Race and Herrenvolk replaced medieval citizenship as the great leveling principle

Evidence

The delusions of medieval citizenship, which had been expanded into shared patrimony and had persisted for five centuries in western Europe as the single great leveling principle, were to be supplanted by race and (to use the German phrase) Herrenvolk, in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. — Cedric J. Robinson, Black Marxism_ The Making of the Black…, 208

Categorization

• QUESTION: What exactly did ‘medieval citizenship as leveling principle’ look like in practice, and how did its collapse connect causally to the rise of racial ideology? Worth chasing.