Introduction
The question of why a person would want to become a noble in early modern Central Europe appears at first sight a pointless one to ask. So unchallenged was the nobility's position at the upper end of society and so high was its prestige that a commoner's desire for a share in those advantages is entirely understandable. In the course of the sixteenth century, the nobility came to occupy the highest ranks of society, and in the following century its social, political, and cultural hegemony was fully in place. A commoner's decision to seek ennoblement for himself is therefore, from the point of view of a present-day observer, not only immediately comprehensible but also perfectly rational. Yet, if we bear in mind that unconcealed ambition to improve one's status and to seek social advancement fundamentally contradicted the premodern conception of the role of commoners in society, the assumption that aspirations for ennoblement were simply the result of rational career-planning becomes less satisfactory. Although far from uncommon in itself, ennoblement was by no means the standard avenue for social advancement. On the contrary, promoting somebody into another estate remained the exception; an exception moreover that had to be well founded in each individual case, as it constituted an infringement of the principles on which social order rested. Certainly, anybody could theoretically become wealthy and powerful through personal hard work, but this did not by itself imply the ability to claim a higher social rank. One's place in the social order was hardly affected by such considerations as wealth or other status factors that were dependent on individual endeavor. In everyday life, a nobleman, even an impoverished one, was always given preference over a commoner, no matter how rich and distinguished he was.
Nevertheless, ambition seems to have been the main reason for attempts to be raised to the ranks of the nobility. But in following their ambition, aspirants had to expect rebuke from two sides for setting their sights too high. For noblemen, ambition was an important feature of their social identity, and it was considered a sine qua non particularly for those who pursued a military career.Footnote 1 Moreover, every nobleman was expected to display ambition in the defense and furtherance of his personal honor and of the honor of his family. In a commoner, however, this would not only have been unbecoming, it would also have been considered by the nobility as an encroachment on the code of conduct of that commoner's betters. In a non-noble context, ambition could evoke associations with envy and could possibly have been perceived as a moral lapse. Signaling an intention to leave one's place in society in search of a more exalted place could ruin a community of equals and harm the atmosphere of solidarity among its members. The intention of attaining ennoblement was an even more risk-fraught undertaking by the seventeenth century, when social climbers could no longer count on becoming integrated into the aristocracy. The odds were high for them to end up in social limbo.
In the period that George Huppert deals with in his book on French Renaissance elites, the reasons for seeking ennoblement were perfectly clear.Footnote 2 Sixteenth-century bourgeois merchants could expect considerable long-term return on investments, if part of their capital was used to secure an ennobling office. As nobles, they stood to enjoy a number of lucrative privileges. They were entitled to purchase noble land and were eligible for fiscal exemption, which was particularly gratifying. Although the amount of financially relevant privileges and the legal conditions for enjoying them varied between states and even between regions, the net benefit was always substantial and worth the investment. Ennoblement entailed a significant enhancement of status, and the investment required was easily retrieved through regular salary and seigneurial rents. This strategy enabled numerous families to alter their social profile completely within three generations from industrious urban businesspeople to respected royal officeholders with a seigneurial background or to country squires without any practical employment at all.
In the seventeenth century, however, the situation changed completely. Once they had established themselves as the state's administrative elite, the newly ennobled families joined the old aristocracy in closing ranks against the next wave of upstarts. Generally speaking, social mobility ceased to be a fairly commonplace phenomenon in society. Although social advancement was never the norm in the full sense of the word, it did occur, and the public (including the old aristocracy) had been relatively tolerant of exceptions. Various explanations have been given for this sudden change. Most historians agree that it was the state that put an end to unchecked usurpation when its officials assumed control over social mobility. In sociological terms, however, the closing off of elite groups is seen as a consequence of their consolidation. Once established, groups generally try to define their identities by stressing the differences that set them apart. This results in demarcation lines between themselves and others; defining a group therefore usually means blocking access to it for newcomers. Early modern nobility provides a fine instance of this.
Ambitious social climbers were the first to feel the adverse effects of this development. The road to the top became ever more arduous. Even for the most enterprising, there was little prospect of joining the nobility under the changed conditions and, in fact, only a lucky few managed to penetrate the upper ranks of nobility. People at the time must have been aware that it was extremely unlikely for them to make it into the aristocracy, regardless of how determined they were to oblige both in terms of the required investment and conduct. Moreover, in closing ranks, the beneficial and profitable noble privileges became an almost exclusive preserve of the old nobility: nobles were relatively undertaxed throughout the early modern period, but their privileged tax status was gradually eroding by the seventeenth century.Footnote 3 Only if a noble's revenue was primarily based on landed property legally defined as noble and as entail could such privileges bring substantial return. This was rarely the case with the newly ennobled. Furthermore, the high church positions that were so much in demand, particularly the rank of canon, came to be reserved for the offspring of ancient lineages because they required proof of noble ancestry. In addition to the general odium that was attached to social progression anyway, this could have been another good reason to put aside plans to strive for ennoblement.
In this essay, I discuss some of the problems inherent in the question of why so many people persisted in their wish for ennoblement in conditions that made it unlikely for the result to come up to their (or our) expectations. At worst, after all, they risked the kind of ridicule heaped on Monsieur Jourdain in Molière's Le Bourgeois Gentil-Homme. What returns did they expect when they applied for ennoblement in the seventeenth or eighteenth century? There must have been additional reasons that made noble status highly desirable or even necessary, despite its inability to automatically open up a path into the coterie of the old families.
