All rights reserved.However, while the Renaissance brought about some positive changes for Europe, the geographical exploration that flourished during this time led to devastation for the people of the Western Hemisphere as European conquest and colonization brought plagues and slavery to the Indigenous people living there.

Copyright В© 2012, Columbia University Press. The Columbia Electronic Encyclopedia, 6th ed. Many relics of feudalism still persist, and its influence remains on the institutions of Western Europe. It was not completely destroyed in France until the French Revolution (1789), and it persisted in Germany until 1848 and in Russia until 1917. and did much to destroy the feudal classifications of society.

This process was greatly accelerated in the 14th cent. Another disruptive force was the increase of communication, which broke down the isolated manor, assisted the rise of towns, and facilitated the emergence of the burgess class. The rise of powerful monarchs in France, Spain, and England broke down the local organization. The concentration of power in the hands of a few was always a great disruptive force in the feudal system. Feudalism continued in all parts of Europe until the end of the 14th cent. The important features of feudalism were similar throughout, but there existed definite national differences. It was extended eastward into Slavic lands to the marches (frontier provinces), which were continually battered by new invasions, and it was adopted partially in Scandinavian countries. In England the Frankish form was imposed by William I (William the Conqueror) after 1066, although most of the elements of feudalism were already present. This feudal connection between church and state gave rise to the controversy over lay investiture.ДЇeudalism spread from France to Spain, Italy, and later Germany and Eastern Europe. Many bishops and abbots were much like lay seigneurs. Most of this land, given by nobles as a bequest or gift, carried feudal obligations thus clerical land, like lay land, assumed a feudal aspect, and the clergy became participants in the temporal feudal system. The church owned much land, held by monasteries, by church dignitaries, and by the churches themselves. The church also had great influence in shaping feudalism although the organization of the church was not feudal in character, its hierarchy somewhat paralleled the feudal hierarchy.

By these processes feudalism became fixed in Frankish lands by the end of the 10th cent. Local royal officers and great landholders increased their power and forced the king to grant them rights of private justice and immunity from royal interference. More and more, this service-and-protection contract came to involve the granting of a beneficium, the use of land, which tended to become hereditary. The development of fiefs was also influenced by the Roman institution of patricinium and the German institution of mundium, by which the powerful surrounded themselves with men who rendered them service, especially military service, in exchange for protection. It was also possible for the manorial system to develop from the Germanic village, as in England. Increasingly, the poor landholder transferred his land to a protector and received it back as a precarium, thus giving rise to the manorial system. Important in an economic sense was the Roman villa, with the peculiar form of rental, the precarium, a temporary grant of land that the grantor could revoke at any time.

The system used and altered institutions then in existence. Of course, the rise of feudalism in areas formerly dominated by Roman institutions meant the breakdown of central government but in regions untouched by Roman customs the feudal system was a further step toward organization and centralization. A long dispute between scholars as to whether its institutional basis was Roman or Germanic remains somewhat inconclusive it can safely be said that feudalism emerged from the condition of society arising from the disintegration of Roman institutions and the further disruption of Germanic inroads and settlements. The feudal system first appears in definite form in the Frankish lands in the 9th and 10th cent.

Feudalism chart renaissance