The Frankish country, on the one hand, the growth of the feudal system and the four European systems were born on the basis of the collapse of Roman slave society; on the other hand, they were born on the basis of the collapse of the clan system of various Germanic tribes. The interaction of these two processes was reflected and completed through the revolutionary movement that overthrew the Western Roman slave empire and established the Germanic feudal kingdom. In the process of the decline of the Roman Empire, new feudal factors - slave peasants, the "predecessors of medieval serfs" - had sprouted and grown. However, the slave-owner class rule hindered the development of new production relations. When the Roman slave empire collapsed, the feudal system could develop rapidly after removing the obstacles to its advancement. The Franks, like other Germanic peoples, were in the transitional stage from primitive communes to class society before they invaded the Roman Empire. In the continuous military operations, tribal alliances and tribal military leaders and their retinues have gradually become a new privileged group - a noble. Nobles owned more land, livestock and slaves. Germanic slaves were different from Roman slaves. Generally, Germanic slaves were placed on small plots of land with their own houses and families. After the Franks conquered Gaul, the supreme military leader turned king confiscated the Roman state land and the large estates of the slave-owning nobles, and occupied large tracts of land and forests that had not been cultivated in the past. The Frankish nobles received large estates from the king, including slaves and peasants. Some Roman Gaul landowners who surrendered to the Franks still retained their manorial properties. The number of slaves has been greatly reduced during the uprisings in the later years of the empire, and there are not many slaves left in the manor. Moreover, the status of these slaves was different from before. Like the Germanic slaves, they received allotments of land from their masters to cultivate, and paid rent and labor services to their masters.
As a result, with the development of the feudal system, slaves, slave peasants and poor landless free peasants were transformed into serfs and dependent peasants, and the Frankish aristocracy also merged with the Roman Gaul landlords to become the new ruling class —A Letter to the Founding Class In the feudal society of Western Europe, in addition to the kings and nobles, the upper class of the Christian Church was an important part of the feudal class. During the process of the disintegration and collapse of the Western Roman Empire, the Christian churches across Western Europe continued to expand their power. The upper echelons of the church and the Frankish rulers formed a mutual alliance. The Frankish king not only allowed the upper class of the church to maintain their original lands, but also gave them batches of manors in the form of gifts or gifts. The heads of the Christian churches in Western Europe are bishops. The bishop of Rome holds the leadership of the church in Western Europe and is called the pope. The Pope also established monasteries in various places. In the 6th century, monasteries were widely established in Western Europe. The pope, bishops, abbots and other upper echelons of the church were all big landowners who owned large tracts of land, many manors, and also had great political power. They also continued to expand their real estate by occupying and plundering the land of free farmers. As early as the end of the 7th century, Christian churches and monasteries occupied one-third of all Frankish land. In the early days of the establishment of the Frankish Kingdom, a large number of ordinary Franks were still free farmers. "Between the Roman slave peasants and the new serfs were the free Frankish peasants." ① The king distributed land in units of rural communes (called Marks in Germanic) where Frankish free peasants gathered. Land was originally the public property of rural communes. It was allocated by village communes as allotments to members for hereditary use and could not be bought, sold or transferred.
Members of the village community only have ownership rights to the land next to their houses. More than a century after the founding of the Frankish Kingdom, the land allocated to village communities had gradually become private land that could be freely transferred or bought and sold, called "autonomous land". Individual small farmers with "autonomous land" were not only unable to resist the attacks of natural disasters and diseases, but also, during the external expansion of the Frankish feudal lords and the long-term domestic melee war, the peasants were burdened with heavy military service, exorbitant taxes and fines, and were also subject to Extortion, extortion, embezzlement and annexation, deception and fraud by the nobility and the church. All of this made free farmers bankrupt and forced them to become serfs and dependent farmers of big landlords. The process of transforming all pre-feudal relations into feudal relations, such as the process of free peasants losing their land, losing their freedom and becoming serfs, is called the process of feudalization. The Frankish feudal regime played a role in promoting and accelerating the feudalization of Frankish society. (In the first half of the 8th century, Charles Martel of the Carolingian family, a large landowner who controlled the real power of the Merovingian dynasty (reigned in 2001), implemented the fief system. The fief system changed the old law in which the king unconditionally rewarded the church and secular nobles with land. Replaced by a new conditional fief, the fief must bear military service obligations to the fief. In principle, the fief will be used by the fief for life; if the fief fails to fulfill his military obligations, the land will be taken back. ·After Matt, feudal lords at all levels also divided the land into layers. Although the fiefs that were popular in the late 9th century were still subject to military service, they became feudal. The fiefs and even the territories were enfeoffed together with the peasants living on the land. In this way, the Frankish feudal regime stipulated that the peasants in the fiefs or territories became serfs or dependents who could not freely leave the land. Peasants. At the same time, since those who served in the military for the feudal lord were all landowners who received fiefs, peasants were excluded from the feudal military force, and some of their original rights as warriors were also lost in the fiefdom system for a certain period of time. Strengthening the feudal state power played a more significant role. Charles Martel, his son Pepin the Short, and grandson Charles relied on the feudal armed forces established by the fief system to suppress peasant resistance internally and expand territory externally.
