What is the difference between a baron, a king, a lord, a vassal, and knight? What do all these terms actually mean?
>>352217
Nothing a quick google search wouldn't tell you.
>>352217
Depends on who you talked to and what time period they lived in.
>>352217
>Baron
A baron is a low ranking member of the landed gentry
>Lord
Lord is the title of a baron.
>King
A king is a dude who controls vast swathes of land to the point he can be recognized king.
>Knight
Knights used to be the term for important members of the army, now it's a purely honorific term.
>Vassal
Subservient to another power or individual.
>>352217
I'm not going your 4th grade homework kid
Men don't follow titles, they follow courage
>>352217
A baron is someone who owns a landed estate and rents out the homes and fields of the land to the peasantry.
A lord is just a title given to anyone who owns a fief of land; they could be a baron, a prince, a duke, or a king, etc.
A king is the title of a man who rules over all the dukes, barons, earls, etc, in a kingdom.
A knight is the title of a noble official who directly serves his liege, but doesn't own any land.
A vassal is anyone who has a liege.
What is a Duke?
>>352217
>Baron
A ranking of lord. A barony is a loose classification of land larger than a country but smaller than Duchy, Principality, or Kingdom.
>King
A lord who has several levels of vassals under him, and has absolute suzerainty over his domain. A Kingdom is usually several duchies or counties take together but is sometimes smaller or larger.
>Lord
Anyone who owns an estate and pays homage to a liege lord. Can be as small as a count or burgher to as large as a duke or baron.
>Vassal
Anyone who owns an estate under a lord. This can be several levels deep. A king might have a duke under him, and the duke might have several counts under him, and the counts all have knights and burghers under them.
>Knight
Both a level of nobility and a title. As a noble, knights usually own a small parsel of land (think, a small homestead), but they can own more or literally nothing depending on circumstances. The title of knight is a religious one, and implies that the bearer is a warrior affiliated with the church, who has a liege lord. Knights were generally expected to pay for their land with their fighting abilities in a war. A lord or king can be a knight, but not all knights are lords.
Also this
>>352222
>>352526
Knight isn't a level of nobility, nor really a title. It's an honourific, and in past times a military role.
>The title of knight is a religious one, and implies that the bearer is a warrior affiliated with the church
Well no, not really.
>>352231
>>352368
>landed gentry
>owns a landed estate and rents out the homes and fields of the land
Ironic you would emphasise the land so much.
Barons were originally low ranking nobles who followed the king and court and didn't own or manage any land of their own. The word still has that meaning in French today, somebody's "barons" are his most powerful followers that gravitate around him.
>>352613
>The word still has that meaning in French today, somebody's "barons" are his most powerful followers that gravitate around him.
[language envy]
>>352424
A duke leads an army.
A count manages land, collects taxes etc.
A marquess manages a march, meaning a border region.
A baron owns no land but belongs to the king's entourage.
Those are the original meanings of those titles from Merovingian and Carolingian France, back when they were civil service positions and originally not even hereditary. When the empire collapsed and the feudal system emerged, they lost their original function and just turned into titles of nobility, usually ranked in the order above. Although counts can often be more important than dukes, for instance the traditional secular Peers of France are three dukes and three counts.
>>352671
Oh and a count is called an earl in the English peerage. The earl was the Anglo-Saxon version of the Scandinavian jarl, and his function was roughly similar to that of a count so the Normans kept the name.
>>352368
>A knight is the title of a noble official who directly serves his liege, but doesn't own any land.
A knight was not necessarily a nobleman. During the late middle ages this was pretty much the case but during the high middle ages you had plenty of people who were knights but not of noble birth, e.g. such as the ministerials in HRE. Many of these later became "real" nobles of course.
>you'll never be a duke
>>353235
Not unless you marry a close relative of the monarch.
So what's the difference between a King and a sovereign duke, or a subjugated King in an empire and a subjugated Duke in a kingdom?
>>352217
>murkan educaschun
>>353266
Well just as you pointed out, it has to do with what degree of autonomy you can provide yourself with. The Duke of Burgundy was a rival to the King of France even though he was technically subordinate to him, precisely because he was wealthy and powerful enough to pay only lip-service to his oath of fealty to the King. He didn't do as he as told, but all still understood his rank was technically lower. He was a sovereign Duke. An over-mighty subject, as they used to say.
