Everything about Nobles totally explained
Nobility is a government-privileged title which may be either hereditary (see
hereditary titles) or for a lifetime. Titles of nobility exist today in many countries although it's usually associated with present or former monarchies. The term originally referred to those who were "known" or "notable" and was applied to the highest
social class in
pre-modern societies. In the
feudal system (in Europe and elsewhere), the nobility were generally those who held a
fief, often land or office, under
vassalage, for example, in exchange for allegiance and various, mainly military, services to the Monarch and at lower levels to another nobleman. It rapidly came to be seen as a hereditary
caste, sometimes associated with a right to bear a hereditary title and, for example in pre-revolutionary
France, enjoying fiscal and other privileges. Today, in most countries, "noble status" is a purely honorary dignity that confers no legal privileges; an important exception is the
United Kingdom, where certain titles - titles of the
peerage, until recently, guaranteed a seat in the
Upper House of the
UK Parliament; hence its name,
House of Lords - still confer some residual privileges.
Nobility is a historical, social and often legal notion, which shouldn't be confused with
socio-economic status which is mainly statistical based on income and possessions. Being wealthy or influential doesn't automatically make one a noble, nor are all nobles wealthy and influential (aristocratic families have lost their fortunes in various ways, and the concept of the 'poor nobleman' is almost as old as nobility itself).
Countries without a feudal tradition don't have a nobility as such. Various republics, including
forms of address.
Western nobility
This quotation demonstrates the strong historical link between nobility and heraldry, whereby the right to bear arms was restricted by law to the upper class (a system which continues to this day in many European countries, including Britain).
European nobility originated from the feudal/seignorial system that arose in Europe during
the Middle Ages. Originally,
knights or nobles were mounted warriors who swore allegiance to their sovereign and promised to fight for him in exchange for an allocation of land (usually together with
serfs living there). During the time period known as the
Military Revolution, nobles gradually lost their role of raising and commanding private armies, as many nations created cohesive national armies. This was coupled with a loss of the social-economic power of the nobility, owing to the economic changes of the
Renaissance and the growing economic importance of the merchant classes (or
bourgeoisie), which increased still further during the
Industrial Revolution. In countries where the nobility was the dominant class, the
bourgeoisie gradually grew in power; a rich city merchant was more influential than a minor rural nobleman. However, in many countries at this time, the nobility retained great social and political importance; for instance, the UK's government was dominated by the nobility until the twentieth century.
The nobility of a person might be either inherited or earned. Nobility in its most general and strict sense is an acknowledged preeminence that's
hereditary:
for example, legitimate descendants (or all male descendants, in some societies) of nobles are nobles, unless explicitly stripped of the privilege. In this respect,
nobility is distinguished from the
peerage: the latter can be passed to only a single member of the family. The terms aristocrat and
aristocracy are a less formal means to refer to persons belonging to this social milieu. Those lacking a distinct title, such as junior siblings of peers (and perhaps even the children of 'self-made'
VIPs) may be considered aristocrats, moving within a small
social circle at the apex of a hierarchical
social pyramid.
"Blue" blood
Blue blood is an
English expression recorded since
1834 for noble birth or descent; it's a translation of the Spanish phrase
sangre azul, which described the Spanish
royal family and other high nobility who claimed to be of
Visigothic descent, while their subjects were largely of mixed descent (Moorish, Celtic, and Germanic). There is no connection between the phrase and the actual blood color of nobility; however, in the ancient and medieval societies of Europe, much of the
upper classmay have had
superficial veins that appeared blue through their untanned skin, in contrast with the
working class of the time, mainly agricultural peasants. An alternative traditional explanation,
argyria (a disease causing a blue-grey skin tone after digestion of silver), is considered less valid, as table silverware wasn't yet regularly used by much of the nobility. (
Becket (film) dramatizes the introduction of the
fork at the court of
King Henry II of England.)
Robert Lacey explains the genesis of the blue blood concept: "It was the Spaniards who gave the world the notion that an aristocrat's blood isn't red but blue. The Spanish nobility started taking shape around the ninth century in classic military fashion, occupying land as warriors on horseback. They were to continue the process for more than five hundred years, clawing back sections of the peninsula from its Moorish occupiers, and a nobleman demonstrated his pedigree by holding up his sword arm to display the filigree of blue-blooded veins beneath his pale skin—proof that his birth hadn't been contaminated by the dark-skinned enemy.
(Robert Lacey,
Aristocrats. Little, Brown and Company, 1983, p. 67)
Another theory claims -not without reason - that the "blue blooded" must ultimately have hailed from the ranks of the "blue"
Ashina, the early
Mediaeval ruling dynasty of the so called
Göktürks ("Blue" or "Celestial" Turks) themselves connected to various people who had a seminal impact on the birth of the aristocracy -with whom they interacted- of Central and even Western Europe, as were the
Huns, the
Alans, the
Avars or the
Khazars. Out of these, the
Iranian-speaking
Alans, from 407 to 409 A.D. together with the allied Germanic tribes like the
Vandals and
Suevi, swept into the Iberian peninsula. In response to this invasion of Roman Hispania,
Honorius, the emperor in the West, enlisted the aid of the Visigoths to regain control of the territory. The
Alanic aristocracy in the
Iberian peninsula was eventually absorbed by the ruling caste of the
Visigothic royalty, yet not before passing over to it the tradition of the "blue blood" as a distinctive
appanage of nobility and a relic of its Eastern "blue"
Ashina heritage.
