Christendom Destroyed

5. Noble Pursuits

THE FORTUNES OF CHIVALRY

Nobility existed to defend Christendom by force of arms. Knighthood was the institution founded by the Church for the purpose. It centred on the rite of dubbing (or benediction), which conferred a grace upon the knight to enable him to fulfil his Christian duties. The aristocratic warrior code of chivalry, which had been promoted by the rituals and etiquette of the military orders, was gradually transformed in the later Middle Ages, partly through the influence of conduct books and a burgeoning vernacular romance literature, into a more general moral ethos. The complaint was already common by 1500 that chivalry was in decay. But early printed chivalric romances in poetry and prose in the vernacular were still hugely popular, the Amadis de Gaule (a French chivalric adventure, based on an earlier Spanish story) leading the way. For the young Philip II this was his favourite reading, the Arthurian romances organized at Binche in his honour in 1548 a realization of his chivalric dreams. The promotion of chivalric rituals such as dubbing and tourneys at princely courts, which declined only gradually towards the end of the sixteenth century, furnishes further evidence that chivalry became a way by which lay aristocratic élites retired from the increasing brutality of warfare into a make-believe world, peopled by perfect, gentle knights, one where troublesome clerics and protesting people did not exist.

So chivalry did not expire, but its meaning changed until, like Christendom, it became a fantasy land. Chivalry transmuted into a courtly code of aristocratic behaviour, reflecting the evolving nature of political authority and, with it, the obedience and service which were expected from its lay élites. As a military ethos it had perished amid conflicts fought not to protect Christendom from its enemies but to champion one version of Christianity against another and advance the dynastic objectives of princely houses over one another. Nobility, too, underwent considerable change in the same period. It came to signify hereditary social status, detached from military prowess. The majority of nobles in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Europe never shattered a lance in battle even though they claimed the dignity of knighthood. To wear a sword, to claim membership of a knightly order, and to adopt the symbols and manners of chivalry became the marks of asserting noble distinction.

Giovanni Della Casa’s Galateo (1558) turned the chivalric moral code into questions of noble distinction and comportment. Torquato Tasso restaged the First Crusade in a climate of personal and Counter-Reformation turmoil in his epic ‘Jerusalem Delivered’ (Gerusalemme Liberata, 1580). Love, heroism and self-sacrifice became the signs of true nobility in a world of moral degradation. A scene from the poem inspired the path-breaking operatic duet of Claudio Monteverdi, the ‘Combat between Tancredi and Clorinda’ (1624). Luís de Camões’s Os Lusíadas (The Lusiads, 1572) deployed the chivalric romance to celebrate the Portuguese discovery of the ocean route to India, while Edmund Spenser’s Faerie Queene (1590, 1596) transposed chivalry into a world of magic realism into which contemporaries could read glorified elements of the Elizabethan expeditions to Ireland and the Netherlands.

Chivalric romances were popular because they bridged the gap between noble reality and illusion. One work, above all the others, exposed that gap for what it was. Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra lived the ambiguities of the noble who sought to defend a Christendom that no longer existed, and about which he would later write in the Ingenious Gentleman Don Quixote of La Mancha (El ingenioso hidalgo don Quijote de la Mancha, 2 vols. – 1605/1615). He was from a parvenu noble family, his paternal grandfather being a merchant in Córdoba whose son became a lawyer for the treasury of the Spanish Inquisition and (thanks to aristocratic patronage) an appeal court judge. When contemporaries were asked whether the Cervantes were nobles or not, they said that they never seemed to pay taxes, that they dressed in silk, and that their ‘sons were often to be seen jousting on good and powerful horses’. When the family fell on hard times, those sons sought ways of keeping up appearances while making their way in the world. But each attempt brought deception with it. Based in Seville for a time, Miguel sought passage to the Spanish New World, but was refused. Fleeing the consequences of a duel fought in the confines of the royal court at Madrid in late 1568, he entered service abroad, first in Rome to a cardinal, and then in Naples.

Like many of his contemporaries, Cervantes weighed up the advantages of being a noble of the pen rather than the sword: ‘for though Letters have been the foundation of more estates than Arms, still soldiers have an indefinable superiority over men of letters and a certain splendour about them which puts them above everybody’. That led him to serve on a galleon at Lepanto along with his brother Roderigo. Miguel’s left hand was smashed and his chest severely wounded in the battle. On his return to Spain in 1575 he was captured by corsairs and spent five years in an Algiers prison with a ransom of 5,000 escudos on his head. His family sold their possessions to help pay it, and petitioned the royal council in vain for aid towards his release. Miguel’s own attempts to engineer his escape were pure adventure, it being a matter of luck that three Mercedarian friars, despatched from Valencia to secure the release of Christian slaves, were able to prise him from the clutches of a Greek renegade corsair in Algiers whose savagery was renowned. Forced to live by the pen rather than the sword, Cervantes became a munitions master in Andalusia for the Armada in 1587–8, which led to a spell in jail under suspicion of corruption, while his brother soldiered on with scant rewards in Flanders.

In prison, Miguel began writing the first chapters of what became the road novel adventures of Alonso Quijano, the retired country gentleman from a village in La Mancha, whose reading of books about chivalry so excited his imagination that he ceased to eat and sleep, such that ‘his brain dried up and he went completely out of his mind’. Determined to become a knight-errant, he donned a suit of armour and renamed himself ‘Don Quixote’, setting off with a peasant farmer, Sancho Panza, as his squire, on a bony pony named ‘Rocinante’. Don Quixote takes on all-comers in his attempt to be the knight-errant of his imagination in a world that seemed no longer Christendom. Each time he fails. In the most famous scene of all, Don Quixote spots some windmills on the horizon – part of the Extremadura landscape, they were also a symbol of Spain’s Dutch rebels. ‘Destiny guides our fortunes more favourably than we could have expected,’ says Quixote. ‘Look there, Sancho Panza, my friend, and see those thirty or so wild giants, with whom I intend to do battle . . . This is noble, righteous warfare, for it is wonderfully useful to God to have such an evil race wiped from the face of the earth.’ When told by the ever-practical Sancho Panza that they are not giants at all, Don Quixote replies with the optimism of the deluded: ‘Obviously, you don’t know much about adventures.’ Sancho Panza’s reply comes later in the book: ‘I have heard tell that Fortune, as they call her, is a drunken and capricious woman.’ The fortunes of being noble in the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries depended more on Lady Luck than on protecting Christendom.

