Noble Elites Research Articles

Early studies of the arms and armour collection in the National Museum of Slovenia

The study of historical arms and armour has no firmly established tradition in Slovenian scholarship. This may be attributed to various factors – on the one hand, the widely entrenched notions of Slovenia’s past reduced to a mythologised nation of peace-loving country folk, and on the other hand, the lack of representative arms and armour collections belonging to noble elites, such as may be found in the neighbouring political centres. A rather unreflective approach to military historical heritage could be observed during the formative period of the Carniolan Provincial Museum in Ljubljana, the precursor to the later National Museum, where this particular field remained largely uncharted until the end of World War II. Ljubljana’s museum experts ultimately recognised the true value of their arms and armour collection only towards the end of the 1950s, to a considerable extent or even mainly thanks to the interest of outside observers and foreign connoisseurs like the Viennese curator Dr Bruno Thomas. Within the National Museum, this shift finally stimulated the creation of a curatorial post devoted to arms and armour. Its tasks were entrusted to Ferdinand Tancik, Slovenia’s first specialist in the military heritage of the premodern era and, despite his brief career, a surprisingly influential local pioneer in arms and armour studies.

A Daring Obedience: Ibn ʿArabī’s Futuwwa on the Right Side of the Law

Abstract While Sufi writings have largely depicted futuwwa as the selfless virtue of upright young men, there has been, throughout Islam’s intellectual history, an underlying current characterised by brave rebelliousness, a current tied to the virtue’s complex relationship with urban fraternal societies. This paper investigates Muḥyī al-Dīn Ibn ʿArabī’s (d. 638/1240) deliberate response to futuwwa’s implications of recalcitrance. Making a case for a law-abiding variety of the virtue, Ibn ʿArabī builds a theoretical frame in which this manly trait, one of consideration and altruism, mimics divine attributes, especially a divine calculating wisdom. In doing so, Ibn ʿArabī performs a role that Jeff Mitchell describes as the prerogative of noble elites, historically speaking, namely, the social construction of virtue. As is argued here, while Ibn ʿArabī makes a careful case for a law-abiding futuwwa, the lingering resonances of the virtue’s gangster associations indicate that social influence is, to a degree, reciprocal. That is, while Ibn ʿArabī’s framing of futuwwa makes a detailed and metaphysically-substantiated case for law-abidingness, his argument also suggests, however implicitly, that the virtue cannot completely escape its non-elite outlaw framework.

State services, fortuitous marriages, and conspiracies: Trans-territorial family strategies between Madrid, Brussels, and Vienna in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries

Early modern composite monarchies functioned by maintaining local rights and traditions and the successful accommodation of noble elites in the army, diplomatic corps, and regional governments. Scholars commonly focus on the integration of nobles from the core lands in order to implement a faithful civil service and reliable institutions for government. Yet noble families from peripheries or border regions have been disregarded either as supporters or as opponents of royal power. This article explores the differing strategies of the Carrettos from Imperial Italy and the Arenbergs from the Southern Netherlands, two noble families from the border regions of the Habsburg realms and how they responded to integrative measures offered by the Spanish and Austrian Habsburgs. It analyses four important aspects of noble family strategies. First, the article examines how vassalage, loyalty, and sovereignty created important bonds between noble families in the western border regions of the Holy Roman Empire and the emperor or sovereign. Second, it establishes how families became members of competitive Habsburg court societies via court honours, titles, and interregional marriage alliances. Third, the article looks at how these families supported the early modern state with successful performances of state service and how they utilized the vast career possibilities of composite monarchies. Fourth and finally, it analyses how the failed integration of noble elites from border regions resulted in governmental crisis and uprisings. This article demonstrates how nobles in the border regions could be integral to state power.

