Books
Jaques Heers. The Invention of the Middle Ages.
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MPH, MSc
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Jacques Heers (1924-2013) was a professor of history at the University of Paris X Nanterre and director of medieval studies at the Sorbonne. Heers wrote The Invention of the Middle Ages in 1992. In his work, Heers shows how historical concepts and periodizations are not natural realities, but rather linguistic labels created later by historians, if not ideologues, to produce interpretations that serve an ideological and propagandistic purpose rather than historical documentation.
Instead of documenting history, political concepts were produced which, with the very idea of the Middle Ages, conveyed the notion of a primitive state of man, as if he had only reached an intermediate stage in evolution. People born after this stage feel part of a higher order, belonging to the "enlightened age" that contrasts with the "dark ages" promoted by the new "modern" social engineers: princes, courtiers, capitalists, revolutionaries, etc. Diderot and d'Alembert disseminated this idea in the Encyclopédie, making it the central mythology necessary for the acceptance of the Hobbesian centralized state. The concept of the Middle Ages assumes that all countries were at the same stage in history, had the same type of economy and culture, and were all living in a constant state of decline.
There is also no objective date to mark the beginning of the Middle Ages. Cellarius published History of the Middle Ages in 1688, placing it until the fall of Constantinople. What is referred to as the "fall of Rome" is, in reality, a more gradual transformation whose beginning could be placed as early as the 1st century or as late as the 6th century, depending on whether the formal abdication of Romulus Augustulus, the process of general institutional decline, or the beginning of the barbarian invasions, among other criteria, is used as the criterion for "fall." On the other hand, many "barbarian" kingdoms did not renounce their Roman heritage and preserved inherited institutions, legal and social structures, creating more of a continuity under new leaders than a break with the past. This implies that it was a society that was largely more "Roman" than medieval.
Additionally, it should be remembered that the Roman Empire continued in the East. Byzantium was not an archaeological remnant, but a cultural, religious, military, and economic superpower that controlled extensive regions of Anatolia, the Balkans, Greece, Syria, Palestine, Egypt, North Africa, and at times much of Italy and southern Hispania. Emperor Justinian I in the sixth century had a policy of reconquering the Roman legacy lost in the West, recovering Italy (including Rome). The historiographical marginalization of Byzantium is not a coincidence, but an ideological decision. It was an empire in the middle of the Middle Ages, Christian and splendid, culturally rich, a commercial and military power, incompatible with the promoted vision of a "dark" Middle Ages. Renaissance historiography, encyclopedists, the Enlightenment, and modern state propaganda constructed a deliberate narrative void: between Rome and the Renaissance, "there were only 1,000 years of darkness." Pamphleteers have tried to make us believe that the sun went down. This cliché, absurd to anyone who stops for two seconds to think about what it is saying, continues to shape the consciousness of "modern" man to this day.
Rather than a "fall of Rome" that ushered in the period known as the Middle Ages, there was a long period of slow and heterogeneous transformation in Europe. Contrary to the myth of a backward economy, many areas enjoyed remarkable prosperity.
The antagonistic image caricatures lords and peasants as simple exploitative relationships, in which the "serf" was chained to the "lord's" land, performing forced labor in which he barely survived. This narrative assumes that only peasants existed on manorial lands, as if they owned nothing and gained no advantage from their work. However, analyses based on notarial records show a great complexity of social hierarchies, in which there were different degrees of responsibility, diverse roles and ranks, from supervisors, officers, managers, errand boys, guards, shepherds, provosts, second vassals, etc. Many peasants were free tenants or even owners of their land. To speak of a "peasant mass" as a uniform mass that lived the same miserable life chained to the land is a mythological image, stereotypical and dishonest to the social reality of the time. "Any historian who is somewhat familiar with accounting books, tax records, and private documents of various kinds will inevitably note an extraordinary social fluidity." It does not take much imagination to suppose that certain peasants prospered better than others and brought better crops to market, thereby progressing independently or within the manor, perhaps not so differently from what happens today in any company. Even if one tries to force an antagonism, vassals were generally committed to upholding the rights of their lord, and there is no reason to think that they did not want him to prosper, from which they themselves benefited to a greater or lesser extent.
The existence of peasants who owned their own land is almost taboo. Studies such as those by Robert Boutruche in 1947 showed that peasants worked outside the feudal system. Feudal estates, of course, were far from covering the entire territory; on the contrary, they left large areas of unowned land where anyone could settle. Much more taboo is the notarial existence of evidence documenting the sale of land by peasants who were supposed to be almost slaves. Notaries show modest peasants selling land freely and without any obligations. Allodial ownership, more or less modest, undoubtedly inherited from Roman dominium, remained widespread in southern France, Italy, Provence, Flanders, Languedoc, etc. The texts attest to considerable movements of land ownership, whether tenures or allodial, among the rural population: purchases, leases, secured loans, etc. Thus, there were families who became wealthy quickly, having good harvests, and enormous differences in acreage arose. We are told that the lord owned the land that the peasant exploited in exchange for the payment of a census and certain obligations. However, feudal tenure exceeded modern leases in a substantial number of rights. Today, a tenant cannot remain in a place for as long as he pleases without a rent increase, cannot bring in his relatives, cannot transfer that lease to his children for the same price as part of the contract, nor can he sell his right of occupancy to a third party or divide the land into several lots, among other things that were part of feudal law in the Middle Ages. Tenure was not only a lifelong right that only the peasant could break if he wanted to move elsewhere, but it was also hereditary, guaranteeing prosperity and stability for his family and descendants, if things developed prosperously.
People talk about vassalage as if working the land were an imposition, rather than part of a contract of rights and duties, in which the peasant sought land to work, settle, and live in security. Residence obligations were imposed in some cases, but not in all peasant conditions, and were part of the agreement, so that men in the countryside often accepted the adventure of settling down and living in a stable manner, establishing themselves freely where they saw the greatest opportunity for their families. There was greater fluidity of property than has been acknowledged, as well as notable hierarchies of wealth within the peasant world. In addition, there were marriages, inheritances, land clearances, etc. However, the relationship of vassalage is not a relationship between the peasant and the land, but a personal legal relationship, which involved a bond between individuals rather than a relationship with the state. Feudalism was not simply an economic system of land tenure, but rather a legal system based on mutual agreements. The vassal sometimes provided a service, often military, and in return received a reward (beneficium or fief). This fief commonly consisted of land, but could also include rents, administrative positions, titles, rights to tolls, mills, etc. Contrary to the image that has been portrayed, it was not a system of forced slavery on the land, but rather an agreement between parties and a way of life that many peasants sought because it offered them greater security, especially in times of greater instability, such as after the crisis of the Carolingian Empire, which led to an increase in Viking and Saracen invasions, etc.
The concept of nobility is very vague and has never been properly understood or criticized. The nobility did not enjoy a precise legal status, but was a heterogeneous and constantly changing concept, both due to the arrival of new families whose social advancement was perfectly accepted, and due to the decline of those unfortunate individuals who were unable to maintain their status due to the vicissitudes of life. On the other hand, it was not necessary to have any lordship or be of noble birth to have workers or power over a village. There were properties managed by bourgeois, notables, jurists, notaries, merchants, officials, artisans, etc. The term "lord" is also misleading. The social conditions of the lords were very diverse: they could range from a castle capable of offering refuge to vassals, to a simple, more modest fortified house around a village. Large landowners were often educated people with skills in generating sources of income and improving yields, promoting farming, etc. They hired officials, people capable of managing accounts, calculating labor, animal, and seed requirements, keeping records, etc. In short, these were lords and officials who had nothing to do with the feudal lord portrayed in caricature as an authoritarian and idle beneficiary who lived off his income without working. It was as if he did not participate in the management by making purchases, transporting seeds and tools, coordinating, managing, supervising, negotiating, as well as buying, selling, etc.
This feudal system did not intervene directly in the management or exploitation of the land or in the relations between owners and cultivators. "Feudal society" and "feudal economy" are two ambiguous and, in reality, invented concepts. An abstract view would tend to show a rural territory held by a single lord who, as the owner of the land, would also impose his right to justice and his banal rights. But this is a view that does not correspond to reality. Even in areas where we might find a systematically structured feudalism, we do not always find an exact territorial correspondence between the ownership of the lands of the territorial lordship and the ownership of the various rights, and many areas and villages were divided into different lordships. Sometimes around a castle, manor house, hotel, church; sometimes around several manor houses. In southern Europe, feudal rights encountered many obstacles and had to adapt to traditions and legacies. In northern Italy and the Germanic countries, they also evolved differently. In most of Europe, there were a very large number of village communities that were not under the power of any lord, with different landowners, including people from the towns themselves, abbots, etc. Far from being the backbone of so-called feudal societies, this system was only found in a relatively small geographical area.
With regard to the bourgeoisie, we could say that economically prosperous individuals have existed since the 1200s and continued to do so for centuries. Sometimes, part of the "people" could have prospered with a farm, a workshop, etc., and became "bourgeois" by working diligently, being skilled in trade, or simply having good fortune. At other times, some families benefited from the emigration of the nobility or made their fortune from the confiscation of the clergy's property or skilled individuals benefited from political changes. Small craftsmen, merchants, notaries, lawyers, money changers, bankers, etc., also owned land, vineyards, herds, and forests, which they often entrusted to wage earners or sharecroppers. They were as urban as they were rural.
Of course, there were miserable day laborers who wandered from place to place trying to find someone who would give them something to eat in exchange for their work, but that also exists today. There are also documented peasant revolts throughout the centuries, but most of them did not have an ideological class component, but arose from local conditions, discontent, famines, insecurity, grievances, etc. There were also forms of serfdom. However, multiple forms of economic or even legal subjugation existed more extensively before feudalism and continued to exist in the bourgeois cities of the Mediterranean until the 16th century, in the supposed "beacons of civilization." In many territories during the Middle Ages, it was residual, for example in northern Europe, although serfdom disappeared earlier in countries that were more exposed to monetary circulation, where it was easier to pay wage earners, than in countries more isolated from trade circuits. Therefore, the aim is to present a picture with serfdom as the central axis, based on what were simply residual structures.
One bias is that the archives of large estates were better preserved than those of small lords, and free peasants rarely produced archives of any kind. This is the most serious gap for Heers, which has prevented him from perceiving the existence of different modes of peasant property and labor relations. Without denying the existence of abuses, it is not honest to view farm work as an exploitative structure, as there was rather a condition of leasehold with a certain degree of autonomy, certain rights, and also obligations to the lord. And yet, this "mass of peasants," supposedly weak and hungry, has shaped the landscapes and villages of Europe for centuries and continues to do so today, without any help from the state, accomplishing the most spectacular undertaking in history.
Trade, buying and selling, and the provision of services existed, so there were also fees for services and rents, just as there are in today's economy. These have been called "taxes" and payments have been attributed to them that have nothing to do with the lordship or the Church. Others were charges increasingly demanded by the public authorities, falsely attributed to the lord or the Church. The manuals almost always mention the census that the tenant had to pay; however, this census, which was sometimes only symbolic or very small, is not a tax at all, but a rent. None of our contemporaries would think of calling the rent for land or a house a "tax." It has been implied that the payment of the census on estates was a sign of servitude, as if this were not an economic fact that has continued and even increased with the modern state. "Such nonsense is found in Montesquieu, who writes with great certainty: 'to be a servant was equivalent to paying the census, to be free was equivalent to not paying it.'"
In addition, territorial lordship is confused with banal lordship. Many "taxes" were banalities, not seigneurial charges derived from their relations with the peasants. Banalities were relations between the State (or the public authority) and its subjects. Some of these banalities were, in reality, monopolies that obliged all inhabitants of the territory, whether peasants or not, to use the seigneurial mill, oven, etc., for which a payment was demanded, which was also paid by the lords, abbeys, etc. Similar monopolies and restrictions existed in bourgeois areas and continued to exist outside the seigneurial and feudal framework. However, we are outraged by the seigneurial ban while meekly accepting all the monopolies of the state, which are rarely questioned. Other rights of the ban taxed rights of way, roads, passage over a bridge, etc., which were basically tolls. The banal toll was justified by the need to maintain roads, bridges, the safety of roads, waterways and mountains, buildings, surveillance, etc. Sometimes a few coins were handed over, but a low-priced animal could also suffice, or even a simple gesture or acknowledgment, such as humbly greeting the bishop.
