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VASSAL (Fr. vassal, vassaut, vassault, &c.), the tenant and follower of a feudal lord (see FEUDALISM). The etymology of the word has been a matter of considerable dispute. The late Henri de Tourville, in his Histoire de la formation particulariste, maintained ...

VASA, or NIKOLAISTAD, in the grand duchy of Finland, capital of the province of Vasa, on the east coast of the Gulf of Bothnia, 327 m. by rail north-west of Helsingfors. Pop. (1904) 18,028. It has two classical lyceums for boys and three for girls, a school of

... with which the 8th century opened. It has wrongly been held to be the origin of vassalage. Only the king had antrustions; every lord could have vassals. The antrustions were a military institution; vassalage was a social institution, the origins of which are v ...

... Under the English rule the counts of Armagnac were turbulent and untrustworthy vassals; and the administration of the Black Prince, tending to favour the towns of Aquitainc at the expense of the nobles, drove them to the side of France. The complaint against ...

... proclaimed king, could no longer maintain himself, because he appeared to be a vassal of the Romans; Artabanus returned from Hyrcania with a strong army of Scythian (Dahan) auxiliaries, and was again acknowledged by the Parthians. Tiridatcs left Sclcucia and ...

... y made an expedition into North Wales, and forced its prince Owen to become his vassal, not without some fighting, in which the English army received several sharp checks at the commencement of the campaign. Yet once more Henry's stay on the English side of th ...

... inscriptions it has been gathered that Padi, king of Ekron, was for a time the vassal of Hezekiah of Judah, but regained his independence when the latter was hard pressed by Sennacherib. A notice of its history in 147 B.C. is found in i Mace. x. 89; after the ...

... mporal powers of the bishop were abolished. In 1367 it (as well as the bishop's vassals in the Lower Engadine) joined the newly founded League of God's House or Gotteshausbund (see GRISONS), one of the 3 Raetian Leagues, which lasted till 1799-1801, when the w ...

... ewish state then existing in S. Arabia, and reducing that country to a state of vassalage: the king is styled in Ethiopian chronicles Caleb (Kaleb), in Greek and Arabic documents El-Esbaha. In the 7th century a successor to this king, named Abraha or Abraham, ...

... all but the semblance of power by its delegation to their more or less nominal vassals, the feudal organization was early recognized as impossible as a form of state government, if the state was to be preserved; and the history of the three great European pow ...

... 76). Evagoras was allowed to remain nominally king of Salamis. but in reality a vassal of Persia, to which he was to pay a yearly tribute. The chronology of the last part of his reign is uncertain. In 374 be was assassinated by a eunuch from motives of private ...

... he raised objections, he had in the end to content himself with being simply a vassal of Rome. Sulla returned to Italy in 83, landing at Brundisium, having previously informed the senate of the result of his campaigns in Greece and Asia, and announced his pre ...

... d is debated. Du Cange (Glossarium, s. Valeti) explains it as the diminutive of vassallus, a vassal, the sons of vassalli being termed vasseleti (and so vasleti, valeti), on the analogy of domicelli (damoiseaux) for the sons of domini. This view is also taken ...

... or; Fr. vavassour, tavassor, vasseur, &c.), in its most general sense a mediate vassal, i.e. one holding a fief under a vassal. The word was, however, applied at various times to the most diverse ranks in the feudal hierarchy, being used practically as the syn ...

... ted by Pippin's attack. The position of Venice was now assured. The state was a vassal of a weak and distant empire, which would leave it virtually free to pursue its own career; it was an independent tributary of a near and powerful kingdom with which it coul ...