From Slavery to Feudalism in South-Western Europe

by Pierre Bonnassie , Translated by Jean Birrell

• ISBN13: 9780521112550
• ISBN10: 0521112559
• Edition: 1st
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2009-06-04
• Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Summary

This book is first and foremost an extended examination and discussion of the enslavement of men and women by others of their society and in particular of the means and causes of the gradual end of slavery in early medieval Europe between 500 and 1200. Drawing upon a very wide range of primary and archival sources, Professor Bonnassie places fresh findings about subjection, servitude and lordship in relation to the prevailing understanding of social history which has developed since the work of Marc Bloch. The author explains how slavery long persisted in southern France and Spain, as part of a public order that also sheltered free peasants, giving way in the tenth and eleventh centuries to a new regime of harsh lordships that mark the beginnings of feudalism. He shows that feudalism in south-western Europe was no less significant than in northern European lands.

Table of Contents

List of maps

Foreword

Abbreviations

The survival and extinction of the slave system in the early medieval West (fourth to eleventh centuries)

Society and mentalities in Visigothic Spain

From the Rhone to Galicia: origins and modalities of the feudal order

Descriptions of fortresses in the Book of Miracles of Sainte-Foy of Conques

The formation of Catalan feudalism and its early expansion (to c. 1150)

Feudal conventions in eleventh-century Catalonia

The noble and the ignoble: a new nobility and a new servitude in Catalonia at the end of the eleventh century

Rural communities in Catalonia and Valencia (from the ninth to the mid-fourteenth centuries)

From one servitude to another: the peasantry of the Frankish kingdom at the time of Hugh Capet and Robert the Pious (987-1031)

Marc Bloch, historian of servitude: reflections on the concept of 'servile class'

Index

Table of Contents provided by Publisher. All Rights Reserved.