By Marcus Havelock
At first glance, the twenty-first century seems light-years from the medieval battlefield. Our wars are tracked by satellites, waged by drones, and broadcast in real time across the globe. Yet the political patterns beneath the technology feel startlingly familiar. Strip away the stealth jets and encrypted networks, and what remains is a logic of vassals, tribute, and proxy skirmishes that would be legible to a baron in the thirteenth century.
The Feudal Logic Reborn
In medieval Europe, kings rarely ruled directly. Instead, they relied on a patchwork of lords who pledged loyalty in exchange for land and protection. These vassals, in turn, fought the king’s wars while pursuing their own local interests. Today’s great powers echo this structure. Washington arms and funds regional partners in exchange for alignment. Moscow deploys mercenaries and leverages dependent states to extend influence. Beijing builds economic tributaries through infrastructure loans and digital systems of dependence. The empires have returned, not through conquest but through chains of allegiance.
Proxy Wars as Siege Warfare
The wars of our age — Syria, Ukraine, Yemen — resemble medieval sieges more than the total wars of the twentieth century. Instead of direct clashes between superpowers, we see strongholds contested by proxy. Just as medieval lords tested one another’s strength by besieging border castles, today’s powers probe through limited theaters, careful never to risk a decisive collision. The battlefield is global, but the strategy is attrition, exhaustion, and indirect dominance.
Tribute in the Currency of Dependence
In the Middle Ages, tribute was measured in grain, coin, or military service. In the modern order, it comes in subtler forms: military basing rights, favorable trade agreements, access to critical minerals, or votes in international assemblies. States caught in the orbit of larger powers are compelled to pay these modern tributes, not unlike their medieval counterparts tethered to a king’s court. Sovereignty, in practice, becomes conditional.
The Empire Without a Crown
What is striking is that few of today’s powers call themselves empires, yet their behavior fits the archetype. The United States secures loyalty through security guarantees. Russia wields energy pipelines like fiefdoms. China binds partners into its Belt and Road as though weaving them into an imperial tapestry. All operate less as nation-states pursuing clean borders than as overlords tending sprawling zones of influence. The lines on the map remain neat, but the lived geopolitics are layered, contested, and feudal in texture.
Why the Medieval Lens Matters
Seeing our world through the lens of empire is not nostalgia, but clarity. It explains why wars drag on without resolution: they are not contests for total victory but moves in a longer game of allegiance and tribute. It highlights why small states matter so much: like medieval marches, they are buffer zones whose loyalty can tip balances of power. And it reminds us that modernity does not erase history’s logics. Power recycles its patterns, even as its weapons change.
We live not in a post-imperial age, but in an empire without coronations — a world of vassals, lords, and overlords dressed in modern clothes. The castles may be cities, the tributes contracts, the fiefs digital, but the shape of domination endures.