MARKS OF DISTINCTION

The dilemma for Europe’s stratified societies was how to placate personal animus. Family feud and social envy were destructive in societies where wealth was limited, much sought after and gained at the expense of someone else. Their potential for harm was exacerbated by Reformation religious conflict. One way forward was through rituals of gesture and cultures of decorum that turned ways of behaviour into social distinction. In a society of orders, such marks of distinction were the daily manifestation of what held Christendom together.

In 1580, the Polish magnate Stanislaw Siecienski moved from Masovia to the borderland of southeast Poland around Przemysl, a town among the noble latifundia of that region, bordering the route through the Carpathian Mountains to Hungary. There he constructed a new palace around a courtyard. Its sides represented the four quarters of the globe, and the oval towers erected at each extremity were dedicated to the pillars of the society of orders: the ‘Divine’, the ‘Papal’, the ‘Royal’ and the ‘Noble’. The entrance was via a lake, traversed by a bridge leading to a gateway, topped by a square-shaped clock-tower. This was where the king and queen of Poland, Sigismund III and Constance of Austria, were welcomed as guests in 1608. Greetings and farewells were an essential part of the rituals of the society of orders. Nowhere were they more elaborate than in the Polish-Lithuanian ‘nobleman’s paradise’. To accompany the welcome there were several sorts of bowing, handshaking, kissing and knee-bending. The purpose of that tower was to enable servants to watch the road and announce approaching high-born visitors well in advance so the household could welcome them at the gate. Hats played an important part in the proceedings, doffed at the moment of the bow just deeply enough to sweep the floor. In Polish official proceedings, they were removed at every mention of the king or the pope. The physical embrace, initially regarded as a somewhat plebeian custom, became an indispensable element in noble social rituals. Peasants obligatorily kissed the hands of their lords, and minor nobility expected to do the same to their magnate superiors, who might take off their gloves, depending on the rank of the individual in question.

How you walked, dressed, spoke and rode were all signs of who you were. Books of etiquette told you how to use body language to master your emotions, and the space around you. Some gestures did not earn these books’ approval, especially the male noble swagger adopted in so many paintings of this period. This posture – standing with one hand holding a baton, a whip or leather gloves, the weight on one leg and the other hand on the hip – could indicate statesmanlike restraint or peacock display. Either way it was assertive of space, moral and political. Franz Hals’s Cavalier (1624) is not laughing with us; he is pushing his elbow in our faces.

Noble deportment was inculcated by tutors – and from around 1600 increasingly in academies specializing in the arts of riding and fencing. It was often taught through dance, that of the Polish nobility giving rise to the Polonaise, or ‘walking dance’, upon which travellers often commented. Transgressing social convention was increasingly difficult for those in upper ranks. King Sigismund III was ridiculed by the Polish gentry because of his fondness for playing football. Surviving family books from Polish nobles record the elaborate formulas setting down how to invite a neighbour to a hunt, to express condolences on someone’s death or to congratulate them on a safe journey home. The silent revolution in Europe’s thirst for communication created a greater awareness, too, of social distinction and the various ways of distancing social groups one from another. As the four towers of the Krasiczyn palace suggest, both the court and the Catholic Church had a great deal to do with the elaboration of rituals of distinction. But so, too, did the ambition to create a ‘godly commonwealth’ in which people knew their place and acted accordingly. This was what inspired the writings of Szymon Starowolski, himself from an impoverished Lithuanian noble family, who spent his life tutoring the sons of magnates. In the Reform of Polish Customs he presented an idealized world in which social gradations were each marked by different responsibilities.

Dreams of social harmony on the basis of social distinction were not new in Poland. Mikołaj Rej, a self-educated Polish noble of modest means and Protestant persuasions, made himself into a magnate owning several villages and a new town (named Rejowiec). His writings include a verse Short Conversation between a Squire, a Bailiff and a Parson (1543), in which the social evils of the day – ignorant clergy, grasping lawyers and the corruption of political life – were put under the spotlight. For Rej, the world was increasingly complicated. It was harder to live up to ideals of virtue and social harmony. He wanted to believe that the latter lay in the noble household where honesty was rewarded with loyalty from the servants. Yet in his verse drama ‘The Merchant’, he turned the conventional morality play on its head. The merchant in question is a social parasite who abandons his first wife (‘Conscience’) and has a son (‘Profit’) by his second (‘Fortune’). At the Day of Judgment which ends the play (itself a parody of a Polish seigneurial court), the princes, bishop and bailiff invoke their virtues in vain and the merchant is saved, thanks to his faith in Christ’s grace. In short, nothing was simple when it came to matching the ideal with the real world.

That did not stop Europe’s élites from trying to make it so, through sumptuary legislation that covered a wide range of social behaviour, from dress to dining, from weeping at funerals to disorderly conduct at weddings. These laws became an increasing preoccupation of Europe’s legislators, their increasing frequency perhaps evidence that they knew that they were fighting a losing battle. Yet the ordinances were not a sham; the problem was rather that legislation was an inappropriate way of preventing social distinctions being transgressed. Luxury knew no law, and rising anxieties about weakening social cohesion were reflected in reissued sumptuary laws. Legislators were on the horns of a dilemma because some luxury was to be encouraged since it demonstrated the power of a ruling élite. One of the paradoxes of the first half of the seventeenth century was that, at the same time as the more complex etiquettes of the ‘society of orders’ permeated its upper echelons, so the efforts to enforce them by legal means slackened. Some countries (England in 1604) repealed their sumptuary legislation while others (the majority) silently let them pass into disuse.

The society of orders depended on social emulation. That, however, posed further dilemmas, since this was as likely to encourage the transgressing of boundaries as the reinforcement of them. To be a gentleman meant, as it had to the Cervantes family, behaving and dressing like a gentleman. Francesco Sansovino, for example, idealized the Venetian society to which he belonged as a world of social harmony where its patricians wore long black gowns in public as a sign of the ordered life of the republic. Yet he also noted the ostentatious displays of rich clothing as contemporaries engaged in conspicuous consumption. For this was a city where a humble oar-maker left among his possessions in 1633 six trunks containing forty-three shirts, where fabrics of all kinds were readily available, and where there was a market in second-hand clothing. It was not just at Carnival time that Venetians dressed up. In the painting of The Tailor (Giovanni Battista Moroni, c. 1565) the artisan in question is wearing a beautiful silk doublet and rich russet breeches while holding scissors, ready to slice into the black velvet for a patrician toga. Who, indeed, was the gentleman? Everywhere in Europe, the marks of distinction that defined gentility were becoming more elaborate. It is an understandable paradox that the ideals underpinning the society of orders became more insistently expressed even as weakening social cohesion was undermining the effort to legislate them into place.

