiquity: the population grew, new public entities, communication between them became more multifaceted. And Europe was turning into a qualitatively new civilization.
European feudal societies were more dynamic not only than ancient societies, but also contemporary ones in other parts of the world. However, compared with subsequent eras, the social development of the Middle Ages in Europe was slow. Manual production, the direct transfer of production and household skills, the underdevelopment of trade limited labor productivity. The primitiveness of the means of communication made it difficult to communicate and exchange experiences. Low level technology and knowledge made a person dependent on the natural conditions of life: the natural environment and its vagaries, demographic disasters. Diseases of people and livestock, loss of crops, frequent famines and wars drastically reduced material wealth and the very life of people. The requisitions of the landowners, the state and the church exacerbated the difficulties for the majority of the people. The strength of tradition, the dogmatic constraint of thinking made it difficult to innovate in all spheres of life.
The process of organizing large landownership in the feudal estate of the Carolingian era is one of the main stages in the further historical development of Europe.
1. Frank state. Carolingians
The Franks are a tribal union that developed by the 3rd century AD. from the German population of the lower reaches of the Rhine and the nearest coast of the North Sea. The well-known interpretation of the ethnonym Frank - "free" - arose later, and initially it was understood as "swift", "unbridled". The first Roman mention of franci dates back to 275.
From the 4th century, the Franks began to gradually move into northwestern Gaul. Their development of the whole of Gaul lasted for several centuries. By the middle of the 5th c. no more than 200 thousand francs settled there. The predominance of the Germans has been noted since the 7th century, and their transformation into the leading ethnic group since the 9th. But at first, the barbarians settled in their usual conditions - in humid river valleys, while the local population, who had long forgotten about slash-and-burn agriculture, who knew regular crop rotation, lived on dry and fertile coastal terraces. So, at first, being in the minority, the Germans did not mix with the indigenous population, they lived in their consanguineous groups and communities.
Even during the reign of the Visigoths in Italy, the warlike Chlodion (c. 427-447) united the Salic Franks, subjugated the entire territory of modern Belgium, reached the Somme, but then collided with the Romans, was defeated by Aetius and the Franks became federates of the Romans, gaining a foothold in the northwestern Gaul Chlodion's successor was Merovei (447-456), who gave the name of the dynasty. The son and successor of Merovei - Childeric I (456-481), according to legend, was distinguished by debauchery, seduced the daughters of free Franks, for which he was expelled by subjects who surrendered under the patronage of the head of the Gallo-Roman state Egidius. Childeric fled beyond the Rhine to the Thuringians, seduced Queen Basina there, with whom he returned to his kingdom when he was called by the Franks, disillusioned with Egidia. Bazina became the mother of the founder of the Frankish state Clovis.
The most important event of the further reign of Clovis was the baptism, which was preceded by his marriage to the Burgundian princess Clotilde, a devout Catholic. Under the influence of his wife and after the victory over the Alemans, which he asked Christ for, on December 25, 496, Clovis was baptized in Reims with his three thousand strong retinue.
So, being the grandson of the noble Frank Merovei, Clovis founded the Merovingian dynasty, which lasted until 687.
The Frankish community has become a territorial organization uniting neighboring land users. Such a community, which united completely independent landowners-allodists, was called a brand. At the same time, there was no unconditional, private property in the modern sense. The property of the community member was only those plots in which labor was invested. In other cases, the property was not the plot, but only what was on it. But the rights to marked trees in the common forest remained only for 1 year.
The Franks, like other Germans, had an even stronger commitment to the allod than the Romans to private property, for only the presence of the allod was proof of personal freedom and public full rights. Therefore, in the V-VII centuries. Allod was perceived not so much as property, but as an inheritance, inseparable from the family. In this form, under Roman influence, allod arose among the Franks in Gaul. In the communities, along with full-fledged Franks, there also lived incomplete ones - litas and even slaves (serfs). They probably served the nobles. Recall that the Germans considered noble families from which military leaders, elders and other officials were selected. With the formation of royal power, the communal tops turn into the lowest layer of the royal administration, which was not numerous at that time. The allod with the right to renounce kinship contributed to the exit of this layer from the brand community and, ultimately, to the isolation of the nobility with its land holdings from the ordinary population. In addition, the royal power, as the supreme one, received the right to dispose of unoccupied, free communal lands. On these lands, the kings planted their people, also on the rights of allodists. For their settlement, the consent of the community members was no longer required.
In the 6th century, however, there were still local court assessors - Rakhinburgs, who were elected by the people. The intervention of the counts in their affairs was punishable by death, which testified to the slow elimination of tribal institutions under the Merovingians. Although gradually the earls, having almost complete power in their counties, became so strong and turned into large landowners that they entered into a struggle with the kings for an autonomous existence from them. Dukes and other nobles behaved similarly later.