A subjugated Duke or King was simply one who had held those titles, but who was obliged to obey his liege superior because he did not have the means to resist.
Feudalism is sometimes hard to get your head around because we tend to look at the various titles and ranks the way we would look at modern positions within a modern government, where authority is top-down and totally contingent on the pleasure of your superior. The cabinet secretaries can be dismissed at will by the head of state and have no independent power base with which to defy this and maintain their position (though they may do so by other means, appealing to populism and running for other positions in the government). Kings were frequently not the most militarily powerful or the most wealthy person in their country, so they were typically obliged to play their nobles against one another to keep them in check. If one magnate became too great, they could summon several others and combined they were enough to suppress the upstart. If they couldn't do this, the king was essentially helpless.
This was made even more acute by the need to grant titles and their attendant lands to your vassals to reward and ensure their loyalty. So the problem of alienation of crown lands became a big one, where kings had to give away their holdings to their subjects and so became weaker and more impoverished themselves.
Read about the Wars of the Roses sometimes. It's a great example of over-mighty subjects run amok.
>>353296
But surely by virtue of becoming a sovereign ruler with no superior, a Duke with no superior such as in Ferrera would "naturally" promote to a King?
>>353304
Well what made a king a king was a very serious matter, and it often had to do with a great deal of tradition, and divine right. You could not simply make yourself king (notionally anyway) because the butt already in the chair had been put there by God and a lot of tradition and precedent and whatever laws of inheritance you followed. So you couldn't just say "Well the King of France can't boss me around so I guess that makes ME a king." Nobody would take that seriously. Again an important part of understanding this involves getting into the mindset of a medieval person. It isn't like today where a military leader might stage a coup, annihilate or exile the previous regime and declare himself Dictator for life. It was a lot more complex than that. And you can't forget that the Papacy had an important say in what made a king legitimate.
The Italians states are an odd case because Italy had not had a king the way France or the English had. Parts of it were nominally part of the HRE, but basically they were a bunch of petty kingdoms, all tied up in the fabric of the papacy.
Kings were serious business, anon. As weird as it seems to us, one did not simply make himself king if he was not born to it. Even in places where it happened (like the Wars of the Roses I alluded to) the usurpers were careful to point out they had an inherited right through some distant relative, or because they were the descendant of a previous dynasty that had been wrongly deposed.
>>353324
as an addendum to this, it is useful to think about how seldom kings were outright slain, even when defeated in battle. You might beat a king, you might even capture him, but during the height of Feudalism anyway, the notion of just killing him to strike a serious blow to your enemy was just not even considered. It wasn't done. Kings were semi-mystical, semi-divine beings with immense temporal and spiritual significance. So in a fit of pique you might throw one in jail, as was done to Richard the Lionhearted, but they were almost never outright executed even if you had them totally in your power. At least not until feudalism really started to unravel.
>>352221
Like 90% of the threads on this board
>>353296
>>353324
>>353333
5 star posts my nigga
>>352217
Feudalism was among other things a political system of hierarchy, with the Pope on top and the Church acting as a -interested- guarant of the whole system.
Feudalism varied over time and there wasn't a single model, but the basic idea is decentralization of power because the King cannot effectively attend all the matters of the kingdom and offer effective protection because the clay is too large, communications too deficient and administration/economy too primitive. Therefore they needed to outsource tasks in exchange for lands and fealty when the nobility decided that hereditary titles>appointed titles. How into legitimacy and trust in this system? By establishing an order, set of godly rules guaranteed by the Church. As a principle you have to swear fealty and allegiance in rank, unless you don't because he been bad boy and the Church agrees and your fellow noble mates with their armies agree too and so on.
But you just can't go and declare yourself king just because, even if the actual king is in practical terms a powerless faggot with an effective army of a few hundred men whereas you the Count of 4chania have 10 times that and 5 times the moneys and lands the King has. In fact, this scenario was pretty common in f.i France during the XI,XII centuries.
This however led to situations like the Norman King of England, in practice a gorillion times more powerful than the King of France, having to pay hommage to him not as King of England but as Duke of Normandy which was part of the French, or as in Catalonia, where the Count of Barcelona didn't give two fucks about what the King of France had to say but couldn't himself into King, because in theory the King was the one in Paris because the Frankish Marca Hispanica, until Catalonia merged with Aragon, which was already a Kingdom, and thus the trick was done.
