But didn’t the fact that Navarre had a viceroy in the first place (as did Aragon, Valencia, and Catalonia), while Castille didn’t suggest that Castille was the dominant player in the relationship? I mean, the capital of the empire was Madrid, not Saragossa, Valencia, or Pamplona.
Navarre had viceroys when the king was only king of Navarre but was away, too.
Castille was the dominant player? Sure. Now go tell the Scotts, the Northern Irish or the Welsh that they are English. And in our case, the personal union that started with Emperor Charles was made by marriages and by an internal civil war with external guests: the transformation from personal union into a single country called Spain (not Castille) was by treaty between equals, not by conquest.
Madrid was never Imperial Capital; Spain (mainly Castille) had an Empire, but wasn’t one. The Imperial Capital was Toledo, being the Capital of Charles V of the Sacred Empire (Felipe II wasn’t Emperor). While Toledo was and is certainly in Castille, let’s get our terminology right please.
You can say the same thing with Aragon, though, can’t you? It was never conquered by Castille either, but joined with it through marriage. In fact, you can make the argument better with Aragon than you can with Navarre, because had not Ferdinand and Charles invaded Navarre (to support their claim to the kingdom), Spanish Navarre would have been ruled by King Henri. (And, remember, the separate Kingdom of Navarre also had self government until the French revolution.
And while Phillip II didn’t have the title Emperor, it’s still commonly called “The Spanish Empire”, even under him, because of Spain’s enormous holdings in America. It was that to which I was referring.
Funny coincidence, I had a lecture on that very subject yesterday :).
And yes, vassals were very widespread starting around the tail end of the 9th century. Quick version (that will nevertheless run a bit long) :
Charlemagne and his line were fairly clever about setting up a political apparatus that wouldn’t get hijacked like they, in fact, had hijacked the Merovingian one : by setting up local dynasties that slowly grew in power and influence until the King was just a husk, a powerless figurehead who would in the end be deposed through a simple letter to the Pope (candidly asking his Hatness what he thought about “those kings that do not govern, and whether that is right ?”).
So. Carolingians take power. They then reorganized their empire administratively and made administrative charges both heavily delegated (the local aristocrats wielded the very authority of the Emperor), but with heavy oversight, centralized laws and most importantly were ephemeral : the Emperor appointed the Count of this and the Bishop of that, and if they didn’t do a good job of it he could kick 'em right out. If and when Count Something keeled it, the Emperor named a new one at his leisure. That’s the theory, or rather that’s how it was at first.
Problem is, these non-hereditary aristocrats still wound up forming local power bases over the course of the execution of their missions - a loyal military force, monasteries built on land they gave to the Church personally (and as such could expect to see Abbots thereof coming from their own families), large private holdings and so forth.
The other big problem was that the kingdom came under attack at that point by raiders and pirates of all stripes : Muslims, Bulgars, Vikings, Slavs… the Merovingian system of defence was inadequate at protecting the peasants, and moreso the monasteries which is where the money was and what raiders looted first.
So in response to these lightning raids first the age of castles began and mottes soon dotted the landscape, and second the carolingian kings drafted large “super counties” that would be topped by one supercount, who could boss the other local counts around and organize them militarily over a larger geographical area. It worked. Kindasorta (not going into the details there, funtimes as they were)
In time, those supercounts, dubbed Princes, started saying that their power was not a proxy for that of the Emperor ; but that it had been given to them by the Grace of God, and that said Grace happened to be hereditary.
You might at this point wonder why the Emperors and Kings let that happen. Truth is, they didn’t really have a choice. For one thing the kingdom was much to big for them to hope to micromanage, for another it was under attack from all sides (including the inside, as the succession of Charlemagne’s son was a bloody mess that turned into a civil war) and the kings needed strongmen they could count on and damn the expense, and for a last one as I said this was the beginning of the age of castles. A rogue count could now hold out pretty long on his own turf.
So the kings let the hereditary thing slide, long as the oaths of loyalty were observed. It was pretty much a fait accompli anyway.
And so a strong, heterogenous but centralized realm was divided into N quasi-autonomous principalities that were only nominally subordinated to the central King, who himself wielded zero direct power within them. The King of France wouldn’t have rated a pot to piss in were he to have been travelling to Burgundy; but for the word of the local bigwig.