La música dentro de las cortes europeas del siglo XVI. El modelo de Il Cortegiano y el papel de las damas en su consolidación. El ejemplo de las cortes italianas

Durante el siglo XVI las élites nobiliarias tomaron como modelo de comportamiento al gentiluomo descrito por Baldassare de Castiglione en su Cortegiano. Según este ideal, la música jugaba un papel esencial en la formación de príncipes y cortesanos. El soberano humanista debía conjugar la doble faceta de intérprete y patrón. Paradójicamente y bajo este prisma, en las cortes italianas de Mantua y Ferrara la figura de la mujer adquirió una relevancia especial en dos ámbitos, por un lado en el intenso patronazgo musical ejercido por las princesas de las familias gobernantes, y por otro en la importancia de las cortesanas y profesionales como intérpretes. Todo ello posibilitó el desarrollo de un estilo de canto de gran refinamiento y de un virtuosismo extremo, explicitado en el concerto delle dame de la corte estense de Ferrara de finales del siglo XVI.

Victims of Political Choice

The political history of the small territory of Dobrzyń Land became much more complex at the beginning of Władysław Jagiełło’s rule (1386–1434). Władysław of Opole pledged part of Dobrzyń Land (the castle of Złotoria, 1391) to the Teutonic Knights. Then in 1392, after a short war against the king of Poland, Władysław of Opole pawned the entirety of Dobrzyń Land to the Teutonic knights. Neither King Władysław Jagiełło nor the Polish political elite recognized the legality of the pledge. However, the rule of the Teutonic Knights in Dobrzyń Land led to the polarization of political attitudes among the local noblemen. A faction of local noble elites, the so-called Teutonic party, accepted the rule of the Order and collaborated eagerly with the temporary rulers of the land. Another faction, the so-called the royal party, did not agree to the rule of the Order and chose to emigrate to territories ruled directly by Władysław Jagiełło. Their domains in Dobrzyń Land were confiscated by the Order. The Polish king in response gave them temporary possessions within the territory of the kingdom. The situation reversed in 1405 when Dobrzyń Land was redeemed by Władysław Jagiełło. As a consequence, the refugees returned and redeemed land confiscated by the Order. Repression in turn by the Polish ruler induced some of the Teutonic party to seek the protection of the Order in Prussia. A few years later, as a result of the Polish-Lithuanian–Teutonic war (1409–1411), Dobrzyń Land was again occupied by the Teutonic Knights. Once more, some of the nobles fled from their homeland to territories unoccupied by the Teutonic Knights, while some of the Teutonic party returned to Dobrzyń Land. In the end, as a result of the Teutonic Knights’s defeat at the Battle of Grunwald (1410) and decisions of the First Peace of Toruń (1411), Dobrzyń Land came again under the long-term rule of Polish kings. That meant the return of refugees from the royal party and again forced the Teutonic Knights’ supporters to go into exile. In the end, some of the latter reconciled with the Polish king and came back to their homeland. Some, however, remained in the Teutonic State, where they were given domains.

Monarchy Transformed: Princes and their Elites in Early Modern Western Europe, ed. Robert von Friedeburg and John Morrill

This volume is the result of two conferences held in Rotterdam in 2008 and 2011. Both were part of Robert von Friedeburg’s project ‘Reason of State or Reason of Princes—the New Monarchy and its Enemies’. The volume, edited by Robert von Friedeburg and John Morrill, presents a final reckoning with an outdated Rankean state formation narrative and has the ambition to present a new synthesis. The main bête noire is the so-called ‘New monarchy’ which has long been presented as a pivotal stage in state formation. These monarchies supposedly succeeded at increasing taxation and subduing traditional, noble elites. Scholars have demonstrated in recent decades that rulers in fact remained dependent on their elites, particularly financially, because tax revenues were rarely enough to cover increasing expenditure on war. Moreover, the seventeenth-century crisis of the nobility has been decisively laid to bed. This volume extends this argument further, demolishing the old narrative and arguing for a new, ‘transformed’ monarchy instead.

