THIS CHAPTER COMPARES personal ties of political friendship, service, loyalty, and obedience that existed between princes in Rus and between members of lay elite in Latin Europe. A discussion of such ties inevitably leads to the subject of “feudalism.” A personal bond known as the “feudal contract” is at the core of the narrow definition of feudalism as a legal system based on the lord's grant of fief in exchange for the vassal's service and obedience. A broader, more widely used model, going back to Mark Bloch's classical work, does not reduce feudalism to the feudo-vassalic bond, but includes this bond among the defining features of “feudal society,” along with a subject peasantry, the fragmentation of public authority, and the dominance of the warrior aristocratic class. Within this latter class, there was a “widespread use of service tenement (i.e. the fief)” and ties of obedience and protection that assumed the distinctive form of vassalage, and, “in the midst of all this, the survival of other forms of association, family and State.”

As is well known, the concept of feudalism has been subject to much critique, which has become particularly vigorous since the 1990s. According to its most radical critic, Susan Reynolds, the union of fief and vassalage that is at the heart of the “feudal contract” never was sufficiently formal, systematic, and widespread to justify the traditional view of it as central to the medieval social order; to the extent that feudo-vassalic relations existed at all, they were a creation of late medieval jurists. Some aspects of Reynolds's thesis have been broadly accepted. Most historians agree that earlier scholarship mistakenly saw feudo-vassalic relations in the early Carolingian period. This mistake appears to be the ultimate manifestation of the “confusion of words, concepts, and phenomena” that, according to Reynolds, is at the core of the problem with “feudalism”: as soon as historians encounter in their sources words, such as vassus or beneficium (thought to be synonymous with feodum), they assume the existence of the textbook fiefs and vassals. Studies of these and other terms describing power and property relations have demonstrated that words, with what look from a modern perspective like “feudal” connotations, had, in fact, a wide variety of meanings; and that there is, indeed, no evidence that the early medieval beneficium was the type of property traditionally described in scholarly literature as “fief.”