Recently in my down time I started to play Europa Universalis III on the computer.
Basically the game is you are in control of a country and you play from the years 1399 to 1821.
When you start the game in 1399 Europe there are about 50 “countries” but the thing is the 50 are pretty much under the control of the powerhouse nations like France or Poland.
The vassals are basically just off shoots of the powerhouse nation, they have their own economy but the diplomacy is pretty much determined by the mother nation.
In the game France has 8 vassals in 1399…Orleans, Boubonnis, Faux, etc.
My question is, was this actually as widespread a practice in Europe?
What’s was the point?
Or was it simply the game makers wanting to spice up game play a bit.
Vassalage is a somewhat weird historical topic because the practice of feudalism varied over time and culture. Plus, in practice many “feudal states” were really their own governments, which only were integrated over time .
So, was this historically accurate. Eh, as an approximation, it’s not terribly inaccurate. The creators did a lot of research, but there’s only so much they can clearly set out in a game and occasionally they got things really wrong. They can only put in so many government types and everything has to fit into those categories. They can only describe so many relationships.
France in that age was not a nation as we think of it now. As a series, Europa Universalis is about the period in time when modern states were developing alongside nationalistic ideals. I fact, it was in this period that the modern world effectively took shape. Hence France at the beginning of EU is more an distant ideal that only gradually coalesced into a world power.
I believe if you start a game at the same time period in Crusader Kings 2, all those countries are shown as “France” on the map, but the dukes of Orleans, Boubonnis, Faux, etc are all pretty powerful and are always one harelipped inbred heir away from rebellion. Like smiling bandit says, the EU games are simulating the early modern period in which states in a more-or-less modern sense began to emerge and so that’s how the game mechanics work; the vassal states thing is a way to shoehorn the earlier medieval vassalage-states into those mechanics.
(I’d be interested to see if anyone has the CK2 to EU4 save game converter how it handles it-- does it keep France, etc as one giant country or does it spin off vassals? Or does it depend on crown authority, etc?)
Vassal states, not “vassals”, please… in a feudal state, a vassal is any person who isn’t The Guy Up Top and yes, those were very much in use. Kind of hard to have a domain without any vassals, nobody to do the cooking.
Some areas were more likely to see vassal states than others (mostly it depended on whether the stronger ruler considered it more practical to take a vassal or to acquire outright, and or course this second course of action could result in the theoretically-stronger state ending up losing the war); also, the vassalage relationships often changed back and forth.
As smiling bandit explains, and although the notion of nation-state was still very much in the future c. 1399, many of the geographical areas which currently are nation-states were already defined and in the middle or just beginning processes of union which for some of them (such as France) were relatively fast but for others didn’t really gel until the coming of the concept of nation-state in the 19th century. Vassalage was more common in the previous centuries, one of the things that were happening during the period you’re talking about is that vassalage relationships were being “upgraded” to absorptions.
Here’s a map of France in 1477 when the quasi-state of Burgundy was about the disappear, divided between France and the Habsburgs after the death of Charles the Bold.
Note the difference between the pale blue ‘crown lands’ and the numerous great vassals of the state. By this time if not toothless all of these vassals save Burgundy ( about to be broken ) had rather blunted teeth. The old feudal sources of income were pitifully incapable of sustaining a more modern state and all of them combined were not up to the power of an increasingly centralized France. The 1465 War of the Public Weal, a fiasco for the nobility, is often cited as the last gasp of of the great French houses to try and dictate policy. The later wars of Charles the Bold were essentially a ( failed ) independence struggle and when the crown was riven by civil war later it was rather more a matter of competing court/religious factions.
Subsequently many of those appanages would be absorbed into the state - Burgundy seized in war. Brittany, Bourbon, the Albret and Armagnac lands absorbed by royal inheritance. etc.
