Bandit kingdom(or domain) in the medieval ages

ar-pharazon

Banned
Banditry was of course an issue up until the 19th century in some places and the roots of the concept of banditry go back to before antiquity(before the Greco Roman era) and the ideas of rebels in the countryside with motive part criminal part political existed in the form of the Baguadae in late roman Gaul.

How can we have bandits, woodsmen or highwaymen in the medieval ages end up ruling a kingdom or domain of great size-basically a criminal state,

How can medieval authority collapse into this point?

Is this even possible? I
 
Isn't this what feudalism basically is? Just legalized banditry? I personally struggle to see the difference between a nobility enforcing feudal dues and a mafia organization forcing businesses to pay them protection money.
 
Isn't this what feudalism basically is? Just legalized banditry? I personally struggle to see the difference between a nobility enforcing feudal dues and a mafia organization forcing businesses to pay them protection money.

ARE YOU QUESTIONING THE DIVINE AND SACRED RIGHT OF OUR GLORIOUS KING TO RULE?
 

ar-pharazon

Banned
I mean bandits in the sense they have no legimitacy or a criminal background, like classical medieval bandits you see either in movies or some of those raving bands that existed during the Hundred Years' War.
 
Every f***ing noble house started with a bandit or a pirate. It's the old wisdom: "Why treason never prosper? Because if it prospers no one dares to name it treason". The same applies to bandits or insurgents or invaders or whoever aims for a jump in upward mobility: if they prosper, they become legit; if they fail, they are quartered and hung in the central square.
 

Deleted member 97083

Depending on when you consider the Middle Ages ending, then the early Spanish Empire in the Americas, and Portuguese naval expansion in Africa and Asia could be bandit states as well. As well as most examples of European colonialism, though for other powers that's well beyond the Middle Ages.

Not Hungary, surely, otherwise every mass migration is a case of banditism. I think it's weird to conflate these two things, myself.
If you're going to go that route, it's pretty weird to conflate a nomadic empire sending raiding parties across a continent, to every mass migration.

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If you're going to go that route, it's pretty weird to conflate a nomadic empire sending raiding parties across a continent, to every mass migration.

I mean, I can meet you halfway here: a steppe confederation or a steppe-based kingdom is not the same kind of migration as that of agricultural peoples, but neither is it useful to think of this as banditism. The steppe nation is practicing their normal lifeway (herding and raiding), under traditional authortity.

A bandit I think should be a case of someone who usurps or rejects traditional authority and subverts traditional lifeways and lives exclusively on extraction alone.
 
A bandit I think should be a case of someone who usurps or rejects traditional authority and subverts traditional lifeways and lives exclusively on extraction alone.

The emirate of Crete should probably fit the criteria then. A kingdom founded by Berber pirates who expelled the traditional Byzantine authorities and sustained itself mainly through coastal raids and naval piracy. Quite an interesting little place.
 
The emirate of Crete should probably fit the criteria then. A kingdom founded by Berber pirates who expelled the traditional Byzantine authorities and sustained itself mainly through coastal raids and naval piracy. Quite an interesting little place.

Fraxinet could come close, though it can perhaps be interpreted as a permanent outpost from which to launch traditional raziya. That said, when the Emperor sent an ambassador to complain about it to the Caliph, I think there was a level of denial of responsibility. In some ways this is a similar dynamic as Russia and the Ottomans had re: the Cossacks (who plundered part-time, except the Zaporozhians who were a bit more hardcore).
 
Banditry was of course an issue up until the 19th century in some places and the roots of the concept of banditry go back to before antiquity(before the Greco Roman era) and the ideas of rebels in the countryside with motive part criminal part political existed in the form of the Baguadae in late roman Gaul.

How can we have bandits, woodsmen or highwaymen in the medieval ages end up ruling a kingdom or domain of great size-basically a criminal state,

How can medieval authority collapse into this point?

Is this even possible? I

This is basically any medieval kingdom.
 
Honestly the clear answer to this should be the Barbary States. A bandit domain in Europe itself would end up being conquered, simply for the fact that such a state wouldn't be protected by having any kind of legitimacy, while the feudal states build on taxation of the peasantry. The Barabry States seem to have been build on raiding and slave trade.
 
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