Feudal hierarchy – An Overview

Below is the first section of my upcoming book Magnificent Tales of Doomed Kingdoms. It helps the reader understand how landed titles were organized in a feudal hierarchy. I also try to establish the size of these land holdings as I imagined them in my mind. Note that these sizes were not set in stone. The goal here, is not about being historically accurate but to provide a quick guide to the reader.

In the feudal system all land holdings were arranged in a hierarchical manner – from large to small. Rulers in many different cultures had to contend with the challenge of assigning ownership and rights to different sizes of holdings of lands and most used a similar system. As a result, land holdings were categorized according to their size. At the smallest level there would be something referred to by some cultures as a Barony, managed by a Baron or a Baroness. Depending on the size of the Barony, it could be split into about ten to twenty fiefs, with each fief assigned to a knight or person at a similar level (in other cultures) to oversee as well as to provide revenue and military service to the Baron. The size of a fief could be anywhere from a few hundred acres (in the range of a Square Kilometer) up to a thousand or so acres (in the range of Four to Five Square Kilometers). Given this you can imagine a Barony could range from the size of a small (Ten to Twenty Square Kilometers) town to a medium sized (Eighty to Hundred Square Kilometers) city. Each Barony would generally specialize in something somewhat like modern cities. Some would be major centers of trade, some would be places where thousands would visit to worship, some centers of production from steel to ships and then some others might mostly have defensive fortifications. Moreover, the geographical landscape of the area had a strong influence on what sort of structures would develop there over time.

When we combine multiple Baronies together, we get a county, managed in turn by a Count or a Countess. All the Barons or Baronesses in a county would be considered as Vassals of the Count or Countess and would provide services to their ruler or Leige. These services would also vary depending on the specialization of a Barony. The variation in the size of Baronies also caused huge variation in the size of the Counties. When compared to today’s land units, Counties would range in size of multiple small towns to a grouping of a couple of cities and all the land between them.

The next level above a county would a Duchy. As you might have guessed, this is a collection of counties and were of a significant size. They were ruled over by a Duke or a Duchess – a ruler who was considered hierarchically second to the title of a King or a Queen (in the Western European Cultures). All Counts and Countess for the counties inside the Duchy were considered the vassals of the ruler of the Duchy. There were also cases where a ruler could rule multiple Duchies and, in that case, they were generally called Grand Duke or Grand Duchess. Depending on their size, a Duchy might be comparable to a state or a province in most modern countries. However, historically, around various parts of the world, various land holdings at the same hierarchical level as a Duchy of various sizes were carved out based on various factors such as population, financial and trade value, culture, geography, political alignments, etc.

The next level up is probably the most recognizable to most people. It would be a Kingdom and was ruled by a King or a Queen. A kingdom would be a collection of various Duchies as well as any other lands that the rulers of the Kingdom would reserve for themselves. The easiest analogy of a Kingdom would be a Country by today’s standards. However, that said, it was common for many Grand Dukes to declare the lands they controlled as Kingdoms and themselves as Kings and Queens of those lands. Since then, many of such smaller kingdoms have been combined into bigger administrative units that we know as Countries today. Hence it is worth remembering that a historically a Kingdom could also be significantly smaller than the current countries we see today.

There is one more level above a King or a Queen in the feudal system and that was of an Emperor or an Empress. This is a person who had as their vassals Kings and Queens of various Kingdoms. As you can imagine, Empires such as The Arabian Empire, The Byzantine Empire, The Chinese Empire, The Indian Empire, The Mongol Empire, The Persian Empire, etc. spanned many Kingdoms and vast stretches of globe. Today, we don’t find a similar analogy to an empire, but it is not too difficult to imagine the vast scales of governance, martial and administrative control needed to bring up and control such regions.

Although the names and the number of administrative titles have varied across cultures and regions around the globe, it is the above-described structure and titles I thought of while writing my book.