Domen
Misico dux Vandalorum
Declining? Our students and education system rate as among the best of Europe.
/derail.
What about this?:
http://wiadomosci.wp.pl/kat,18032,t...tyka,wid,15169114,wiadomosc.html?ticaid=1fcb8
History questions not worth their own thread IV
- Thread starter Plotinus
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What about this?:
http://wiadomosci.wp.pl/kat,18032,t...tyka,wid,15169114,wiadomosc.html?ticaid=1fcb8
Yes. Society was not structured around these relationships; the overwhelming majority of people were not in such relationships. There was no system for bringing this about and it was never state policy to impose it as a way of life: the view of aristocrats holding their land from the monarch in exchange for military service is a myth; they held it in their own right and fought for him out of loyalty to their oaths of fealty, which came about initially because the king was, in simple terms, the strongest aristocrat in the area, and had the coercive power to force any other aristocrat to do as he wished. The model of armies being structured around feudal knights is incorrect; there were huge numbers of paid infantry, mercenaries, professional Free Companies, and so on; many officers maintained their own private regiments and hired themselves out to the monarchy in times of war, often across national lines.
This is not to say that such relationships didn't exist - they did, mostly between farmers who had fallen on hard times and lords who agreed to look after them in exchange for their effective servitude - but they were in no way the basis of societal structure.
Again, there's a wonderful article in this very forum 'On Feudalism' by LightSpectra, with links to an even more wonderful, if rather difficult, article on the subject.
TheLastOne36
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LightSpectra
me autem minui
The fact that the Asiatic mode of production was a wonky category to begin with probably helped.
A bold claim- both that Marx was "mediocre", and that his work can be reduced to sociology.
Sort of ironic that you're questioning me calling him mediocre while simultaneously justifying the Stalinist censorship on the basis that the original thing was sort of a screw-up on Marx's part.
Traitorfish
The Tighnahulish Kid
It's like rain on your wedding day.
_random_
Jewel Runner
So that same art history textbook states that prior to the Romanesque period, few medieval laymen attended church regularly. I have reasons to doubt the author on religious history, but this did pique my curiosity. What were the patterns of church attendance over the medieval period? Did this vary significantly by geography and/or social class? What about special occasions like Baptisms and weddings? Were there any "Christmas and Easter only" Christians in the Middle Ages?
Louis XXIV
Le Roi Soleil
What I was told is that, during the Renaissance (can't comment directly on the time before), it was receiving Communion that was essential, not attending Mass. So church attendance was, if not uncommon, at least deemphasized.
In all three conflicts, there was extremely heavy fighting in the Lorraine segment of the border. The main actions of the War of 1870 took place between Saarbrücken and Metz, obviously. In August 1914, the bulk of the German army in the west was deployed to Lorraine once again, where it fought the Battle of Morhange and cut the onrushing French forces to pieces. (I have mentioned this in other places, but the so-called "right wing" was actually weaker, numerically, than the German "center" in the Battles of the Frontiers. And the Morhange engagement, or something similar to it, was the primary focus of prewar General Staff wargames. Much like Tannenberg, the German commanders had played the maneuvers out already, and their actual operational conduct owed much to their experience on Schlieffen and Moltke's staff rides.)
I can't really speak to 1940, but I know that the German Army Group C eventually ended up making a frontal assault against the Maginot defenses in Lorraine and carried them, although it was later in the contest, after the panzer spearheads had already rolled into Abbeville.
The Alsatian part of the frontier received much less operational attention. In 1870, the French initially planned to attack across the Rhine further south, near to Strasbourg or so, in order to push their armies into Bavaria as rapidly as possible and try to shift Bavarian (and Austrian, and Italian) loyalties into France's camp with tangible military successes. This did not actually happen because Napoleon simply did not command it, and none of his generals were capable and/or willing to manage the entirety of the campaign for him. In 1914, as has been mentioned, the French launched an initial thrust into the area to kick off the war, with the undersized "Army of Alsace", but this was chiefly done as a propaganda coup and took second place to the planned offensive into the Belgian Ardennes, Luxembourg, and western Lorraine. I can't say much about 1939-40 here, either, but the French weren't really that interested in an offensive anyway at that point.
Operationally, it is much easier to commit troops to fighting for the Rhineland first before attempting to force a crossing further south. The Rhineland is valuable economically, was long a target of French annexationism, and was perceived as easier to defend from the east due to the existence of a riverine barrier. Seize the Rhineland, and France would have its prize, its early victory, and perhaps be able to force Berlin to come to its senses - and if not, then it would make a fine base for further operations. Conversely, thrusting across the Rhine without first clearing the northern flank has been viewed by most French generals as possessing all the audacity of Napoleon the Great's campaigns with none of the sense. In the days of Napoleon I, south Germany assumed critical importance as the highway to Austria, the 'real enemy', and it was in this role that south Germany was potentially relevant in 1870, albeit this time to coax Austria into the war as an ally, not an enemy. By 1914, south Germany was little more than an agrarian firesack: the French army might advance across the Rhine in the south, but there was little for it to fight for there, and such an advance would leave French rear areas sprawling wide open for the Germans to simply march in.