As long as ennoblement continued to be an important stepping-stone on the route of social advancement, noble status remained highly desirable, as I would like to propose, for the following three reasons. First, being a potent status symbol, a noble title enabled commoners to demonstrate a high level of worldly success, which was particularly valuable to those who could not afford more costly means of representation. This was especially important for the growing class of professionals and officials, but in some cases also for merchant-class entrepreneurs. Second, concentrating on such a well-established and highly esteemed status symbol made sense because of the prestige attached to it. The newly ennobled shared in the social capital that accrued from the nobility's long and glorious history by following in the footsteps traditionally associated with the nobility. And third, as opposed to all other material status symbols, noble status was forever. Its loss presupposed a serious breach of the code of conduct on the part of the noble person. Noblemen commanded the respect of society even when they lacked the means to keep up the bright appearance of the rich. To an extent, noble status dispensed its holders from the constant struggle for wealth and prestige. Members of the nobility and their descendants were visibly a cut above the common people, and they were assured of remaining there for life. Clearly, these points refer primarily to the symbolic aspect of nobility, which was to become its most important feature in the course of the development in question.
The Benefit of Noble Status
Generally speaking, nobility is a very special type of status in which modern concepts of status do not apply. Moreover, an understanding of nobility as an early modern social phenomenon is not helped by the ambiguity that is attached to the term nobility as used by historians. In order to avoid confusion, we can roughly distinguish among three meanings. First, the nobility was a tangible historical phenomenon. It was a group or a set of groups of families whose members shared a similar economic basis, similar privileges, specific status symbols, and a similar lifestyle.Footnote 4 On a regional level, face-to-face interaction and a more or less close family relationship was typical. When historians talk about nobility as a social and political factor, they usually refer to this tangible aspect of the term. Second, the nobility was a legal entity, that is, it was an entity protected by the law. People who enjoyed noble status were legally entitled to certain privileges, such as specific types of land ownership, fiscal and judicial exemptions, status symbols such as titles and coats of arms, and preeminence in the public space. Nobles whose nobility was only nominal did not belong to the group, which is commonly referred to as the nobility. Finally, nobility, in the sociological sense of the term, is a general social phenomenon. It can be characterized as a particular type of elite that reproduces its status biologically. According to this very general understanding, nobility occurs whenever a distinguished person has successfully transmitted her or his status to her or his kin. If one's status is primarily based on wealth, this kind of nobility is easy to obtain because the family inherits the status along with the fortune. But this mechanism also applies to meritocratic elites with a more modest economic background. The process of dynasty-building invariably takes place in all societies irrespective of their historical background.
Distinguishing among the different meanings of the term nobility not only clarifies its semantic content, but enables us to gain a better perspective on the notion of nobility itself. This is particularly useful for our attempt to explain why ennoblement did not cease to be attractive for commoners once it had lost its material attractions. Figure 1 shows the constant demand for noble status in the period under consideration on the basis of a random sample of 3,528 cases covering 20 percent of all registered imperial ennoblements.Footnote 5 The data comprises applications for ennoblement throughout the empire including the Low Countries and parts of Italy. It includes both acts of ennoblement the emperors conferred as heads of the empire (Reichsadelsstand) and as heads of the Habsburg monarchy (erbländischer Adelsstand).Footnote 6
The trend of imperial ennoblement 1600–1800.
Given that people in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries were aware of the legal and sociological aspect of nobility, they were likely to perceive that obtaining a noble rank could safeguard their social status for their future generations and transfer their material wealth into the most solid form of symbolic capital. Its main benefit seems to have been its potential to place a family once and for all on the highest level in the hierarchy of honors by providing them with the symbols of highest esteem. A noble title could achieve what individual economic success or high office alone failed to attain: enduring and sustainable prestige, which was independent of material circumstances.
For wealthy merchants and artisans, ennoblement was unlikely to make any significant difference concerning their practical living conditions. Acquiring such options as the right for a daughter to retreat to a convent reserved for the nobility or for a son to take up a career as a military officer added prestige to the family name and enhanced its reputation, yet the benefits were largely symbolic and came at a price. But that was exactly what it was all about: by enabling these burghers to leave their bourgeois standing behind, ennoblement compensated them for the relative lack of dignity commercial pursuits.Footnote 7
Conversely, being noble without living nobly was potentially equally incommensurate. The financially hard-pressed officials of the lower and middle ranks of the administration were in a particularly awkward situation. During his stay in Salzburg in 1777, Kaspar Riesbeck encountered many nobles serving the local prince, who complained that the state did not provide for them according to their status. Riesbeck, though, was unable to tell their status because they neither resembled the highly ranking aristocracy dwelling at court nor did they ever mingle with commoners. Nonetheless, they strongly insisted on being addressed invariably as “Euer Gnaden,” and ladies would regard it as a painful insult to be addressed as “Madame.”Footnote 8 Case studies on Baden-Durlach, Brandenburg-Ansbach, Brandenburg-Bayreuth, Hannover, Osnabruck, and Württemberg provide further evidence for the specific needs and conditions of a service nobility.Footnote 9 For them, ennoblement became a necessary condition to maintain their status. This group compensated for their lack of wealth by ostentatiously insisting on the symbols of their elevated position. It was evidently a matter of status inconsistency when men laying claim to this kind of position were constantly in danger of derogation on account of insufficient income. The only possible way of preventing loss of status was for them to rely on their patron's favor and on the protection that a noble name traditionally conferred.
