That pure feudal system was not universal across Europe and it was pretty short lived. For example, England didn't had it as William the Conqueror didn't allow the establishment of powerful territorial dukes when he divided the land.
France had powerful feudal dukes but the kings also had a large royal domain that eventually absorbed all those duchies. That large royal domain usually meant that they had their own money and army for which they didn't rely on dukes.
The dukes did rebel sometimes but that was usually just a moderating force against excessive royal power. If the great lords got too ambitious they would be opposed not only by the king but also by the powerful Catholic Church which was big on legitimacy, the towns which were allied with the Crown because they needed safe roads for trade and even their own feudal barons and knights who may use the occasion to improve their own power.
Feudal order was a cheap and effective system that allowed to run a country without a bureaucracy.
There are some drawbacks to primogeniture but it allows for incredible stability. The crown of France passed from Hugo Capet in 987 AD to the French Revolution in 1789 with only 2 minor crises of legitimacy. This means that compared to other systems France had far fewer civil wars, no paranoid rulers launching purges and always seeking for traitors, kings could trust competent ministers and generals because they didn't fear them. And in all those 800 years there was only 1 mad king Charles VI who spent almost his entire reign under a regency. Because of regencies madness was not a big concern.
There was always social mobility even in feudal Europe. The bulk of soldiers in amedieval army were men-at-arms, archers, crossbowmen, valets and sailors which were commoners. Military success could lead to being knighted and receiving a fief The church also allowed for social mobility either by raising in the ranks of Church hierarchy or by becoming a professor at a medieval university. Education could also lead one to become a member of powerful judicial courts like the Parliament of Paris. A skilled craftsman could move to a different country and receive a royal letter patent giving him a temporary monopoly on the technology he brought, the origins of our modern patents.
Wow! Thanks so much! This is super interesting to read. I really do know next to nothing about European history. But a military-based advancement system means you've got to almost constantly be at war, right? That was the main downfall of Qin Dynasty. They won the Warring States period by promising peasants advancement through military service, and when they were done uniting the world, there were no more profitable wars to fight. But to keep the system going, they were forced to fight increasingly less profitable wars, and eventually, the whole thing fell apart. That's why Han Dynasty's top priority was to find an alternate route of advancement that had nothing to do with war.
Joining the church as a way up makes sense to me, except for the whole part about not being allowed to have kids. How many peasants were really willing to make that trade? A slim chance of social advancement for only yourself for precisely one generation? Or was there less of a culture of paving the way for your children in Europe?
How proliferated was education? My impression of medieval Europe was always that literacy rates were probably super low, because did you have taverns where the sign would just be a picture, because not enough of the customer base could read? In Dynastic China, at least as of Tang Dynasty, peasants at least had practical reading skills--that is, be able to perform basic transactions and read road signs and figure out which store is the pharmacy and which one is the cobbler, and how much things on a menu are. Starting from Tang Dynasty, there were government subsidised schools where you could send your children to study for next to free (you had to provide the food they would eat at school, and obviously, if they're studying, they're not helping in the field). By the time Ming Dynasty rolled around, there was mandatory education, where if you didn't send your kid to school, you would get punished.
It's interesting that you mention peasantry when talking about commoners. I wonder if that's because the peasantry played a bigger political role in China or it's a result of marxist views of history.
In european Middle Ages the peasantry is not much of a factor despite being the majority of population. Serfdom was ended in most of Western Europe and the peasants were quite prosperous by global standards as witnessed by many beautiful medieval village churches but the fact that the medieval landowning class consisted of bellicose, well trained warriors living in fortified castles meant that peasant revolts were always quickly and brutally crushed. So nobody cared if peasants had social mobility or not.
In Europe the influential commoners were the urban population. In the High Middle Ages Europe underwent a big wave of urbanization and many towns become really powerful either as independent city-states like Venice or gained self-government charters from kings, bishops or lords. Such towns were rich, well fortified, had their own administrations, an urban militia and tightly knit guilds so they were not to be messed with even by kings. Medieval towns also had plenty of cathedral schools that in many places evolved after 1200 in universities so by the end of the Middle Ages there was an european network of universities.
Sorry to just jump in, but regarding joining the clergy as a way of advancement: until around the 11th century, it was not terribly rare for Catholic priests to be married and have children (from what I know.) This changed because 1) having families took some of their loyalties away from the church and 2) there's a passing scriptural basis for clerical celibacy.
Of course, rules aren't always followed (even today, some Catholic priests secretly have children and even "wives", unofficially.) There were several popes who fathered children, even though it was against the rules, so we can assume more than a few regular priests secretly had children and may have provided for them in some way.
Protestantism was also a major factor. Martin Luther was a monk who disagreed with the Catholic Church on many things and one of them was clerical celibacy. When he was fully separated from the church and essentially formulating his own version of Christianity, he was involved in basically rescuing nuns who didn't want to be nuns from their convents and helping them find husbands. He ended up marrying one of them himself.
Regarding education, the literacy rate in the Middle Ages generally ranged between 10% to 30% of the population, depending on region, town, city, etc. For priests, it was probably something like 99%.
That's cool! I had no idea! If I recall, a lot of the census side of administration was also done by priests, back in the day, right? Like, birth and death records, I know they did.
Yes; baptismal records, specifically. I'm not certain if births themselves were recorded.
You also might find it interesting that, in the aftermath of the Black Plague (which killed 1/3rd of the continent's population), life for the average person got better; the shortage of labor that resulted led to more favorable work contracts for serfs/tenant farmers and laborers.
