Ernst Kantorowicz: What is Nobility?

Was ist Adel? What is Nobility? – Ernst Kantorowicz' first lecture at the University of Frankfurt 1931 on “The Problem of Nobility in the Later Middle Ages.”

What is nobility? The question resembles Falstaff’s question: What is honor? And it shares with the latter that it cannot be answered from the viewpoint of the individual, but only from that of an estate. For nobility initially designates only an estate, and always and exclusively the estate that knows itself to be something special and is believed by other lower estates to be something special. But is there not, apart from estates, a general-human nobility of the individual? Strictly speaking, only insofar as a whole estate or, in rare cases, the whole of mankind as an estate is represented in it, just as in Adam—for the Middle Ages the classic example of true nobility—the estate of man was represented in relation to the nature that served and was subject to him. Only in this way did this nobility of the paradise-man, which still remained somewhat estate-based, transform into a general nobility of mankind: through viewing the first man as detached from his natural world order, no longer positioning him against nature as his servant estate, but understanding him as the symbol of individuality itself. Thus, in the man of paradise, two possibilities of nobility were already united: a bound, estate-based nobility and a free nobility of the individual.

Nobility as an estate, however, presupposes a higher and a lower, presupposes a graduated order. Since the shattering of the last semblance of this order, since the great fall of the dynasties of Europe, since the devaluation of both legitimacy and blood nobility, since the consolidation of a society whose thinking is primarily oriented towards the rights of the individual or profit-making associations, in short: since there is no longer an estate that could claim for itself to be the nobility.. since then the question: What is nobility? has inevitably been related almost exclusively to the individual being. For the question of nobility has been almost completely divorced from blood as one of the natural ties of the estate, and even if today, alongside the call for a leader, there is often a demand for a renewal of nobility, this does not mean the nobility of blood passed on from generation to generation, but a so-called spiritual nobility of the individual. For not only the nobility of blood itself, but also the idea of nobility of blood has been devalued, and insofar as it was originally based on a belief in very specific, almost magical powers and abilities inherent in the blood, the present state—regardless of how it was brought about—actually marks the victory of the intellect over the irrational belief in those secret powers.. and with that, for the time being, ends a battle that has continued through the literature of centuries, cloaked in the question of the true nobility of man—in the question of whether true nobility is constituted by blood or by “virtus,” the excellency of the individual. Of this battle of opinions—behind which lies both the entire reshaping of medieval estates and the search for the ideal image of man as the concept of “virtus” evolved—allow me to tell you in broad outlines, without following every twist and turn of individual viewpoints or addressing each strand of thought, how it played out during the decisive period of the late Middle Ages.

The literary campaign against nobility of blood did not proceed, as one might easily assume, from the Christian doctrine of election by grace. As important as this dogma would become at a certain stage of the debate: the early Middle Ages hardly reflected on the problem of nobility as such, or better: the problem, although virtually always present, was not developed in theoretical discussion. ‘If man has no virtue, where then is his nobility?’ - so the patristic writers might ask. But the testimonies handed down to us: perhaps a letter attributed to St. Jerome to a Roman noblewoman, then a section in a larger work by Bishop Rather of Verona, individual scattered remarks by various authors: they all merely repeat the dogma that Christian teaching does not recognize human estates, but rather looks only at the individual soul.. that no one could be more noble than Peter, the fisherman, and that it is meaningless to pride oneself on the nobility of blood, since all men are redeemed by the one blood of Christ, all are equally reborn and of equal value before God. Thus the problem of nobility, overshadowed by dogma, is rendered moot.

Not so in practical politics. Here, the contrast between election of the person and claims of blood became quite significant when needed, and made itself felt in the political writings of the Investiture Controversy, when the question of whether the Empire was an elective or hereditary realm was also debated. For it was precisely in the appointment of the imperial throne, but also in the accessions of Western kings, that the Curia fundamentally subordinated the principle of legitimacy to that of the suitability of the claimant to the throne, and in times of greatest power also directed its attacks against the Germanic right of blood. Gregory VII openly declared that the election of a king corresponded more to the interest of the Church than if “carnal love” alone were to inherit the dignity, and he forced Rudolf of Rheinfelden, the papal counter-king against Emperor Henry IV, at his election in Forchheim to explicitly renounce any dynastic hereditary right to the Roman Empire. As indifferent as the popes generally were to the blood right of the Western kingdoms when no special occasion arose, and as unconcerned as they were even in the Roman Empire to consent to the election of the emperor’s son: opposing the idea of a hereditary emperorship was one of the unshakable principles of curial policy. Not for nothing did the Roman emperor possess a quasi-priestly character.

