Tribute - Western European Notions of Tribute in Medieval Times

Western European Notions of Tribute in Medieval Times

Raiders, like Vikings and Celtic tribes, could also exact tribute instead of raiding the place if the potential targets agreed to pay an agreed amount of valuables.

Tribute was not always money, but also valuables, effectively making the payers hostages kept unpillaged in exchange for good behaviour.

Various medieval lords required tribute from their vassals or peasants, nominally in exchange for protection to incur the costs of raising armies, or paying for free-lance mercenaries against a hostile neighbouring state. That system evolved into medieval taxation and co-existed as a secular approximation of the churchly tithe levied on production

Read more about this topic:  Tribute

Famous quotes containing the words western, european, notions, tribute, medieval and/or times:

    There has never been in history another such culture as the Western civilization M a culture which has practiced the belief that the physical and social environment of man is subject to rational manipulation and that history is subject to the will and action of man; whereas central to the traditional cultures of the rivals of Western civilization, those of Africa and Asia, is a belief that it is environment that dominates man.
    Ishmael Reed (b. 1938)

    So in Jamaica it is the aim of everybody to talk English, act English and look English. And that last specification is where the greatest difficulties arise. It is not so difficult to put a coat of European culture over African culture, but it is next to impossible to lay a European face over an African face in the same generation.
    Zora Neale Hurston (1891–1960)

    Hang ideas! They are tramps, vagabonds, knocking at the back- door of your mind, each taking a little of your substance, each carrying away some crumb of that belief in a few simple notions you must cling to if you want to live decently and would like to die easy!
    Joseph Conrad (1857–1924)

    His meter was bitter, and ironic and spectacular and inviting: so was life. There wasn’t much other life during those times than to what his pen paid the tribute of poetic tragic glamour and offered the reconciliation of the familiarities of tragedy.
    Zelda Fitzgerald (1900–1948)

    The medieval town, with frieze
    Of boy scouts from Nagoya?
    John Ashbery (b. 1927)

    I tried self-sacrifice a couple of times in my youth.
    Mason Cooley (b. 1927)