PEDIGREE

Europe’s nobility was a diverse, well-established and resilient group. Their grasp of wealth, power and status required constant and sometimes ruthless adaptation. They concentrated their resource base in landownership in some parts of Europe, diversified into other investments and activities in others. It was a survival of the fittest, since there was no more potentially violent force in European society than its nobility. The weakest members – poor nobles, rich in lineage perhaps but weak in resources – went to the wall, unable to live the life that their status dictated. They were replaced with new blood, either through artificial elevations of new families to nobility in reward for their service to monarchies and states, or through hypogamy (‘marrying down’) that had long protected Europe’s nobility from what would otherwise have been its inevitable extinction. The ideology justifying rank and privilege was not service to Christendom but pedigree.

Genealogy had strong biblical legitimacy, through the patriarchs of the Old Testament to Christ himself. It was male-dominated since biblical begetting was largely from father and son. Pedigree was not confined to nobility or gentry, not even to human beings. It was individual and corporate, part of a chain of being that extended to the animal kingdom. Genealogy had immediate and practical significance (who inherited, who succeeded), but it was also the key to patrimony and legitimacy. In all Europe’s customary laws, the concern was always the continuity of a lineage, even though it might be secured by various means. There were no better claims to legitimacy in this period than lineage. Ancestor-worship was a way of justifying the status quo and also a spur to be worthy of one’s forebears. The unfortunately named Suckbitches, a modest gentry family in Devon, knew that they had made it since, as one of them said in the later sixteenth century, ‘it had pleased God to continue one name [i.e. theirs] amongst a thousand, to enjoy a place so many ages’. That entitled them to look down on their richer noble neighbours, the Courtneys.

Recording one’s ancestry was important. The early seventeenth-century Welsh antiquary George Owen Harry advised any Welsh gentleman of the ‘meaner sort’ to have his family pedigree written out for him. If the gentleman could not name by memory his four great-grandfathers and their wives he could only be ‘out of love with himselfe’. Christoph von Zimmern spared no effort in compiling the chronicle of his Swabian noble family, complete with richly coloured blazons. Lineage mattered since evidence of ancestral right frequently figured in property disputes and claims to privilege. Ancestry could claim you a place in an aristocratic retinue, a family pew or grave, and an entry to a college or university. Humanist writers fashionably proclaimed that true nobility lay in virtue and education. It sounded plausible enough, but everyone knew that, in reality, pedigree mattered more, which was why such strenuous efforts went into proclaiming and proving it.

Lineage was paraded, painted, emblemized and documented. When the French king Francis I processed ceremonially into Lyon in 1515, the Valois dynasty was portrayed before him in a painting like the tree of Jesse. When Archduchess Isabella entered Brussels in 1615, she did so accompanied by a wrought-iron mantle depicting her ancestors. Chancels and naves, fireplaces and charitable foundations afforded opportunities for genealogical self-fashioning. Coats of arms and heraldic devices permeated Europe’s architecture and material possessions. Through funerary lozenges and monuments, stained glass and ceramics, silverware and furniture, the nobility stamped themselves on their environment, a constructive revalorization of the past, circulated to sustain the present.

What circulated was creative if not invented; new noble blood in old family bottles, spurious claims that the aggressive pre-eminence of the Russell, Howard, Cecil, Sidney or Holles families (to take only English examples) prevented contemporaries from examining too closely. Some claims relied on oral testimony. The Yorkshire-born Sir Thomas Wentworth, in high favour under King Charles I, had his family’s ancient pre-eminence confirmed when his father reported that he had ‘herde that our name and progenie hath for a long tyme before the Conquest bene of worship and reputation’, vaguely recalling that ‘thear are att this daie in the Lowe Countries records thereof in some towne’. Yet the nobility had to adapt to the increasing importance of the written record. Rulers wanted registers of who really was noble. In England, that was the task of the heralds, incorporated into a ‘college of arms’ in 1555. Thomas Benolt, officer of the Court of Heralds, was the first to conduct a regional inspection of all those claiming armorial bearings excluding the peerage, gentry being required to appear before him with their written evidence. The objective was not so much to limit the creation of new nobles as to regulate and profit from the privilege concerned.

Across the Channel, claims to nobility led to exemption from taxation and antipathy to noble interlopers. The response was to appoint commissioners to investigate noble titles, in which families were required to prove that their title went back three generations. The nobility of Lower Normandy was subjected to examination eight times between 1500 and 1650 and the results were not foregone conclusions. The investigation around Caen in 1634–5 found 114 out of the 994 families could not prove their titles. In other parts of Europe, such investigations were carried out more summarily. In 1626 King Gustav Adolf of Sweden unilaterally repudiated the claims of three quarters of those claiming noble status (from 400 to just 126) on the grounds that they were too poor to claim the status.

The pedigree craze led to antiquaries being commissioned to research and publish lineage. John Lambert of Kirkby Malham, grandfather to the Cromwellian major-general of the same name, counted himself an amateur genealogist and found a companion of William the Conqueror, Ranulph de Lambert, from whom he claimed to be descended, publishing forged charters that he had probably concocted himself. William Cecil, Elizabeth I’s secretary of state, financed research to prove that he was descended from Welsh princes who had been companions of King Harold, his son Robert finding it tiresome (‘these vain toys . . . such absurdities’). By the early seventeenth century, no one would doubt the ancestry of a Cecil. By 1650, the nobility was on the way to being a more classified and defined élite, for whom lineage constituted their right to own and to rule.

Genealogies were presented in different ways, but the problem was how to represent two different realities: lineage and consanguinity. The latter was important, not least to prevent the intermarriage of close cousins. Roman jurists developed a way of charting it, but it deracinated lineage by emphasizing collateral relationships with other families. By emphasizing marriage, it suggested that lineage was not necessarily masculine, as indeed it was not. In German genealogical trees the line was sometimes presented as coming from the stomach of the woman. In England, there was a custom of presenting marriages in genealogies as handshakes from one lozenge to another, with the offspring emerging from the conjoined hands. Either way, the spotlight was placed on marriage.

