History in the high style begins in every Culture with the feudal State, which is not a State in the coming sense of the word, but an ordering of the common life with reference to an _Estate_. The noblest fruit of the soil, its race in the proudest sense, here builds itself up in a rank-order from the simple knighthood to the _primus inter pares_, the feudal Overlord amongst his Peers. This sets in simultaneously with the architecture of the great cathedrals and the Pyramids--the stone and the blood elevated into symbols, the one _meaning_, the other _being_. The idea of feudalism, which has dominated all Springtimes, is the transition from the primitive, purely practical and factual, relationship of potentate to those who obey him (whether they have chosen him or have been subdued by him) into the _private-law_ (and, therefore, deeply symbolical) relation of the lord to the vassal. This relation rests entirely upon the ethic of nobility, honour, and loyalty, and conjures up the cruellest conflicts between duty to one’s lord and duty to one’s own family. The decadence of Henry the Lion[640] is a tragic example of it.

The “State” exists here only to the extent of the limits of the feudal tie, and it expands its domain by the entry of alien vassals therein. Service to, and agency for, the ruler--originally personal and limited in time--very soon became the permanent fief which, if it escheated, _had_ to be reassigned (already by 1000 the principle of the West was “No land without a lord”), and from that presently passed to the stage of being hereditary (law of Emperor Conrad II, 28th May 1037). Thereby the formerly immediate subjects of the ruler were mediatized, and henceforth they were only his subjects as being subjects of a vassal of his. Nothing but the strong social interbonding of the Estate ensured the cohesion of what must be called, even under these conditions, the State.

The idea of power and booty are seen here in classic union. When, in 1066, William and his Norman chivalry conquered England, the whole land was made King’s property and fee, and it remains so in name to this day. Here is a true Viking delight in “having,” the care of an Odysseus who begins by counting his treasure.[641] From this booty-sense of shrewd conquerors there came, quite suddenly, the famous exchequer-practice and officialdom of the early Cultures. It is well to distinguish these officials from the incumbents of the great confidential offices which had arisen out of the older personal agency;[642] they were _clerici_ or clerks, and not _ministeriales_ or ministers--“servants,” but in a prouder sense now. The financial and clerical officialdom is an expression of Care, and it develops in exact proportion with the development of the dynastic idea. Thus in Egypt it reached an astonishingly high level at the very beginning of the Old Kingdom.[643] The early Chinese official-State described in the _Tshou-li_ is so comprehensive and complicated that the authenticity of the book has been doubted,[644] but in spirit and tendency it corresponds exactly with that of Diocletian, which enabled a feudal order to arise out of an immense fiscal machinery.[645] In the early Classical world it is markedly absent. “_Carpe diem_” was the motto of Classical economics from the first to last, and in this domain as in others Improvidence, the _autarkeia_ of the Stoics, was elevated into a principle. Even the best calculators were no exception--thus Eubulus in Athens, 330 B.C., managed business with an eye to surpluses, but only to distribute them, when gained, amongst the citizens.

The extreme contrast to Eubulus’s finance is afforded by the canny Vikings of the early West, who by the financial administration of their Norman states laid the foundations of the Faustian economics that extend to-day over the whole world. It is from the chequered table in the Norman counting-house of Robert the Devil (1028-35) that we have the name of the English “Exchequer” and hence the word “cheque.” Here also originated the words “control,” “quittance,” “record.”[646] Here it was that after 1066 England was organized as booty, with ruthless reduction of the Anglo-Saxons, to serfdom, and here too originated the Norman State of Sicily--for it was not upon nothing that Frederick II of Hohenstaufen later built; his most personal work, the constitutions of Melfi (1231) he did not create, but only (by methods borrowed from the money-economics of high Arabian Civilization) polished and perfected. From this centre the methodic and descriptive technique of finance spread into the business world of Lombardy and so into all the trading cities and administrations of the West.