The tithe was not even applied to all crops; it was mainly applied to wheat, and in many cases did not reach 10%, let alone that. It should be added that the Church took on a significant part of public assistance: hospitals, asylums, almshouses, hospices, taking care of abandoned children, etc. Much of the teaching was also provided in the parishes. Heers compares the 5-10% paid then with what is paid now. On the other hand, feudal records have a bias towards showing amounts due, but not amounts actually paid. It was a time when refusals to pay were very common and delays were a daily occurrence, so establishing charges solely on the basis of the tax base or census lists does not correspond to reality. Few accounting records of the actual collections have survived, but in reality they could have been as much as a third of what was supposedly collected. Attempting to establish administrative systematicity was incompatible with social reality. As a result, things were negotiated or paid for in other ways, reductions were agreed upon, etc. In contrast, modernity is a simple structural fiscal steamroller under which the abuses denounced in the Middle Ages are legalized, multiplied, normalized, and even disguised with narratives of moral desirability.
The royal tax appeared later, for example in France in 1357. Until then, not all landowners could collect taxes. The modern state, once again, has done nothing more than multiply tolls and payments of all kinds, with veritable armies of agents and collectors. What was the progress of the modern king? By centralizing the state, a body of officials regularly collected royal taxes, multiplying payments and taxes everywhere through a more systematic administration, perfectly accepted by everyone thanks to the discourse of pamphleteers. All these collectors, who had no contact with the population, were much more ruthless towards them, with means of repression that a rural fiefdom could never have imagined. Systematized and standardized everywhere, and perhaps because of this, they seem less striking to us psychologically than the particular taxes of the Middle Ages, laden with legend and narrative force. However, the establishment of a central authority has created nothing but increasingly heavy burdens. This is a historical reality. People talk about medieval taxes and tithes as if they had ceased to exist with the destruction of feudalism.
In the Middle Ages, there was no contempt for the ancient heritage, as has been insistently claimed. Charlemagne had sculpted marble transported from Byzantine churches, inspired by the Mediterranean world of Rome. In addition to the obvious fact that medieval Romanesque art in Italy, Spain, and Provence was directly inspired by Roman antiquity. The exploits of Alexander the Great are present in dozens of works throughout Europe, in epic poems of thousands of verses. Leo the Deacon translated Greek stories and the legend of Troy into Latin, and these stories were passed down in the form of character plays at street festivals.
The so-called "Renaissance" was not a social or cultural awareness of the time either. Roman monuments and their ruins were completely ignored, if not sold as mere quarries for stone. The Roman Forum was then nothing more than a huge quarry for exploitation, and the temples were warehouses. Theaters, baths, amphitheaters... were destroyed to build new buildings. The authors of treatises on architecture and urban planning presented city designs that were not at all inspired by the Roman heritage or classical forms. In Rome, too many beautiful monuments were destroyed; marble was pulverized to obtain lime, and no ruins were rebuilt. This has often been attributed to Christianity, but this is uncertain. In fact, the protection of Roman ruins did not come from humanists, but from the Church: municipal statutes, papal bulls, and even lamentations such as that of Eugene IV are evidence of a real concern about destruction. Raphael himself, in 1518, wrote to Pope Leo X to complain. In the twelve years he had spent in Rome, he had seen the temple of Ceres in the forum, the triumphal gate of the Baths of Diocletian, and a large part of the forum of Nerva demolished. Petrarch accused them and launched harsh invectives against them: "O Rome, your people tear beautiful marble from venerable walls to make vile lime!" There was no renaissance, but rather a systematic contempt that contrasted with the self-aggrandizement that had begun in aristocratic circles. Pope Eugene IV attempted a topographical restoration of the ancient city by drawing up an inventory of notable monuments and calling for respect for the ruins. Magistrates proclaimed statutes prohibiting damage to ancient monuments, and a hundred years later Pius II issued a bull to protect those monuments that were still in good condition.
Petrarch is traditionally considered the father of humanism and one of the first to use the notion of a break with a "dark age," denigrating the works of previous centuries in order to extol those of Roman antiquity. However, this judgment was not innocent; it sought to extol the figure of the prince over the city in a strategy against the Avignon papacy. Boccaccio, in his writings, interspersed praise for both Dante and Petrarch, recognizing their role in the evolution of the arts, and also extolled the painter Giotto as a model of aesthetic renewal. But this praise was not ideologically neutral: it was intertwined with political loyalties, such as his support for the Angevin dynasty that ruled Naples, revealing that culture served political interests. It was a way for artists to cozy up to the court and form an aristocracy. We must remember that only the voices of court professionals, who served a political agenda, have come down to us. The opinions of the public, of ordinary men of various professions and backgrounds, are not reflected in literary works. Only those who made money writing flattering texts that were useful as propaganda tools speak to us.
With this "Renaissance," a cultural aristocracy began, a proclaimed opposition between the 'enlightened' of the cities and the "ignorant citizens" who did not live in those urban and courtly environments. Humanists were self-proclaimed oracles of good taste. No historian can ignore that this same artistic interest, associated with the Renaissance, existed long before. Lords, princes, bishops, and councils prided themselves on employing artists, collecting all kinds of books and scholarly works, and having a court of poets, writers, and intellectuals who compiled ancient texts and brought them up to date. However, in the Middle Ages, popular cultures were not despised. On the contrary, things were done around popular festivities. And yet, with this renaissance, the idea of art as something to be separated from the common people began to take hold, and an artistic aristocracy was consolidated. Gothic art, so harshly attacked, would be elevated in England, widely used in the architecture and decoration of stately homes, in the restoration of castles, and in many urban elements, also encouraged by its own nationalism. Spanish painting was long ignored by the European cultural elites, until it began to be rediscovered and appreciated in the 19th century, in the context of a growing interest in realistic and dramatic pictorial styles. Spanish painters, still almost unknown at the beginning of the 19th century, such as Murillo, Velázquez, Zurbarán, etc., began to be highly valued in world culture.
The Renaissance did not restore the classical world in material or spiritual terms, but used it for self-aggrandizement and as part of political games. Literature would also be a suitable vehicle. Authors such as Dumas produced swashbuckling novels that perfectly matched the cliché: the perverse, lustful, greedy nobleman, thirsty for blood and revenge; the poor but brave and honest young man, champion of virtues and just causes; the sensible and faithful young woman.
The view that attempts were made to destroy books is even more dishonest. In the Middle Ages, Greek, Latin, Arabic, and Hebrew texts were copied, studied, and commented on. There was no rupture, but rather intellectual continuity. Ptolemy was read and reread, published, and commented on. Many translations from Arabic into Latin (Avicenna, Averroes, Alhazen...) were made in Toledo, with ecclesiastical support and the collaboration of Jews, Muslims, and Christians. Boethius, already in the 6th century, translated Aristotle and transmitted ancient logic to the Middle Ages. Thomas Aquinas, Albertus Magnus, John Duns Scotus, and other medieval theologians attempted to synthesize faith and natural philosophy. They never opposed knowledge, but sought to reconcile it, avoiding a break with the transcendent world. Isidore of Seville wrote one of the greatest encyclopedias in history: his Etymologies were not a simple taxonomy of definitions like the modern encyclopedia, but a true compendium of the knowledge of the greatest works of humanity. It was the most widely read text of its time. It is true that many of these texts arrived via Byzantium, although much earlier, from the 12th century onwards. Burgundio, born in Pisa in 1110, offered Pisa the famous manuscript of the Pandects, by Roman jurists, on which commercial contracts and arbitration awards had been based for several generations. This manuscript was considered the most valuable in the world after the Bible, until 200 years later when the Medici family seized it and placed it in their library. The men of the "Renaissance" were content to appropriate, to steal, what the merchants of the Middle Ages had collected.
Contrary to the idea of a retrograde scholasticism, which attempts to portray teaching as limited to the repetition of a series of dogmatic texts, a wide variety of documentation obtained from municipal accounting archives, judicial archives, tax records, etc., amply attests to the existence of professional school teachers, common in different regions. Many of them were lay people, with degrees in arts and law, paid professionals who taught children to read and write, arithmetic, etc. Notarial and tax documents prove that literacy rates in medieval cities were higher than has been claimed, particularly among the urban middle classes.
Another myth is that men of science were persecuted in the Middle Ages. Just look at the myth of Galileo's persecution by the Church, constantly repeated in scientific circles. Heers gives the example of the myth of Columbus, supposedly driven by "science" and "progress," as opposed to "backward" Spaniards who believed that the Earth was flat and who, trapped in superstition, did not know how to calculate. However, the reality is quite the opposite: Columbus was wrong in his calculations of the distance between Portugal and Japan, and the Spanish corrected him. "The men of Salamanca were true scholars," says Heers. There was no episode of obscurantism, intellectual clumsiness, or intolerance, but rather the Spanish realized that his project was unfeasible. The truth of this story is that the scientific calculations were better made by the scholars of that backward Spanish Church, which had already founded dozens of astronomical observatories around the world. It should also be remembered that figures such as Copernicus, Gregor Mendel, and Roger Bacon were members of the Church.
The development of hospitals throughout Europe was also a result of the Middle Ages. It was the Church that decreed that wherever there was a cathedral, a hospital must also be built. For Heers, in the judgments that have been made about the Church, there is no attempt to be honest, to discuss the light and shade, or to try to understand its position. Mockery and many falsehoods have simply been spread in the supposed name of enlightenment and reason.
"Religious struggles" have been another rich source of mythology. Political, territorial, and economic disputes in which kings, princes, aristocrats, and republics fought to control territories, increase their power, weaken their enemies, or maintain alliances were labeled "religious wars." However, to a large extent, religious differences were a pretext for what was purely geopolitical strategy or economic interest. Although Heers does not mention it, the example of Catholic France allying itself with German Protestants to curb Spanish Catholic domination is enough to see how much "religion" there was in these "religious wars." Many of these wars, incidentally, do not belong to the "Middle Ages" but to the "Renaissance." There is little mention of the constant massacres and power struggles in these prosperous Italian cities. Bishops and religious leaders tried to reconcile families and imposed solemn ceremonies of forgiveness, but the quarrels immediately flared up again.
What can be said about the Salem witches and the bonfires of Geneva in Calvin's time, in the middle of the Renaissance, attributed to the Middle Ages? Gustave Hernisson has perfectly demonstrated that the criminal madness of witch hunts is an eminently modern phenomenon. Witch hunts have even been attributed to the Catholic Church, when it was the local civil courts that were responsible for most of those persecutions. The Spanish and Roman Inquisitions, on the other hand, acted with greater skepticism, reducing panic and even protecting the accused in many cases. In fact, there were very few witch trials in Spain over the centuries, partly because the inquisitors were trained jurists, skeptical of this type of social contagion and more focused on other concerns.
Another widely disseminated false legend is that of the "derecho de pernada" (also called ius primae noctis or droit du seigneur), according to which a feudal lord could sleep with a serf's wife on her wedding night before him. Today, it is widely considered to be another false legend reproduced and exaggerated by certain writers, particularly enlightened propagandists and later by less rigorous historians. It has even been said that the lord had the right to disembowel peasants to warm his feet. Voltaire, Diderot, Rousseau, and other enlightened thinkers spread this kind of gossip as part of their "rational and enlightened" critique of "feudal barbarism."
In line with Hermann Heimpel's thesis, modernity was not born with any freedom, but with an increase in centralized power. The bourgeoisie was not the original agent of change, but rather political power struggles. The power games of the princes described by Machiavelli were the driving force of modernity. To centralize power and control all regions, kings needed to reduce the autonomy of lords and the feudal system, so from the 13th-14th centuries onwards, they expanded more centralized state structures around a royal administration, centralized taxation, written law, a central army, imposing royal courts on local ones, etc. The consequence was that feudalism gradually lost strength, being replaced by absolute monarchies and, later, by the centralized state. The king granted the lords privileges and representation in the courts in exchange for their adherence to the centralization of the kingdom-state. Machiavelli himself clearly explained how the medieval political order was incompatible with the concentration of power, which first required a strong and centralized state. It is in this process of centralization that we find the beginnings of the modern authoritarian state and the narratives created by those who benefited from the concentration of power, promoted as "intellectuals" or "artists." Only the ideology of centralizing power over society should be viewed favorably.
Modern politics is largely based on creating antagonisms based on so-called social groups, which consists of defining two categories, usually entirely invented. Opponents and supporters of the republican ideal were not really different at all. Everyone condemned feudalism, everyone defended the concentration of power that would give way to the modern authoritarian state. The first enemy of feudalism was the king and his advisors. In order to gain central power, they had to get rid of lords, nobles, abbots, etc. They needed to suppress particularities and private rights in order to turn the entire population into direct subjects of the king. The compulsory suppression of feudal rights and corvée labor, expropriations and confiscations from the Church, etc. were undertaken. All ties, intermediaries, and communities managed around a nobleman or monastery had to be eliminated so that everyone would be "equal" before the king. This is still the same formula of domination used by the modern authoritarian state, presented as a social benefit of "equal treatment" by a central authority.