How to make a good noble marriage? The experience was rather like playing contract bridge with an unreliable partner. There were so many variables to take into account: the age of a potential spouse, her likely capacity to bring heirs to the marriage, her relatives and connections, how her estates complemented one’s own, what her prospects were as a potential heiress. In the circumstances, there was often not much room for affection as the basis for marriage, even if there is plenty of evidence that it could be a result of it. Celibacy was frequently the preferred option, thereby threatening the continuity of noble lineages. In parts of northern Italy (the Venetian terra firma and the duchy of Milan, for example) the custom was to restrict marriage to one male per generation in order to avoid the proliferation of collateral lines. Aristocrats could rely on princely courts as the best marriage market, and diplomats, magistrates and financial councillors as shrewd match-makers. Princes might, however, interfere. French kings regularly prevented matches or imposed others upon unwilling families. In England, the Court of Wards and Liveries, established in 1540 and abolished along with all feudal tenures at the end of the Civil War in 1646, exploited the prerogative right of the monarchy to take into its care the orphaned heirs of the aristocracy, an opportunity to exploit their estates and have a say in their marriages. Aristocrats could expect to play the marriage market well. Not so the middle and lower ranks of the nobility upon whom the fate of the class as a whole depended. The sharply rising cost of dowries – evident for all noble groups across this period – was making it harder to keep up.

LIVING NOBLY

Noble privileges lay at the heart of a society of orders. They were an essential part of ‘living nobly’. Such privileges varied widely across Europe and they tended to overlap with those enjoyed by commoners. Moreover, especially in the stronger polities of western Europe, they were eroded under state pressure. They were often the subject of debates which, either implicitly or explicitly, led to anxiety and sensitivity about the nature of nobility.

The almost universal privilege was the right to carry weapons, typically a sword. Nothing charts more graphically the challenges to Christendom than the advent of the long, thin laminated steel rapier. Lightweight, carried on a belt at the waist, these weapons were designed for the courtyard rather than the battlefield. It needed skill and practice to use them against an opponent similarly armed. Manuals offered technical advice and, from the 1570s, incorporated engravings that turned interpersonal fighting into a science. Girard Thibault’s Academy of the Sword (1626) was a sumptuous folio which included forty-six engravings of duelling duos in action. In reality, a good fencing instructor was indispensable, and there were plenty around, the best being reputedly the Italians, retained by Europe’s princely aristocrats.

Duelling became an expression of noble consciousness in some parts of Europe. It had hitherto existed as part of judicial combat, a sanctioned means of settling quarrels between nobles by asking God to decide the outcome in battle. One of the last such judicial duels was the high-profile encounter between François de Vivonne, sieur de La Châtaigneraie, and Guy Chabot, count of Jarnac, in Paris on 10 July 1547. Private duelling, by contrast, reached epidemic proportions in parts of Europe, travelling northwards from Italy to France and thence to England. This was despite condemnation from on high. The Council of Trent forbade it. King Henry III declared it a capital offence in France in 1576. James VI and I outlawed it too. Writing in 1609, the Parisian diarist Pierre de L’Estoile reckoned that 7–8,000 French noblemen had lost their lives in duels in the previous twenty years. His estimate may be inflated but he was writing about a France that had lived through forty years of intermittent civil war and its accompanying encouragement to noble feud and division.

The reality was that duelling reflected how sophisticated and deep-rooted the noble honour code had become. For its aficionados, it was the public defence of honour and, as Jesuits argued in defence of duelling, since honour is as precious as property one should be entitled to defend it. Treatises on noble honour and its defence abounded, mostly unreadable and lampooned by Touchstone in Shakespeare’s As You Like It. In fact, the majority of Italian duels were exercises not in killing someone but in the art of going through the motions of a fight while leaving the door open to an honourable reconciliation. Annibale Romei’s 1585 treatise on the subject (translated into English as The Courtiers Academie in 1598) began from the proposition that duelling should not happen and that it had been banned. So it included sections on how to reconcile quarrels and the face-saving formulas that one could use to resolve a dispute.

Exemption from paying taxes was traditionally a key mark of nobility. In fact, it had never been an exclusive one. Large numbers of commoners enjoyed fiscal exemptions. So, for example, when the Swedish crown wanted to encourage the peasantry of Finland or the Baltic seaboard of Pomerania to serve in its cavalry in the Thirty Years War it accorded them hereditary tax exemption on their lands. Nor was tax exemption enjoyed by all nobility. Nobles in Tuscany, Venice, East Prussia and the British Isles paid taxes and their nobility was not compromised. Where tax exemptions existed, they tended to be diluted or diminished in various ways. As states had greater recourse to indirect taxes, so the nobility found themselves paying their share. In Saxony, nobles were required to pay taxes on their estates in 1529, 1541–2 and 1557, or to make voluntary ‘free gifts’ to the ruler’s exchequer, as in 1622. Nobles were taxed for failing to turn out for cavalry service or required to pay feudal dues as tenants-in-chief. Exemptions tied to particular noble property rather than to the person were widespread. With a busy land market and the impact of generations of noble succession, a mismatch between noble status and tax exemption became prevalent.

In some places, noble fiscal exemption was a consequence of service to the prince in a military or administrative capacity, which meant that nobility was accorded to the legal and medical professions. In Spain, it was a benefit for lay members of the Inquisition. In France, the immunity was the fruit of royal office and, as the weight of the French state grew in this period, so did the number of its administrators. Office could be bought, and with it came immunity from direct tax. One of the main perquisites of French royal offices was that they fell outside the customary laws governing landed property and so were treated as ‘movable goods’. So an office could serve as part of a dowry, the guarantee on a loan, the payment of a debt or to gratify a younger son who might otherwise be excluded from the inheritance. But, in addition, the exemption from direct tax could become hereditary if you could prove that your family had been noble and tax exempt for three generations. A new, articulate ruling group was emerging, sometimes referred to in the early seventeenth century as the ‘nobility of the robe’ from the long gowns worn by judges and officials.

