Depends on historians interpretations mostly -- as in any case there are instances that support your point and those that refute it, and there are historians wh

Depends on historians interpretations mostly -- as in any case there are instances that support your point and those that refute it, and there are historians who come to your conclusions and those that come to the opposite ones. By necessity, local landlords and smaller communities were in a much stronger "competition of sorts" with their neighboring "jurisdictions", more effective than our grand nation states with their inter-national tax agreements. Some of them were nasty bastards, but the next one presumably less so. They seriously couldn't indebt themselves and keep raising taxes quite as abusively as today's nation governments do, the world over, and didn't. You do realize than sub-10% taxes were the default scenario in these times long past, and in many European provinces they were in fact paid voluntarily, for real armed protection services that could be denied if you chose not to pay them, but weren't forced to. References / citations? Read Hans Hermann Hoppe's Democracy book, it's full of them.