European Nobility of the 15th century

In a chapter of his Discourses. . . on Livy Machiavelli was to reflect on the

structures of states. 4 Having proposed as his definition of ‘gentlemen’ a

leisured class without trade or profession that lived solely from revenues which

came mainly from estates, and, stressing that those in possession of castles,

rights of jurisdiction and subjects (in short, feudatories) posed the greatest

threat to public order, he went on to consider the case of German towns where

civic virtue and integrity, particularly fiscal integrity, held sway. Why was this

so? According to Machiavelli it was because the inhabitants, having no knowledge

of the outside world, were thus uncorrupted by it; because they were

content with their lot; and because gentlemen were strictly excluded from their

society. Such gentlemen were to be found in the kingdom of Naples, the papal

states, the Romagna, and Lombardy; yet in the Italian republics – Florence,

Lucca, Siena – they were few in number, and those few possessed no castles.

But what of Venice, where only gentlemen could hold office? It was not a

contradiction of Machiavelli’s theory, since these Venetians were gentlemen in

name rather than in reality, as their wealth derived from trade, and they had

neither lands, nor castles, nor jurisdiction over subjects. Furthermore, their

nobility was merely honorary; all Venetians understood the rules of the game,

which consequently provoked no unrest.

More or less everywhere the titled nobility broke away, or stood apart from the

mass of nobles: its members held high offices and were sometimes termed

great lords or magnates. They numbered a few dozen families out of a few

hundred or a few thousand ordinary nobles, perhaps between 1 per cent and 5

per cent of all nobles. Contemporary documents carefully listed the duchies

and counties of the French kingdom, as well as their feudal status, but it must

be said that the same individual might hold several of these great fiefs

simultaneously and that ‘sires’, occasionally barons or viscounts, could themselves

claim to belong to the high nobility.

It needs to be said, too, that in the fifteenth century the

whole of western Christendom already knew, or adopted more generally

than before, the traditional hierarchy of titles and offices that was Roman,

Frankish or French in origin: duke, marquis, count, viscount, baron, knight,

and squire. Translations from one language to another were suggested, for

instance, in French/Flemish/English phrase books of the fourteenth century:

‘duc’/‘hertoghe’/‘duke’; ‘comte’/‘grave’/‘earl’; ‘chevalier’/‘ridder’/‘knyghte’;

‘йcuyer’/‘sciltknecht’/‘squyer’; while the French ‘grants seigneurs’ was translated

‘grote heeren’ in Flemish and ‘great lords’ in English.

The matter of actual numbers of nobles is fundamental, and must be considered

first. It does not seem possible to suggest percentages, even approximate

ones, for all the countries of Europe; available figures are incomplete and

too imprecise to enable one to discern possible trends in this area in the fifteenth

century. In France, at the end of the Middle Ages, the noble class, the

‘peuple des nobles’ as one contemporary termed it, from the princes of the

blood to the most unpretentious squires and mere gentlemen, accounted for

between 1. 5 per cent and 2 per cent of the total population, although this

masked considerable regional differences: Brittany, in particular, numbered

some 9, 000 noble families which, at a reckoning of five individuals per family,

gives 45, 000 souls, or some 3 per cent of a population of about 1, 500, 000.

Proportions of 4 per cent cannot be discounted in Dauphinй and Savoy, for

example, whereas elsewhere, in the region around Chartres, numbers would

scarcely reach 1 per cent.

In England, a rather different picture emerges. About 1500, the nobility in

the strict sense of the word (‘peers of the realm’ summoned to sit in parliament

as ‘lords temporal’), formed a group of sixty peers, in effect sixty families.

Immediately below them were found the gentry (generosi) who, although claiming

to belong both culturally and socially to the noble class in its broadest sense,

by statutory definition were no longer deemed noble at the end of the fifteenth

century. At a rough estimate this group comprised some 500 knights, about 800

esquires (constituting the squirearchy) and 5, 000 gentlemen. Next in order

descending the social scale were the yeomen, who cannot be included in the

noble class, however loosely defined. Accordingly, it can be proposed that the

noble class, in the broadest sense of the term, would have amounted to 30, 000

individuals, which, assuming a total population of 2, 500, 000, is a proportion of

only 1. 2 per cent.

Castile, about the year 1500, had an estimated population of 5, 000, 000

people. According to contemporary sources nobles of all ranks (grandes and

titulos, caballeros, hidalgos, donzellos and escuderos) would account for one sixth

(16. 6 per cent) of this total. Most historians consider this figure far too high:

some suggest lowering it to 4 per cent; others, probably nearer the mark, to at

least 10 per cent, that is 500, 000 individuals or 100, 000 families, with, as in

France, strong regional variations, the Asturias, Leуn and the region of Burgos

providing more than half the hidalgos, who were uncommon in the dioceses of

Cordova and Seville where, by contrast, town-dwelling caballeros were established.

The proportion for the kingdom of Navarre may have risen to 15 per

cent, while, somewhat unexpectedly, the proportion in Aragon may have been

as low as 1. 5 or 2 per cent.

In Scandinavia we have an example of a region where the nobility took a

long time to become established, although, as it happens, the fifteenth century

was an important phase in its evolution. Around 1500, in a country with a

population of 300, 000, there were some 300 noble families in Norway; making

the noble families 0. 5 per cent of the total population. In neighbouring

Denmark, where such families numbered between 250 and 300 – of which a

score or so belonged to the higher nobility – they constituted 0. 25 per cent of a

population of about 500, 000. In short, these societies clearly were not essentially

feudal in character; the well-to-do peasantry was more important.

Conversely in Poland, Hungary and Bohemia nobles were numerous: 2, 000

noble families, it is claimed, in Bohemia; a population 5 per cent noble in

Hungary; in Poland, not, as has been long accepted, 10–15 per cent noble, but

rather between 3 and 5 per cent, yet a still far from negligible proportion of the

population.

The matter of percentages is of prime historical importance. A very small

noble class may have meant a measure of affluence for the ‘happy few’, and less

of a drain on production, particularly agricultural production, but more certainly

it meant that noble dominance of society as a whole was weak, that noble

brilliance was toned down. Conversely, a superfluity of nobles inevitably

brought poverty in its wake. For, fundamental to the very concept of nobility,

was the idea that it demanded, at the very least, a comfortable way of life.