I'm curious to ask if medieval China ever had laws on what a person can or cannot wear (sumptuary laws) --- Medieval England had laws of that nature to make sure that it was easy to tell commoners from the nobility, past a certain point. I think other parts of Europe had similar laws.
I actually did know about that specifically regarding the Black Death. I think I read it in some article while researching the Black Death a while back.
China had a lot of rules about what a person can or cannot wear, mostly in the form of having uniforms for certain positions. But for the most part, there's no limit on how fancy you could dress as a commoner so long as you had money, so long as you didn't try to dress up like a police officer/tax officer/judge etc. And you didn't wear any of the bright yellow that was reserved for the Emperor.
One of the thing said about the peak of Tang Dynasty was that society was so wealthy, you would walk down the streets of Chang'an and not be able to tell who was a noble and who was a peasant.
But for most period, there didn't have to be a lot of laws, because money kind of already determined how well you could dress. Like if you're poor, you're not gonna be able to afford silk. Or afford to have your silk embroidered. And because dye technology was kinda behind and silk had a tendency to wrinkle after getting wet, true nobility only wore their silken outfits once before throwing it away. It was a sign of lesser nobility if it's obvious that you're wearing clothes that have been washed before.
Thank you for this wonderful post, so in depth! It makes me think of two things I’ve been reading lately.
One of them is a blog by a pre-modern Mediterranean history professor (https://acoup.blog/) who has a bunch of posts about things like “how did these systems of vassalage work to keep kingdoms from imploding?” I wonder whether you might enjoy it!
The second is this book called “the WEIRDest people in the world”, and I think its argument for why pre-modern European cultures didn’t do this reasonable hybrid-meritocracy-plus-concubines thing is the whole Christian insistence on fidelity between one man and one woman. Which is partially a religious fixation, but their argument is that it’s also practical, in a way related to something you mentioned about why the CCP is pushing marriage so hard: if there’s no polygamy/concubinage, there are enough wives to go around even for poor peasants. And if even the poorest peasant men have a wife and family to lose, they’ll be less willing to rock the boat/burn it all down.
I honestly don’t know enough, I feel like I need to read more from the ACoUP blog!
ADDITION: Come to think, I wonder whether it was post-Rome, pre-modern Europe’s lack of coordination that stopped it from having a system like this. In order to reward a soldier for bringing back an enemy’s head, you have to be able to identify and *get* the materials for that reward in the first place. And to keep him from giving that inheritance to his children, you need to have the organization to notice that he’s hoarding, and the power to take it away from him. For a locally powerful noble to advance more and take more land, maybe even become a king, they need to feed and coordinate enough soldiers to take and hold the land, and administer and tax it. If the big problem is logistics and extracting surplus from the peasants — a 10-30% literacy rate isn’t enough to have a good pool of talent for a big bureaucracy — noble holdings and armies just wouldn’t be able to get overly big. This is spit-balling, but it would kind of make sense that China was able to take a certain level of organization/bureaucracy for granted when other, simpler places couldn’t!
Well, concubinage isn't nearly as much of a problem as polygamy, because concubines are "shared" so to speak. In any particular period, the number of women being concubines is a small enough number that it doesn't really affect poor peasants getting wives. If you're really desperate, there's no reason you couldn't get enough money together to buy a third, fourth, or n-th hand concubine as your wife, for example. There's no exclusivity.
Thanks for the blog recommendation! I will definitely read it!
I think China was able to take a lot of things for granted because rice and bamboo are fucking magic. It was amazing the sheer amount of books that existed in China even before the invention of paper, because bamboo grows super quickly, is super cheap, you can make scrolls out of it which are relatively cheap, and it keeps forever. It's not like papyrus, where any exposure to humidity at all and it starts falling apart. It's a hell of a lot cheaper than animal hide. It allowed China to have shelf upon shelf of records going all the way back through the bronze ages. I don't think a high literacy rate is useful or possible to maintain unless you have super cheap stationery.
I think that’s a crucial difference right there in outlook, that concubinage is widely accepted to be of a different… caliber? than Real Marriage. The exclusivity *is* the difference!
And the amazing qualities of rice and bamboo definitely seem like a huge difference. I was reading on that “ACoUP” blog about how rice is both more productive per acre *and* relies way more heavily on human power/hand tools than Europe’s entire dependence on wheat and barley (vs China where the south had rice and the north had wheat?). European peasants could be dominated by the local nobles, because the nobles owned oxen and plows and mills. According to what he said, rice farming *couldn’t* use plows, because it would break through the hardpan! Do you know if he is right about that?
More accurately, if the government didn't give out subsidies so that people could independently farm, then a lot of people will sell their land to the wealthy and then sell themselves into slavery. And this causes the problem again of too much power being concentrated into the hands of the nobles. Once a couple of wealthy nobles own most of your land and most of your labour force, are you Emperor or are they Emperor?
Uh, no, rice farming definitely used plows. In fact, the invention of the curved axle plow was a major agricultural advancement that drastically cut down on the amount of manpower required to plow a field. There are pictures in this Chinese askreddit thread of people farming rice the medieval way: https://zhuanlan.zhihu.com/p/24127541
But in order to encourage agriculture, China has always had a program where the government gave out oxen and farming tools for free, and you just had to pay to get them maintained. And if you were working previously wild land that hadn't been planted on before, then you got to farm it tax free for 5-10 years, so you'd make back your investment. Cause it's a lot more work getting a field to a state where it's farmable, than to just continue farming existing fields. If China didn't put these incentives on farming, then they'd get too many peasants who just do something other than farming. And China was basically always in need of more farmers. So there were a lot of farming subsidies.
