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  • 4 - The European Nobility

  • from PART II - ECONOMIC AND SOCIAL DEVELOPMENTS
  • Edited by Christopher Allmand, University of Liverpool
  • Book:
    The New Cambridge Medieval History
    Published online:
    28 March 2008
    Print publication:
    18 June 1998, pp 87-105

  • Summary

    The nobility of Europe at the end of the Middle Ages needs and deserves to be studied from a standpoint that is not merely socio-economic, but political and cultural, too. Europe is deemed synonymous with Latin Christendom. The Castilian nobility was distinctly divided into three categories: the titulos, the caballeros and later the hidalgos and the escuderos. Nobles from different parts of western Christendom could also meet at the court. The Prussian Reise, that cross-roads of western nobility, was more characteristic of the fourteenth than of the fifteenth century. Texts, in some cases translations, spread far from their place of origin identical concepts of nobility and chivalry, and stimulated commentaries upon them. The existence of noble classes of varying importance within different European societies is explained, first and foremost, by the long-term history of these societies, and, vitally, by its outcome.