Thus, in the field of practical politics, while there is a constant readiness of the Curia to fight against the right of blood: a theoretical-literary debate on the problem of nobility has not been addressed. How should the question have been formulated? — perhaps: whether the chivalric nobility of blood ranks higher or the nobility of Christian virtues? Here the real contrast was missing, indeed it was completely eliminated when, in the 12th century, the “militia armata,” the chivalric weapons nobility, and the analogously constructed “militia coelestis,” the estate of saints, then the clerical estate in general, had jointly established their highest symbol in the spiritual orders of knighthood as a new “militia Christi.” It is now highly significant that just at this moment, when there was nothing more to be said about the ideal of the perfect “miles christianus,” and when, on the other hand, at least in the Empire, the nobility had found its lawful conclusion in the fact that since Barbarossa only the sons of knights could become knights, that from a third side a completely different noble ideal was demanded—a sign that either in the spiritual order of knighthood not all the powers of the time had yet found their symbol, or else that outside the two old estates another new power had matured, to stand as an equal alongside the previous powers or to incorporate them.

The great social transformation and spiritual conversion that took place in Europe around the turn of the 12th and 13th centuries, and which in significance is perhaps only equaled by the French Revolution, has been increasingly illuminated in our times. What began then, barely consciously, was the rejection of the entire system of the medieval world order with its interplay of regnum and sacerdotium, of emperor and pope, knight and monk—in short: was the gradual dissolution of medieval dualism in favor of a three-part division of all life contexts, a trichotomy, on whose foundation the Renaissance grew and which is perhaps the most essential characteristic of this cultural epoch so much disputed today. Writings spread at the end of the 12th century, dealing with the “Differentia animae et spiritus,” the difference between soul and spirit, testify with their problems to how that non-material unity of soul and spirit, which the Church had opposed to the body as matter, was then splitting into its two components, so that, roughly speaking, in the end the soul remained with the Church, while the spirit became free. Accordingly, in addition to the two old classes of clergy and nobility, a new class of educated, mostly bourgeois laymen arose at that time, who embraced the spirit and became, in a certain sense, its actual representatives. This lay education, however, did not present itself as a unified closed estate like clergy and nobility, but manifested itself in various fields, within which estate-like groups then formed, appearing first in poetry, then almost simultaneously in state and science. These groups were united, however, in rejecting a nobility derived solely from blood and birth, in place of which they instituted a nobility of the person based on the “virtus” of the individual, and it is hardly surprising that each of these groups claimed to embody, in its respective ideal of “virtus,” the true nobility of man.

The first to demand such a new noble ideal were the troubadours. It is known that with the songs of these poets, highly artistic in form, rather simple in thought, a new vision of the world, a new ethic, and a new valuation of all life sprouted. Some have emphasized the connection with the heretical Albigensians and the intrusion of pagan worldliness into the Christian world, others the value of courtly education, and still others other aspects; indeed, it is not easy to reduce all this to a single formula—the easiest, however, is that which almost suggests itself: namely, that alongside the service to lords and the service to God of the knighthood and the clerical estate, there now emerged the service to love of the wandering minstrels. If we accept Goethe’s word here, that being duty-bound has always been the truest meaning of any nobility, then with the new service to love, a new possibility of ennoblement would indeed be given.

Out of a so to speak practical necessity—this perhaps suggests itself first and has been emphasized often enough—the troubadour came to question the value of nobility of blood. For while in Germany in the heyday of the Minnesang no bourgeois singer is encountered, the number of non-knightly-born among the troubadours is not small. According to courtly views, it was permitted for a man to love beneath his estate, but not for a woman, and in his “Three Books on Love,” the French chaplain Andreas declares: only if a man of lower birth compensates for this deficiency through countless other qualities, through the exemplariness of his behavior and his virtue, can he be deemed worthy of the love of a lady of rank. The chaplain, who lived at the turn of the 12th and 13th centuries, had thereby given expression to a thought that the troubadours, and in Germany since Gottfried von Strassburg also the Minnesingers, had been voicing for several decades: that it is not so much blood as a noble heart that confers nobility. In fact, the singer’s nobility wanted to manifest itself in nothing other than in Cortezia, the all-encompassing essence of courtly education. While he did not need to reject bravery and piety, they alone, in his view, were no longer sufficient for the representation of true nobility: courtly education, precisely Cortezia, was still needed to be truly noble, and even for the knightly-born poet it henceforth became merely self-evident convention to demand the same in his songs. In this convention, however, the new ideal of the estates made itself felt; for whoever did not possess Cortezia—regardless of high or low birth—was a “vilain,” just as, conversely, the “vilain” in the sense of: citizen and peasant was the despised counterpart of the noble knight.. a transfer, therefore, of the social contrast into the spiritual realm, and with it a separate estate founded beyond the estates, based on certain forms and valuations of life, which here—without excluding the earlier estates from it—emerged under the breath of love poetry.

