By Tom R. Pike
Tom R. Pike delves into the complex history and nature of feudalism and discusses how it informs the his lates novella, “Red Ships”, in our [July/August issue], on sale now!
A feudal realm is not a nation state.
The social science behind “Red Ships” begins there. The building block of a feudal realm is not armies or territory, but a family, whose relationships to other families in the realm are the same thing as politics. We call families “dynasties” when the marriages, births, and deaths of family members have immediate political ramifications, but it is still essentially a family. Alliances spread only via marriage.
A nation-state can exist with or without being tied to a dynasty. A feudal realm cannot. The realm is the family. The titles they hold pass down according to rules of inheritance dictated by cultural norms. Those titles are associated with land, and with vassals, who have their own titles, lands, and vassals.
Titles associate a territory with a dynastic bloodline, but not usually with a culture, language, or state. Titles can even exist without a holder, some going centuries without being claimed.
Each vassal is their own realm, and has their own dynasty. They can make war without the permission of their lord. They may even be allowed to fight other vassals of the same lord—or, if not strictly speaking allowed, they may be able to get away with it. Power in a feudal realm is very diffuse.
Because of that, feudal realms do not generally have standing armies. Their legal systems are weak: more customs and norms than ironclad laws. The King, if there even is one, is not the most relevant lord on the average peasant’s mind. The local lord of lowest rank—often a baron—has the largest impact on their peasants’ lives.
Beyond the edicts of their own lord, peasants don’t really care about any of this court intrigue. If a peasant lived in England, they would consider themselves English because they are of English culture, not because they are the subject of a “nation” called “England”. “England” is a cultural concept first, and a legal concept second. To the extent “England” legally exists, it exists as a title held by a dynasty.
In war between feudal realms, it often made little difference to the peasants what was being fought over, by whom, or why. Lords did this kind of thing to each other, whether those lords shared a culture or religion or not. Cultural and religious differences were catalysts for conflict, yes, but to a peasant whose town is being torched, the motives of the attacker become academic.
Not every peasant has a baron! In the personal domains of kings, dukes, counts, and so on, there is no level between the peasant and a higher lord. And a count need not actually have any barons, though if his realm is large, it helps him if he does. Directly administering a large number of titles is costly and inefficient, and dynasties like to outsource that work to lower-ranked dynasties where they can, so they can focus on their priorities.
The lower-ranked family also benefits from this arrangement, securing protection in exchange for fealty. All it costs the vassal is taxes, food, and levies in wartime, though in times where their lord is weak, the vassal can withhold these due to “misunderstandings” or “forgetfulness”.
Because delegating power from one dynasty to another is usually a symbiotic exchange, feudalism has convergently evolved repeatedly throughout history, in wildly divergent contexts. Vassalage can result from a war of subjugation, as fealty can be offered in exchange for peace, but it need not form due to violent conquest. A lord can freely choose to pledge homage and fealty to a higher-ranked lord, though they or their descendants might regret this, and getting out of the arrangement is harder than getting into it. The spread of realms tends to also spread peace, at least within the internal borders of each realm, which—remember—are still meaningful borders. The King does not own his vassals’ titles or land.
Nobody deliberately designed these systems. They start out informal, a lord owning one title pledging homage and fealty to another who owns another. Families of lord and vassal intermarry, creating stronger obligations than paper could enforce. Ad-hoc arrangements coalesce into formalized hierarchies of rank.
But feudalism carries the seed of its own destruction.
Internal peace spreads with the interweaving of noble families within each realm. That peace is good for harvests and markets, which are good for a growing bureaucracy and central administration, which in turn drive the system slowly, haltingly, over centuries, toward centralization. After all, the whole reason the queen wants to delegate to a duke is because she doesn’t have the necessary bureaucratic apparatus to directly administer a huge territory. If she starts to think maybe she doesn’t need dukes anymore, trouble might start.
Because a feudal king only directly controls their own personal holdings, to which they personally own the titles, if they want to pass a law that affects their whole realm, they must gain the consent of the vassals whose job it would be to actually enforce the law throughout the bulk of the king’s territory. Attempts to centralize power, likewise, have to survive contact with vassals. If vassals particularly don’t like a newly-proposed law, they can band together and fight the king. The king is always aware that his vassals can do this, and that tension keeps him from trying to seize too much power from his vassals too quickly.
That is how you end up with a King who does not directly rule those you and I might assume would be their subjects. But we are from nation-states, and we think fundamentally differently, because a nation-state is fundamentally a different thing.
