i know a good number of us have been listening to Hell on Earth and while it's been a decent primer for the sequence of events---the takes are quite spicy for historiography heads
here are the questions for the class:
What is Feudalism?
When did Feudalism End?
Feudal lords invading and stealing other feudal lords' land is largely a feature of feudalism with European characteristics. In places with stronger feudal states like Imperial China, feudal lords are held in check by the feudal state. Nobody's invading and stealing shit from other people because the emperor had the largest army and a massive state bureaucracy to smoothly run the empire. Feudal lords stealing other feudal lords' land only became a thing with the decline of a particular dynasty, and even then, it's more of a case of warlordism with most warlords' aim of proclaiming their own imperial dynasty and pacifying rivals in order to rule the empire once again with a strong feudal state.
And that's why I was only referring to European feudalism in my posts, which is also what most people think about when we say "feudalism." I'm not knowledgeable enough to comment on Indian, Chinese, Iranian, etc. empires at the time. They operated very differently than Europe. The closest analogue is Japan, but that's a whole nother can of worms.
And the reason I only mentioned European feudalism is because it was within medieval europe where bourgeoisie capitalism started to bloom. The foundations for capitalism were laid in the urban growth of medieval Europe. By the modern era (30 years war more or less), these European states had monopolized violence and enshrined private property (mostly, that's a long process). Then these European nation-states conquered the world, imposed their economic system, and eventually the whole world became divided into nation-states that operate under bourgeoisie capitalist economics. Even socialist states mostly operate under the concept of nation-states.