The other enemy of feudalism was the revolutionaries and reformers of the Enlightenment, inspired by state officials concerned with efficiency, order, tax collection, and the administrative and technical rationality described by authors such as Ellul, Adorno, and Horkheimer. Who can deny the influence of moralists and vigilantes such as Voltaire, Rousseau, and Diderot, all of whom were coincidentally protected by princes? These masters of morality said nothing about morality that was not strictly confined to pamphlets against feudalism. They condemned the privileges of the past while saying not a word about the new privileged classes. They all spoke in synchronized fashion, with the same omissions, in a predictable manner. They attacked tithes and censuses, but not centralized tax burdens, which were greater than the tithes they so severely criticized. They did not criticize the urban banker, the speculative bourgeois, the corrupt administrator of the new regime, or the power-hungry opportunists who thrived around the new state. They were only concerned with feudalism, nothing outside of it. A very convenient moral concern. They spread gossip after gossip, legend after legend, in the name of "enlightenment." The reality is that it is questionable whether, with the fall of feudalism and in the name of freedom, more political privileges, more taxes, and a machinery of power over the majority of the population were not created. With the fall of feudalism, taxes, privileges, abuses... supposedly all that ceased to exist. That is what they led people to believe. Of course, the same ideologues and pamphleteers did not perceive themselves as privileged recipients of benefits of dubious productive contribution to society.
In the march toward prosperity and republican peace, with the virtue of the new man freed from prejudice and darkness, they devoted themselves to denouncing the misdeeds of nobles, lords, the evils of feudalism or the king... with a catalog of largely invented anecdotes. While massaging the "people," proclaiming them oppressed and full of civic virtues to be exploited, incessantly exposed to the humiliation and gratuitous cruelty of greedy lords, the intellectuals of the French Revolution did not propose a real redistribution of power, only a political reconfiguration into the hands of others. Who constituted this new cliché of "the people"? The lord's tenant, the teacher, the manager, the tavern keeper, the merchant, the baker, the sheriff, the hunter, the musician, the midwife, the weaver, the doctor...? The pamphleteers were the classists of the city, the cultural aristocracies at the service of the centralized apparatus. They are the ones who have suppressed the local customs of the people, annihilating them under an absolutist machinery over all society. They are the ones who have prevented the people from governing themselves, turning medieval municipalities into bourgeois administrative republics or, later, socialized machines.
Religious processes in the Middle Ages were full of nuances, reflections, and questions, and no effort has been made to understand them and analyze their own evolution within the Church. Everything expanded when, in France, England, and elsewhere, after the revolutions, a violent anti-religious movement arose, providing an excuse not only to attack clergy as individuals but also to confiscate everything they owned: land, monasteries, libraries, abbeys, hospitals, schools, works of art... the plundering was massive. Instead of violent appropriation, it was called justice. All these assets passed to the state, and "the state is the people," said the propagandists. This benefited the bourgeoisie and allies of power, new elites that were more powerful, authoritarian, violent, and extractive than their predecessors. The revolution merely reorganized the ruling classes; it did not eliminate power, reduce the tax burden, or improve community relations. In the years 1830-1860, there was never any talk of asset hoarders, speculators, traffickers of all kinds, opportunists who benefited from power struggles, state ideologues, the nouveau riche, buyers of national assets, army suppliers, or dishonest financiers who were part of that "people." The "good bourgeoisie" of the cities only showed their hatred for those castles and lands of nobles that they had not yet been able to confiscate or buy at a good price, taking advantage of political changes or confiscations from the clergy. Only the old forms of land ownership were persecuted, but not the new landowners who speculated with what had been confiscated from the nobles or the Church. The beneficiaries of the new political-economic order, authentic dynasties of opportunists and speculators, are precisely those who have long dictated history and school textbooks, molding minds to accept the modern authoritarian state. We remain heirs and accomplices to an ideological struggle that completely concealed reality in order to impose a narrative.
There are many superstitions, popular devotions, rites, myths, and legends throughout history. Most wars have nothing to do with religion; many have to do precisely with its abandonment, without anyone saying anything about it. We could add to Heers' criticism that no "conversion" has been as massive as those produced by secular universalism, proletarian socialism, or technocratic globalism, without being subject to the same criticism. To claim that human happiness comes with the simple advent of central institutions and political systems may well be the greatest myth of all. The trail of blood left by the cult of the state and the cult of the party, which came with modernity, bears no comparison. The ideologues of socialized centralization and industrial mercantilism have been infinitely more murderous, calculating, and power-hungry than any medieval battle or Christian crusade.
Capitalists and revolutionaries have generally agreed to draw a line between the medieval economy, described in its most favorable light as a world of craftsmanship, if not outright misery. No serious historian today would argue that the rural economy was constantly on the brink of disaster and that society was steeped in anguish, misfortune, and barbarism. Population growth alone contradicts the narrative of constant deprivation. There was a balance, perhaps unequal but real, even with the presence of severe epidemics, which were generally able to quickly replenish population gaps. In addition, these were years of expansion towards the Atlantic Islands, from the Canaries to the Antilles, and then to Brazil and New Spain. These explorations were carried out for more than 500 years under the control of the lordship.
On the other hand, the existence of a clear dividing line between the "medieval" and the 'modern' is questionable. Various cities with high levels of commercial activity and trade in Italy, Germany, and England, among others, did not wait for the arrival of the "Renaissance" to innovate in business and financial activity and to develop prosperous commercial activity and multiple forms of business innovation. The market economy and trade had spread widely in the West long before the 15th century. This boom in trade, commerce, and navigation cannot be placed simply at the cut-off point called the "Renaissance." It has sometimes been called pre-capitalism, which originated in the Middle Ages. The most widespread theory is that the traditional feudal system, based on rents in kind (grain, labor, etc.), was confronted with an increasingly money-oriented economy. The growth of cities and trade shifted the center of economic power from land, the exchange of rents, and rights to the urban bourgeoisie. The nobility saw war as a solution to their loss of relevance and wealth. However, this linear economic process and the supposed decline of the nobility have been questioned. On the one hand, trade also benefited producers, particularly those living in areas of greater commercial activity. Some nobles adapted, others prospered, and others fell into disgrace, in an era of great prosperity or, at least, equilibrium, despite the existence of struggles, some poor harvests, and demographic problems.
Following Max Weber, it has been claimed that merchants increasingly questioned the Church for placing obstacles in the way of the circulation of money and promoted the Protestant Reformation. This would create a "new Church" against Rome, for which money and accumulation were not contrary to God, and would promote "freedom of thought" against "paralyzing obscurantism." However, statements and actions in society are not exactly the same. Although the Church condemned usury, there is no evidence of effective repression by the Church, beyond a small number of trials and fines. Businessmen and men of the Church understood each other better than has been said. Both sides knew how to compromise, and there was generally prudence and good manners. Lenders were tolerated if they were reasonable, moderate in their demands, acted in the community's interest, or offset part of their profits with donations. Sometimes a loan was disguised as a partnership agreement, in which one party provided the money and the other did the work, with the profits being shared. In practice, there was understanding and a climate of prudence on both sides.
The Church itself had qualified its position on certain points and recognized that the benefits of money became lawful when the service offered was important to the community or there was a significant risk in the enterprise undertaken. Dominicans and Franciscans were, in fact, closely linked to the business world and provided extensive theoretical justifications for a large number of financial practices, linking them to the common good. In reality, all kinds of commercial practices were authorized. In Italy, there were commenda, societas, colleganza, family-based Florentine companies, Genoese companies a carati, some before a notary, with fines for late payment. Maritime risk loans were made to help build ships and serve as insurance. Interest rates of between 7 and 12% have been documented, a perfectly reasonable level.
The usurer was allowed to make amends for his mistakes in order to escape the secular arm or the Church, mainly through donations to the poor. Also, in the twilight of their lives, they often bequeathed a portion to hospitals or financed certain social projects. There is evidence of this, for example, the hospital founded in Prato by a moneylender named Francesco Di Marco Dattini, or the Iávaco grammar school financed by the Milanese moneylender Tomás Ograsi, or in Padua the Scrovegni Chapel, etc. In short, medieval trade escapes the caricatured image and, even more so, the black legend of miserabilism. Lending at interest was practiced everywhere, simply with a certain degree of caution on the part of all.
Much has been said about Jewish moneylenders, but this needs to be put into context. Many bourgeois families used the Israelites so as not to appear to be usurers themselves, and much Christian capital was in Jewish hands. Many social recriminations in bad times ended with the expulsion of Jews or Lombards. The people supported their being singled out as scapegoats because this allowed them to delay or cancel their debts, and the rulers had an easy formula for pointing the finger at external culprits and appeasing the furious masses with the expulsion of a minority. Jews often found refuge with bishops and abbots behind the walls of convents. It was Rome and the Pope who took in the Jews expelled from Spain by the edicts of the Catholic Monarchs. It was not primarily a religious issue-other groups such as the Lombards suffered a similar fate-but rather one of political and financial opportunism. Lenders were often nobles, townspeople, or even members of the Church. However, a large number of these loans were also made within families, out of friendship, and free of charge.
While the Hundred Years' War certainly caused difficulties in France, other countries became very wealthy during the same period, such as England, which was nourished by the fruits of its conquests. There was no decline in England, nor in the cities of southern Germany, which were covered in gold, nor in Italy. The modern economy simply wanted to give free rein to what we might call the exploitation of labor by capital, without any moral or social restraint, until we arrived at a society dominated by consumerism and machines, as Ellul already explained.
Furthermore, it is legitimate to ask whether peasants did not, in fact, enjoy greater freedom and more tax advantages by living in the countryside. It is said that cities were free in contrast to the exploited peasantry. However, it is uncertain whether economic, financial, and administrative freedoms were consolidated earlier in cities than in village communities. We know that in Italy, where there were many cities that appear to us as perfect examples of free, prosperous, and advanced mercantile republics, communal statutes had been codified earlier in many villages, where there was real autonomy with market and justice rights. Many villages were, in fact, infinitely more democratic than the Italian republics or our current administrative machinery, however much we may wish to call them "democracies." Peasants were not behind the commercial cities in terms of organizing themselves, enacting regulations, appointing officials, or getting their lord to recognize certain individual or collective freedoms. For example, the charter of Lorris, granted by Louis VII in 1155, was adopted by 83 communes. Or the charter of Beaumont in Aragon, dated 1182, which we find in hundreds of villages in Champagne and Burgundy, or Prisches in Hainaut... How many inhabitants did Lorris and the surrounding villages have? They were not centers of production or distribution. There were no bourgeoisie, only peasants and craftsmen working in forges, mills, and ovens. At most, there was a market for crops and livestock, seeds, agricultural tools, pottery, cloth... There is no shortage of evidence that livestock-farming and forest villages obtained charters of freedom and even municipal charters very early on, benefiting from true individual and collective freedom. And these probably simply recorded rights that existed previously, dating back even further.
Many of the large municipalities that led the "freedom" movement found that their magistrates did not reduce the fighting, but rather increased it, eventually asking the prince to restore all his power. In the cities, there was, of course, patronage, mass mobilization, and demagoguery, but no democratic consensus. Several communes in the Île-de-France and Picardy were abolished of their own accord around 1300: Seine (1318), Compiègne (1319), Melun (1320), Saint-Lys, Soissons, Provins, etc. Many of them were consulted. In Provins, for example, 2,701 people participated, of whom 350 were women. 2,545 voted for the return of the king and only 156 against. It is questionable whether there were more urban assemblies or, precisely, more rural assemblies. And it is questionable whether many of these rural villages were not, in fact, more democratic than these modern cities. In many of these "backward" rural areas, more decisions were made through popular consultation than in what we call "democracy" even today. There were strictly peasant institutions that were united in the face of taxation, resolved disputes, had representatives with decision-making powers, and existed before the city. There was also a role for parish churches. Peace, often imposed by the bishop, offered an inviolable refuge around the church, at least since 1100. The guilds promulgated rural management regulations based on experience and tradition, lent money, tools, seeds, work animals, etc. These guilds behaved like true municipalities.