Thank you so much, I’m glad to learn this! It definitely sounds like a big strength of this system is the level of organization, being able to deliver subsidies and rewards like that to keep resources from getting too concentrated.
Say you're the 17th son of a noble, and you're not particularly gifted. Is your best bet in life to make friends with the betters among your brothers? How realistic was it to get some sort of minor office or a cushy household position if you're the chosen son's childhood buddy?
Not particularly gifted in what? If you're just not academically gifted, you could try going into the military. If that won't work either, you're best bet is probably to kiss up to your dad in the hopes that he'll leave you a little bit of land you could rent for passive income. You can't get an official position without passing the national exams (at least in the Dynasties where that was a thing). At most, if you're super good friends with the main branch inheritor, then he might hire you as an advisor or assistant, and pay you a portion of his wages. But honestly, he's a lot more likely to hire people who barely failed the national exams, because those people actually have real talent and capability to run things.
Before the national exam system, where it was still based on recommendations from current ministers, by kissing up to your dad and his peers, you have a decent chance of being recommended for at least some kind of minor office. But this sort of nepotism was exactly what the national exam system was invented to combat.
Though, just being the son of a noble means that you have way better access to education, tutors, and books than the children of poor families. So it would take a remarkably bad student to not even be able to pass the first tier or two of the exams. And so long as you've passed even one tier of the exams, you could make a half-way decent living for yourself being a tutor to others.
Was going through some old posts and I came back to this one, and it got me wondering about rewards for "unpredictable" achievements. Like, in the military and civil service they had well-established metrics to measure performance, but what if somebody did something one-off that they couldn't have predicted? For instance, suppose someone tries to assassinate the emperor and some random peasant punches the assassin out. No doubt that peasant would get some kind of reward -- would that include a position? Or for a less dramatic example, let's say someone invents a better way of making bridges.
If you save the Emperor as a random nobody (it wouldn't be a peasant, because peasants would be allowed anywhere near enough to the Emperor to do that, but say a really low-rank common soldier), then the standard reward is usually some amount of gold/silk and the promise of an Imperial pardon/get out of jail free card. They'll also write about you in the newspapers, so you get like 15 minutes of fame.
If someone invents a better way of making bridges, that's what the Department of Works is for. Any kind of extraordinary engineer gets hired to positions in the Department of Works and gets put on all kinds of infrastructure/engineering projects. And you're basically exactly a civil servant. If you do well in your projects, you'll get promoted and so on.
Since the Han Dynasty. It wasn't really newspapers like a household thing. More of, like, public announcements that would be posted once a month, which includes things like major news, latest court cases, and sometimes even Aesop's style morality stories, where the whole town would gather to read it, or listen to it being read aloud.
i've been interested via historical K-dramas how the concubine system arose and what attitudes to sexuality were. From what i hear korea basically copied the system from china but on a smaller scale. It's super interesting to hear the logic behind it, would love to see more deep dives into aspects of historical china like this :)
One reason for the persistence of European hereditary kingship (even when those kings weren't fit to rule) is because European feudal states grew up with the legacies of the Roman Empire. As a result of inheriting various Roman legal traditions, along with some Roman attitudes towards the sanctity and importance of law (which survive in highly modified form today in countries with civil law like France, vs the common-law tradition of England), European states legitimized the transfer of power through the legal system. Precisely because of the lack of political centralization — the relative weakness of the king compared to his vassals — the binding force for states became allegiance to a common system, to a procedural method (i.e. law) that limited choices but ensured everyone's interests were protected.
And so you get persistent bloodline inheritance according to law, because every single feudal ruler from the king down to the smallest baron maintained their power and legitimacy thanks to this common system. Unlike in China, you couldn't become the ruler simply by killing your brothers and deposing your father — or at least, not without such an overwhelming advantage in force that you could offset the destruction of any legitimacy.
This sort of thinking eventually evolved into things like Enlightenment social contract theory: the idea that you consent to giving up certain freedoms (to kill, steal, etc) in exchange for the creation of an authority that can guarantee that you won't be killed by others or stolen from.
Another point too is that for most of this period the single most powerful political entity in Europe wasn't a kingdom, but the Roman Catholic Church. Bishops were feudal lords, with their own territories, and the church also preserved and spread the notion of rule of law. The church itself was run based on laws, the pope was selected according to longstanding legal procedures, and so on. With this hugely powerful cultural and political force also protecting inheritance laws, most European noble lords had no choice but to also follow along.
It's true in China too, that if you're not the official named Crown Prince, then you definitely need overwhelming advantage to get enough backing that you can even come up with the organisation and resources to attempt to depose your father and kill any brothers that are a threat. Or else, if you're just aimlessly stabbing people in the face in the palace, people are gonna be like, "Yo! Hey! He's a criminal!"
I've been really into pre-modern law lately too. One topic I find especially fascinating is pre-automative traffic law. Like, speed limits for horses, ancient rules for right of way, illegal parking fines for carriages. It's amazing to read about.