The advance of the troubadours was certainly triggered and promoted by something deeper. The brutalization of the noble knightly estate, much lamented by contemporaries, may have provoked an intellectual counterattack, while the dogma-adjacent argument of the common descent of all estates from the first human couple—until well beyond the end of the Renaissance one of the most popular commonplaces—offered a moral foundation, which in Italy was very soon broadened by learned recourse to classical authors—especially Juvenal Cicero Seneca Boethius. In general, the problem of nobility was only deepened and above all: made the subject of philosophical contemplation, when it—along with Provençal lyric poetry in general—was taken up by the Italians, among whom the estate structure was quite different from that in the lands of feudality. The noble knighthood in Italy had been largely urbanized since the civic struggles of the 12th and 13th centuries, and in the cities themselves, the third estate had reached a high point of life, and the education of the lay bourgeoisie had achieved a breadth unmatched elsewhere in the West. A nobility based almost exclusively on personal education, as the troubadours sang of it as the foundation of courtly essence, had to find a particularly willing reception and gain in significance in the urban democracies of Italy—adapted to their less chivalric-courtly than bourgeois-scholarly conditions and correspondingly transformed—the more the blood nobility of the knightly estate lost significance there through assimilation to the bourgeoisie.

A kind of philosophical doctrine of nobility could, of course, already be derived from the poetry of the Provençals. Cortezia was inseparable from courtly love: only those who loved could even have an inkling of what Cortezia might be, since it had its origin only in the wellspring of love, as the knowledgeable chaplain explained. But only nobility was capable of love.. first the nobility of rank, then—according to the new concept of nobility of the troubadours—the courtly educated nobility; only from nobility of heart could true love flow (ex sola cordis nobilitate procedens amor), while the peasant, the “villanus,” was not capable of love at all, but merely mated like a horse or a donkey. Thus, the nobility proved itself through the capacity to love—certainly not a bad criterion. But since love in turn bestowed Cortezia as the epitome of noble virtue, a cycle of nobility-love-virtue emerged that formally challenged the scholastic syllogism that nobility is love. However, the doctrine of nobility was first incorporated into the thinking of scholastic philosophy by the learned Italian poets.. and here, two new lines of thought should first be taken up, within which the question of nobility coincided with the main philosophical problem of the age, I mean: the incorporation of Aristotle into the dogmatics of the Church.

The Aristotelian position can be briefly described as viewing hereditary nobility, based on virtue and old wealth, as a potentiality, thus nobility disposed men toward excellency, toward perfectio. This view was understandably adopted by the nobility of birth. Much more than in those of lower birth—so it was thought at the Sicilian Hohenstaufen court—ignorance and incompetence were to be censured in princes, because the nobility of blood, through the infusion of a refined and noble soul, makes princes receptive to any teaching and instruction before other men, over whom they would otherwise have no advantage. And when imperial courtiers once quarreled over the problem of nobility, here too the defender of blood nobility declared that just as from purer elements and from a clear sap, so from noble blood more splendid shoots could emerge, and that if nobles degenerated, this did not speak against nobility, but only for the vice of the degenerate himself. Blood nobility is thus understood in a thoroughly Aristotelian way as a prōton physei: as a disposition, a natural endowment for rulership, for perfection, for virtue.

How does scholasticism now take possession of this? Scholasticism was bound by the view, already briefly sketched, that Christian teaching does not recognize human estates, but looks only at the value of the individual, at the individual’s soul. Thus, as birth nobility could find an advocate in Aristotle, so the ecclesiastical doctrine of election by grace rather benefited the bourgeois educational nobility, just as politically at that time Church and bourgeoisie in Italy came together in “guelfismo popolare.” Nevertheless, scholasticism did adopt the Aristotelian doctrine of nobility. For example, toward the end of the 13th century, William Peraldus in his treatise “De eruditione principum” emphasizes that while the natural origin is common to all sons of Adam and that from one root spring noble and base alike, from one free will spring good and evil, that nobility could never lie in bodily advantages, since the soul is more noble than the body. But insofar as nobility bases on wealth and blood might perhaps have some value, it could induce its bearer to lead a virtuous life.

Aegidius Romanus goes further with Aristotle. In his mirror for princes, he explains, largely in agreement with Albertus Magnus: nobility has four innate virtues by nature: magnanimitas, greatness of soul.. generosity made possible by ancient wealth.. docility and receptivity, “docilitas”.. and fourthly, political abilities; the nobles are by nature “politici,” because from the beginning of their lives they are at home in political virtue and always accustomed to living in the great world—“in magna societate”—just as conversely the peasants become backwoodsmen because they live in isolation. There is, however, as he said elsewhere, also a nobility “secundum veritatem” such as virtues and goods of the soul. Aegidius thus allows, as does his contemporary Francesco da Barberino in his “Documenti d’Amore” and Dante in the “Monarchy” (II,3,14), two possibilities of nobility to exist side by side, a solution that one encounters again and again later, then usually with reference to a saying of Plato, transmitted by Diogenes Laertius. According to this, Plato counted among the well-born, the eugeneis, both those descended from famous ancestors or from rulers or from victors in competitions, as well as those whose nobility rested only on their own competence—indeed, Plato is said to have called this kind of nobility the best.

