European Tribalism

Europe was once the home of many tribes, consanguineous societies who owed loyalty to the group and who warred and raided right up into Medieval times.

But then something changed and over the Medieval period the Tribes were dismantled and replaced with Feudalism, without loyalties to tribe the common people were instead tied to the land and thus the landholder

The most significant factor in this seems to have been the conquest of the Western Roman Empire by Germanic tribes and more specifically the spread of holy roman catholic church.

Amongst other things the Church go rid of polygamy, discouraged adoption and banned cousin marriage, it made females property of their fathers/husbands and focussed on the primacy of the nuclear family-husband and wife, children and parents' - all designed to undermined large kinship groups and discourage kinship networks. Thirteenth-century English court rolls indicate that even cousins were grouped with non-kin for most purposes.

While we can't know f this was a deliberate strategy it probably was underpinned by greed on behalf of the Church and Nobility. By discouraging large families you reduce the number of family members who demand a share of someone’s legacy when they die. The wealth instead accumulates and can be taken by the Church or Lord.

Of course the Nobility were all for small units working their land and owing loyalty to the Landholder rather than to Kinfolk. Tribes become a problem when the Lord of the Manor is a foreign conqueror with no blood ties, but irrelevant if residence is more important than kinship.

Of course we are well aware that the Royal families of Europe do infact constitute a single tribe who have maintained the consanguineous ties even to modern times.

Anyway we get Tribalism replaced by Feudalism and then Feudalism replaced by Corporatism and the rise of the Corporate-State. So it seems that the breakdown of Tribalism lead to the development of Europe as we know it today

Emperor Constantine, the first Christian Roman Emperor, married his children to the children of his half-brother - so what if cousin marriage and tribalism had been allowed to continue and flourish in Europe, what would change?.

...But Feudalism didn't exist? It wasn't some concerted effort and it probably as a real institution never actually appeared in any capacity as it is often shown in CK2 for instance. It's a hell of a lot more complex than tribal --> Feudal.

I'd contend that tribalism never actually left, it's just we use the word to denote people less than us. For example, what is the difference between the Angle tribe and the English people? Nothing, really, at least until the 20th century. The thing is, a tribe is just a group of people with a similar background, either cultural or familial. Tribes still exist today in Europe, and have always. We just stopped calling them that because of Eurocentrism.

That's my opinion anyway

what is the difference between the Angle tribe and the English people ?

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In this case, i think OP means anthropologycal? sense of tribalism, Pashtun is typical sense of "tribe". that tribe as group of individual descended from common male ancestor. Tribe in tribalism has sub-tribe and super-tribe all depend on how far you tracked male common ancestor.

English people is a nation, a group has some sense of culture and language, but no longer possess various sub-tribe and genealogical descent, each member is individual within English nation; while Angle tribe is likely have hundred of sub-tribe and clans, each could track male common ancestor and has some organization, each member could track his clans, sub-tribe, so-on until Angle tribe.

I generally thought the consensus was that Feudalism isn't really a thing that existed.

For the effect on tribalism in Europe :

- more tribute paying, instead of feudalism, successful ruler would accept tribute and had less interference in local affairs, they cannot replace local rulers with their supporters, but can only force tribute payment.
- less universal law like English Common Law, each tribe would have different law about dress, taboo and inheritance.
- less powerful Church, the clergy would either become hereditary like Brahmin in India, or like Irish Church more invested in local clan affairs.
- disappearance of Hajnal line
- lower status of women
- lower marriage age
- possibly better status of minority
- more numerous Jewish people

Errnge said:

I'd contend that tribalism never actually left, it's just we use the word to denote people less than us. For example, what is the difference between the Angle tribe and the English people? Nothing, really, at least until the 20th century. The thing is, a tribe is just a group of people with a similar background, either cultural or familial. Tribes still exist today in Europe, and have always. We just stopped calling them that because of Eurocentrism.

That's my opinion anyway

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But then we have clan systems like the ones in Ireland and Scotland that have faded from relevancy almost completely.

You could argue that the various tribes of the dark ages evolved into the strong regional identities in modern Europe. The Saxons settled into Saxony, the Bavarians into Bavaria, the Thuriginians into Thuriginia, and so on. However, the continuity seems only nominal - the original tribes were much more mobile while modern regional identities are strongly tied to their land.