There are also, of course, questions of terrain to consider; fighting a large army in southern Alsace when it must be chiefly supplied by rail is not an easy task. It was questions of supply that partially forced MacMahon's troops to retreat from the region early in the 1870 war (reserves coalesced around them and they eventually marched back to the theater to try to break Bazaine out of Metz, but that plan ended up in disastrous failure at Sedan), depriving the French of a potential threat to the Germans' southern flank and depriving Alsace of its opportunity to host a major battle. In December 1870, the Republic dispatched its last great army to the area under Charles Bourbaki to try to cut German supply lines to the siege of Paris by relieving the siege of Belfort - and potentially score a propaganda victory at the ancient citadel for some Huns-and-
Plan XVII was not necessarily a plan of operations or campaign, it was a mobilization scheme. The campaign itself was to be directed by the commander in the field; although the plan was geared towards constructing an army that was designed to operate in a certain area and in a certain way, there was an awful lot of leeway.
Given the forces employed and the relative geometry of the two armies, the plan was not intrinsically bad; it got more French troops to the frontier faster than the majority of German troops, and by and large they were in the positions in which they would do the most good even given the German deployments. Joffre's - and the French army's as a whole - failures were in the conduct of the campaign itself, not in the mobilization plan that preceded it. Insofar as the French army had institutional problems - and it certainly did - those problems had little to do with mobilization. Reconnaissance failures, partially conditioned by the institutionally excellent German cavalry and the comparatively mediocre and misused French cavalry, led to Joffre committing his troops in locations and times where the Germans had local numerical superiority. The French military did not fail in the August offensives because of terrain - French troops were turned back in the wooded hills of the Ardennes as well as on the plateau of eastern Lorraine.
And it did not fail because of the Germans' "right wing", which did not participate in the battles, had minimal operational effect on their outcome, and which was at any rate outnumbered by the victorious German center. It was the "right wing" that caused the retreat of Lanrezac's Fifth Army and of the BEF, but this decision, by and large, had little to do with the utter collapse of the offensives in the center. Actually, one might argue that Joffre overestimated the strength of the German right wing in comparison to the German center (which is precisely the opposite indictment from the one historians usually deliver); he believed it had a larger proportion of German troops than it actually did, and therefore - so he reasoned - the German center was numerically weak and could be crushed, splitting the German army into two fragments and permitting the Entente to defeat each in detail. French reconnaissance failures tied into this, along with the Germans' adept screening, partially due to German cavalry and partially due to the German use of the Metz fortress complex (referred to as the Moselstellung) to mask the buildup of Fourth, Fifth, and Sixth Armies.
Honestly, compared to the rest of the Battles of the Frontiers, Plan XVII was actually one of the French army's best accomplishments in the opening weeks of the war. It's a pity that the plan's name has turned into a byword for stupidity.
The allies didn't really concern themselves much about general offensives east of Champagne. Joffre thought the area was an operational wasteland in the context of German possession of the enormous Noyon salient, and he was probably right. The Americans were posted mostly in Lorraine, but this was not initially done with a view towards employing them in an offensive capacity there. In fact, Pershing's initial proposals for a Lorraine offensive - the campaign that developed into the operations against the St.-Mihiel bulge and in the Meuse-Argonne region - were vetoed by Pétain and Foch because both feared that there would be little to gain in the area and wanted to use the Americans in reducing the Noyon salient. (For tactical reasons - diplomatic tactics, not military tactics
- Pétain supported some of Pershing's arguments in war council, but was personally opposed to the project and worked to oppose it. Ultimately American numbers and firepower allowed Pershing to throw his weight around and get his Lorraine offensive in spite of the French military hierarchy's wishes, and it didn't hurt that American troops were able to participate in the Noyon attacks anyway.)Interestingly, Foch's ultimate plan for the Hundred Days offensives ended up being remarkably similar to Joffre's original December 1914 plan for the reduction of the Western Front. He pinned most of his hopes on a two-pronged attack against the bases of the Noyon salient, which were supposed to link up in Mézières. Joffre's plan did not work, partially because it was far too bold for the tactical conditions at the time and partially because the Allies simply did not understand how to properly conduct a major offensive yet in terms of logistics and planning. Foch's plan did work, partially because the Allies understood these things better than they once had but largely because the German field armies in the West were a broken reed, fought out because of the spring offensives, and quite incapable of opposing even a halfhearted, indifferently organized Allied offensive. Allied success on the Western Front was certainly a worthy achievement and a good demonstration of how the French, British, and American armies had matured in the conduct of war over the past several years, but it absolutely could not have happened in the way that it ultimately did without the German army being badly weakened by the spring offensives first.
