Fiefs Sentence Examples

If there was thus only a customary and unwritten law (and William of Tyre definitely speaks of a jus consuetudinarium under Baldwin III., quo regnum regebatur), then the "Letters of the Sepulchre" are a myth - or rather, if they ever existed, they existed not as a code of written law, but, perhaps, as a register of fiefs, like the Sicilian Defetarii.

Thomas's other sons received fiefs and bishoprics abroad, and one of them, Boniface, was made archbishop of Canterbury.

It should also here be noticed that the changes introduced into the holding of the fiefs, whether by altering their boundaries or substituting Frankish for Lombard vassals, were chief among the causes why the feudal system took no permanent hold in Italy.

Internally Charles left the affairs of the Italian kingdom much as he found them, except that he appears to have pursued the policy of breaking up the larger fiefs of the Lombards, substituting counts for their dukes, and adding to the privileges of the bishops.

She was the last heiress of the great house of Canossa, whose fiefs stretched from Mantua across Lombardy, passed the Apennines, included the Tuscan plains, and embraced a portion of the duchy of Spoleto.

Here again he cited the action of Charlemagne, his august predecessor, who had merely given certain domains to the bishops of Rome as fiefs, though Rome did not thereby cease to be part of his empire.

Henceforward he who inherits a barony must pay r¦o, he who inherits a knight's fee too shillings or less, and for smaller holdings less "according to the ancient custom of fiefs."

The loss of his southern possessions by the treaty of Bretigny was compensated by the fiefs of Auvergne and Berry, with the rank of peer of France.

Every manor composing these great fiefs was likely to be affected by the policy or the character of the administration of the feudal lord, and he, again, by the policy or the difficulties, the strength or the weakness, of the central government.

In order to hold these possessions, she borrowed from the Franks the feudal system, and granted fiefs in the Greek islands to her more powerful families, on condition that they held the trade route open for her.

We have already seen that it was the theory of the Eastern emperors - a theory which logically followed from the homage of the crusaders to Alexiusthat the conquests of the crusaders belonged to their empire, and were held by the crusading princes as fiefs.

The conception of the kingdom as a fief not only subjected it to the jurisdiction of the high court; it involved the more disastrous result that the kingdom, like other fiefs, might be carried by an heiress to her husband; and the proximate causes of the collapse of the kingdom in 1187 depend on this fact and the dissensions which it occasioned.

Thus conceived as the holder of a great fief, the king had only the rights of suzerain over the four great baronies and the twelve minor fiefs of his kingdom.

But the king had another force in addition to the feudal levy - a paid force of soudoyers, 2 holding fiefs, not of land, but of pay (fiefs de soudee).

Locally, the consideration of the system of justice administered in the kingdom involves some account of three things - the organization of the fiefs, the position of the Italian traders in their quarters, and the privileges of the Church.

There were some thirty-seven cours de bourgeoisie (several of the fiefs having more than one), each of which was under the presidency of a vicomte, while all were independent of the court of burgesses at Jerusalem.

Manuel Comnenus demanded that all conquests made by the crusaders should be his fiefs; and the question was debated whether the crusaders should follow the land route through Hungary, along the old road of Charlemagne, or should go by sea to the Holy Land.

The conspiracy failed, and Eustace was sentenced to forfeit his English fiefs.

Cesare, then a youth of sixteen and a student at Pisa, was made archbishop of Valencia, his nephew Giovanni received a cardinal's hat, and for the duke of Gandia and Giuffre the pope proposed to carve fiefs out of the papal states and the kingdom of Naples.

Among the fiefs destined for the duke of Gandia were Cervetri and Anguillara, lately acquired by Virginio Orsini, head of that powerful and turbulent house, with the pecuniary help of Ferdinand of Aragon, king of Naples (Don Ferrante).

But when the French invasion became a reality he was alarmed, recognized Alphonso as king, and concluded an alliance with him in exchange for various fiefs to his sons (July 1494).

The expenditure of the first category was made up of the service of foreign loans, of the general debt, of the dotations replacing ziamet and timarat (military fiefs) and of fixed contributions such as vakufs.

