The History of Politics, Part II

Part I of this series looked at how the Roman Republic split power between leaders, aristocrats, and the people, and how that system shaped every republic that came after it. Unfortunately, Rome fell. And for the next thousand years, Europe tried something completely different. Instead of dividing power, they concentrated it in kings who claimed God chose them to rule, in a Church that said it spoke for God on earth, and in a feudal system that tied everyone from knights to peasants into a chain of loyalty and obligation. This article covers how that system worked, why people accepted it, and how cracks started to form; especially with the Magna Carta in 1215, one of the most important political documents ever written.

Introduction

When the Roman Empire collapsed in the west around 476 CE, it didn’t just take down a government. It took down the roads, the trade networks, the legal system, and the shared sense that people belonged to something bigger than their village. What replaced it wasn’t another empire. It was a group of small kingdoms, warlords, and a Church that was the only institution left standing across all of Europe.

The political ideas that came out of this period look nothing like what Rome built. If Rome was asking “how do we keep power divided?”, medieval Europe asked “who did God put in charge?”. It was a completely different way of thinking about what government is.

This article asks three questions: How did feudalism organize society from top to bottom? Where did the idea that kings rule by God’s will come from? And what happened when people started pushing back?

Feudalism: Society’s Glue

After Rome fell, there was no central government, no standing army, and no reliable way to keep order across large areas. The solution that slowly emerged — mostly between the 800s and 1200s — was feudalism: a system of personal deals between powerful people.

Here’s the basic idea. A king owned (in theory) all the land. He gave large pieces of it to his most powerful supporters — lords, dukes, barons — in exchange for loyalty and military service. Those lords then gave smaller pieces to lesser nobles (vassals), who gave even smaller pieces to knights. At the very bottom were the peasants and serfs, who actually worked the land and had almost no rights at all.

The key word in all of this is obligation. Feudalism wasn’t a government with laws that applied equally to everyone — it was a web of personal relationships. A vassal swore an oath to his lord. A lord owed protection to his vassals. Everyone had duties running upward and downward. But the people at the bottom — the serfs — got the worst deal by far. Most couldn’t leave the land they were born on, couldn’t marry without permission, and owed a huge share of everything they produced to the lord above them.

One important thing: feudalism wasn’t one neat system that worked the same everywhere. It looked different in England than in France, different in France than in the Holy Roman Empire. Historians today actually debate whether “feudalism” is even a useful word, since it papers over a lot of messy local variation. But the core pattern — land in exchange for loyalty, with everyone locked into a hierarchy — was real and widespread.

No Church in the Wild: The Other Government

You can’t understand medieval politics without understanding the Catholic Church, because in this period the Church was a political figure. It had its own courts, its own taxes (the tithe — everyone owed 10% of their income), its own laws (canon law), and its own territory (the Papal States in central Italy). The Pope was a head of state.

The Church’s political influence came from a simple: the soul matters more than the body, so spiritual authority is higher than earthly authority. If the king controls your land and your labor, but the Church controls whether your soul goes to heaven or hell.

This set up the biggest political rivalry of the Middle Ages: popes vs. kings. Both claimed to be the ultimate authority, and they clashed a lot. The Investiture Controversy (1076–1122) was decades-long fight over who got to appoint bishops — the Pope or the Holy Roman Emperor. It sounds a lot like a religious argument, but it was really about power. Bishops controlled huge amounts of land and wealth, so whoever picked them controlled a massive chunk of the political system.

The low point came in 1077, when Emperor Henry IV was excommunicated by Pope Gregory VII and had to walk barefoot through the snow to the Pope’s castle at Canossa to beg for forgiveness. Whether Henry was genuinely sorry or just making a political move is debatable but the image of the most powerful ruler in Europe kneeling before the Pope tells you everything power during the medival times.

The Divine Right: God’s plan

Medival kings had a problem. Their power depended on keeping a bunch of powerful lords loyal to them, the Church is constantly trying to tell them what to do, and there’s no written constitution that says they were in charge. So where does their authority actually come from?

The answer medieval kings landed on was the divine right of kings: the idea that God himself chose the king to rule, and that disobeying the king was the same as disobeying God. The coronation ceremony was a religious ritual, kings were anointed with holy oil, just like Old Testament kings in the Bible. All of this sent a very clear message. In their eyes, god wanted them to be appointed and wanted them to be in charge.

The theory had roots going back to early Christianity. St. Paul wrote in Romans 13 that “there is no authority except that which God has established,” and medieval thinkers like St. Augustine ran with it. By the later Middle Ages, thinkers like Thomas Aquinas were trying to turn divine authority into something more practical — Aquinas argued that while all authority comes from God, a king who governs unjustly becomes a tyrant, and tyranny can be resisted. For the times, this was a radical thought.

But the full-blown version of divine right, the idea that the king answers to absolutely no one but God, and that subjects can never resist, didn’t peak until the 1600s with thinkers like Jacques Bossuet and King James I of England. That later version is what eventually provoked the revolutions this series will get to. For now, the medieval version was softer: the king rules by God’s will, but he’s expected to follow God’s law and protect his people. If he doesn’t, the Church might have something to say about it.