This was most likely one of the reasons why officials began to obtain noble status on a massive scale by the seventeenth century. Johann B. Martin Arand, a high-ranking official at Altdorf (k.k. Oberamtsrat and Landschreiber), stated in his letter of application in 1798 that his current status as a commoner was not only demeaning to him personally but hurtful to the reputation of his office as well. Granting him nobility, he reasoned, would increase the effectiveness of his work.Footnote 10 By far the greatest number of imperial ennoblements was allotted to officials and military officers.Footnote 11 As a consequence, in the Habsburg monarchy, the lower ranks of nobility came to be associated with the emerging service nobility.Footnote 12 In its original function, ennoblement had been a reward for long-standing service and loyalty. This was now almost reversed: noble status became a sine qua non for the career of officials who wanted to obtain the position of councillor or an even more exalted one. The more the ranks of civil servants swelled with lower nobility, the more newcomers were expected to follow suit and seek ennoblement in their turn; if they did not, they risked being treated as inferiors by their colleagues and by the people they were supposed to govern.Footnote 13
It is important to note that in Central Europe the service nobility did not merge with the landed nobility. Neither did it create an alternative model of nobility comparable to the noblesse de robe in France. Office-holding also did not impart automatic ennoblement as in France, nor did the acquisition of a noble estate alone prepare the way for nobility.Footnote 14 Beamtenadel (the service nobility) never approached the long-standing noble elites in terms of influence and wealth, nor did they even attempt to rival the aristocracy's social dominance. Most of its members simply did not have the means for independent power; only a few had the resources necessary to sustain a lifestyle in keeping with their rank. Hardly any opted for the noble lifestyle based on feudal traditions and land ownership that was the crucial criterion of real noblesse for the landed nobility. To hold noble estates, which implied membership in the local diets and maintaining some independence from the princes, contrasted even the ancient but shrinking and increasingly impoverished knightly lineages (Ritterstand) with most of the newly titled service nobility. A closer look into noble pedigrees of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries reveals that even those members of old families who needed to take employment in the administration never intermarried with newly ennobled families and that noble marriage circles remained largely closed.
For the newly ennobled, even if they had wanted to return to the fold of their group of origin, there was no turning back once they had assumed noble status. As a status group that had monopolized the sphere of administration to a large extent and that enjoyed the favor of the rulers, however, they were strong enough to establish themselves as a kind of separate lower upper class between the landed nobility and the bourgeoisie.Footnote 15 As a new class without tradition but with considerable influence, the administrative elite was in need of viable symbolic devices to strengthen their claim to privileged status. For officials, a noble title thus served as a status symbol that indicated membership in the administrative elite and justified their social position as a whole.Footnote 16
For the children of ennobled officials, the family title was probably the only asset they stood to inherit, but there is no doubt it was a most valuable one. They were the first to benefit substantially from their parents’ investments. Their titles and their good names were the most important qualifications for a future career and in many cases the only ones that really carried weight. Economically dependent as they were, they were in need of privileged access to the sphere of governmental decision-making. The people who mattered—most of them high-ranking nobles of ancient extraction—were unlikely to associate even with eminent officials if they were too inferior in rank. In a period in which the society of contacts had not yet fully replaced the society of orders, noble status paved the way both to court circles, where opportunities, grants, and honors were distributed, and to private circles, where appointments were negotiated in an informal setting. A title, to be sure, was never a membership card for high society, but it could be an entrance ticket.Footnote 17 In practice, however, it was the title that qualified a name for a place on the invitation list.Footnote 18 If sons intended to follow their fathers into the civil service, they required exactly the kind of support that only connections could achieve. Furthermore, nobles in general and the sons of noble officials in particular were invariably given preference over commoners when it came to filling vacancies and the granting of promotions. Veit Ludwig von Seckendorff, a renowned expert in administration, stated that non-noble officials had to compensate for their lack of noble status with better professional skills.Footnote 19 In fact, the service nobility benefited more from this significant aspect of noble status than the landed nobility, who had other ways and means at their disposal. Nobility was therefore an asset to its bearer, one that made up for concrete talents and skills; nobility meant being somebody before you became somebody.Footnote 20
This did not mean, as has been argued, that social advancement became generally more difficult as a result.Footnote 21 On the contrary, in technical terms, obtaining noble status was easier than ever when ennoblement became a simple administrative act. But as the act of ennoblement only conferred the legal status (nobility as a legal entity according to the aforementioned definition) and the symbols assigned to nobility, the actual status of newly created noblemen was far from clear. Accordingly, the validity of ennoblement by imperial grant was constantly under debate.Footnote 22 It clearly did not create the kind of nobles that the old aristocracy was prepared to accept as equals. The old families were not at all impressed by the hundreds of letters patent churned out by the Viennese chancelleries.