A nation-state is founded on an ideology. It may place a territory, an ethnic group, a language, a religion, or an idea at the center of civic life. A nation-state that is also a monarchy can still form marriage alliances like a feudal realm might, but such familial alliances come with new risks—Marie Antoinette was seen as “foreign”, and this mattered to the French, whereas their forebears would never have batted an eye at a lord marrying a “foreigner”. “Frenchness” existed by the late 1700s as an idea tied to a people, a language, and a territory. Frenchness was not totally new, but it had never before been so important.
All of the traits of nation-states—ideology, standing armies, state languages, and state religions, can be present in a feudal state which is in the process of centralizing. But because the feudal state formed with the consent of its vassals, it is a centuries-long process for a monarchy to consolidate its power, and vassals often push back. Still, kings are tempted to risk it by the allure of a tax that a petulant vassal cannot withhold, or levies that need not be raised because the state can feed and pay a standing army year-round. Eventually, after centuries of centralizing, lesser nobles become window dressing, with a central bureaucracy taking their place as administrators of territory and executors of laws. When the people who implement laws serve at the pleasure of the king, the king’s laws become more absolute and consistently-applied, than when the king serves only with the consent of their vassals. In a nation-state monarchy, the king’s edicts matter greatly to the common person. The king’s law is now everywhere.
I wanted to tell a story that showed the differences between a feudal realm and a nation-state. I wanted to do this because the idea of a feudal realm is counterintuitive to anyone from a nation-state, but was absolutely obvious to many peoples throughout many millennia of history. Because we are on the other side of the divide, feudalism is rarely portrayed accurately in our science fiction. That makes it a tempting challenge.
The first scene I conceived of for “Red Ships” was simply two characters, one from a nation-state, and one from a feudal realm, speaking about power, trying to figure out who has more of it. Though they are speaking the same language, they can barely understand each other.
That is obviously not a whole story, so I needed to figure out who was speaking, and what was at stake.
The question they are wondering is: what would happen when a feudal realm met a nation-state in battle? The result, as both would be aware, would be foregone. Even if each contained the same population, and the same resources existed in and under their soil, and the same technology was available to both, the nation-state would crush the feudal state, every time. The degree of organization simply cannot be matched. I mean “organization” here broadly: tactical formations, combat drilling, manufacture of standardized arms and armor, supply lines, and, critically, methods of recruitment make it so that a decentralized feudal realm cannot compete. Despite having the same populace, the nation-state would field and supply a larger, better-trained army. And that’s not even touching the economic advantages that come with centralization!
Though a feudal realm is not as intimately tied to a culture as a nation-state is, that doesn’t mean they don’t have culture. But the culture belongs to the people of a realm, with the lords having relatively little influence on it. If a nation-state conquers a feudal realm, that can be very bad news for the people whose lords were defeated, because nation-states build schools and churches. The locals’ culture will die with their lords’ armies. It will just take longer.
A feudal dynasty that was once engaged in a long term project of cultural conquest might have the misfortune of elevating a new ruler who would rather read books all day than act as steward of the realm, but a nation-state cannot ignore internal divisions. It must eliminate them, because if tolerated, differences of culture would disprove the lie at the heart of the nation-state.
In my Analog stories, I do not feel a need to focus on overly violent conquests. I explore those plenty in other fiction. In Analog, I prefer to ask questions about the lighter shades of imperialism.
Recife is never actually invaded by the titular red ships. Still, it falls to them, and there was never a course of action available to the Thanes and Kings of Recife that would have led to a different outcome.
I wanted to show the helplessness of watching your culture being on the edge of slipping away, but knowing that your human lifespan will not be long enough to know, before you will die, whether or not your culture would survive foreign contact. All you know is you have a sinking pit of despair in your gut.
But that is not where the story ends. Nation-states are all founded on ideology. And since every ideology is reductionist to the point of being untruthful, nation-states are all founded on a lie.
“France”, even as a nation-state, has always contained people who weren’t French—those who didn’t speak the language, didn’t belong to the culture, or ascribed to a variation of Frenchness that was aberrant and not yet stamped-out. The idea that “France” exists is therefore a kind of mass delusion not supported by the vast variations between the local varieties of Frenchness. It is utter nonsense to point at a spot of land and say, “This spot is French”. That chunk of soil has “Frenchness”? Ludicrous.
While a feudal realm is purely a practical arrangement that never seeks to justify its own existence, a nation-state must constantly insist upon its own meaningfulness, despite its obvious absurdity. Nation-states are hollow, purposeless things, whose founding myths richly deserve to be punctured.
And so the conquered get one parting laugh as consolation: the knowledge that our conquerors believe in things that are not real, and the hope that their reliance on a delusion might eventually lead to their comeuppance. Just not in our lifetime.
The Astounding Analog Companion 