Feudal city . Feudal exploitative relationships covered not only peasant villages, but also the city, where artisans and merchants preferably resided. Artisans made up the majority of the urban population and were complemented essentially by peasant serfs escaped from the city.
Summary
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- 1 Emergence
- 2 The union regime
- 1 Merchants’ Associations
- 2 The opposition between city and country
- 3 Mercantile and monetary relations
- 1 The natural character of production
- 2 Mercantile production and trade
- 4 Classes and status in feudalism
- 1 The class structure of society
- 2 The political division
- 3 The centralized state
- 5 Sources
Emergence
In the Feudal City , when they became artisans of the city, those who at one time were peasant servants of the gleba fell again under the yoke of servitude. The feudal lords as owners of the territories where the cities were located, established in them a system of personal dependency.
By forcing the residents of the city to fulfill various kinds of benefits, to pay taxes, the feudal lords thereby made the ownership of the land.
The union regime
The union regime
In the cities they organized the specific feudal form of organization of the trades: the guilds, organizations of artisans within the framework of a specific city and a certain branch of artisan production. Within the guilds, there was a rigorous system of subordination and dependency.
The teachers who owned the workshops were members of the unions with all the rights. In the workshop, in addition to the teacher, the officers and apprentices worked. The characteristic feature of the guilds in the Middle Ages was the rigorous regulation of production and sale. This guaranteed the monopoly of the workshop in the production of one or another article and avoided competition between artisans.
Under the guild system, officers and apprentices were exploited by teachers. Because the same teacher worked in the workshop, his highest status compared to officers and apprentices, was based not only on private ownership of the means of production, but also on his professional mastery. By instructing the apprentices who entered the workshop, he did not pay them any remuneration even though they provided him with certain income from his work. The officers, who were skilled craftsmen, received from the master a certain remuneration for their labor.
Merchants’ Associations
The cities were the concentration point of the merchants, who carried out internal and external trade. Commercial capital played a very important role in feudalism. Small commodity producers were not always able to make their products due to the dispersion of production and the location of markets. Merchants assumed the role of intermediaries in the realization of their products and took over an important part of the product of direct producers. Merchants came to the feudal lords luxury items, weapons, wines, spices, etc. of which one part was bought in the country and the other in foreign markets. The profit obtained by these merchants contained part of the feudal income from the land by reselling the products at higher prices.
The weakness of the central power of the feudal state and its inability to protect people and the patrimony of the traveling merchants impelled them to gather in corporations for the purpose of self-defense. The members of the corporations promised to give each other mutual help and support. The corporations fought against the competition of the foreign merchants, they were in charge of regulating the measures and weights and they fixed the sale prices. Among the merchant associations of different cities, a bitter fight was developing for the markets and for the right to a monopoly on the sale of merchandise. The grouping of merchants into corporations contributed to a faster accumulation of capital, since it created more favorable conditions for trade.
As wealth accumulated in money and mercantile monetary relations developed, the role of commercial capital was transformed. Initially, merchants were only casual intermediaries in the exchange. Little by little, the group of producers who sold their merchandise to a certain merchant became permanent. Sometimes merchants interspersed their mercantile operations with usurers, giving loans to artisans and peasants and thereby subjecting them further. On the other hand, the merchants subordinated the producers by means of the realization of the articles created by them in exchange for the goods that were necessary for the producers for personal consumption and for productive consumption.
The considerable sums of money accumulated by the merchants turned them into a powerful economic force, which was the basis of their dominance in the urban administrative organs. In turn, merchants tried to break free from feudal fetters, transforming themselves into a force capable of confronting feudal lords.
The opposition between city and country
In the conditions of feudalism, the countryside dominated the city politically. This was determined because the cities were owned by the feudal lords. The inhabitants of the city were forced to carry out certain benefits in favor of the lords.
Karl Marx
The feudal lord was the supreme judge of the city’s residents and had the right to sell the city, bequeath it by inheritance and mortgage it. However, the economic development of the cities considerably exceeded that of the countryside.
The development of artisan production and the concentration of great wealth in the hands of merchants and usurers, created the necessary conditions for the economic dominance of the city with respect to the countryside. “If in the Middle Ages – wrote Marx – the countryside exploited the city politically, except in places where feudalism was broken by the exceptional development of cities, such as in Italy, in exchange for this the city exploited economically in everywhere and without exception to the countryside, through its monopoly prices, its tax system, its union regime, its blatant mercantile swindle and its usury. ”
Feudal power held back the development of crafts and commerce. That is why the cities waged a stubborn fight against the feudal lords. Cities were striving for political independence, self-determination, and freedom from taxes. Little by little, the cities became independent from the feudal lords, but the opposition that existed between the city and the countryside did not disappear. The city continued to economically exploit the countryside. The exploitation of the countryside grew because the city was frequently the place of residence of the feudal lords, the administrative center of the absolutist feudal state.
