Las dependencias personales y las prestaciones económicas en la expansión feudal en la Cataluña nueva (Siglo XII)

Abstract

This article analyses the feudal society in the territories and in the age of the great Catalan expansion in the middle of the 12th century, it focuses on the relationships of personal dependence and their economic manifestation in rents, as the basis of this social organisation. The transformation of the forms of personal dependences as a result of the conquests meant that a system where power, shared and supported by military activities was replaced by one where the lords consolidated their seigneurial power and extended dependency to other sections of society. The lords’ hierarchical structure and the compartmentalization of territorial power were replaced by increased lordly authority, as exemplified by new manifestations in religious orders, urban and count’s powers. New forms of pacification and justice were consequently developed, the rental system was simplified and subaltern social classes emerged, which all contributed to the imposition of the feudal society in the occupied lands and to their consolidations in the regions previously under feudal control.