CHAPTER OUTLINE

I. Introduction

II. The Great Raids of the Ninth and Tenth

Centuries

III. The Emergence of Feudal Institutions

A.The Consolidation of Feudalism:

Subinfeudation and the Heritability of Fiefs

B. Feudalism and the Manor

IV. Social and Economic Structures in Nonfeudal

Europe

V. The Feudal Monarchies

A.France and Norman England

B. The Ottonian Empire

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CHAPTER 8

THE BEGINNINGS OF THE FEUDAL AGE

T

he empire of Charlemagne did not long sur-

vive his death. As his grandsons divided their

vast inheritance, Europe was attacked from all

sides by ferocious warriors. Political decen-

tralization aggravated by devastating raids threatened

to destroy the fabric of society. New forms of military

and social organization arose to combat the threat and

gradually hardened into the system known as feudal-

ism. Feudalism rested upon the far older social and eco-

nomic system known as manorialism, which, though it

had existed in Roman times, adapted to feudal circum-

stances and expanded enormously during the dark years

of the ninth and tenth centuries. Together, feudalism

and manorialism became the dominant institutions of

medieval Europe and profoundly influenced the devel-

opment of politics and social attitudes until well into

modern times. Although feudalism pervaded most of

what had been the Carolingian Empire and spread

eventually to England and southern Italy, many parts of

the subcontinent escaped its grasp.

The Great Raids of the Ninth

and Tenth Centuries

Even before the death of Charlemagne, reports reached

him that trouble was brewing along the borders of his

empire. Muslim raiders, sailing out of their North

African ports in search of slaves and booty, had begun

to harry the Mediterranean coasts. In the north the

dragon prows of Viking longships made an unwelcome

appearance in seacoast villages. The northmen came to

trade if a village were well defended and to loot if it

were not. By the middle of the ninth century these first

tentative incursions had become massive raiding expe-

ditions that threatened the survival of European life.

Some years later the Magyars, a nation of horsemen

whose origins lay in the steppes of central Asia,

pastured their herds on the rich grasses of the

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