West Francia had little governmental authority and much war.Īs a result of constant warfare (albeit warfare that was usually local in scope), power came to rest in control of fiefs and the ability to extract surplus from their occupants and to use this surplus to outfit armed men. Further, the powerful nobles often lost control of the warlords of more local regions. The near constant warfare (both external attacks and civil wars) of the tenth and eleventh centuries, however, meant that the kings of West Francia gradually lost control over the more powerful nobles. Ultimate control of a kingdom’s army had rested with the king, and the great nobles had also exercised strong authority over their own fighting men. How had such a system emerged? Even in Carolingian times, armies in much of Western Europe had come from war bands made up of a king’s loyal retainers, who themselves would possess bands of followers. They would use the surplus from these fiefs to equip themselves with weapons and equipment, and they often controlled their fiefs with little oversight from the higher-ranked nobles or the king. We call it feudalism because power rested with armed men in control of plots of agricultural land known as fiefs and Latin for fief is feudum. Out of a weak and fragmented kingdom emerged the decentralized form of government that historians often call feudalism. This kingdom would eventually come to be known as France. This decentralization was most acute in West Francia, the western third of what had been Charlemagne’s empire. Most of the rest of Christian Western Europe’s kingdoms, however, were fragmented. In the aftermath of the Abbasid Caliphate’s political collapse and the gradual weakening of Fatimid Egypt (see Chapter Eight), the eleventh-century Byzantine Empire was the strongest, most centralized state in the Eastern Mediterranean, and indeed, probably the strongest state west of Song China. Out of the chaos and mayhem of the tenth and eleventh centuries, East Francia-the eastern third of Charlemagne’s Empire that is in roughly the same place as modern Germany-and England had emerged as united and powerful states.
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