feud

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The term feud refers to a legal institution that, from the Middle Ages to the early modern period, regulated the regulation of breaches of law directly between the injured party and the injuring party without invoking a neutral, third instance, in particular the ordinary jurisdiction . Only free people were able to veto . Actions of a servant were imputed to his master.

Nowadays it is often equated with blood vengeance, but the latter as a blood feud only represents the ultima ratio for resolving the conflict within the feud if atonement and compensation were no longer effective or were rejected by one of the parties.

The term feud is a negative connotation according to today's sense of justice, as in the modern state with monopoly and the rule of law governing the relations between him and the citizens and the relations among citizens vigilante justice is denied.

More recent research contradicts this view, which they consider to be anachronistic: a world that knew no state could not be entirely non-violent. Law was therefore far less understood as an abstract claim than as a concrete property that had to be defended and preserved. Feuds were consequently a common and even necessary part of medieval society. Only the emergence of a territorial public welfare awareness and a functioning jurisdiction could really delegitimize the feud.

history

Early days

The roots of the legal norm on which the Central European feuds are based can be found with the Germanic tribes . The peace of the house was the core of the social order there. As part of the Munt , the landlord had the power of disposal over his wife and children as long as they had not yet established their own household as sons or married as daughters into another household, but also over the entire servants belonging to the household . The members of the household were obliged to support the landlord in all domestic matters and in emergencies. His powers of punishment extended to the death penalty. In return, the landlord was obliged to give the members of his household protection and a screen against any threat and to take care of the basic needs of food, clothing and accommodation. The subordinates were not separate legal entities , but were represented in court and in legal transactions by the landlord, who in turn was liable to third parties for damage to his household.

The social organization went beyond the household over the clan to the tribe , whereby both the common family origin was seen in the narrower or broader sense. The concept of a superior nation was missing. Within the clan and tribe, the Germanic tribes were organized on a cooperative basis .

The principle of allegiance developed as a further form of order. Although there was no fixed definition of nobility among the Germanic peoples, the later principle of nobility and fiefdom was already emerging in the allegiance principle . Followers were mostly free young men who subordinated themselves to the courage of a gentleman in order to support him with advice and help, mostly on military expeditions, while the latter granted them protection and maintenance and a share in any booty. The legitimation of power was still based on personal characteristics such as courage, wealth or trust in leadership and less on family origin, whereby the resulting accumulation of power in a family favored a later birthright . Nevertheless, this relationship of following had to be confirmed from generation to generation by a renewed oath of loyalty. This was evident up to the early modern period, when people did not see themselves as citizens of a country or as members of a nation, but as subjects of the current sovereign.

This shows a social system that was organized vertically along a fief pyramid, but horizontally consisted of members with equal rights. In the absence of a strong vertical organization, legal peace had to organize horizontally as well.

Germanic tradition

In the earliest written evidence of the Germanic tradition, the Hildebrandslied , the Nibelungenlied and the Isländersagas , the feud occupies a central place, mostly in the form of blood revenge. Now, however, it is not to be expected that such heroic legends would rather represent the atonement and compensation. The representations here deal with the merciless struggle up to the extermination of the enemy, even children are not spared. The Grágás , the oldest written Icelandic law, sees as grounds for feud not only murder and manslaughter, but also insults of honor, adultery, wounding, robbery or killing of slaves and cattle.

The injured was entitled to take revenge himself and to start a feud (faida) on his own in order to force the injured to atone for his offense. However, attempts were soon made to carry out this atonement in a material form by paying Wergeld . For this purpose catalogs of penance were drawn up. Those affected were not bound by this solution, unless the arbitrators succeeded in getting them to accept an oath of peace, or a higher-ranking liege lord, up to and including the king, obliged them to accept a peace.

However, since the security of the weak against the strong was in question through such a right to feud, it was customary to intervene in favor of the injured person if he was unwilling or unable to make use of his right to feud. The injured person was taken to court and forced to give satisfaction to the injured person. Once the satisfaction had been achieved, which consisted in the payment of a certain sum of money, the wergeld, to the injured, both parties resigned to their previous peace.

Such a peace ( compositio , settlement) guaranteed by the people's court was customarily reinforced by solemn atonement formulas .

Incidentally, the offender also had to pay the people, later the king and judge, peace money ( fredus or fredum ) because of the peace he had broken .

