In the early Middle Ages, violence was not simply a matter of chaos or brute force—it was governed by ideas about honour, law, and legitimacy. This article explores how feuds and warfare were justified in early medieval Germany, and where contemporaries drew the line between acceptable conflict and criminal aggression.
By David Bachrach
Max Weber famously argued that one of the hallmarks of a modern state was a monopoly on the legitimate use of physical force within a defined territory. Within the compass of the law of war, Weber’s insights have been associated with the legal tradition of ius ad bellum. This is the concept that governments retained the exclusive authority to declare legitimate war. One of the arguments made by scholars seeking to demonstrate a fundamental distinction between the governmental and legal traditions of the Roman Empire and early medieval Europe is the supposed breakdown in the content of the ius ad bellum after the end of imperial rule, so that the right to wage war was diffused widely throughout the upper strata of society.
It is widely understood that although the later Roman Empire suffered from large-scale and organized violence inflicted during both foreign invasions and internal wars, the basic legal principle was maintained that the state determined which types of organized violence were legitimate, and which were to be characterized as rebellion or treason. The main legal issue was determining who was the legitimate ruler of the state, and consequently who had the legal authority to justify war and to mobilize the resources of the state for war.
By contrast with the unitary ius ad bellum in the Roman Empire, many scholars have asserted that there was no abstract concept of the state in medieval Europe until at least the supposed rediscovery of Roman law (meaning the Justinianic Code) in the twelfth century. Even more fundamentally, it has been widely assumed that there was no practical governmental control over the legitimate exercise of military violence at least into the twelfth century.
Inventing the Germanic Feud
A warrior in a 12th-century German manuscript – Fondation Martin Bodmer 127 fol. 098r
The assumed cause of this break with the Roman legal and governmental traditions was the overrunning of the Empire by “barbarian” Germanic tribes and the introduction of a wholly new set of legal and societal norms around the exercise of violence. At the center of this putatively barbarian tradition was the “feud”. The concept of the Germanic feud emerged during the nineteenth-century in the context of the romantic-nationalist tradition that developed as a response to the Napoleonic conquest of the German states, and has continued to play an outsized role up to the present in discussions about the legitimate exercise of violence, including the right to declare and wage war in early medieval history.
The “feud” as conceptualized by scholars interested in the question of who had the right to wage war in the early medieval period can be divided into two distinct elements. The first of these was the right to self-help, or more specifically the right to exercise violence to protect against direct threats to oneself, one’s family, and one’s property. The second aspect of the “feud” was the “right of resistance”, which was supposed to have been limited to the societal elite, and to have permitted them to engage legally in large-scale violence not only horizontally against other members of the “nobility”, but also against the ruler.
The right to engage in violent self-help was understood by nineteenth-century legal scholars as part of an archaic and inherently Germanic system of law, which was necessitated by the lack of governmental policing powers. The “feud” also was thought to be part of an irrational mindset that led to endless cycles of violence between family groups. In the post-war period, scholars influenced by the anthropological turn in historical studies reinterpreted the feud as a mechanism for conflict resolution, which avoided violence by assuring potential perpetrators that they would face vengeance from an entire family group. Similar to their nineteenth-century predecessors, however, anthropologically inclined historians of the post-war period assumed that the feud functioned in a society that lacked effective governmental institutions.
Critically, scholars in both schools as well as their modern successors have ignored the crucial fact that violent self-help was an essential element of private law in the Roman Empire and was recognized as legitimate by the government in a wide range of circumstances. Moreover, early medieval governments also recognized the legitimacy of violent self-help in some circumstances while strenuously regulating it in others. In this context, John D. Niles recently has demonstrated that the entire concept of the “feud” as a specific and endemic category of violent self-help that proliferated in the absence of effective governmental institutions is a fiction, created out of an agglomerate of nineteenth-century nationalist historiography and more recent scholarly efforts to preserve a primitive image of early medieval society.
The concept of the “right of resistance” in early medieval Europe is based on equally shaky foundations. The foundational study by the German scholar Fritz Kern, Gottesgnadentum und Widerstandsrecht im früheren Mittelalter(Divine Right and the Right of Resistance in the Earlier Middle Ages), published in 1914, was based almost entirely on stories drawn from Icelandic sagas produced in the thirteenth century and after. These sagas had no connection to the contemporary German kingdom, much less to the kingdoms that emerged seven centuries earlier in the erstwhile provinces of the western empire.
Nevertheless, Kern’s findings subsequently were popularized by Otto Brunner in his exceptionally influential book Land und Herrschaft (Territory and Lordship), originally published in 1939, and reissued in numerous subsequent editions and translations. Brunner brought together Kern’s idea of the right of resistance with the model of society developed by scholars under the rubric of the New Constitutional History. A core belief of the New Constitutionalists was that the “nobility” in the German kingdom enjoyed autogenous lordship that they held on the basis of ancient Germanic custom. Brunner argued, again drawing almost exclusively on later medieval sources, that horizontal feuds between nobles, and vertical feuds between nobles and the ruler were the central defining characteristic of medieval society dating back to the migration of the Germanic tribes into the Roman Empire.