The process of social differentiation of Frankish society led to the formation of a special administrative apparatus, known as the state. Under the Merovingians, it was weak, amorphous. Power in the person of the king and the nobility had not yet encroached on the basic rights of the free Franks, who owned allods, participated in the militia and elections of local governments, and existed primarily through the exploitation of the inferior in their possessions - slaves and litas. Therefore, the state and society in this era can be called pre- or proto-feudal.
Evidence of the consolidation of Frankish society and the formation of statehood was the codification of customary law, expressed in the appearance of the "Salic Truth". In the future, all state legislative acts came from the kings.
After the death of Clovis in 511, the state was divided among his four sons. According to custom, the inheritance was divided in equal shares without preference to the elder. There was also no capital city, although Clovis understood the importance of Paris and was buried there. According to the partition, Paris went to the middle son. The brothers' possessions were located in stripes. The brothers jointly led the conquests. But the principle of equal division inevitably led to the disintegration common state which only violence could have prevented. After the death of one of the brothers, the most ferocious of the sons of Clovis - the youngest - Chlothar personally slaughtered two underage nephews, later captured another nephew and burned him in a hut with his wife and two daughters. So he is in the middle of the VI century. united all the Frankish lands, but soon died and again had to divide the country, now between the children of Chlothar I, then their wives - during the so-called war of two queens. In addition to the personal ambitions of the rulers, strife was caused by the uneven development of various regions of the kingdom.
The former royal military servants, settling on the ground, receiving it on the rights of allods, that is, in property, began to be burdened by the service and turned into practically independent local administrators. Lacking the strength to rule, the last Merovingians lost interest in active politics, closed themselves in their estates, preferring hunting to everything and ... degenerated as monarchs. According to the custom of the Merovingians, receiving the crown in infancy, by the age of 14-15 they were already becoming fathers. Due to the excesses of stormy youth, they usually lived only up to 24-25 years. Never cut their hair according to tribal tradition, they grew wild, lived secluded on their estates, traveled like peasants in ox carts, and had no idea about state affairs. The country was ruled by mayors, who usually contributed to such a disastrous way of life for their master kings. There were also 3 of them - in Neustria, Burgundy and Austrasia.
Taking advantage of the apathy of the kings, the nobility begins to appropriate communal lands and subjugate the peasants themselves, forcing them to serve themselves and depriving them of their rights to land. Weak kings did not need a peasant militia, and they did not defend the peasants, and they did not have the strength to do so. But the dissatisfaction of the ordinary population was taken advantage of by the major of Austrasia Pepin Geristalsky. He managed to unite all the Franks and from 687 became the sole mayor of the kingdom. Under him, the Merovingian princes were brought up in monasteries and kept under reliable supervision, waiting until they choice will fall mayor's house. When brought into the world, they grew their hair and performed ceremonial functions. As kings, they lived on modest estates, from where they were taken to the palace to receive foreign ambassadors or to the annual March public meetings under an escort in a simple wagon drawn by a pair of oxen.
Thus, in the Merovingian era in Frankish society, the ruling class and state, royal power were already completely distinguished. But the bulk of the population remained free, not subjected to exploitation. The main function of the ruling class was to manage, consolidate the population, protect it and the occupied territory, as well as seize other lands in order to increase the wealth and influence of the nobility. And only gradually the ruling class, having strengthened itself in successful wars, begins to subjugate its own community members.
So, the well-being of the ruling class no longer depended on gifts from the royal table, but on land holdings. Having received them, the nobility practically caught up with the kings in terms of the availability of specific material benefits and begins to be burdened by their subordinate position. Hence the desire for separatism. But the possibilities of the service layer were still limited by their allods and royal awards. However, there were huge tracts of communal lands around, in principle, not protected by anyone and nothing, except for the old primitive traditions. And the nobility began to gradually pick them up. This has been observed since the middle of the 7th century. But for some time the persistence of the nobility was balanced by the huge numerical superiority of the peasants, who supported, in particular, Pepin of Geristalsky. Therefore, there has not yet been a mass subjugation of the peasants. It began in the next, VIII century, under another dynasty.
So during the two hundred years of the Merovingian era, the Franks went from consolidation within a single state to the beginning of the formation of feudal orders.
After the death of Pepin Geristalsky and his new strife illegitimate son Charles, again with the help of the Austrasians, becomes the sole mayor of the Franks (715-741). He treats the Merovingian kings like puppets, and from 737 he rules without kings at all. His influence especially increased after the advance of the Arabs was stopped under his leadership.
