A similar fate overtook its neighbor in the valley of the Nile: “Princes spring from the families of the usurpers, free landlords, who pay land-taxes to nobody but to the king, and rule over certain strips of land, or districts. These district princes govern a territory specifically set apart as pertaining to their official position, and separate from their family possessions.
“Later successful warlike operations, perhaps filling in the gap between the Ancient and the Middle (Egyptian) Empire, together with the gathering in of captives of the wars, who could be utilized as labor motors, brought a more stringent exploitation of the subjects, a definite determination of the tributes. During the Middle Empire, the power of the princes of the clans rose to an enormous height, they maintained great courts, imitating the splendor of the royal establishment.”[113] “With the decline of the royal authority during a period of decay, the higher officials use their power for personal aims, in order to make their offices hereditary within their families.”[R][114]
[R] Maspero says, New Light on Ancient Egypt, pp. 218–9: “Until then, in fact, the high priest had been chosen and nominated by the king; from the time of Rameses III. he was always chosen from the same family, and the son succeeded his father on the pontifical throne. From that time events marched quickly. The Theban mortmain was doubled with a veritable seigniorial fief, which its masters increased by marriages with the heirs of neighboring fiefs, by continual bequests from one branch of the family to the other, and by the placing of cadets of each generation at the head of the clergy of certain secondary towns. The official protocol of the offices filled by their wives shows that a century or a century and a half after Rameses III., almost the whole of the Thebaid, about a third of the Egyptian territory was in the hands of the High Priest of Ammon and of his family.”—Translator’s Note (and italics).
But the operation of this historical law is not restricted to the “historical” peoples. In speaking of the feudal states of India, Ratzel states: “Even beyond Radshistan, the nobles often enjoyed a great measure of independence, so that even in Haiderabad, after the Nizam had acquired the sole rule over the country, the Umara or Nabobs maintained troops of their own, independently of the army of the Nizam. These smaller feudatories did not comply with the increased demands of modern times as regards the administration of Indian states as often as did the greater princes.”[115]
In Africa finally, great feudal states come and pass away, as do bubbles arising and bursting from the stream of eternally similar phenomena. The powerful Ashanti empire, within one and a half centuries, has shriveled to less than one-fifth of its territory;[116] and many of the empires that the Portuguese encountered have since disappeared without leaving a trace of their existence. And yet these were strong feudal powers: “Stately and cruel negro empires, such as Benin, Dahomy or Ashanti, resemble in many respects ancient Peru or Mexico, having in their vicinity politically disorganized tribes. The hereditary nobility of the Mfumus, sharply separated from the rest of the state, had mainly the administration of the districts, and together with the more transitory nobility of service, formed in Loango strong pillars of the ruler and his house.”[117]
But whenever such a state, once powerful, has split into a number of territorial states either de facto or juristically independent, the former process begins anew. The great state gobbles up the smaller ones, until a new empire has arisen. “The greatest territorial magnates later become emperors,” says Meitzen laconically of Germany.[118] But even this great demesne vanishes, split up by the need of equipping warlike vassals with fiefs. “The Kings soon found that they had donated away all their belongings; their great territorial possessions in the Delta had melted away,” says Schneider (l. c. page 38) of the Pharaohs of the sixth dynasty. The same causes brought about like effects in the Frankish Empire among both Merovingians and Carolingians; and later in Germany in the case of the Saxon and Hohenstaufen Emperors.[119] Additional references are unnecessary, as every one is familiar with these instances.
In a subsequent part of this treatise, we shall examine into the causes that finally liberated the primitive feudal state from this witch’s curse, this circling from agglomeration to disintegration without end. Our present task is to take up the social side of the process, as we have already taken up the historical phase of it. It changes the articulation of classes in the most decisive manner.
The common freemen, the lower strata of the dominating group, are struck with overpowering force. They sink into bondsmenship. Their decay must go along with that of the central power; since both, allied one might say, by nature, are menaced simultaneously by the expanding power of the great territorial lords. The crown controls the landed magnate so long as the levy of the common freemen of the district is a superior force to his guards, to his “following.” But a fatal need, already set forth, impels the crown to deliver over the peasants to the landed lordling, and from the moment when the county levy has become weaker than his guards, the free peasants are lost. Where the sovereign powers of the state are delegated to the territorial magnate, i. e., where he has developed more or less into an independent lord of the region, the overthrow of the liberties of the peasants is carried out, at least in part, under the color of law, by forcing excessive military services, which ruin the peasants, and which are required the more often as the dynastic interests of the territorial lord require new lands and new peasants, or by abusing the right to compulsory labor, or by turning the administration of public justice into military oppression.
The common freemen, however, receive the final blow either by the formal delegation or by the usurpation of the most important powers of the crown, the disposition of unoccupied lands or “commons.” Originally, this land belonged to all the “folk” in common; i. e., to the freemen for common use; but in accordance with an original custom, probably universal, the patriarch enjoys disposal of it. This right of disposition passes to the territorial magnate with the remaining royal privileges—and thus he has obtained the power to strangle any few remaining freemen. He now declares all unoccupied lands his property, and forbids their settlement by free peasants, while those only are permitted access who recognize his superior lordship; i. e., who have commended themselves to him, or are his serfs.
That is the last nail in the coffin of the common freemen. Heretofore their equality of possessions has been in some way guaranteed. Even if a peasant had twelve sons, his patrimony was not split up, because eleven of them broke new hides of land in the commons of the community, or else in the general land not yet distributed to other villages. That is henceforth impossible; hides tend to divide where large families grow up, others are united when heir and heiress marry: henceforth there come into existence “laborers,” recruited from the owners of half, a quarter, or even an eighth of a hide who help work a larger area. Thus the free peasantry splits into rich and poor; this begins to loosen the bond which hitherto had made the bundle of arrows unbreakable. When, therefore, some comrade is overwhelmed by the exactions of the lord and has become his liegeman, or if bond peasants are settled among the original owners, either to occupy some hide vacated by the extinction of the family or fallen into the hands of the lord because of the indebtedness of its occupant, then every social cohesion is loosened; and the peasantry, split apart by class and by economic contrasts, is handed over without power of resistance to the magnate.