Middle Ages and early modern times

Feud announcement.
The messenger of the Count of Valengin

In the Middle Ages , the feud was also referred to as "small cavalry", while the war was known as "large cavalry". In the case of major feuds between cities and knight associations, however, devastating battles could also ensue, in which entire regions were involved. A wide variety of motives and causes were cited as grounds for a feud. This included, for example, property disputes , physical fights , damage to property or insults for which apology was not enough to give satisfaction. Often, a dismissed complaint was enough to take against certain opponents.

In the past, the right to feud was subject to certain restrictions. So the feud should rest against everyone who was with the king or was on the way to or from him ( royal peace ). In addition, the king could grant an individual a special royal peace. In the same way, peace should apply to everyone who was in a church or a place of justice, was on the way there or came from there (church or court peace ).

Since the 10th century, the church has sought restrictions on the right to feud as part of the God's Peace Movement. The peace of God (Treuga Domini or Treuga pacis Dei) was held four days a week: from Thursday to Sunday evening, every feud should rest. But even because of this - after initial successes - the arbitrariness of the powerful and the law of the fist were not set any fixed limits.

A complete elimination of the feud that the Roman-German emperors tried in the 13th and 14th centuries was not possible at that time due to the lack of control and sanctioning instruments. They therefore took advantage of the so-called civil peace , which was proclaimed for a certain number of years, usually only for certain parts of the empire. The Mainzer Landfriede from 1235 was the first regulation, valid for the whole empire and indefinitely, which brought about restrictions on the right to feud. He only allows armed self-help after a previous unsuccessful appeal to a court. In addition, the exercise was tied to certain forms: the feud had to be announced three days apart by means of a formal letter of rejection, the feud letter (also rejection, dissipatio); Certain places such as places of worship, mills and cemeteries, people such as clergy, pregnant women, the seriously ill, pilgrims, merchants and carters with their belongings, farmers and vine gardeners outside their homes and during their work, and things such as plows and hearths, should be excluded from the malpractice. In Switzerland, a feud ban was issued in 1370 with the Pfaffenbrief .

Only the German king and later emperor Maximilian I was able to persuade the imperial estates in the course of the imperial reform at the Worms Reichstag of 1495 to renounce martial decisions of their disputes and to establish a perpetual peace for the whole empire. In this way, every feud, including the one previously permitted, was eliminated and the continued use of feudal and fist law was declared a breach of the peace . The creation of the Reichshofrat , the Reichskammergericht and the possibility of subject trials opened up further ways of resolving conflicts peacefully by legal means.

Among the last feuds after the establishment of perpetual peace, the most notorious are those of Duke Ulrich von Württemberg with the city of Reutlingen because of the murder of a foot servant , as a result of which Ulrich was declared an imperial ban and was expelled from his country for a long time, the feud Franz von Sickningens with the Archbishop of Trier , which resulted in the ostracism of Sickingen and the siege of his Nanstein Castle near Landstuhl , as well as the Hildesheim collegiate feud of 1518. The Werdenberg feud shows what conflict even Maximilian I got into when fighting the feuds . The Grumbachian Handel should be mentioned as the last breach of the peace .

Occurrence in literature

Feuds were repeatedly addressed in literary works, such as in Shakespeare's drama Romeo and Juliet , where the warring families of the Montagues (Romeo) and the Capulets (Juliet) fight each other to the brim. Further examples are the feuds of Götz von Berlichingen in Goethe's play of the same name and the feud of the bourgeois businessman Hans Kohlhase against the state of Saxony in Kleist's novella Michael Kohlhaas .