The fact is that, having captured the Pyrenees quite easily, from 720 the Arabs launched an attack on Gaul. But in the decisive battle at Poitiers in 732, the Arab cavalry could not break the line of the Frankish infantry, armed with war hammers, and after the death of their commander, Prince Abdrachman, retreated. This battle, although it was fought by the Arabs with insignificant forces, brought an end to their raids in Europe.
For this victory, Charles was subsequently nicknamed Martell (Hammer). Having risen thanks to such success, in 735 he managed to subjugate the richest duchy in the Frankish lands - Aquitaine. Karl Martel owed his military successes to the change in the status of land grants of his subordinates. Previously, the lands complained for serving as property and became, in fact, allods. This alienated landowners, especially large ones, from the throne and even pushed them towards independence. The Arab threat prompted Charles Martel to replace this order of donations with benefices - land grants given only on conditions of military service. In case of refusal to serve, the lands were taken away. This order was not Karl's invention, but earlier it was applied sporadically, but now it has become a rule. This more firmly tied the nobility to the ruler of the Royal lands, and there were not enough confiscated from the traitor magnates. And Karl carried out the secularization of significant masses of church lands and paid with them. In justification, he referred to the fact that the lands were allegedly given to the church for temporary use until a special state need. Now she has arrived. Charles also began to appoint bishops without the consent of the pope. And the church was powerless to fight this, because Martell had achieved broad social support.
The policy of distributing beneficiaries was continued by the son of Charles Martell, Pepin the Short (741-768). The still not very numerous ruling stratum was forced to submit. Only with the church Pepin decided to make peace and agreed with her that the lands secularized by his father, remaining with the holders, were recognized as church property, for which the church received a double tithe. Having thus strengthened his power, Pepin obtained from the pope of Rome recognition of him as the king of the Franks - instead of the Merovingians who had lost real power. In response, he promised the pope help against the Lombards who were oppressing him.
Having received consent from the pope, in 751 he gathered the Frankish nobility in Soissons and achieved his election as the new king of the Franks. The former king of the Merovingians - Childeric and his son were tonsured monks. But with the promised help to the pope, who was pressed by the Lombards, Pepin was in no hurry, because the war with the ethnically close German state did not meet with sympathy among the Franks. Then the pope himself arrived with an embassy to Pepin and performed a rite of chrismation on him, his wife and son, which immediately exalted the new king and his family, for such a thing was not done over the Merovingians. So Pepin became king with the right to transfer the title by inheritance, and the pope, after a successful war between the Franks and the Lombards, received secular possession - the Papal States in the center of Italy (756).
Turning to the pope, Pepin the Short made a revolution in his mind, for he abandoned tribal traditions and resorted to the authority of church legality. The pope, thanks to this precedent, received in the future the right to remove kings and entire dynasties from power.
Pepin was replaced by Charles, nicknamed the Great (768-814). Initially, power was traditionally shared by two sons of Pepin - Karl and Carloman. But after the death of his brother, which soon followed, at the age of 26 Charles became the only king. The posthumous nickname "Great" he deserved. His greatness was reflected even in the fact that the word "king" arose from his name.
His father began to involve him in business early. Already at the age of 11, Karl met Pope Stephen II, then participated in campaigns and meetings. He was large and strong build, with a rare then growth of 192 cm; his hair was long, slightly wavy, his face was decorated with a thick mustache hanging down according to the Frankish tradition. The proportions of his body were so harmonious that neither a short neck nor a rather solid belly in adulthood were noticed. He usually wore the traditional costume of the Frank: a linen shirt and underpants, on top - a tunic with silk patterns, trousers wrapped with strips of fabric wrapped below the knees, in winter - a vest made of otter or rat skin. Above - a blue cape, on the side - a sword with a baldric. On holidays, gold ornaments were added.
Despite sincere religiosity, he married 6 times and had many concubines. But he was an exemplary father in relation to his many children, with whom he always tried to share his leisure time. The death of one of them mourned like a woman. He was especially attached to his daughters. In order to keep them to himself, he never married a single one, but he allowed them to have lovers. Karl valued education, created a kind of family academy, to which he invited scientists famous at that time; He studied himself and forced his family members to study. He himself spoke and read Latin, understood Greek by ear, however, he mastered writing only in adulthood. Then he studied logic, rhetoric, astronomy. In need of land to endow the growing service class, as well as to maintain the greatness of his state, Charles pursued an active policy of conquest. Taking advantage of another complaint from the pope about the Lombards, who were pacified by Pepin, but retained their independence, he finally defeated them and placed the iron crown of the Lombard king on his head. During this war, in 774, he visited Rome and received from the pope all the grants that were granted to his father.
