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In western history, this was definitely something (re?)introduced by various germanic people after the western roman empire collapse, and already they were enco
by geeB 5y ago
In western history, this was definitely something (re?)introduced by various germanic people after the western roman empire collapse, and already they were encouraging monetary reparations.
In roman times, if someone killed your cousin you could go to court and it would mostly end there. After the collapse, if someone killed your cousin your family had the right to kill someone of "equal value" from the family of the killer. Aside from the brutality and senseless violence (as seen from us today), the biggest problem was that people disagreed on "equal value", resulting in a feud, i.e. an escalation of revenge because each party felt that the other side's killing was way more than warranted to make things even.
So the states (starting from the early barbarian kingdoms) would encourage the family of the killed to accept a monetary payment to avoid the murders to spiral out of control. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Weregild https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Weregild.
I think the concepts of feud and weregild did not even exist in the roman world.
But you are right that for a long time you still had the right for revenge, until eventually it was fully phased out. A bit like the transition between the gold standard and fiat currency.
- meepmorp 5y ago> I think the concepts of feud and weregild did not even exist in the roman world. The article related to this post mentions that in Rome, working out monetary compensation for the life of a family member was a common practice. It's not a uniquely germanic-in-origin practice.
- geeB 5y agoI think from their perspective it was very different though. The article specifically talks about compensation to a woman's family if her husband kills her. It sounds like if a slave or a woman was killed, it was considered similar to someone's cattle being killed or a property crime, as opposed to a homicide of a free man, and thus something to be payed for. It seems that the remarkable thing about this story (aside from the emperor's involvement) was that usually a husband wouldn't be encouraged to kill himself for murdering his wife. Whereas in the barbarian kingdoms and later on, all murders were initially a private matter and people retained the right to kill someone back (not necessarily the killer) unless they opted for the compensation. If this specific case happened after the fall of the empire, probably the father would have just killed the husband back instead of seeking government involvement. And probably the husband's family would have not thought it fair and either seek compensation or kill another member of the wife's family. Either way, I'm glad things have changed since then!