Distributing Land [War::Space]

History has always dismissed the nomads Attempts have been made to apply a properly military category to the war machine (that of "military demo c. racy"), and a properly sedentary category to nomadism (that of "feudalism"). But these two hypotheses presup. pose a territorial principle: either that an imperial State appropriates the war machine, distributing land to war. riors as a benefit of their position (cleroi and false fiefs), or that property, once it has become private, in itself posits relations of dependence among the property own. ers constituting the army (true fiefs and vassalage 71). In both cases, the number is subordinated to an "immobile" fiscal organization, in order to establish which land can be or has been ceded as well as to fix the taxes owed by the beneficiaries themselves. There is no doubt that nomad organization and the war machine deal with these same problems, both at the level of land and that of taxation (in which the nomadic warriors were great innovators, despite what is said to the contrary). But they invent a territoriality and a "movable" fiscal organiza- tion that testifies to the autonomy of a numerical principle: there can be a confusion or combination of the systems, but the specificity of the nomadic system re- mains the subordination of land to numbers that are displaced and deployed, and of taxation to relations internal to those numbers; already with Moses, for example, taxation played a role in the relation between the numerical bodies and the special body of the num- ber). In short, military democracy and feudalism, far from explaining the numerical composition of the no- m ads, instead testifies to what may survive of it in sedentary regimes.