middle ages

When you mention "a medieval state" these days, it kindles some interest only in very few people. It is considered a self-evident fact a state was a completely normal part of our human history since time immemorial. The main reason why the term state is now commonly used also for the Early Middle Ages is the idea that today's modern states simply evolved from the ancient times. Historians, too, refer to a medieval political formation as State. They rarely, however, ask what is actually State when writing about political formations from the past.

Perspectives of what is corruption have been changing with the development of the society and according to the shifts of its values. The study examines not only activities that were considered morally wrong and corrupted in the middle ages and early modern period, but also those forms of behaviour that started to be generally considered corrupted only later. Anachronistic as this approach might seem, it gives us better insight into the slow process of changing attitudes towards some forms of corruption.