Római Európa, feudális Európa, barbár Európa
Roman Europe, feudal Europe, barbarian Europe

Summary/Abstract: The author believes that researches on Germanic and Slavic societies should be harmonized, and the results of German researches applied to Slavs as well. An excellent starting point for that is provided by the studies of Reinhard Wenskus, although he does not differentiate among the territories of Barbaricum, which lay outside of the Roman world. The various zones within Barbaricum can be distinguished on the basis of how the influence of the old Roman institutions made themselves felt in them. The kingdom of the Franks wished to introduce Roman institutions in the Germanic parts, i.e. in Austrasia and then in Saxony, as well, but with little success because collective jurisdiction, which was of tribal origins and based on relations among neighbours, survived. The expansion, starting from Frankish Gaul, and within it from Austrasia (from what Walter Schlesinger called “Roman Germania”) managed, however, to assimilate “Germanic Germania”, and then, three hundred years later, with the mediation of the latter, “Slavic Germania”. The sources indicate that originally the Germans and the Slavs (the Saxons, on the one hand, and the Obodrit and Liutich, on the other) had similar political and social structures. The advance of expansion in both cases went conspicuously hand in hand with the loss of rights and the degeneration of the free, with the expansion of landownership, and with the appearance of new structures based on immunity, territorial authority. The greater part of the Slavic world, however, as well as the territories under the similar Hungarian rule, and Scandinavia was beyond the scope of the Frankish and/or German expansion. The influence of Roman structures is very slight in those areas. Initially, the new states resisted the power aspirations of the aristocracy, and controlled the population of the country relying on the traditional tribal, neighbourhood, and peasant communities (opol, osada, mir). These rustici provided service for the court of the ruling prince and its local representatives (comites), and were subject to communal jurisdiction. One part of the aristocracy regarded the offices distributed by the ruler as the common property of the most distinguished families, but despite their resitance, the other part, which started to draw the peasant population under its control through the mediation of the state, through gaining immunities, was increasingly gaining ground. The church was playing a pioneering role: since bishops could not be removed by secular powers, the authority of castellanus granted to them was alienated from the monarchy. The gaps made in the system of “principal right” (ius ducale) helped the spreading of western models of immunity and landownership (although not that of feudalism and beneficium), which would become decisive in Central Eastern Europe by the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries.

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