United States or Pitcairn Islands ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
This term was now applied to acts that subjected the knight, or city, not to feudal control, but to complete absorption by the king or prince of Napoleon's creation. Six Imperial or Free Cities survived the Secularizations, namely, the three Hanse towns, and Augsburg, Frankfurt, and Nuremberg.
An extreme instance is the recent attempt to introduce party government into Japan, a country just emerging from the feudal stage, an interesting account of which is given in the Nineteenth Century for July, 1899. The experiment failed because the clans could not be divided on questions of political principle.
In many of the feudal courts and castles of Languedoc, Provence, and Aquitaine, imaginations, words, and lives were licentious; and the charming poetry of the troubadours and the gallant adventures of knights caused it to be too easily forgotten that morality was but little more regarded than the faith.
They are still pugnaciously national, but they have unlearned so much of the feudal preconceptions as to leave them in a defensive attitude, under the watch-word: Peace with honour.
The national state could, therefore, neither share authority with the Pope at Rome, nor endure independent feudal or municipal jurisdictions within the realm; and in its military and administrative organization, feudal officers, since the thirteenth century in France and England, had been steadily replaced by paid agents appointed by the king, whose hostility to the Pope was chiefly inspired by the desire to secure from the Church the money necessary to maintain them.
In this Grecian city he surrounded himself with Asiatic pomp and ceremonies. He assumed the titles of Eastern monarchs. His palace was served and guarded with a legion of functionaries that made access to his person difficult. He created a new nobility, and made infinite gradations of rank, perpetuated by the feudal monarchs of Europe.
"This was an important step in the development of the feudal system.
The supporters of this school came principally from old princely families that had lost their feudal possessions, and not from among the so-called scholars. They were people belonging to the upper class who possessed political experience and now offered their knowledge to other princes who still reigned.
The quarrel between King Harold and Duke William was in no sense of the word a national quarrel but a personal dispute in which the feudal adherents of both parties were necessarily involved, the gage being the crown and spoil of England.
You know, in imagination at least, how it winds among craggy hills of splendid form, turning so abruptly as to leave you often shut in with no visible outlet from the wall of rock and forest; how the castles, some in ruins so as to be as unsightly as any old pile of rubbish, others with feudal towers and battlements, still perfect, hang on the crags, or stand sharp against the sky, or nestle by the stream or on some lonely island.
Word Of The Day