Vasilief, A History of the Byzantine Empire

The Empire of Nicaea (1204-1261)

Byzantine feudalism 

Page 14

With the epoch of the crusades, western crusaders and other westerners appeared. At first they only passed through the territory of the Empire; then, especially owing to the latinophile policy of Manuel I, they settled in great numbers and penetrated into all branches of Byzantine social and economic life. Finally after the Fourth Crusade they occupied the major part of the Byzantine Empire. By this time feudalizing processes in Byzantium had assumed so definite a shape that the westerners found nothing new to them in the general conditions of the Empire.

A mass of most interesting material for the study of feudalism in the Latin states established in the East in the epoch of the Crusades is found in the codes compiled there. The first place belongs to the so-called Assises of Jerusalem or the Letters of the Holy Sepulchre (Lettres du Sepulcre) which, according to later Jerusalemite tradition, were attributed to the first ruler of Jerusalem, Godfrey. Omitting here the complicated and debatable question of the different versions of the Assises and all discussion of the relation of the original code to the later Assises of Jerusalem, the Assises, whatever their origin, were purely thirteenth century law, and the laws of Jerusalem were based on the feudal customs of eleventh century Europe as brought to the East by the men of the First Crusade. The Assises have the most fundamental significance both for better understanding of feudal relations in the Christian Orient in connection with local conditions and for the problem of feudalism in general. A French historian who made a special study of the institutions of the Kingdom of Jerusalem, Gaston Dodu, wrote: The Assises de la Haute Cour (this was the section of the Assises treating of the relations between the Latin princes and their vassals) represent the old and the purest expression of French feudalism; the compilers of the texts which have survived wrote a complete treatise of feudal holdings superior to anything the Middle Ages have left us on this subject. One must go to the Assises to study the true character of feudalism. Very recently an American historian who wrote a very important book on the feudal monarchy in the Latin Kingdom of Jerusalem, John L. La Monte, emphasized the same idea. He wrote: The Assises de la Haute Cour are in essence French feudal law, and the feudal system of Jerusalem, if the feudal system be taken to mean only the relations between the landholding nobility, was pure western feudalism which the crusaders had brought with them from their western homes. Once established it was preserved. The forces which affected feudalism in the West had but little effect on the slower moving East. For there is truth in the old assertion that in the feudal system of Jerusalem we find an almost ideal system of feudalism. Western institutions of the eleventh and twelfth centuries are transplanted into a semi-virgin field and are retained into a later age when the west itself had largely abandoned them. Thus quite unexpectedly the Christian East has given into the hands of scholars a code of feudal law brought into a definite system, under whose conditions western Europe lived for a long time.

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Reference address : https://ellopos.net/elpenor/vasilief/feudalism.asp?pg=14