Before opining about "feudalism," it should be mandatory to master the German scholarship of the topic (the best in any language, Susan Reynolds notwithstanding).

The Lehnswesen tradition was the first to put the "feudal" in its proportionate place as a legal phenomenon.

https://twitter.com/thinkingwest/status/1810654053895979278

Against vague uses of "feudalism" as an all-encompassing system, the central insight of Heinrich Mitteis in his magnum opus "Feudal Law and State Authority" (1933) was that it was a well-defined politico-legal form of tenure centered on fief-holding and reciprocal ties.

There's something to this, but it obscures the significant differences in internal structure between France and the Empire already in the late Middle Ages. Despite "feudal" ties between monarchs and nobles in both realms, France was still much more centralized. A short 🧵. 1/9

https://twitter.com/lijukic/status/1763880023826534776

By ~1300, the French kings had already established the principle and practice of judicial supremacy over the whole kingdom (via the parlement of Paris). While the emperors could theoretically dispense justice across the whole Empire, in practice few resorted to their courts. 2/9

#OTD 600 years ago one of the strangest events in medieval European history occurred: a Lithuanian prince from a recently pagan family, Žygimantas Kaributaitis, entered Prague to govern Bohemia, the first "heretical" kingdom to successfully split off from Catholic Christendom. 1/ The image of Žygimantas entering Prague in the tweet above is from Eberhard Windeck's chronicle of the reign of Emperor Sigismund, ruler of Hungary and the Holy Roman Empire, who spent the 1420s failing to conquer Bohemia from the Hussites, despite several crusades. 2/

A key issue missing from much of the medieval peasantry discourse is that the category "medieval peasant" contains an extraordinarily diverse range of lifestyles and circumstances. A short thread. #medievaltwitter 1/ A free pastoral farmer in 11th-century Iceland would have lived in a dramatically different way from a bondsman ("serf") producing arable crops on a seigneur's estate in Ile-de-France in the early 14th century, with attendant corvées, tithes, jurisdictional restrictions, etc. 2/