Van555 said:

I generally thought the consensus was that Feudalism isn't really a thing that existed.

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I don't think the nobility was sitting around admiring how feudal things were, but there was definitely a sentiment of 'higher man' in the form of noble born that was legitimized by the officials of the Catholic church. This power structure, which includes other aspects mentioned such as tenants being bound to the land, is the paradigm that lasted roughly 800-1200 years in Europe depending on the location and who you ask.

My favorite is the development of mercantilism and Parliament in England through the means of bastard feudalism, a system increasingly reliant on retinues and services by contract over services by feudal obligation, a means achieved by abolishing the courts of lesser noblemen and centralizing them under a budding national bureaucratic network in the hands of the gentry.

Koro said:

Europe was once the home of many tribes, consanguineous societies who owed loyalty to the group and who warred and raided right up into Medieval times.

But then something changed and over the Medieval period the Tribes were dismantled and replaced with Feudalism, without loyalties to tribe the common people were instead tied to the land and thus the landholder

The most significant factor in this seems to have been the conquest of the Western Roman Empire by Germanic tribes and more specifically the spread of holy roman catholic church.

Amongst other things the Church go rid of polygamy, discouraged adoption and banned cousin marriage, it made females property of their fathers/husbands and focussed on the primacy of the nuclear family-husband and wife, children and parents' - all designed to undermined large kinship groups and discourage kinship networks. Thirteenth-century English court rolls indicate that even cousins were grouped with non-kin for most purposes.

While we can't know f this was a deliberate strategy it probably was underpinned by greed on behalf of the Church and Nobility. By discouraging large families you reduce the number of family members who demand a share of someone’s legacy when they die. The wealth instead accumulates and can be taken by the Church or Lord.

Of course the Nobility were all for small units working their land and owing loyalty to the Landholder rather than to Kinfolk. Tribes become a problem when the Lord of the Manor is a foreign conqueror with no blood ties, but irrelevant if residence is more important than kinship.

Of course we are well aware that the Royal families of Europe do infact constitute a single tribe who have maintained the consanguineous ties even to modern times.

Anyway we get Tribalism replaced by Feudalism and then Feudalism replaced by Corporatism and the rise of the Corporate-State. So it seems that the breakdown of Tribalism lead to the development of Europe as we know it today

Emperor Constantine, the first Christian Roman Emperor, married his children to the children of his half-brother - so what if cousin marriage and tribalism had been allowed to continue and flourish in Europe, what would change?.

Click to expand...

This whole post is pretty conspiratorial and paints the church as doing worse things than it really did. And there's good evidence the pre-Christian Anglo-Saxons, for example, had very strong class divisions between the nobility and commoners. Things were not egalitarian just because the details of them are lost in the mists of time. Don't forget that these pagan European groups were still settled farming communities with land and property ownership, as well as slavery.

pa_dutch said:

But then we have clan systems like the ones in Ireland and Scotland that have faded from relevancy almost completely.

You could argue that the various tribes of the dark ages evolved into the strong regional identities in modern Europe. The Saxons settled into Saxony, the Bavarians into Bavaria, the Thuriginians into Thuriginia, and so on. However, the continuity seems only nominal - the original tribes were much more mobile while modern regional identities are strongly tied to their land.

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Just how mobile were they in ancient times? Probably more mobile than in medieval times, but the great Germanic and Slavic migrations were caused by them being forced to flee from the Huns and other groups fleeing from the Huns. How mobile were they prior to that era?

Also, there didn't seem to be a great deal of difference between the Scottish clan system and ordinary feudalism, except if anything the clan chiefs had more autonomy. They were still landed lords ruling over landless peasant farmers.

Short answer : Nope. Really really nope.

Long answer : tribalism in European history does exist, obviously, but as a formal institution it's more related to an acient background rather than medieval.
Celtic tribes comes in mind of course, but as well Roman tribes that formed one of the original institution.

But a tribe was far more than just a group of people banding together because of familial ties : hence why ancient geographers made the difference between the family/extended family (genos), mass of people (laos), organised body (dèmos) and the group of people with a similar origin (ethnos).

What we call a tribe can be all or part of these, the word being vague enough (vagueness mainly due to a pejorative naming : people is civilized, tribe isn't for a XIXth scholar).

This proteiform use of tribe doesn't really help : it's not like you had one tribal model used by all Europe, as you didn't had one feudal model.

