Although the powerful attraction of the noble ideal was preserved, even strengthened, and the noble class showed a far greater adaptability than one would have supposed likely, and was in no way apathetic in the face of difficulties, historians should not be tempted to minimise these difficulties. Leaving aside eastern Europe, the seignorial system which traditionally underpinned the nobility undeniably experienced a considerable jolt in the fifteenth century, while feudal structures were very often no more than feeble and outdated relics. In spite of many regional variations and the mercurial economic climate, the fifteenth century could in no way pass for the golden age of landed revenues which, in fact, frequently fell catastrophically. Many nobles felt threatened by new elites who, because they used their legal, financial, administrative or even military expertise to greater effect, were often regarded as competitors. Even where representative assemblies still existed (as they did in the majority of states) those institutions which brought nobles together were perhaps less vigorous in 1500 than they had been a century earlier.
However, some nobles did manage to find new sources of revenue (in the service of the state, for example), and eventually the economic situation picked up in their favour. Nobles also acquired at university, or elsewhere, the knowledge or expertise which would in future be indispensable for governing or managing men. The upper echelons of the Church did not escape their invasion: of the thirty-six Hungarian bishops appointed during the century, sixteen were of baronial and ten of noble origin. At least in the fields of war and diplomacy, those twin pillars of the modern state, nobles maintained their dominant positions. In fifteenth-century Pisa, a few dozen families called noble provided the city with condottieri, castellans, podesta for the lands of the contado, as well as ambassadors and prelates. The Renaissance witnessed the flowering of courts and the exaltation of the courtier, an individual who naturally flourished in a noble environment, or rather in an aristocratic one. As for their rivals, historians have been stressing how fervently ‘outsiders’ longed, sooner or later, to become ‘insiders’, to enter the magic circle by whatever means possible. Wealthy merchants from Burgos, proud of their genealogies and coats of arms, enamoured of fine weapons and wholeheartedly dedicated to the leisures of the chase, were not the only members of European society to be inspired by the example of the nobility. In France, the gradual creation of what would become the ‘service nobility’ (noblesse de robe) in the sixteenth century might be perceived as a threat to the traditional military nobility (noblesse d’epee); but it was also recognition of the traditional concepts of nobility: antiquity, wealth, private virtue and readiness to serve society. In the north of the Italian peninsula and in Tuscany, the ruling class combined in fairly eclectic fashion both popolari and nobiles. Christine de Pisan was thus able to define the Venetian patriciate as made up of ‘ancient bourgeois families who claim that they are noble’, a description worth comparing to her definition of the bourgeois as ‘born of ancient families in cities; their names, surnames and arms are antique and they are the most important inhabitants in towns, with revenues; they inherit houses and estates, which are their sole source of income. In some places the oldest among them are called nobles when they have long enjoyed considerable status and reputation.’
One portrait of nobility in this century paints it in a hundred different guises, fragmented, a mass of contradictions to the point where it would prove impossible to find common ground between a noble duke and a mere gentleman, between a Castilian hidalgo, a Scottish laird and a Prussian Junker, between a landowning Sicilian baron and a noble Venetian, or between a Franconian Raubritter and an English esquire, justice of the peace, or member of parliament. One is entitled to prefer, however, the vision of a noble society which, transcending obvious differences, not only derived from them its essence and its vitality, but also considered itself a single order, una et eadem nobilitas, within a society of orders (Standegesellschaft).
Another portrait depicts this century as afflicted by the slow degeneration of an intellectually underdeveloped nobility, economically and demographically weakened, unsure of its own identity and vocation, threatened by states, businessmen and lawyers, reduced to means of self-defence now increasingly far-removed from the realities of the day (and only good enough for chivalric festivals); in short, a nobility on the verge of forfeiting for good its historic role. For this, one is entitled to substitute the vision of the world of the Renaissance, in which the relics of feudalism were gradually transforming themselves into nobility, when, for example, the Herren and Ritter of the Empire fused to form the Adel. In fact, the nobility of the ancien regime dates from the fifteenth century. In France, at least, it was to endure until the Revolution of 1789, whilst in the rest of Europe it would preserve its identity and its very essence at least until the First World War.