Good point. The idea of a powerful, centralized national government that threw its weight around and made sure that local governments couldn’t ever become powerful is a rather modern concept. The old, feudal way of life involved loose relationships between city states, warlords, local confederacies, and other smaller organizations and how they gradually came under the influence of kings and emperors who were not necessarily more powerful than their new “subjects”, but often held superior social or religious status. E.g. it was often a Good Thing ™ to have the Pope approve of your country, and why not swear an oath of fealty to him and technically place yourself under his domain? You might even get some additional friends who also like the pope and won’t attack you because you like the pope too! You’ll still get to pretty much run your country the way you want, he doesn’t have enough money to send shock troops to your capital to enforce Federal law or anything. Maybe in 20 years you’ll have gotten fed up with him and you expel his representative from your court, get attacked by your neighbor who is all gung-ho for the pope, and then you call in your new allies from the mountains who never liked the pope anyway and welcome the chance to work with you to defeat the papists. Fun times.
The easiest way to understand pre-modern Europe is just to imagine the Mafia running everything. You’ve got a few big powerful families who have complete control over their own territories. And you’ve got a lot of lesser thugs who operate under the protection of the big families. Give a cut of what you scrape from the peasants to the don and promise to help him if he gets into a fight and he’ll protect you from the other big families.
Gah, that is what freaking pisses me off about some of the almost-docmentaries I watch for amusement [mrAru says he can tell when I am watching one from the resounding cries of bullshit at some badly researched almost-true fact being passed off as true history] they treat for example the collected islands and peninsulae of Greece as a single country in 750 BCE … or the whole boot and football of Sicily and Italy as a single country when they are discussing the city-state of Florence or Venice. I bloody well guarantee that if you called a Venitian a Florentine, or vice verse something nasty would probably happen to you in 1500!
Except, of course, “Greece” and “Italy” are recognised and significant cultural entities at the times you speak of. They weren’t unified states but, yes, they were countries, and in cultural, ethnic, geographical, etc contexts were commonly spoken of as such. The notion that each nation/country should rightly have a single corresponding state is a fairly modern one.
Catalans use “castilian” to refer to anybody whose primary language is Spanish.
Navarre is the only part of Spain that was never part of the Crown of Castille (Catalonia was part of it for some 130 years). We were not absorbed by Castille. We were not conquered by Castille. We eventually got tired of being mistaken for a part of a nonexistent political entity and proposed to Castille the official funding of such a polity.
Calling my more Navarrese than thou dad “castillian” was a guaranteed method to make him pop a vein… and if I want to watch a Catalan go through the ceiling, all I need to do is remind him that they were part of Castille for 130 years. I usually refrain from it. Usually.
Good point, and this sort of thing happens elsewhere too. The (German-speaking) Amish of Pennsylvania infamously refer to their English-speaking neighbors as “English”, regardless of their actual ancestry. Saying, “No, I’m Scottish” won’t help. Now, call a Scotsman “English” at a pub in Glasgow, you might be lucky to escape with only half a dozen broken bones. Language just does that - it’s not exact and it conforms to the culture in which it finds itself.
Wasn’t Spanish Navarre conquered by the troops of Castile and Aragon in 1512 and forced to accept a Castillian viceroy? Henry of Navarre, with French backing and a popular uprising, tried to reconquer it in 1521, but after early successes, were defeated at Nolain. (It was that war, at the Battle of Pamplona, that Ignatius of Loyola, defending the city, was wounded by a Navarrese cannonball. His recovery would cause him to have a religious awakening and found the Jesuits.)
Castillian (mostly Basque) mercenaries under pay of Aragon, but with the reasoning being that the king of Aragon claimed to be King of Navarre as well and that by saying he wasn’t, we were just being a bunch of pouty, stubborn, misbehaving vassals. Calling that “an invasion by Castille” is akin to saying that Switzerland invaded Holland (see “landsknechts in the Tercios, and actually in like half the armies of the period”). The viceroys were sometimes from Castille, sometimes from Aragon, and even sometimes from Navarre. Was Mexico under Navarrese rule when their viceroy was the Navarrese Palafox? Nope, what happens is that the Catholic Ones and their descendants treated all their territories as one when it came to personnel.
Background: Ferdinand’s father, John I of Aragon, was the widower of Queen Blanca I of Navarre. John had never accepted that he was not king-regnant of Navarre, but king-consort: he was to Navarre was Blanca was to Aragon. Blanca’s heir was her son by John, Charles, first Prince of Viana - John refused to accept this, he claimed that he was king-regnant and therefore after her death, king-period. Charles was eventually murdered without issue (had sons but not legitimate ones), according to our laws his heirs were Ye Usual French Cousins, according to the Trastamaras hell no.
