Oh, and the plague didn’t hit Spain and Portugal except to bring us immigrants, which anyway had been coming throughout the middle ages. (out of window, sorry)
Eh? It killed Alfonso XI in 1350 while he was in the midst of seiging Gibraltar. It was less severe in Castille, true ( though it did hit there ), but it devastated Catalonia. You aren’t some kind of filthy Castillocentric, are you 
? To quote:
The background to the Catalan crisis was plague, recurrent and remorseless; 1333, a year of famine, came to be known as the ‘first bad year’, but it was between 1347 and 1351 that the Pincipality was first ravaged by plague. The Black Death of those years took a heavy toll of a population already stretched to its limits by the imperial adventures of the recent past. Where the visitation in Castille was harsh but swift, it proved in Catalonia to be only the first of a long and terrible succession. Although the first losses were made up with surprising speed, further waves of epidemics - 1362-3, 1371, 1396-7, and then periodically throughout the fifteenth century - steadily sapped the country’s vitality. The 430,000 inhabitants of 1365 were reduced to 350,000 by 1378 and 278,000 by 1497, and the population did not return to something approaching its pre-Black Death figures until the second half of the sixteenth century.
From Imperial Spain, 1469-1716 by J. H. Elliot ( 1963, 2002 Penguin Books ).
In al-Andalus:
Then came the demographic disasters of the fourteenth century: poor harvests and widespread famine in its second decade , and then the shattering visitation of the Black Death, initially in the years 1346-1350, then in recurrent later outbreaks. The pace of resettlement slackened. Medina Sidonia, conquered in 1249, had only a hundred and fifty households as late as 1367. There were farms not far from Cordoba that lay abondoned from the thirteenth century to the eighteenth.
From Moorish Spain by Richard Fletcher ( 1992, University of California Press ).
- Tamerlane
Poking around it appears Portugal got hammered from 1347-1348. Like Castille it seems to have been devastating but short-lived, but it was definitely part of that initial general Mediterranean pandemic.
- Tamerlane
I have to take this part to task. One of the hallmarks of feudal armies were that common folk were much less important to them. The low population and poor agricultural output meant that lords wanted their peasants to stay home on the land to raise food. Also, the emerging class-identities dictated that it was the Nobles role to fight (knights don’t like peasants who know how to kill a knight). So most battles were between relatively small forces of men who were warriors by birth. The rise of the common man in warfare extended both from the increasing surplus of warm bodies and the revival of Greek and Roman ideas in the rennaisance. When the Swiss showed what disciplined men with 20 foot pikes could do to knights with 15 foot lances, it wasn’t just an argument that size matters. It showed that commoners were militarily important.
On edit, I just want to say that this doesn’t mean that peasants were not a part of medieval warfare. Just that they were not considered to be worth much more than fire support in the case of archers or to provide cheap footmen if needed.
Ehm, my lastname has the structure Commonlastname from Village.
The first time one of my foreparents appears in a record it’s as “Firstname Commonlastname, from the village of Village, called to parliament as Captain of the village and of the surrounding settlements”. IX century.
The last one of my foreparents to be Captain-Knight of that village was my great-grandparent.
We never had money for mercenaries. Our guys were the villagers, and yes, we needed to go back in time for the heavy work - unlike mercenaries.
Please take into account that I speak from the point of view of Spain, where we spent 800 years burning the neighbor’s fields every other summer, with occasional breaks on those years when we were trying to get the neighbor’s daughter to marry our son. Not from the point of view of those people who thought you had to go all the way to Jerusalem to find a few Moors to smack, or even cross the Channel to slap the neighbors around. We had the Crusades right at home, so we could get back in time to bring the (unburned) wheat, fruit and grape in and butcher the pig.
Navarrocentric. And compared with the general butchery in Italy the plague hit in Spain was peanuts.
Nava, you’ve brought up one of the big problems of medieval history studies. Every place was different and changed over time. The demands of the reconquista put a very different slant on Iberian warfare than one would find in the tournaments in France or the baronial squabbling William the Conquerer and his decendents faced.
I have heard this argument-that Rome (in the reign of Diocletian0 effectively began the feudal era (by binding the free men to the estatets-the landowners became feudal lords. This was done to stop the migration of free men to the cities, and turned the freemen into serfs (thus ushering in the medieval era).
I think the late Prof. weber espoused this view.
Nobody’s mentioned the financial revolution after the Church changed its traditional stance against usury, and allowed credit so long as the interest did not exceed the principal.
The view that I heard is that Feudalism was imposed when the barbarian invaders took over from the Romans. The barbarian warrior culture was completely centered around personal oaths of loyalty from a fighting man to his chief, who swore loyalty to a mightier chief, etc… thus creating the key concept of feudalism and imposing it on top of the civic culture of the “Roman” peasants. One theory on the origins of free and unfree peasants is that when the Empire was declining, many city dwellers had to move out to the country to find work. Once there, they had to settle for whatever bargain a landlord would give them. Consequently, they had to pledge their labor to a lord in exchange for land. This rather crappy deal was made heriditary so that the descendants all had to give labor to their lord for free based onthe amount of land they worked for him. This theory might explain how it came about in some places, but assuredly not all of Europe. In France, the majority of peasant-held land was actually owned by the peasants. such a land holding was called an Allod and was a pain to the local lord who did not have nearly as much control over the peasant owners. William the conqueror created possibly the “purest” feudal state by simply erasing much of the land ownership in England and establishing holdings for his followers. But even then, there were exceptions such as land given over to the church.
This might fall under the general topic of trade since notes of credit were a way for international merchants to conclude big-time deals. Keep in mind though, that this is not credit in our modern sense of interest, but rather as a primitive form of checks.
A little ancedote: At the trade fairs in Troyes, France, in order for a note of credit to be official it had to be signed by a Warden of the Fair. (I forget the actual term for the office. It may be “judge of the fair” or something similar.) One of the perks of that office was that the holder was exempt from taxes for life.
And a good book on the subject is Medieval Money Matters. It’s a collection of scholarly essays on trade and economic subjects in the Middle Ages.