Assuming you mean a maintain of pre-Roman identification (meaning no possible universal citizenship), it would obviously require to screw Rome. I'd tend to think the polis/royal hegemon models would eventually get widespread in Europe (as it did in Hispania and Gaul IOTL).

As for the transmission between "tribalism" and "feudalism", how you describe it (but giving the answer, you're not the only one) is really wrong.
As I tried to point out, Barbarians of the Vth were culturally really close of Romans, and their kingdoms were in the continuity of the Late Empire.

Feudalism didn't appeared overnight because Barbarians just decided to impose it, but formed from a complex politico-social context where tribalism disappeared (at least in Romania) since centuries and where the political referent was the hierarchical power (individualized and charismatized since the Principate; but the individualisation of power could be found in different republican systems in the Mediterranean). Simply said, it appeared as an answer to the decline of Frankish conquests and the need to focus on local productions (to compensate lack of loot) and the defense against devastating raids; achieving a process of clientelisation trough redistribution of royal wealths by the Carolingians.

The length of the changes is quite obvious when it cames to, for using one of your exemples, polygamy. It really disappeared by the XIth century (as a lot of late antiquity features, such as important slavery) and the power of the church on civil society was quite limited.
You really have to wait Ottonian reforms and the Truce of God movement (and i'll strongly disagree with Delvetius there, but if it points something, it was the distinction and rivality between clergy and nobilty rather than "You worship Jesus, and you obey the count because it's what Jesus want").

I couldn't list all the fights between Church as an institution and a power based and nobility in Middle Ages. There's simply too many of these, at the international (fight of Emperors as Frederick against Papacy) or local level (fight of Albi or Narbonne bishops against Trencavels)

Not that you didn't have a rationalisation in the Later Feudal era (rather than Bastard Feudal, that implies there is one classical model, rather than a clusterfuck of different definitions), but by the time it established itself and flourished? Too many differences and too many occurences of "You don't need to be high born to be fair and good" to systematize it (assuming the feudality even touched the lower classes).

Sucrose really nailed it (I won't even talk about egalitarianism), so I'll keep it short.

Basically, you're stuck there with a systematical and ultra-formalising vision of Middle-Ages and Ancient world, where it looks more as a CK2 game with clear borders than historical conceptions where these barely exist.
Tribalism is not clanism is not dynastism is not Ev0l Church.
At very best, what you describe is a Late Feudal English model (Feudality in England always had a far more formal tone)

The whole "Church made women property of men" is, frankly, laughable (JSmith, out of this body!). What you describe is actually the Roman where women had to adopt the name of their father or their husband.
Quite at the contrary, it's pretty obvious that women had in this period access to more autonomy and independence they had in later times, up to the XXth century.
Heck, an actual reason for Christianity to rise as it did was the support of widows and independent women that were considered at best as burden by society before.

Anyway, back to the OP. You want a Church far more relaxed on cousins/kinsmen marriage?
"Easy" : get rid of the reinforcement of the papacy and the Church as an independent institution in the IXth/XIth centuries. You'd manage to keep a "nationally"-based church with councils led by kings or important nobles (strangely, it didn't led to a "ev0l Church" abiding to all nobility demands).

You probably butterfly some sort of feudalism (but probably end with something close enough), but it would be a by-product of the change in Carolingian policies rather than the cause.

I've often wondered how, the other way around, we can STILL even in this day and age speak of TRIBES in Libya or Iraq etc. It therefore MUST have origins in the RELIGION of the people and in the effects that the religion brought about.

Best Regards
Grey Wolf

Do you mean that North African peoples and tribal organisation is due to Islam? Allow me to be particularly doubtful : the tribal disposition of Berber peoples, for instance, can be traced back to pre-islamic features.

Not that tribal institutions are irreconciliable with a citadine outlook : in spite of being largely urbanized culture, Arabo-Islamic continuum preserved the tribal background for centuries (as Republican Rome preserved the original tribes as well).

It MUST nothing at all, but look on the general ground of tribal organisation and its adaptation on different grounds (again, North African tribes maintained themselves quite well during Roman and Late Roman period, and as well during Arabo-Islmamix Middle-Ages) and the stability of the political entities involved (you didn't had that stables North African realms, while their northern mediterranean counterparts structurated themselves along different lines).

