Fustel de Coulanges Maps the Medieval

Translator's Preface of 'The Origins of the Feudal System'

This is an original preface by the translator to his upcoming translation of Numa Denis Fustel de Coulanges’s The Origins of the Feudal System: Benefices and Patronage During the Merovingian Period. Please do not miss the next entry in this project, Coulanges’s introduction.

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Between the ancient world of Rome and this modern world of ours stretches a vast territory, filled with landmarks we know well, but in much larger part foreign and mysterious. This vast territory interposed between our world and the glorious world of the Caesars, lying “in the middle” so to speak, is of course the Middle Ages.

Ever since Renaissance historians labelled everything between Rome and themselves the medium aevum, the notion of the “middle” has carried a sense of disapproval, of darkness, of a historical purgatory in which Christian man waited like Adam in limbo, banished from the earthly paradise of Rome until suddenly delivered by new birth into life again.

For those willing to risk the journey into that vast and foreign territory, however, the discoveries may make the travel worthwhile. For just as the collapse of the Greeks’ bronze age splendor into a dark age made way for us to encounter Homer’s heroes, so the collapse of Rome into a dark age gave way to the chivalry and heroism so characteristic of the medieval.

The knights of the Middle Ages—both the legendary ones of poetry and the historical ones of royal chronicle—lived and fought and died in a social structure just as singular and characteristic of the medieval as they themselves were, namely: feudalism.

Where did feudalism come from? And what exactly was it? That is what Numa Denis Fustel de Coulanges attempts to answer in The Origins of the Feudal System: Benefices and Patronage During the Merovingian Period. Readers who have heard of Coulanges know him probably for The Ancient City, his landmark historical work examining the religious, political, and social institutions of the Aryan, i.e. the Indo-European, people. In that work, Coulanges examined ancient sources to cast a brilliant light on the prehistorical darkness that preceded them.

But Coulanges did not hesitate to journey forward into that vast, sepulchral territory that proceeded from it as well. And it is unfortunate that such a renowned scholar should remain, at least for English-language readers, something of a one-hit wonder, when his scholarship encompasses so much more than a single book.

The Origins of the Feudal System is merely the fifth volume in his sprawling history of his native France, which he titled, Histoire des Institutions Politiques de l'Ancienne France, or History of the Political Institutions of Ancient France, composed of the following:

· Roman Gaul

· The German Invasion and the End of the Empire

· The Frankish Monarchy

· The Allod and the Rural Estate During the Merovingian Period

· The Origins of the Feudal System

· Royal Transformation During the Carolingian Period

To my knowledge, none of these works have been translated into English before. I have chosen to translate select chapters from the fifth volume simply out of interest. The role that the fief, the vassal, the lord all together play for the medieval—in other words, the role that feudalism plays—is as central for understanding the Middle Ages as the polis is to classical Greece. And feudalism’s origins, even the question of whether it really existed at all, is shrouded in darkness, at least as much darkness as—if not more than—the Renaissance historians tried to lay over the millennium lying between them and Rome. Drawing a map of the territory, it seems to me, requires first of all plotting the coordinates of the feudal system. In this book, that is precisely what Coulanges attempts to do.

Coulanges died in 1889 and The Origins of the Feudal System was edited and published under the supervision of his student Camille Jullian (an impressive historian in his own right), the following year. The text of my translation comes from the second edition, published in 1900.