Word Finder - fiefs

definition

An estate held by a person on condition of providing military service to a superior.

definition

Something over which one has rights or exercises control.

definition

An area of dominion, especially in a corporate or governmental bureaucracy.

If there was thus only a customary and unwritten law (and William of Tyre definitely speaks of a jus consuetudinarium under Baldwin III., quo regnum regebatur), then the "Letters of the Sepulchre" are a myth - or rather, if they ever existed, they existed not as a code of written law, but, perhaps, as a register of fiefs, like the Sicilian Defetarii.

Thomas's other sons received fiefs and bishoprics abroad, and one of them, Boniface, was made archbishop of Canterbury.

It should also here be noticed that the changes introduced into the holding of the fiefs, whether by altering their boundaries or substituting Frankish for Lombard vassals, were chief among the causes why the feudal system took no permanent hold in Italy.

Internally Charles left the affairs of the Italian kingdom much as he found them, except that he appears to have pursued the policy of breaking up the larger fiefs of the Lombards, substituting counts for their dukes, and adding to the privileges of the bishops.

She was the last heiress of the great house of Canossa, whose fiefs stretched from Mantua across Lombardy, passed the Apennines, included the Tuscan plains, and embraced a portion of the duchy of Spoleto.

Here again he cited the action of Charlemagne, his august predecessor, who had merely given certain domains to the bishops of Rome as fiefs, though Rome did not thereby cease to be part of his empire.

Henceforward he who inherits a barony must pay r¦o, he who inherits a knight's fee too shillings or less, and for smaller holdings less "according to the ancient custom of fiefs."

The loss of his southern possessions by the treaty of Bretigny was compensated by the fiefs of Auvergne and Berry, with the rank of peer of France.

Every manor composing these great fiefs was likely to be affected by the policy or the character of the administration of the feudal lord, and he, again, by the policy or the difficulties, the strength or the weakness, of the central government.

In order to hold these possessions, she borrowed from the Franks the feudal system, and granted fiefs in the Greek islands to her more powerful families, on condition that they held the trade route open for her.

We have already seen that it was the theory of the Eastern emperors - a theory which logically followed from the homage of the crusaders to Alexiusthat the conquests of the crusaders belonged to their empire, and were held by the crusading princes as fiefs.

The conception of the kingdom as a fief not only subjected it to the jurisdiction of the high court; it involved the more disastrous result that the kingdom, like other fiefs, might be carried by an heiress to her husband; and the proximate causes of the collapse of the kingdom in 1187 depend on this fact and the dissensions which it occasioned.

Thus conceived as the holder of a great fief, the king had only the rights of suzerain over the four great baronies and the twelve minor fiefs of his kingdom.

But the king had another force in addition to the feudal levy - a paid force of soudoyers, 2 holding fiefs, not of land, but of pay (fiefs de soudee).

Locally, the consideration of the system of justice administered in the kingdom involves some account of three things - the organization of the fiefs, the position of the Italian traders in their quarters, and the privileges of the Church.

There were some thirty-seven cours de bourgeoisie (several of the fiefs having more than one), each of which was under the presidency of a vicomte, while all were independent of the court of burgesses at Jerusalem.

Manuel Comnenus demanded that all conquests made by the crusaders should be his fiefs; and the question was debated whether the crusaders should follow the land route through Hungary, along the old road of Charlemagne, or should go by sea to the Holy Land.

The conspiracy failed, and Eustace was sentenced to forfeit his English fiefs.

Cesare, then a youth of sixteen and a student at Pisa, was made archbishop of Valencia, his nephew Giovanni received a cardinal's hat, and for the duke of Gandia and Giuffre the pope proposed to carve fiefs out of the papal states and the kingdom of Naples.

Among the fiefs destined for the duke of Gandia were Cervetri and Anguillara, lately acquired by Virginio Orsini, head of that powerful and turbulent house, with the pecuniary help of Ferdinand of Aragon, king of Naples (Don Ferrante).

But when the French invasion became a reality he was alarmed, recognized Alphonso as king, and concluded an alliance with him in exchange for various fiefs to his sons (July 1494).

The expenditure of the first category was made up of the service of foreign loans, of the general debt, of the dotations replacing ziamet and timarat (military fiefs) and of fixed contributions such as vakufs.

He established the system whereby the lands conquered by the arms of his troops were divided into the different classes of fiefs, or else assigned to the maintenance of mosques, colleges, schools and charitable institutions, or converted into common and pasturage lands.

On the conquest of a country the lands were apportioned by the nishanjis, who first computed the tithe revenueof each village, its population, woods, pasturage, &c.; and divided it into the three classes of fiefs (khas, ziamet and timar), or into vakilf (pious endowments) or pasturage.

Fiefs with a revenue of from 20,000 to 100,000 aspres were called ziamets and were conferred on similar terms on inferior officers, usually for life or during good behaviour.