The Aristotelian doctrine, according to which the nobility of the blood is a predisposition toward perfection, had thus been more affiliated with than incorporated into the scholastic system, by constructing a twofold possibility of nobility: nobility of soul as habitus remained alongside blood nobility as potentiality. It was left to the poets of the ‘new sweet style’, Guido Guinicelli above all and Dante, to create yet another solution here. Their foundation was the doctrine of the troubadours, which let love grow out of nobility and virtue out of love, and into this cycle the Aristotelian view, which had come down to them from scholasticism, fitted almost inevitably. But with one important change! The poets transferred the idea that nobility is the disposition toward perfection, toward virtue, from blood to the soul or better: to the heart. Thus, no longer blood nobility as in Aristotle, but nobility of heart was the aptitude for perfectio.. and this doctrine demanded that blood nobility be eliminated altogether, after its most distinctive feature—namely, to dispose toward perfection—had been taken from it and transferred to nobility of heart. From here we can understand Dante’s struggle in the Convivio against the Aristotelian definition of nobility that he put into the mouth of Frederick II: he had to prove that for nobility of heart, which only God bestowed and could in principle bestow on any person, old blood and old wealth were quite irrelevant.. although it is strange, that this struggle was conducted not only with the help of Christian categories, but above all with Aristotelian ones.

In this way, the doctrine of the troubadours was given a philosophical foundation without changing much of the doctrine itself. For as with the Provençals, so too for the singers of the “dolce stil nuovo,” nobility of heart and love were intimately linked.

Amore e’l cor gentil sono una cosa..

Love and a noble heart are the same thing—as stated in the Vita nuova with reference to a famous canzone by Guinicelli, in which he expressed that nature created neither love before nobility nor nobility before love, that the two were one. Nobility of heart was thus also the disposition toward love, was love in potentia, as it is sometimes called. But it no longer meant merely love for a real lady, but also for a lady of a higher, spiritual kind, and it signified a further spiritualization when Dante understood nobility of heart also as an inclination toward divine love, toward beatitude. “Nobility—so his definition in the end—non sia altro che seme di felicità messo da Dio nell’anima ben posta..” Nobility is nothing other than a seed of happiness, sown by God in the well-disposed soul, whose body shows a good constitution.. Nobility is, Dante once again, “a seed sown by divine power.”

With this definition, Dante had indeed removed the problem to other realms, in which the actual historical question of the value or worthlessness of blood nobility became irrelevant. To be sure, Dante’s attitude toward inherited nobility in the “Monarchy,” in the “Comedy,” and even in the “Convivio” itself was by no means uniformly negative, though to him hereditary nobility was always only like a cloak that the scissors of time shortened day by day, unless the wearer constantly added a piece to it.. or as he says another time: the individual ennobles the lineage, not the lineage the individual. But the original troubadour question about the relationship of nobility-love-virtue was brought to its conclusion through the sublimation of the three concepts and thereby actually removed from the dispute: the thread could no longer be spun further, and a connection for later thinkers was possible only in partial aspects.

But something else could also be inferred: namely, that Dante’s concept of nobility no longer coincided—as it still did with the troubadours—with an estate-based one, but that it expressed a nobility of the sovereign individual, who embodied humanity as a whole in the “humana civilitas,” as emperor and pope did in their domains.. individual, that is, not in the modern sense of a libertine bourgeois, but still bound by and integrated into an estate like any monarch. Precisely in this sense, however, Dante’s nobility claim and simultaneously his image of nobility continued to have an effect, while his theory could no longer be further developed. For Dante, since he joined the poetic majesties of antiquity on the asphodel meadow of Limbo, had claimed for the poet a sovereignty that would never have been granted to any poet of the Middle Ages, and the poet was indeed for the first time granted a rank that elevated him far above any nobility.. But since Dante, in the first canto of Paradise, invoking Apollo, complained that in his days

only seldom is the laurel plucked for the honor of a Caesar or a poet,

he was the first to place the laurel of the poet in the same rank with the laurel of the Caesar, and thus created the Caesar-poet of later times, crowned on the Capitol with the consecrated sign of a spiritual imperium. Our conception, like that of the Classical and Romantic periods, of the poet not only as a “vates,” as antiquity knew him, but as a prince in a realm of his own kind goes back via Tasso, Ariosto, Petrarch to Dante and to him alone. Twenty years after the death of Dante, who was crowned only on his deathbed with the laurel that had been implored in Paradise, Petrarch, wrapped in the royal purple of Robert of Naples, received the wreath of leaves on the Roman Capitol, while the Roman populace acclaimed the poet’s coronation as it acclaimed the election of emperors and popes. In his great address to the Senate and the people of Rome, Petrarch gave words to the same thought as Dante in his invocation of Apollo: that only the highest political and highest spiritual principate were worthy of the Delphic branch. The document, on the other hand, issued to the crowned poet by the Roman Senate, says that poets provide immortality to those whom they deign to ennoble through their songs.

Never again could a dispute flare up as to whether the nobility of the poet was equal to, or even preceded, any nobility of blood. But the poets no longer formed an estate—except in the caricature of the officially approved “poetae laureati.” Nevertheless, if the problem of nobility continued to be debated for centuries in letters, treatises, writings, it was not to defend the nobility of poets—or, as we can now say, the nobility of genius. Rather, it was other groups of the new world of education that claimed nobility for themselves as an estate. Here it was initially the autonomous secular state, detached from ecclesiastical omnipotence, which since the 13th century had, out of itself and its necessities, come to form a new, non-chivalric noble estate, namely that of the learned jurists.