NOBLES BY NUMBERS

Counting Europe’s nobility is not easy before 1650, and regional variations were considerable and inexplicable. In the region around Alençon in France, the nobility were relatively thick on the ground (230 per 386 square miles by 1667), five times as numerous as in neighbouring Anjou and sixteen times more plentiful than in the Limousin. France, however, was part of Christendom’s heartland where, in common with Germany, Bohemia, Lower Austria, the Netherlands and the Italian peninsula, nobles were not a large proportion of the population. With some exceptions (the Basque country and Navarre, for example), they were generally not more than 5 per cent of the population, and mostly the figure was lower – sometimes close to or below 1 per cent. Europe’s republics were particularly parsimonious in creating nobles. In Venice, the nobility were a high-born caste of only twenty-eight clans in the early sixteenth century, the status being preserved by admitting only a select few to appear in the Golden Book, the register of its ranks, instituted in 1577. The Swiss cantons, some city-states (for instance, Geneva) and Balkan regions (notably Serbia and Bulgaria) proclaimed that they had no indigenous nobility at all.

The need to defend Christendom against its external enemies was only one reason for its more populous noble margins. The periphery also never experienced feudal overlordship, so nobility was personal and not restricted by the legal constraints of holding a tenured barony. In some places to the east, too, group ennoblement was used as a privilege to encourage settlers into border areas and impose military obligations on them. In other regions, grants of nobility resulted from enfeebled states which had difficulty in controlling tacit ennoblement. In Castile, municipalities created nobles by accepting a head of household as a ‘commoner knight’ (caballero villano), and thus exempt from taxation on the local register, in return for a fee.

In frontier regions with smaller densities of population, the nobility managed to retain or even expand their numbers as a proportion of the population. In 1591, nobles made up over 46 per cent of the population of the provinces of Burgos and León in the north of Spain, and a majority of the population in towns such as Burgos itself. In Polish Masovia and Podlachia, the nobility composed at least 20 per cent of the population. There were places (over 1,600 in Masovia alone) where villages were composed uniquely of noble tenant farmers who rented and worked peasant holdings. The division of land holdings as a result of partible inheritance, however, reduced nobles to more or less landless status, creating the paradox of peasants with noble status.

Something similar happened to the increasingly populous nobility of Hungary. In the years following the Turkish occupation of the lower Danube in 1526, the Habsburg rulers of western Hungary took to ennobling those who would provide mounted service against the Ottomans. Serfs became nobles overnight. But the Danube basin was one of the parts of Europe where customary law protected lineage by an extreme form of partible inheritance. All the daughters as well as the sons were entitled to up to a quarter of the estate upon succession. In addition, there were strict customary restrictions on the mortgage and sale of noble estates. So, as in Poland, many Hungarian nobles became landless, serving in due course as mercenaries, traders, craftsmen and the servitors of other nobles. There were no derogation statutes (laws making the practice of ‘menial’ activities incompatible with noble status) and many of these nobles ended up working peasant tenures, no more capable of signing their name than their peasant neighbours. As their landed and economic capital declined, so these lesser nobles hung on to their cultural capital the more fervently. Obsessed with the militarized (Magyar, Sarmatian, Rus) mythologies of the past, living in their modest wattle houses with thatched roofs, they peered suspiciously at the outside world.

A more noticeable transformation took place among Europe’s higher, titled aristocracy – its dukes and peers. Except as a special right accorded to members of royal families such titled nobility hardly existed before 1500. By the 1630s, however, titled aristocrats had mainly taken over as the means by which states admitted new families to the ranks of the highest nobility. The rise of the peerage was the result of princely efforts to control their nobility and, from the prince’s point of view it had much to commend it. Letters patent for a peerage involved no investment; rather the reverse, since they could be sold or turned into a reward for services rendered. The result was an inflation of honours, the equivalent to what was happening to currencies, a progressive and corrosive devaluation in what ‘honour’ was worth.

Some regions acquired titled nobility for the first time (Hungary, Sweden, Denmark). Elsewhere, it was massively expanded. In England, the monarchy sold baronetcies and peerages in profusion in the early seventeenth century. King James I similarly tripled the number of English knights. In France, the expansion in the peerage included the controversial elevation of foreign families. Membership of the knightly Order of St-Michel was used as an alternative to paying those who served the king in the civil wars of the later sixteenth century. The resulting debasement in the honorific standing of the chivalric orders and the opposition from malcontent nobles to his rule led the last Valois king, Henry III, to institute the Knights of the Holy Spirit (1579), limited to a hundred at any one time. In Spain, the monarchy began to expand its titled nobility from 1520 (grandes or títulos; collateral lines – segundones or mesnaderos). The numbers of knights (caballeros) habited by the three military orders also increased. These wealthy foundations held the rights to grant admission to their order (creating caballeros de hábito) which guaranteed the essential quality of nobility (hidalguía). The status was much sought after because rigorous proof was demanded by the general chapters of the orders that those admitted were free from all trace of Jewish or Moorish blood, their pedigree equally unsullied by victims of the Inquisition. To be admitted to a military order advanced one’s prospects of making a good marriage in Spanish society. With an empire to protect, however, Philip IV and his first minister, Count-Duke Olivares, put admission to the orders up for sale. The king told his council in 1625: ‘Without reward and punishment no monarchy can be preserved. Now rewards may be either financial or honorific. Money we have not, so we have thought it right and necessary to remedy the fault by increasing the number of honours.’ Olivares said that the privileges were given to those whose merit would have led them to be regarded as noble in any case. But the proofs for purity of blood were relaxed, and the resulting criticisms were directed at the monarchy itself as the architect of noble corruption.

In many parts of Europe, the upper fringe of titled nobility’s resources came disproportionately (in comparison with the rest of the noble order) from the state. Despite their landed resources, aristocrats became dependent on their income from the emoluments of court office, provincial governorships and lieutenancies, and other lucrative revenue streams from heading up tax-farm consortia or speculating in government debt. They also sought a separate political identity. In those states where the nobility already possessed two chambers of delegates in provincial assemblies (Aragon, Hungary, Bohemia), the titled nobility wanted exclusive rights to the upper assemblies. In the Swedish national assembly the nobles were divided into a hierarchy of three groups from 1626 onwards, each voting separately. In the Scottish Parliament by the end of the sixteenth century, lairds and peers sat apart, albeit in the same assembly. Lesser nobilities were suspicious of their courtier and magnate superiors. In Poland the lesser nobility coalesced into military confederations in the course of the first half of the sixteenth century using the national and provincial assemblies (the Sejm and sejmiks) to force the crown to repossess crown lands that had been progressively sold off to magnates. From 1548 to 1563, anti-magnate sentiments were at their height, giving the lesser nobility a sense of political purpose.

