Form a 500-word summary report to summarize the political characteristics of Western European feudal society and the reasons for its formation.

The history of Europe from the fall of the Western Roman Empire in 476 to about 1500 is called the "Middle Ages" by Western historians. It is a period of history between the demise of ancient Greek and Roman civilization and the emergence of modern capitalist society. Compared with China's feudal society, the political situation in Western Europe shows completely different characteristics. China has established a centralized power with supreme imperial power and implemented feudalism and patriarchal systems. The imperial power has been consolidated, but Western Europe is not as powerful as China. The imperial power of power. After the fall of the Western Roman Empire, several regimes emerged in the territory of the Western Roman Empire. The Frankish Empire later split into France, Germany, and Italy. It is very difficult to develop politics in these Western European countries. There is no unified central power in each country, and it is impossible to develop politics. And every regime does not have a strong imperial power. The king does not have much power. Every time a major decision is made, a large group of people from the royal family must be organized to discuss it. Until later, when the king decides on something, it can be vetoed by the royal family. Starting from China's Qin Shihuang, China's emperor has always been supreme, and the things he decides cannot be changed. This is one of the reasons for the imbalance of feudalism in Western Europe. Reasons for the extremely uneven development of feudal society in Western Europe 1. Strict feudal system In the early feudal society of Western Europe, land was the main wealth. The king entrusted part of the land to the great feudal lords, and these people became princes. The princes then enfeoffed part of the land to smaller feudal lords, and the small feudal lords further enfeoffed it downwards. The king and the great feudal lord each assigned a group of knights as their own armed forces. This layer-by-layer enfeoffment resulted in feudal lords of different levels, from big to small, such as duke, marquis, earl, viscount, baron, knight, etc. These feudal lords each owned fiefs of varying sizes, with varying numbers of manors, serfs, and armed forces. In this way, a relationship between lords (lords) and vassals (vassals) was formed in every corner of society, and they had obligations to each other. The lord protects the vassal, and the vassal must swear allegiance to the lord and provide various services to the lord. However, a lord could only directly govern his own vassals, not his vassals. Every feudal lord is no different from a small king, who is divided into one side and governs his own affairs. The princes were very powerful, and some dared to challenge the king. Feudal nobles lived in heavily guarded castles and had their own armed forces; their economic production units were called manors, which were generally self-sufficient and did not interact with the outside world. As a result, the strict feudal hierarchy, countless castles surrounded by vast manors, and steeple churches reaching into the sky became the typical political style and unique social landscape of the early feudal society in Western Europe. 2. Conflict between church and state. Starting from the 5th to 6th centuries, the power of the church in Western Europe grew rapidly. The Roman Catholic Church was the most powerful feudal lord, owning one-third of the land in the Catholic world. The church also established its own hierarchical system in a feudal way. The highest one is the pope, followed by the archbishops, bishops, etc., each with their own jurisdiction. In the mid-8th century, the Papal State was formed in central Italy. The pope is both a religious leader and the king of a country with secular power. He directly governs a territory of more than 40,000 square kilometers. In order to sanctify their rule, kings often asked the pope to crown themselves in the name of God. Charlemagne did just that. This approach strengthened the connection between the feudal king and the church, and also meant that religious power overrided sovereignty. In the 9th century, the pope became the arbiter of Western Christendom. However, the pope and the feudal monarchs sometimes colluded with each other and sometimes fought openly and covertly. In the Middle Ages in Western Europe, people believed that all power in the world was granted by God, but opinions differed widely on who was the owner of this power. Both the king and the church wanted to take this great power for themselves, and there were constant collisions and frictions between the two sides. Only in the late Middle Ages, with the formation and growth of centralized states in Western Europe, the rise of the bourgeoisie, the Renaissance, the Enlightenment and the Reformation, did the power of the Pope and the Roman King of Rome gradually decline. 3. The Rise of Cities In the 11th and 12th centuries, cities across Europe generally re-emerged. In the Middle Ages, due to the increase in population and the development of commerce, in addition to the original old cities during the Roman Empire, many new towns appeared in areas near castles, main churches, and large monasteries. In the process of the re-emergence of Western European cities and the rapid development of industry and commerce, the citizen class was formed, and further differentiated into craftsmen, merchants, bankers, etc. Merchants and bankers, as the upper echelon of the civil class, developed into the early bourgeoisie. The vast majority of Western European cities launched a struggle for the right to autonomy, formulated their own laws, established their own armed forces, and challenged the feudal kingship and feudal lords at all levels. By the 14th and 15th centuries, the emerging urban middle class that developed from within the feudal society of Western Europe was already incompatible with the feudal system and became a powerful revolutionary force against feudal royal power in Europe. 4. The emergence of the feudal hierarchical representation system. In the early 13th century, the monarchs of some European kingdoms tried their best to revive the royal power and bring local power to the central government. As a result, royal power was constrained by feudal laws and the king's arbitrary actions were restricted. The king was unwilling to lose his power and provoked a civil war. The king was defeated. In the second half of the 13th century, the British parliamentary system began to sprout. From then on, the parliament gradually became divided into two chambers: the upper and lower chambers.

The king must impose taxes and make laws through parliament. The feudal monarchy of hierarchical representation limited the power of the king. At the beginning of the 14th century, a hierarchical representation system represented by the Estates-General also appeared in France. Since the French royal power was relatively strong, the role of the Estates-General in restricting royal power was relatively small. The British hierarchical representation system had a huge impact on the development of Western political systems. In the struggle against the autocratic centralization of power by the feudal king, the feudal nobles, senior priests, urban merchants, etc. united in the struggle, forcing the king to sit down and discuss with them major issues related to the national economy and people's livelihood, such as tariffs, which restricted the feudal royal power. The British hierarchical representation system played an important role in the struggle to restrict feudal royal power and establish a capitalist political system, and became the origin of the modern Western parliamentary system. To sum up, it is understandable that the feudal development of Western Europe was extremely uneven, and the darkness of the Middle Ages in Western Europe was inevitable.