Титул Ch(t)igin или Chinggis

The article examines some versions for the etymology of the title ‘Chinggis’ and notes that the amount and quality of studies on the topic have reached the level when it is necessary to classify and arrange them on the basis of historiographic analysis. Most researchers consider the title of Chinggis Khaan (Genghis Khan) to be a recent one. The most popular opinions regarding the etymology of the title suggest that the word ‘Chinggis’ stems from a number of different lexemes, namely: 1) the word tengis (‘ocean’) borrowed from the language of ancient Turks, 2) the word chin (‘firm’), 3) the word combination chingis tengri related to shamanistic beliefs, 4) the Hunnic title name chan-yu (shaniui, ‘Son of Heaven’) inherited by the Mongols in a misspelled form to evolve into Chinggis. Still, the paper concludes none of the hypotheses mentioned have been supported with sufficient arguments, and sets forth an original version regarding the origin of the title. The work proposes that the title of the prominent Khan of Mongols stems from the term chigin / tigin traditionally inherited by Mongolic nomads since the earliest times. In Mongolian, the word chigin / chagan / chegen contains the seme ‘white’. The word was first mentioned in written sources describing the states of the Tuoba and and the Xianbei — in the form 直勤 ‘Cjichjeni’. It is thus suggested that the title bestowed upon the noble elites (‘the white bone’) in the mentioned states actually meant ‘Tsagaan’ (‘the White (ones)’). Later, ancient Turks kept using the title in the form ‘tegin’, and attributed the title to members of the ruling dynasty who did not inherit the throne. So, the use of the title ‘chigin’ (‘white’) can be traced back to the era of the Tuoba and Xianbei, and is historically determined by the long-lived tradition to refer to the ruling clan elites as ‘the white bone’. And the ancestors of Mongols passed the title down from generation to generation up to Chinggis Khaan’s reign.

Hospitality networks, British travel writers, and the dissemination of competing Transylvanian claims to civilization, 1830s–1930s

Hungarian, Saxon, and Romanian nationalist activists in Transylvania disseminated competing claims to “Westernness” by swaying visiting British travel writers' descriptions through hospitality networks that guided what writers saw and heard, assuring that travelers favored the nationalists' classifications of the region's ethnicities. Although the qualities British travelers valued varied depending on individual differences and intellectual currents such as enlightened reform, scientific racism, and the romantic revival, travelers consistently ascribed the qualities they best favored to the nationality on whose hospitality they relied. Wealth and time of travel determined which hospitality networks travelers favored. The Hungarian noble elites hosted most travelers until 1918, when the newly dominant Romanian nobility replaced them. Throughout, peasant voices especially remained marginalized.

Familia nobiliară Vuchetich de Brinye şi Cenei / The family Vuchetich nobles of Brinye and Ceney

Historical research of the noble families of the Habsburg Empire occupies an important place in the concerns of the researchers interested in the social elites. !e approach, as interesting, as necessary, is meant to contextualize and provide important data on the involvement of the nobility in the social, political and ecclesiastical life of the Empire. To fully understand the asset of nobility for the multicultural, multiethnic and multireligious space of the Banat region, it is necessary to present all the noble families, regardless of their ethnic and religious a"liation. In this context, the presentation of the family Vuchetich nobles of Brinye and Ceney can bring clari#cation also on the establishment of the Croatian families in the region of Banat, as well as on the role played by this family in the noble elites of the time.