But in Feudalism build-up and breakdown lie close together. When the primary estates were still in full bloom and vigour, the future nations, and with them the germ of the State-idea proper, were stirring into life. The opposition between temporal and spiritual power and that between crown and vassals was cut across again and again by oppositions of nationhood--German-French even from Otto the Great’s times; German-Italian, which rent Italy between the Guelphs and Ghibellines and destroyed the German Empire; French-English, which brought about the English dominion over western France. Still, all this was far less important than the great decisions within the feudal order itself, where the idea of nationality was unknown. England was broken up into 60,251 fiefs, catalogued in the Domesday Book of 1084 (consulted even to-day upon occasion), and the strictly organized central power required allegiance to itself even from the sub-tenants of the peers, but all the same it was less than a hundred and fifty years later that Magna Charta was forced through (1215), and actual power transferred from the King to the Parliament of the vassals--made up of great barons and ecclesiastics in the Upper house, gentry and patricians in the Lower--which thenceforward became the support and champion of _national_ development. In France the baronage, in conjunction with the clergy and the towns, forced the calling of the States-General in 1302; the General Privilege of Saragossa in 1283 made Aragon into a quasi-republic of nobles ruled by its Cortes, and in Germany a few decades earlier a group of great vassals made the election of the German Kingship dependent upon themselves as Electors.

The mightiest expression that the feudal idea found for itself--not merely in the West, but in any Culture--came out in the struggle between Empire and Papacy, both of which dreamed of a consummation in which the entire world was to become an immense feudal system, and so intimately enwove themselves into the dream that, with the decay of feudalism, both together fell from their heights in lamentable ruin.

The idea of a Ruler whose writ should run throughout the whole historical world, whose Destiny should be that of all mankind, has taken visible shape in, so far, three instances--firstly, in the conception of the Pharaoh as Horus;[647] secondly, in the great Chinese imagining of the Ruler of the Middle, whose domain is _tien-hia_, everything lying below the heavens;[648] and, thirdly, in early Gothic times. In 962 Otto the Great, answering to the deep mystical sense and yearning for historical and spatial infinity that was sweeping through the world of those days, conceived the idea of the “Holy Roman Empire, German by nation.” But even earlier, Pope Nicolas I (860), still completely involved in Augustinian--that is, Magian--lines of thought, had dreamed of a Papal democracy which was to stand above the princes of this world, and from 1059 Gregory VII with all the prime force of his Faustian nature set out to actualize a papal world-dominion under the forms of a universal feudalism, with kings as vassals. The Papacy itself, indeed, under its domestic aspect, constituted the small feudal State of the Campagna, whose noble families controlled the election of popes, and which very rapidly converted the college of cardinals (to which the duty was entrusted from 1059 on) into a sort of noble oligarchy. But under the broader aspect of external policy Gregory VII actually _obtained_ feudal supremacy over the Norman states of England and Sicily, both of which were created with his support, and actually awarded the Imperial crown as Otto the Great had awarded the tiara. But a little later Henry VI of Hohenstaufen succeeded in the opposite sense; even Richard Cœur-de-Lion swore the vassal’s oath to him for England, and the universal Empire was on the point of becoming a fact when the greatest of all popes, Innocent III (1198-1216) made the papal overlordship of the world real for a short time. England became a Papal fief in 1213; Aragon and Leon and Portugal, Denmark and Poland and Hungary, Armenia and the recently founded Latin Empire in Byzantium followed. But with Innocent’s death disintegration set in within the Church itself, and the great spiritual dignitaries, whom their investitures turned into vassals of the Pope as overlord, soon followed the lay vassals’ example and set about limiting him by means of representative institutions for their order.[649] The notion that a General Council stood higher than a pope was not of religious origin, but arose primarily out of the feudal principle. Its tendency corresponded precisely to that which the English magnates had made good in Magna Charta. In the councils of Constance (1414) and Basel (1431) the last attempts were made to turn the Church, under its temporal aspect, into a clerical feudalism, in which an oligarchy of cardinals would have become the representative of the whole Clerical Estate of the West and taken the place hitherto held by the Roman nobility. But by that time the feudal idea had long taken second place to that of the State, and so the Roman barons won the victory. The field of candidature for the Papacy was limited to the narrowest environs of Rome, and unlimited power over the organizations of the Church was _ipso facto_ secured to the centre. As for the Empire, it had long ago become a venerated shadow, like the Egyptian and the Chinese.

