[Discuss] Dukes still not recognised properly?

[Lyman Stone]

>>>  If your Duke  secedes, it's your feudal duty to join him.
>
> That's not technically true in most classic feudal structures. A  
> knight
> swearing an oath to the Duke of York would have a lot of language  
> about
> fealty to the Crown of England in there -- even though his direct  
> fealty is
> to the Duke, his 'ultimate' allegience is still to the crown, such  
> that the
> Crown's insistence that the real Duke is their puppet replacement  
> for the
> newly-seceded Duke of York means, minimally, that knights are going  
> to have
> a tough time of it.

I've spent some time reading over feudal oaths and it rarely mentions  
rulers, kinds, the Crown, etc. At least, in the ones I've read. Now,  
if it's an oath of allegiance TO the King, then yes, it talks about  
the King. But if it's an oath of allegiance to, say, a duke, the only  
mention of the Crown is usually something like, I swear allegiance to  
Duke Bob, "Who was appointed by the Crown" or some such thing.

Ultimate allegiance meant little in the western european middle ages  
pre-Hundred Years War. During/after the Hundred Years War, it does  
become much more apparent, hence why France is the first nation in  
Europe to launch a revolution. But, really, ideas that the King could  
supercede his nobles didn't become in vogue until absolute monarchies  
came into style around Louis.... XIV is it? By that time it's about  
1700 or so, which I TEND to think is not really the cultural era  
we're going for.

By the way, someone said that the only big shift in Russia was from  
Muscovite to Russian Empire. heh. The commercial center in Russia for  
the past few generations, if not few hundred years, had been Kiev  
(hence why the area was called "Kievan Rus" at the time) and Novgorod  
(hence why northwestern Russia was the "Novgorod Republic"). Then the  
Mongols arrived, razed Kiev, and formed the Golden Horde Khanate.  
They reworked the whole system to weaken the locals and make taxation  
easier, and shifted interest to Moscow, a small trading town.  
Naturally, Moscow grew. The shift from Kiev to Moscow was a HUGE  
shift, and made the nation a new nations. Kievan Rus(the area was not  
yet called Russia) to Muscovite Russia.


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