Books on feudal politics?

October 12, 2006 11:16 AM

I'm looking for book recommendations on feudal politics in Europe, something which gives a vivid but accurate depiction of what politics was like before the rise of strong national governments: the importance of personal loyalties, hostage-taking, assassination, mercenaries.

Reading George R. R. Martin's A Game of Thrones, set in a fantasy version of England during the War of the Roses, you get a really vivid sense of what political maneuvering would have been like in these circumstances. But I'm looking for something historical as opposed to fictional. It doesn't have to be encyclopedic; a book describing a particular historical person would be fine.

I've read Colonel G. F. Young's The Medici and Barbara Tuchman's A Distant Mirror.

The practical reason I'm asking is that politics in Iraq and Afghanistan seems feudal to me, in the sense that local leaders (warlords, notables) with their own groups of personal followers--clans, tribes, etc.--matter more than the central government. I'm looking for something I can refer people to in order to explain this.

posted by russilwvong to Law & Government (11 answers total)

Umm, Machiavelli's Prince? He does contrast the Italian feudal system with the [epoch-specific] democracy of ancient Greece, which will help modern readers a little. But while the Italian system was theoretically feudal, the peninsula was very different to the rest of feudal Europe; it was almost unrecognisable to people from Flanders, France, England, Saxony.

The interpretation of Afghanistan as feudal is something that does appeal to me; I'm learning quite a lot about Tajikistan lately, where you have a country run by one of the Afghan ethnic groups, and the place, while not Switzerland, does seem to have its shit together an order of magnitude more than Afghanistan. And this seems to be at least partly a result of the culture of the nation-state that the Soviets implanted.
posted by Aidan Kehoe at 12:41 PM on October 12, 2006

You might look at some books on the Knights Templar. I don't know that I would classify them as feudal lords, but their wealth and political power was in direct opposition to state governments and the Papal See well before strong national governments (1100 - 1300).
posted by mattbucher at 12:54 PM on October 12, 2006

politics in Iraq and Afghanistan seems feudal to me, in the sense that local leaders (warlords, notables) with their own groups of personal followers--clans, tribes, etc.--matter more than the central government.

You're on to something. But I think a big part of the feudal system was the network of hierarchical obligations. At the very local level, the barons commanded a certain amount of space, peasants and thugs. They owed fealty to the people above them on the hierarchy, which might include military service when the lord needed to plunder other lords, a portion of the harvest, etc. And those people owed fealty in turn to the lords above them, in a line all the way up to the King, who answered only to God (and, some argued, God's representatives on Earth, which led to a number of interesting confrontations between Pope and Crown.)

That was the theory. I'm willing to bet that the day-to-day practice was probably closer to something like contemporary Afghanistan.
posted by jason's_planet at 1:03 PM on October 12, 2006

If you're looking for a bottom-up view of such things, T. E. Lawrence's Seven Pillars of Wisdom" describes elements of tribal politics in Saudi Arabia directly.
posted by jet_silver at 1:55 PM on October 12, 2006

Seven Pillars of Wisdom is available online through gutenberg australia, or this dude put it in html. Copyright may apply outside Oz.
posted by MetaMonkey at 2:27 PM on October 12, 2006

Thanks for the answers. I'm looking for a description of feudal European politics, rather than modern Arab politics, to make it more familiar / less alien to Western readers.
posted by russilwvong at 3:25 PM on October 12, 2006

Norman F. Cantor is good at this. The Civilization of the Middle Ages is a standard work, but for me, the behind-the-scenes gossipy historiography in Inventing the Middle Ages made a more vivid impression.
posted by cgc373 at 8:59 PM on October 12, 2006

I'm surprised no one has thrown out a recommendation for Barbara Tuchman's Bible and Sword. So, allow me. Peripheral, perhaps, to your stated central goal of understanding tribal societies in the Musliim world, and yet, not irrelavant, at all.
posted by paulsc at 2:30 AM on October 13, 2006

Wow - no one mentioned A World Lit Only By Fire, by my secret boyfriend William Manchester?

It's a terrific, readable account of the craziness that was the Middle Ages in Europe. Very enjoyable.
posted by CunningLinguist at 8:29 AM on October 13, 2006

Thanks again. I now have a year to read all these books and post an update!
posted by russilwvong at 4:40 PM on October 16, 2006

Okay, I've read the following:

A World Lit Only By Fire--good book (I really liked Manchester's vivid description of Magellan's voyages in particular); but emphasizes the alienness of the Middle Ages, which is not so much what I was looking for.

I found The Making of the Middle Ages, by R. W. Southern, while looking at a review of Cantor's writings in the New York Review of Books. Excellent, but dense.

Found the memoirs of Philippe de Commynes while looking at book recommendations on the Wars of the Roses. Maybe the best so far, as Commynes provides a first-hand account of the struggle between Charles the Bold and Louis XI (he was an advisor to first one, then the other).

Re-read Machiavelli's The Prince. A bit too terse.

Ruth Putnam, Charles the Bold: Last Duke of Burgundy provides an alternate view of the events described by Commynes.

John Julius Norwich, A History of Venice includes some interesting discussion of political maneuvering.

Currently reading Alison Weir, The Wars of the Roses.

Thanks again to everyone for their recommendations.
posted by russilwvong at 3:21 PM on January 26, 2007