Sentence examples for fief with from inspiring English sources

Another bit in the south is a private fief with ties to shady elements in Russia.

He decorated his fief with roads and health centres named after himself.

The Gambino crime family made Teamsters Local 282 a longtime fief, with three of the union's presidents going to prison in the 1980s and 1990s for their links to organized crime.

Mr. Quattrone left Morgan Stanley in 1996, having been rebuffed by Mr. Mack in an attempt to build a larger investment banking fief with his own research analysts, based in Silicon Valley in California.

Each of these princes has his own fief with an extensive network of power and patronage.The king's allies, a coalition of liberal princes and technocrats such as Mr Gosaibi, are weak by comparison.

Use of the terms associated with feudum to denote the essential characteristics of the early Middle Ages has invested the fief with exaggerated prominence and placed undue emphasis on the importance of a special mode of land tenure to the detriment of other, more significant aspects of social, economic, and political life.

County bosses rule fiefs with an unforgiving eye.

The real suburbs are usually a governmental mess -- overlapping fiefs with layers of ancient taxing districts and triple-tier services.

Given the longevity of Saudi princes, several have turned their government ministries into personal fiefs, with their sons as their top aides.

Russia has long been criticized for its thicket of military and law enforcement agencies, independent fiefs with little accountability, powerful constituencies and a willingness to use their powers for political ends.

A vast purge of members of Saddam's ubiquitous Baath party, combined with the empowerment of parvenu politicians who packed ministerial fiefs with loyalists under an American-endorsed system of sectarian spoils, further stripped state institutions of competence.Such follies are fairly well known.