With the support of the Pope, Pepin overthrew the Merovingian dynasty in 752 AD. From then on, the Franks began the rule of the Carolingian dynasty.
Pepin defeated the Lombards who were enemies of the Roman Pope in Italy, making the Lombard Kingdom a vassal of Frank; he also donated the central Italian region around Rome to the jurisdiction of the Pope. From then on, the Pope not only The head of the Western European Church and the monarch of the Papal States. During the reign of Pepin's successor, Charles (768-814 AD), the Frankish Kingdom reached its heyday. He destroyed the Lombard Kingdom, captured central northern Italy, annexed Bavaria on the upper reaches of the Danube River, captured part of northern Spain, and after more than thirty years of fighting, conquered the Saxony region on the northeastern border. After a series of expansion and conquest wars, the territory of the Frankish state included most of Western Europe. In 800 AD, the Roman Pope held a coronation ceremony for Charles as emperor, and called Charles, who had been engaged in aggressive wars almost all his life, "the pious Augustus crowned by God, the great and peace-loving emperor." Historically, Charles was called "Charlemagne" or "Charlemagne", and the Frankish Kingdom became "Charlie's Empire". However, this behemoth empire turned out to be nothing more than "a temporary and unconsolidated military and administrative alliance without its own economic foundation." As the feudalization of society further developed, it soon split. After Charles, the concentration of land and the increase in serfs and dependent peasants enabled the large feudal lords to gain more and more power.
Feudal lords independently exercised administrative, judicial, military, financial and other powers within their territories, and these powers were passed down from generation to generation along with the territory. The king had to legally recognize this fait accompli and cede the country's right to rule a certain area to the feudal lord through an imperial edict, and state officials were not allowed to enter the territory. This is the so-called "privilege" term. The big lords relied on this privilege to accelerate the serfization of peasants in their territories and strengthen their independence from the central power. Amid this growing centrifugal tendency, only thirty years after Charles' death, in 843 AD, his three grandsons divided the empire into three parts. Based on these three parts, three kingdoms were formed: West Francia, the Kingdom of France; East Francia, the Kingdom of Germany; and the Kingdom of Italy. France and Italy were both within the original territory of the Western Roman Empire. Since the collapse of the Roman Empire, feudal states have been established in this area one after another. Feudalization started early and progressed quickly. In the 9th century, as late as the beginning of the 10th century, they had basically completed the process of feudalization. In these two countries, the feudal lords governed their own affairs, and the big feudal lord was just like the king of a small country. The actual power of the king cannot extend beyond his immediate territory. The German territories were mainly the areas newly conquered by Charles. Its feudalization process essentially began during the reign of Charles. The development of various regions in Germany was uneven, but generally speaking, it completed the feudalization process from the 11th to the 19th century. Germany only implemented knighthood in the first half of the 10th century. At that time, the king of Germany used nobles, small and medium-sized landowners and some wealthy free farmers as knights to form a powerful force and had strong royal power. King Otto I (reigned from 936 to 973 AD) subdued the feudal princes internally and expanded his territory externally. In the mid-10th century, he invaded the economically prosperous and politically divided northern Italy. In 962 AD, he was crowned "Roman Emperor" by the Pope and placed Germany and Northern Italy under the rule of his empire. This regime, called the "Holy Roman Empire", was in name only from the beginning and never achieved effective rule. The feudal princes under the empire tried their best to become independent. Every emperor of the empire had to start from scratch when he took over the throne. He would first suppress the dissatisfied princes in Germany, then send troops to conquer Italy, and then rush to Rome to accept the Pope's coronation. Coupled with the conflicts between the emperor, the pope, and the church, wars between Germany and northern Italy continued. As a result, the people were destitute and their wealth was exhausted, and the economic development of Germany and Italy was damaged and hindered.