Feudal Kingdom

It's not all that futal then
More Byzantine

The society stops being feudal when the king monopolizes military might. What you have is on its way to becoming an absolute monarchy.

Officers under him. Surrounded by personal soldiers loyal to him. When you bring your band of knights, mercenaries and men-at-arms to the King's rallying call, you are surrounded by men who (you're pretty sure, or at least that's why you brought them) will obey you first and foremost, and protect you first and foremost, even if the King turns on you. You may have brought the King his men, but you've also brought your own bodyguards.

If you're a general in the King's personal army, you aren't surrounded by men that you know you can rely on; you're surrounded by men that the King has deemed fit to place under your command. These men owe their livelihoods to the King and probably live in the Crownlands; unlike your sworn men, they may not share your hometown, and they may not have family under your control that you can use to leverage power over. You've put yourself, largely alone, into the King's hands with nothing more than the faith that he will not act against you. That takes some ridiculous loyalty or some blatant stupidity.

you wouldent have a feudal kingdom anymore then would you? Plus, what would the king do when a group of nobles just says no? They are the ones with the armies, it's not like he can force something on them that they dont want to do

Congratulations, you have just invented scutage. Collect $200 and 3 mercenary tokens.

This happened, it was a thing. To those claiming this is incompatible with feudalism, when exactly would you say feudalism ended?

With the emergence of absolutism

>futal

That's pretty much absolutism.

Isn’t it just easier to have no taxes and let armies be run by the free market?

That's a good point for low nobles, but the great ones are not going to like it.

And low nobles are far more likely to answer the call of their local great lord than the king.

Well I mean yeah, it's possible but realistically the kingdom wouldn't remain feudal for much longer.

It can be viable. But transitioning from one form to another can be difficult.

>Feudal Kingdom
>except it's not feudal

Something like that happened in Italy.
It didn't worked quite well

They will, but out of fear

Doesn't the feudal system mainly rely on barter and services, rather than currency? That's why the lord brings whatever men he can when the king wants to have a war, because he owes the king military service due to his feudal dues.

Not only does actually having an economy with currency enough for proper taxation that could pay for an army take it a bit beyond the feudal, but having that professional army kind of takes away from what the feudal system is supposed to do. Now the lords just do nothing but be rich and enjoy privileges, and squeeze money from the peasantry in order to finance big wars. Sort of like pre-revolution France, I guess.

>sort of like all nation states after the feudal age

Fix'd

>scutage
Scutage isn't comparable to what OP is describing.
>when exactly would you say feudalism ended?
Why would the King allow the nobility to keep their feudal rights? The King pretty much holds all the cards.

They tried that. It made mercenary kings who held the fate of nations in their hands. John Hawkwood was a madman.

Isn’t that infinitely better though?

Normal kings just take money through taxes.

Mercenaries would accomplish taxes to get money.

Tasks*

Man I can’t proof-read

Machiavelli would slap the idea out of you if he could. Like said, it really doesn't work... At all.

No they just end up killing a fuck ton of people because they hold no allegiances except to their band and to the highest bidder. The time when mercenaries lords ruled italy was a time of unprecedented bloodshed.

A mercenary has no reason to keep the peasantry alive, quite the opposite in fact, as it is cheaper to chew through them to feed and supply your army. A dead peasant leaves behind things you can use, and you can then simply move on. A King can't do that and must keep his citizenry alive.

A Mercenary will burn a nation for a coin.

Machiavelli says hello. Go read some of his works, he talks extensively why this is a bad idea.

>Nobles were always scared of their life when in the presence of their king
You're super fucking stupid.

There's a difference between having a more centralized standing army, and removing all more from the nobility.
Wealth, land influence, personal troops, sway in the military ranks, etc.
The nobles are far from powerless in what OP proposed.

Scutage: Payments to the king in lieu of military service so he can recruit mercenaries or keep a much smaller feudal force in the field by turning them into paid troops

Op: Instead of going to war for the king, cities and nobles pay a tax so that the king can maintain an professional army.

That's pretty much the same thing. In a medieval context, what is the difference between mercenaries on long-term contracts and household retainers (augmented by more mercenaries in time of war which might last years) paid for by taxes and scutage and a professional force?

At no point does the nobility have to be disarmed, and there are still far more of them than any paid force the king can field. The option to throw some money at the king to avoid the hassle of being called up for feudal service is attractive to nobles, but if the king moves against their interests they can still mobilise, as well as hire mercenaries of their own. Not to mention that a large portion of the troops the king is paying to fight are those very nobles and their followers.

Not him, but Feudal society was all about checks and balances keeping things in order.

The other issue I haven't seen anyone talking about is farming. In a feudal system the conscripts spent their non-military time being farmers for their local lords. A professional army implies that these fighters are always prepared for war and are constantly training in some way, meaning they have no time to till the fields and raise a crop. For the remaining peasants who didn't join the military to be able to maintain a steady supply of crops without the missing manpower your society would have had to undergo an agricultural revolution of some sort. So by the point you've really mastered agricultural technology you're sufficiently advanced enough to not really be a feudal state anymore. You'd start to look a lot more like a proper nation-state circa the Napoleonic wars, with mastery of sea travel and a good understanding of gunpowder weapons.

No they weren't, because they had their own armies and sworn warriors

>taxes

mercenaries =/= trained soldiers They are vastly inferior in almost every conceivable sense and were used troughtout history mostly as a support/skirmishing unit because of that. Only exception being Italy and they got fucked by other powers and the mercenaries themselves because of that.

yes, the problem being that you dont know what feudalism is

The problem is nobles don't want to pay for army which would be used against them eventually and would rather get lands and money from the king to provide their own soldiers (so they would get more power instead of losing power to the king). Cities would like to counterbalance the power of nobles but professional army is very expensive.

Politics are always safest when there are armed men behind you as well as in front of you.

Sounds like videogame thinking, as if they (people with no moral guiding them other than money) wouldn't amass a shitload of money and then just became rebel leaders in the province for a short while until they had to be put down for pillaging and shit.

Yes and no.
Armies are fucking expensive, like, really expensive, specially for medieval times. So we are already talking about a very rich and prosperous kingdom, otherwise either the idea would fail or your army would be the laughing stock of everyone else.
With that aside, the idea is quite good and desirable. Institutionalized armies have been a thing for a very long time, so it's nothing world breaking. Also, form the top of my head, I can remember Machiavelli talking about the pros of having one and the problems with temporary/mercenary forces, and considered this is from the end of the feudal era and it wasn't any bright insight he had but an already existing argument, then it's perfectly ok.
Also, the Japanese have done it pretty well, creating lineages of soldiers, codes for them, and a military structure, which became so well established that it survived centuries of peace and even created literature about what a samurai should do when there is no war to die in.
So it really comes down to the Kingdom you've made, their overall culture, and what is going on around them (justifying an expensive personal army during peace time would be quite hard, meanwhile if they are at wars and mercenaries are simply fucking more shit than helping, and the fields are starting to lack manpower, then it's a lot more to appealing).

Before everyone realized it, a system like existed near the tail end of Feudal Japan, where the Ashigaru had become a professional army in their own right due to constant being mobilization to the point that most given men in it were soldiers for the majority of their lives. It was still technically a feudal system, but held in place entirely by inertia from the previous era and the moment everyone noticed it the Satsuma Rebellion occurred precisely to stop the transition from feudalism but instead broke the masquerade entirely.
What are the Swiss and mercenaries of the various German states? Mercenaries only really became outright inferior to paid troops when warfare scaled to the point that they could no longer afford cutting edge equipment such as automatic weapons and armoured vehicles.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Army_of_Hungary