Mercantile and monetary relations
The natural character of production
Characteristic of feudal estates was the closed nature of the economy. The personal needs of the feudal lords and peasants, as well as the needs of production, were almost entirely paid for on the product of each hacienda.
The additional product generally did not take the commercial form and was appropriated in kind by the feudal lords. The peasants and their families produced in their natural estate almost everything they needed to satisfy their personal needs and the continuity of production. The relationships between members of the peasant’s family within the framework of his hacienda, as well as the relationships between people at the scale of the entire feudal estate, were natural. Even by moving into rent in money, part of the additional product and sometimes all the additional product, it turned into money, the necessary product, which made up a large part of the overall product of the peasant hacienda, generally retained the natural form .
Mercantile production and trade
Although feudal production had a deep natural character, it ensured both the creation of material conditions for the subsequent development, considerably greater productive forces and the elevation of labor productivity compared to the slave regime.
As a result of the increase in productive forces and the development of the social division of labor in feudalism, mercantile production and mercantile circulation achieved a certain development. But mercantile production in the conditions of feudal relations of production, had a subordinate character in relation to the natural estate, served feudal production and played an auxiliary role, especially in the initial phase of feudalism. It was the mercantile production of the small artisans of the city and peasants who produced small quantities of products for exchange on their individual estates.
By dominating the forms of income in labor and products, production for change was an isolated and fortuitous phenomenon. Only when money income appears does the quantity and part of the products that the peasants make for change grow. Due to the increase in trade between the peasants and the feudal lords, on the one hand and with the artisans of the city on the other, internal markets are formed. With the help of trade, economic ties between agricultural producers and artisan producers are established and consolidated.
The development process of mercantile production and mercantile circulation was intensified thanks to the appearance and expansion of foreign trade. International trade was already quite developed at the time of slavery. As the society moved from slavery to feudalism, international trade was greatly reduced, but it began to revive as production grew and the commercial and monetary relations expanded.
As mercantile and monetary relations grew, usurious capital developed. The usurers granted loans in metal to the feudal lords or to the direct producers (artisans and peasants). The source of usurious credit, like the source of mercantile profit, was the additional product created by direct producers and also part of their necessary product.
As the mercantile and monetary relations developed, the feudal hacienda was incorporated into the market rotation. When buying luxury items and items from artisans, the feudal lords were in increasing need of money, so it was convenient for them to move the peasants out of the landowning economy system and the tax economy to pay the rent in money. With this, the individual peasant hacienda was increasingly incorporated into the market rotation.
Classes and status in feudalism
The class structure of society
Feudal society was structured into two fundamental classes: feudal lords and servant or dependent peasants. The feudal lords, owners of the fundamental means of production (land), were the economically dominant class. However, it did not form a totally homogeneous social class. The small feudal lords paid tributes to the most powerful, supported them in wars, and at the same time, had their protection.
The protector was called lord, and the protected, vassal. The lord could be at the same time the vassal of another more powerful lord ..
In keeping with their dominant social position, the feudal lords concentrated all political power in their hands and were concentrated in two privileged states: the nobility and the clergy. The nobility included the regular feudal lords: kings, princes, dukes, counts, barons, viscounts, etc. The clergy was made up of archbishops, bishops, deanes of monasteries, abbots, etc. All the other layers of society comprised the third state, whose members were deprived of political privileges, and a large part of them had absolutely no rights. Peasants lacking all kinds of rights were at the base of the hierarchical pyramid of feudal society and constituted the base of production, from whose exploitation the entire feudal hierarchical pyramid was sustained.
In cities there was also social differentiation. The fundamental part of the population was made up of artisans and merchants. The class structure of the feudal city was not well defined, and they were heterogeneous. In cities freed from dependence on feudal lords, wealthy merchants, usurers, and large homeowners occupied the dominant position, the so-called urban patriciate, to which the wealthy teachers of the guilds also belonged. The rest of the teachers, officers, apprentices and laborers formed the urban plebs.
The political division
The feudal economy and the class struggle engendered by its development determined the essence and form of its political superstructure. The economic division conditioned its political division.
Among the political institutions that constituted the superstructure situated on the economic base, the feudal state played the main role, which took various forms. In its beginnings of feudal society, vast monarchies were formed, in which feudal lords, with the aim of achieving and perpetuating their rule, united around the head of state.
With the definitive establishment of the feudal mode of production, these monarchies of the initial period were divided into a multitude of small independent or semi-independent states.
Emperors, kings or princes were those who personified the supreme power, but outside the limits of their possessions, the power of the monarchs was insignificant. The kingdoms, empires and principalities were in turn divided into numerous large and small estates, in which their owners actually disposed of the full power.
The centralized state
Subsequently, as a result of the economic development of society, the increase in the social division of labor, the spread of mercantile monetary relations, and the increase in the role of the market, the conditions appear for the abolition of the isolation of feudal lords. The tendency to overcome the political division and form centralized states gained strength.
Despite the different forms of the feudal state , its class essence was the same in all the territories. It was an organ of violence , class-controlled by the ruling classes.