This leads to another basic aspect of nobility that has not yet attracted the attention it deserves. Monique de Saint Martin has pointed out that the very existence of nobility depends on whether one believes in the innate substantial superiority of the nobly born.Footnote 23 The case of the newly-created nobility clearly shows that this not only applies to Saint Martin's twentieth-century France. The fact that noble status lacked definite criteria as regards its social role and appearance reduced the acceptance of someone as a genuine member of the nobility to a matter of opinion. Of course, the emperor expected all his subjects—including the aristocracy—to respect his decision to ennoble whoever he deemed fit and to treat them according to their new status, but everybody was still free to decide who to socialize with.Footnote 24 The emperor's subjects did indeed abide by their sovereign's will. In public, in official contexts, and in personal interaction, newly-created nobles were invariably addressed in a meticulously correct manner, and no information about the actual standing of the person addressed could possibly have been inferred from this formal way in which they were addressed. This situation closely resembled the strategy of the French gentry, as described by George Huppert.Footnote 25 Newcomers acquired the trappings of noble status in order to conceal their real social background.
If we want to understand the mechanism that made this strategy work, we have to introduce distinctions that were alien to the people of the time. Formally, families who received noble status in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries belonged to the second estate, but they only did so in the legal sense of the word. Most of them did not even try to pretend to have genuine noble descent by producing false genealogies or by adopting a consistently noble appearance, as the French gentry did. Imperial ennoblement did not renew the old aristocracy; in reality, it created a new kind of nobility, one that hardly ever lived nobly but was nevertheless legally entitled to make use of noble prerogatives and of all the advantages of a privileged and highly prestigious status. If we are led to the assumption that we are dealing here with a newly emerging elite, the whole issue of nobility as a device for social advancement must be reconsidered. For newcomers wishing to reproduce their status in the most effective way, nobility was obviously the best possible means. The key factor in this strategy was the ambiguity in the notion of nobility. The term nobility not only denoted a tangible social group or an order, but a certain state of honor and social grace as well. It was from the latter aspect that the nobility derived its privileged status and formally justified its existence. Furthermore, the symbols of noble status principally referred to noble honor. All the titles and specific forms of address, sumptuous clothing, and armorial bearings did not convey noble power as such but functioned, as it were, as exclamation marks clamoring for that person to be treated with the utmost respect.
Symbols, in turn, can confer power if they are cleverly employed. The right to sit where others must stand, the right to ride where others must walk, among many others, were prone to inspire an internalized and habitual sense of reverence in commoners exposed to these prerogatives on a routine basis. Honorific privileges elicited a response of respect and deference in everyday interaction. A person with such privileges had to be treated with respect regardless of whether she or he was considered to “deserve” it either on account of position or personal qualities. But as honors were originally intended essentially to symbolize respectability and quality of character, anyone who was distinguished as honorable was regarded as endowed with superior morals and accomplishments. This reputed superiority, in turn, justified the claim for leadership in nearly all situations of everyday life and doubtlessly contributed to the constant mystification of the noble race.Footnote 26
For this strategy to work, the meaning of symbols had to be turned upside down and fed into a circular loop. Marked as honorable, nobles were vested with the authority contingent upon honor—even though it remained uncertain whether they really possessed the qualities required. In other words, noble status symbols were symbols without real objects of reference. They symbolized a claim to honor, as Julian Pitt-Rivers has pointed out, rather than genuine honorableness.Footnote 27 It is remarkable, however, that this did not make any difference in practice, as if it were the symbols of honor that exacted respect from the commoners rather than honorableness itself.Footnote 28 Within the framework of institutionalized inequality, it sufficed to acquire honorific privileges and specific forms of distinction by grant (that is, nobility as a legal entity) in order to gain a prominent and advantageous position in society.
Perhaps partly as a result of the growing number of ennoblements, the conceptual gap between nobility as a social group and as a legal entity increased by the seventeenth century. In the course of this process, the notion of nobility split by detaching its symbolic dimension from the concrete social group it labeled. It gradually evolved from a tangible corporate body, legally defined by privileges and kin collectives, toward a pure status symbol. It was this distinction that enabled newcomers to take advantage of noble status for their social advancement, as they were only interested in its easily accessible symbols. This was not the first time in history that the entire notion of nobility underwent a profound change. The idea of nobility was linked to late-medieval knighthood, which did not vanish along with the knights. It survived as a concept, if substantially modified and adjusted to the conditions of the early modern state, as it proved helpful in the legitimization of claims to power.Footnote 29
Nobility and Absolutism
In Central Europe (the Holy Roman Empire and the Habsburg monarchy), the usual manner of becoming ennobled was simply to apply by sending a petition to the emperor. The applicant would enumerate reasons why nobility was sought and why the applicant was deserving of it. The official act consisted of an examination and, by the eighteenth century, sometimes a formal investigation into the applicant's claim for noble status and, if she or he passed the test—and after payment of the required fee—the presentation of the award by the emperor. (Further information about how the Viennese authorities managed the process of ennoblement is currently unavailable because its administrative aspect is still largely unexplored. Apart from reasons of space not allowing an exploration of the administrative procedure, it is a matter outside the scope of this article.) Approximately 25,000 records of ennoblement are stored at the Archive of Nobility in Vienna.Footnote 30 The sheer number seems to be evidence of the importance emperors attributed to ennoblement, whatever the underlying reasons may have been. Of course, the empire was no service-sector business that tried to satisfy the public's hunger for titles. We would be well advised to assume that there was a deeper reason as we look at governmental motives for granting ennoblement.