At the latest since Azo, who lived around the turn of the 12th and 13th centuries, but probably earlier, the view was held among the jurists of Bologna that jurisprudence ennobled its adepts.. for it as a blessing-bestowing mistress let the legal scholars rule throughout the world, come and go at the imperial court, pass judgment over districts and nations, and indeed it was only through jurisprudence that kings ruled. This doctrine prevailed.. and in the founding document for the University of Naples—initially known as a school of law—written entirely in the Bologna spirit, it is likewise emphasized that study “has nobility as its retinue.” The power that the jurists represented in the Sicilian state of the Hohenstaufens, then the crown jurists at the French court, is well known, and while in Sicily the judiciary was rather understood as a kind of state clergy, in France it was placed alongside knighthood, and knighthood and judiciary were considered the two pillars that God gave to the world to support the order of divine and human law.

This equation of jurists and knights was already suggested by the then much-quoted sentence from the preface of the Justinian Institutes, that imperial majesty must not only be adorned with weapons, but also armed with laws—“non solum armis decoratam, sed etiam legibus oportet esse armatam.” But again it was the Italians who took the decisive step. Bartolus, the famous legal scholar and glossator of Roman law in the first half of the 14th century, had distinguished in his commentary on Justinian’s Code between a nobility of arms, the “militia armata,” and an unarmed nobility, the “militia inermis.” The unarmed nobility in turn included two types of knighthood: the “militia coelestis,” the clergy, and the “militia legum,” the nobility of jurists.. so that with knighthood, clergy, and juristhood, three equal classes of nobility were created. For Bartolus had proved from Justinian law, through an interpretation that was actually incorrect, that every doctor of Roman law was a “nobilis,” a nobleman.. indeed, from another law, he even deduced the thesis that every doctor of law who had taught at a university for twenty years was entitled to the dignity of a count. This did not remain merely a curious theory, but since then, in almost all of Europe, a distinction was made between a nobility of arms and a nobility of jurists, the chevaliers des armes and chevaliers des lois, just as the doctorate was correspondingly understood as a knightly consecration: already in the late Trecento, the legal doctoral candidate was admitted after passing the examination into the order of the “militia legum” and girded like a proper knight with the “cingulum militare.” From 1500 onward, the jurist was also equal to the nobility in clothing, and this judicial knighthood continued into heraldry, though it remained controversial whether the doctor was entitled to the helmet with the open visor of the fighting noble knight or only the helmet with closed visor, which was borne by the arms-bearing bourgeoisie.

As in France, Italy, the Netherlands, and elsewhere, this view became established in Germany with the full adoption of Roman law and found an eager defender around the middle of the 15th century, for example in Peter von Andlau, the author of the first German constitutional law. Although this jurist nobility later disappeared again, the predicate “vir nobilis et doctissimus” remained for the legal doctor until the 18th century, while “dominus nobilis” designated the nobility of blood. Only later was this predicate weakened again by the superlative, and the legal doctor was henceforth called “vir praenobilissimus et doctissimus,” as was still to be read—or at least until before the war—on our legal doctoral diplomas. In England, however, this judicial nobility has been preserved to this day, which, by the way, was by no means just a baroque playfulness, but served a very practical purpose—insofar as the higher courts, which were composed only of nobles, after the retreat of popular laws and the predominance of Roman law, required educated Roman law scholars. That these, as far as they were of bourgeois origin, could participate in the courts, was most simply made possible by the fact that as doctors they belonged to the nobility. The nobility of jurists, demonstrable, by the way, already in the Sicilian kingdom of the Angevins, thus had a meaning as an estate lying entirely within the state itself, and although it clearly derived from the humanistic spirit, it was not identical with the learned scientific nobility that the humanists brought into the field against the nobility of blood.

But the catchword of the “humanist republic of scholars” shows that the humanists represented an estate for which the aforementioned word of Cicero could provide the motto: “Sapientes sapientibus etiam ignotis esse amicos”—The wise are friends to the wise, even to those not known. And what they had in common was considered “virtus” understood as science. Let us return once more to the troubadours and the singers of the “Dolce stil nuovo.” If their doctrine of nobility was characterized by the three elements: nobility-love-virtue, then the humanistic problem of nobility had the trinity: nobility-science-virtue as its foundation. Or to express it differently: for the humanists, virtue constituted the essence of human nobility (though they understood virtue more in moral-aesthetic terms), but unlike the poets, who believed love awakened dormant powers in a moment of inspiration, the humanists held that engagement with the sciences led to virtue.. indeed, science and virtue became almost synonymous terms, just as love and virtue were for the poets, so that one could now claim: nobility equals the cultivation of sciences.