Fiefs with a revenue of from 3000 to 20,000 aspres were timars, furnishing one armed warrior for every 3000 aspres' revenue; the grant of a fief was conditional on obligatory residence.

While the persevering policy of the Capets, which aimed at reuniting the great fiefs, duchies, countships, baronies, &c., to the domain of the crown, gradually reconstructed for their benefit a territorial sovereignty over France, the institution of the appanage periodically subtracted large portions from it.

The biens nobles (fiefs) and the biens ecclesiastiques were exempt; tenures roturieres, however, by whomsoever held, were taxed.

Le Couronnement Looys, already mentioned, Le Charroi de Nimes (12th century) in which Guillaume, who had been forgotten in the distribution of fiefs, enumerates his services to the terrified Louis, and Aliscans (r2th century), with the earlier Chanrun, are among the finest of the French epic poems. The figure of Vivien is among the most heroic elaborated by the trouveres, and the giant Rainouart has more than a touch of Rabelaisian humour.

Thus were formed the vast but straggling fiefs which are recorded in Domesday.

In the 14th century the original house of Dalberg became extinct in the male line, the fiefs passing to Johann Gerhard, chamberlain of the see of Worms, who married the heiress of his cousin, Anton of Dalberg, about 1330.

After this murder John was condemned by the court of peers of France, and stripped of the fiefs which he possessed in France.

This was first done on a large scale in 1803, when by a recess of the imperial diet many of the smaller fiefs were mediatized, in order to compensate those German princes who had been forced to cede their territories on the left bank of the Rhine to France.

Ideally regarded, feudalism covered Europe with a network of these fiefs, rising in graded ranks one above the other from the smallest, the knight's fee, at the bottom, to the king at the top, who was the supreme landowner, or who held the kingdom from God.

But the members of the feudal court met, not to fulfil a duty owed to the community, but a private obligation which they had assumed in return for the fiefs they held, and in the history of institutions it is differences of this sort which are the determining principles.

In the 11th century Eccelin, a German, obtained fiefs in this district from Conrad II.

The second class maintained communications between the fiefs and the Tokugawa court as well as their own families in Yedo, for in the alternate years of a feudatorys compulsory residence in that city his family had to live there.

It was included in Charlemagne's empire and was divided by him into counties, which evolved there as elsewhere into hereditary fiefs; but after the break-up of Charlemagne's empire, the Burgundian kingdom revived and Savoy was again absorbed in it.

But although this division was formally recognized in 1295, Amadeus succeeded in enforcing his own supremacy over the whole country and making of it a more unified state than before, and by war, purchase or treaty he regained other fiefs which his predecessors had lost.

On the extinction of this family in 1248, most of their fiefs were given by the two bishops to the father-in-law of the last lord of Andechs, Albert, count of Tirol.

On the 22nd of May 1200 the treaty was finally signed, John ceding with his niece the fiefs of Issoudun and Gragay, together with those that Andre de Chavigny, lord of Chateauroux, held in Berry, of the English crown.

They would also have conceded the pope the right to play the role of a secular ruler in his own lands, as did the German bishops, and to dispose of such fiefs as reverted to him.

A second rising was caused when, on the death of Ulrich II., count of Weimar and OrlamUnde, without issue in 1112, Henry seized these counties as vacant fiefs of the empire, while Lothair supported the claim of Siegfried, count of Ballenstadt, whose mother was a relative of Ulrich.

He then received as papal fiefs the vast estates of Matilda, marchioness of Tuscany, thus securing for his daughter and her Welf husband lands which might otherwise have passed to the Hohenstaufen.

In 1135, Eric II., king of Denmark, acknowledged himself a vassal of Lothair; Boleslaus III., prince of the Poles, promised tribute and received Pomerania and Riigen as German fiefs; while the eastern emperor, John Comnenus, implored Lothair's aid against Roger II.

About 1 33 8 John bought Culmbach and Plassenburg, and on the strength of a privilege granted to him in 1347 he seized many robberfortresses and held the surrounding lands as imperial fiefs.

Throughout the 9th and 10th centuries, as the life-benefices of the later Carolingian kings were gradually transformed into hereditary fiefs, the insecurity of life and property increased, for there was no central power to curb the warring local magnates.

This corruption was fatally apparent in the army, the feudal basis of which was sapped by the confiscation of fiefs for the benefit of nominees of favourites of the harem, and by the intrusion, through the same influences of foreigners and rayahs into the corps of janissaries, of which the discipline became more and more relaxed and the temper increasingly turbulent.

By the Angevines Potenza was made a domain of the San Severino family; in the beginning of the 15th century it was held by Francesco Sforza, and in 1435 it passed to the Guevara family; the Loffredi, who succeeded by marriage, continued in possession till the abolition of the great fiefs.

Feudalism had a phraseology to express the varieties of fiefs which existed under it; modern international law has no generally-accepted terminology for the still greater variety of states which now exist.