FREDERICK  ENGELS
[THE  DECLINE  OF  FEUDALISM  AND  THE  RISE
OF  THE  BOURGEOISIE]
While the noise of the devastating wars waged by the
ruling feudal nobility filled the Middle Ages, the labour of
the oppressed classes had quietly undermined the feudal
system throughout Western Europe creating conditions in
which less and less room remained for the feudal lord. It
is true that the noble lords still carried on as before in the
countryside, tormented their serfs, led a life of luxury
based on their toil, rode down their crops and raped their
wives and daughters. But all around them cities came into
being, ancient Roman municipia rose from their ashes in
Italy, the south of France and on the Rhine; elsewhere,
especially in the interior of Germany they were newly
created. These cities, which were always encircled with a
protective wall and moat, were fortresses far stronger than
the castles of the nobility, for they could only be conquered by a large army. Behind these walls and moats
the medieval handicrafts developed-along guild lines and
on a rather petty scale-the first capitals were accumulated,
the need for commerce between the cities and with the rest
of the world arose, and with this need the means to protect
this commerce were gradually acquired.
In the fifteenth century, the urban citizens were already
a more essential element of society than the feudal nobility. Although the bulk of the population was still engaged
in agriculture, which thus remained the principal branch
of production, but the very few free peasants, who had

THE  DECLINE  OF  FEUDALISM  AND  THE  RISE OF  THE  BOURGEOISIE  461
survived in some places despite the usurpations of the
nobility, demonstrated sufficiently clearly that not the
idleness and the extortions of the nobleman were of vital
importance in agriculture but the work of the peasant.
Moreover, the requirements of the nobleman had also
increased and changed to such an extent that even for him
the cities had become indispensable, for he obtained the
only means of production he used, his armour and
weapons, from the towns. He bought everything-locally-
made cloth, furniture and jewellery, Italian silks, Mechlin
lace, furs from the North, perfumes from Arabia, fruit
from the Levant, spices from India-everything, except
soap, from the townspeople. A certain amount of international trade had developed. The Italians sailed across the
Mediterranean and beyond it along the Atlantic coast up
to Flanders, and the Hanseatic League136 still dominated
the North Sea and the Baltic, though it encountered growing Dutch and English competition. Overland routes were
used to link the northern and southern centres of maritime
commerce, and these routes went through Germany.
Whereas the nobility became more and more superfluous
and hampered development to an increasing extent, the
townspeople became the class that represented the further
development of production and commerce, of culture and
of social and political institutions.
All these advances in production and exchange were
actually very limited, according to modern concepts.
Production remained entirely within the confines of the
craft guilds and therefore retained its feudal character.
Commerce remained within the European waters and did
not go beyond the coastal towns of the Levant, where it
obtained the products of the Far East. But although the
trades remained petty and restricted and with them also
the citizens who carried on these trades, they were nevertheless able to overturn feudal society, and at any rate they
continued to develop whereas the nobility stagnated.
The townspeople moreover had a powerful weapon

462 FREDERICK  ENGELS
which they could use against feudalism-money. There was
hardly any room for money in the feudal economic model
of the early Middle Ages. The feudal lord got everything
he needed from his serfs, either in the form of labour or
as finished products. The women span and wove flax and
wool and made clothes, the men tilled the land, the children tended the cattle of the lord and gathered the products
of the forest, birds' nests and litter, and in addition the
family as a whole had to provide corn, fruit, eggs, butter,
cheese, poultry, young cattle and many other things. Every
feudal domain was self-sufficient, even war contributions
were collected in kind, commerce and exchange did not
exist, money was therefore superfluous. Europe had been
reduced to such a low level and had to start again from
the beginning, so that the function money fulfilled at that
time was simply political and to a much smaller extent
social-it was used to pay taxes and was mainly acquired
through robbery.
All that changed now. Money was again the universal
means of exchange and accordingly its amount increased
significantly. The noblemen too could no longer manage
without it, and since they had little or nothing to sell and
robbery too was not such a simple business any longer,
the noblemen were obliged to borrow money from the
plebeian usurer. Money undermined the castles of the
knights long before the new cannon breached their walls,
in fact gunpowder was as it were merely a bailiff in the
service of money. Money was used by the townspeople as
the great political leveller. Wherever money relations displaced personal relations and payment in money displaced
payment in kind, bourgeois relations took the place of
feudal relations. Although the old crude natural economy
survived to a large extent in the countryside, there were
however already entire districts, e.g., in Holland, Belgium
and on the lower Rhine, where instead of corvee and dues
in kind, the peasants paid money to the lords, where the
lords and their subjects had already taken the first decisive