We have been taught that cities had fortunately freed themselves from the oppression of their lord, usually the count or bishop, thanks to popular, or at least bourgeois, revolts that had achieved great advantages, and that from then on freedom prevailed, leaving behind the barbarism of feudalism. However, this is false: the charters were not obtained after a revolt, but were the result of deals or purchases. Political upheavals and riots were rarely driven by the bourgeoisie, as we have been told. In many cases, the bourgeoisie limited themselves to supporting some of the adversaries against others for their own benefit, supporting the count, the bishops, the revolts, and everything else or the opposite, as long as it was profitable for them. The "popular" is another empty label, which included neighbors, guilds, merchants, bourgeois, etc., with their own internal disagreements, and who simply took advantage of situations for their own particular benefit. The municipality was not a unified popular revolt, but simply the result of social disputes that have existed throughout human history. In Pisa, for example, the party known as "del Pópolo" arose from quarrels between wealthy noble families, who were well endowed with fiefdoms in the mountains. In Genoa, they also took the initiative and leadership of the Popular Party to oppose other nobles like themselves. Nothing changed after the Popolari came to power. Behind all the "people's" parties, there was nothing but power struggles between classes of large families, nobles, royal advisors, and, ultimately, various aspirants to power. There was no single movement called "the people," not even "the bourgeoisie," nor was it a general contagion, nor did it transform political customs and social structures throughout Europe. The consequences were different, for example, in northern or central Italy, but not in many other regions. Venice, Genoa, Florence, the Papal States, Rome... In some cities, such as Flanders, enriched by their cloth industries, they managed to obtain self-government from the count. The supposed freedoms of the cities are more questionable than has been suggested. For example, in Milan, a peasant who settled in the city did not have full citizenship rights until he had lived there for 30 years. And if his relatives continued to work on the land, he could never become a citizen.
The merchant city lived day after day with an obsession with treason and conspiracy, with suspicion, denunciation, imprisonment, and execution of enemies of the people and the party. Sometimes in a disguised form, through intermediaries who were loyal and strictly dependent, such as the Medici, the "modern" government did nothing but reinforce the powers that be. Meanwhile, people talked about the history of the Florentine people or the history of the Venetians to extol the "modern" forms of government. Not to mention Machiavelli's Florentine Histories. As soon as it freed itself from royal or princely control, the city spent most of its days in internal wars. The merchant cities of Italy, presented as examples of urban peace and sophistication, invaded the surrounding regions in order to further increase their dominion. They threw garbage and dead animals over the walls to infest and cause epidemics. At the end of the summer, these bands of looters, male citizens of the municipality, returned home with their booty, prisoners (mainly women and children, since the men were massacred), animals, wheat, wine, etc. Beheadings were carried out in the public square, images of horror that are not often shown in books.
From the 12th century onwards, the bourgeois cities of Italy were covered with private fortresses. This was an essential feature of the urban landscape, under which the phenomenon of civil wars was long hidden. In Florence alone, there were more than 100 stately towers belonging to the great merchant families; in Bologna, more than 200. This is not the image of a peaceful city, but of a city in the midst of civil war. Only the popes managed to gradually conquer all these fortress cities.
Culture is above all a vehicle for propaganda, depending on whether one wishes to emphasize a social spirit oriented towards the classical, the realistic, or the disruptive, the avant-garde, etc. It is pure mass psychology that political ideologues began to understand perfectly for their use in power games. Hence the proliferation of an elite of "artists" and "intellectuals," always close to power. Every art gallery, more recently every film, every song broadcast by the mass media, what appears to be an innocent "interview" on the radio, is carrying out psychological and political orientation work on the population's thinking, and is therefore doing something very different from what everyone believes. The system works on people's brains 365 days a year, everywhere. No artist benefits from the system's media unless they occasionally support certain things in public, or their work conveys certain ideas that steer the minds of the masses in a certain direction. It is clear that propaganda has become much more systemic than in previous centuries.
The fiscal function is inherent in all types of government and has existed in medieval times, in the West, in the East, in commercial cities, etc. However, everywhere it has been more profound than that of the feudal lords, and yet people have wanted to talk only about the taxes of feudalism. Few novels or films have dealt with the systematic collection of taxes and the civil servants of the modern state. In the days of "feudal barbarism," taxes were neither more numerous nor higher than they had been previously, nor than they have been since. Certainly, in order to create the industrial world, it was necessary to eliminate human relationships and put the production of objects at the forefront. This process culminates in our current technocracy, with human beings subjugated by surveillance and control technologies in an authoritarian world, which will lead to a world of robots, and whatever else God wills. But let no one claim that this world is enlightenment. And this, far from being reactionary, is a critique of the Frankfurt School, which reached Foucault, Marcuse, Baudrillard... until it arrived at scientific philosophy with Nick Bostrom, etc.
History has undoubtedly been more organic, symbiotic, and diverse among the actors than the concepts and taxonomies sold by the pamphleteers of the state. Contrary to the cinematic vision of "masters and servants," most of life was spent in villages, manors, and cities that involved many professions: farmer, blacksmith, baker, cook, brewer, butcher, fishmonger, milkman, sharecropper, winegrower, gardener, oil maker, shepherd, cowherd, stableman, woodcutter, resin and plant collector, beekeeper, hunter, gamekeeper, craftsman, blacksmith, carpenter, stonemason, potter, weaver, dyer, shoemaker, tailor, glazier, smelter, forger, shipbuilder, basket maker, sailor, cabin boy, merchant, peddler, tavern keeper, innkeeper, bill collector, money changer, notary, scribe, tax collector, boatman, apothecary, bookseller, copyist, butler, bailiff, foreman, provost, messenger, errand boy, priest, clergyman, monk, abbot, schoolmaster, doctor, knight, soldier, armorer, watchman, spinner, weaver, laundress, midwife, herbalist, wet nurse, cook, servant, matron, painter, illuminator, sculptor, minstrel, troubadour, jester, mime, puppeteer, musician, poet... The so-called "Middle Ages" was a period that was far from dark, but rather full of color and rich social activity.
Other labels have been parallel in the development of the mythology of modern politics, such as the supposed "social contract," another imaginary invention of pamphleteers that alludes to a contract that no one has seen, no one has read, and no one has signed. And therefore it cannot be a contract, it has no consent whatsoever, it cannot be resolved, nor can it have any legal validity as such, and its arbiter is the very State that imposes it coercively. This is what has been defended by so-called "intellectuals," left-wing reformers posing as capitalists, statesmen, industrial oligarchs, ideologues scattered throughout schools and institutes, and opportunists of all kinds who have benefited from the new distribution of power.
Modern politics can be defined fundamentally by its operational effectiveness and its progressive abstraction. Precisely for this reason, it has greater capacity for imposition and abuse. There is no one to point to or remove from office if they are perceived to be abusing their power, a risk to which more personal politics in the fiefdom was exposed. Today, there is only an administrative machine against which no one can do anything, since there is no one directly responsible who can be singled out or removed. The evolution of institutions has not made them more democratic, but rather more resistant to the influence of individuals. Very much in line with Ellul, propaganda seeks to destroy social forms in order to produce forms of technical domination. The discourse of "inequalities" is based on the fallacy of making the simple act of doing something to everyone equally correct. Something is not fair simply because it is imposed on everyone equally. This fallacy is quite visible among those who maintain such schemes of justice reduced to mere form, to process, to arithmetic (uniform, progressive...). It perfectly illustrates a reproductive mindset, a mechanized psyche that is simply reproducing the mechanical scheme of administrative operations. Morality is reduced to the very process of the system, as Ellul clearly showed.
It is clear that at the political level, narratives are what matter, not facts. Human beings have a serious problem with language. Neurocognitively, labeling a complex story with a cognitive label such as "middle age" or "peasant masses" produces a heuristic, generating a labeling and clustering bias under which reality disappears. A few language labels overlap, creating a series of simple mental images that act as clichés. Thought is literally stunted, and reasoning is prevented. The Machiavellis of modern politics understood precisely that it is more effective to convince the masses with a few emphatic labels (anti-vaccine, denier) than to tell them the truth, make them think, or give them all kinds of complex explanations. The human brain is trapped in a series of clichés about the world and cannot escape its state of hypnosis. It is difficult to believe that so many people, even today, think that the system is reconfiguring itself to move in the opposite direction of increasing its efficiency and systematic control of the population. Millions of people continue to believe such nonsense.
"Is it necessary to compare these rates of between 5 and 10% with what we pay today for social security and the costs of our education systems?" Jacques Heers.
THE MIDDLE AGES AS A PROPAGANDISTIC CONCEPT
The Middle Ages are not a natural historical reality, but rather a cognitive category, a linguistic label, and a judgment created through narratives that were not developed by those who lived during those years, but were added later. An attempt is made to cut the past into "slices" to give a block image of the Middle Ages, as if people had lived the same life experience from the fall of the Roman Empire to the Modern Age, or from the countries of Northern Europe to the shores of the Mediterranean. Thus, through narratives, concepts such as the Middle Ages and the Renaissance have been accepted as natural facts rather than labels invented later by ideologues.Instead of documenting history, political concepts were produced which, with the very idea of the Middle Ages, conveyed the notion of a primitive state of man, as if he had only reached an intermediate stage in evolution. People born after this stage feel part of a higher order, belonging to the "enlightened age" that contrasts with the "dark ages" promoted by the new "modern" social engineers: princes, courtiers, capitalists, revolutionaries, etc. Diderot and d'Alembert disseminated this idea in the Encyclopédie, making it the central mythology necessary for the acceptance of the Hobbesian centralized state. The concept of the Middle Ages assumes that all countries were at the same stage in history, had the same type of economy and culture, and were all living in a constant state of decline.
There is also no objective date to mark the beginning of the Middle Ages. Cellarius published History of the Middle Ages in 1688, placing it until the fall of Constantinople. What is referred to as the "fall of Rome" is, in reality, a more gradual transformation whose beginning could be placed as early as the 1st century or as late as the 6th century, depending on whether the formal abdication of Romulus Augustulus, the process of general institutional decline, or the beginning of the barbarian invasions, among other criteria, is used as the criterion for "fall." On the other hand, many "barbarian" kingdoms did not renounce their Roman heritage and preserved inherited institutions, legal and social structures, creating more of a continuity under new leaders than a break with the past. This implies that it was a society that was largely more "Roman" than medieval.
Additionally, it should be remembered that the Roman Empire continued in the East. Byzantium was not an archaeological remnant, but a cultural, religious, military, and economic superpower that controlled extensive regions of Anatolia, the Balkans, Greece, Syria, Palestine, Egypt, North Africa, and at times much of Italy and southern Hispania. Emperor Justinian I in the sixth century had a policy of reconquering the Roman legacy lost in the West, recovering Italy (including Rome). The historiographical marginalization of Byzantium is not a coincidence, but an ideological decision. It was an empire in the middle of the Middle Ages, Christian and splendid, culturally rich, a commercial and military power, incompatible with the promoted vision of a "dark" Middle Ages. Renaissance historiography, encyclopedists, the Enlightenment, and modern state propaganda constructed a deliberate narrative void: between Rome and the Renaissance, "there were only 1,000 years of darkness." Pamphleteers have tried to make us believe that the sun went down. This cliché, absurd to anyone who stops for two seconds to think about what it is saying, continues to shape the consciousness of "modern" man to this day.
Rather than a "fall of Rome" that ushered in the period known as the Middle Ages, there was a long period of slow and heterogeneous transformation in Europe. Contrary to the myth of a backward economy, many areas enjoyed remarkable prosperity.
THE MYTH OF THE LORD AND THE VASSAL
Historians constantly confuse political structures and land exploitation regimes. Even today, people still make the mistake of talking about "feudal economy" or "feudal society." History books speak indiscriminately of "peasants," "serfs," "vassals," "subjects"... regardless of whether they were free tenants or even owners of small plots of land. Feudalism and lordship are, indisputably, of a different nature. Rural lordship is by no means a product of feudalism, but developed alongside it and continued long after it ended. There were various types of lordships that were not part of a feudal system and could be owned by cities, monasteries, bourgeoisie, etc. There was local control of the territory and rights over the peasants (jurisdiction, rent, corvée). A manor was a group of lands, partly exploited directly by the lord, but which could also be divided into holdings, farms, estates, sharecropping, etc., entrusted to various tenants.The antagonistic image caricatures lords and peasants as simple exploitative relationships, in which the "serf" was chained to the "lord's" land, performing forced labor in which he barely survived. This narrative assumes that only peasants existed on manorial lands, as if they owned nothing and gained no advantage from their work. However, analyses based on notarial records show a great complexity of social hierarchies, in which there were different degrees of responsibility, diverse roles and ranks, from supervisors, officers, managers, errand boys, guards, shepherds, provosts, second vassals, etc. Many peasants were free tenants or even owners of their land. To speak of a "peasant mass" as a uniform mass that lived the same miserable life chained to the land is a mythological image, stereotypical and dishonest to the social reality of the time. "Any historian who is somewhat familiar with accounting books, tax records, and private documents of various kinds will inevitably note an extraordinary social fluidity." It does not take much imagination to suppose that certain peasants prospered better than others and brought better crops to market, thereby progressing independently or within the manor, perhaps not so differently from what happens today in any company. Even if one tries to force an antagonism, vassals were generally committed to upholding the rights of their lord, and there is no reason to think that they did not want him to prosper, from which they themselves benefited to a greater or lesser extent.