Contrary to the claims of Kern, Brunner, and their successors, however, there is no evidence at all from the early medieval period for a legally distinct caste of nobles, much less nobles who had the legal right to resist the ruler. Even more broadly, there is no evidence from the post-Roman successor states, the Carolingian Empire, or the early medieval German kingdom that anyone other than the ruler or his appointed officials had the authority to wage war legitimately, that is the ius ad bellum. The authors of a wide range of contemporary sources consistently make clear that military action against the ruler, or against anyone else without the ruler’s permission, was illegitimate.
Who Could Wage War Legitimately?
From a practical perspective, early medieval rulers maintained a monopoly on the sinews of war. Only the ruler or his designated officials could mobilize royal subjects for service in defense of their local districts or to go on campaign on the basis of their military obligations to the res publica. Only the ruler or his delegated officials could mobilize the king’s subjects to provide labor to build and maintain fortifications, roads, and bridges. In addition, early medieval rulers maintained a monopoly on the construction of militarily significant fortifications, i.e., those that were not intended merely as the personal residence of an aristocrat.
This tight control over the human and material resources of the state is mirrored by the preferential legitimation by the church of wars that were initiated by the ruler. Soldiers who killed the enemy in the context of a bellum publicum that had been declared by a legitimate ruler were subject to significantly lighter penances to cleanse their souls than were required for any other type of homicide. Soldiers serving in the king’s army benefitted from special intercessory masses that called upon God to aid them in battle. By contrast, soldiers serving in the armies of rebellious magnates could expect no such special pastoral concern. It was rather more likely that they would be excommunicated for daring to fight against the Lord’s anointed.
In sum, the “feud” was invented from whole cloth by scholars seeking to differentiate early medieval Europe from the Roman Empire, and to demonstrate the “Germanic” nature of early medieval society. In reality, both the legal concept of ius ad bellum as well as the practical governmental control over the means to conduct war were retained by the rulers of Rome’s successor states in the same manner as they retained so many other late imperial institutions and practices.
David Bachrach is a Professor at the University of New Hampshire, where he researches medieval military history, particularly in England and Germany.
John D. Niles, “The Myth of the Feud in Anglo-Saxon England,” Journal of English and Germanic Philology 114.2 (2015), 163-200.
David S. Bachrach, “Feud, Governmental Authority, and the Balance of Power in the Conduct of War in Ottonian Germany,” in Violence in Pre-Modern Warfare-Representations, Discourses, Practices and Experiences of War Violence in the Pre-Modern World, ed. Lennart Gilhaus (Leiden, 2025), 27-43.
In the early Middle Ages, violence was not simply a matter of chaos or brute force—it was governed by ideas about honour, law, and legitimacy. This article explores how feuds and warfare were justified in early medieval Germany, and where contemporaries drew the line between acceptable conflict and criminal aggression.
By David Bachrach
Max Weber famously argued that one of the hallmarks of a modern state was a monopoly on the legitimate use of physical force within a defined territory. Within the compass of the law of war, Weber’s insights have been associated with the legal tradition of ius ad bellum. This is the concept that governments retained the exclusive authority to declare legitimate war. One of the arguments made by scholars seeking to demonstrate a fundamental distinction between the governmental and legal traditions of the Roman Empire and early medieval Europe is the supposed breakdown in the content of the ius ad bellum after the end of imperial rule, so that the right to wage war was diffused widely throughout the upper strata of society.
It is widely understood that although the later Roman Empire suffered from large-scale and organized violence inflicted during both foreign invasions and internal wars, the basic legal principle was maintained that the state determined which types of organized violence were legitimate, and which were to be characterized as rebellion or treason. The main legal issue was determining who was the legitimate ruler of the state, and consequently who had the legal authority to justify war and to mobilize the resources of the state for war.
By contrast with the unitary ius ad bellum in the Roman Empire, many scholars have asserted that there was no abstract concept of the state in medieval Europe until at least the supposed rediscovery of Roman law (meaning the Justinianic Code) in the twelfth century. Even more fundamentally, it has been widely assumed that there was no practical governmental control over the legitimate exercise of military violence at least into the twelfth century.
Inventing the Germanic Feud
127 fol. 098r
The assumed cause of this break with the Roman legal and governmental traditions was the overrunning of the Empire by “barbarian” Germanic tribes and the introduction of a wholly new set of legal and societal norms around the exercise of violence. At the center of this putatively barbarian tradition was the “feud”. The concept of the Germanic feud emerged during the nineteenth-century in the context of the romantic-nationalist tradition that developed as a response to the Napoleonic conquest of the German states, and has continued to play an outsized role up to the present in discussions about the legitimate exercise of violence, including the right to declare and wage war in early medieval history.
The “feud” as conceptualized by scholars interested in the question of who had the right to wage war in the early medieval period can be divided into two distinct elements. The first of these was the right to self-help, or more specifically the right to exercise violence to protect against direct threats to oneself, one’s family, and one’s property. The second aspect of the “feud” was the “right of resistance”, which was supposed to have been limited to the societal elite, and to have permitted them to engage legally in large-scale violence not only horizontally against other members of the “nobility”, but also against the ruler.