Ennoblement obviously achieved a number of different purposes from the state's point of view. It was a convenient and economical way of rewarding merits and favourites. Moreover, it served a political purpose: the privilege to grant ennoblement was one of the last remaining rights that uniquely belonged to the Roman emperor, thus underlining his supremacy among German princes.Footnote 31 Finally, ennoblement served, according to a still widely held opinion, as a fiscal expedient. We do not know how much revenue the Crown raised by imposing a fee on ennoblement, but we do know that it could have been more. Studies on the ennoblement policy in the Austrian Low Countries have shown that “the demand constantly exceeded the offerings, without resulting in an adjustment of the price.”Footnote 32 For at least two centuries (1600–1800) the price remained at 300 fl for the rank of untitled nobility. Although it is of course true that the state sold nobility for money, it remains far from clear what the monetary aspect of ennoblement contributes to an overall understanding of the function of ennoblement. In any case, it does not in the least diminish its social significance. Apart from the fact that the fee had the character of an administrative charge to defray the expenses that accrued from the processing of the application, honor and money were not necessarily contradictory but rather complementary in premodern society. Because people were accustomed to showcasing their own and their family's honor in most elaborate manners, and because this cost money anyway, it was not at all demeaning to pay for honor in the first place. What does the fact that noble status was bought and sold teach us about the idea of nobility? Only that it was valuable, which is not new for us.
Generally speaking, the Crown's attitude toward the nobility was ambivalent at best. As a trend that can be observed throughout Europe, absolute monarchs overrode the nobility politically yet strengthened its position socially. In the Habsburg monarchy, the old, formerly Protestant nobility was still under suspicion for being unreliable in its loyalties in the seventeenth century, particularly in the period after the crushing of the Bohemian revolt in 1620. Yet the conservative absolutist idea of how society ought to be constituted overrode these reservations. In spite of its painful experiences with autogenous noble power, emperors still believed in a hereditary ruling class as a necessary and essential constituent of society. Moreover, the state seized the opportunity to stress its sovereignty by claiming to be the only legitimate source of nobility (fons honorum). A number of theorists were engaged to produce evidence for the emperor as the only authority entitled to declare a person noble irrespective of a family's lineage.Footnote 33 By common consent, the sovereign's duties included safeguarding the smooth working of society and intervening to make necessary changes in its structure. This implied the obligation to promote people in rank within the hierarchy of orders, whenever their current position was not in harmony with their abilities or their worth. Yet sovereignty, according to the concepts of absolutism, affected the status of every person and subjected everyone to the emperor's judgment, including the nobility.Footnote 34 In theory, every single member of the nobility enjoyed noble status only as long as the emperor allowed him or her to.Footnote 35 Acquiescing in the proposition that they were nobles only until further notice and that descent counted for nothing certainly meant a considerable strain for families of old stock and was a latent source of conflict.
Prominent specialists in the field have claimed absolutism had its own social agenda concerning the role of the nobility in the new, centralized state: the imperial privilege to grant nobility was used in all likelihood as “the instrument of a considered policy on elites, a way of transforming the content of the idea of nobility, of modifying the composition of the second order in whatever way seemed best.”Footnote 36 The enforcement of noble status can be interpreted as part of a deliberate state strategy to create a loyal ruling class by redesigning the nobility as a whole. However, we have at present no positive evidence of whether imperial governmental institutions implemented an intentional agenda concerning elites or even whether they paid any attention to the possible long-term effects of their ennoblement policy. We do not even know to what extent they were really aware of the social role of the nobility because nothing of the kind has been established so far. Only circumstantial evidence is available to support the assumption that there was a more or less clear idea about what the nobility was intended to be like and what purposes it was supposed to serve in society.
For the theorists, it was obvious that nobility did play a substantial role in society. In contrast to the supporters of the ideology of lineage, who claimed that the nobility's superiority, founded on blood as it was in their view, was basically an inherited trait, the emperor's men held a functionalist view. For them, the nobility's raison d’être lay in their specific responsibility for society and particularly the state.Footnote 37 In this view, the nobility's main purpose was, on the one hand, to shield the ruler from hostile acts and, on the other, to protect the emperor's subjects against acts of tyranny in the name of the summum bonum. Thus, nobles were called upon to act as advocates of the commonweal and to use their social preeminence to promote that ideal. There was agreement among theoreticians that nobles were qualified to rule as a matter of principle and in all respects and that they could be entrusted with responsibility in almost all affairs of public life.Footnote 38 The right to rule was not meant to be confined to the local sphere and the duties of a landowning squire; it was considered to be universally valid since the collective capacity to rule made every noble person eligible for a leading position in any field. In reality, nobles could be active in a number of areas, in the service of the state, in the army, in the church, and in estate management, provided that they were active in their capacity as leaders and that there were subordinates to command. Unlimited competence and collective capacity to rule had always been a crucial element of noble identity, and the state was well prepared to use this attitude as an instrument of governance.