But the main military efforts of Charlemagne were directed to the east, where there were many poorly organized barbarian tribes. In 772, he began a war with the Saxons, some of whom were still in the 5th century. moved to Britain, but the bulk of them remained on the lands from the Lower Rhine to the Elbe. The conquest of the Saxons lasted for 32 years. Their stubborn resistance was caused by the cohesion of the Saxon society, which was still at the stage of decomposition of the primitive order. The Franks, on the other hand, brought new relationships, alien even to the young Saxon nobility. Ultimately, the Franks conquered Saxony, and after it, Bavaria, establishing their feudal order there.
During the Saxon wars, the Franks came into contact with the Slavic tribes living on the Elbe, whom Charles used as allies against the Saxons. In the future, some of them were also temporarily subjugated by the Franks. In the Middle Danube, the Franks during 791-796. defeated the Avars and founded the Pannonian brand.
Thus was created an empire that covered the territory modern France, Germany, northern Italy and Spain, as well as Hungary, the Czech Republic and Austria.
In 800, Charles supported Leo III on the papal throne, who, in gratitude, during the solemn divine service, according to the old custom, bowed to the ground to Charles and placed the imperial crown on his head. Charles considered this well deserved by all his deeds, by which he returned to Rome the power over her former provinces. Moreover, a woman, Empress Irina, was sitting on the throne of Constantinople at that time.
But in order to obtain international recognition of his imperial title, Charles nevertheless began to bother with Byzantium. Even at the age of 58, he began to woo Irina, not embarrassed by the fact that she had achieved autocracy in her country by organizing the murder of her own son. But this marriage was not destined to come true, for Irina was soon deposed from the throne. However, the Byzantine government, reluctantly, but weighed down by the fight against the Arabs, in 812 nevertheless recognized the title of basileus for Charles.
In an effort to elevate the role of the church, Charlemagne actively interfered in its affairs. 250 years before the actual church decisions, he issued several decrees on the celibacy of the clergy. He also introduced compulsory tithes for the benefit of the church. In many ways, the activities of Charles laid the foundation for the ideology of the emerging Western world. His demands to organize free primary schools contributed to the transformation of Latin into the international language of Western Europe. The multifaceted interests and seething energy of Charles contributed to the consolidation of Western European society. Perhaps those who claim that Charlemagne laid the foundation of Western European unity on which 1200 years later, in our time, the construction of the European Union was completed are right.
Charlemagne died at the age of 72 from pneumonia, having caught a cold while hunting, outliving all his wives. From his name came the name of the new dynasty - the Carolingians. Under him, the foundations of Western European feudalism were laid.
franc tribal feudal fiefdom
2. Organization of a largeownership. Feudal fiefdom
By the end of the 5th century and the beginning of the 10th century, a revolution in land relations in the Frankish state led to the dominance of feudal property - the basis of the feudal system. The seizure of peasant lands by secular and ecclesiastical large landowners was accompanied by the intensification of various forms of non-economic coercion. This was an inevitable consequence of the establishment of feudal landed property, since, provided that land and means of production were provided to direct producers, surplus labor in favor of the owner of the land could only be extracted by non-economic coercion.
The seizures of peasant allotments by large feudal lords take on a particularly massive character by the beginning of the 4th century. Large landowners, in particular those who, as counts or other officials, had the means of coercion in relation to the local peasant population, by force turned them into dependent people.
The ruin of the peasantry was facilitated by the active aggressive policy of the Carolingians, especially Charlemagne, the demand from the free peasants who still remained, mainly in the German regions, for long-term military service, which for a long time separated them from the economy, as well as church tithes, heavy taxes, and high judicial fines.
The church played an important role in dispossessing the land and dragging the peasantry into dependence. To expand her land holdings, along with direct violence, she used the religious feelings of the peasant masses, suggesting to believers that donations in favor of the church would provide them with remission of sins and eternal bliss in the afterlife. Church institutions, individual prelates, and above all the popes themselves, widely practiced forgery in order to assert their rights to certain landed possessions.
Ruined or on the verge of ruin, free peasants easily fell into dependence on large landowners. At the same time, however, the feudal lords were not interested in driving the peasants from the land, but rather in their attachment. Under the dominance of natural economy, the land was the only means of subsistence. Therefore, even losing allods, free community members took land from the feudal lords for use on the condition that certain duties were performed.
One of the most common ways to draw the free peasantry into dependence even under the Merovingians was the practice of transferring land to the precarium. In the VIII-IX centuries. this practice was particularly widespread as one of the most important means of feudalization. A precarium is a conditional land holding, which a large owner transferred for temporary use to some person, most often a landless or landless person. For the use of this allotment, its recipient usually had to pay dues or, in some cases, perform corvée in favor of the owner of the land.