Check out the extraordinarily different laws of ancient Iceland — a society where "Killing was a civil offense resulting in a fine paid to the survivors of the victim. Laws were made by a "parliament," seats in which were a marketable commodity. Enforcement of law was entirely a private affair. And yet these extraordinary institutions survived for over three hundred years, and the society in which they survived appears to have been in many ways an attractive one . Its citizens were, by medieval standards, free; differences in status based on rank or sex were relatively small and its literary, output in relation to its size has been compared, with some justice, to that of Athens. "
One part that comes up in standard economic histories of dark ages/medieval Europe is that due to various sorts of technological limitations (e.g. the horse collar didn't become universal until the 12th century) limiting how much land could be put into use, there was often a surplus of labor relative to suitable land. Hence, with peasants as "cheap expendables", you saw the development of systems like serfdom where people are contractually bound to the land and couldn't leave. The lords didn't exactly need to pay much mind to peasant welfare because peasants had so little economic bargaining power.
Hence, one consequence of the Black Death (which killed something like a third to half of of the population of Europe in ~1350) was a radical shift in economic relations. Suddenly land became cheap and plentiful, while labor was scarce, and this meant rulers suddenly had a lot harder time treating peasants as expendables. Indeed, serfdom largely vanishes from Western Europe (but not from Russia) in this era because peasants who ran away could find themselves welcomed by other lords desperate for labor instead of being sent back to their previous lords.
This is all tremendously oversimplified, but the key point is that a Tang-dynasty Chinese peasant very much had more economic bargaining power than a peasant in Western Europe at the same time, and this strongly influenced political relations. On top of that, since rice agriculture requires much more cooperation across a larger group of people (due to the need for water infrastructure), Chinese peasants would also have been much better organized (and thus more capable of rebelling). The relatively more isolated European peasant could efficiently be dominated by a small number of armored knights on horseback and had few options besides.
Not all of China ran on rice though. That was mostly a strictly southern crop until modern times. There are vast, vast swathes of China that mostly farmed wheat and millet. The traditional cuisine where I come from, for example, features no rice at all. Just a lot of steamed bread. But I guess if half of your peasantry are getting rights through rice, you can't deny it to the other half? That makes sense.
I've been wondering for a very long time why Chinese peasant rebellions are consistently more successful than their western counterparts, and this is a really good explanation! Thanks!
Speaking of the rice vs wheat dichotomy, there are these fascinating studies showing that rice-farming causes people to put much more emphasis on social comparison vs wheat farming (because it is a more collectivist enterprise), and this social comparison on factors like income, education, etc causes a lot of the happiness penalty we observe in East Asia relative to similarly developed countries. The effect appears to be causal and not just a correlation, too! the CCP (helpfully) randomly assigned farmers to rice or wheat in neighboring regions and we can observe the effect: https://twitter.com/ThomasTalhelm/status/1617937504187060233
This is fascinating: thank you. European history buffs of my acquaintance will typically point to the Ottoman system, which has obvious similarities to the Chinese one (polygyny, competitive choice of which son will inherit) as the cause of great strife and problems. Because what happens when you have a bunch of sons, any of whom could inherit...is that they all try to murder each other. And their mothers all try to murder each other. It's a very violent, very messy affair, and I've seen it pointed to as an utter disaster. Sure, you're picking the best surviving son, but at what costs?
The non-possessiveness over concubines is *fascinating*, and challenges something I thought was close to a universal among patriarchal societies. Viewing women as possessions, sure, normal. But actually exchanging them or lending them out just Does Not Happen in European contexts that I'm familiar with.
How do fei (妃), pin (嫔), shifu (世妇) and yuqi (御妻,) translate? I'm assuming that these were essentially ranks, but I have no idea how the concubine hierarchy worked.
Well, you don't wait until you're dead before the sons all try to resolve who's going to be king in some kind of deathmatch cage fight. By the time they're 10-12 years old, you can tell the difference between geniuses, average kids, and idiots. At that point, you're young and healthy enough that you should have more than enough control over politics that none of these primary schoolers can get their hands on enough political support to fight each other. That's when you name a Crown Prince and start helping him build connections in court and teach him the tools of ruling, so by the time his brothers get to their twenties and can muster real resistance, he's already well-established with your support.
As for mothers, it doesn't particularly matter. When you pick a child as Crown Prince and he was born from, let's say, a low-ranking concubine. She's literally not important. He'll be adopted under the Empress's name, and she'll be his official mother. There's really no need to go about killing a bunch of concubines, who were never a threat to begin with. The only important person is the Empress, and she's going to have almost as many guards and safety measures as the Emperor. Not to mention, even if the Empress dies, a low-level concubine would never become Empress. The Emperor is more likely to marry a completely new daughter of a noble family. So there's not a lot of motivation for the concubines to try to murder the Empress.
Lending them out didn't happen either. That's um...weird. But gifting them on permanently happened all the time.
I'm not sure how to translate the names either--they don't have much of a meaning outside of the specific context of the ranks of the Emperor's concubines. That's why I had to settle for a transliteration. There's honestly not that much to the concubine hierarchy, because unlike ministers and military officers, you don't actually have any authority or responsibility. The rank merely determines the amount of your yearly pay, and how often the Emperor is legally obliged to sleep with you.
Because yes, the Emperor does not sleep with whoever he wants. He is on a strict schedule. The higher your rank, the more often you see the Emperor. The lower your rank, the more you might go an entire year and only see him once.
Your rank also determines your standard of living, in addition to your pay. There are certain jewels that only higher-ranked concubines got. A specific type of pearl was reserved for the Empress and Dowager Empress, etc, etc. And you got better food and better decor and better clothes if you climb the ranks.
The Empress herself has the authority to manage the harem and deal out punishments to concubines who break the rules. But otherwise, higher ranking concubines don't have any authority over other concubines.
That pure feudal system was not universal across Europe and it was pretty short lived. For example, England didn't had it as William the Conqueror didn't allow the establishment of powerful territorial dukes when he divided the land.