Ever since chivalry evolved in the late Middle Ages into what became known as the nobility, the supposed collective capacity to rule had been a core element of aristocratic ideology. This attribute was thought of as an inner quality based on a morally superior predisposition. Some even went so far as to claim that only nobles were capable of rational reasoning or that they were endowed with greater civility and particularly with a deeper understanding of political affairs and the raisons d’état.Footnote 39 These claims were designed to reinforce the impression that nobles were human beings of a different and higher order along the lines suggested by everyday interaction between nobles and commoners.Footnote 40 Although the nobility's moral superiority was never questioned in absolutist reasoning, its basic element had to be redefined in order to reconcile it with the demands of the modern state. This could be achieved by replacing the traditional notion of noble virtue based on chivalric values with qualities that reflected the principles of the modern state. The traditional notions of honor and total commitment to a cause were to be reoriented toward such categories as merit, service, and loyalty.Footnote 41 According to this concept, those who had consistently demonstrated fearless allegiance to the emperor and his house (that is the state) were to be considered fit for the exercise of power. The notion of honor was thus conceptually linked to values that did not explicitly infringe on the traditional idea of noble loyalty; rather, it was a reinterpretation of the feudal relationship between vassals and their supreme lord. Yet the new concept favored by the state's authorities included aspects that were incompatible with the mentality of the nobility. Unconditional obedience and subordination to authorities of whatever kind (with the exception of the Almighty) remained alien to aristocrats brought up in the tradition of noble freedom and prepared by their education to be rulers rather than subjects. As a consequence, the notion of noble loyalty was changed altogether; a knight's loyalty was after all voluntary, whereas the loyalty of modern subjects was enforced and obligatory.
Although absolutism tended to create the impression that it had redefined the standards of government (which has at times even misled historians), its practices were actually deeply rooted in feudal tradition. In the seventeenth century, the concept of office was still based on the institution of fief holding: office-holders were charged to exercise power on behalf of the ruler; in return, they received part of the fees as income. Furthermore, holding an office included the exercise of a form of power hitherto reserved to nobles. Iurisdictio in subditos, which used to be an essential feature of noble power, was now transferred to non-noble specialists in administration in open contradiction to the traditional notion of legitimate power. Yet at the same time, this enabled officials to meet a necessary condition for noble status. Exercising political authority in the public space was initially considered a noble prerogative; assuming social leadership was part of nobles' duties and a main element of lordship. The reversal of the original concept of legal authority, which derived entitlement to power from noble status and feudal privilege, enabled a noble occupation (such as the exercise of political authority through office) to confer noble quality on the person who pursued it. Imperial authorities tacitly took up this position and—rather unsurprisingly—so did the officials who were the main beneficiaries.Footnote 42 If supplicants for ennoblement had pursued a noble occupation (adelige Charge), they unfailingly mentioned it in their letters of application, and it was equally unfailingly acknowledged by the imperial chancellery as a sufficient argument in support of claims to noble status.
It almost goes without saying that the profile of a person the imperial authorities considered worthy of ennoblement coincided perfectly with the specific qualities habitually found in officials both civil and military. The features required for being judged worthy of ennoblement were the ones that made a person useful for the state. In this respect, too, officials seemed to represent the template for an ideal subject, which was now also applied to the definition of the ideal aristocrat. Officials were active almost by definition; they had a strong sense of duty and they were, above all, absolutely loyal. Moreover, they had the skills required to meticulously carry out whatever task had been assigned to them; in this way, they contributed in a concrete and practical way to the smooth functioning of the state's system. Certainly, loyalty and subordination were not meritorious by themselves because everybody was expected to submit to authority to a certain degree. To make loyalty commendable and a good argument for ennoblement it had to be performed proactively. Although merit was introduced in this way as a necessary condition for ennoblement, the concept of nobility as such did not therefore become meritocratic. The existence of certain qualities of character regarded as specifically noble was still considered the precondition for genuinely noble conduct. Ennoblement was not granted because of one's meritorious deeds, but because the deeds were proof that these qualities already existed in a person.Footnote 43 Letters patent contained a list of qualities every candidate for ennoblement was required to possess: respectability, probity, good noble conduct, virtue, and reason.Footnote 44 These were the qualities that were rewarded through ennoblement because they were considered to be the only basis for anyone to be truly meritorious and thus useful to the state. Their explicit invocation as the foundation upon which ennoblement rested made them publicly and socially operational.
If the reasoning behind a system of rewards concerns motivating people and strengthening their ambition, we may assume that such a rationale was one of the reasons why emperors granted ennoblement. The significance of this aspect in terms of its benefit for the state was emphasized by contemporary authors, such as Montesquieu and Justus Möser, who stressed that honors and rewards were the strongest stimuli to make people behave to the best advantage of the commonweal.Footnote 45 Nor were the supplicants the only ones to be encouraged by ennoblement: they were intended to serve as models for others. Apart from having a convenient way of rewarding the right kind of behavior at their disposal, governments used ennoblement as a means to communicate their views on what the ideal subject should be like. Noble status was a kind of high-profile reward, and regardless of the frequency with which ennoblements were granted, the neighborhood was likely to find out soon and to adapt to the new situation, for they simply could not ignore their neighbor's new status for long without insulting him. This was in fact not simply a welcome side effect, but it was explicitly intended. The standard text of the letters patent stated that the supplicant was granted noble status so that others might likewise feel encouraged and inspired by this gracious reward to follow in good conduct and in doing noble deeds.Footnote 46 Newly created nobles were expected to help spread the state's idea of a new elite as living examples for its program. Seeing what type of character and achievement was singled out for honor and rewarded by the sovereign, the public was able to infer what the sovereign ideally expected of them.
Did Imperial Government Regulate Noble Status?
