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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 3369429" data-attributes="member: 4937">Thunderfoot: No need to apologize.  We all get told something at some point or the other that we take for truth, and then find things are more complicated than that (or sometimes even more simple) later.  I've been reading everything I can get my hands on about the middle ages for about 30 years.There are two things I would caution you on.  First, alot of the Reinnasance through Early Modern sources on the Medieval period are not to be trusted.  The Reinnasance writers were 'counter culturists', and they wanted to portray themselves in as fine of light as possible, and do that they wanted to portray the proceeding culture as being as backwards, ignorant, and brutal as possible.  Alot of our notion of the middle ages as 'dark ages' comes in part from what is essentially the propaganda of that day.  The real dark ages as such were over by the time you get to what we think of as the middle ages.  There was nothing particularly dark about 12th or 13th century Europe - plenty of writing and learning were going on.  Secondly, don't confuse Serfdom in the middle ages for the 'second serfdom' of the modern period, which really was just the return of slavery.  For example, in Poland - were serfdom reached a degree of harshness that probably equalled just about anywhere - in the middle ages serfs started out needing to work thier lords land less than one day a week.  By the 18th century, pretty much all the land was the lord's land, the serfs were required to work it six days a week, and they were in no better economic conditions (and maybe even worse) than black slaves in America.  Basically what I'm saying is that if a serf doesn't have any significant land of his own usury to farm, then he's not really a serf.Now, if you like contridictions and ever want a really funny (or really tragic) story about economics in the middle ages, you need to research how Karl Marx misenterpreted economic data from the Middle Ages to create his theory of communism.   True story, the economic theory of communism was based on the trade monopolies of the late medieval and early reinnasance trade guilds, which looking back we might consider to be the exact opposite of communism - namely virtually unrestricted merchantile power in the hands of a corporation.  But if I go any farther, people are going to accuse me of discussing politics.</blockquote>

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