HISTORIOGRAPHY

‘All Germany is a gang of bandits and, among the nobles, the more grasping the more glorious’ – a Roman cardinal thus summed up the state of the German nation in the late Middle Ages. There was more to this remark than curial hauteur: complaints about the bad manners and violence of German noblemen were a commonplace among German literati as well. The latter were wont to base their criticism on an old European tradition which equated nobility with personal virtue rather than genetic qualities. This was a conviction to which aristocratic authors, too, were willing to subscribe. At the same time, they gave it a different interpretation. In his dialogue ‘The Robbers’ (1521), the Franconian noble and humanist Ulrich von Hutten made one of the characters, Franz von Sickingen, say that

It is noteworthy that this harangue is delivered in the context of an argument between the three dramatis personae – Franz von Sickingen, Ulrich von Hutten, and a nameless merchant – over the right of noblemen to feud. The merchant denies that nobles have a self-contained authority to declare feuds.