He established the system whereby the lands conquered by the arms of his troops were divided into the different classes of fiefs, or else assigned to the maintenance of mosques, colleges, schools and charitable institutions, or converted into common and pasturage lands.

On the conquest of a country the lands were apportioned by the nishanjis, who first computed the tithe revenueof each village, its population, woods, pasturage, &c.; and divided it into the three classes of fiefs (khas, ziamet and timar), or into vakilf (pious endowments) or pasturage.

Fiefs with a revenue of from 20,000 to 100,000 aspres were called ziamets and were conferred on similar terms on inferior officers, usually for life or during good behaviour.

Fiefs with a revenue of from 3000 to 20,000 aspres were timars, furnishing one armed warrior for every 3000 aspres' revenue; the grant of a fief was conditional on obligatory residence.

While the persevering policy of the Capets, which aimed at reuniting the great fiefs, duchies, countships, baronies, &c., to the domain of the crown, gradually reconstructed for their benefit a territorial sovereignty over France, the institution of the appanage periodically subtracted large portions from it.

The biens nobles (fiefs) and the biens ecclesiastiques were exempt; tenures roturieres, however, by whomsoever held, were taxed.

Le Couronnement Looys, already mentioned, Le Charroi de Nimes (12th century) in which Guillaume, who had been forgotten in the distribution of fiefs, enumerates his services to the terrified Louis, and Aliscans (r2th century), with the earlier Chanrun, are among the finest of the French epic poems. The figure of Vivien is among the most heroic elaborated by the trouveres, and the giant Rainouart has more than a touch of Rabelaisian humour.

Thus were formed the vast but straggling fiefs which are recorded in Domesday.

In the 14th century the original house of Dalberg became extinct in the male line, the fiefs passing to Johann Gerhard, chamberlain of the see of Worms, who married the heiress of his cousin, Anton of Dalberg, about 1330.

After this murder John was condemned by the court of peers of France, and stripped of the fiefs which he possessed in France.

This was first done on a large scale in 1803, when by a recess of the imperial diet many of the smaller fiefs were mediatized, in order to compensate those German princes who had been forced to cede their territories on the left bank of the Rhine to France.

Ideally regarded, feudalism covered Europe with a network of these fiefs, rising in graded ranks one above the other from the smallest, the knight's fee, at the bottom, to the king at the top, who was the supreme landowner, or who held the kingdom from God.

But the members of the feudal court met, not to fulfil a duty owed to the community, but a private obligation which they had assumed in return for the fiefs they held, and in the history of institutions it is differences of this sort which are the determining principles.

In the 11th century Eccelin, a German, obtained fiefs in this district from Conrad II.

The second class maintained communications between the fiefs and the Tokugawa court as well as their own families in Yedo, for in the alternate years of a feudatorys compulsory residence in that city his family had to live there.

It was included in Charlemagne's empire and was divided by him into counties, which evolved there as elsewhere into hereditary fiefs; but after the break-up of Charlemagne's empire, the Burgundian kingdom revived and Savoy was again absorbed in it.

But although this division was formally recognized in 1295, Amadeus succeeded in enforcing his own supremacy over the whole country and making of it a more unified state than before, and by war, purchase or treaty he regained other fiefs which his predecessors had lost.

On the extinction of this family in 1248, most of their fiefs were given by the two bishops to the father-in-law of the last lord of Andechs, Albert, count of Tirol.

On the 22nd of May 1200 the treaty was finally signed, John ceding with his niece the fiefs of Issoudun and Gragay, together with those that Andre de Chavigny, lord of Chateauroux, held in Berry, of the English crown.

They would also have conceded the pope the right to play the role of a secular ruler in his own lands, as did the German bishops, and to dispose of such fiefs as reverted to him.

A second rising was caused when, on the death of Ulrich II., count of Weimar and OrlamUnde, without issue in 1112, Henry seized these counties as vacant fiefs of the empire, while Lothair supported the claim of Siegfried, count of Ballenstadt, whose mother was a relative of Ulrich.

He then received as papal fiefs the vast estates of Matilda, marchioness of Tuscany, thus securing for his daughter and her Welf husband lands which might otherwise have passed to the Hohenstaufen.