The existence of peasants who owned their own land is almost taboo. Studies such as those by Robert Boutruche in 1947 showed that peasants worked outside the feudal system. Feudal estates, of course, were far from covering the entire territory; on the contrary, they left large areas of unowned land where anyone could settle. Much more taboo is the notarial existence of evidence documenting the sale of land by peasants who were supposed to be almost slaves. Notaries show modest peasants selling land freely and without any obligations. Allodial ownership, more or less modest, undoubtedly inherited from Roman dominium, remained widespread in southern France, Italy, Provence, Flanders, Languedoc, etc. The texts attest to considerable movements of land ownership, whether tenures or allodial, among the rural population: purchases, leases, secured loans, etc. Thus, there were families who became wealthy quickly, having good harvests, and enormous differences in acreage arose. We are told that the lord owned the land that the peasant exploited in exchange for the payment of a census and certain obligations. However, feudal tenure exceeded modern leases in a substantial number of rights. Today, a tenant cannot remain in a place for as long as he pleases without a rent increase, cannot bring in his relatives, cannot transfer that lease to his children for the same price as part of the contract, nor can he sell his right of occupancy to a third party or divide the land into several lots, among other things that were part of feudal law in the Middle Ages. Tenure was not only a lifelong right that only the peasant could break if he wanted to move elsewhere, but it was also hereditary, guaranteeing prosperity and stability for his family and descendants, if things developed prosperously.
People talk about vassalage as if working the land were an imposition, rather than part of a contract of rights and duties, in which the peasant sought land to work, settle, and live in security. Residence obligations were imposed in some cases, but not in all peasant conditions, and were part of the agreement, so that men in the countryside often accepted the adventure of settling down and living in a stable manner, establishing themselves freely where they saw the greatest opportunity for their families. There was greater fluidity of property than has been acknowledged, as well as notable hierarchies of wealth within the peasant world. In addition, there were marriages, inheritances, land clearances, etc. However, the relationship of vassalage is not a relationship between the peasant and the land, but a personal legal relationship, which involved a bond between individuals rather than a relationship with the state. Feudalism was not simply an economic system of land tenure, but rather a legal system based on mutual agreements. The vassal sometimes provided a service, often military, and in return received a reward (beneficium or fief). This fief commonly consisted of land, but could also include rents, administrative positions, titles, rights to tolls, mills, etc. Contrary to the image that has been portrayed, it was not a system of forced slavery on the land, but rather an agreement between parties and a way of life that many peasants sought because it offered them greater security, especially in times of greater instability, such as after the crisis of the Carolingian Empire, which led to an increase in Viking and Saracen invasions, etc.
The concept of nobility is very vague and has never been properly understood or criticized. The nobility did not enjoy a precise legal status, but was a heterogeneous and constantly changing concept, both due to the arrival of new families whose social advancement was perfectly accepted, and due to the decline of those unfortunate individuals who were unable to maintain their status due to the vicissitudes of life. On the other hand, it was not necessary to have any lordship or be of noble birth to have workers or power over a village. There were properties managed by bourgeois, notables, jurists, notaries, merchants, officials, artisans, etc. The term "lord" is also misleading. The social conditions of the lords were very diverse: they could range from a castle capable of offering refuge to vassals, to a simple, more modest fortified house around a village. Large landowners were often educated people with skills in generating sources of income and improving yields, promoting farming, etc. They hired officials, people capable of managing accounts, calculating labor, animal, and seed requirements, keeping records, etc. In short, these were lords and officials who had nothing to do with the feudal lord portrayed in caricature as an authoritarian and idle beneficiary who lived off his income without working. It was as if he did not participate in the management by making purchases, transporting seeds and tools, coordinating, managing, supervising, negotiating, as well as buying, selling, etc.
This feudal system did not intervene directly in the management or exploitation of the land or in the relations between owners and cultivators. "Feudal society" and "feudal economy" are two ambiguous and, in reality, invented concepts. An abstract view would tend to show a rural territory held by a single lord who, as the owner of the land, would also impose his right to justice and his banal rights. But this is a view that does not correspond to reality. Even in areas where we might find a systematically structured feudalism, we do not always find an exact territorial correspondence between the ownership of the lands of the territorial lordship and the ownership of the various rights, and many areas and villages were divided into different lordships. Sometimes around a castle, manor house, hotel, church; sometimes around several manor houses. In southern Europe, feudal rights encountered many obstacles and had to adapt to traditions and legacies. In northern Italy and the Germanic countries, they also evolved differently. In most of Europe, there were a very large number of village communities that were not under the power of any lord, with different landowners, including people from the towns themselves, abbots, etc. Far from being the backbone of so-called feudal societies, this system was only found in a relatively small geographical area.
With regard to the bourgeoisie, we could say that economically prosperous individuals have existed since the 1200s and continued to do so for centuries. Sometimes, part of the "people" could have prospered with a farm, a workshop, etc., and became "bourgeois" by working diligently, being skilled in trade, or simply having good fortune. At other times, some families benefited from the emigration of the nobility or made their fortune from the confiscation of the clergy's property or skilled individuals benefited from political changes. Small craftsmen, merchants, notaries, lawyers, money changers, bankers, etc., also owned land, vineyards, herds, and forests, which they often entrusted to wage earners or sharecroppers. They were as urban as they were rural.
Of course, there were miserable day laborers who wandered from place to place trying to find someone who would give them something to eat in exchange for their work, but that also exists today. There are also documented peasant revolts throughout the centuries, but most of them did not have an ideological class component, but arose from local conditions, discontent, famines, insecurity, grievances, etc. There were also forms of serfdom. However, multiple forms of economic or even legal subjugation existed more extensively before feudalism and continued to exist in the bourgeois cities of the Mediterranean until the 16th century, in the supposed "beacons of civilization." In many territories during the Middle Ages, it was residual, for example in northern Europe, although serfdom disappeared earlier in countries that were more exposed to monetary circulation, where it was easier to pay wage earners, than in countries more isolated from trade circuits. Therefore, the aim is to present a picture with serfdom as the central axis, based on what were simply residual structures.
One bias is that the archives of large estates were better preserved than those of small lords, and free peasants rarely produced archives of any kind. This is the most serious gap for Heers, which has prevented him from perceiving the existence of different modes of peasant property and labor relations. Without denying the existence of abuses, it is not honest to view farm work as an exploitative structure, as there was rather a condition of leasehold with a certain degree of autonomy, certain rights, and also obligations to the lord. And yet, this "mass of peasants," supposedly weak and hungry, has shaped the landscapes and villages of Europe for centuries and continues to do so today, without any help from the state, accomplishing the most spectacular undertaking in history.
THE MYTH OF UNBEARABLE TAXES
Few aspects reveal the cynicism and hypocrisy of modern narratives as much as the image of the "unbearable taxes" that medieval peasants supposedly endured. In many accounts, these taxes were the source of peasant revolts against the lords who suffocated them with debt, under the image of a slave peasant who starved or barely survived.Trade, buying and selling, and the provision of services existed, so there were also fees for services and rents, just as there are in today's economy. These have been called "taxes" and payments have been attributed to them that have nothing to do with the lordship or the Church. Others were charges increasingly demanded by the public authorities, falsely attributed to the lord or the Church. The manuals almost always mention the census that the tenant had to pay; however, this census, which was sometimes only symbolic or very small, is not a tax at all, but a rent. None of our contemporaries would think of calling the rent for land or a house a "tax." It has been implied that the payment of the census on estates was a sign of servitude, as if this were not an economic fact that has continued and even increased with the modern state. "Such nonsense is found in Montesquieu, who writes with great certainty: 'to be a servant was equivalent to paying the census, to be free was equivalent to not paying it.'"
In addition, territorial lordship is confused with banal lordship. Many "taxes" were banalities, not seigneurial charges derived from their relations with the peasants. Banalities were relations between the State (or the public authority) and its subjects. Some of these banalities were, in reality, monopolies that obliged all inhabitants of the territory, whether peasants or not, to use the seigneurial mill, oven, etc., for which a payment was demanded, which was also paid by the lords, abbeys, etc. Similar monopolies and restrictions existed in bourgeois areas and continued to exist outside the seigneurial and feudal framework. However, we are outraged by the seigneurial ban while meekly accepting all the monopolies of the state, which are rarely questioned. Other rights of the ban taxed rights of way, roads, passage over a bridge, etc., which were basically tolls. The banal toll was justified by the need to maintain roads, bridges, the safety of roads, waterways and mountains, buildings, surveillance, etc. Sometimes a few coins were handed over, but a low-priced animal could also suffice, or even a simple gesture or acknowledgment, such as humbly greeting the bishop.
The tithe was not even applied to all crops; it was mainly applied to wheat, and in many cases did not reach 10%, let alone that. It should be added that the Church took on a significant part of public assistance: hospitals, asylums, almshouses, hospices, taking care of abandoned children, etc. Much of the teaching was also provided in the parishes. Heers compares the 5-10% paid then with what is paid now. On the other hand, feudal records have a bias towards showing amounts due, but not amounts actually paid. It was a time when refusals to pay were very common and delays were a daily occurrence, so establishing charges solely on the basis of the tax base or census lists does not correspond to reality. Few accounting records of the actual collections have survived, but in reality they could have been as much as a third of what was supposedly collected. Attempting to establish administrative systematicity was incompatible with social reality. As a result, things were negotiated or paid for in other ways, reductions were agreed upon, etc. In contrast, modernity is a simple structural fiscal steamroller under which the abuses denounced in the Middle Ages are legalized, multiplied, normalized, and even disguised with narratives of moral desirability.
The royal tax appeared later, for example in France in 1357. Until then, not all landowners could collect taxes. The modern state, once again, has done nothing more than multiply tolls and payments of all kinds, with veritable armies of agents and collectors. What was the progress of the modern king? By centralizing the state, a body of officials regularly collected royal taxes, multiplying payments and taxes everywhere through a more systematic administration, perfectly accepted by everyone thanks to the discourse of pamphleteers. All these collectors, who had no contact with the population, were much more ruthless towards them, with means of repression that a rural fiefdom could never have imagined. Systematized and standardized everywhere, and perhaps because of this, they seem less striking to us psychologically than the particular taxes of the Middle Ages, laden with legend and narrative force. However, the establishment of a central authority has created nothing but increasingly heavy burdens. This is a historical reality. People talk about medieval taxes and tithes as if they had ceased to exist with the destruction of feudalism.
THE MYTH OF THE RENAISSANCE
The term "Renaissance" suggests an allegory about an "awakening," first used in a novel by Balzac and later adopted in all countries. The vision of Renaissance art did not arise from a collective awareness at that time, but began as an undisguised nationalist movement, in which Neapolitans, Romans, Florentines, Tuscans, etc., proclaimed the superiority of their art over other artistic forms. Germans, French, Flemish, not to mention Spaniards, were considered inferior. The Greeks, to whom that classical virtue owed so much, were not even mentioned. Those who see a new era in Italian literature and the arts are faced with numerous problems. Many works considered "Renaissance" were produced in the period that academics themselves called the "Middle Ages." Pisano completed the pulpit of the Baptistery of Pisa in 1260, Giotto finished the scenes in the Upper Church of Assisi before 1300, Dante's Divine Comedy was written between 1307 and 1321, Petrarch's rhymes are from 1327, and Boccaccio's Decameron was written between 1350 and 1355. In addition, works from later centuries, corresponding to what academics call the Renaissance, are attributed to the Middle Ages. French art in the 15th century, for example, is called "medieval" under the derogatory name Gothic, which means "barbarian." However, so-called Renaissance art often ignores the Gothic roots of many works. Pisano himself was inspired by French Gothic sculpture. Many other works cannot be interpreted as an "awakening" in opposition to the medieval, as they were deeply rooted in medieval society and Christian thought. Artists did not see themselves as "Renaissance" or revolutionary, but as part of a historical chain of masters, without ever intending to break with them or with the spiritual, moral, and technical framework they had inherited. Not to mention that a significant number of them were, in fact, Christians.In the Middle Ages, there was no contempt for the ancient heritage, as has been insistently claimed. Charlemagne had sculpted marble transported from Byzantine churches, inspired by the Mediterranean world of Rome. In addition to the obvious fact that medieval Romanesque art in Italy, Spain, and Provence was directly inspired by Roman antiquity. The exploits of Alexander the Great are present in dozens of works throughout Europe, in epic poems of thousands of verses. Leo the Deacon translated Greek stories and the legend of Troy into Latin, and these stories were passed down in the form of character plays at street festivals.