The precarist, renouncing the right of ownership of the land, turned from the owner into its holder. Although initially he retained personal freedom, he fell into land dependence on the owner of the land. Thus, although the precarious relationship took the form of a "voluntary contract", in reality it was the result of the difficult economic situation of the peasants, forcing them to give land to large landowners, and sometimes the result of direct violence.
Along with the peasants in the VIII-IX centuries. small estate owners often acted as precarists, who themselves exploited the labor of dependent people, usually coming from the environment of more prosperous communal allodists. In these cases, the precarium served to formalize land relations within the layer of feudal lords, since such a small patrimony was already, in essence, a feudal landowner who entered into certain relations with a larger feudal landowner who provided him with land in the precarium.
If in the VI-VII centuries. royal awards played a decisive role in the folding of large feudal property and the establishment of peasant dependence, then in the VIII-IX centuries. a more important factor in these processes is the ruin of the mass of the peasantry and its drawing into land dependence on large feudal lords, even without the active role of royal power. By losing land, the peasant often soon lost his personal freedom as well. But it could be otherwise. The poor man, being unable to pay his debt, fell into bondage to the creditor, and then into the position of a personally dependent person, not much different from a slave. The act of commendation of a small free peasant to a secular magnate or church often led to personal dependence. In practice, the establishment of a personal dependence of a peasant on a feudal lord could sometimes precede the loss of his allod. However, the wide spread of such personal relations between them had as its general premise the rapid growth of large-scale landownership at the expense of small peasant and communal property, which expressed the main trend social development Frankish society of that era.
The further concentration in the hands of individual large landowners of political power, which served them as an instrument of non-economic coercion, contributed to no small degree to the ruin and drawing the peasantry into dependence. The kings, being unable to prevent this process, were forced to sanction it through social awards. Such awards appeared under the Merovingians, but their wide distribution dates back to the Carolingian period. Their essence lies in the fact that by special royal letters officials - counts, centurions and their assistants - were forbidden to enter the territory belonging to this or that magnate in order to perform any judicial, administrative, police or fiscal functions on it. All these functions were transferred to magnates and their officials. Such an award was called immunity.
Usually, the immunity rights of a large landowner boiled down to the following: he used judicial power on his land; had the right to collect in the territory of immunity all revenues that had previously been in favor of the king; finally, he was the leader of the military militia, convened on the territory of the immune district. The jurisdiction of immunity was subject to claims for land and other property and cases of petty offenses not only personally dependent, but also personally free residents of his possessions. The supreme criminal court usually remained in the hands of the counts, although some immunists also arrogate to themselves the rights of supreme jurisdiction.
Most often, the immunity award simply formalized those means of non-economic coercion that the feudal lord, as a large landowner, appropriated to himself long before receiving the award. Having judicial-administrative and fiscal powers, the immunist used them to acquire more and more land holdings, intensify exploitation and strengthen the dependence of his peasants, including those who were still personally free. During the Carolingian period, the immunity grant often extended the power of the immunist to land and people not previously under any private authority. At the same time, immunity contributed to strengthening the independence of the feudal lords from the central government, thereby preparing the subsequent political collapse of the Carolingian Empire.
The development of vassal relations also contributed to the growth of the political independence of the feudal lords. Vassals were originally called free people who entered into personal contractual relations with a large landowner, mostly as his military servants - vigilantes. In the Carolingian period, entry into vassalage was often accompanied by the granting of a beneficiation to the vassal, which gave it the character of not only a personal, but also a land connection. The vassal was obliged to faithfully serve his master, becoming his "man", and the lord was obliged to protect the vassal. Having a large number of vassals, a large landowner acquired political influence and military strength, strengthened his independence from the royal administration.
In 847, the grandson of Charlemagne, Charles the Bald, in his capitulary of Mersenne prescribed that "every free man should choose his lord." Thus, vassalage was recognized as the main legal form of social communication. The development of vassalage led to the formation of a hierarchical structure of the ruling stratum of the feudal lords, weakened the central authority and contributed to the strengthening of the private power of the feudal lords.
With the approval and formalization of large-scale feudal land ownership by the beginning of the 10th century, significant changes took place in the economic and social organization Frankish society. In the 8th - early? 10th centuries, the feudal patrimony, the seigneury, became its basis, absorbing both free Frankish communities and large land complexes of the Gallo-Roman type.