In 1135, Eric II., king of Denmark, acknowledged himself a vassal of Lothair; Boleslaus III., prince of the Poles, promised tribute and received Pomerania and Riigen as German fiefs; while the eastern emperor, John Comnenus, implored Lothair's aid against Roger II.

About 1 33 8 John bought Culmbach and Plassenburg, and on the strength of a privilege granted to him in 1347 he seized many robberfortresses and held the surrounding lands as imperial fiefs.

Throughout the 9th and 10th centuries, as the life-benefices of the later Carolingian kings were gradually transformed into hereditary fiefs, the insecurity of life and property increased, for there was no central power to curb the warring local magnates.

This corruption was fatally apparent in the army, the feudal basis of which was sapped by the confiscation of fiefs for the benefit of nominees of favourites of the harem, and by the intrusion, through the same influences of foreigners and rayahs into the corps of janissaries, of which the discipline became more and more relaxed and the temper increasingly turbulent.

By the Angevines Potenza was made a domain of the San Severino family; in the beginning of the 15th century it was held by Francesco Sforza, and in 1435 it passed to the Guevara family; the Loffredi, who succeeded by marriage, continued in possession till the abolition of the great fiefs.

Feudalism had a phraseology to express the varieties of fiefs which existed under it; modern international law has no generally-accepted terminology for the still greater variety of states which now exist.

The prevalent opinion, however, was that sovereignty was compatible with rights such as were possessed by the Reich over the princes of Germany; that there might be fiefs held in full sovereignty; and that vassal states, when subject only to "nude vassalage," were sovereign.

At the enfeoffments of 1072 and 1002 no great undivided fiefs were created, and the mixed Norman, French and Italian vassals owed their benefices to the count.

The founder of the family in England was a Norman baron, Guy or Guido de Baliol, who held the fiefs of Bailleul, Dampierre, Harcourt and Vinoy in Normandy.

Henry married Lora or Lauretta, a daughter of Philip de Valoines (Valsques), lord of Panmure, and in 1234 inherited part of the rich English fiefs of the Valoines family.

Two months later Eric was crowned at Upsala, on which occasion he first introduced the titles of baron and count into Sweden, by way of attaching to the crown the higher nobility, these new counts and barons receiving lucrative fiefs adequate to the maintenance of their new dignities.

Within the duchy were some independent secular territories, notably the county of Mark, while other districts were held as fiefs from the archbishops, afterwards electors.

That same year the Dorias inherited the fiefs and titles of the house of Pamphilii-Landi of Gubbio, patricians of Rome and princes of San Martino, Valmontano, Val di Toro, Bardi and Corupiano.

Within the limits of these minor dynasties the same rules were observed, and the same may be said of the hereditary fiefs of Turkish amirs not belonging to the royal family, who bore ordinarily the title of atabeg or atabek (properly "father bey"), e.g.

The large old fiefs (baronie) in Corfu, as in the other islands, have left their traces in the form of quit-rents (known in Scotland by the name of feu-duties), generally equal to one-tenth of the produce.

He denied the power of clerks to possess fiefs, and allowed them only religious authority and tithes.

The States of the Church were enlarged during this period by the reversion of two important fiefs - namely, Ferrara (1598) and Urbino (1631).

Though the whole of Tibet is under the suzerainty of China, the government of the country is divided into two distinct administrations, the one under the rule of the Dalai lama of Lhasa, the other under local kings or chiefs, and comprising a number of ecclesiastical fiefs.

Not only did pupils flock to Tosa from many quarters, attracted alike by the novelty of Itagaki's doctrines, by his eloquence and by his transparent sincerity, but also similar schools sprang up among the former vassals of other fiefs, who saw themselves excluded from the government.

Somewhat later the adoption of hereditary surnames and armorial bearings marked the existence of a large and noble class who either from the subdivision of fiefs or from the effects of the custom of primogeniture were very insufficiently provided for.

When the Lombard kingdom fell before the Franks under Charlemagne in 774, the archbishops of Milan were still further strengthened by the close alliance between Charles and the Church, which gave a sort of confirmation to their temporal authority, and also by Charles's policy of breaking up the great Lombard fiefs and dukedoms, for which he substituted the smaller counties.

