Among the arguments in favour of a comparative approach is the one that contemporaries themselves sometimes resorted to such comparisons. It is well known that, at the end of his reign, Louis XI intended to transform the French nobility, taking as models its English and Italian counterparts: ‘The chancellor proclaimed to us that the king’s pleasure was that anyone wishing to engage in trade might do so within the kingdom, without forfeiting his nobility or other privileges, as was the custom on the Italian peninsula and in the kingdom of England.’
The Castilian noble, Diego de Valera (c. 1412—88), a man with much experience of a variety of countries, wrote a treatise, Espejo de verdadera nobleza (1441), which was soon translated into French for the benefit of the Burgundian court. In the translation the author asks how long ‘nobility dependent on heredity’ is likely to survive. He reproduces the time-honoured answer of the celebrated Italian jurist, Bartolus of Sassoferrato (c. 1314—57): in the case of ‘mere gentlemen’, down to the fourth generation; as for those ‘established in high offices and lordships, kings, dukes, counts, barons and others whose positions and lordships confer nobility upon them’, they will survive as long as they retain the offices and lordships in question. Yet he also points out that Bartolus’s theory no longer pertains because ‘the custom has changed everywhere’, declaring that an individual’s nobility is now deemed all the greater when it can be traced to long-deceased ancestors.
The author then comments on different countries. ‘In Germany, nobility endures as long as nobles live honourably and without engaging in unseemly functions or professions.’ On the Italian peninsula ‘all descendants of legitimate nobility are noble as long as they are not reduced to poverty or demeaning customs through taking on unfitting positions, for then they are no longer considered noble’. Here Diego de Valera is in agreement with the contemporary Veronese, Bartolomeo Cipolla, who wrote that ‘if an individual is reduced to poverty or engages in demeaning tasks, he cannot be called or be considered noble’. In France, on the contrary, according to de Valera, purely economic considerations do not enter into it: ‘nobility endures as long as the nobleman lives an impeccable life, that is, a noble one, irrespective of wealth or poverty’. In Spain, particularly in Castile, even more latitude is allowed:
all these things are not so closely examined and considered, for although some are bastards legitimised by the prince, and have undertaken demeaning functions, or are not endowed with virtues and seemly customs as they should be, as long as they can show that their fathers and grandfathers were exempt from paying the gabelle to the prince, then they are considered to be of gentle birth, even though all these things are contrary to what is right and are forbidden by the laws of the kingdom, by which it is ordained and decreed that nobility is forfeit where there are disreputable manners, base occupations, and where nobility demeans itself.
For de Valera, this is a deplorable state of affairs. If only the laws were adhered to, ‘nobles living in true nobility would be as highly esteemed as they ought to be’.
Diego de Valera also adopts an interesting comparative approach to heraldry. He begins by stressing that ‘it behoves knights and nobles to wear their arms and carry pennants by which they and their kin may be identified’. These arms may indicate either ancestry or office, or a combination of the two, as in the case of the duke of Burgundy ‘who bears by reason of his lineage the quartered arms of France with a bordure as mark of difference, and adds to them the arms of his principal dignities’. Having explained how arms can be adopted and worn in four different ways (by inheritance, grant by the prince, capture in war, personal initiative), de Valera returns to the subject of princely grants, remarking that ‘this custom is universal, though practised chiefly in Germany, France and Italy’; he adds that ‘this custom was formerly followed above all in Spain, and now is practised above all in your kingdom [that of Juan II] where there are individuals alive who were granted arms by your father, the late king Enrique [III] of blessed memory’. He notes that the custom of wearing a coat of arms in battle ‘is practised more in France and England than elsewhere, for there any knight or noble, however poor, wears his coat of arms in battle’. Finally he observes that ‘mainly in France and Germany’ ‘the bourgeoisie adopt arms as they please’, but may display them only in their homes and parish churches, whereas ‘nobles display their arms wherever they wish and on coats’ (doubtless he has tournaments and jousts particularly in mind). All the same, according to de Valera, a bourgeois ennobled by the prince has the right to bear his arms everywhere, like nobles of ancient heritage.
Writing in 1441, the Paduan, Michele Savonarola, used a similar approach in order to compare ‘military’ chivalry, peculiar to the kingdom of Sicily and to Spain, with the ‘civil’ and ornamental chivalry to which aspired, through mere vanity, the urban patriciate of Tuscany even if it was connected to the popolo. These ‘patricians’ (adopting a word not in contemporary usage) betrayed no enthusiasm for things military; they engaged unblushingly in trade, agriculture and the mechanical arts, even though, just like authentic nobility, they had at their disposal horses, hounds, hawks and servants.
