Today, I learned the details of something I first learned the general idea of two and an half years ago, namely the reality of feudalism in the European Middle Ages.

Traditionally — that is, in the tradition of the Brunner Thesis — Feudalism has been perceived and presented as a system where a material reward (the so-called beneficium , usually land) was connected to military service in a relation of vassality. A knight or minor lord gave his service, allegiance and loyalty to a great lord, in exchange for protection and rewards, usually land. This model has been used to explain just about everything (and thereby nothing, really), and in this model, the decline of the Frankish Empire becomes a function of Carolingian power being based on the supply of new land to distribute to supporters in exchange for military service and suchlike, and the supply of new land drying up after the end of the conquests around 820.

However, while beneficium indeed was a way of distributing land, the rarely revealed fact is that military service was mandatory for everyone who could afford to purchase the necessary equipment. (An importent point which I’ll come back to in a second.) This was a hard, almost impossible system to enforce, so the king would give powerful lords estates in exchange for their devotion to the enforcement of this law. As we can see from this, the various elements of the Brunner kind of Feudalism is kept intact, they’re just disconnected from each other and applied less rigidly.

As for the Carolingian armies, Bachrach did extensive — indeed, close to comprehensive — studies on these, and one of his conclusions was that the Carolingians as good as never based their tactics on heavy cavalery — excepting the times when they lost miserably. Any theses about them adopting the stirrup from the Arabs in this period seems to be wrong, too, as the Arabs hardly ever fought mounted in their westernmost campaigns in these days. Cavalery played a role, of course, but it was never the deceicive factor.

Simply put, the Carolingians were the largest landowners in the Frankish kingdom, and could use the soldiers raised from this base to pressure others into helping them in times of war. But every landowners of a certain calibre, including monasteries, have been found to have had entire villages inhabited by as good as nothing but soldiers — infanterymen.

This system was quite decentralised, but could be effective under a strong, capable ruler. However, it fared less well after the abdication of Louis the Pious in 840, when his sons divided the realm between them (Verdun, 843), and then proceeded to wage war on each other from 848 and onwards. In this situation, where the core areas of the Carolingians had been split in two while most of the other lords and families still had their lands pretty much intact, each king had less land from which to raise troops, but about the same area to suppress with these soldiers.