France had powerful feudal dukes but the kings also had a large royal domain that eventually absorbed all those duchies. That large royal domain usually meant that they had their own money and army for which they didn't rely on dukes.
The dukes did rebel sometimes but that was usually just a moderating force against excessive royal power. If the great lords got too ambitious they would be opposed not only by the king but also by the powerful Catholic Church which was big on legitimacy, the towns which were allied with the Crown because they needed safe roads for trade and even their own feudal barons and knights who may use the occasion to improve their own power.
Feudal order was a cheap and effective system that allowed to run a country without a bureaucracy.
There are some drawbacks to primogeniture but it allows for incredible stability. The crown of France passed from Hugo Capet in 987 AD to the French Revolution in 1789 with only 2 minor crises of legitimacy. This means that compared to other systems France had far fewer civil wars, no paranoid rulers launching purges and always seeking for traitors, kings could trust competent ministers and generals because they didn't fear them. And in all those 800 years there was only 1 mad king Charles VI who spent almost his entire reign under a regency. Because of regencies madness was not a big concern.
There was always social mobility even in feudal Europe. The bulk of soldiers in amedieval army were men-at-arms, archers, crossbowmen, valets and sailors which were commoners. Military success could lead to being knighted and receiving a fief The church also allowed for social mobility either by raising in the ranks of Church hierarchy or by becoming a professor at a medieval university. Education could also lead one to become a member of powerful judicial courts like the Parliament of Paris. A skilled craftsman could move to a different country and receive a royal letter patent giving him a temporary monopoly on the technology he brought, the origins of our modern patents.
Wow! Thanks so much! This is super interesting to read. I really do know next to nothing about European history. But a military-based advancement system means you've got to almost constantly be at war, right? That was the main downfall of Qin Dynasty. They won the Warring States period by promising peasants advancement through military service, and when they were done uniting the world, there were no more profitable wars to fight. But to keep the system going, they were forced to fight increasingly less profitable wars, and eventually, the whole thing fell apart. That's why Han Dynasty's top priority was to find an alternate route of advancement that had nothing to do with war.
Joining the church as a way up makes sense to me, except for the whole part about not being allowed to have kids. How many peasants were really willing to make that trade? A slim chance of social advancement for only yourself for precisely one generation? Or was there less of a culture of paving the way for your children in Europe?
How proliferated was education? My impression of medieval Europe was always that literacy rates were probably super low, because did you have taverns where the sign would just be a picture, because not enough of the customer base could read? In Dynastic China, at least as of Tang Dynasty, peasants at least had practical reading skills--that is, be able to perform basic transactions and read road signs and figure out which store is the pharmacy and which one is the cobbler, and how much things on a menu are. Starting from Tang Dynasty, there were government subsidised schools where you could send your children to study for next to free (you had to provide the food they would eat at school, and obviously, if they're studying, they're not helping in the field). By the time Ming Dynasty rolled around, there was mandatory education, where if you didn't send your kid to school, you would get punished.
It's interesting that you mention peasantry when talking about commoners. I wonder if that's because the peasantry played a bigger political role in China or it's a result of marxist views of history.
In european Middle Ages the peasantry is not much of a factor despite being the majority of population. Serfdom was ended in most of Western Europe and the peasants were quite prosperous by global standards as witnessed by many beautiful medieval village churches but the fact that the medieval landowning class consisted of bellicose, well trained warriors living in fortified castles meant that peasant revolts were always quickly and brutally crushed. So nobody cared if peasants had social mobility or not.
In Europe the influential commoners were the urban population. In the High Middle Ages Europe underwent a big wave of urbanization and many towns become really powerful either as independent city-states like Venice or gained self-government charters from kings, bishops or lords. Such towns were rich, well fortified, had their own administrations, an urban militia and tightly knit guilds so they were not to be messed with even by kings. Medieval towns also had plenty of cathedral schools that in many places evolved after 1200 in universities so by the end of the Middle Ages there was an european network of universities.
Sorry to just jump in, but regarding joining the clergy as a way of advancement: until around the 11th century, it was not terribly rare for Catholic priests to be married and have children (from what I know.) This changed because 1) having families took some of their loyalties away from the church and 2) there's a passing scriptural basis for clerical celibacy.
Of course, rules aren't always followed (even today, some Catholic priests secretly have children and even "wives", unofficially.) There were several popes who fathered children, even though it was against the rules, so we can assume more than a few regular priests secretly had children and may have provided for them in some way.
Protestantism was also a major factor. Martin Luther was a monk who disagreed with the Catholic Church on many things and one of them was clerical celibacy. When he was fully separated from the church and essentially formulating his own version of Christianity, he was involved in basically rescuing nuns who didn't want to be nuns from their convents and helping them find husbands. He ended up marrying one of them himself.
Regarding education, the literacy rate in the Middle Ages generally ranged between 10% to 30% of the population, depending on region, town, city, etc. For priests, it was probably something like 99%.
That's cool! I had no idea! If I recall, a lot of the census side of administration was also done by priests, back in the day, right? Like, birth and death records, I know they did.
Yes; baptismal records, specifically. I'm not certain if births themselves were recorded.
You also might find it interesting that, in the aftermath of the Black Plague (which killed 1/3rd of the continent's population), life for the average person got better; the shortage of labor that resulted led to more favorable work contracts for serfs/tenant farmers and laborers.