Review of periodical articles

One of the key concepts of Max Weber's writings on cities was that in north-western Europe, the landed nobility and urban elites were clearly distinguished. For Weber, this was indeed a main reason to locate the occidental city in the north rather than in the Mediterranean. Christof Rolker tackles this question in his ‘Heraldische Orgien und Sozialer Aufstieg. Oder: Wo ist eigentlich “oben” in der spätmittelalterlichen Stadt?’, Zeitschrift für Historische Forschung, 52 (2015), 191–224. The in-depth analysis of one of the largest and at the same time most widespread armorials in the late medieval Holy Empire, namely that of Konrad Grünenberg (d. 1494), demonstrates that in Konstanz (where Grünenberg lived) guilds (and not the nobility) first insisted on patrilineal descent as a proof of status. Traditionally, Grünenberg is seen as a paradigmatic social climber, as he left his guild to join the society of the local nobility (called ‘Zur Katz’). Yet his sumptuous armorial, containing over 2,000 coat of arms mainly from the south-west of the Empire, does not mention any single member of this noble society. Instead, it praises the tournament societies of which Grünenberg was not a member, and highlights chivalric events in which he never participated. This, Rolker argues, indicates that armorials were not only about status already gained or to be gained, but also a manual for contemporaries to discuss the social order in a more abstract way. In his ‘Wappenbuch’, Grünenberg constantly explains why he could not join the noble societies he praised, while at the same time he ignored the ‘Zur Katz’ association of which he was a member. Therefore, Rolker concludes that it was not only members (or would-be members) of the respective social groups who knew and reproduced social codes. So the boundary between noble and urban elites was more blurred than Weber claimed – though Rolker is of course not the first to criticize Weber on this. Clearly, Grünenberg's armorial was part and parcel of a wider discussion of origins and kinship, namely patrilineal kinship that took place in several social milieux, rather than simply a book which displayed inherited status.

Jane Ohlmeyer. Making Ireland English: The Irish Aristocracy in the Seventeenth Century.

This is a self-consciously important book by an author whose explicit intention is to write on a grand scale: a social, cultural, economic, and political history of the Irish nobility in the seventeenth century (in effect a “short” seventeenth century, from 1603 to 1689), all placed within the context of the evolution of strategies of government. Jane Ohlmeyer not only provides a missing Irish dimension to the study of noble elites in early modern Europe but also contributes significantly to the historiography of English rule in Ireland, echoing and at the same time subtly challenging Nicholas Canny's Making Ireland British, 1580–1650 (2001). While Canny focused on the violence of conquest and plantation, and its underpinning ideology, Ohlmeyer examines the role of the aristocracy—native and planter, Old English and New English—as both subjects and agents of the anglicization process. It is a bold enterprise: a study of an entire social class that simultaneously attempts a major reinterpretation of the narrative of seventeenth-century Irish history.

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

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.

Warrior‐Monks in Japanese History1

AbstractJapan's early medieval age, roughly the late eleventh through the late fourteenth centuries, is usually described as an age when power shifted from noble elites to the warrior class, most commonly embodied in the cultic samurai. However, scholars subscribing to the notion of a clearly defined military class with a common ethos from this period will find few figures in the premodern age that correspond to those idealized images. Those who fought came from all facets of society, indicating that the separation of the samurai from other warriors was a much later invention. This distinction of different fighters have affected monastic warriors more than any other group, for they have been seen as a negative influence on society, often referred to by the later term sōhei (monk‐warriors). This essay explores the social origins of monastic warriors, their relationship to those we now call samurai (or bushi) during the early medieval age, and the later creation of stereotypical images of evil naginata (glaive)‐wielding monks that have dominated both popular culture and academe until the present.

Estate interest vs. state service: the (un)easy integration of the Bessarabian nobility into the Russian imperial system

This article discusses the process of the integration of the regional local elite of Bessarabia into the Russian imperial estate system during the first half of the nineteenth century. Presenting the Bessarabian case in a comparative perspective, this case study examines two sets of problems. The first deals with the question of social identification and the specific pattern of centre–periphery relations that emerged in the Russian Empire by the early nineteenth century. The local noble elites were not just passive recipients of central policies, but attempted to articulate a political autonomist agenda that was frequently at odds with the centralist designs of the government. These attempts amounted to an alternative project for the province's organisation. The corporate identity of the Bessarabian nobles was rather fluid and uncertain due to the incongruity of the traditional Moldavian social hierarchy with the orderly structure of the Russian ‘first estate’. Centre–periphery relations were determined by the willingness of the empire to rely on a model of indirect rule in the borderlands. The nobility was viewed as an indispensable intermediary stratum carrying out administrative functions at the local level, but it frequently did not correspond to the model of imperial dvorianstvo elaborated by the government. The second block of issues focuses on the mechanisms of cultural interaction that determined the outcome of the negotiation between the centre and the regional elite, causing the failure of the autonomist experiment in Bessarabia. Using the concept of ‘cultural misunderstanding’, the article suggests that differing interpretations of social and cultural categories were at the root of the conflict that prompted the centre to curtail the previously granted privileges of the local elite. Finally, the article proposes a more complex approach to issues of resistance and mutual influence that are often interpreted in simplistic and dichotomous terms.

