With the decline of the Roman Empire, centralized authority was eroded and led to an era of what many have called ‘feudal anarchy’.22 A politico-economic system based on the hierarchical relationship of patronage emerged in Europe. This system of hierarchical patronage created a chain of pyramidal dependencies starting from the ruler or lord. The latter gave loyal and trusted subordinates grants and rights of land called benefices in repayment for gold and in return for military services. In the German vassal system, warrior communities declared their personal loyalty to their lord in return for protection. A combination of these two elements is considered to have given rise to feudalism. A vassal was obliged to show loyalty and homage to a feudal lord in return for being allowed to occupy land belonging to the lord and receiving his protection. The land came to be known as a ‘fief, which was granted on a tenure basis. The vassal lord in turn, created dependent peasantry.
We can say that a hierarchy of sub-infeudation (hierarchical system of privileges and services) was created, which signified the dispersal of power in the feudal state. At the top of this hierarchy stood the feudal lord and at the bottom, the serfs. We can differentiate between two forms of relationships in this system—One was the lord-serf relationship and another was the lord-vassal relationship. While the former signified a feudal economy and an exploitative relationship where the final obligation lay on the serfs who were landless peasants, the latter was a form of political rule. The system of vassalage meant that there was no absolute monarch. With the exception of Northern France and England where monarchy was stronger, it is said that the feudal monarch was different from his lords only in degree and not in kind. The dispersal of power, a weak central authority, internal tensions between different and overlapping sources of power, etc. characterized the feudal state. Stuart Hall concludes that ‘the feudal monarchy was, therefore, never “sovereign”, only a suzerain—a particularly limited type of secular authority.’23
Amidst this feudal anarchy, the Christian church emerged as another centre of power claiming overriding authority invoking ecclesiastical sources. Until the advent of Machiavelli and other political thinkers in the Renaissance, the State in its feudal form was kept captive by feudal anarchy on the one hand and the church-state controversy on the other. However, while the Roman Empire contributed in terms of law, the concept of citizenship, the public realm and so on, the feudal state created conditions where the germ of modern conceptions of sovereignty could be found. The church-state controversy and the Papal claim of sovereign spiritual power provoked a counter-claim to retain the supreme, secular and independent authority of the monarchy. Machiavelli gave expression to the latter in his The Prince. Changes in the mode of production during the Renaissance and the advent of the Industrial Revolution were proof enough that the feudal state had disintegrated.
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