Princes & Territories

Lordship was an innate right to command. Lords did not necessarily own all of the land in an area they control; instead, the fact that they own land there (and presumably therefore have erected some sort of fortification, dwelling, or other building that required people to staff, maintain, and support it) gave them the right to command the labor of the common people to support him, so that he could perform his duty to the King and to God. Since the basic duties of the nobility included military service, the evolution of warfare in the medieval period necessitated more sophisticated forms of organizing the work of the masses to provide the nobility with fortifications and fighting men to garrison them. In addition, the forest-clearing and cultivation work of the previous centuries began to support larger populations, providing the nobility with the manpower to do just that. The church shared in the development of medieval society, acquiring properties and jurisdictions as secular nobles (and indeed bishops and abbots were endowed with titles and secular jurisdictions). The organization of the growing population was a challenge for these men, as it required more and more men to be endowed with fiefs and lands and titles and jurisdictions, increasing the number of noblemen theoretically eligible to vote for the King, and meant more potential heirs among whom such riches, with the possible exception of formal titles, would have to be divided.

The actual holding of a title was significant in that it indicated that the person bearing the title was the senior member of his or her entourage, the paterfamilias although not of the Roman type, the person around whom everyone else's existence revolved. The King/Emperor considered himself in principle the paterfamilias of the whole Roman realm, while the Pope might be considered to be the paterfamilias of the Latin church, each with lesser familiae beneath them, and other lesser familiae beneath them. Each person was prescribed a role in society, as were the noblemen and churchmen, even the common people of the Roman realm, everyone precisely arranged in a neatly-ordered universe; "oratores, bellatores,  laboratores." Things were never really that simple.

Charlemagne's reputation as a great monarch was due in no small part to his generalship, for the ninth century was still the early days of the medieval warrior aristocracy, when the king could still rely on the support of significant numbers of armed freemen and was not as dependent upon the services of the nobility as he later became. His abilities at fending off "barbarian" incursions and at conquest earned him a reputation as a man not to be trifled with; but even Charlemagne was forced to put down rebellious nobles. The tradition of obedience became attenuated however as the Carolingian Empire splintered, Although there had been for centuries lead to a significant decentralization of power over th which meant that he had to engage in political maneuverings to secure the support of enough of the major princes to survive a challenge to his authority by any of his noblemen. He does this in part through recognizing the rights of the princes, such as the heritability of fiefs and titles, and through diplomatic marriages with major noble houses. Frederick III. is the product of such a marriage, as were his father and uncle Conrad, and indeed as are most of the princes. He also attempts to balance the power of the princely houses by patronizing men in the lower ranks of nobility, setting them up with comital jurisdictions in order to prevent the former from unacceptably consolidating their power, setting up certain castles as major command centers and appointing their commanders as Burgraves, a practice sometimes followed by other nobles, appointing Counts Palatine, and creating new comital offices such as the Landgraviate, a kind of super-count on par with Dukes. Another tactic employed is the creation of new offices, whether under an old name or a new one.