The military leader now placed himself at the head of the older social organization, and associated with his immediate followers on terms approaching equality.
A well-known illustration of this is the incident of the vase taken from the Cathedral of Rheims, and of Chlodowig's efforts to rescue it from his independent comrade-in-arms.
The process of the development of the feudal polity of the Middle Ages is, of course, a very complicated one, owing to the various strands that go to compose it.

In addition to the German tribes themselves, who moved _en masse_, carrying with them their tribal and village organization, under the overlordship of the various military leaders, were the indigenous inhabitants amongst whom they settled.

The latter in the country districts, even in many of the territories within the Roman Empire, still largely retained the primitive communal organization.

The new-comers, therefore, found in the rural communities a social system already in existence into which they naturally fitted, but as an aristocratic body over against the conquered inhabitants.

The latter, though not all reduced to a servile condition, nevertheless held their land from the conquering body under conditions which constituted them an order of freemen inferior to the new-comers.
To put the matter briefly, the military leaders developed into barons and princes, and in some cases the nominal centralization culminated, as in France and England, in the kingly office; while, in Germany and Italy, it took the form of the revived Imperial office, the spiritual overlord of the whole of Christendom being the Pope, who had his vassals in the prince-prelates and subordinate ecclesiastical holders.
In addition to the princes sprung originally from the military leaders of the migratory nations, there were their free followers, who developed ultimately into the knighthood or inferior nobility; the inhabitants of the conquered districts forming a distinct class of inferior freemen or of serfs.