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Agreed. My sense of the qualitative difference is that those taxes were customary, as opposed to arbitrary.
They didn't have a tax policy that was expected to change regularly and entirely at the discretion of the ruler.
An interesting thing to consider is that even though in the medieval era, kings and emperors had more de jure power over their subjects, the de facto situation was probably a lot more decentralized and locally controlled than things are now. Even though we live in a democracy, I'd venture to guess that the medieval king had less control over a random peasant's everyday life than the President of the USA has over the average American citizen's life.
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I'm sure that's true
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