The extremes of rich and poor grew greater among the nobility as in the rest of society. Poor nobles were the structural consequence of the mismatch between noble status and wealth. The political problems they posed, however, were widely recognized and becoming more pronounced. ‘A numerous nobility causeth poverty,’ wrote Francis Bacon in 1605, ‘for it is a surcharge of expense; and besides, it being of necessity, that many of the nobility fall, in time, to be weak in fortune, it maketh a kind of disproportion, between honour and means.’ Falstaff and Don Quixote were figures of fun on stage and in print, part of the evidence that mocking the nobility was fair game. In Lope de Vega’s play Fuenteovejuna (1612–14) enraged peasants from the village of that name (now called Fuente Obejuna) murder Fernán Gómez de Guzmán, their local squire (a comendador mayor of the Order of Calatrava), in revenge for his oppression. The plot was more social comment than black comedy. In southwest Corsica, a handful of feudatory nobles hung on to their rights to extract tax from their peasants on behalf of the Genoese state. Exploiting their distance and isolation from the centre of power, they had extraordinary authority over their peasantry. From their fortified farmsteads the Bozzi, d’Ornano and Istria clans quarrelled, rustled sheep and squeezed all they could out of the local population. The Genoese state turned a blind eye until August 1615 when the house of the Bozzi was set on fire and various members of the clan were butchered by their peasants. Wherever the state found itself in contention with local populations, there was generally a role among its opponents for the nobility (constrained to act or willing participants, it is often hard to judge), long in lineage, local prestige and pretension, but impoverished, disruptive, disrespectful of judicial authority and procedure, and with a sense that the world owed them something.

NOBLE FORTUNES

Rich and poor nobles had always existed, and the relationship between the two determined the evolution of noble fortunes and their relationship to the rest of society too. If there had been a Forbes ranking of the richest individuals in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Europe (excluding its princely rulers), it would probably have indicated that the number of very rich nobles had grown substantially larger between 1500 and 1650. The opportunities for wealth acquisition and concentration became greater as aristocrats found ways of exploiting expanding state power to their advantage, tapping into Europe’s capital markets (and running colossal debts as a result), and maximizing the benefits of landed power. Aristocratic wealth intersected with princely power, growing alongside it and correspondingly vulnerable when it was weak.

A snapshot album of the wealthiest nobles in later sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century Europe would certainly have to include Alonso Pérez de Guzmán el Bueno y Zúñiga, seventh duke of Medina Sidonia – holder of the oldest aristocratic title in Spain and owner of one of the most colossal fortunes of his day. It was partly based around the massive latifundia estates that the family owned in Andalusia – an estimated 90,000 vassals and a rent roll of 150,000 ducats – his landed interests covered half the province of Huelva. In 1588, he was chosen by Philip II to lead the Felicissima Armada after the death of Álvaro de Bazán, marquis of Santa Cruz. Historians have generally been puzzled by the appointment – by his own admission he had ‘no knowledge or experience of the sea’. His fortune, however, was what counted since it enabled him to be the Armada’s subcontractor. Medina Sidonia was an able manager of his estates and interests and his wealth also came from his posts at court. He already had the huge contract for building and running the Spanish galley fleet in 1574, partly because he offered not to charge interest if the treasure ships from the New World were delayed in arriving at Cádiz. When trying to decline his appointment in 1588, the duke argued that he could not possibly take it on because he was 900,000 ducats in debt; he had ‘not one real to spend on the expedition’. Somehow, the good duke managed to raise the vast sum of 7 million maravedís to underwrite the underprepared and underfunded expedition at a crucial moment.

His grandson, Gaspar Alfonso, ninth duke of Medina Sidonia, found it harder to protect that fortune in the 1640s. Implicated in the Andalusian rebellion of the summer of 1641, he was stripped of his offices, exiled from his estates, forced to pay a humiliating ‘gracious gift’ to the crown, and could not save the head of his relative, the marquis of Ayamonte, who confessed to having supported plans for an Andalusian ‘commonwealth’. His execution paralleled that of Henry II, duke of Montmorency, in France in 1632, an exemplary punishment to discourage other would-be aristocratic rebels. Despite having played leading parts in the Fronde and other uprisings in the middle of the century, Europe’s aristocracy was generally treated leniently by those in charge of the state, who had discovered that keeping aristocrats at court was a more effective way of emasculating their political potential. The one exception was the English aristocracy, all of whom lost their titles after the English Civil War, saw their feudal dues abolished in 1646, and the majority of their estates and revenues confiscated as well. Since the English peerage owned about a quarter of the country (only in central Europe could comparable percentages of land in the hands of the higher aristocracy be found), it was the most spectacular and consequential capsizing of an aristocratic ruling élite anywhere in Europe before 1789.

Jan Zamoyski would also find his place among the wealthiest of Europe’s aristocrats. From a family of modest gentry in Masovia, he became a leading Polish-Lithuanian magnate, first duke of Zamosc, and perhaps the most underrated political figure of the period. Well educated (he studied at the universities of Paris and Padua), he put the learning to good use in a series of books (including one on The Roman Senate, whose principles of rule he emulated) and half a lifetime of service as Lord Grand-Chancellor of Poland from 1578 (responsible for domestic and foreign affairs) and Grand Hetman (in charge of the army) from 1581. He founded the town of Zamosc, built as a model city to designs by the Italian architect Bernardo Morando and settled with Sephardic Jews. At its centre lay the Zamoyski Palace, the focus for an aristocratic patrimony the size of a country. By his death in 1605, he was the magnate of eleven cities and 200 villages (covering about 2,500 square miles) as well as royal steward with extensive interests in a further 112 cities and 612 villages. Zamoyski shrewdly headed up the reformist-minded middle and lesser nobility of the Commonwealth who became known in some quarters as ‘his people’ (zamojczycy – a play upon his name). No one else in Europe in the sixteenth century was a king-maker like Zamoyski (he orchestrated the election of three kings of Poland). Towards the end of his life he was tempted to dethrone one of them, the Vasa king Sigismund III, whose absolutist tendencies he resisted. That was remembered a generation later when, in the time of the ‘Polish Deluge’ (1648–67), the Zamoyski estates were (along with those of other Polish-Lithuanian magnates) ransacked by Swedish troops.