THE  DECLINE  OF  FEUDALISM  AND  THE  RISE OF  THE  BOURGEOISIE  463
step towards the transition to landlords and tenants, and
where therefore the political institutions of feudalism were
deprived of their social basis even in the countryside.
The thirst for gold, which gripped Western Europe at
the close of the fifteenth century, demonstrates vividly
the extent to which feudal society was already undermined
and eroded at that time. The Portuguese tried to find
gold on the coast of Africa, in India and throughout the
Far East, gold was the magic word which drove the
Spaniards across the Atlantic to America, and gold was
the first thing the white man inquired about as soon as he
set foot on a newly-discovered shore. But this urge to set
out on adventurous journeys in search of gold, although it
was initially realised in feudal or semi-feudal forms, was
nevertheless fundamentally incompatible with feudalism,
whose basis was agriculture and whose military campaigns were essentially designed for the conguest of land.
Navigation moreover was definitely a middle-class occupation, and its anti-feudal nature has left its mark on all
modern navies.
Feudal society in Western Europe was therefore rapidly
declining in the fifteenth century. Towns with their anti-
feudal interests, their own law, and their body of armed
citizens had penetrated into the feudal territories everywhere, and by means of their money had already made the
feudal lords partly dependent on them socially, and in
some places politically as well. Even in the country where
agriculture had improved owing to specially favourable
conditions the old feudal ties began to be loosened under
the influence of money. Only in newly-conquered territories, such as the German conquests east of the Elbe, or in
other backward regions situated far from the trade routes,
did the traditional rule of the aristocracy continue to flourish. But everywhere-in town and country-there was an
increase in those sections of the population whose principal demand was the cessation of the interminable senseless
wars, the feuds waged by the feudal lords, which led to

464 FREDERICK  ENGELS
permanent internal warfare even when enemies from
abroad stood in the country, that state of incessant and
quite pointless devastation which continued throughout
the Middle Ages. These sections, which were still too weak
to enforce their demands, received strong support from
the monarchy, the apex of the entire feudal system. And
this is the point where the examination of social conditions
leads us to the examination of political conditions, and
where we have to proceed from economics to politics. ■
Gradually new nationalities arose from the welter of
ethnic groups which we see in the early Middle Ages, and
it is well known that this process led in most of the former Roman provinces to the assimilation of the conquerors by the vanquished, the Germanic lord by the peasant
and the townsman. Hence the modern nationalities are
likewise the product of the oppressed classes. A graphic
picture of how amalgamation proceeded here and lines of
demarcation were established there, is provided by Menke's district map of central Lorraine."' One need only trace
a line dividing Romance and German geographical names
on this map to realise that as far as Belgium and Lower
Lorraine are concerned, this line coincides in the main
with the linguistic boundary between French and German
which still existed a century ago. In some places one can
still find a narrow disputed strip where the two languages
are striving for priority, but it is on the whole certain
which part will remain German and which Romance. The
Old Lower Frankish or the Old High German form of
most geographical names on the map proves that they
arose in the ninth century, or at the latest in the tenth, and
that therefore the boundary had for the most part been
already established at the close of the Carolingian period.
On the Romance side, especially near the linguistic boun-
* Spruner-Menke, Hand-Atlas zur Geschichte des Mittelalters und
det neueren Zeit, 3. Aufl., Gotha 1874, Karte Nr. 32. [Note by Engels.]