In a chapter of his Discourses ... on Livy Machiavelli was to reflect on the structures of states. Having proposed as his definition of ‘gentlemen’ a leisured class without trade or profession that lived solely from revenues which came mainly from estates, and, stressing that those in possession of castles, rights of jurisdiction and subjects (in short, feudatories) posed the greatest threat to public order, he went on to consider the case of German towns where civic virtue and integrity, particularly fiscal integrity, held sway. Why was this so? According to Machiavelli it was because the inhabitants, having no knowledge of the outside world, were thus uncorrupted by it; because they were content with their lot; and because gentlemen were strictly excluded from their society. Such gentlemen were to be found in the kingdom of Naples, the papal states, the Romagna, and Lombardy; yet in the Italian republics — Florence, Lucca, Siena — they were few in number, and those few possessed no castles. But what of Venice, where only gentlemen could hold office? It was not a contradiction of Machiavelli’s theory, since these Venetians were gentlemen in name rather than in reality, as their wealth derived from trade, and they had neither lands, nor castles, nor jurisdiction over subjects. Furthermore, their nobility was merely honorary; all Venetians understood the rules of the game, which consequently provoked no unrest. Only if it were dominated by a strong monarchy could a genuine noble class be compatible with social order. Similarly anyone wishing, for his own ends, to set up a principality or kingdom in an egalitarian society would be well advised to create nobles who, in return for the granting of castles, possessions and powers of jurisdiction, would render him service.
In the fifteenth century there were the acknowledged specialists in matters of nobility who were arbitrators, even judges, and at the same time acted as expert witnesses on various aspects of noble life. These were the heralds of arms (kings of arms, marshals of arms, pursuivants, who all formed part of a more or less official hierarchy) whose vocation and outlook were international. Their work was not simply the compilation of armorials. They travelled a great deal, from castle to castle, from court to court, from tournaments to jousts or passages of arms, from weddings to chivalric festivals, from one diplomatic meeting to another, and (of course) from war to war. These heralds of arms could thus, with reason, lay claim to an extensive knowledge of noble circles, most particularly those of their own nation. Yet they also had the more or less avowed aim of gathering all nobles within the European sphere into the fold of a single model. Here can be glimpsed the origins of what would later become the Almanach de Gotha, guide to the exclusive society of nineteenth-century Europe.
Among these heralds (Toison d’Or, Navarre Herald, Richmond Herald, or Clement Prinsaut) Berry Herald merits attention since, in addition to his Armorial and his Chroniques du roi Charles VII, he also left a Livre de la description des pays, whose scope extends well beyond the limits of Latin Christendom. In this book are found numerous references to the nobility of different regions which the author reviews in turn. In Poitou, there is an ‘abundance of nobles’, while in Touraine there are ‘great lords’. In the duchy of Bar ‘fine nobility’ is to be found, while Brittany has ‘great lords, barons and gentlemen’. In his view, France has more nobles than any other two Christian kingdoms together. Other countries are also the object of the herald’s curiosity; he may be more reliable on some than on others, as he comments briefly on their characteristics: the number of their subjects (county of Burgundy); their courageous conduct in war (Portugal); and their sense of courage and honour (Scotland). Beneath these conventional platitudes there is at least the notion that for any country it is a positive asset, above all an honour, to have a noble class that is numerous, courageous and well endowed with subjects, lordships and strongholds.
If the European nobility presented a measure of unity, this resulted in considerable measure from a strong tendency to marry within itself, a characteristic particularly marked among princely and royal families. Amadeus VIII, duke of Savoy (1391—1451), provides a good example of the consequences of this. Among his sixteen great-great-grandparents were Theodore II Palaiologos, marquis of Montferrat, and Argentina Spinola (of a noble Genoese family); Louis I, duke of Bourbon, and Mary of Hainault; Charles of Valois and Mahaut of Chatillon (in Champagne); King Philip VI of Valois and Joan of Burgundy; John of Luxemburg, king of Bohemia, and Isabeau of Bohemia; and Count Bernard VI of Armagnac and Cecile of Rodez, giving him a broad and noble background covering France, the Italian peninsula and the Empire. As for Amadeus’s own dynastic links, they extended as far as England in the person of Anne of Burgundy, wife of John, duke of Bedford; to Brittany through Francis, count of Montfort; to Navarre through Isabel of Navarre, wife of John IV, count of Armagnac; to Cyprus through John II, king of Cyprus; to the peninsula of Italy through Filippo Maria Visconti, duke of Milan; to Bavaria through William of Bavaria; to Austria through Leopold IV, duke of Austria; and to the Low Countries through the person of Adolf IV of Cleves.
