"The princes, though not the other nobles, formed with the monarchy the principle agents and bulwarks of Imperial governance. Through all the changes, there nonetheless survived a common noble culture based on eligibility for enfiefment and the honor of knighthood, a noble lifestyle (when they could afford it), a shared military ethos, and a boundless taste for celebrating their lineages in image, word, and deed." [p. 42]Despite the longevity of the holy warrior culture - that had peaked perhaps in the 12th-13th century- there was less and less for a noble knight to do locally, with fewer offices of power available, princely city-states absorbed into larger regional seats, the Pope and church failing to call or pay for, any sustaining crusade. There were as well a host of personal reasons. The very nature of existence for a noble house to maintain continuity, for an inheritor of a name and an estate to last more than a generation or two was already extremely perilous.
As Brady points out, 'both, whether titled or untitled', a noble, had to protect his holdings, his family and his family's future interests. These included good marriages for the daughters and enough land and property for sons to hold onto, if they could. As fewer and fewer families were chosen in administrative spots, there was also a concerted effort to codify territories and the specific offices ruling those territories. This process happened differently in different places and took time. But it doesn't take too many calculations to recognise that within a few generations, even the most steadfast of gurdians could see it all fall apart. A grandfather of a noble house could have a dozen grandsons and if all wanted a piece of an inheritance, some, or their children, may not have much to rule or sustain themselves in years to come. All the while fending off neighboring territorial advances, Imperial exactions, living through disasters, disease, uprisings. This is a simple view, but captures the state of change that landed interests, whether wealthy, connected or otherwise had left to find benefit or service in. Marriages became the preferred method for many, including Maximillian and the Habsburgs, rather than battle.[pp. 42-5]
Many nobles and their families and relatives went and served the church. Some became mercenaries and travelled Europe. Some few became members of the Imperial Guard or part of the retinue of some office-holder. But the change, this gulf between the nobles who were running state affairs and the many, many more members of noble houses that no longer had a clear function in society, was itself recognized in the literature of the day. The noble, chivalric knight of Chaucer of a century before can be contrasted with the hapless, impossibly zealous bufoonery of Cervantes' Don Quixote of a century later. All through the period everybody knew of and would even celebrate the several available sorts of knights, in different stages of advancement, as well as in different ways continent-wide. The names and honors and colors and flags and steeds and weapons and armor, the hunts and jousts, the holidays were all highlights of the communal experience. The lords and knights could still win this attention and acclaim thru contest, whether real or imagined. Albrecht Dürer published a number of engravings of knights. This one is from 1513.
Albrecht Durer - "The Knight, Death and the Devil" pic.twitter.com/Xbo1WiJtVt
— RealDaveR (@OtrOOne) February 6, 2014
At home, across German lands, the number of nobles engaged in regional organizations, or Leagues that met and mustered local nobles for military purposes, dwindled over the fifteenth century. Emperor Maximillian tried in 1495 to enlist the great majority of them for a new Imperial cadre of knights, but they didn't want to contribute or become a standing army. [p. 46] Brady comes to his point in the middle of this chapter."The knight, like all mortals, was doomed to die, but so, believed many sixteenth-century observers and most modern historians, was his entire estate. The lesser nobles, with their small holdings and their inability to forge their limited judicial authority over peasants into a kind of proto-sovereignty, had certainly lost much economic substance during the agrarian crisis." [p. 45]This crisis was a result of the awful destructions of the waves of plague from the century before, where half the population died and most lands were bought up by fewer and fewer families. A 'proto-sovereign' system that was coming into place in some areas had not met with widespread practice and would not for most places until the seventeenth century, when territorial states would become enshrined in both law and practice.
As internal wars decreased and as more arable land was put to use, prices for agricultural products fell. But with increasing concentrations of people in cities, the flourishing of trade all over Europe, and the resurgence of guilds after the earlier disruptions (c. 1350-1450), the price of manufactured goods went up. Brady highlights this change for the many lesser nobles.
"The price scissors caught them, as it did peasants, between falling farm prices and rising ones for manufactured goods.... [Yet] the nobles' incomes were ... surely falling behind those of wealthy burghers.... Constrained by custom from increasing rents, now increasingly fixed in cash rather than produce, the nobles adapted to shore up their incomes. Some hitched their wagons to princely stars, others imitated the burghers by getting educations and yet others moldered away in their old lifestyles of ignorant banditry, hated by the common people and bullied by princes." [pp. 45-46]The last of the independent noble leagues did last until the sixteenth century but they no longer had military responsibilities. A number over the years would become enterprisers, ones who would recruit fighters and lead them behind a captain, for mercenary hire. "To fight for pay was to move with the times."[p. 47]
The examples Brady gives offer a wide view of outcomes. Many would live out lives in poverty, or be cut to lives of servitude, some becoming wealthy bandits while others stayed still and suffered. Stuck in one place, still with some responsibility, protecting some fortress or keep of a lord they might not feel beholden to. Like Ulrich von Hutten (1488-1523) a Franconian, that was
"... a veteran of ten German and Italian universities and one of the best educated nobles of his age. He chose princely service to escape the relentless monotony, the squalor, and the stinks of country life... country gentlemen [he wrote] spend their days "in the fields, in the woods, and in fortified strongholds," leasing their lands to "a few starveling peasants who barely manage to scratch a living from it. From such paupers we draw our revenues, and income hardly worth the labor spent on it." It was dangerous to leave his fortified residence, it was disgusting to live in its "dark rooms crammed with guns, pitch, sulfur, and other materials of war," where "the stench of gunpowder mixed with the the smell of dogs and shit and other such pleasant odors." "[p. 48]
These quotes Brady tells us, are from a 'famous' letter sent to Willibeld Pirckheimer (1470-1530) in Nuremburg and detailed in the Gerald Strauss edited book Manifestations of Discontent in Germany on the Eve of the Reformation, 193; Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1972.
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quotes and pagination from: Thomas A Brady Jr: German Histories in The Age of Reformations, 1400-1650; University of California, Berkeley for the Cambridge Univeristy Press, 2009
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