We say that in the middle ages nations didn't really existed and everything was dictated by loyalty to an individual...

Theoretically, the king "owns" everything as he is the legitimized representative of Christ, with the blessing of the church. They called this system the Two Swords Theory.

The king can't rule everything personally though, as infrastructure went to shit after the fall of Rome, there are no proper roads and his officials could barely read. So the only way to actually rule of his land, he lends out fiefs to his vassals, who then lend out their own fief to their vassals, and so on. Eventually those titles become hereditary. You also must understand that private property is a fairly new concept that came with capitalism, back in the day it was more about the right of usufruct then it was about ownership. You still have socio-economic models like this today: Tenancy, for example. The reason the peasants agreed being someone's vassal was because they couldn't defend themselves. There was no law enforcement. You either have a lord or you are a prime target for bandits or robber knights.

Paul Giamatti wrote this awesome speech for an action flick that kind of puts you in the mindset of the era.

youtu.be/h5czM9pf9Wo

There was a lot that went in to it really.

First of all 99% of people were illiterate and utterly ignorant of the wider world. Most villiages werent even named and were just refered to as "the villiage" by the locals.

Second of all, there was this whole idea of "the divine right of kings" and a bunch of other religiouselements to monarchy. Look it up on Wikipedia.

Third of all, kings offered protection from bandits and raiders. The nobility was happy enough as well because they profited from war.

After the black death, peasants actually revolted en masse because labor shortages caused by the plague made them slightly valuable for once.
They tried to enact a sort of proto communism, but got annihilitated by knights and the nobility.

So in a sense monarch was part corrosion and part obfuscation, at least in medieval europe.

*monarchy was part coercion

That doesn't change the fact that they didn't have a concept of private property.

That's not how the people perceived it. They believed that Jesus is the king of kings, and through his representation, the church, the pope legitimizes the rule of a king as a vassal of God.

People weren't obfuscated, they genuinely believed this, and the ruling class did as well. If the pope decided to excommunicate a king, he was pretty much done for.

Yeah but the idea that Jesus was the "king of the kings" is itself obfuscation. Jesus preached asceticism and anti materialism. He was obviously no ruler. Expressions like "the prince of peace" and "kingdom of god" were meant to turn those ideas on their head.

The authorities at the time twisted the bible to mean what they wanted it to.

As time went on, Medieval armies were comprised of more and more mercenaries for this very reason. Fedual levies were indeed not always the most loyal soldiers, and feudal contracts typically guaranteed only a relatively short period in which a vassal was obligated for military service. Most common, that period was about 40 days.

Mercenaries, on the other hand, would fight loyally as long as the gold kept flowing, and as they entered into military service of their own volition rather than as a mandatory obligation, they were more than willing to fight for extended periods. The very word "soldier" comes from the French word "soud," meaning "shilling," because these soldiers fought for gold, not a contract.

Matthew 20:25 Jesus called them together and said, “You know that the rulers of the Gentiles lord it over them, and their high officials exercise authority over them. 26 Not so with you. Instead, whoever wants to become great among you must be your servant, 27 and whoever wants to be first must be your slave— 28 just as the Son of Man did not come to be served, but to serve, and to give his life as a ransom for many.”

>How did people find motivation to fight for just one guy?
It was about the money lmao

Originally, yes, but once Christianity became the state religion in the Roman Empire, it had to stop being so transcendental. Faced by invasions, Augustine of Hippo wrote City of God, applying Christianity to concepts of statehood and military. I wouldn't say it was twisted, it was done out of necessity.

If you want to talk about kings using some obfuscating divine right, you have to look to the Early Modern Age.

This has also something to do with military revolutions. Before the mercenary armies, knights were pretty much dominating every battlefield. After the Swiss BTFOed the Habsburger, this monopoly was broken.

The king was the strongest individual knight-the one with the most will to power, who could convince or control other powerful knights(lords,counts barons etc) to obey his rule. Everyone else either fell in line behind him, or was removed.

No, kings got cucked by their vassals all the time. The king of France practically only controlled the region arround Paris until Phillippe II. There was a strong ruler from time to time but before the establishments of states, kings weren't that powerful.