How is this to be explained? The path can be followed here almost step by step. In the early Middle Ages, the sciences also had a high status.. according to the medieval view, the sciences enabled man to ascend to eternal truth and the highest virtue. But science was understood primarily as theology. That this leading power also grew in the secular sciences was caused by the incursion of the still somewhat semi-theological jurisprudence, which in the 12th and 13th centuries temporarily threatened to suffocate theology. Thus, as we have already seen, the first traces of a doctrine of nobility based on non-theological, secularized science can also be found among the jurists of Bologna. But the ability to ennoble soon spread to all the sciences. Not only did Philip of Vitry, for example, introduce science as a third equal power alongside Foy and Chevalerie, the representatives of the clergy and the nobility, in his “Chapelle des fleurs de lis” at the end of the 13th century, but there are even clearer testimonies. Peter of Prezza, for example, a publicist of the Hohenstaufens and the Interregnum, encouraged his brother and his son to pursue the sciences because they brought fame, fame brought honor, honor brought wealth, and above all: because “it is that science which ennobles man, that raises the poor from the mud and assigns him a place beside the princes of the earth.” Almost the same is explained in other words by Peter of Boateriis, a nearly contemporary Bolognese master of dictamen, who additionally equates the flourishing of the sciences with the “renovatio,” with the renewal of man.

This last point: the question of the renewal of man, indicates the direction here. For the view that the sciences ennobled man cannot be separated from the new, almost mystical significance which reason, “ratio,” gained in this time, which was praised as the power that led man back again to the original nobility of Adam in paradise. It was only through the power of reason that Adam, when nature fell away from him after sin, was able to bring nature back under his dominion, thus attempting to restore his original kingship through reason. And the courtiers of the imperial court understood as noble those who strove to eradicate the “primum defectum” in themselves and to return to the glory of the first nobility. In the mirror of reason, the nobilis pars Dei, man would also become again the “imago Dei,” the divine image, as Adam had been. But it was the sciences that taught how to use reason, how to become conscious of it. “The leadership of noble science has by nature that it unites man to reason and reason to man,” declared the aforementioned publicist. A life without science is the death and the grave of an inglorious man, it was said in the Enlightenment of the 13th century.. and it is along the same lines when Aegidius Romanus called a king who did not promote studies a tyrant.

Thus, by leading man to the highest reason, the sciences themselves were able to ennoble man. Compared with the views considered so far, this doctrine of nobility meant a considerable intellectualization. For this nobility of the intellect was already attainable through the study of the sciences, had become learnable. In general, the increasing intellectualization of life constituted the well-known great danger of humanism. Just as humanistic friendship often, without ever seeing the so-called friend or even testing the friendship, thus completely detached from human essence, enthusiastically inclined toward the like-minded intellect, so too the concept of virtue of the humanist had been intellectualized, especially in comparison with Cortezia, for ignorance was synonymous with vice, virtue was the cultivation of science—views that clearly reveal their origin in Stoicism, just as this doctrine, which, as was thought, could easily be reconciled with Augustine and Christianity, temporarily formed the actual bridge to the ancient world for humanistic ethics.

This virtue, fulfilled in the cultivation of science, was transfigured by the passionate devotion to the “sacra studia,” the beloved, the sacred studies, and to the sacred songs and teachings of antiquity, which suddenly determined the present and thus almost became the present. But the Stoic contempt for the world in turn led to intellectual hubris, and the “Extolle te super homines,” which Salutati calls out to a young studious Pisan, already anticipates the entire later conceit of the scholar, who believed that with mere scholarly knowledge he also possessed virtue as an ennobling habitus. On the other hand, the Stoic model led to a new kind of hermitage. For the poets, love had actually been the axis of the problem of nobility. For the humanistic ideal of Salutati, but already for the older Petrarch, love for the physical human being was no longer considered as ennobling, but only as disturbing, as an accident that only disrupted scholarly contemplation, and the true ideal meant a turning away from the world. However little actual life usually corresponded to this ideal—especially among the Italians familiar with state affairs—yet with the idea of a scientific asceticism, of monasticism in new garb, often precisely in the garb of the Stoics, was carried over into the new age. As much as this scientifically anchoretic form of life could find approval among contemporaries, since it was conditioned by devotion to studies.. allowing it to be considered as nobility was most decidedly opposed by Lorenzo Medici according to Poggio’s description in his treatise on nobility.

The writing, attractive for its sense of reality, is a dialog between Lorenzo and the humanist Niccolo Niccoli, behind whom Poggio himself is probably concealed. Together, the two had visited Poggio at his country house in Terranuova to admire the antique sculptures that Poggio had had brought there. Jokingly, Lorenzo, alluding to the custom inherited from the Romans, said: Poggio had probably collected the many pictures to replace the missing ancestral images and thereby ennoble himself—certainly more an acknowledgment than a denigration of Poggio. But the remark sparked a conversation about nobility. Niccoli first sharply criticized the actual nobility as it existed in Italy, Germany, France, England, and the Orient, and, relying on Plato, he sought to counter the Aristotelian definition of nobility represented by Lorenzo, until Lorenzo turned against the image of virtue and nobility of the humanistic philosopher and scholar: The philosopher, almost unknown to himself and the world, content with his studies, spending his days soberly, piously, chastely, and wisely in his “bibliothecula,” one could certainly grant him virtue, Lorenzo thought, but never nobility, and one could well call him virtuous, but not noble. For nobility included not only knowledge, but also old blood, as the Greek word for nobility: eugeneia clearly showed the connection with blood.