The structure of large feudal landownership that developed in the Carolingian period was not homogeneous. Large landowners, both secular and ecclesiastical, owned land of varying size and quality. Among their possessions were large estates, which occupied continuous territories that coincided with an entire village or consisted of a number of villages. Estates of this type were most widespread in the northern regions of the Frankish kingdom - between the Rhine and the Loire. But even there, sometimes the possessions of even large landowners consisted of small estates, which included part of a large village or lay in different villages, or even from individual households interspersed with the possessions of other owners, sometimes still free peasants. This type was especially characteristic of southern regions countries.
The diversity in the structure of large landownership was explained by the fact that, both in the north and in the south of the country, it was far from always that a large landowner immediately became the owner of the entire village. Sometimes he first acquired several small peasant plots, and then gradually rounded up his possessions by exchange, purchase or direct seizure, until the whole village turned into his fiefdom or part of it.
Sources on the history of the large feudal patrimony of the Carolingian period more fully describe to us the feudal patrimony of the Frankish kingdom.
1. We wish that our estates, to which we have appointed to serve our own needs, wholly serve us, and not other people.
2. So that our people are treated well and no one brings them to ruin.
3. So that the managers do not dare to put our people in their service, demanding from them corvee, cutting [forest] material and other works in their favor; let them also not accept any gifts from them - neither a horse, nor an ox, nor a cow, nor a pig, nor a ram, nor a pig, nor a lamb, or anything else, with the exception of gourds, gardening products, apples, chickens and eggs.
6. We wish that our stewards give tithes from the whole harvest in full to the churches, which are in our fiscals; and do not give our tithes to other churches, except where it has been established from ancient times. And let not other clergy be at the head of these churches, but only ours - from our people or from our chapel.
9. We wish that every governor in his district has the same measures - modii, sextarii, situlas of 8 sextarii and boxes, which we have in our palace.
12. So that none of the administrators make our hostage in our estate their vassal.
19. In the granaries of our main estates (in villis capitaneis), keep at least 100 chickens and at least 30 geese. And in farms (mansioniles) keep at least 50 chickens, and at least 12 geese.
23. In each of our estates, let the stewards keep as many stables as possible for cows, pigs, sheep, goats and goats, and we can’t do without it. In addition, let them keep working cattle (vaccas), distributed to the slaves for the performance of their service, so that because of [this] service, teams and carts for the master's needs are not diminished in any way. And let them have, when they serve to feed dogs, bulls that are lame, but not sick, cows or horses that are not scabious, and other cattle that are not sick. And, as we said, because of this, teams and carts should not be diminished.
28. We wish that every year on Fortecost, on Palm Sunday, called Hosanna, [managers] by our order deliver money from our economy, after we get acquainted with the accounting of the amount of our income of this year.
30. We wish our stewards to take into account (segregare faciant) separately from each kind of products what they must deliver when they serve for our needs, and also separately take into account what should be loaded onto wagons for war from houses and shepherds, so that they know [exactly] how much is sent for this case.
37. So that our fields and zaimki are well cultivated and our meadows are protected in a timely manner.
41. That the buildings in our [master's] courtyards and the fences surrounding them be well guarded, and that stables, kitchens, bakeries and winepresses be furnished with care, so that our employees can perform their duties there decently and with great neatness.
43. It has been established that our women's quarters should be given material for work in time, namely: flax, wool, woad, scarlet and red dyes, a comb for combing wool, fluff, soap, fats, vessels and other trifles that are needed there.
45. That every manager should have good craftsmen in his charge, namely: blacksmiths, silversmiths and goldsmiths, shoemakers, turners, carpenters, gunsmiths, fishermen, bird-catchers, soap makers, brewers, i.e. those who are well versed in the manufacture of beer, apple, pear and other various drinks, bakers who would make white bread (simitam) for our needs, people who are good at weaving a net for hunting and nets for fishing and catching birds, as well as other employees, which would be too long to list.
47. So that our hunters, falconers and other employees who perform permanent duties at court receive [necessary] assistance in our estates, in accordance with a written order from ours or the queen, when we send them on some of our business or when the steward and chalice from our name, they will be ordered to do something.
48. So that the wine presses on our estates are well arranged; and the managers must take care of this, so that no one dares to crush our grapes with their feet, but everything must be neat and honorable.
52. We wish that different people from the serfs and from our slaves or from the free ones living in our fiscals and estates, [managers] created a full and just court, as everyone should.
54. Let every manager see to it that our people work well and do not roam idly around the markets.
55. We wish that the administrators would order everything that they give, spend and separate for our needs to be recorded in one list, and everything that they themselves spend - in another and a special list would notify us of what will be in the remainder.
