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This chapter concludes the discussion of the nobility by drawing out the similarities and differences between the role of noblemen in war and the effects of war on noble power in England and the Netherlands. War was not the sole key to noble power, but it remained very important through the resources, skills, and social power noblemen deployed in sustaining their princes' wars; through the offices, influence, and rewards they gained in war; through the relationships with others forged in war; and through the honourable reputations they won or lost. In some respects, the independent military power of the nobility in both polities declined over the period. But in helping to develop new forms of state power, the nobility built its own influence into them at many points.

The French nobility was acculturated to violence that coexisted with courtliness. Feuding is indelibly associated with the Middle Ages, with a culture that is opposed to modernity. But, in fact, evidence for feuding in France before 1559 is fragmentary. Among the aristocracy at least private violence was increasingly under control during the late Middle Ages: revenge killing as a feature of high politics had been eradicated by the beginning of the 16th century. Factors often identified with modernity did much to create the conditions for a recrudescence of vindicatory violence: social mobility, Protestantism, and duelling. Vindicatory violence increased in France because of, not in spite of, the social and economic dynamism associated with the Renaissance, as the traditional elite was challenged by the enterprising and socially mobile.

This introductory chapter puts the book in the context of recent scholarship into the reigns of Richard II and Henry IV. It considers the sources used in the book — a range of archival material and printed primary and secondary writing.

This chapter brings together all the arguments presented in the book regarding the importance of the great household to late 14th-century England. It summarizes the political positions developed in Gower's Confessio Amantis and the poem's profound influence on contemporary ways of thinking regarding the roles of the gentry, nobility, and royalty and their feelings of responsibility to the political economy, and the subsequent impact of this view of society.

This chapter investigates the locations and modes of musical performance in the residences of the nobility in seventeenth-century Rome, indicating the differences between this period and the Renaissance. In particular, instances of music-making in the courts of princes and cardinals are identified and described, in relation to considerations of etiquette, social conventions and anthropology. This research, based on first-hand documentary research in the archives of Roman noble families, has revealed unexpected locations for music-making, which cannot always be justified in terms of acoustic or aesthetic criteria. Particular attention is paid to the places where instruments were stored, as recorded in inventories, and their typology.

This book demonstrates that the Counter-Reformation of the 16th and 17th centuries contributed to the process of state building in Inner Austria in various ways, most important among which were the enhancement of the power of the Habsburg Monarchy and the creation of an ideological formula for the consensus between the dynasty and the provincial nobilities who represented the political nation. On the other hand, there was the case of Hungary and the unsolved problem of crypto-Protestantism which illustrated the dialectics of a confessional policy that already carried the germ of self-destruction. In the course of the 18th century, it was to succumb to the dissolvent, secularising forces of the Enlightenment, whose ‘cosmopolitan’ expansionism was in turn checked by the countercurrents of nascent nationalism. The age of confessionalisation and aspiring confessional absolutism thus left an ambivalent legacy of repression and revolt, to be rejected or assimilated by the modern national movements of the peoples in the Habsburg Monarchy.

For all the research that has been done into French politics and society in the fifty years before the Revolution, only a handful of serious studies have looked at the great noble families and the royal court. Moreover, the history of the army, where leading noble families dominated the upper ranks, has been integrated neither with that of the court, nor with that of intra-noble relations. This chapter therefore examines the most prestigious units of the French army — the privileged forces associated directly with the royal households — to bring together the history of the military and the court and suggest why, by the time the old regime collapsed in 1787–89, the great nobility was at loggerheads with the monarchy, and why relations between higher and lesser nobles had deteriorated a great deal since the reign of Louis XIV. The collapse of elite cohesion was ultimately disastrous for all concerned.

The history of the French nobility has long been symptomatic with that of the Revolution, and this chapter takes a fresh look at the state of the second estate in the years preceding 1789. Confronted by the problems arising from demographic decline, the pressure of the state, and a certain internal malaise as it sought to cope with internal divisions and to make sense of its own place in the world, the French nobility could be seen as a state of crisis. With some nobles even going so far as to attack the concept of nobility itself, these divisions would have important repercussions in 1789.

This chapter examines the Russian nobility from February to late summer 1917. Initially, the nobility played a prominent role in national and local government, and this was something that its main body, the United Nobility, sought to promote. Increasingly, however, the popular movement forced nobles out of local government as the former privileged classes, whilst their prominence in the Provisional Government declined. The increasing social conflict and attacks on former elites forced the United Nobility to focus on preserving the nobility. Yet nobles seemed unconvinced that this class‐based body was effective, and instead favoured new, professional unions that represented particular interest groups within the elites, such as the Union of Homeowners. An attempt to transform the United Nobility into such a group, the Society of Nobles, to safeguard its property was a hesitant process.

This chapter focuses on how Cicero constructs specific human beings and human ‘types’, to which individuals are assigned. It first discusses the factors that underwrote the constitution and reproduction of Rome's ruling elite, with particular emphasis on how Cicero combated what he stigmatizes as the ‘class racism’ of the nobility. Further sections consider how the category ‘nature’ was used in late republican rhetorical thought, as foil for an exploration of how Cicero deployed the lexemes natura and homo to construe persons as, first and foremost, human beings, quite irrespective of their historical identities. The chapter further illustrates Cicero's penchant for thinking in anthropological categories, and his reasons for doing so.

This chapter examines Buddhism and the features of the Buddhist art in the Bactria-Tokharistan region of Central Asia. The findings indicate that Buddhism spread to Bactria in the Kushan period because of the support of the Kushan nobility. During the first to third centuries there was a considerable growth of Buddhist art, mainly that of the monumental variety. Most of the work on the decoration of Buddhist monuments at that time was undertaken by professional artists who did not belong to the Buddhist community.

This chapter begins with a discussion of the Old English Vision of Earl Leofric, a remarkable text which was written shortly after Leofric died in 1057, and which describes four visions which the earl is said to have experienced shortly before that date. The Vision serves to introduce some of the salient themes of the book, for it is replete with assumptions about lordship and power, as well as piety. There follows a brief survey of the historiography of the late Anglo-Saxon nobility: the prejudiced brilliance of Freeman, the wreckage caused by Round, and the neo-Freeman revival which began in the early 1980s and continues to flourish. The chapter then describes how the book engages with and develops this literature, and summarizes the salient arguments of the book.

This chapter asks how the demands of war changed towns' relationships with other elements in the polity. War accelerated their direct communication with central government, whether through correspondence or princely visits. Provincial councils took some part in steering towns into compliance with princely policy in war, but more important were intermediaries from the local nobility. Their role declined over time in England, though fluctuating with the character and courtly power of individual noble patrons. It remained significant in the Netherlands whenever campaigns came near or princely tax demands had to be considered. Representative institutions — parliament in England and the provincial states and States-General in the Netherlands — were important forums in which towns could trade consent to taxation for favourable legislation or other concessions. At times they even enabled towns collectively to manage the war effort in their own strategic interest.

This chapter introduces the nobility in England and the Netherlands, and the role of war in the relationship between the princes and noblemen. Though noble land-holding and political influence varied from region to region, both polities had an elite of wealthy lords — often influential at court — as provincial governors or lords lieutenant, and as the leaders of affinities among the gentry or lesser nobility. The Percy earls of Northumberland were great lords in the north of England, and the Howard dukes of Norfolk and earls of Surrey office-holders at court, with estates concentrated in the south. The Croÿ counts of Roeulx confronted the French as governors of Artois and Flanders, while the Egmond counts of Buren held lands on the borders of Holland and Brabant, and mostly campaigned against Guelders.