The so-called "Renaissance" was not a social or cultural awareness of the time either. Roman monuments and their ruins were completely ignored, if not sold as mere quarries for stone. The Roman Forum was then nothing more than a huge quarry for exploitation, and the temples were warehouses. Theaters, baths, amphitheaters... were destroyed to build new buildings. The authors of treatises on architecture and urban planning presented city designs that were not at all inspired by the Roman heritage or classical forms. In Rome, too many beautiful monuments were destroyed; marble was pulverized to obtain lime, and no ruins were rebuilt. This has often been attributed to Christianity, but this is uncertain. In fact, the protection of Roman ruins did not come from humanists, but from the Church: municipal statutes, papal bulls, and even lamentations such as that of Eugene IV are evidence of a real concern about destruction. Raphael himself, in 1518, wrote to Pope Leo X to complain. In the twelve years he had spent in Rome, he had seen the temple of Ceres in the forum, the triumphal gate of the Baths of Diocletian, and a large part of the forum of Nerva demolished. Petrarch accused them and launched harsh invectives against them: "O Rome, your people tear beautiful marble from venerable walls to make vile lime!" There was no renaissance, but rather a systematic contempt that contrasted with the self-aggrandizement that had begun in aristocratic circles. Pope Eugene IV attempted a topographical restoration of the ancient city by drawing up an inventory of notable monuments and calling for respect for the ruins. Magistrates proclaimed statutes prohibiting damage to ancient monuments, and a hundred years later Pius II issued a bull to protect those monuments that were still in good condition.
Petrarch is traditionally considered the father of humanism and one of the first to use the notion of a break with a "dark age," denigrating the works of previous centuries in order to extol those of Roman antiquity. However, this judgment was not innocent; it sought to extol the figure of the prince over the city in a strategy against the Avignon papacy. Boccaccio, in his writings, interspersed praise for both Dante and Petrarch, recognizing their role in the evolution of the arts, and also extolled the painter Giotto as a model of aesthetic renewal. But this praise was not ideologically neutral: it was intertwined with political loyalties, such as his support for the Angevin dynasty that ruled Naples, revealing that culture served political interests. It was a way for artists to cozy up to the court and form an aristocracy. We must remember that only the voices of court professionals, who served a political agenda, have come down to us. The opinions of the public, of ordinary men of various professions and backgrounds, are not reflected in literary works. Only those who made money writing flattering texts that were useful as propaganda tools speak to us.
With this "Renaissance," a cultural aristocracy began, a proclaimed opposition between the 'enlightened' of the cities and the "ignorant citizens" who did not live in those urban and courtly environments. Humanists were self-proclaimed oracles of good taste. No historian can ignore that this same artistic interest, associated with the Renaissance, existed long before. Lords, princes, bishops, and councils prided themselves on employing artists, collecting all kinds of books and scholarly works, and having a court of poets, writers, and intellectuals who compiled ancient texts and brought them up to date. However, in the Middle Ages, popular cultures were not despised. On the contrary, things were done around popular festivities. And yet, with this renaissance, the idea of art as something to be separated from the common people began to take hold, and an artistic aristocracy was consolidated. Gothic art, so harshly attacked, would be elevated in England, widely used in the architecture and decoration of stately homes, in the restoration of castles, and in many urban elements, also encouraged by its own nationalism. Spanish painting was long ignored by the European cultural elites, until it began to be rediscovered and appreciated in the 19th century, in the context of a growing interest in realistic and dramatic pictorial styles. Spanish painters, still almost unknown at the beginning of the 19th century, such as Murillo, Velázquez, Zurbarán, etc., began to be highly valued in world culture.
The Renaissance did not restore the classical world in material or spiritual terms, but used it for self-aggrandizement and as part of political games. Literature would also be a suitable vehicle. Authors such as Dumas produced swashbuckling novels that perfectly matched the cliché: the perverse, lustful, greedy nobleman, thirsty for blood and revenge; the poor but brave and honest young man, champion of virtues and just causes; the sensible and faithful young woman.
THE MYTH OF CULTURAL BACKWARDNESS
In literature, the idea of an ignorant Middle Ages, or one that burned books and prevented education, has become widespread. From Balzac, Victor Hugo, and Michelet to "the most insignificant scribblers," they have sought to spread this image. The fact that universities were founded in the Middle Ages is still ignored: Bologna (1088), Paris (1150), Oxford (1096), Salamanca (1218)... These institutions specialized in law, medicine, theology, and the liberal arts with autonomy and structure: statutes, degrees, exams, and titles. The trivium (grammar, logic, rhetoric) and the quadrivium (arithmetic, geometry, music, astronomy) constituted an advanced and comprehensive educational program. From the 9th century onwards (especially promoted by Charlemagne), there were schools linked to cathedrals and monasteries that trained generations of lay people and clergy.The view that attempts were made to destroy books is even more dishonest. In the Middle Ages, Greek, Latin, Arabic, and Hebrew texts were copied, studied, and commented on. There was no rupture, but rather intellectual continuity. Ptolemy was read and reread, published, and commented on. Many translations from Arabic into Latin (Avicenna, Averroes, Alhazen...) were made in Toledo, with ecclesiastical support and the collaboration of Jews, Muslims, and Christians. Boethius, already in the 6th century, translated Aristotle and transmitted ancient logic to the Middle Ages. Thomas Aquinas, Albertus Magnus, John Duns Scotus, and other medieval theologians attempted to synthesize faith and natural philosophy. They never opposed knowledge, but sought to reconcile it, avoiding a break with the transcendent world. Isidore of Seville wrote one of the greatest encyclopedias in history: his Etymologies were not a simple taxonomy of definitions like the modern encyclopedia, but a true compendium of the knowledge of the greatest works of humanity. It was the most widely read text of its time. It is true that many of these texts arrived via Byzantium, although much earlier, from the 12th century onwards. Burgundio, born in Pisa in 1110, offered Pisa the famous manuscript of the Pandects, by Roman jurists, on which commercial contracts and arbitration awards had been based for several generations. This manuscript was considered the most valuable in the world after the Bible, until 200 years later when the Medici family seized it and placed it in their library. The men of the "Renaissance" were content to appropriate, to steal, what the merchants of the Middle Ages had collected.
Contrary to the idea of a retrograde scholasticism, which attempts to portray teaching as limited to the repetition of a series of dogmatic texts, a wide variety of documentation obtained from municipal accounting archives, judicial archives, tax records, etc., amply attests to the existence of professional school teachers, common in different regions. Many of them were lay people, with degrees in arts and law, paid professionals who taught children to read and write, arithmetic, etc. Notarial and tax documents prove that literacy rates in medieval cities were higher than has been claimed, particularly among the urban middle classes.
Another myth is that men of science were persecuted in the Middle Ages. Just look at the myth of Galileo's persecution by the Church, constantly repeated in scientific circles. Heers gives the example of the myth of Columbus, supposedly driven by "science" and "progress," as opposed to "backward" Spaniards who believed that the Earth was flat and who, trapped in superstition, did not know how to calculate. However, the reality is quite the opposite: Columbus was wrong in his calculations of the distance between Portugal and Japan, and the Spanish corrected him. "The men of Salamanca were true scholars," says Heers. There was no episode of obscurantism, intellectual clumsiness, or intolerance, but rather the Spanish realized that his project was unfeasible. The truth of this story is that the scientific calculations were better made by the scholars of that backward Spanish Church, which had already founded dozens of astronomical observatories around the world. It should also be remembered that figures such as Copernicus, Gregor Mendel, and Roger Bacon were members of the Church.
The development of hospitals throughout Europe was also a result of the Middle Ages. It was the Church that decreed that wherever there was a cathedral, a hospital must also be built. For Heers, in the judgments that have been made about the Church, there is no attempt to be honest, to discuss the light and shade, or to try to understand its position. Mockery and many falsehoods have simply been spread in the supposed name of enlightenment and reason.
THE MYTH OF THE ENLIGHTENED INTELLECTUALS
The ideologues of the time needed to construct a mythology to legitimize a new order, presenting the previous feudal regime as barbaric. For the framers of 1789 and the "enlightened intellectuals," their main sources were legends, anecdotes, and often invented gossip. The black legend about the Inquisition has been one of the most powerful pillars in the construction of a modern narrative that contrasts a progressive, enlightened, and rational Europe with a backward, obscurantist, fanatical, and repressive image, particularly of Spain. It was claimed that the accused had no defense, that the penalties were atrocious, that there was torture, burning at the stake, or walling up, even before these practices existed. However, the manuals of the inquisitors themselves and contemporary historiography have shown that this view was greatly distorted. The number of people executed is much lower than the figures that have generally been given. The Spanish Inquisition in particular was the most regulated and protective, with appeals, restrictions on the use of torture, and a negligible percentage of executions over the centuries, which cannot be compared to other countries in northern Europe. It did not intervene in civil or common criminal matters and could not act without evidence, so the novelistic stereotype of the anonymous informer does not reflect the actual processes."Religious struggles" have been another rich source of mythology. Political, territorial, and economic disputes in which kings, princes, aristocrats, and republics fought to control territories, increase their power, weaken their enemies, or maintain alliances were labeled "religious wars." However, to a large extent, religious differences were a pretext for what was purely geopolitical strategy or economic interest. Although Heers does not mention it, the example of Catholic France allying itself with German Protestants to curb Spanish Catholic domination is enough to see how much "religion" there was in these "religious wars." Many of these wars, incidentally, do not belong to the "Middle Ages" but to the "Renaissance." There is little mention of the constant massacres and power struggles in these prosperous Italian cities. Bishops and religious leaders tried to reconcile families and imposed solemn ceremonies of forgiveness, but the quarrels immediately flared up again.
What can be said about the Salem witches and the bonfires of Geneva in Calvin's time, in the middle of the Renaissance, attributed to the Middle Ages? Gustave Hernisson has perfectly demonstrated that the criminal madness of witch hunts is an eminently modern phenomenon. Witch hunts have even been attributed to the Catholic Church, when it was the local civil courts that were responsible for most of those persecutions. The Spanish and Roman Inquisitions, on the other hand, acted with greater skepticism, reducing panic and even protecting the accused in many cases. In fact, there were very few witch trials in Spain over the centuries, partly because the inquisitors were trained jurists, skeptical of this type of social contagion and more focused on other concerns.
Another widely disseminated false legend is that of the "derecho de pernada" (also called ius primae noctis or droit du seigneur), according to which a feudal lord could sleep with a serf's wife on her wedding night before him. Today, it is widely considered to be another false legend reproduced and exaggerated by certain writers, particularly enlightened propagandists and later by less rigorous historians. It has even been said that the lord had the right to disembowel peasants to warm his feet. Voltaire, Diderot, Rousseau, and other enlightened thinkers spread this kind of gossip as part of their "rational and enlightened" critique of "feudal barbarism."
In line with Hermann Heimpel's thesis, modernity was not born with any freedom, but with an increase in centralized power. The bourgeoisie was not the original agent of change, but rather political power struggles. The power games of the princes described by Machiavelli were the driving force of modernity. To centralize power and control all regions, kings needed to reduce the autonomy of lords and the feudal system, so from the 13th-14th centuries onwards, they expanded more centralized state structures around a royal administration, centralized taxation, written law, a central army, imposing royal courts on local ones, etc. The consequence was that feudalism gradually lost strength, being replaced by absolute monarchies and, later, by the centralized state. The king granted the lords privileges and representation in the courts in exchange for their adherence to the centralization of the kingdom-state. Machiavelli himself clearly explained how the medieval political order was incompatible with the concentration of power, which first required a strong and centralized state. It is in this process of centralization that we find the beginnings of the modern authoritarian state and the narratives created by those who benefited from the concentration of power, promoted as "intellectuals" or "artists." Only the ideology of centralizing power over society should be viewed favorably.