I'm curious to ask if medieval China ever had laws on what a person can or cannot wear (sumptuary laws) --- Medieval England had laws of that nature to make sure that it was easy to tell commoners from the nobility, past a certain point. I think other parts of Europe had similar laws.
I actually did know about that specifically regarding the Black Death. I think I read it in some article while researching the Black Death a while back.
China had a lot of rules about what a person can or cannot wear, mostly in the form of having uniforms for certain positions. But for the most part, there's no limit on how fancy you could dress as a commoner so long as you had money, so long as you didn't try to dress up like a police officer/tax officer/judge etc. And you didn't wear any of the bright yellow that was reserved for the Emperor.
One of the thing said about the peak of Tang Dynasty was that society was so wealthy, you would walk down the streets of Chang'an and not be able to tell who was a noble and who was a peasant.
But for most period, there didn't have to be a lot of laws, because money kind of already determined how well you could dress. Like if you're poor, you're not gonna be able to afford silk. Or afford to have your silk embroidered. And because dye technology was kinda behind and silk had a tendency to wrinkle after getting wet, true nobility only wore their silken outfits once before throwing it away. It was a sign of lesser nobility if it's obvious that you're wearing clothes that have been washed before.
Thank you for this wonderful post, so in depth! It makes me think of two things I’ve been reading lately.
One of them is a blog by a pre-modern Mediterranean history professor (https://acoup.blog/) who has a bunch of posts about things like “how did these systems of vassalage work to keep kingdoms from imploding?” I wonder whether you might enjoy it!
The second is this book called “the WEIRDest people in the world”, and I think its argument for why pre-modern European cultures didn’t do this reasonable hybrid-meritocracy-plus-concubines thing is the whole Christian insistence on fidelity between one man and one woman. Which is partially a religious fixation, but their argument is that it’s also practical, in a way related to something you mentioned about why the CCP is pushing marriage so hard: if there’s no polygamy/concubinage, there are enough wives to go around even for poor peasants. And if even the poorest peasant men have a wife and family to lose, they’ll be less willing to rock the boat/burn it all down.
I honestly don’t know enough, I feel like I need to read more from the ACoUP blog!
ADDITION: Come to think, I wonder whether it was post-Rome, pre-modern Europe’s lack of coordination that stopped it from having a system like this. In order to reward a soldier for bringing back an enemy’s head, you have to be able to identify and *get* the materials for that reward in the first place. And to keep him from giving that inheritance to his children, you need to have the organization to notice that he’s hoarding, and the power to take it away from him. For a locally powerful noble to advance more and take more land, maybe even become a king, they need to feed and coordinate enough soldiers to take and hold the land, and administer and tax it. If the big problem is logistics and extracting surplus from the peasants — a 10-30% literacy rate isn’t enough to have a good pool of talent for a big bureaucracy — noble holdings and armies just wouldn’t be able to get overly big. This is spit-balling, but it would kind of make sense that China was able to take a certain level of organization/bureaucracy for granted when other, simpler places couldn’t!
Well, concubinage isn't nearly as much of a problem as polygamy, because concubines are "shared" so to speak. In any particular period, the number of women being concubines is a small enough number that it doesn't really affect poor peasants getting wives. If you're really desperate, there's no reason you couldn't get enough money together to buy a third, fourth, or n-th hand concubine as your wife, for example. There's no exclusivity.
Thanks for the blog recommendation! I will definitely read it!
I think China was able to take a lot of things for granted because rice and bamboo are fucking magic. It was amazing the sheer amount of books that existed in China even before the invention of paper, because bamboo grows super quickly, is super cheap, you can make scrolls out of it which are relatively cheap, and it keeps forever. It's not like papyrus, where any exposure to humidity at all and it starts falling apart. It's a hell of a lot cheaper than animal hide. It allowed China to have shelf upon shelf of records going all the way back through the bronze ages. I don't think a high literacy rate is useful or possible to maintain unless you have super cheap stationery.
I think that’s a crucial difference right there in outlook, that concubinage is widely accepted to be of a different… caliber? than Real Marriage. The exclusivity *is* the difference!
And the amazing qualities of rice and bamboo definitely seem like a huge difference. I was reading on that “ACoUP” blog about how rice is both more productive per acre *and* relies way more heavily on human power/hand tools than Europe’s entire dependence on wheat and barley (vs China where the south had rice and the north had wheat?). European peasants could be dominated by the local nobles, because the nobles owned oxen and plows and mills. According to what he said, rice farming *couldn’t* use plows, because it would break through the hardpan! Do you know if he is right about that?
More accurately, if the government didn't give out subsidies so that people could independently farm, then a lot of people will sell their land to the wealthy and then sell themselves into slavery. And this causes the problem again of too much power being concentrated into the hands of the nobles. Once a couple of wealthy nobles own most of your land and most of your labour force, are you Emperor or are they Emperor?
Uh, no, rice farming definitely used plows. In fact, the invention of the curved axle plow was a major agricultural advancement that drastically cut down on the amount of manpower required to plow a field. There are pictures in this Chinese askreddit thread of people farming rice the medieval way: https://zhuanlan.zhihu.com/p/24127541
But in order to encourage agriculture, China has always had a program where the government gave out oxen and farming tools for free, and you just had to pay to get them maintained. And if you were working previously wild land that hadn't been planted on before, then you got to farm it tax free for 5-10 years, so you'd make back your investment. Cause it's a lot more work getting a field to a state where it's farmable, than to just continue farming existing fields. If China didn't put these incentives on farming, then they'd get too many peasants who just do something other than farming. And China was basically always in need of more farmers. So there were a lot of farming subsidies.