Une noblesse atlantique ? Le second ordre français de l'Ancien au Nouveau Monde

Abstract : Historians rarely use the European concept of « nobility » to describe the upper strata of French imperial society during the early modem period. And yet, the presence of French nobles in New France or in the French West Indies was widely acknowledged at the time. The social impact ofsuch noble elites, however, has not fully been recognized by Atlantic historians because the general context emphasized wealth and social mobility over lineage. This paper will address this gap by considering the social meanings of nobility in several parts ofthe French empire during the seventeenth and especially the eighteenth-centuries. It concludes that there were few differences betzveen French nobles living in the metropolis and those in the colonies because the Crown strictly determined legal definitions of the French nobility. Nevertheless, it was certainly easier to pose as noble in the colonies than in metropolitan France since the integration of these new families in the second order of the realm was based upon their wealth but also upon their merits. The discourses colonial elites constructed about their nobility anticipated in some ways new definitions of elites elaborated in the metropolis at that time.

“Sarmatianism”

In Polish research, the terms Sarmatia, and Culture (as a political phrase for a line of policy and political designation) are omnipresent and run into the paradigm of Sarmatianism (sarmatyzm) which has been applied to the early modem history of the Polish Lithuanian Union. Looking at manifold sources from over four centuries, this term should either be avoided because of its vagueness or employed in ways which refer to its complex usages. There are at least four different connotations, distinguishable layers reflecting separable ideas: 1. The humanistic of the region Sarmatia from antiquity up to early modem times reaching back to an ancient civilization which was used to legitimize the Polish-Lithuanian-Union. 2. The Origo Idea was a profitable political concept that became part of political programs used by the early-modem monarchy and nobility in foreign and domestic policy. 3. The Sarmatian culture of the Polish nobility was used to unify the 17th century nobility throughout the Union (clothes, gestures, rhetoric). 4. It was also a social and culture political movement and call to arms during the last third of the 18th century that sought to modernize noble elites and bring them closer to western European culture. With the publication of several monographic works after World War II, we can talk about an impressive break-through of this paradigm. In the 1920s and 1930s concepts of a jagelonian idea had been possible. This changed after 1945 when for ideological reasons the cultural heritage of eastern polish regions had been put under a taboo. In this situation the paradigm of Culture was revived because its politics were not incriminated in the Polish People's Republic (PRL). This term could be loaded up with enlightenment ideas and serve as camouflage for the research on the jagelonian idea as well as a label for the obsolete concepts of the elder elites. This is why up to 1989 researchers made use of this paradigm in a broad way but never questioned or clearly defined it. Thus the definition of Culture is not precise. It is used to describe a humanistic educated with its own way of thinking and habits - the every-day life style of the landed nobles and their material situation ― the culture of elites, a political tendency, and a Party. This makes the term itself a Passepartout for cultural history that for analyses and temporal distinction uses mostly political moments (1606/07, 1648/60, 1763/64). Such are the contradictory and inconsistent phenomena in the early modem history of culture of East Central Europe that can in retrospective be encompassed with this one term.

