But whenever such a state, once powerful, has split into a number of territorial states either _de facto_ or juristically independent, the former process begins anew. The great state gobbles up the smaller ones, until a new empire has arisen. “The greatest territorial magnates later become emperors,” says Meitzen laconically of Germany.[118] But even this great demesne vanishes, split up by the need of equipping warlike vassals with fiefs. “The Kings soon found that they had donated away all their belongings; their great territorial possessions in the Delta had melted away,” says Schneider (l. c. page 38) of the Pharaohs of the sixth dynasty. The same causes brought about like effects in the Frankish Empire among both Merovingians and Carolingians; and later in Germany in the case of the Saxon and Hohenstaufen Emperors.[119] Additional references are unnecessary, as every one is familiar with these instances.
In a subsequent part of this treatise, we shall examine into the causes that finally liberated the primitive feudal state from this witch’s curse, this circling from agglomeration to disintegration without end. Our present task is to take up the _social_ side of the process, as we have already taken up the historical phase of it. It changes the articulation of classes in the most decisive manner.
The common freemen, the lower strata of the dominating group, are struck with overpowering force. They sink into bondsmenship. Their decay must go along with that of the central power; since both, allied one might say, by nature, are menaced simultaneously by the expanding power of the great territorial lords. The crown controls the landed magnate so long as the levy of the common freemen of the district is a superior force to his guards, to his “following.” But a fatal need, already set forth, impels the crown to deliver over the peasants to the landed lordling, and from the moment when the county levy has become weaker than his guards, the free peasants are lost. Where the sovereign powers of the state are delegated to the territorial magnate, i. e., where he has developed more or less into an independent lord of the region, the overthrow of the liberties of the peasants is carried out, at least in part, under the color of law, by forcing excessive military services, which ruin the peasants, and which are required the more often as the dynastic interests of the territorial lord require new lands and new peasants, or by abusing the right to compulsory labor, or by turning the administration of public justice into military oppression.