Modern politics is largely based on creating antagonisms based on so-called social groups, which consists of defining two categories, usually entirely invented. Opponents and supporters of the republican ideal were not really different at all. Everyone condemned feudalism, everyone defended the concentration of power that would give way to the modern authoritarian state. The first enemy of feudalism was the king and his advisors. In order to gain central power, they had to get rid of lords, nobles, abbots, etc. They needed to suppress particularities and private rights in order to turn the entire population into direct subjects of the king. The compulsory suppression of feudal rights and corvée labor, expropriations and confiscations from the Church, etc. were undertaken. All ties, intermediaries, and communities managed around a nobleman or monastery had to be eliminated so that everyone would be "equal" before the king. This is still the same formula of domination used by the modern authoritarian state, presented as a social benefit of "equal treatment" by a central authority.
The other enemy of feudalism was the revolutionaries and reformers of the Enlightenment, inspired by state officials concerned with efficiency, order, tax collection, and the administrative and technical rationality described by authors such as Ellul, Adorno, and Horkheimer. Who can deny the influence of moralists and vigilantes such as Voltaire, Rousseau, and Diderot, all of whom were coincidentally protected by princes? These masters of morality said nothing about morality that was not strictly confined to pamphlets against feudalism. They condemned the privileges of the past while saying not a word about the new privileged classes. They all spoke in synchronized fashion, with the same omissions, in a predictable manner. They attacked tithes and censuses, but not centralized tax burdens, which were greater than the tithes they so severely criticized. They did not criticize the urban banker, the speculative bourgeois, the corrupt administrator of the new regime, or the power-hungry opportunists who thrived around the new state. They were only concerned with feudalism, nothing outside of it. A very convenient moral concern. They spread gossip after gossip, legend after legend, in the name of "enlightenment." The reality is that it is questionable whether, with the fall of feudalism and in the name of freedom, more political privileges, more taxes, and a machinery of power over the majority of the population were not created. With the fall of feudalism, taxes, privileges, abuses... supposedly all that ceased to exist. That is what they led people to believe. Of course, the same ideologues and pamphleteers did not perceive themselves as privileged recipients of benefits of dubious productive contribution to society.
In the march toward prosperity and republican peace, with the virtue of the new man freed from prejudice and darkness, they devoted themselves to denouncing the misdeeds of nobles, lords, the evils of feudalism or the king... with a catalog of largely invented anecdotes. While massaging the "people," proclaiming them oppressed and full of civic virtues to be exploited, incessantly exposed to the humiliation and gratuitous cruelty of greedy lords, the intellectuals of the French Revolution did not propose a real redistribution of power, only a political reconfiguration into the hands of others. Who constituted this new cliché of "the people"? The lord's tenant, the teacher, the manager, the tavern keeper, the merchant, the baker, the sheriff, the hunter, the musician, the midwife, the weaver, the doctor...? The pamphleteers were the classists of the city, the cultural aristocracies at the service of the centralized apparatus. They are the ones who have suppressed the local customs of the people, annihilating them under an absolutist machinery over all society. They are the ones who have prevented the people from governing themselves, turning medieval municipalities into bourgeois administrative republics or, later, socialized machines.
Religious processes in the Middle Ages were full of nuances, reflections, and questions, and no effort has been made to understand them and analyze their own evolution within the Church. Everything expanded when, in France, England, and elsewhere, after the revolutions, a violent anti-religious movement arose, providing an excuse not only to attack clergy as individuals but also to confiscate everything they owned: land, monasteries, libraries, abbeys, hospitals, schools, works of art... the plundering was massive. Instead of violent appropriation, it was called justice. All these assets passed to the state, and "the state is the people," said the propagandists. This benefited the bourgeoisie and allies of power, new elites that were more powerful, authoritarian, violent, and extractive than their predecessors. The revolution merely reorganized the ruling classes; it did not eliminate power, reduce the tax burden, or improve community relations. In the years 1830-1860, there was never any talk of asset hoarders, speculators, traffickers of all kinds, opportunists who benefited from power struggles, state ideologues, the nouveau riche, buyers of national assets, army suppliers, or dishonest financiers who were part of that "people." The "good bourgeoisie" of the cities only showed their hatred for those castles and lands of nobles that they had not yet been able to confiscate or buy at a good price, taking advantage of political changes or confiscations from the clergy. Only the old forms of land ownership were persecuted, but not the new landowners who speculated with what had been confiscated from the nobles or the Church. The beneficiaries of the new political-economic order, authentic dynasties of opportunists and speculators, are precisely those who have long dictated history and school textbooks, molding minds to accept the modern authoritarian state. We remain heirs and accomplices to an ideological struggle that completely concealed reality in order to impose a narrative.
There are many superstitions, popular devotions, rites, myths, and legends throughout history. Most wars have nothing to do with religion; many have to do precisely with its abandonment, without anyone saying anything about it. We could add to Heers' criticism that no "conversion" has been as massive as those produced by secular universalism, proletarian socialism, or technocratic globalism, without being subject to the same criticism. To claim that human happiness comes with the simple advent of central institutions and political systems may well be the greatest myth of all. The trail of blood left by the cult of the state and the cult of the party, which came with modernity, bears no comparison. The ideologues of socialized centralization and industrial mercantilism have been infinitely more murderous, calculating, and power-hungry than any medieval battle or Christian crusade.
THE MYTH OF THE BACKWARD FEUDAL ECONOMY
There has been a desire to spread the idea of technical and economic backwardness in the Middle Ages, even though there were treatises on agricultural economics that evaluated productivity costs and the yield of each cereal, among other things. This shows rational management based on the profitability and productivity of land, pastures, vineyards, forests, and livestock. Although spices predominate in the popular imagination, the economy was based, as might be expected, primarily on primary products. Great fortunes arose from the countryside, not from the adventurous trade propagated by modern propaganda. Legend has sought to inflate the aristocratic aspect of trade rather than recognize the real primary basis of the economy. In fact, throughout the Middle Ages, the first merchants were nobles with rural properties, who had wood and iron to arm and sail ships in their enterprises and to transport raw materials. They drove the Reconquista in Spain. Their own self-managed rural lands allowed them to retreat in bad times and survive.Capitalists and revolutionaries have generally agreed to draw a line between the medieval economy, described in its most favorable light as a world of craftsmanship, if not outright misery. No serious historian today would argue that the rural economy was constantly on the brink of disaster and that society was steeped in anguish, misfortune, and barbarism. Population growth alone contradicts the narrative of constant deprivation. There was a balance, perhaps unequal but real, even with the presence of severe epidemics, which were generally able to quickly replenish population gaps. In addition, these were years of expansion towards the Atlantic Islands, from the Canaries to the Antilles, and then to Brazil and New Spain. These explorations were carried out for more than 500 years under the control of the lordship.
On the other hand, the existence of a clear dividing line between the "medieval" and the 'modern' is questionable. Various cities with high levels of commercial activity and trade in Italy, Germany, and England, among others, did not wait for the arrival of the "Renaissance" to innovate in business and financial activity and to develop prosperous commercial activity and multiple forms of business innovation. The market economy and trade had spread widely in the West long before the 15th century. This boom in trade, commerce, and navigation cannot be placed simply at the cut-off point called the "Renaissance." It has sometimes been called pre-capitalism, which originated in the Middle Ages. The most widespread theory is that the traditional feudal system, based on rents in kind (grain, labor, etc.), was confronted with an increasingly money-oriented economy. The growth of cities and trade shifted the center of economic power from land, the exchange of rents, and rights to the urban bourgeoisie. The nobility saw war as a solution to their loss of relevance and wealth. However, this linear economic process and the supposed decline of the nobility have been questioned. On the one hand, trade also benefited producers, particularly those living in areas of greater commercial activity. Some nobles adapted, others prospered, and others fell into disgrace, in an era of great prosperity or, at least, equilibrium, despite the existence of struggles, some poor harvests, and demographic problems.
Following Max Weber, it has been claimed that merchants increasingly questioned the Church for placing obstacles in the way of the circulation of money and promoted the Protestant Reformation. This would create a "new Church" against Rome, for which money and accumulation were not contrary to God, and would promote "freedom of thought" against "paralyzing obscurantism." However, statements and actions in society are not exactly the same. Although the Church condemned usury, there is no evidence of effective repression by the Church, beyond a small number of trials and fines. Businessmen and men of the Church understood each other better than has been said. Both sides knew how to compromise, and there was generally prudence and good manners. Lenders were tolerated if they were reasonable, moderate in their demands, acted in the community's interest, or offset part of their profits with donations. Sometimes a loan was disguised as a partnership agreement, in which one party provided the money and the other did the work, with the profits being shared. In practice, there was understanding and a climate of prudence on both sides.
The Church itself had qualified its position on certain points and recognized that the benefits of money became lawful when the service offered was important to the community or there was a significant risk in the enterprise undertaken. Dominicans and Franciscans were, in fact, closely linked to the business world and provided extensive theoretical justifications for a large number of financial practices, linking them to the common good. In reality, all kinds of commercial practices were authorized. In Italy, there were commenda, societas, colleganza, family-based Florentine companies, Genoese companies a carati, some before a notary, with fines for late payment. Maritime risk loans were made to help build ships and serve as insurance. Interest rates of between 7 and 12% have been documented, a perfectly reasonable level.
The usurer was allowed to make amends for his mistakes in order to escape the secular arm or the Church, mainly through donations to the poor. Also, in the twilight of their lives, they often bequeathed a portion to hospitals or financed certain social projects. There is evidence of this, for example, the hospital founded in Prato by a moneylender named Francesco Di Marco Dattini, or the Iávaco grammar school financed by the Milanese moneylender Tomás Ograsi, or in Padua the Scrovegni Chapel, etc. In short, medieval trade escapes the caricatured image and, even more so, the black legend of miserabilism. Lending at interest was practiced everywhere, simply with a certain degree of caution on the part of all.
Much has been said about Jewish moneylenders, but this needs to be put into context. Many bourgeois families used the Israelites so as not to appear to be usurers themselves, and much Christian capital was in Jewish hands. Many social recriminations in bad times ended with the expulsion of Jews or Lombards. The people supported their being singled out as scapegoats because this allowed them to delay or cancel their debts, and the rulers had an easy formula for pointing the finger at external culprits and appeasing the furious masses with the expulsion of a minority. Jews often found refuge with bishops and abbots behind the walls of convents. It was Rome and the Pope who took in the Jews expelled from Spain by the edicts of the Catholic Monarchs. It was not primarily a religious issue-other groups such as the Lombards suffered a similar fate-but rather one of political and financial opportunism. Lenders were often nobles, townspeople, or even members of the Church. However, a large number of these loans were also made within families, out of friendship, and free of charge.
While the Hundred Years' War certainly caused difficulties in France, other countries became very wealthy during the same period, such as England, which was nourished by the fruits of its conquests. There was no decline in England, nor in the cities of southern Germany, which were covered in gold, nor in Italy. The modern economy simply wanted to give free rein to what we might call the exploitation of labor by capital, without any moral or social restraint, until we arrived at a society dominated by consumerism and machines, as Ellul already explained.