So great an accession of strength to a neighbouring state, whose ambition she had so recently had just reason to fear, was intolerable to Austria, which laid claim to a number of lordships - forming one-third of the whole Bavarian inheritance - as lapsed fiefs of the Bohemian, Austrian, and imperial crowns.

Although generally unsuccessful he strove hard for peace, and during this reign the principle of inheritance was virtually established with regard to German fiefs.

In Germany Conrad did not definitely decree that fiefs should pass from father to son, but he encouraged and took advantage of the tendency in this direction, a tendency which was, obviously, a serious blow at the pow-er of the great lords over their vassals.

On the other hand it was arranged that these elections should take place in the presence of the emperor or his representative, and that he should invest the new prelate with the sceptre, thus signifying that the bishop, or abbot, held his temporal fiefs from him and not from the pope.

Until the time of the interregnum the territories of a prince were rarely divided among his descendants, the reason being that, although the private fiefs of the nobles were Divisions hereditary, their officesmargrave, count and the like of the were in theory at the disposal of the king.

It was thus practically settled that the offices and territories, as well as the private fiefs, of the princes were hereditary, to be disposed of by them at their pleasure.

The enterprise of a usurper in Syria in the year 872 caused the caliph to require the presence of Ahmad in that country at the head of an army to quell it; and although this army was not actually employed for the purpose, it was not disbanded by Abmad, who on his return founded a fresh city called Kati, the fiefs, S.E.

By appropriating the fiefs of the Egyptian officers and giving them to his Kurdish followers he stirred up much ill-feeling, which resulted in a conspiracy, of which the object was to recall the Fran.ks with the view of overthrowing the new rgime; but this conspiracy was revealed by a traitor and crushed.

Egyptian lands were divided in it into four classesthe sultans domain, fiefs, land for the maintenance of the army, and lands settled on religious foundations.

The later dynasties of Brabant and Lorraine, when these fiefs became hereditary, bore only the title of duke.

It fell to the ground for want of adequate support; but another proposition, the fruit of secret discussion between the king and his confederates, which placed all fiefs under the control of the crown as regards taxation, and p rovided for selling and letting them to the highest bidder, was accepted by the Estate of burgesses.

The significance of this ordinance lay in the fact that it shattered the privileged position of the nobility, by abolishing the exclusive right to the possession of fiefs.

In January 1661 a land commission was appointed to investigate the financial and economical conditions of the kingdoms; the fiefs were transformed into counties; the nobles were deprived of their immunity from taxation; and in July 1662 the Norwegian towns received special privileges, including the monopoly of the lucrative timber trade.

The period of decadence was marked in the latter half of the 18th century by the formation of practically independent pashaliks or fiefs, such as those of Scutari under Mahommed of Bushat, Iannina under Ali of Tepelen, and Viden under Pasvan-oglu.

It had acquired by force or purchase various countships and other fiefs in the neighbourhood, and ruled a considerable territory; and its wealth was so great that in 1378 it established a university, the first in Europe that embraced the four faculties.

They were afterwards robbed of the island by Leon Vetrano, a famous Genoese corsair; but he was soon defeated and put to death, and the senate, to secure their position, granted fiefs in Corfu to ten noble families in order that they might colonize it (1206).

He reformed and improved the administration of the country both civil and military, inaugurated a new and improved system for the feudal tenures of limitary fiefs, and his amelioration of the lot of his Christian subjects is not his least title to fame.

John refused; he was summoned to Paris before the royal judges, and failing to appear was sentenced at the end of April 1202 to lose all his fiefs.

It is true that he suppressed some communes in the newly conquered fiefs, such as Normandy, where John had been prodigal of privileges, but he erected new communes in his own private domain, quite contrary to the custom of other kings.

The great feudatories accepted his legislation on dower in 1214 and 1219 and the etablissement of 1209 making co-heirs of fiefs hold direct from the king and not from one of their number.

For both volumes the contents of the returns were entirely rearranged and classified according to fiefs.

His son Borso received the fiefs of Modena and Reggio from the emperor Frederick III.

On the death of the countess Matilda, who had bequeathed all her territories to the Church (1115), the emperor at once laid claim to them as imperial fiefs and forced the pope to flee from Rome.