Insofar as anything can be lumped in with anything else in sub-Roman British history, Wales and northern England - the so-called "highlands" of Roman Britain - had reasonably close similarities, in terms of the sorts of societies that obtained there and, probably, their political organization, which almost certainly owed a great deal to the Roman military, which garrisoned those regions heavily. Economically, the Thames valley bore as much resemblance to the north as it did to Wales, that is to say, not very much.
That's not ironic, that just sucks. Silly Alanis.
gangleri2001
Garbage day!!!
Were there any white slaves in the CSA or pre-Civil War America?
madviking
north american scum
FWIW, some of the indentured servants (not slaves) that came over to Jamestown were white, but that's about all I know.
History_Buff
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Yeah, there were definitely a lot of white indentured servants that came over during British colonization. Don't know of any instances of it in independent America though.
Traitorfish
The Tighnahulish Kid
White indenturement was still quite common into the 18th century, although typically white indentures would only work around three to five years to pay off their transportation and retained certain crucial legal protections throughout their indenture, so it's obviously very different from chattel slavery. Further, the practice had mostly died out by that point, in part because of the difficulty of making or enforcing such contracts between two less-than-cooperative countries.
The only time you'll really see "white slaves" in North America is in the form of convict labour, mostly the losers of the various Irish and Scots rebellions, some of whom were sold onto private owners as de facto slaves. You won't find them by the mid-19th century, though, because by then the British were sending their convicts to Australia rather than North America.
The only time you'll really see "white slaves" in North America is in the form of convict labour, mostly the losers of the various Irish and Scots rebellions, some of whom were sold onto private owners as de facto slaves. You won't find them by the mid-19th century, though, because by then the British were sending their convicts to Australia rather than North America.
Yes. Now, consider what that could mean in context as a reply to LightSpectra.
Where convict slavery was our main source of labour until the British stopped sending them and wealthy white folk had to import Chinese for all the nasty jobs.
I blame you because you didn't quote his post. :3Yes. Now, consider what that could mean in context as a reply to LightSpectra.
Domen
Misico dux Vandalorum
Vast majority of peasants were in such relationship - they were holding the land in exchange for labour and / or service.
And peasants were the great bulk of every Medieval society, from the most urbanized Italy to the least urbanized Scandinavia.
Not everywhere - for example in France and Germany there were some aristocrat families much more powerful than kings of the respective states.
On the other hand, in England or Poland the king or duke was indeed the strongest coercive power and every knight was directly obliged to serve him.
Of course.
And paid cavalry as well. Regarding "feudal" warriors - not only knights, but also other categories of people were obliged to military service. For example governors of villages and towns, people of lower social status than knights ("half-knights"), also peasants (usually each village was obliged to mobilize for example 1 warrior from each 20 or each 10 households) and inhabitants of towns and cities. The general levy being the most extensive form of military mobilization.
That's why the definition of Feudalism developed by Eastern European scholars is not centered around military organization. As I already said and as also prof. Krasowski suggests when using the name "Allegiance state" instead of "Feudal state" - referring to allegiance of peasants & serfs to their lords.
Many towns and cities (in some states even majority) were also owned by aristocrats ("private towns"). Or by monarchs ("royal towns").
His article is merely debunking François-Louis Ganshof's concept of how "feudalism" looked like. And I don't see any reason why we should stop calling those societies "feudal societies" just because one obviously simplified and erroneus concept has been rightfully proven wrong.
Of course that "feudal period" cannot be confined just to the "Middle Ages".
"Feudal societies" or at least some of their features lasted well into the Early Modern Era and even in 19th century.
Long after knights were gone from the battlefields of Europe, European society was still to large extent "feudal".
Of course new "capitalist" features were gradually appearing in the structures of European societies.
By the way - calling those "new" societies "capitalist" is also very oversimplistic. There were situations even in 19th century when a particular city was a big center of "capitalism" and industry, while in a nearby village peasants lived in a very similar way to their grand-grand-grand fathers in 15th century.
No they weren't. Most peasants owned their own lands, and were legally obliged to pay tax to their lords and to go to war when called up. The feudal idea of land ownership being essentially a contract isn't a reflection of what happened - you may as well say that modern Americans hold their houses in exchange for military service, since if they refuse to answer the draft then they will no longer be allowed to live there.