Adelsgeschichte des 19. Jahrhunderts? Eine Skizze

The article looks at noble elites and their interaction with the state in Western and Central Europe in the 17th and 18th centuries. It examines the way in which monarchs and their agents reshaped and redefined the social identity of the nobility. As public service became a decisive criterion for social status, nobilities ceased to be elites "constituted by their own social self-consciousness and by the comportments that it authorized" (H. Ellis on Boulainvilliers) and became dependent on the military and civilian offices and privileges of precedence granted by the ruler. Nevertheless the fact that social identity was increasingly defined in legal terms did not really unify the nobility as an estate but rather created new tensions and made the nobility as a social group more heterogeneous than ever. This partly explains why continental nobles saw the English peerage and gentry as models which they tried to emulate at the end of the 18th century.

Staatsbildung und adlige Führungsschichten in der Frühen Neuzeit: Auf dem Weg zur Auflösung der ständischen Identität des Adels?

Abstract The article looks at noble elites and their interaction with the state in Western and Central Europe in the 17th and 18th centuries. It examines the way in which monarchs and their agents reshaped and redefined the social identity of the nobility. As public service became a decisive criterion for social status, nobilities ceased to be elites constituted by their own social self-consciousness and by the comportments that it authorized (H. Ellis on Boulainvilliers) and became dependent on the military and civilian offices and privileges of precedence granted by the ruler. Nevertheless the fact that social identity was increasingly defined in legal terms did not really unify the nobility as an estate but rather created new tensions and made the nobility as a social group more heterogeneous than ever. This partly explains why continental nobles saw the English peerage and gentry as models which they tried to emulate at the end of the 18th century.

Einführung: Adel in der Neuzeit

Abstract Recent research has pointed out how fragile the notions of nobility and being noble had become in the 19th and early 20th centuries. However, in the early modern period, definitions of nobility were not always that clear and self-evident either. If noble elites managed to maintain a certain coherence, this was partly due to the fact that any self-description as noble had to find acceptance in a public forum. In this respect, we can discern lines of continuity which link the 19th century to the Ancien Regime, despite the revolutionary upheaval. Both before and after 1789, noble elites, if they wished to survive, had to be able to define and present themselves as communities of memory while being capable at the same time of re-inventing themselves and their ideals of behaviour to adapt to new political and cultural challenges.

Grenzgesellschaft und mehrfache Loyalitäten. Die brandenburg-preußisch-polnische Grenze 1656-1772

With a length of 1,500 km, the Brandenburg-Prussian-Polish-Lithuanian border generated border societies which took benefit of scopes in economic, denominational and political matters and developed multiple loyalties. This will be examined with regard to the micro regions of Lauenburg and Butow, the Draheim and the Crone district. Varying lords and vassals opened up chances for appeal. In practice, throughout the early modern era, the border zones only partially evolved into a fixed boundary. By the 17th Century, there were still disputes over the Status of new Settlements, and local conflicts were fought out by means of border violations, or even armed inroads. In Lauenburg and Butow, Brandenburg-Prussia abandoned land registers and contributions in favour of flat rates in order to avoid protest. In Draheim, a border register was drawn up in 1687 and a general map produced in 1711, which, however, out of consideration for the neighbouring nobles, was not used for the purpose of border codification. Thus, the border line was not settled until 1798. Within the border society, there is evidence of multiple loyalties among the noble elites, who sought to combine Berlin's and Warsaw's goals with their own interests. This becomes obvious if we look at the examples of the Przebendowski at Lauenburg and Butow, and at the von der Goltz in the Crone district, whose international careers were based on the Situation at the border: The Przebendowski made their careers as representatives of the local nobility, as lobbyists in Warsaw and as representatives of the Protestant interests in Poland-Lithuania, which, after 1700, led them into the highest public Offices. The von der Goltz belonged to the military and diplomatic elites and were leaders of the dissidents; their importance reached its climax between 1764 and 1795. The two families and other groups took advantage of the border society and tried to stabilize this Situation, since it offered numerous opportunities for income and careers. Historiographically, these mixed loyalties have so far been overlooked and denounced as (denominational, national) treason; however, they are important, since they concern considerable groups within the contact zone. A history from the perspective of these groups still needs to be written.