Interestingly, these princes never seem to have gone the whole mile and a) called themselves kings or b) dealt away with the now far less powerful central kings, or even just told them to sit on it and rotate. They really did kind of did what he said. Mostly - obviously there were always powerplays and upstarts here and there, from time to time. But on the whole the framework of the system held fast. Odd, ne ?
But the more intersting thing is that over time the princes followed the exact same scheme at their middle level : the big principalities and marks in turn also devolved into a congregation of viscounts, vismargraves, bishoprics, knighthoods and baronies… all in turn autonomous and invested of supreme legislative, military, even economic power over their very local dominions (some hammered their own currency, and none of the money flowed upwards via “federal” taxes neither), but still somehow bound to the top local Count by oaths of fealty, and through him to the King. Even those who were in practice a *lot *more powerful than the guys up top were - Charles VII often quipped that he was the poorest lord in all of France.
So power became a very personal affair from then on - you weren’t patriotic or attached to the idea of a nation, your were instead very attached to the land extending from this hill to that one ; and you had a strong, individual, personal and direct bond to the next guy over (although of course ethno-cultural lines were also de facto drawn in the sand. Burgundy for Burgundians and so forth)… and not much further. This is also why genealogies became so very important, as the tangled web of power pacts, alliances and loyalties also had become hereditary. So a little marriage here, a quick hunting accident there and you’ve redrawn the whole map. Very unstable, natch.
The concept of a larger, stable nation englobing all of these *pays *“for real” and wielding actual power from the top down appeared much later, though I couldn’t tell you exactly when - it’s not like they made a press release, yanno ? :). But French historians reckon the idea that would become “France” coalesced around the time of Joan of Arc - so 15th, 16th century, thereabouts - but it was a very progressive shift, over many generations.
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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.
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Not really, though. Yes, “the Greeks” were a thing, but “Greece” really wasn’t. Interestingly, neither was “Athens” : writers of that era called it “the city of the Athenians”, but not Athens. The coinage said “Money of the Athenians”, too. And of course customs and mores varied wildly from one Greek city to the next.
Similarly, the Franks who came to call dibs on what is now France took a very long time to start calling themselves “Kings of France”. They were, rather, “Kings of the Franks”.
What was important in Ancient and Early Medieval times was the community of the people and their bonds of kinship, not the land they occupied and not the larger ethno-cultural groups.
The Crown of Aragon was declared “conquered land” by Philip V and its Parliaments and Laws mowed over (with a few minor exceptions on sections of civil law that it would have been a bitch to change), it’s what the Catalans commemorate with their regional day. September 11th, 1714 is the day that the siege of Barcelona ended. This year marks the 300th anniversary.
Anyway, my apologies: I meant to point out that even nowadays, definitions of “cultural groups” can vary wildly from location to location and even within what “outsiders” would perceive as a single group, and instead it turned into yet another Spanish hijack.
If you get the chance, you should read Eugen Weber’s “Peasants into Frenchmen: The Modernization of Rural France 1870-1914”. He argues that it wasn’t really until after the Franco-Prussian War, when the Third Republic introduced mandatory conscription, free mandatory education, and put a lot of money into industrializing rural France and developing the transportation infrastructure that you started to see a feeling of “Frenchness” in a lot of rural France, replacing the old regional identities, cultures, and languages/dialects.
I’ll be sure to put it in the queue !
And there’s no doubt that regional identities survived for a long time - even in 1914 there were miscommunication problems in the trenches. Bretons *poilus *couldn’t understand what Auvergnats were talking about, all resented their hoity toity officers speaking high falootin’ French at them instead of proper patois… and the steps taken to remedy that situation were pretty forceful too. To this day you’ll find people who resent how Paris stamped out (and stamps out, present tense) their local cultures. Also to this day you’ll find people out in the sticks who still primarily speak NotFrench among themselves, even though they also of course know regular French. They’re slowly dying out, but still there for now.
