Kings and other leaders were not strong enough to control large areas directly. The lower lords were not strong enough to keep themselves safe without help. One of the key principles that underlay this development was the idea that one person could speak for many.
Like most complex scholarly questions, the history ends in a lively and continuing debate. Since within the pronoia the formerly free peasants became more or less serfs, they came under the jurisdiction of the pronoiarios, although this jurisdiction was restricted. The central government, thus, gave up many of its prerogatives including that of direct taxation, and the pronoiarios became small rulers, whose estates appeared as little kingdoms within the empire. The crown became more and more dependent on them, rickey stokes facebook which contributed to the weakening of the central government and to the decline and disintegration of the empire (Ostrogorski 1940; Kantorowicz 1956). In the provinces the key figures were the shugo, who by the end of the fourteenth century had developed into true regional overlords, having acquired the combined powers of the former civil and military governors. They held title, under the shogun, to territories the size of entire provinces, serving as the ultimate authority in both civil and military affairs.
This meant not only communicating their views but committing them to action . Given the responsibility of this role, it was important that the representative should be someone who commanded the confidence of the majority of those whom he represented. The notion of electing representatives by majority vote thus took hold, and so developed a practice which would lie at the heart of modern democracy. These large estates of the late Roman empire were much more economically self-sufficient than their predecessors had been.
In the absence of strong market forces, the short-term leases or life leases that multiplied in the rebuilding of this part of Germany after the Thirty Years’ War faded into perpetual arrangements by the eighteenth century. Lords were content to retain peasants to farm their tenures and pay feudal taxes generation after generation. The rule of a local lord over the peasant population from whose compulsory, tributary labor he sustains himself.
Among his de cisions was the choice to make his former opponents hereditary vassals to his supporters. He also made at tendance at court compulsory, encouraged interna tional trade, and controlled the building of castles within Japan. He revived Confucianism as well, graft ing the reverence for the family to concern for per sonal honor to further strengthen the ties of the feu dal contract. His authority as a military leader with a loyal army to back his position trumped that of the emperor. After his death in 1616, the Tokugawa shogunate continued, as did the trend of power col lecting in the hands of the wealthy and influential daimyo instead of the emperor.