THE MYTH OF THE COUNTRY-CITY ANTAGONISM
There has been an attempt to describe an ideological antagonism between the country and the city. Our historiography has shown more sympathy for urban and industrial societies than for community and rural societies. However, once again, there is more natural symbiosis than pamphleteering antagonism. The capital and merchants of the city frequently intervened in rural industry. Many cities were not antagonistic to the countryside either. The rural environment could contribute economically to the city, sometimes in exchange for defense or other administrative or professional services. Sometimes, what was called a city in a jurisdictional sense also included the countryside, so that the rural environment was precisely part of the city and its project. In censuses, many people resided in the city, but just as many resided in surrounding villages, forming part of the city's census. City markets were larger, but they sold primarily products from the rural environment and the manorial economy. It is absurd to accept that merchants negotiated among themselves in urban areas but not with those who produced agriculture and livestock, with only the former prospering. On the other hand, city dwellers were the first to be attracted to rural property. On the one hand, it allowed them to survive a self-sufficient life if times were hard in the cities. On the other hand, bourgeois, lawyers, advisors, money changers, merchants, notables, people of the law, government officials, financiers, etc., established property there because it gave them a certain social status. Thus, working the land was not necessarily part of the feudal system or those pamphleteered relations between lord and vassal. Many city dwellers had their assistants and domestic workers there.Furthermore, it is legitimate to ask whether peasants did not, in fact, enjoy greater freedom and more tax advantages by living in the countryside. It is said that cities were free in contrast to the exploited peasantry. However, it is uncertain whether economic, financial, and administrative freedoms were consolidated earlier in cities than in village communities. We know that in Italy, where there were many cities that appear to us as perfect examples of free, prosperous, and advanced mercantile republics, communal statutes had been codified earlier in many villages, where there was real autonomy with market and justice rights. Many villages were, in fact, infinitely more democratic than the Italian republics or our current administrative machinery, however much we may wish to call them "democracies." Peasants were not behind the commercial cities in terms of organizing themselves, enacting regulations, appointing officials, or getting their lord to recognize certain individual or collective freedoms. For example, the charter of Lorris, granted by Louis VII in 1155, was adopted by 83 communes. Or the charter of Beaumont in Aragon, dated 1182, which we find in hundreds of villages in Champagne and Burgundy, or Prisches in Hainaut... How many inhabitants did Lorris and the surrounding villages have? They were not centers of production or distribution. There were no bourgeoisie, only peasants and craftsmen working in forges, mills, and ovens. At most, there was a market for crops and livestock, seeds, agricultural tools, pottery, cloth... There is no shortage of evidence that livestock-farming and forest villages obtained charters of freedom and even municipal charters very early on, benefiting from true individual and collective freedom. And these probably simply recorded rights that existed previously, dating back even further.
Many of the large municipalities that led the "freedom" movement found that their magistrates did not reduce the fighting, but rather increased it, eventually asking the prince to restore all his power. In the cities, there was, of course, patronage, mass mobilization, and demagoguery, but no democratic consensus. Several communes in the Île-de-France and Picardy were abolished of their own accord around 1300: Seine (1318), Compiègne (1319), Melun (1320), Saint-Lys, Soissons, Provins, etc. Many of them were consulted. In Provins, for example, 2,701 people participated, of whom 350 were women. 2,545 voted for the return of the king and only 156 against. It is questionable whether there were more urban assemblies or, precisely, more rural assemblies. And it is questionable whether many of these rural villages were not, in fact, more democratic than these modern cities. In many of these "backward" rural areas, more decisions were made through popular consultation than in what we call "democracy" even today. There were strictly peasant institutions that were united in the face of taxation, resolved disputes, had representatives with decision-making powers, and existed before the city. There was also a role for parish churches. Peace, often imposed by the bishop, offered an inviolable refuge around the church, at least since 1100. The guilds promulgated rural management regulations based on experience and tradition, lent money, tools, seeds, work animals, etc. These guilds behaved like true municipalities.
We have been taught that cities had fortunately freed themselves from the oppression of their lord, usually the count or bishop, thanks to popular, or at least bourgeois, revolts that had achieved great advantages, and that from then on freedom prevailed, leaving behind the barbarism of feudalism. However, this is false: the charters were not obtained after a revolt, but were the result of deals or purchases. Political upheavals and riots were rarely driven by the bourgeoisie, as we have been told. In many cases, the bourgeoisie limited themselves to supporting some of the adversaries against others for their own benefit, supporting the count, the bishops, the revolts, and everything else or the opposite, as long as it was profitable for them. The "popular" is another empty label, which included neighbors, guilds, merchants, bourgeois, etc., with their own internal disagreements, and who simply took advantage of situations for their own particular benefit. The municipality was not a unified popular revolt, but simply the result of social disputes that have existed throughout human history. In Pisa, for example, the party known as "del Pópolo" arose from quarrels between wealthy noble families, who were well endowed with fiefdoms in the mountains. In Genoa, they also took the initiative and leadership of the Popular Party to oppose other nobles like themselves. Nothing changed after the Popolari came to power. Behind all the "people's" parties, there was nothing but power struggles between classes of large families, nobles, royal advisors, and, ultimately, various aspirants to power. There was no single movement called "the people," not even "the bourgeoisie," nor was it a general contagion, nor did it transform political customs and social structures throughout Europe. The consequences were different, for example, in northern or central Italy, but not in many other regions. Venice, Genoa, Florence, the Papal States, Rome... In some cities, such as Flanders, enriched by their cloth industries, they managed to obtain self-government from the count. The supposed freedoms of the cities are more questionable than has been suggested. For example, in Milan, a peasant who settled in the city did not have full citizenship rights until he had lived there for 30 years. And if his relatives continued to work on the land, he could never become a citizen.
The merchant city lived day after day with an obsession with treason and conspiracy, with suspicion, denunciation, imprisonment, and execution of enemies of the people and the party. Sometimes in a disguised form, through intermediaries who were loyal and strictly dependent, such as the Medici, the "modern" government did nothing but reinforce the powers that be. Meanwhile, people talked about the history of the Florentine people or the history of the Venetians to extol the "modern" forms of government. Not to mention Machiavelli's Florentine Histories. As soon as it freed itself from royal or princely control, the city spent most of its days in internal wars. The merchant cities of Italy, presented as examples of urban peace and sophistication, invaded the surrounding regions in order to further increase their dominion. They threw garbage and dead animals over the walls to infest and cause epidemics. At the end of the summer, these bands of looters, male citizens of the municipality, returned home with their booty, prisoners (mainly women and children, since the men were massacred), animals, wheat, wine, etc. Beheadings were carried out in the public square, images of horror that are not often shown in books.
From the 12th century onwards, the bourgeois cities of Italy were covered with private fortresses. This was an essential feature of the urban landscape, under which the phenomenon of civil wars was long hidden. In Florence alone, there were more than 100 stately towers belonging to the great merchant families; in Bologna, more than 200. This is not the image of a peaceful city, but of a city in the midst of civil war. Only the popes managed to gradually conquer all these fortress cities.
FINAL WORDS
All the clichés that Heers exposed are, in fact, those that I literally encountered during my own time in the education system. This is what generations of teachers and educators, indoctrinators of children in the service of the state, have spread in the name of the fight against indoctrination. The history of the Middle Ages, often dismissed with the phrase "a thousand years of darkness," is not only an obvious black legend, but one of the most stupid allegories ever told to society. This history is not a natural process experienced by people, but a modern narrative created by ideologues and pamphleteers. Every society invents its scapegoats, and modernity had to construct its own mythology, which consisted of reviling the past as the basis for the teleology of the centralized state and progress. The black legend about the Middle Ages was forged by Enlightenment ideologues such as Voltaire, Diderot, and Condorcet, who wanted to construct a history of progress in which they proclaimed themselves the pinnacle of civilization, just as the Italians proclaimed themselves the vanguard of art. To do this, they needed a dark past against which to set themselves up as heroic fighters, creating their own mythological enemy to defeat. This included the "Middle Ages," the "vassals," and even the image of a backward Spain where, supposedly, the greatest horrors took place. Anyone who bothers to do a little research will find that most of what they have been sold since school is simply falsehoods. All these state officials are fulfilling their role of social control. However, no serious academic today disputes the historical simplification and propaganda that has been applied to the Middle Ages. Nor does any serious academic today dispute the existence of a black legend about Spain, which has created such an inferiority complex and is so electorally profitable for its enemies, both internal and external. Its extent may be debated, but not its existence.Culture is above all a vehicle for propaganda, depending on whether one wishes to emphasize a social spirit oriented towards the classical, the realistic, or the disruptive, the avant-garde, etc. It is pure mass psychology that political ideologues began to understand perfectly for their use in power games. Hence the proliferation of an elite of "artists" and "intellectuals," always close to power. Every art gallery, more recently every film, every song broadcast by the mass media, what appears to be an innocent "interview" on the radio, is carrying out psychological and political orientation work on the population's thinking, and is therefore doing something very different from what everyone believes. The system works on people's brains 365 days a year, everywhere. No artist benefits from the system's media unless they occasionally support certain things in public, or their work conveys certain ideas that steer the minds of the masses in a certain direction. It is clear that propaganda has become much more systemic than in previous centuries.
The fiscal function is inherent in all types of government and has existed in medieval times, in the West, in the East, in commercial cities, etc. However, everywhere it has been more profound than that of the feudal lords, and yet people have wanted to talk only about the taxes of feudalism. Few novels or films have dealt with the systematic collection of taxes and the civil servants of the modern state. In the days of "feudal barbarism," taxes were neither more numerous nor higher than they had been previously, nor than they have been since. Certainly, in order to create the industrial world, it was necessary to eliminate human relationships and put the production of objects at the forefront. This process culminates in our current technocracy, with human beings subjugated by surveillance and control technologies in an authoritarian world, which will lead to a world of robots, and whatever else God wills. But let no one claim that this world is enlightenment. And this, far from being reactionary, is a critique of the Frankfurt School, which reached Foucault, Marcuse, Baudrillard... until it arrived at scientific philosophy with Nick Bostrom, etc.
History has undoubtedly been more organic, symbiotic, and diverse among the actors than the concepts and taxonomies sold by the pamphleteers of the state. Contrary to the cinematic vision of "masters and servants," most of life was spent in villages, manors, and cities that involved many professions: farmer, blacksmith, baker, cook, brewer, butcher, fishmonger, milkman, sharecropper, winegrower, gardener, oil maker, shepherd, cowherd, stableman, woodcutter, resin and plant collector, beekeeper, hunter, gamekeeper, craftsman, blacksmith, carpenter, stonemason, potter, weaver, dyer, shoemaker, tailor, glazier, smelter, forger, shipbuilder, basket maker, sailor, cabin boy, merchant, peddler, tavern keeper, innkeeper, bill collector, money changer, notary, scribe, tax collector, boatman, apothecary, bookseller, copyist, butler, bailiff, foreman, provost, messenger, errand boy, priest, clergyman, monk, abbot, schoolmaster, doctor, knight, soldier, armorer, watchman, spinner, weaver, laundress, midwife, herbalist, wet nurse, cook, servant, matron, painter, illuminator, sculptor, minstrel, troubadour, jester, mime, puppeteer, musician, poet... The so-called "Middle Ages" was a period that was far from dark, but rather full of color and rich social activity.
Other labels have been parallel in the development of the mythology of modern politics, such as the supposed "social contract," another imaginary invention of pamphleteers that alludes to a contract that no one has seen, no one has read, and no one has signed. And therefore it cannot be a contract, it has no consent whatsoever, it cannot be resolved, nor can it have any legal validity as such, and its arbiter is the very State that imposes it coercively. This is what has been defended by so-called "intellectuals," left-wing reformers posing as capitalists, statesmen, industrial oligarchs, ideologues scattered throughout schools and institutes, and opportunists of all kinds who have benefited from the new distribution of power.
Modern politics can be defined fundamentally by its operational effectiveness and its progressive abstraction. Precisely for this reason, it has greater capacity for imposition and abuse. There is no one to point to or remove from office if they are perceived to be abusing their power, a risk to which more personal politics in the fiefdom was exposed. Today, there is only an administrative machine against which no one can do anything, since there is no one directly responsible who can be singled out or removed. The evolution of institutions has not made them more democratic, but rather more resistant to the influence of individuals. Very much in line with Ellul, propaganda seeks to destroy social forms in order to produce forms of technical domination. The discourse of "inequalities" is based on the fallacy of making the simple act of doing something to everyone equally correct. Something is not fair simply because it is imposed on everyone equally. This fallacy is quite visible among those who maintain such schemes of justice reduced to mere form, to process, to arithmetic (uniform, progressive...). It perfectly illustrates a reproductive mindset, a mechanized psyche that is simply reproducing the mechanical scheme of administrative operations. Morality is reduced to the very process of the system, as Ellul clearly showed.
It is clear that at the political level, narratives are what matter, not facts. Human beings have a serious problem with language. Neurocognitively, labeling a complex story with a cognitive label such as "middle age" or "peasant masses" produces a heuristic, generating a labeling and clustering bias under which reality disappears. A few language labels overlap, creating a series of simple mental images that act as clichés. Thought is literally stunted, and reasoning is prevented. The Machiavellis of modern politics understood precisely that it is more effective to convince the masses with a few emphatic labels (anti-vaccine, denier) than to tell them the truth, make them think, or give them all kinds of complex explanations. The human brain is trapped in a series of clichés about the world and cannot escape its state of hypnosis. It is difficult to believe that so many people, even today, think that the system is reconfiguring itself to move in the opposite direction of increasing its efficiency and systematic control of the population. Millions of people continue to believe such nonsense.
"Is it necessary to compare these rates of between 5 and 10% with what we pay today for social security and the costs of our education systems?" Jacques Heers.
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