Poggio’s dialogue necessarily ended without a decision, but especially in its critical part it met with multiple objections. The Venetians felt offended by the harsh criticism of their nobili, and Poggio’s friend on the lagoon, Gregorio Correr, then two other Venetian scholars rejected the attacks, just as in Germany Peter von Andlau defended the German nobility against the invectives of the Florentine, while Archbishop Leonardo of Lesbos—also in the form of a dialogue—wrote a counter-treatise.

On the whole, such treatises “De vera nobilitate,” “De nobilitate animi” or “animae” formally became a distinct literary-moral philosophical genre, which was also erroneously inserted into ancient literature. Thus, under the name of Plutarch, a Greek treatise peri eugeneias was circulated, which was nothing other than an anthology from the anthology of Stobaeus. These treatises tended to take the form of dialogues, in which the noble interlocutor usually represented the Aristotelian standpoint and the humanist the Stoic one.. and this genre also included the charming conversation that Platina had with the Archbishop of Trani, Giovanni Orsini, in Vicovaro, the beautiful country estate of the Orsini in the valley of the Anio. However, the charm of this small work lies more in the description of the landscape, visibly modeled after the Phaedrus, than in the conversation itself, conducted with familiar keywords. In this respect, however, it is significant that here, as elsewhere, the nobility of the blood increasingly found its advocates in the clergy, until this connection finally became the self-evident and natural one: the two old estates, nobility and clergy, had to unite more closely the more powerful the third estate became. This union, however, became an absolute necessity whenever the third estate opposed the old estates not only as an intellectual world but as an oppressed social class.

This becomes particularly evident in pre-Reformation Germany, where the problem of nobility was to take quite different forms from those in Italy. Certainly, treatises on nobility by Italians were also known on this side of the Alps, especially that of Poggio, which Peter von Andlau cites, and that of Platina, which was reprinted in Erfurt in 1510. And it is certainly in the spirit of Italian humanism that in Augsburg, in the office of the weavers’ guild, Cicero, depicted as a full-fledged councilor, shows the motto:

Who has virtue is well-born, without virtue nobility is completely lost.

Another Italian dialogue on nobility, sometimes attributed to Buoncorso de Montemagno of Pistoia, sometimes to Leonardo Bruni of Arezzo, was translated into German by Niclas von Wyl, while Albrecht von Eyb included the dialogue in his “Ehebüchlein” and Felix Hemmerlin of Zurich wove the dialogue into his larger discourse on nobility, in which a knight and a peasant discussed the question of nobility. This last aspect is particularly noteworthy. I would not so much emphasize that instead of two very specific historical personalities like Lorenzo Medici and Niccolo Niccoli or Platina and Giovanni Orsini, here two schematic types, precisely: knight and peasant, conducted the conversation, although this too is characteristic of the entire intellectual situation in Germany, but something quite different is evident.. that here, instead of the free and haughty humanist of Italy, the subjugated peasant attacked the value of blood nobility, and that the problem of nobility in general increasingly slipped into the realm of social struggles. While people of different estates also appeared as interlocutors among the Italians, the difference in rank remained relatively indifferent.. for the discourse always swung inter pares from person to person, whereas in Germany the difference in rank was almost the essential thing and formally degenerated into class struggle, as for instance Agrippa von Nettesheim roundly declared nobility to be nothing other than a “robusta improbitas”: Cain had been the first nobleman, the pious Abel, on the other hand, the first oppressed plebeian. From this standpoint, nobility and clergy hardly differed from each other anymore, both being only oppressors of the “poor people”.. all this a mirror image of the time in which the position of the nurturing estate vis-à-vis the defensive estate and the teaching estate dominated thinking as a social problem, while the powerlessness of the peasant expected the great equalization only from the dance of death.

But it did not stop at attacks against the nobility of blood; the criticism itself generated an idealization of the peasant, in which he is portrayed as the representative of true human nobility. It would be an interesting problem to trace in detail the rustification of Germany after the collapse of the Empire, that ennoblement of rustic crudeness which breaks through everywhere and begins in poetry already with Neithart von Reuental and the “Meier Helmbrecht.” The ethical foundation for this high estimation of the peasant and the poor in general is probably also to be sought in Italy. For since Francis had founded the knighthood of Humilitas and served as a minstrel of the Lord in the service of Lady Poverty, not only was the kingdom of heaven again closer to the poor, but people indulged in praising the virtue and natural wisdom of precisely the small and simple-minded, and the ascetic movement of the 14th century further promoted such glorification of poverty. The peasant also derived his nobility—for example in the nobility dialogue of Felix Hemmerlin—from Adam: Adam had been a farmer, not a knight, squire, or warrior. Had God known a more noble estate than that of the peasant, he would certainly have created the first man as his image in another estate. But the “noble, pious peasant”—so declared the Nuremberg Meistersinger Hans Rosenplüt—represented the noblest of all beings that God created, for man and beast, bird and worm lived from his labor. And not only Adam, but Saul and David were also considered by the Swabian Michael Beheim as the ancestors of the peasant nobility, and it was inevitable that the “noble” peasant, transfigured into the holy peasant, was compared with Christ and God the All-Nourisher, generally entering into the light of religious glorification. Thus, virtue was equated with labor.

