Feudalism
Prior to higher cultures, political forms and relations are hardly more than momentary. Relations are built on power, master controlling slave by force. The aesthetics and forms that dominate in these periods are wholly arbitrary and possess no inner form. This can be seen in Carolingian times before the West, Mycenaean times before the Greek dark ages, the Tsarist Mir system, and the crisis of the 3rd century, which demonstrated how quick the emperors could be felled by their treacherous followers. But when a new culture is born, a shift occurs from purely factual political dynamics, to ones founded on honour, loyalty, and legal practise. This is the beginning of the Feudal state.
Feudalism can be more or less divided into three stages. Feudalism with a head, in the form of a king, emperor, pope, or any analogous type of capstone to a system built on vassalage, Feudalism without a head, where the idea of feudalism does away with a need for these heads and rules predominantly by the nobility and priesthood alone, and the interregnum, where the Summer state idea has not yet formed and a tossup for control of the states results in varying civil wars between powerful houses. The idea of the Feudal state can be best surmised as a state comprised of binding chains of loyalty connecting everyone in society, from peasants to masters, by a pyramid of vassalage. Within this period, the plant-like urges are strong, race remains a powerful instinct both as rootedness to the land and the rhythmic sense of sequential generations. Property and land are one and the same, and so we find that roaming conquerors, would settle and organise on their territories.
There is no better case of Feudalism than the system created in the wake of the Norman conquest of England, and unfortunately it is mainly the West that Spengler focuses on. The Normans were a Viking state, the ancestry of their lords was Norse, hence the name of that part of France. William’s conquest of England would see several bureaucratic advancements that often come with the rise of feudalism in every culture: his victory at Hastings rendered England his property, the Domesday book was commissioned in order to gather intel on the lands and peoples who now owed him taxes[1]. From here is the idea of the Exchequer[2] as part of a financial administration to oversee the affairs of the kingdom. Out of this we get the words Cheque, Control[3], Quittance[4] and Record[5] which become the foundation of the Western impulse to dominate by manner of the will, and beyond this the first traces of State officialdom. The same financial structure can be seen in the Old Kingdom, early Chinese feudal state and the reforms of Diocletian. What’s essential here is that the State is a symbol of care and maintenance. Its first existence can be identified by its regimentation of society towards these ends. But that never detracted from the goal of the system which was to subjugate the native English to the rank of serf. Their lands were then on for the enjoyment of William and his barons.
The problem with feudalism is that across Europe it was slashed and severed by identity lines. The most significant would be that the papacy and the Holy Roman Empire sought to establish two parallel feudal systems, one with the pope as its spiritual head, and the other with the emperor at its crown. The 1054 East-West schism arose out of an ecclesiastical disagreement whereby Catholics invested in the pope infallible authority on religious matters, which differed from the Byzantine council-based method shared between an array of separate churches. It established a hierarchy of authority at which the pope was the top and voice of God on Earth. With Gregory VII in 1059, the vassalage of Kings began to take place in Normandy and England. No longer were kings the highest authority in the land, but the nobility now answered fully to the Vatican and its priesthood, with Innocent III (1198-1216) this papal overlordship actualized for a time the universal Empire, dreamt of as far back as Nicholas I (860). Amusingly the papal states and the Vatican were by no means a pure priesthood. Any priesthood that dabbles in politics is betraying its symbolic nature, but the popes and cardinals of the Papacy were notoriously corrupted by the noble families of Campagna. He who controlled the Pope controlled the truth by his nature in the Catholic system, and whoever controls the truth controls the feudal structure he heads. In quintessential Faustian style, a unified order, global in scope, began with the idea of a Europe united under the church.
After Innocent III’s death in the year 1216 (one after magna carta), the power of the pope began to shrink over its kingdom fiefs by manner of limitation of powers by a council of his own vassals. This is within the same timeframe that kingdoms across Europe were doing the same to their own kings in what’s generally considered as the first step towards democratisation. Though the Magna Carta was the first to create a council of vassals to the king, in the following decades there would be similar developments of noble-governed nations in France (1302), the Spanish kingdom of Aragon (1283), and Germany, all of which featured a system where kings were made subject to their prior vassals.
This brings us to the interregnum period, whereby history is about to move from feudal union to the class-state. It’s typically a period of crisis which has different results in each culture, but for the West it resulted in in-fighting between particularly the Germans[6] and English[7] for the throne, whilst the Papacy continued to recede into the backdrop of European politics. It marked the death of the Springtime and the transition into the ripened state forms of the Baroque, coinciding with spiritual changes such as Protestantism in the early 1500s as well.
Compared to the enormous scope of Faustian feudalism, Greek feudalism came and went in complete silence. We do however find trace elements of late Feudalism in the relationship between Agamemnon and the Basileus kings. The power of the monarch being greatly diminished amongst his peers. The extensive officialdoms seen in England are also found in early Egypt, China and Diocletian Rome. Egypt in particular had an all-encompassing spiritual order not dissimilar to papal hegemony which completely dissolved in its interregnum as Pharoah Isasi slowly gave his domains away to his vassals.
To conclude, the state-idea of the Spring period is Feudalism, broken down into three stages moving in the trajectory of feudalism, as a conglomeration of estates, nullifying the need for a central authority. This results in a power vacuum which causes estates to compete for that position, resulting in the death of the feudal order and its replacement by ripened class-State.
[1] Spengler reminds us of Odysseus counting his treasures. A poetic impulse to keep track of what you have taken possession of by manner of victory.
[2] From the Old French “Eschequier” (chessboard), referring to the chequered cloth used on the accounting tables of the medieval English treasury
[3] From the Old French “Contrerole” (counter roll), which the exchequer used to verify financial records – a control mechanism
[4] From the Old French “Quiter” (to release), a formal release from a debt obligation by the Exchequer
[5] From the Latin “recordari” (to remember). The Exchequer’s use of this word to describe something entered into a roll solidified its definition as an official written memory
[6] The Great Interregnum (1250 – 1273), he extends the interregnum period to a low point in the history of the HRE under Wenceslaus (1400) and likely extends it up to 1500 as well, but doesn’t say so explicitly.
[7] The War of the Roses (1455 – 1487), this would take Britain to the Tudor period and therefore the beginning of the Faustian Summer.