The commander of these Swedish troops was Magnus Gabriel de la Gardie. He was then at the height of royal favour in Sweden. He had been the general of its armies at the end of the Thirty Years War (for which he received the princely reward of 22,500 riksdalers – more than any other Swedish general) and became Governor-General of Livonia. De la Gardie presented Queen Christina in 1650 with a silver throne for her coronation. He was just one of those aristocrats whose fortunes come from military enterprising in the period of the Thirty Years War (Johan Banér; Bernard of Saxe-Weimar; Louis, prince of Condé and others). His income equalled a fifth of that of the Swedish state, and he spent it on buildings. His largest castle (he had many) contained 248 rooms. In 1652, he inherited from his father the Makalös Palace in Stockholm, the most lavish private residence by far in the capital, transforming it into a treasure house for the precious objects that he had looted from central Europe in the war. When the backlash among Sweden’s lesser nobility eventually occurred, the commission of inquiry set up in 1675 to look into the fortunes of de la Gardie and his aristocratic friends hardly knew where to begin. The commissioners eventually calculated that 4 million riksdalers of public assets had passed into their hands, and fined de la Gardie himself a colossal 352,159 riksdalers.

Cardinal Richelieu, who also began life as a nobleman of modest means, was more fortunate. He died in 1642 with his fortune intact and still in high royal favour – worth at least 20 million livres including 4 million in cash – a sum that would have equalled the yearly income of 4,000 of his ordinary noble countrymen. Cardinals had been among the wealthiest individuals in Europe in 1500 and, in that particular respect, the religious reformations of the sixteenth century might as well not have happened, for they were still among Europe’s very rich, although in Richelieu’s case his wealth came from a portfolio of state and ecclesiastical interests. Richelieu’s successor as cardinal first-minister, Jules Mazarin, found it harder than Richelieu to retain the fortune which he acquired. Vulnerable to the charge of profiteering from the French state in the upheavals of the Frondes, he voluntarily withdrew from France, transferring what he could into conveniently transportable assets (especially diamonds). When he died, he left a fortune estimated at between 18 and 40 million livres.

Concentrating on visible magnate fortunes, and on the gap between rich and poor nobles, obscures another, more important theme in this period: the consolidation and expansion of the middle ranks of the nobility. The story here was one of group rather than individual success. The nobility kept traces of their ancient origins while being replenished with new blood and finding new ways of exploiting the human and biological resources to hand. This is the picture revealed by a study of the nobility in the area around Bayeux in Normandy for this period. The overall size of the group grew considerably between 1523 and 1666, with 477 families entering the nobility, of which half were migrants, mostly from other parts of the province. The latter replaced those families who fell extinct, or who dropped out of the noble order through poverty and not being able to ‘live nobly’. But such extinction, although remorseless, was not wholesale. In the duchy of Savoy, almost 50 per cent of the noble families in 1700 could reliably claim that they had been ennobled before 1563 (the origins of just over 20 per cent were not known). The nobility of the Beauce (according to an inquiry in 1667) contained only a minority of families ennobled since 1560 – forty-two, as against eighty-seven ennobled before 1560. In the course of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the English gentry doubled their share of the ownership of England’s land from about a quarter to a half. The rise of the gentry was not an exclusively English affair though it remains the clearest example of the more general phenomenon.

DOMAIN TRIUMPHS

The enlargement of the middle ranks of the nobility occurred because they were able to take advantage of economic change through the management of their principal asset, land. How to expand the efficiently managed domain was the challenge for the nobility. In western Europe, it involved a combination of some direct exploitation along with farming out the rest. In eastern Europe, the expansion of domain exploitation was accomplished through serf labour. The revenues to be derived from seigneurial dues were (in common with the increasing monetization of the economy in general) increasingly paid in cash rather than in kind in western Europe. Once monetized, these resources suffered from the impact of inflation. In general, seigneurial revenues had already begun to fall as a proportion of the overall value of estates before 1500 and that process accelerated during the next century and a half. There was, however, still significant value in some of the casual revenues in a seigneurie, especially from the ‘quit-rents’ (cens) to be paid on the transfer of title from one peasant to another. Domains could be exploited further by encroaching on common land and rights of access to it (although it risked local opposition). Landlords also expanded the marginal economic advantages of their domains, especially the forests and monopoly rights. The buoyant market for wood in the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries was one that they could tap into – especially desirable since the proceeds could be turned into ready money.

The nobility wanted to acquire more land. They did so, purchasing it for the best price they could, and were prepared to mortgage themselves to do so. One of the least noticed but most significant drivers for change in early-modern Europe was the unprecedented market in domain land. Transfers occurred on a scale that would not be seen again in Europe before the end of the eighteenth century. Princely rulers sold off to their nobilities what was left of their crown lands in order to finance the competitive expansion of their states. The Austrian Habsburg monarchy largely divested itself of its crown estates in the period between 1575 and 1625. When the French monarchy tried to sell off its royal domains it encountered the determined opposition of its own courts, but eventually face-saving legal formulas were developed to alienate it legally, as occurred in the wars of religion.

Following the Protestant Reformation in Prussia, the extensive domains of the Order of Teutonic Knights were ‘secularized’ in 1525: the lands of the order escheated to a new ‘duke of Prussia’, some of them remaining in the hands of knights who became Lutherans and converted, others being sold on. The Habsburg monarchy confiscated and sold on to its nobility perhaps half of all the property of the kingdom of Bohemia following the country’s unsuccessful effort to throw off Habsburg rule in 1618–20. The Palatine princes saw their lands confiscated by the Spaniards in the aftermath of their expulsion from the Rhine Palatinate in 1621. Similar confiscations were threatened by the imperial forces as they moved northwards in the later 1620s towards the Baltic. Less than two decades afterwards, the victorious Swedish army commanders found themselves rewarded with estates in their newly acquired provinces of Swedish Pomerania. In Germany, the Low Countries and England, domain land sales accompanied the Protestant Reformation as states took over monastic properties and then sold them off. About a quarter of England’s land came up for transfer in under two decades (1536–53).