They took refuge with the Daimyo of Choshu, and, while there, established relations which contributed greatly to the ultimate union of the two great fiefs, Satsuma and Choshu, for the work of the Restoration.

These German possessions were to be held as fiefs of the empire; and in respect thereof Sweden was to have a vote in the imperial Diet and to " direct " the Lower Saxon Circle alternately with Brandenburg.

As Rudolph immediately claimed as vacant fiefs of the Empire most of the lands held by Ottakar, war was inevitable.

By the system known as aforamento the lands were gradually parcelled out into a number of fiefs granted, under the crown of Portugal, to individuals or to religious corporations in return for military service or equivalent quit-rents.

From the East the fashion was carried back to France; but there the erection of certain fiefs into " principalities," which became common in the 15th and 16th centuries, certainly implied no concession of independent sovereignty, and the title of " prince " thus bestowed ranked below that of " duke," being sometimes borne by cadet branches of ducal houses, e.g.

An unblushing nepotist, he alienated immense fiefs belonging to the Holy See in favour of his natural children.

On his father's elevation to the papacy he was made captain-general of the Church, and received the duchy of Castro in the Maremma, besides Frascati, Nepi, Montalto and other fiefs.

Julius, who was anxious to be on good terms with Charles on account of the council of Trent which was then sitting, ordered Farnese to hand Parma over to the papal authorities once more, and on his refusal hurled censures and admonitions at his head, and deprived him of his Roman fiefs, while Charles did the same with regard to those in Lombardy.

But the duke came to an arrangement with his father-in-law, by which he regained Piacenza and his other fiefs The rest of his life was spent quietly at home, where the moderation and wisdom of his rule won for him the affection of his people.

During the Carolingian epoch the custom grew up of granting these as regular heritable fiefs or benefices, and by the 10th century, before the great Cluniac reform, the system was firmly established.

Before this date, however, he had fought at Hastings, and had added large estates in Warwickshire to the Norman fiefs of Beaumont and Pont Audemer, which he received when his father entered the abbey of St Peter at Preaux.

Robert De Beaumont (1104-1168), justiciar of England, married a granddaughter of Ralph Guader, earl of Norfolk, and receiving his father's English fiefs in 1118 became earl of Leicester.

Waleran De Beaumont (1104-1166) obtained his father's French fiefs and the title of count of Meulan in 1118.

When his father died in 956 he succeeded to his numerous fiefs around Paris and Orleans, and thus becoming one of the most powerful of the feudatories of his cousin, the Frankish king Lothair, he was recognized somewhat reluctantly by that monarch as duke of the Franks.

A vehement opponent of "clan government" - that is, usurpation of administrative posts by men of two or three fiefs, an abuse which threatened to follow the overthrow of the Tokugawa shogunate - he conspired to assist Saigo's rebellion and was imprisoned from 1878 until 1883.

Although he did not decree that German fiefs should be hereditary, he favoured the tendency in this direction, and so attempted to make the smaller vassals a check on the power of the nobles.

From the house of Este they received the lordship of Carpi, and later they acquired the fiefs of Meldola, Sassuolo, &c. Many members of the family were distinguished as condottieri, diplomats and ecclesiastics.

Thus in various ways ecclesiastical benefices were gradually transformed into fiefs, and lay suzerains claimed the same rights over ecclesiastics as over other vassals from whom they received homage, and whom they invested with lands.

Final settlement of the struggle was retarded, moreover, by the question of the succession to the lands of the great Countess Matilda, who had bequeathed all her property to the Holy See, Henry claiming the estates as suzerain of the fiefs and as heir of the allodial lands.

Charlemagne had assigned their portions to his three sons in 781 and again in 806; like Charles Martel and Pippin the Short before him, however, what he had divided was not the imperial authority, nor yet countries, but the whole system of fiefs, offices and adherents which had been his own patrimony.

He gave up his personal right of distributing the fiefs and honors which were the price of adherence, and thus lost for the Carolingians the free disposal of the immense territories they had gradually usurped; they retained the over-lordship, it is true, but this over-lordship, without usufruct and without choice of tenant, was but a barren possession.

The feudal system had in fact turned against the throne, the vassals using it to secure a permanent hold upon offices and fiefs, and to get possession of estates and of power.