60. In no way should elders be appointed from strong people, but from people of average income and faithful.
62. Let our stewards annually by the Nativity of the Lord inform us separately, clearly and in order of all our income, so that we can know what and how much we have on separate items, namely: how much [plowed] by the bulls on which our drovers work ( bubulci), how much [plowing] from the mansi, who owe the orange, how many pigs were received, how many dues, how much for debt obligations (de fide facta) and fines according to the court, how much for game caught in our reserved thickets without our permission, how much for different offenses, how many from mills, how many from forests, how many from fields, how many from bridges and ships, how many from free people and hundreds serving the needs of our fiscal, how many from markets, how many from vineyards and from those who pay in wine, how much hay how much firewood and torches, how much wood and other [forest] material, how much from wastelands, how many vegetables, how much millet and millet, how much wool, flax and hemp, how much fruit from trees, how many nuts and nuts, how much from grafted trees of various kinds, how many from gardens, how many from turnip ridges, how many from fishponds, how many skins, how many furs and horns, how much honey and wax, how much tallow, fats and soap, how much berry wine, boiled wine, mead-drinks and vinegar how much beer, grape wine - new and old, grain new and old, how many chickens, eggs, geese, how many from fishermen, blacksmiths, gunsmiths and shoemakers, from tumblers and chest makers, how much from turners and saddlers, how many from locksmiths, from mines of iron and lead, how many of the draft people (tributariis), how many stallions and fillies.
64. So that the basterns - our wagons that go to war, are well made and their tops are well covered with leather, sewn in such a way that, if necessary, water crossings with all their contents could be transported across rivers and water would penetrate inside could not, and our goods, as we said, could be transported in complete safety. We wish that flour for our table would be sent in wagons, each with 12 modi, also in those in which wine is carried, 12 modi would be sent to our measure, and each wagon would have a shield and a spear, a quiver and a bow.
65. To sell fish from our cages, and plant another in its place and always, thus, have fish [at the ready], only if we have not visited [our] estates, sell [whole], and the income let our stewards turn to our advantage.
66. About goats and goats, their horns and skins, we give an account, annually freshly salted fat goat meat from them to us.
67. Let them notify us of unoccupied manses (de mansis absis) and [newly] acquired slaves, if there is no [site] where they could be planted.
68. We wish that the steward always had at the ready good barrels bound with iron hoops, which could be sent to war or to the palace; and do not make leather skins.
They show that already in this era it was an organization for the appropriation by large landowners of feudal rent - the surplus labor of peasants in the form of dues and corvee. The land in the feudal patrimony was usually divided into two parts: the master's land, or the domain, on which the feudal lord's economy was conducted, and the land that was in the use of dependent peasants and consisted of allotments. In the north, the domain in such estates was quite large, accounting for at least 1/3 of all the lands included in them.
The composition of the master's or domainial land included a manor's estate - a house and a yard with outbuildings, sometimes with workshops of a patrimonial artisan, a garden, a vegetable garden, a vineyard, a barnyard, a senior's poultry house. Mills and a church, which were considered the property of the feudal lord, were usually associated with the manor. Arable lands, meadows and vineyards of the estate, divided into small plots, in the northern regions of the kingdom lay interspersed with plots of dependent peasants. Part of the forests and those pastures, meadows and wastelands, which previously belonged to the free community, now also turned into the property of the feudal lord. As a result of interleaved land, forced crop rotation prevailed in the estate with cattle grazing in fallows and in stubble after harvesting. The cultivation of the master's land was carried out mainly by dependent peasants who worked on the corvée with their own cattle and equipment, and also, although to a much lesser extent, by yard slaves who used the equipment and cattle of the estate.
The lands that were in the use of the peasants were divided into allotments, which were called mans in the western part of the Frankish state, gufs in the east, and colonics in the south. Each allotment included: a peasant yard with a house and outbuildings, sometimes a garden and a vineyard adjoining the yard, and a field arable allotment, consisting of separate strips of arable land, scattered interspersed with land plots of other peasants and the estate itself. In addition, the peasants used the pastures left at the disposal of the community, and sometimes in the hands of the feudal lord for a fee. Thus, the communal organization with forced crop rotation and the collective use of undivided land did not disappear with the emergence of the estate. However, from free it has now turned into a dependent one, and the rural gathering of free community members into a gathering of dependent peasants. It was chaired by a headman appointed by the lord, who carried out the demands of the lord, but at the same time defended the interests of the peasants before him.
The allotments on which the dependent peasants sat were taxable, that is, certain duties lay on them. On the lands of the patrimony, there were usually also free holdings - precarias and beneficiaries of officials of the patrimonial administration, which they used as payment for their service, as well as beneficiaries of petty vassals of the lord.