From this world of thought, which was always guided by the pure utility value of the peasant and therefore repeatedly praised his work, the truly questionable word and the almost more questionable outlook on life may have been born that “labor ennobles”.. a view which, making one increasingly incapable of an “otium cum dignitate,” had to devalue every nobility, that of blood as well as of spirit, which, however, only points ahead to the last and most recent desertification of existence in Hesperia: performance as such—whatever its nature—can ennoble. Admittedly, a more distinguished genealogy for this performance nobility can be traced back to the beginnings of humanism. For when the humanistic concept of virtue emerged, which understood itself as the cultivation of science, the Renaissance concept of virtue immediately split off: the less papery, but rather metallically tasting virtù of the “Vita activa” and of those who understood their ideal as action to be realized by rational means.. the virtù therefore in the sense of power, even demonism, as it dwelled in the despots and statesmen of the Renaissance, whose nobility rested solely on this virtù, whose spokesman was Machiavelli, and whose concept of nobility—since Napoleon’s word: “his nobility came from Montenotte” was hammered into the world—was seized and flattened by a bourgeois, then proletarian age.

VIII.

It is hardly surprising that this nobility, manifested in virtù, was at most noted in a negative sense by the humanists, among whom one would not want to count Machiavelli, and even a work like Castiglione’s “Cortegiano,” more at home in the atmosphere of Bramante’s and Raphael’s halls, has no proper relationship to this nobility. Nevertheless, the “Cortegiano” is of a unique kind. While all others argued about what should be valued more highly: nobility of blood or nobility of virtue, and engaged in pros and cons, Castiglione erected the symbol of the true Nobile of his time. For as such the perfect courtier, the Cortegiano, is to be understood, and it is indeed significant how indifferent that celebrated Urbinate court society was toward genealogical nobility. To be sure, the question of nobility like every problem of the time is touched upon here as well.. but it is irrelevant and they quickly agree that the Cortegiano, for a purely practical reason, would better be of noble blood: namely, because this would facilitate his demeanor.

Most peculiar, however, is how Castiglione envisioned the prototype of the true Cortegiano. Since nobility without service is unthinkable, the Cortegiano is indeed in the service of a prince.. but at the same time he is placed above the prince as his educator and guide. That no learned humanist, no nobility of intellect and science would be suitable for the office of one who, as it were, had to be more than a prince, is demonstrated—from a spirit related to Lorenzo Medici—by the example of Callisthenes, who accompanied Alexander on his expedition: because he wanted to be only a “puro filosofo” and only an “austero ministro della nuda verità,” only a strict servant of naked truth, without making it enjoyable through Cortegiania, he only harmed Alexander instead of benefiting him and lost his own life. The archetypes and forerunners of the princely instructor and genuine Cortegiano are, besides Phoenix in his relationship to Achilles, above all Plato as the teacher of Dion and Aristotle as that of Alexander. And it speaks for the ideal of Enkyklopaideia at that time that even the objection whether Plato and Aristotle could also have taught fencing and dancing is met with a “yes”: it is not to be assumed that these ingenia would not have been capable of everything necessary for the education of a prince and belonging to the perfect Cortegiano.

It is certain that Castiglione, in his attempt to grasp the essence of the true Nobile not with the concepts of blood and spirit, but in image, and to understand the Nobile himself as a model, as a prince-educator, came closer than any other contemporary to a solution of the problem of nobility that could almost be binding even for today. Nevertheless, with the concepts of the time, it was never quite possible to escape from that dualistic separation of nobility as blood and nobility as spiritual merit. Only when one gives up understanding blood purely as matter and, conversely, stops taking the intellect as independent and unconditioned by the blood basis, could one gain a new concept of nobility that encompassed each of these realities. For as little as nobility is purely material, just as little is it—therein most closely related to honor—a matter of the individual intellect: nobility is not only something internal that belonged only to the individual, but nobility is an estate and must appear as such, is a model, is image altogether.. indeed, one can describe the possibility of becoming an image precisely as the test of genuine nobility and thus, as it were, replace the ancestral test. There is no other answer to be given today, when an estate is lacking in which nobility could present and manifest itself, to the question: What is nobility? and there is today no other criterion for the nobility of man than his image, which continues to point, until the topsy-turvy of new estates has ordered itself into a higher and a lower of human ranks. For even the last expedient of a tired liberalism, to attribute nobility to spirit as such, no longer catches on, since it has become merely intellect and thereby vulgar. Thus Nietzsche was the first to take up the fight against it, while also rejecting the notion of nobility derived solely from the Gotha; as he—to avoid misinterpretation—explicitly prefaced his statement with an ‘insertion for donkeys’:

There is only nobility of birth! Spirit alone does not ennoble; rather it first needs something that ennobles the spirit. What then is needed? Blood.

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