For the proud and passionate Eleanor married, two months later (May 1152), the young Henry, count of Anjou and duke of Normandy, who held, besides these great fiefs, the whole of the south-west of France, and in two Rivafryof years time the crown of England as well.

The English king had to submit himself to the advice and desire of the king of France, doing him homage for all continental fiefs (1187-1189).

The royal judges at Paris condemned John, as a felon, to death and the forfeiture of his fiefs (1203), and the murder of Arthur completed his ruin.

Like the fiefs, feudal institutions at large had been shattered.

The consequent struggle between the popes, who claimed the inheritance, and the emperors, who maintained that the countess had no right to dispose of imperial fiefs, enabled the principal cities of Tuscany gradually to assert their independence.

Sometimes they were sent to organize and govern a march, sometimes they were rewarded with benefices, and as, with the growth of feudalism, these developed into hereditary fiefs, the word vassus or vassallus was naturally retained as implying the relation to the king as overlord, and was extended to the holders of all fiefs whether capital or mediate.

The Arabs at first were content to take a fifth of the land to constitute the public domain, or khoms, out of which fiefs held on military tenure were provided for the chiefs of the conquering army.

Together with other fiefs, it was bequeathed to Pope Gregory VII.

The central power had become weakened and the central organization relaxed while the electorate had lost most of the advantages which formerly distinguished it from other German fiefs.

This implacable war, which threw the whole of the nobility of the north of France against that of the south, and destroyed the brilliant Provencal civilization, ended, politically, in the treaty of Paris (1229), by which the king of France dispossessed the house of Toulouse of the greater part of its fiefs, and that of Beziers of the whole of its fiefs.

The Counts family originated from Westphalia, where they held fiefs of the archbishop.

On the other hand, he carefully avoided creating territorially based feudal fiefs, then fashionable in most of Europe.

Albert had failed in his attempt to seize Holland and Zealand, as vacant fiefs of the Empire, on the death of Count John I.

When, ex ruler of Tabriz, and one of Jenghiz Khan's lieutenants, the Seljukian Empire was at the point of dissolution, most of its feudatory vassals helped rather than hindered its downfall in the hope of retaining their fiefs as independent sovereigns.

The administration of kazas, or cantons, was usually entrusted to the cadis and the holders of the more important fiefs; the sanjaks, or departments, were ruled by alai beys or mir-i-livas (colonels or brigadiers), pashas with one horsetail; the vilayets, or provinces, by beylerbeys or mir-i-mirans (lord of lords), pashas with two horse-tails; these were all originally military officers, who, in addition to their administrative functions, were charged with the duty of mustering and commanding the feudal levies in war time.

The avenues to power were through bribery and yet more unspeakable paths; the fiefs which formed the basis of the feudal array were bestowed on favourites' favourites, or sold to the highest bidder, and the sultan himself shared in the corrupt plunder.

Selim profited by the respite to abolish the military tenure of fiefs; he introduced salutary reforms into the administration, especially in the fiscal department, sought by well-considered plans to extend the spread of education, and engaged foreign officers as instructors, by whom a small corps of new troops called nizam-i-jedid were collected and drilled.

In the partition of the Eastern empire by the Latins which followed that event the island was divided into three fiefs, the occupants of which ere long found it expedient to place themselves under the protection of the Venetian republic, which thenceforward became the sovereign power in the country.

Many of their fiefs he seized for himself, and he was implicated in the murder of Pier Luigi Farnese, duke of Parma (see Farnese), who had helped Fiesco.

The Riksdag of 1682 proposed a fresh Reduktion, and declared that the whole question of how far the king was empowered by the law of the land to bestow fiefs, or, in case of urgent national distress, take them back again, was exclusively his majesty's affair.

The rule of the marzbans was marked by relentless persecution of the Christians, forced conversions to Magism, frequent insurrections and the rise to importance of the great families founded by men of Assyrian, Parthian, Persian, Syrian and Jewish origin, and in some cases of royal blood, who had been governors of districts, or holders of fiefs under the Arsacids.

It also had a few fiefs in Piedmont and in Genoese territory.

The fiefs were not hereditary, and were held directly from the sultan.