The same expression is encountered in several European languages:
In
France, influential high bourgeois, most particularly the members of the
parlements (courts of justice), obtained noble titles from the king. The old nobility of military origin, the
noblesse d'épée ("nobility of the sword") became increasingly irritated by this newer
noblesse de robe ("nobility of the gown"). In the last years of the
ancien régime, before the
French Revolution, the old nobility, intent on keeping its privileges, had pushed for restrictions of certain offices and
orders of chivalry to noblemen who could demonstrate that their family had enough "
noble quarterings" (in French, 'quartiers de noblesse'), a reference to a noble's ability to display armorially their descents from
armigerous noble forebears in each of their lines of descent to demonstrate that they were descended from old noble families, who bore arms that could be quartered with their own
male line arms, and thus prove that they didn't derive merely from bourgeois families recently elevated to noble rank (although historians such as
William Doyle have disputed this so-called '
Aristocratic Reaction'. (W. Doyle, Essays on Eighteenth Century France, London, 1995). A noble could be asked to provide proof of noble antecedents by showing a genealogy displaying
seize quartiers (sixteen quarterings) or even
trente-deux quartiers (thirty-two quartering) indicating noble descent on all bloodlines back five generations (to great-great grandparents) or six generations (great-great-great grandparents), respectively. This illustrates the traditional link in many countries between
heraldry and nobility; in those countries where heraldry is used, nobles have almost always been armigerous, and have used heraldry to demonstrate their ancestry and
family history. (However, it's important to note that heraldry has never been restricted to the noble classes in most countries, and being armigerous doesn't necessarily demonstrate nobility.)
Nobles typically commanded resources, such as food, money, or labor, from
common members or nobles of lower rank of their societies, and could exercise religious or
political power over them. Also, typically, but not necessarily, nobles were entitled to land property, which was often reflected in the title. For example, the title
Earl of Chesterfield tells about property, while the title
Earl Cairns was created for a surname. However all the above isn't universal; quite often nobility was associated only with social respect and certain social privileges. An example of the latter would be early 20th-century
Polish nobility (
szlachta) after their political, economic, judicial and religious privileges were abolished in 1921 and they remained only landed proprietors on the same legal basis as their landed-commoner neighbours. In the
modern age, the notion of inherited nobility with
special rights has become, in the
Western World, increasingly seen as irrelevant to the modern way of life. The
founding fathers of the
United States rejected anything that could have helped in recreating a nobility; the
French Revolution abolished the nobility and its special privileges (though some nobility titles would be recreated by
Napoleon I and
III, they were mostly honorific).
A list of noble titles for different European countries can be found at
Royal and noble ranks. To learn how to properly address holders of these titles, see
Royal and noble styles.
Some
con artists also sell fake titles of nobility, often with impressive-looking documents to back them up. These may be illegal, depending on local
law.
They are more often illegal in countries that actually have nobilities:such as European monarchies. In the U.S., such commerce would be a form of
fraud, but it would only victimize the buyer of the supposed titles and wouldn't threaten an established class of nobles with enforceable titles.
Nobility in Eastern countries
Medieval
Japan developed a feudal system similar to the European system, where land was held in exchange for military service. The
daimyo class, or hereditary landowning nobles, had great social and political power. Like their European counterparts, they commanded private armies made up of
samurai, an elite
warrior class; for long periods, these held real power without a real
central government and often plunged the country into a state of civil war. Although there are differences, the daimyo class can be compared to European peers, and the samurai to European knights, but with important differences, such as the distinction between the European code of
chivalry and the Japanese code of
bushido. These feudal titles and ranks were abolished in Japan with the
Meiji Restoration of 1868 and replaced by the
kazoku, a five-rank
peerage system after the British example which granted seats in the upper house of the Imperial Diet, but this too was abolished in 1947, following Japan's defeat in World War II.
Many other non-Western nations have had noble or aristocratic classes of various kinds: these are so diverse that it's somewhat misleading to try to translate them all into western feudal terminology. For the feudal hierarchy on the
Indian subcontinent, see
princely state.
In some
Islamic countries, there are no definite nobility titles, but the closest to that are given the title Syed or
Sayyid. This exclusive title, given only to certain descendants, literally means, 'Sir' or 'Lord'. There are no special rights concerning the title: they're considered more religious than the general population, and many people come to them for first-hand religious questions.
In
Iran, the nobility titles are
Mirza,
Khan,
ed-Dowleh,
Shahzada, etc... . Nowadays, these titles don't exist anymore, an aristocrat family can now being recognized by his
family name (often derived from the post the ancestors had, considering the fact that family name in Iran only appeared in the beginning of the
20th century) .
In
East Asia the system was often modelled on imperial
China, the leading culture, where the emperor conferred degrees of nobility, which were not permanent but decreased a rank each generation. China had a feudal system in the
Shang and
Zhou dynasties, but the system gave way to a more bureaucratic system beginning in the
Qin dynasty (221 BC). By the
Qing dynasty, titles of nobility were still granted by the emperor, but served merely as honorifics: under a
centralized system, governance in the empire was the responsibility of the Confucian-educated scholar-officials and local gentry.
In
tribal societies, such as and the
Polynesian Island states, the system of often (semi-)hereditary
tribal chiefs can also be compared to a form of noble class; in
Tonga, after Tongan contact with Western nations, the traditional system of chiefs developed into a Western-style monarchy with a hereditary class of barons, even adopting that English title.
Nobility by nation
For full categorized countries, see ; some other follow:
Further Information
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