Sublime

suzerainty

suzerainty

If they did not permit a certain man to call himself a proprietor of the soil, they still allowed him the possession of it; he cultivated his land, sold it, and devised it by will. It was not said that this land was his, but they said it was as good as his, pro suo. It was not his property, dominium, but it was among his goods, in bonis.633

Transcendent states and beings frequently authorize sovereign positions, but the nature of this inscrutable position is also important. If it is cognized as an all-powerful, all-knowing and punishing God, it is a position that can be delegated to or inherited by the human subject as the new sovereign. If, on the other hand, authoritative sources in

although warlords might claim possession of territory by conquest, they were unlikely to enjoy, in their new-won lands, the networks of élite client relations on whom secure rule depended. As late as the tenth century very powerful kings of Wessex struggled to engender loyalty among peoples recently ‘liberated’ from Viking control. There is a fine

Enki is superior to all the others. He has the power to determine the destinies of different lands and territories,

He was claiming the right of disposal of our possessions. He has given them to us only as trustees, not as owners.

Some fifth-century lords may have ruled quite large territories, and the organizational effort required to construct some of the great dyke systems may be their enduring witness. Gildas’s five tyrants look as though they inherited or won rights over the lands of former civitates. But so little is known about them that it is impossible to say if