You should also have a paragraph or two explaining how the Medieval kingdoms, commonly understood to be ruled by an all-encompassing feudal hierarchy, were actually administered. I understand this is a broad topic with a great deal of variety, but it wouldn't hurt to spread some information to take the place of the misinformation being stamped out. I for one had no fun trying to find out how why there what counts and dukes did in pre-Carolingian Europe, and look forward to anything you decide to add.
Btw, when feudalism is used to describe things like the Persian empire (and it has been), I suspect it stems not so much from misunderstanding of how such systems worked as from using the term in a much broader sense than Medievalists do. --Josh Grosse
for example, what to counts and dukes do, and how do their titles relate? Well, in the 5th through 9th centuries, the titles were always in Latin, and so we had comes (pl. comites and dux (duces). These were Roman military titles that had survived the Gallo-Roman period and carried on as that society became kinda synthesized with the new Frankish inhabitants of Gaul ("Roman" was a prestigious thing, so the titles stayed on as office cum fashion statement, in a way).
In the 8th and 9th centuries, we see dux used more often in conjunction with military appointments to border regions, but not exclusively. As for counts, there were cases of particular comites who seemed to be connected to particular comitati, now translated as counties. We can even see that many of these known pairings occured where the comes belonged to a Frankish leading family that had been in power for a long period and may have been occasional rivals of the Carolingians for over two hundred years. But sometimes, they weren't. We even have a source that talks about one of Charlemagne's comites -- he was also a servus which can mean slave or serf (different types of unfree people).
THEN, if you talk about England, where conventional Western Civ wisdom will tell you that a comes was known as a jarl -- Anglo-Saxon for Earl (today, counts and earls ar the same rank, pretty much -- you see Earls/Countesses? in Britain, and Counts/Countesses? in other places -- except where the German Graf fell into use. Which leads us to the Counts of the March, like Roland...or the Markengraf/Margrave?...except that, like I said, often the person in charge of a March/Mark?, at least in eastern Francia, was a dux.
Where was I? Oh ...and if you want to talk about better feudal models, there is also Japan from about the 16th century (more or less...I think it began before the Battle of Shimenoseki in (maybe, this is off the top of my head) 1621) where, at least under the Tokugawa shoguns, you see something that looks much more like what we expect feudalism to look like.
So Josh, I guess I'll be going there, but it's going to be one confusing chunk at a time. Actually, I think some of that stuff might better go under Carolingian administration?? J Hofmann Kemp
Probably, and then we can have a pointer to it here. The stuff about duces and comites I had already figured out, but only after much laborious searching, which I think we should save people whenenver possible (and much of what I put into wikipedia is for that purpose). We should make things as simple as possible while still being true. Maybe only the pseudofeudal system of the Carolingians should be discussed, and then deviations from it (i.e., other countries) can be discussed on separate pages. But I can't help, since I know very little in this field.
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