THE  DECLINE  OF  FEUDALISM  AND  THE  RISE OF  THE  BOURGEOISIE  465
dary, we find composite names consisting of a German
personal name and a Romance geographical name, e.g.,
west of the Meuse near Verdun-Eppone curtis, Rotfridi
curtis, Ingolini curtis and Teudegisilo-villa, now Ippecourt,
Recourt la Creux, Amblaincourt sur Aire and Thierville.
These were estates of Frankish lords, small German colonies on Romance soil, bound to become Romance sooner or
later. Larger German colonies, which existed in the towns
and some rural areas, preserved their language for a considerable time, for example as late as the close of the ninth
century the Ludwigslied137 arose in one of these colonies.
But the formal oaths sworn by the kings and their magnates in 842, in which Romance is already used as the
official language of France,138 show that a large number
of Frankish lords were Romanised even earlier.
Once the areas of the language groups were delimited
(apart from subsequent wars of conquest or extermination,
like those waged against the Slavs on the Elbe139) it was
natural that they served as a convenient basis for the formation of states, and that nationalities began to develop
into nations. How strong this factor was even in the ninth
century is demonstrated by the rapid disintegration of
Lotharingia,140 which was a composite state. Although
throughout the Middle Ages linguistic boundaries and
state boundaries were by no means identical, nevertheless
each nationality, perhaps with the exception of Italy, was
represented in Europe by one particular big state, and the
tendency to set up national states-a tendency which became
increasingly conspicuous and purposeful-is one of the
principal progressive factors of the Middle Ages.
The apex of the entire feudal hierarchy in each of these
medieval states was the king, and the vassals, who could
not possibly manage without him, were at the same time
in a state of perpetual rebellion against him. The foundation of the whole feudal economy, the granting of land in
return for certain personal services and dues, even in its
initial and most simple form provided sufficient opportu-
30 — m

466 FREDERICK  ENGELS
nity for conflicts, especially when so many were interested
in picking a quarrel. How much worse was the position
in the late Middle Ages, when feudal relations in all countries formed an inextricable tangle of granted, withdrawn,
renewed, forfeited, changed or somehow modified rights
and duties. For example Charles the Bold held some of his
land from the Emperor, and other territories from the
King of France; on the other hand the King of France,
his liege lord, held certain territories from Charles the
Bold, his own vassal. How was it possible to avoid conflicts under these circumstances?
Hence we see for centuries an alternation of the vassals
being attracted by the monarchical centre, which alone
could protect them against attacks from without and against
one another, and the constant and inevitable transformation of this attraction into repulsion. Hence the incessant struggle between monarchy and vassals, whose monotonous din drowned everything else during the long period when robbery was considered the only source of income worthy of a free man. Hence that endless and constantly repeated series of treachery, assassination, poisoning, foul play and any other villainy imaginable, which
masqueraded under the poetic name of chivalry and talked
ceaselessly of honour and loyalty.
It is self-evident that the monarchy was the progressive element in this universal confusion. It stood for order
in this disorder, for the emerging nation as against fragmentation into rebellious vassal states. All revolutionary elements which arose under the feudal surface depended just
as much on the monarchy as the monarchy depended on
them. The alliance between monarchy and townspeople
dates from the tenth century. It was often suspended by
conflicts, for nothing followed a consistent course throughout the Middle Ages, but was renewed and became firmer
and firmer and more powerful, until it enabled the monarchy
finally to triumph and as a reward the monarchy subjugated and plundered its allies.