That religion (critically when these represented a social-political model as Islam still does) played a role is a thing, pretending that the very origins of tribes and their maintain are there is really pushing it.

Especially when tribes is only a convenient and do-it-all expression that comes directly from an eurocentric and colonialist approach of realities whom ancient greeks needed four distinct expression to try describe best.
"Tribe" mix up ethnos, laos, demos and genos in a blurry soup; when each of these terms should be more adapted to the historical and current realities.
A "tribe" of Libya is not organised or reflect the same way than a "tribe" in Kenya.

I don't mean its EXISTENCE is, I mean its survival is.

In Europe 1900, the areas where tribalism still existed were Serbia (somewhat), Montenegro and Albania, all of which had relatively recently been freed from Ottoman rule.

Best Regards
Grey Wolf

I don't really get what you call "tribalism" in these countries.
As said above, this word covers so many definitions and blurs them all that you could call tribal any ethnic without frowning any eye.

Tribal is simply too vague for someone to say "this is a tribe, this is not".

Even if you're talking only about the survivance and not about origins (as you said before), but impying that social organisation remained the same because Islam! is as much absurd (critically when it comes to Ottomans that definitely weren't tied up to the same socio-cultural grounds than other and older Arabo-Islamic entities).

But okay : what are you calling "tribal" in Montenegro that wouldn't be found elsewhere and that would be due (at least regarding their survival) to Islam! when the region was definitely not the most islamized to begin with.
The Mountain Clans? At this point, we could as well point the tribality of Scotland, with all these clans and tartans being around.

(Not that the comparison is illegit, of course, in an historical perspective. But the religious part is...say REALLY limited when it comes to that)

I believe what are referred to as "tribes" in the Middle East are really "extended kinship networks." You could just as easily call them that, or clans. "Tribes" is really pretty misleading, I think. Personally when you say "tribes," I think of independent polities, which those kinship networks aren't. But as Grey Wolf says, use of the term may have a lot to do with them being non-Western.

Sucrose said:

Just how mobile were they in ancient times? Probably more mobile than in medieval times, but the great Germanic and Slavic migrations were caused by them being forced to flee from the Huns and other groups fleeing from the Huns. How mobile were they prior to that era?

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It depends. Pliny and Tacitus describe a Germanic "tribe" called the Hilleviones or the Suiones, likely related to the ancient Svear, that seems to have been pretty fixed in place - If the continuity between them and the modern Swedes is true, then they never left their home villages en masse except for the Vikings who went east.

On the other hand, you have groups like the Cimbri, Teutones, Marcomanni, and Bastarnae which were migratory during the classical era.

pa_dutch said:

It depends. Pliny and Tacitus describe a Germanic "tribe" called the Hilleviones or the Suiones, likely related to the ancient Svear, that seems to have been pretty fixed in place - If the continuity between them and the modern Swedes is true, then they never left their home villages en masse except for the Vikings who went east.

On the other hand, you have groups like the Cimbri, Teutones, Marcomanni, and Bastarnae which were migratory during the classical era.

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Pliny and Tacitus (the latter having largely copied the former) had a really general overview of Germanic world, and roman ethnography tends to be "fixist", both historically (a people remain the same people regardless of the obvious changes), territorialy (with the climatic influence on the social and psychological charachteristics) and institutionally (Germans have their own institutions that are carried in their "DNA" so to say, and that are immediatly corrupted at the contact of Romans).

As only Romans have a right to a real History (it's arguably less present on Tacitus, whom work is essentially an hagiography and moralist), Germans are represented as an isolated and pure population (where there is no inner migration ever possible), Britons as a patchwork of diverse miogrants carrying their institutions and names with them. Both points, that are essential on the Roman view of Barbaricum are known to be quite wrong (as the general introduction on German situation was obsolete by Tacitus' time).

Dio Cassius, for exemple, called Vandals "Celts" because he know by older authors that Celts lived there (it can be argued that Germans were heavily celtized, but that's the case of a large part of Magna Germania).

As for the "migrating peoples", it's really hard to really see entiere people migrating (we don't really have that in the Great Migrations periods as well) or rather an agglomerate of various groups (as pointed out by the important Celtic or Celtized names).

The territorial fixism of Roman ethnography (you can see as well with the Goths/Gaeti or different Suebi confusion) doesn't really help to determine which group did migrated often or which didn't.