In Ireland, meanwhile, the Tudor state reinforced its authority over the indigenous clans and their leaders by using an unsuccessful rebellion as a pretext for extending English law of individual property rights into a country where clan rendered them meaningless. By the principle of ‘Surrender and Regrant’, Irish clan chiefs were required to give up their hereditary rights in order to have them restored to them as tenants-in-chief of the English king (ex dono regis). This seemingly anodyne legal fiction was in reality a massive confiscation, one which laid the basis for the next century of English colonialism in Ireland. Domain title passed from the Irish lord to the English king, and what the king gave, he could take away and assign to others. The Anglo-Irish gentry living around Dublin in the area already dominated by the English (the Pale) took the lead. Aided by commercial interests in England they pushed for the unilateral confiscation of the counties of Leix and Offaly in 1557, transforming them into the Queen’s County and King’s County, two thirds of the land being regranted to English colonizers to form estates. This was the first ‘plantation’ of its kind and it actually occurred at the close of the reign of the Catholic Mary I. So religion was not essential to the English colonialism of Ireland, though it certainly increasingly served as its pretext and justification.

English aristocrats confectioned genealogies to establish their rights to possess the land of Ireland in cahoots with adventurers and administrators from the Pale. Gaelic chiefs responded with determined rebellion, only to give ground eventually before the military force of the Tudor state. The revolt of Gerald Fitzgerald, count of Desmond, which took in the province of Munster up to the Wicklow mountains in 1586, was followed (for example) by a further plantation in which almost all the region was confiscated and granted out to a small group of speculative ‘undertakers’, who undertook to establish their estates with English colonists and drive the Irish out. In the short term, it seemed to work. With the flight of the earls of Tyrone and Tyrconnel in 1609, a further half a million acres were confiscated and resettled by English and Scottish (mainly Presbyterian) planters in Ulster, the latter widening further the social basis of the emigration involved, since the Presbyterian dissenters from lowland Scotland were mostly not from the social élites.

The Stuart monarchy was readily persuaded that plantation was justified, and that it worked. The English attorney general, Sir John Davies, explained that earlier English colonization had failed because it had neglected to pursue determined military conquest and follow it up with the imposition of law. Both conquest and law were essential to sovereignty. Ireland must ‘be first broken by a warre, before it will be capable of good Government’. Irish laws and customs seemed to Sir John Davies to prove that the Irish were ‘little better than cannibals’: ‘all their possessions [are] uncertain’ and ‘every man being born to Land, as well Bastard, as Legitimate, they all held themselves to be Gentlemen’. English colonialism in Ireland was justified, not merely because it was part of God’s Protestant providential dispensation and King James I’s will, but because it was civilizing the Irish. Such justifications were no different from those that were used in London by the Virginia Company and its supporters to justify colonization in North America. In the later 1620s and 30s Charles I and his viceroy in Ireland, Sir Thomas Wentworth, pushed the politics of plantation to its extreme limits, confiscating Connaught, Clare and Ormonde to found new plantations of Anglican colonists in the midwest of Ireland, seeking to counter the influence of the Presbyterians in Ulster and balance the books of the Stuart monarchy. It aroused the indignation of the earlier colonial settlers in Ireland as well as the native Irish. The resulting rebellion in October 1641 led to brutality that some contemporaries compared to the massacre of English colonists at Virginia on 22 March 1622, where land transfer was also one of the issues at stake.

Domain land transfer characterized Spanish colonization in Mexico, Peru and Chile in the foundation of latifundia domains (encomiendas), modelled on the ranching estates that were an essential part of the agrarian economy of the Extremadura region around Seville. Landlord rights were granted to Spanish colonists (encomenderos). Portuguese colonization in Brazil (especially from 1580 onwards) was characterized by sugar, and later tobacco, plantations, domain agriculture on a hitherto undreamed-of commercial scale and complexity. Back in Europe Catholic Church lands were vulnerable to transfer into lay hands, especially where the defence of the Church against the Protestant onslaught offered a convenient justification for it. In France, five successive alienations of Church wealth took place during the civil wars albeit, in many cases, with the possibility of repurchase later on being included in the sale. In Spain, the Church was divested of hundreds of thousands of villagers as its domains were sold off to pay contributions to the Habsburg monarchy’s war efforts against Protestantism to the north.

Such transfers of property rights emphasized the significance of contracts, and the importance of the legal mechanisms to enforce them. Contracts of all sorts – indentures for apprenticeship, new instruments of credit and debt, trading ventures – served to abstract property rights from landed property and distance ‘wealth’ from ‘landed wealth’. ‘Contract’ even became a way of envisaging political authority. The Dutch Revolt was presented and justified by contemporary theorists as occurring because of a breach of contract by Philip II, who had failed to protect the ancient liberties of the Low Countries as guaranteed by charters. Similar arguments would be applied by Protestant political theorists during the civil wars of late sixteenth-century France and, later, in the English Civil Wars. The arguments carried more weight because of the emphasis placed in some Protestant circles on the notion that God and his chosen people were bound by mutual promises and obligations, reflected in the Old Testament account of a king’s relationship with the Hebrew people. Such arguments were the more convincing, however, especially in those parts of western Europe where the notion of ‘contract’ as a way of delineating wealth as possession had become commonplace, not least among the nobility.

Domain land transfers favoured the secular nobilities of Europe, and especially their middle ranks. Efficiently exploited landed property was the key to noble survival in the seventeenth century. Land outperformed other investments, even though (and especially in southern Europe in the 1630s and 40s) land values were faltering and even falling. But it needed management and exploitation, and that meant a new emphasis on the competence and trustworthiness of the steward, measured in the outcrop of advice books on the subject, stressing the importance of preparing and scrutinizing annual accounts and comparing them year on year to establish trends. Noble land resources tended to be legally tied up in knots by entails and substitutions to keep the estates intact, provide for mortgages and marriage portions, and help out members of the family in difficulties. So domain wealth was not easily released in an emergency. Hence the paradox, especially noticeable in the Italian and Spanish peninsulas towards 1640, of rich aristocrats with vast estates who, in conditions of chronic monetary instability and facing falling rent rolls, not to mention demands upon their resources from all quarters which they could not meet, felt themselves to be in crisis. By 1650, a section of the higher nobility had become vulnerable, victims in part of their own predatory exploitations of the state and their expanded domains. The nobility as an order was more secure, more powerful and more dominant. Without it, the diminishing social cohesion in Europe would have been more damaging and critical. It was upon the nobilities of lineage and land that the social compacts underlying Europe’s ancien régime after 1660 would be built.