As the Roman empire fell, various economic and military initiatives were started to try and prevent the slide into barbarism. These initiatives laid the basis for the social and political systems of the Medieval era that followed.
Rome's economy appears to have initially been a plunder economy where the expansion of the empire was financed by plundering the nations it conquered. Until the advent of Adam Smith during the Enlightenment, most nations had very little idea how national wealth was created and sustained. So once the plunder dried up, Roman could not afford the kind of military that had created its empire in the first place. Rome was in deep deep trouble.
There was trouble with taxation. Taxes had become so high, that workers started moving from one province of the empire to another, and from one profession to another, in order to avoid tax collectors and taxes that heavily targeted specific occupations.
So one of the economic initiatives of the later empire was an edict that froze all workers into the provinces they were already in and the professions they were already in. And this later became hereditary. If your father was a farmer in France, that meant that you were restricted to being a farmer in France too.
This made tax collecting much simpler for the bureaucrats, but it would later lead to the birth of the serfs in the Medieval era: people who were by birth attached to a specific tract of land to do a specific job and who could not leave it without the permission of the person who owned the land (the infamous landlord.) They were little more than slaves. Little more than machines for working the land in an age that had no machines.
So now that you had these little packets of land with human machines on them to grow food and generate income, you had to have rough-hewn military types to protect them from the barbarians and give them government. This is where the titles of Roman military commanders begin to become the ranks of peerage and the terms of nobility in the later Medieval era.
For example, the title "emperor" originally came from the Roman military honorific "imperator," which meant "commander."
The word "prince" is from the the Latin word "princeps." In the old Roman republic, the princeps was the first citizen of the republic. He was the senator who spoke first in a meeting of the senate. In the transition to the empire, the title of princeps was taken over by the emperors, who found it useful to be the first to speak in the senate because it let the senators know which way the wind was blowing in regards to what he wanted them to do. So the latin term "princeps" came to mean "ruler." Hence, the medieval expression "a prince of the realm."
As the Roman military collapsed, the Roman legions became smaller detachments of soldiers lead by a "leader" (In latin, "dux"). The title "dux" became our word for "duke." (In Italian this is duce'. Hence Mussolini was "Il Duce," "the leader.')
These leaders had subordinate officers called "companions" (in latin, "comes.") "Comes" became "comte" in French and "Count" in English. A Count was someone who ran and protected a "county" for a "Duke" (who ran and protected the larger whole, a "duchy"). Counties and Duchies were basically tracts of land that had serfs on them to provide the income for the soldiers who protected them.
An English "viscount" was a vice-count. Counties that were on the borders of a barbarian tribe were called "marches." Hence the French title "marquis" and the English titles, "marquess" (male) and "marchioness (female). There are German towns with "mark" at the end of their names that thereby denote that they were once in a march of the old empire.
So, all those Europeans with these high sounding titles are in essence descendants of the rough-hewn military types who kept chaos at bay when the Roman empire fell.
No comments:
Post a Comment