Chivalric orders and chivalric devices, which appeared in the second quarter of the fourteenth century, soon spread over a large part of western Christendom, a typical instance of cultural and institutional development overriding linguistic, political and national frontiers. One of the main objectives evident in the statutes of these ‘orders’ or ‘associations’ (‘fraternities’ might be a better name for them) was to allow a prince, head of the order in question, to gather more easily about him, in his own service, the nobility of his states, domains and lordships, an aim most successfully achieved in the case of the order of the Golden Fleece (‘Toison d’Or’), the only centralised and centralising institution of a rather amorphous Burgundy. Nevertheless, in the case of a number of orders, such as that of the English Order of the Garter, the incorporation of a number of foreign members, besides furthering the diplomatic and political ends of the order’s sovereign, did add a significant international dimension to their character.
Nobles from different parts of western Christendom could also meet at the court. A treatise, written for presentation to Charles VII, urged the king to extend a welcome to both native and foreign nobles. Nobles met, of course, when engaged in war, the law of arms (jus armorum), in particular that part of it concerned with ransoms, helping to protect their relationship when they were on opposing sides. Generally speaking, courtly and chivalric principles applied without distinction, and above all to nobles of all countries whose social conventions bound them to an identical code of honour. The Prussian Reise, that cross-roads of western nobility, was more characteristic of the fourteenth than of the fifteenth century. Furthermore, the defeat of the crusading force at Nicopolis in 1396 left a permanent legacy: it wrecked Philippe de Mezieres’s plans to found the Order of the Passion, and Christian nobles of the fifteenth century had no opportunity, in spite of the Oath of the Pheasant (1454) and the admonitions of Pius II, to support a great crusade. Yet, on a perceptibly more modest scale, this did not prevent land or sea operations against the Turk giving nobles from different countries occasion to rub shoulders; while the Order of the Hospitallers of St John of Jerusalem, an order fully international in character, continued to function. Was it not, generally speaking, in the very nature of nobles to form as many different relationships as possible, to travel about freely, suitably armed with letters of recommendation and safe-conduct, even if only in their years of apprenticeship? The accounts of travellers reveal that within the European context nobles knew one another, or recognised their peers. They sensed that they belonged to the same social world, irrespective of the multitude of customs and linguistic barriers which might divide them, although it is worth noting that the higher a nobleman’s rank, the more circumscribed his world was likely to become.
It goes without saying that the vocabulary relating to nobles and nobility varied from one language to another, but, if only through the medium of Latin, the whole of western Christendom at this juncture employed common terms for social concepts. This explains why noblesse in French echoed (if it did not exactly correspond to) the English word nobility, the Italian nobilta, and the Spanish nobleza. It needs to be said, too, that in the fifteenth century the whole of western Christendom already knew, or adopted more generally than before, the traditional hierarchy of titles and offices that was Roman, Frankish or French in origin: duke, marquis, count, viscount, baron, knight, and squire. Translations from one language to another were suggested, for instance, in French/Flemish/English phrase books of the fourteenth century: ‘duc’/‘hertoghe’/‘duke’; ‘comte’/‘grave’/‘earl’; ‘chevalier’/‘ridder’/‘knyghte’; ‘ecuyer’/‘sciltknecht’/‘squyer’; while the French ‘grants seigneurs’ was translated ‘grote heeren’ in Flemish and ‘great lords’ in English.
Texts, in some cases translations, spread far from their place of origin identical concepts of nobility and chivalry, and stimulated commentaries upon them. Such an example are the numerous translations made of Le libre delorde de cauayleria by the Catalan, Ramon Lull. In 1484, for example, ‘at a requeste of a gentyl and noble esquyer’, William Caxton printed his own translation, The book of the ordre of chyualry, for ‘noble gentylmen that by their vertu entende to come & entre in to the noble ordre of chyualry’. Earlier, Gilbert of the Haye, a Scotsman of letters, had translated the same work under the title The buke of the ordre of knychthede. In the same way Alain Chartier’s Breviaire des nobles was translated into English prose at the end of the fifteenth century as The porteous of Cadzow, while Christine de Pisan’s Livre des faits d’armes et de chevalerie was also rendered into English. The most striking example is perhaps that of the Controversia de nobilitate, written in Latin in 1428 by Buonaccorso da Montemagno, scion of a noble family of Pistoia, which was to be translated into Italian, French, German and English, the original, as well as the translations, being accorded the privilege of early printings, thereby ensuring their widespread dissemination.