Right. Knights, being noblemen, were the only ones properly trained and armored for battle, while feudal levies were almost useless in comparison. Villages, based on their prosperity, were typically divided up into groups of 3-6 men, only one of which would actually go off and fight when the levies were summoned, and the rest of whom were required to provided arms and supplies to the fighter. Essentially this meant your standard peasant warrior was a man with next to no training, and equipment of dubious quality, while the knights were the only ones who could actually accomplish much on the battlefield. Of course, once a class of career mercenaries became economically viable, knights lost a lot of their former prestige.

The Black Death expedited this process a lot, because the major drop in population meant that lords could no longer summon the old feudal levies in the numbers they previously could, as not only were there less people overall, but less men as a percentage of the total population could be called up (the survivors of the plague still had to man the farms, after all.) This gave a much higher value to mercenary forces.

Philip II*

Why is English so weird with historical names

I think you will find the regions around Paris were among the most densely populated and wealthiest parts of France, and the French king was still acknowledged as king even by the robber barons

To your very correct statement I'd like to add that the development of new techniques in warfare accelerated this process by thinning out the broad mass of knights. By the time of the Hundred Year's War, knights were an elite circlejerk only consisting out of higher nobility.

Ironically, during the golden age of knights arround 1200, knights wouldn't look at all like they are being portrayed in popular culture. There was no plate armor or lance but a spear which was actually used as a javelin. A chainmail was worn. In the beginning of the 14th century, a new technique became popular: The thrust with applied lance. The lance, now considerably longer, was being jammed under the arm. To defend yourself against such an onslaught, plate armor was evolved and the new art of battle, basically two lines of applied lances galopping into each other, basically meant that the side with the longer lances wins - this led to the ridiculous long lances we imagine knights with. The most expensive thing was the horse: With such a massive weight on the right side, you'd need a specially trained warhorse who has a so-called "left gallop" - the horse had to naturally lean to the left to make up for the weight of the lance.

This killed off pretty much all the poorer knights. To afford such an equipment, you'd have to be higher nobility. Hence armies got smaller and to be a knight became a privilege to the richest. The development of new military techniques was the material base which defined the social superstructure in the middle ages.

Kings base their legitimacy on being chosen by god to rule over their serfs. Medieval serfs were religious. They'd serve their legitimate ruler to serve their god.

>nations didnt really existed

if you cant speak English I dont want to hear anything you have to say

He was formally acknowledged, but so was the Tenno in Japan during the rule of the Shogun.

Paris itself was a big city but it was nowhere near the most wealthy region of France. Toulouse and Occitania outmatched Ill-de-France not only economically due to their Mediterranean ports, they also outshined the royal court culturally: Occitanian was spoken in the Crusader States and gave birth to the Troubadours. Raimond of Toulouse probably led more men into the Frist Crusade than the French King could hope to.

Only over the course of history, especially due to the conflict with England and Anjou, the French King actually became the most powerful entity in France which led to France becoming a Nation - at the expense of the Occitanian culture, sadly.

lmao 1pl8

Who is in the pic?

>nations didn't really existed
Only lying commie and uneducated retatrd say this

People in middle age were fiercely nationalists, basically every people believed to be from one ancestor who founded their people, and to have a good lineage was EXTREMELY IMPORTANT

I bet you translate "pietas" as "piety", too.

Get the fuck out, brainlet. Don't waste our time.

>What gave him the right to own it?
Divine right etc etc

>And did the people contested this right?

You go protest about the violence inherent in the system to their armed knights m8

>now pietas isn't translated by piety

Literally KYS lying commie scum

Holy shit, you are an uneducated piece of shit.

If you'd explained to a medieval guy what a nation is he'd probably think you are retarded.

Hint: "natio" isn't the same as the modern nation state

>Hint: "natio" isn't the same as the modern nation state

Where did i say it was the same stupid whore ?

