The Late Medieval "Crisis of the Nobility" Reconsidered: The Case of Flanders

Abstract

This article is concerned with one of the classic discussions of twentieth-century historiography, namely the presumed “crisis of the nobility” in later medieval Europe. It intends to revisit this debate with a social study of the Flemish nobility. The question whether the nobility was faced with an existential crisis in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries provoked fierce discussion in the 1970s and 1980s, but it became gradually a somewhat stale debate. Indeed, in the English-language historiography, the last major contribution to this discussion appeared in 1996.1 Specialists of the medieval and Early Modern era came to agree that the nobility remained the apex of the social and political hierarchy in European society until well into the nineteenth century.2 It is not my intention to question this general conclusion, but rather to show that the important question as to how the nobility adapted to change remains largely unanswered. That I have felt the need to add to the already mountainous scholarly literature on this topic springs from a recent trend in the historiography in which the post-war focus on the financial troubles of late medieval nobles is gradually replaced with an equally rigid paradigm that tends to stress the perpetual endurance of noble elites in the face of the far-reaching economic, social and political changes that transformed European society in that period. In what follows, I will first provide a survey of how the debate about the “crisis of the nobility” developed for the county of Flanders to show the limitations of the present-day perspective. Subsequently, I will show that a social perspective helps to understand the remarkable resilience of the nobility as a key institution of pre-modern Europe. The nobility of sixteenth-century Flanders was no less prominent than that of the thirteenth century, but it was different in nature than that of its thirteenth-century predecessor. That issue is anything but stale.