The Fractal Beauty of Feudalism

"Feudal" is today a pejorative term, but feudalism was in some ways well suited to a time of instability. Like the classic chiefdom, it kept food on the table without relying on a sound currency or on trade with distant peoples. It also kept warriors at the ready. This was especially impressive because, with the ascendancy of armored cavalry (due largely to the coming of the stirrup), equipping warriors got expensive. It was almost as if, today, no soldier could safely set foot on the battlefield without his own personal tank. The solution to this financial challenge—giving knights lordship over chunks of property they could subdivide for the use of peasants—worked well enough. And making each lord a governor of his immediate subordinates (not just peasants, but any other vassals) made for a decentralized government—a handy thing in a time of poor roads, low literacy rates, and other barriers to distant administration.

Perhaps most important, feudalism’s nested structure, its long chain of mutual obligation, gave the system a kind of resilience. Each link in the chain was a simple and direct nonzero-sum relationship; a lord and his vassal both benefited from the deal, and had consecrated this interdependence with ornate oaths of devotion. So if for any reason the bonds at the highest level broke, the lower levels of the hierarchy tended to stay intact out of mutual self-interest. When kingdoms collapsed, they broke up into regional or local polities, not into anarchy. Moreover, because larger units were structurally identical to the smaller units constituting them—mathematicians call this a "fractal," or "self-similar," structure—subsequent reassembly could proceed readily.

Source: NonZero. The Logic of Human Destiny. (2000) by Robert Wright.