Domen
Misico dux Vandalorum
Yes they were. Modern Americans don't pay taxes to their lords (i.e. other citizens) but to the state treasury...
That is essentially the difference. And the fact that most of peasants owned "their own" land means nothing, because they were still obliged to pay tax to their lords (and often to work on his "personal" land during a few days of the week), who also considered that land / that village as "their own".
Villages were almost always considered as property of either the monarch, the nobles or the Church. Peasants had "their own" land - true - but that very same land was, at the same time, part of a village which was property of some noble, some monastery, some bishop or some duke / king.
Which means there was a much different understanding of "property" in feudal period than in post-feudal period.
The same piece of land could be "owned" by peasant X, but at the same time it was owned (as well as the rest of the village) by knight Y.
Feudalism has nothing to do with methods of military service. It has to do with social-economic organization and understanding of property. In 18th century Europe countries such as Prussia, Austria or Russia already had professional standing armies, but still had largely feudal social-economic organization.
Some others connect feudalism with state organization and in their understanding absolute monarchy was already something different than "feudal state".
In this understanding "feudal state" is - in simplest possible words - a decentralized state, while "absolute monarchy" is a centralized state.
But the fact is that in 18th century absolute monarchies around Europe the countryside was still functioning in similar way as in Medieval.
This requires such a different conception of 'property' that I feel you're twisting words to fit your argument - see below. In law, the house was the property of its owner, and he could legally tell his local lord to get off his land - there may have been practical difficulties with this, but not enough to say that it was 'owned' by both parties.
Now you're just outlining the existance of tenancy, which exists even today. Is Britain today a feudal society, because there are people whose houses are owned by a landlord?
Which is just an abstraction of the same, a body delegated (in the UK, by HM the Queen) to do what an individual cannot. At any rate, the concept of feudalism relies on mutual obligation, and there's no suggestion that there was anything of that sort - lords demanded taxes from the peasants because they had the power to do so and no legal accountability, and they defended them to protect their incomes and out of a sense of noblesse oblige, not out of some sort of reciprocal contract.
Besides, my point was that just because the state has the right to take away something, that doesn't make it state property.
Under this logic, 'feudalism' simply means a strong aristocracy! This is the real problem with the term 'feudalism', and why scholars no longer trust it - its meaning is so vague that the societal structures linked under the banner of 'feudalism' actually bear almost no resemblance to each other, save the name of feudalism!
Medieval states were not decentralised - the myth of the local baron ruling the countryside and totally disregarding the authority of the king is just that. An absolute monarchy is a system in which the monarch is not legally accountable to any other body, and so in law has carte blanche to do whatever he wants: this has no bearing on how centralised a country is, which is to a great extent dependant on its size and the speed of communications - as a rule of thumb, historically speaking, the level of effective power exercised by a central government in the day-to-day affairs of a country is inversely proportional to the time that it takes a message to travel from the border to the capital. The Roman Empire was an absolute monarchy and yet hugely decentralised, while the USSR was not a monarchy at all and yet was perhaps the most centralised state in history.
In much the same way as it had been functioning in Roman times. Estimations of ground-breaking change in people's daily lives are usually overrated.
Domen
Misico dux Vandalorum
Some Medieval states in some periods were VERY decentralised.
Mainly France and the Holy Roman Empire.
Others were less decentralised / more centralised.
No of them however had as strong administration or police, as efficient tax system, or was as centralised, as absolute monarchies.
Even in states where local baron was not ruling the countryside, he still had great influence on the monarch. Like in England (the imposing of Magna Carta on the monarch - and later even more liberties - is just one of examples).
A monarch cannot do whatever he wants and not be legally accountable to any other body without strong administration and police system.
That is why an absolute monarchy was by definition a centralised state with strong administration and police, both well-paid by the monarch.
18th - 19th century Russia was a very centralised absolute monarchy with strong administration & state police, despite vast size and poor communications.
Sorry but this is not true at all. When you have efficient & loyal administration and state police / invigilation system, size is not that important.
Russia is a good example.
I've never heard the term "absolute monarchy" applied to an Ancient Era state.
Absolute monarchy is pretty much a European invention of 18th century.
And the Roman Empire was not an absolute monarchy - even during the Dominate. Not mentioning Principate or the Republic.
Almost all of them were absolute monarchies! Britain remained one until the 17th century and France was one until 1789; Russia was one until 1905 and even Germany strongly resembled one until 1918.
Absolute monarchy has nothing to do with how involved a monarch is in the running of his country, only the unrestrained nature of his power. If there's no rules limiting what the king can do, it's an absolute monarchy.
wikipedia said:
Absolute monarchy has nothing to do with how involved a monarch is in the running of his country, only the unrestrained nature of his power. If there's no rules limiting what the king can do, it's an absolute monarchy.
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