Still, I mean, the country (as a political entity and sovereign state) was unified and centralized earlier than that. Taxes were collected, mail was delivered, national laws & edicts were drafted, prefects were appointed from Paris to make sure they were enforced all over and so on. With the caveat that some regions held out longer than others - Languedoc, Béarn, Burgundy and Brittany all kept special statuses and regimes all the way to the Revolution, and I think Brittany still has a weird administrative status on paper.
Precious little of that going on in 1399.
Would you try to put monopoly into a coherent context too? It would not make sense to do so any more than what you are asking.
Firstly: :rolleyes:
But actually, yeah, there is an interesting coherent context into which you can put Monopoly. The earliest version of the game was invented by a disciple of the economist Henry George with the game intended to illustrate how the workings of the rental market invariably leads to a small group of people enriching themselves at the expense of all the others. George’s ideas on communal ownership of land maybe don’t have much traction these days, but Monopoly is still a decent illustration of the tendency of capitalism to concentrate wealth. (Or at least it would have been if me and my siblings had ever gotten that far in a game…)
The game the OP is talking about is most definitely in the same category of being some compelling edutainment. Asking to what degree and in which way a game mechanic reflected the reality of the time period being represented is a perfectly reasonable (and interesting!) question. Here’s some more rolley eyes for you: :rolleyes:
Relevant link. A Monopoly victory is dark 
.
And yes, it’s totally deliberate. I never grokked how or why it became the kind of exemplar of simple, family-friendly, children’s fun it has.
I’ll nitpick your quibble. Any person who isn’t the monarch is a subject. A vassal is generally a subject who holds a fief, often some domain that the vassal maintains for themself, under certain conditions (the fealty). The relationship between liege and vassal is a personal one: being a vassal of the king shows high status. No cook or other menial servant would claim to be a vassal; that is far above their station.
You are right to draw a distinction between vassal state and vassal. A vassal state owes its allegiance to another state. While individuals are involved, as representatives of their respective states, the allegiance is between the states, not the representatives.
To make things really amusing - try and count how many different territorial organizations historically used the name “Burgundy”. 
The definition and boundaries of cultural groups is an issue everywhere. Over here in the US, many people consider Texans to be a cultural group but not Floridians. Some immigrant groups in this country have formed their own “breakway” ethnicities in certain areas that maintain a hybrid culture to some extent, such as Louisiana Cajuns and Pennsylvania Dutch. However, there are no shared “Vermont Scot”, “Californian Gotlanders”, or “Walloons of Alaska” identities, even though there are people of those backgrounds in those states.
And ponder which map designer picked the color to represent Burgundy? “Hmm… yellow? Orange? Which color should designate Burgundy?”
An interesting point I read once - it was the advent of gunpowder and related technical advances that did in the mini-states. The ones that survived - Luxembourg, Andorra, etc - accidents of history, relics of ancient power struggles. We see this as Italy unites. It used to be that a state only had to raise a peasant army and hand them pikes and arrowheads.
It’s obscene to medieval minds how much energy - wood, later coal - was required to make a decent sized cannon, plus the specialized technology and expertise to make one that would not blow up when fired. A state like Florence or Sienna eventually lacked the resources or money to field enough hardware to defend against a state the size of France or Spain. Like the players of Monopoly, the big ones pushed out the lesser ones and absorbed what they had.
he final denouement was when Napoleon could march up to the edge of the lagoon and point his canon at Venice, and it surrendered without a shot. Until a few decades ago, canon could not reach across that water; now they could, and Venice could either surrender, or be pulverised and then surrender.
I should add, another factor in improved technology was the organization and transportation. (logistics, logistics, logistics!)
A limit to any attempt to impose will in medieval times was manpower - if everyone had easily made pikes and bows, the deciding factor would be the number of men and the number of horsemen, all things being equal. To field an overwhelming force required the ability to feed them; armies tended to live off the land, and the land could only support so big a horde. Sieges were a difficult strategy because inside the castle would have a few months’ supplies maybe, but the surrounding army had to find its food from a population around it reluctant to give away their limited supply. So you might be King of All Franks, but your ability to prove it was limited by how many men the surrounding countryside could support.
Even later, the great royal Chateaux like Chambord were supposedly created because the royal court was so large, one locale could not continuously supply it. Instead, the entire court changed location several times a year.