You quoted some Latin text claiming that medieval people were "nationalists" - this is beyond dumb. Even Jean d'Arc wasn't a nationalist

But they were nationalists

>Even Jean d'Arc wasn't a nationalist

LMAO

Of the love or hatred God has for the English, I know nothing, but I do know that they will all be thrown out of France, except those who die there

t. Joan of Arc

National consciousness developped in the Middle Ages, extremly slowly. France was already conscious of itself in the XIIIth Century, thanks to the work of centralization by the french monarchy, the Albigenese crusade, and later by the Hundred Years War. The people who claim that Nations didn't exist in medieval times are pretty dumb and just abide by a strange stereotype. Not everything was created in the XIXth century. People in different villages could travel or meet strangers or merchants depending of times, and it is no surprise that many chronicles actually speak about how important the difference in "language" or "race" is (Like in Guillaume le Breton's retale of the Battle of Bouvines, where we see a clear distinction between the "french" knights, actually the knights from the nothern oïl countries, and the "teutons", or Ferrand de Portugal who is accused of coming from the lands of witches, etc).

Yeah, France as a region not as a nation. God told her to help House Valois to the French crown. It was literally just a dynastic struggle.

What you say would be true if Joan of Arc fought in the XIIth Century, when the Kings of England were french. But by the XVth Century, the nations of England and France were already born, and every subject of each Kingdom clearly recognized their loyalty not simply through a pledge to a local landlord, but through symbols, through language, through culture.

The British nobility still spoke French and the House Anjou-Plantagenêt saw itself as French princes. The English symbolic you are referring to is just the sigil of their house.

England only became a nation through its isolation which happened after the war, and then eventually because of its religious split with Rome.

Sure the Anglos are French

Can you remind me how do we call the people who want to protect their people from foreign hordes and expel the foreigners from their country ?

pro;tip you don't need to do so cause i have pic to answer it

But English courts adopted the english language in the XIVth Century out of fear that the french language would overtake them ; This alone goes to show how people felt conscious about their own identity and bothered to protect it. A nation isn't born overnight, but people identifying themselves as "english" and using a tongue close to the one we have today did exist from much futher than the modern times, even if their nobility was indeed franco-norman.
It is the same thing for France. It built itself slowly, with clear and distinct differences between the occitans and their nothern counterparts, in pratical ways (Like how they practiced law, how they ate, how they plowed their fields even !), yet France forged itself during the medieval era. That is why I think it is unfair to say that every nations were magically born in the XIXth century when the men from the Springs of People didn't ask themselves questions any different from their ancestors from the medieval times.
And yes, Joan of Arc was a tool of propaganda for Charles VII, but the way she was used and written about in chronicles was clearly to establish the fact that France belonged to frenchmen, and they played with this fear of the english people and a foreign dominance.

But who made up the footsoldiers in the entire army? Did they just grab the farmers and cobblers and bakers from the bottom of the serfs and hand them a dagger and a spear?

WHO, as in what identity did these men have, that did all the foot fighting? Where did all the fielded men come from? Surely an army wasn't comprised solely of knights?

>protect their people from foreign hordes
>use the logo of the single deadliest foreign horde in Russian history

Krokodil is a hell of a drug.

>Occitanian culture

meme

>which led to France becoming a Nation

I don't see the logic behind your post, France didn't wait for Occitan to exist, Occitans are in fact a communist creation and so is Occitania

They are Auvergnats, Languedociens, Savoyards, Provencaux, Gascons, but certainely not "Occtian"

> In Fiefs and Vassals: The Medieval Evidence Reinterpreted (1994),[6] Susan Reynolds expanded upon Brown's original thesis. Although some contemporaries questioned Reynolds's methodology, other historians have supported it and her argument.[40] Reynolds argues:
>Too many models of feudalism used for comparisons, even by Marxists, are still either constructed on the 16th-century basis or incorporate what, in a Marxist view, must surely be superficial or irrelevant features from it. Even when one restricts oneself to Europe and to feudalism in its narrow sense it is extremely doubtful whether feudo-vassalic institutions formed a coherent bundle of institutions or concepts that were structurally separate from other institutions and concepts of the time.

You don't still believe in the "feudalism" meme, do you Veeky Forums?

You're American aren't you