The right to engage in violent self-help was understood by nineteenth-century legal scholars as part of an archaic and inherently Germanic system of law, which was necessitated by the lack of governmental policing powers. The “feud” also was thought to be part of an irrational mindset that led to endless cycles of violence between family groups. In the post-war period, scholars influenced by the anthropological turn in historical studies reinterpreted the feud as a mechanism for conflict resolution, which avoided violence by assuring potential perpetrators that they would face vengeance from an entire family group. Similar to their nineteenth-century predecessors, however, anthropologically inclined historians of the post-war period assumed that the feud functioned in a society that lacked effective governmental institutions.
Critically, scholars in both schools as well as their modern successors have ignored the crucial fact that violent self-help was an essential element of private law in the Roman Empire and was recognized as legitimate by the government in a wide range of circumstances. Moreover, early medieval governments also recognized the legitimacy of violent self-help in some circumstances while strenuously regulating it in others. In this context, John D. Niles recently has demonstrated that the entire concept of the “feud” as a specific and endemic category of violent self-help that proliferated in the absence of effective governmental institutions is a fiction, created out of an agglomerate of nineteenth-century nationalist historiography and more recent scholarly efforts to preserve a primitive image of early medieval society.
The Myth of a “Right of Resistance”
The concept of the “right of resistance” in early medieval Europe is based on equally shaky foundations. The foundational study by the German scholar Fritz Kern, Gottesgnadentum und Widerstandsrecht im früheren Mittelalter (Divine Right and the Right of Resistance in the Earlier Middle Ages), published in 1914, was based almost entirely on stories drawn from Icelandic sagas produced in the thirteenth century and after. These sagas had no connection to the contemporary German kingdom, much less to the kingdoms that emerged seven centuries earlier in the erstwhile provinces of the western empire.
Nevertheless, Kern’s findings subsequently were popularized by Otto Brunner in his exceptionally influential book Land und Herrschaft (Territory and Lordship), originally published in 1939, and reissued in numerous subsequent editions and translations. Brunner brought together Kern’s idea of the right of resistance with the model of society developed by scholars under the rubric of the New Constitutional History. A core belief of the New Constitutionalists was that the “nobility” in the German kingdom enjoyed autogenous lordship that they held on the basis of ancient Germanic custom. Brunner argued, again drawing almost exclusively on later medieval sources, that horizontal feuds between nobles, and vertical feuds between nobles and the ruler were the central defining characteristic of medieval society dating back to the migration of the Germanic tribes into the Roman Empire.
Contrary to the claims of Kern, Brunner, and their successors, however, there is no evidence at all from the early medieval period for a legally distinct caste of nobles, much less nobles who had the legal right to resist the ruler. Even more broadly, there is no evidence from the post-Roman successor states, the Carolingian Empire, or the early medieval German kingdom that anyone other than the ruler or his appointed officials had the authority to wage war legitimately, that is the ius ad bellum. The authors of a wide range of contemporary sources consistently make clear that military action against the ruler, or against anyone else without the ruler’s permission, was illegitimate.
Who Could Wage War Legitimately?
From a practical perspective, early medieval rulers maintained a monopoly on the sinews of war. Only the ruler or his designated officials could mobilize royal subjects for service in defense of their local districts or to go on campaign on the basis of their military obligations to the res publica. Only the ruler or his delegated officials could mobilize the king’s subjects to provide labor to build and maintain fortifications, roads, and bridges. In addition, early medieval rulers maintained a monopoly on the construction of militarily significant fortifications, i.e., those that were not intended merely as the personal residence of an aristocrat.
This tight control over the human and material resources of the state is mirrored by the preferential legitimation by the church of wars that were initiated by the ruler. Soldiers who killed the enemy in the context of a bellum publicum that had been declared by a legitimate ruler were subject to significantly lighter penances to cleanse their souls than were required for any other type of homicide. Soldiers serving in the king’s army benefitted from special intercessory masses that called upon God to aid them in battle. By contrast, soldiers serving in the armies of rebellious magnates could expect no such special pastoral concern. It was rather more likely that they would be excommunicated for daring to fight against the Lord’s anointed.
In sum, the “feud” was invented from whole cloth by scholars seeking to differentiate early medieval Europe from the Roman Empire, and to demonstrate the “Germanic” nature of early medieval society. In reality, both the legal concept of ius ad bellum as well as the practical governmental control over the means to conduct war were retained by the rulers of Rome’s successor states in the same manner as they retained so many other late imperial institutions and practices.
David Bachrach is a Professor at the University of New Hampshire, where he researches medieval military history, particularly in England and Germany.
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Further Readings:
John D. Niles, “The Myth of the Feud in Anglo-Saxon England,” Journal of English and Germanic Philology 114.2 (2015), 163-200.
David S. Bachrach, “Feud, Governmental Authority, and the Balance of Power in the Conduct of War in Ottonian Germany,” in Violence in Pre-Modern Warfare-Representations, Discourses, Practices and Experiences of War Violence in the Pre-Modern World, ed. Lennart Gilhaus (Leiden, 2025), 27-43.
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