Thank you so much, I’m glad to learn this! It definitely sounds like a big strength of this system is the level of organization, being able to deliver subsidies and rewards like that to keep resources from getting too concentrated.
Say you're the 17th son of a noble, and you're not particularly gifted. Is your best bet in life to make friends with the betters among your brothers? How realistic was it to get some sort of minor office or a cushy household position if you're the chosen son's childhood buddy?
Not particularly gifted in what? If you're just not academically gifted, you could try going into the military. If that won't work either, you're best bet is probably to kiss up to your dad in the hopes that he'll leave you a little bit of land you could rent for passive income. You can't get an official position without passing the national exams (at least in the Dynasties where that was a thing). At most, if you're super good friends with the main branch inheritor, then he might hire you as an advisor or assistant, and pay you a portion of his wages. But honestly, he's a lot more likely to hire people who barely failed the national exams, because those people actually have real talent and capability to run things.
Before the national exam system, where it was still based on recommendations from current ministers, by kissing up to your dad and his peers, you have a decent chance of being recommended for at least some kind of minor office. But this sort of nepotism was exactly what the national exam system was invented to combat.
Though, just being the son of a noble means that you have way better access to education, tutors, and books than the children of poor families. So it would take a remarkably bad student to not even be able to pass the first tier or two of the exams. And so long as you've passed even one tier of the exams, you could make a half-way decent living for yourself being a tutor to others.
Was going through some old posts and I came back to this one, and it got me wondering about rewards for "unpredictable" achievements. Like, in the military and civil service they had well-established metrics to measure performance, but what if somebody did something one-off that they couldn't have predicted? For instance, suppose someone tries to assassinate the emperor and some random peasant punches the assassin out. No doubt that peasant would get some kind of reward -- would that include a position? Or for a less dramatic example, let's say someone invents a better way of making bridges.
If you save the Emperor as a random nobody (it wouldn't be a peasant, because peasants would be allowed anywhere near enough to the Emperor to do that, but say a really low-rank common soldier), then the standard reward is usually some amount of gold/silk and the promise of an Imperial pardon/get out of jail free card. They'll also write about you in the newspapers, so you get like 15 minutes of fame.
If someone invents a better way of making bridges, that's what the Department of Works is for. Any kind of extraordinary engineer gets hired to positions in the Department of Works and gets put on all kinds of infrastructure/engineering projects. And you're basically exactly a civil servant. If you do well in your projects, you'll get promoted and so on.
Wait, they had newspapers?
Since the Han Dynasty. It wasn't really newspapers like a household thing. More of, like, public announcements that would be posted once a month, which includes things like major news, latest court cases, and sometimes even Aesop's style morality stories, where the whole town would gather to read it, or listen to it being read aloud.
i've been interested via historical K-dramas how the concubine system arose and what attitudes to sexuality were. From what i hear korea basically copied the system from china but on a smaller scale. It's super interesting to hear the logic behind it, would love to see more deep dives into aspects of historical china like this :)
One reason for the persistence of European hereditary kingship (even when those kings weren't fit to rule) is because European feudal states grew up with the legacies of the Roman Empire. As a result of inheriting various Roman legal traditions, along with some Roman attitudes towards the sanctity and importance of law (which survive in highly modified form today in countries with civil law like France, vs the common-law tradition of England), European states legitimized the transfer of power through the legal system. Precisely because of the lack of political centralization — the relative weakness of the king compared to his vassals — the binding force for states became allegiance to a common system, to a procedural method (i.e. law) that limited choices but ensured everyone's interests were protected.
And so you get persistent bloodline inheritance according to law, because every single feudal ruler from the king down to the smallest baron maintained their power and legitimacy thanks to this common system. Unlike in China, you couldn't become the ruler simply by killing your brothers and deposing your father — or at least, not without such an overwhelming advantage in force that you could offset the destruction of any legitimacy.
This sort of thinking eventually evolved into things like Enlightenment social contract theory: the idea that you consent to giving up certain freedoms (to kill, steal, etc) in exchange for the creation of an authority that can guarantee that you won't be killed by others or stolen from.
Another point too is that for most of this period the single most powerful political entity in Europe wasn't a kingdom, but the Roman Catholic Church. Bishops were feudal lords, with their own territories, and the church also preserved and spread the notion of rule of law. The church itself was run based on laws, the pope was selected according to longstanding legal procedures, and so on. With this hugely powerful cultural and political force also protecting inheritance laws, most European noble lords had no choice but to also follow along.
It's true in China too, that if you're not the official named Crown Prince, then you definitely need overwhelming advantage to get enough backing that you can even come up with the organisation and resources to attempt to depose your father and kill any brothers that are a threat. Or else, if you're just aimlessly stabbing people in the face in the palace, people are gonna be like, "Yo! Hey! He's a criminal!"
I've been really into pre-modern law lately too. One topic I find especially fascinating is pre-automative traffic law. Like, speed limits for horses, ancient rules for right of way, illegal parking fines for carriages. It's amazing to read about.
Check out the extraordinarily different laws of ancient Iceland — a society where "Killing was a civil offense resulting in a fine paid to the survivors of the victim. Laws were made by a "parliament," seats in which were a marketable commodity. Enforcement of law was entirely a private affair. And yet these extraordinary institutions survived for over three hundred years, and the society in which they survived appears to have been in many ways an attractive one . Its citizens were, by medieval standards, free; differences in status based on rank or sex were relatively small and its literary, output in relation to its size has been compared, with some justice, to that of Athens. "
http://www.daviddfriedman.com/Academic/Iceland/Iceland.html
O.o. That is fascinating. What if the murder is also a survivor of the victim? Does he pay himself?