As has become apparent from this discussion, every single act of ennoblement implicitly constituted a political statement concerning the profile of an elite consistent with the modern state. But is this evidence strong enough to suggest the existence of a deliberate ennoblement policy? On the one hand, it is true that governments succeeded in controlling the recruitment of the nobility. A policy of extensive ennoblement indubitably stressed the state's monopoly over the granting of noble status and the formal promotion in rank in general.Footnote 47 Yet this does not fully account for the extent to which imperial authorities exercised ennoblement. The average number of approximately 87.76 acts of ennoblement a year (1600–1800) suggests that government acted in a principled, nonrandom way.Footnote 48 Emperors would have had many other means at their disposal to reward merits. When they chose ennoblement to single out people for special honor, they probably did not do so only to comply with the request of the supplicants; surely its significance was more than symbolic. They did so because they thought nobility to be the appropriate status for those who were prepared to devote themselves and their qualities, which were desirable ones from a political point of view, to the cause of the empire. In this respect, early modern emperors simply continued the policy of their predecessors and intensified it according to the absolutist view of governance.
Conversely, if ennoblement was to have tightened the emperor's grip on the nobility, it clearly failed to achieve that goal. This was not because emperors did not try to exert its influence on the nobility, but rather because their efforts did not reach the group they were aimed at. Some of the political measures imposed by governmental institutions did of course affect the nobility's cultural profile, such as courtly culture, the confessionalisation of court patronage, and the establishment of the state monopoly on violence. These were important factors, indeed, and they have already been sufficiently analysed by recent scholarship.Footnote 49 However, the impact of these measures on the concept of nobility and its ideological foundation was small. If there was a substantial shift in the development of the notion of nobility, it had already taken place in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, when the notion of nobility being a profession was given up in favor of the ideology of lineage. But this was the last development that affected the nobility as a whole. Ennoblement policy affected nobility—whether intentionally or unintentionally—only insofar as it separated the legal aspect of the term nobility from the group it previously used to denote. The emperors and their councils must have realized that most of the people they ennobled did not become part of the established nobility and that their influence on the aristocracy's social composition was therefore practically negligible. What actually happened was that the concept of nobility came to be applied to another group which, for the most part, did not live nobly according to the traditional view, but exercised modern forms of power and had the skills the state needed and the inclination to serve it without reservation. Effective rule needed nobles of the old type, though, to perform the tasks they were trained for. The high positions at court and in government remained their preserve and they were also eminently suited for diplomatic and military service. The old aristocracy evidently did not become a meritocratic nomenclature that was focused solely on the state's interests. On the contrary, the old families moved closer together and insisted even more irritably on their exclusivity and their traditional identity.
It was, however, in the state's interest to prevent the nobility from becoming too homogeneous. It would have been simply paradoxical for the emperor to strengthen the old nobility by renewing it with the members of the modern administrative elite after so many efforts to defeat it politically. If the new nobles had been integrated into the old aristocracy, the result could have been a strong corporate body of the kind that had just been deprived of power. An aristocracy vested with the joint power derived from bureaucracy and lordship could hardly have been controlled by anyone, even less so, if those charged with controlling it were members of the group to be controlled. From an absolutist point of view, the only prudent course to take was therefore to grant noble status to nearly anyone who could afford it regardless of their social background. This was likely to see off any convergence between old and new nobility.Footnote 50 It was also the reason why no attention was paid to whether supplicants had the means to meet the cultural and economic standards of the landed nobility or whether they were able to afford a genuinely noble lifestyle. Even if supplicants stated in their letters of application that they had been living almost like noblemen in the past, this was never accepted as an argument for ennoblement by the authorities.Footnote 51 Nobility was spread so widely in terms of social background that a common corporate identity among new nobles was extremely unlikely to take shape. Ennoblement policy softened and watered down the notion of nobility as a status group so that it could be reshaped in accordance with the sovereign's needs and wishes. In this respect, the government was successful in regulating noble status, although this was a rather passive form of control.
Conclusion
When specialists on early modern elites summarize the transformation that the nobility underwent in the course of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, they usually come to the conclusion that the nobility became more heterogeneous and more complex. Social mobility and ennoblement, so runs the argument, changed the nobility's internal structure considerably and, as a consequence, it gradually lost its uniform appearance and its consistent cultural and ideological profile.Footnote 52 Diversification was, in fact, the common denominator of all the nobility's developments in terms of social structure, but this remains true only as long as one takes the term nobility at face value. If we choose to class, for instance, the ruling prince of Liechtenstein and the Salzburg poorhouse administrator Joachim von Mayr (1732–1796) as members of the same status group, we may—if we look hard enough—detect a couple of features the two had in common, but it would surely be absurd to assume that these amount to more than superficial resemblances. In practice, these two noblemen clearly did not share one single socially relevant trait except formal membership in the second estate and perhaps a higher level of education. At any rate, the resemblances do not justify classifying old and new nobles as members of the same status group. Given their actual social standing, conflating both groups under the term nobility seems inaccurate and misleading. It would therefore seem to be pointless to take the existence of nobility as a consistent status group for granted and to set out to explain it without first examining the suitability of the term nobility as a tool of scientific analysis.