Magna Carta Holy Grail

In 1215, King John of England was in trouble. He’d lost expensive wars in France, taxed his barons into fury, and picked fights with the Pope (who excommunicated him). A group of rebel barons had had enough. They marched an army to London, and in June 1215, they forced John to meet them at a meadow called Runnymede and sign a document listing the things a king could not do.

That document was the Magna Carta which was Latin for “Great Charter.” Most of its 63 clauses dealt with specific complaints the barons had: limits on taxes, rules about inheritance, protections for the Church. A lot of it was technical feudal law that wouldn’t mean much to anyone today. But buried in the details were a few ideas that changed everything:

• No taxation without consent. The king couldn’t demand money from his barons without their agreement. This is the seed of the idea that governments need the consent of the governed — and it’s a straight line from here to “no taxation without representation.”
• Due process. Clause 39 said that no free man could be imprisoned, stripped of his rights, or destroyed “except by the lawful judgment of his peers or by the law of the land.” That’s the ancestor of due process in the U.S. Constitution’s Fifth and Fourteenth Amendments.
• The king is not above the law. This was the biggest deal. For the first time in English history, a document said in writing that the king’s power had limits — that even the ruler had to follow rules.

The Magna Carta wasnt a democratic document. It was written by and for wealthy barons protecting their own interests. It didn’t mention peasants, women, or anyone who wasn’t a landowning man. King John agreed to it under pressure and immediately asked the Pope to annul it, which he did. The original version lasted about ten weeks before civil war broke out again.

Later versions of the Magna Carta were reissued and became part of English law. Over time, people read those broad principles like consent, due process, the rule of law and applied them far more widely than the barons ever intended. The Magna Carta became so widely used because its language was vague enough to grow and change as humanity grew and changed. The American colonists cited it. So did the authors of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in 1948.

What Medieval People Actually Thought About Power

It’s easy to look at the Middle Ages and think people were just brainwashed into accepting a terrible system. But that’s not really fair. Medieval people had a world view that made these arrangements feel normal.

The core idea was the Great Chain of Being: the belief that God had created a fixed hierarchy for all of existence. God at the top, then angels, then the king, then the nobles, then commoners, then animals, then plants, then rocks. Everyone had a place, and that place was assigned by God.

This sounds oppressive, but it also came with responsibilities. A good king was supposed to protect his people. A good lord was supposed to care for his serfs. The Church preached that the rich had a duty to give alms and that cruelty toward the poor was a sin. The system was deeply unequal, but it had a built-in language of obligation that people used to hold their rulers accountable — at least in theory.

When rulers broke those obligations, people didn’t just accept it. Peasant revolts happened regularly. the English Peasants’ Revolt of 1381 is a famous example of a peasant revolt. Rebels didn’t usually argue against the system itself, they thought the system was being violated. “The king is good, but his advisors are corrupt” was a common framing. It would take centuries before people started questioning the hierarchy itself rather than just the people at the top of it.

Why This Period Still Matters

The Middle Ages are the bridge between the ancient world and modern politics. Almost every big political argument of the last 500 years is really an argument about medieval ideas — either defending them or tearing them down.

The medieval system, for all its inequality, provided a kind of stability and social cohesion that earlier and later periods often lacked. The obligations running downward — the lord’s duty to protect, the Church’s duty to care for the poor — were real, even if they were inconsistently kept. Some historians argue that the medieval social contract, while deeply unequal, was at least a contract, not just raw domination. Whether that makes it better or worse than what came before and after is a question worth sitting with.

Conclusion

For roughly a thousand years, European politics ran on like this: God is in charge, the king is below God, the Church is God’s voice, and everyone else falls under. Feudalism organized daily life around loyalty and land. The divine right of kings gave rulers a justification that was almost impossible to argue with. And the Church acted as both a check on royal power and a power player in its own right.

Part III of this series picks up where the medieval world starts to crack open in the Renaissance, the Reformation, and the first modern arguments that ordinary people are the real source of political power.

References

Primary sources

• Magna Carta (1215). English translation available via the British Library.
• Aquinas, Thomas. Summa Theologica, especially I-II, Q. 90–97 (on law) and De Regimine Principum (On the Government of Rulers). c. 1265–1274.
• Augustine of Hippo. The City of God, especially Books 4–5 and 19. c. 426 CE.
• Paul the Apostle. Epistle to the Romans, Chapter 13. c. 57 CE.

Secondary sources

• Bloch, Marc. Feudal Society. Translated by L.A. Manyon. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1961.
• Holt, J.C. Magna Carta. 3rd ed. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015.
• Tierney, Brian. The Crisis of Church and State, 1050–1300. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1988.
• Ullmann, Walter. A History of Political Thought: The Middle Ages. London: Penguin, 1965.
• Wickham, Chris. Medieval Europe. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2016.

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This article simplifies a period spanning roughly 500–1400 CE across an entire continent. Regional variations were enormous, and the “feudal system” as described here is a useful model, not a precise description of any single place or time.