Conclusion
Depriving the peasants of their ownership of the land and drawing them into dependence caused fierce resistance from both the still free and already dependent peasantry. It took various forms. One of them was the mass escapes of peasants. Often there were open peasant uprisings.
The stubborn resistance of the peasantry to feudalization is evidenced by the capitulary of 821 of King Louis the Pious, which reports the existence in Flanders of "illegal" conspiracies and unions of dependent peasants. Peasant uprisings took place in 848 and 866. in the possessions of the Bishop of Mainz. The largest uprising took place in Saxony in 841-842. The slogan of the peasants who rose against the oppressors - the Saxon and Frankish feudal lords and the royal administration that supported them - was a return to the old, pre-feudal order: the peasants expelled the masters and "began to live in the old days." Hence the name of the movement - the "Stelling" uprising, which can be translated: "Children of the ancient law."
The development of feudal relations, as well as the dominance of the religious worldview, gave rise to many historians, starting from the Renaissance, to consider this period as the "dark ages", a time of decline, degradation of the human person and society as a whole. This is how the traditional designation was born, put into use by humanist historians - the term "Middle Ages", i.e. as if "timelessness", an intermediate step between the high rise of the human spirit in antiquity and its rebirth on the threshold of modern times. Such a negative assessment of the classical Middle Ages, understandable in the mouths of humanists, enlighteners of the 18th century. and some liberal historians of the 19th century who struggled with the remnants of feudalism in Europe, is presented from the standpoint of modern science not only unhistorical, one-sided and superficial, but simply wrong.
After all, it is impossible to forget that it was precisely in the Middle Ages that the majority of modern states arose, their borders were mainly determined, the ethno-cultural foundations of future nations were laid and national languages. There were parliaments, jury trials and the first constitutions. Scissors, clocks, printing, window glass, firearms, and many other innovations were invented. Written applied and theoretical works on chemistry, mathematics, mechanics, medicine, the first encyclopedia. There were "projects" of a society of well-being and universal equality of people. At the end of the XV century. Europeans discovered America, made the first world travel. Great shifts in the field of production, social relations, spiritual life brought to Europe the era of the Middle Ages.
Hosted on Allbest.ru
Similar Documents
The study of the Trinity-Sergius Monastery as a large feudal fiefdom. Documentation system in Russian monasteries and features of the Trinity archive. The fortress treasury of the Trinity Monastery. Copy books and inventories of the serf treasury. The structure of rural settlement.
dissertation, added 02/28/2010
Formation of the Frankish state: social structure Frankish and Gallo-Roman society under the Carolingian dynasty. The development of feudal relations, the organization of power in the estate, the resistance of the peasants. records of "Salic truth" about the structure of society.
test, added 11/26/2009
The formation of the feudal state on the example of the Frankish. The main social strata of Frankish society. The period of the Salic truth. Historical indications of increased wergeld for the murder of priests and bishops. Free Franks and slaves.
abstract, added 07/07/2011
The device and economy of the patrimony. Economy medieval Rus'. Votchina in the writings of historians. Mutual relations between the votchinnik and the rural community. Russkaya Pravda is the oldest Russian collection of laws. Votchina according to Russian Pravda. Apparatus of patrimonial administration.
term paper, added 07/10/2009
The coming to power of the ancient Carolingian family in the Frankish state. The life path and personality of Charlemagne, his coronation and the significance of this event for the Byzantine Empire. Revival of the education system in the state. The end of the emperor's life.
presentation, added 11/26/2013
The economy of the ancient Franks according to the "Salic truth". Communal system, forms of ownership in the Frankish kingdom. Microstructures of barbarian society. Legal status of the main groups of the population. The level of economic development of Frankish society.
term paper, added 05/01/2011
The disintegration of Rus' into specific principalities under Yaroslav the Wise. Causes of the feudal fragmentation of the Old Russian state. Feature of the period of feudal fragmentation in Rus'. Feudal fragmentation as a political decentralization of the state.
abstract, added 03/08/2010
Features of the development of the feudal economy in Russia. General features of the feudal economy. Political formations of the period of formation of feudalism in the European part of the country. The main features of the feudal economy of Russia, forms of feudal dependence.
test, added 10/25/2010
The main types and features of feudal systems. Genesis and development of the feudal economy (on the example of the Frankish state). The classical model of the feudal economy in France. Features of feudalism in Russia. Characteristics of the feudal economy of England.
term paper, added 11/14/2013
State of the Franks: history of appearance, founder. The story of the bowl from Soissons. Noble Franks of the Merovingian and Carolingian eras. Salic truth as a code of laws of the Franks. The baptism of the Franks, the main consequences. State of the kingdom after the death of Clovis.