We use general terms in order to denote sets of individuals or phenomena that share a critical number of common features. If we bear this in mind, it would appear that the general term nobility ceased to be applicable with the nobility losing its consistent structure. In the eighteenth century, when the process in question was completed, the term nobility denoted hardworking professionals as well as leisured grandees, middle-class characters living in modest flats, as well as magnates with lifestyles vibrant with conspicuous consumption, aristocrats quietly assured of their natural superiority and their unique vocation to rule as well as “white-collar workers” focused exclusively on the duties of their job. In terms of social status and identity, the majority of the new nobles actually remained commoners, in spite of their legal status. In a reversal of this general tendency, however, some distinguished commoners of the Dresden or Vienna high society met the standards of courtly culture and noble lifestyle much better than quite a few petty lords. In a word, using the term nobility to refer to all individuals formally belonging to the second estate obscures rather than describes social reality. With regard to the different phenomena covered by the term nobility, one is consequently faced with the task of identifying common features where there were none.
The fact, however, remains that nobility did have a meaning to early modern society; had it been without meaning, the strong demand for ennoblement would be inexplicable. The key to the solution is recognizing the importance of the various aspects of its meaning. We have to be aware that in the process of nobility losing its social uniformity, its ideological and symbolic aspects increasingly gained in importance as compared to the social aspect. With this understanding in mind, we can explain what happened to nobility in early modern Central Europe.
The core group of the nobility remained basically unaffected by governmental policies. Although it had lost its formal right of political participation, this loss was more than compensated for by the manifold opportunities the court provided the core group to tend their interests in an informal way. Apart from that, absolutism confirmed the aristocracy's monopoly in the highest positions in the state and strengthened its hold on seigneurial forms of land ownership, which considerably consolidated their material resources and broadened their social scope. As a consequence of their economic reinforcement, the aristocracy was strong enough to control movement into the group and to keep out upstart trespassers. Rank endogamy (connubium) came to be more strictly observed than before, which kept the old families entre eux. In this way, the landed nobility formed a socially stable body of families, which was not only uniform in terms of culture and mentality, but biologically homogeneous as well.
At the same time, the imperial ennoblement policy and the demand for titles caused a major transformation outside the aristocracy. This was not the result of absolutism having caused a change in the concept of nobility, but, on the contrary, the consequence of the state insisting on the traditional role of the nobility as the only legitimate ruling class. Thus, the same reasoning that lay behind the reinforcement of the old nobility led the Crown to confer noble status on those who bore responsibility in important positions in society, both in the service and in the economy. In accordance with the view that the exercise of power in a well-ordered society should be the exclusive domain of the nobility, the emperors eliminated the anomaly of commoners in powerful positions by ennobling them. Likewise, nobility was conferred on those who had shown good qualities and unconditional loyalty toward the state and had thereby given proof of their suitability for office. This was a clear political statement. The Crown confirmed the traditional role of the nobility as a hereditary ruling class, but it also extended the scope in which power could be legitimately exercised. It recognized the fact that, in early modern society, power was no longer confined to the spheres of government and lordship, as it increasingly shifted toward the spheres of administration and commerce. Thus, people who wielded power in these fields had to be ennobled in order for them to exercise their power legitimately. Power in whatever form was considered legitimate only when associated with nobility, and whoever was powerful was a suitable candidate for ennoblement.
For the Crown, nobility seems to have existed only as an ideological entity, as the idea of a general qualification for leadership. Of course, emperors and their councils were quite aware that the nobility also happened to be a real social group with particular interests and considerable influence, but when it conferred noble status on commoners, it was in denial of this. This attitude inevitably caused the separation of the ideological aspect of nobility from its social aspect. With the number of new nobles increasing, it became clear that nobility in the legal sense and nobility as a group were no longer the same. For those who did not belong to the aristocracy, it was not only the symbols of nobility, but noble status as such that were little more than symbols. Probably the most significant evidence for this development was the changing role of the most important noble status symbol. The nobiliary particle “von” (of) between first name and surname typically distinguished nobles from commoners, although it had been granted in the past only if a noble person owned a noble estate, which the “von” referred to in this (privilegium denominandi). In the eighteenth century, it became a necessary and indispensable noble distinguishing mark, when supplicants for ennoblement applied explicitly to be bestowed with the right to use “von” as a quasi-title. Even old families changed their names to keep up with fashion. When noble status became a pure symbol, the importance of its symbols increased. The symbols became its main characteristics.
Nevertheless, for newly created nobles, their new, exalted status served a strategic purpose in the context of social advancement. Paradoxically, noble status (in the legal sense) was the result as well as the precondition for the development of the service nobility. It was unquestionably the most effective means to preserve their current status for generations to come and, thus, met their desire to establish their families and the group they formed as a hereditary elite. Nobility in the general sociological sense was the objective that could be obtained through nobility in the legal sense. Granting that eminent persons generally aspire to preserve their status by transferring it to their kin and that building dynasties is typical of elites, this was even more the case with officials whose material condition was precarious and who lacked the corporate structures that were so important in premodern society. Without a fortune to bequeath and without the solidarity of an institutionalized corporate body to back them up, officials were urgently in need of a well-defined, high-profile position within the hierarchy of orders. Ennoblement helped them to attain this goal because noble status and its prestigious symbols made up for the shortfall. If new noble families succeeded in establishing themselves as a lower upper class on a local basis with a corporate identity and a hold on important positions, and if officials were eligible for membership in this group, ennoblement had finally served its purpose.