THE  DECLINE  OF  FEUDALISM  AND  THE  RISE OF  THE  BOURGEOISIE  467
Kings and citizens were strongly supported by the
emerging profession of jurists. The rediscovery of Roman
law led to a division of labour between clerics, the legal
advisers of the feudal period, and non-ecclesiastic lawyers.
This new type of lawyer belonged from the outset intrinsically to the middle class, moreover the law which these
lawyers studied, expounded and applied was by its very
nature anti-feudal and in a way middle-class. Roman law
is to such an extent the classical legal expression of the
living conditions and conflicts of a society dominated by
unadulterated private property that none of the codes of
law adopted later was able to improve it substantially. But
middle-class property in the Middle Ages was still strongly
affected by feudal restrictions, e.g., it consisted largely of
privileges, in this respect therefore Roman law was far in
advance of the civic relations obtaining at that time. The
further historical development of middle-class property
was bound to, and actually did, lead to pure private property. But this development must have received a strong
impetus from Roman law, which already contained everything towards which the townspeople of the late Middle
Ages were heading though as yet unwittingly.
Even though in many individual cases Roman law served
as a pretext for the increased oppression of the peasants
by the nobility, e.g., when peasants were unable to supply
written proof that they were freed from customary obligations, this does not affect the substance of the matter. Without Roman law the nobility would also have found such
pretexts, and did find them every day. It was at any rate
a tremendous advance when a code of law was recognised
to which feudal relations were something quite unknown
and which completely anticipated modern private property.
We have seen that the feudal nobility were becoming
economically superfluous, and indeed an impediment, in
the society of the late Middle Ages, and that politically
too they even obstructed the development of the towns and
of the national state, which at that time could only arise
80*

468 FREDERICK  ENGELS
in a monarchical form. In spite of all that they had been
sustained by the fact that up to then they had the monopoly of using arms, and that without them no wars could be
waged and no battles fought. This was to be changed as
well, a decisive development was to occur making it evident to the feudal lords that the period socially and politically dominated by them was at an end, and that as knights
they were no longer of any use even on the battlefield.
To fight the feudal system with a feudal army, whose
soldiers were bound by closer ties to their immediate liege
lords than to the monarch's army headquarters, obviously
meant moving in a vicious circle and making no headway.
From the beginning of the fourteenth century, the kings
tried to become independent of this feudal army and to
create their own army. From that time onwards we see
that the armies of the kings comprised a constantly growing section of hired or mercenary troops. Initially they were
mainly foot-soldiers, consisting of the scum of the urban
population and fugitive serfs, Lombards, Genoese, Germans, Belgians and so on. They were used to garrison
towns and for siege operations, and in the beginning they
could hardly be used in open battle. But towards the end
of the Middle Ages we see that knights with their retinue
which they had scraped together somehow or other, went
as mercenaries into the service of foreign princes, thus
demonstrating the irredeemable collapse of the feudal military system.
It was at the same time that the towns and free peasants,
where they had survived or had again come into being,
provided the chief prerequisite for the creation of an effective body of foot-soldiers. The knights and their retainers,
likewise on horseback, had up to then constituted not
merely the nucleus of the army, but rather the army itself,
for the crowd of serfs who accompanied them did not
count, and in the open field they seemed to exist merely
in order to run away or to plunder. All battles were fought
and decided by the cavalry in the heyday of feudalism, up

the decline of feudalism and the rise of the BOURGEOISIE  469
to the close of the thirteenth century. But from then on
matters changed and moreover at several points simultaneously. The gradual disappearance of serfdom in England
created a large class of free peasants, yeomen"' or tenants,
and thus the raw material for a new kind of foot-soldier
practised in the use of the longbow, then the English national weapon. The introduction of the longbowmen, who
always fought on foot whether they were mounted during
the march or not, brought about a substantial change in
the tactics of the English armies. Since the fourteenth
century, the English knights liked to fight on foot where
the terrain or other circumstances made this appropriate.
Behind the longbowmen, who started the fight and wore
the enemy down, the compact phalanx of dismounted
knights awaited an enemy attack or an opportune moment
for charging, while only some of them remained on
horseback to help decide the outcome by flank attacks.
The victories then constantly gained by the English in
France141 are largely due to this reintroduction of a defensive element in the army and are for the most part defensive battles with an offensive counter-thrust, just as those
fought by Wellington in Spain and Belgium. After the
adoption of these new tactics by the French-perhaps after
they began to use hired Italian crossbowmen whose role
was similar to that of the English longbowmen-the victorious advance of the English came to an end. It was likewise at the beginning of the fourteenth century that the footsoldiers of the Flemish cities dared to confront-and often
successfully-the French chivalry in open battle,142 and that
a stimulus for the establishment of the first modern infantry of European fame was given by Emperor Albrecht's
attempt to betray the free Swiss peasants to the Archduke
of Austria, i.e., to himself. The triumphs of the Swiss over
the Austrians, and especially over the Burgundians, signify the irrevocable defeat of the armoured cavalry-mounted
Engels uses the English word.-Ed.