In comparison with the immense dynamism of these decisions, the building-up of feudalism in the Classical world was slow, static, almost noiseless, so that it is hardly recognizable save from the traces of transition. In the Homeric epos as we have it now, every locality possesses its Basileus, who, it is fairly evident, was once a great vassal--we can see in the figure of Agamemnon the conditions in which the ruler of a wide region took the field with the train of his peers. But in the Greek world the dissolution of the feudal world was associated with the formation of the _city_-state, the political “point.” In consequence, the hereditary court-offices, the _archai_ and _timai_, the _prytaneis_, the Archons, and perhaps the original Prætor,[650] were all urban in nature; and the great families therefore developed, not separately in their counties, as in Egypt, China, and the West, but in the closest touch with the city, where they obtained possession of the rights of the King, one after the other, until nothing was left to the ruling house but that which could not be touched because of the gods--namely, the title attaching to its sacrificial function (hence the _rex sacrorum_). In the later parts of the Homeric epic (_c._ 800) it is the nobles who invite the king to take his seat, and even unseat him. The Odyssey really knows the kingship only as part of the saga--the actual Ithaca that it shows us is a city dominated by oligarchs.[651] The Spartiates, like the Roman partriciate of the Comitia Curiata, are the product of a feudal relation.[652] In the _phiditiæ_[653] there are evident remains of the old open table of the noble, but the power of the king has sunk to the shadowy dignity of the _rex sacrorum_ of Rome, or the “kings” of Sparta, who were liable to be imprisoned or removed at any time by the Ephors. The essential similarity of these conditions forces us to presume that in Rome the Tarquinian Tyrannis of 500 was preceded by a period of oligarchical dominance, and this view is supported by the unquestionably genuine tradition of the _Interrex_, a person appointed by the council of the nobles (the Senate) from amongst its own members to act until it should please them to elect a king again.

Here, as elsewhere, there comes a time in which feudalism is falling into decay, but the coming State is not yet completed, the nation not yet “in form.” This is the fearful crisis that emerges everywhere in the shape of the Interregnum, and forms the boundary _between the feudal union and the class-State_. In Egypt feudalism was fully developed by about the middle of the Vth Dynasty. The Pharaoh Asosi gave away his domains literally piece by piece to the vassals, and, further, the rich fiefs of the priesthood were (exactly as in the West) free of taxation and gradually became the permanent property (“mortmain,” as we should say) of the great temples.[654] With the Vth Dynasty (_c._ 2530 B.C.) the “Hohenstaufen” age comes to an end. Under the shadow-kingship of the short-lived VIth Dynasty the princes (_rpati_) and counts (_hetio_) become independent; the high offices are all hereditary and the tomb-inscriptions show us more and more proud stress upon ancient lineage. That which later Egyptian historians have hidden under the reputed VIIth and VIIIth dynasties[655] is really half a century of anarchy and lawless conflicts between princes for each other’s domains or for the Pharaoh-title. In China, even I-Wang (934-909) was obliged by his vassals to give out all conquered lands, and to do so to sub-tenants nominated by them. In 842 Li-Wang was forced, with his heir, to flee, and the administration of the Empire was carried on by two individual princes. In this interregnum began the fall of the House of Chóu and the decline of the Imperial name into an honourable but meaningless title. It is the corresponding picture to that of the Interregnum in Germany, which began in 1254 and brought the Imperial power to its nadir of 1400 under Wenceslaus, simultaneously with the Renaissance-style of the _condottieri_ and the complete decay of the Papal power. After the death of Boniface VIII, who in 1302 had once again asserted the feudal power of the Papacy in the Bull _Unam sanctam_ and had consequently been arrested by the representatives of France, the Papacy experienced a century of banishment, anarchy, and impotence, while in the following century the Norman nobility of England for the most part perished in the contest of the houses of York and Lancaster for the throne.