See also

literature

  • Gerd Althoff : Rules of the game of politics in the Middle Ages. Communication in peace and feud. Primus-Verlag, Darmstadt 1997, ISBN 3-89678-038-7 .
  • Otto Brunner : Land and Dominion. Basic questions of the territorial constitutional history of Austria in the Middle Ages. Unchanged reprographic reprint of the 5th edition (Rohrer, Vienna / Wiesbaden 1965). Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, Darmstadt 1990, ISBN 3-534-09466-2 (first edition: Rohrer, Baden bei Wien et al. 1939).
  • Malte Dießelhorst, Arne Duncker: Hans Kohlhase. The story of a feud in Saxony and Brandenburg at the time of the Reformation (= legal history series. Vol. 201). Lang, Frankfurt am Main a. a. 1999, ISBN 3-631-34694-8 .
  • Mattias G. Fischer: Reich reform and "Eternal land peace". About the development of feudal law in the 15th century up to the absolute ban on feuding in 1495 (= studies on German state and legal history. New series, vol. 34). Scientia, Aalen 2007, ISBN 978-3-511-02854-1 (also: Göttingen, Universität, dissertation, 2002).
  • Manfred Kaufmann: feud and legal assistance. The treaties of Brandenburg sovereign princes to combat robber baronship in the 15th and 16th centuries (= series of historical studies. Vol. 33). Centaurus-Verlags-Gesellschaft, Pfaffenweiler 1993, ISBN 3-89085-777-9 (also: Freiburg (Breisgau), university, dissertation, 1992).
  • Fritz Kern : Divine Right and Right of Resistance in the Early Middle Ages. On the history of the development of the monarchy. Edited by Rudolf Buchner. 7th edition, unchanged reprint of the 2nd edition from 1954. Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, Darmstadt 1980, ISBN 3-534-00129-X .
  • Konstantin Langmaier: '' The land of Ere and Nucz, Frid and Gemach: The land as a community of honor, benefit and peace: A contribution to the discussion about common benefit. '' In: '' Quarterly journal for social and economic history. '' Vol. 103 (2016), pp. 178-200.
  • Herbert Obenaus : Law and constitution of the companies with St. Jörgenschild in Swabia. Investigation of nobility, collection, arbitration and feuds in the fifteenth century (= publications of the Max Planck Institute for History. 7, ISSN  0436-1180 ). Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, Göttingen 1961, (also: Göttingen, University, dissertation, 1959).
  • Elsbet Orth : The feuds of the imperial city of Frankfurt am Main in the late Middle Ages. Feud law and feud practice in the 14th and 15th centuries (= Frankfurt historical treatises. Vol. 6, ISSN  0170-3226 ). Steiner, Wiesbaden 1973 (at the same time: Frankfurt am Main, University, dissertation, 1971).
  • Christine Reinle : Peasant feuds. Studies on the feuding of non-aristocrats in the late medieval Roman-German Empire, especially in the Bavarian duchies (= quarterly journal for social and economic history. Supplements. No. 170). Steiner, Stuttgart 2003, ISBN 3-515-07840-1 (also: Mannheim, Universität, habilitation paper, 1999/2000).
  • Christine Reinle: feud. In: Concise dictionary on German legal history. Volume 1: Aachen - Spiritual Bank. 2nd, completely revised and enlarged edition. Schmidt, Berlin 2008, ISBN 978-3-503-07912-4 , Sp. 1515-1525.
  • Reinhard Scholzen : Franz von Sickingen (1481–1523): feud as a profession. In: Austrian military magazine . Vol. 52, No. 5, 2014, pp. 523-531, digital version (PDF; 1.91 MB) .
  • Heiko Steuer : Archaeological evidence for the feuds during the Merovingian period. In: Uwe Ludwig, Thomas Schilp (Ed.): Nomen et Fraternitas. Festschrift for Dieter Geuenich on the occasion of his 65th birthday (= Reallexikon der Germanischen Altertumskunde supplementary volumes. 62). de Gruyter, Berlin a. a. 2008, ISBN 978-3-11-020238-0 , pp. 343-362, online (PDF; 6.2 MB) .
  • Thomas Vogel: Feud law and feud practice in the late Middle Ages using the example of the imperial capital Nuremberg (1404–1438) (= Freiburg contributions to medieval history. Studies and texts. Vol. 11). Lang, Frankfurt am Main a. a. 1998, ISBN 3-631-33100-2 (also: Freiburg (Breisgau), University, dissertation, 1994).

Web links

Wiktionary: feud  - explanations of meanings, word origins, synonyms, translations

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Konstantin Langmaier: The land Ere and Nucz, Frid and Gemach: The land as honor, utility and peace community: A contribution to the discussion about common utility. In: Quarterly for social and economic history. Vol. 103 (2016), pp. 178-200.
  2. ↑ Archived copy ( memento of the original from March 8, 2013 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / www.regionalgeschichte.net
  3. ^ Werner Goez: Church reform and investiture dispute 910–1122. Stuttgart / Berlin / Cologne 2000