470 FREDERICK  ENGELS
or dismounted-by the infantry, of the feudal army by the
incipient modern army, and of the knights by the townsmen and free peasants. So as to establish at once the middle-class nature of their republic, the first independent
republic in Europe, the Swiss immediately began to turn
their military glory into cash. Disregarding all political
considerations, the Cantons were turned into recruiting offices for the supply of mercenaries to the highest bidder.
Elsewhere too, especially in Germany, recruiting was in
full swing, but the cynicism of a government whose only
purpose seemed to be the sale of its own subjects remained
unequalled, until it was surpassed by German princes in
the period of extreme national degradation.
Moreover also in the fourteenth century the Arabs
brought gunpowder and artillery via Spain to Europe. But
hand-guns were of no importance up to the close of the
Middle Ages, this is understandable because the longbow
of the English archer at Crecy could hit a target at the
same distance as, and perhaps even more reliably than,
the smooth-bored musket used by the infantryman at Waterloo, although not with the same effect.143 The field-gun
was likewise still in its infancy, but heavy cannon had
already frequently breached exposed castle walls, thus
announcing to the feudal nobility that gunpowder confirmed the end of their rule.
The spread of printing, the renewed study of classical
literature, and the whole cultural movement which grew
constantly stronger and more general since 1450-all this
helped the townspeople and the monarchy in their struggle
against feudalism.
The combination of all these causes, which became stronger with every year as a result of their growing interaction,
which increasingly moved in the same direction, brought
about the victory of the monarchy, though not yet of the
middle class, over feudalism in the second half of the
fifteenth century. Royal power suddenly gained the upper
hand everywhere in Europe, even in distant minor states

THE  DECLINE  OF  FEUDALISM  AND  THE  RISE OF  THE  BOURGEOISIE  471
which had not experienced feudalism. On the Iberian
Peninsula the kingdom of Spain was formed by the union
of two Romance speaking peoples, and the state of Aragon,
whose population spoke a Provencal tongue, adopted the
Castilian written language144; the third group combined
their linguistic area (except Galicia) to form the kingdom of Portugal, the Iberian Netherlands, which, turning its back on the interior, proved by its seafaring activity that it had a right to an independent existence.
After the destruction of the buffer state of Burgundy,145
Louis XI of France finally managed to establish national
unity, represented by the monarchy, on French territory,
which at that time was still considerably smaller; he succeeded to such an extent that his successor*  was already
able to interfere in Italian affairs146 and national unity
was only once imperilled, for a short time, by the reformation.147 England had at last abandoned her quixotic wars
of conquest in France, which in the long run would have
bled her white. The feudal nobility tried to find a substitute in the Wars of the Roses148 and got more than they
bargained for; they destroyed one another and placed the
Tudors on the throne, whose regal power surpassed that of
all their predecessors and successors. The Scandinavian
countries were long since united. Poland, after her union
with Lithuania, was advancing towards her golden age
with an as yet unimpaired monarchy. And even in Russia
the subjugation of the local princes went hand in hand
with the liberation from the Tartar yoke and was finally
brought about by Ivan III.149 Italy and Germany were the
only countries in the whole of Europe in which monarchy
and national unity, which at that time could not be
achieved without monarchy, did not exist at all, or existed
only on paper.