One part that comes up in standard economic histories of dark ages/medieval Europe is that due to various sorts of technological limitations (e.g. the horse collar didn't become universal until the 12th century) limiting how much land could be put into use, there was often a surplus of labor relative to suitable land. Hence, with peasants as "cheap expendables", you saw the development of systems like serfdom where people are contractually bound to the land and couldn't leave. The lords didn't exactly need to pay much mind to peasant welfare because peasants had so little economic bargaining power.
Hence, one consequence of the Black Death (which killed something like a third to half of of the population of Europe in ~1350) was a radical shift in economic relations. Suddenly land became cheap and plentiful, while labor was scarce, and this meant rulers suddenly had a lot harder time treating peasants as expendables. Indeed, serfdom largely vanishes from Western Europe (but not from Russia) in this era because peasants who ran away could find themselves welcomed by other lords desperate for labor instead of being sent back to their previous lords.
This is all tremendously oversimplified, but the key point is that a Tang-dynasty Chinese peasant very much had more economic bargaining power than a peasant in Western Europe at the same time, and this strongly influenced political relations. On top of that, since rice agriculture requires much more cooperation across a larger group of people (due to the need for water infrastructure), Chinese peasants would also have been much better organized (and thus more capable of rebelling). The relatively more isolated European peasant could efficiently be dominated by a small number of armored knights on horseback and had few options besides.
Not all of China ran on rice though. That was mostly a strictly southern crop until modern times. There are vast, vast swathes of China that mostly farmed wheat and millet. The traditional cuisine where I come from, for example, features no rice at all. Just a lot of steamed bread. But I guess if half of your peasantry are getting rights through rice, you can't deny it to the other half? That makes sense.
I've been wondering for a very long time why Chinese peasant rebellions are consistently more successful than their western counterparts, and this is a really good explanation! Thanks!
Speaking of the rice vs wheat dichotomy, there are these fascinating studies showing that rice-farming causes people to put much more emphasis on social comparison vs wheat farming (because it is a more collectivist enterprise), and this social comparison on factors like income, education, etc causes a lot of the happiness penalty we observe in East Asia relative to similarly developed countries. The effect appears to be causal and not just a correlation, too! the CCP (helpfully) randomly assigned farmers to rice or wheat in neighboring regions and we can observe the effect: https://twitter.com/ThomasTalhelm/status/1617937504187060233
That is super neat and fascinating!
This is fascinating: thank you. European history buffs of my acquaintance will typically point to the Ottoman system, which has obvious similarities to the Chinese one (polygyny, competitive choice of which son will inherit) as the cause of great strife and problems. Because what happens when you have a bunch of sons, any of whom could inherit...is that they all try to murder each other. And their mothers all try to murder each other. It's a very violent, very messy affair, and I've seen it pointed to as an utter disaster. Sure, you're picking the best surviving son, but at what costs?
The non-possessiveness over concubines is *fascinating*, and challenges something I thought was close to a universal among patriarchal societies. Viewing women as possessions, sure, normal. But actually exchanging them or lending them out just Does Not Happen in European contexts that I'm familiar with.
How do fei (妃), pin (嫔), shifu (世妇) and yuqi (御妻,) translate? I'm assuming that these were essentially ranks, but I have no idea how the concubine hierarchy worked.
Well, you don't wait until you're dead before the sons all try to resolve who's going to be king in some kind of deathmatch cage fight. By the time they're 10-12 years old, you can tell the difference between geniuses, average kids, and idiots. At that point, you're young and healthy enough that you should have more than enough control over politics that none of these primary schoolers can get their hands on enough political support to fight each other. That's when you name a Crown Prince and start helping him build connections in court and teach him the tools of ruling, so by the time his brothers get to their twenties and can muster real resistance, he's already well-established with your support.
As for mothers, it doesn't particularly matter. When you pick a child as Crown Prince and he was born from, let's say, a low-ranking concubine. She's literally not important. He'll be adopted under the Empress's name, and she'll be his official mother. There's really no need to go about killing a bunch of concubines, who were never a threat to begin with. The only important person is the Empress, and she's going to have almost as many guards and safety measures as the Emperor. Not to mention, even if the Empress dies, a low-level concubine would never become Empress. The Emperor is more likely to marry a completely new daughter of a noble family. So there's not a lot of motivation for the concubines to try to murder the Empress.
Lending them out didn't happen either. That's um...weird. But gifting them on permanently happened all the time.
I'm not sure how to translate the names either--they don't have much of a meaning outside of the specific context of the ranks of the Emperor's concubines. That's why I had to settle for a transliteration. There's honestly not that much to the concubine hierarchy, because unlike ministers and military officers, you don't actually have any authority or responsibility. The rank merely determines the amount of your yearly pay, and how often the Emperor is legally obliged to sleep with you.
Because yes, the Emperor does not sleep with whoever he wants. He is on a strict schedule. The higher your rank, the more often you see the Emperor. The lower your rank, the more you might go an entire year and only see him once.
Your rank also determines your standard of living, in addition to your pay. There are certain jewels that only higher-ranked concubines got. A specific type of pearl was reserved for the Empress and Dowager Empress, etc, etc. And you got better food and better decor and better clothes if you climb the ranks.
The Empress herself has the authority to manage the harem and deal out punishments to concubines who break the rules. But otherwise, higher ranking concubines don't have any authority over other concubines.