Link to Chronology
Finally, back to reading Pirenne
A History of Europe by Henri Pirenne
University Books, first published 1938 but written during the Great War
Book Eight
The European Crisis
(1300-1450)
The Avignon Papacy, the Great Schism, and the Hundred Years War
Additional notes:
So thinking about how the Third Estate and then "The People" came to power in Europe, makes me wonder if we aren't in a variation on that theme today. And as always, you have to look for the group getting the short end of the stick to see who is going to struggle to gain power. At this time in history, that's people of limited intelligence and people with mental health problems. No idea what percentage of the population this would be, but, for the sake of convenience, let's call them the 49% (people of literally below average intelligence).
It's my belief that these are the people who have elected Trump, and that Trump represents them. Of course, Trump isn't really going to do them any good, except in so far as he makes the political establishment aware that they have to consider this constituency. What politicians are good at is attempting to act in the interest of any identifiable constituency. Politicians may be whores, but the good thing about whores is that they will service anybody if there's something in it for them.
Now all the mainstream politicians have to do is discover a new blend of policies that appeals to the 49% without offending their existing constituencies too much. It's what they should have been doing all along, because it's the right thing to do, but that kind of foresight would be remarkable in a politician.
Trump, so far, is democracy working the way it should. This is a test of American democracy but probably no uglier a test than some that happened in the 19th century. Trump is also a test of the current balance of power between the three branches of government in the U.S.A. This is trickier because the Executive has accumulated so much power during the past century. It wouldn't be a bad thing if that process was reversed now, and I can also see that happening. There's still a chance that we will come out of this crisis with a more inclusive democracy and a newly limited Executive branch. I could live with that.
Chapter III
The Empire. The Slav States and Hungary
1. The Empire
p448 Germany, during the great interregnum, had assumed the political form which she was to retain down to modern times. It is not very easy to define her constitution, in which were comprised, without any real coherence, a monarchy which possessed none of the attributes of sovereignty, a multitude of ecclesiastical or lay princes, urban republics (Free Cities), and "immediate" (unmediated) nobles, enjoying complete independence... An anarchy in monarchical form: that perhaps is the best description of this extraordinary political entity... The necessity of an Emperor, who no longer corresponded to any existing reality, was imposed by tradition. And since the King of Germany was the Emperor-designate, to suppress him would have been to abolish the Empire. He therefore continued to exist...
...
p449 Rudolf of Hapsburg never found time, during his long reign (1273-1291, to go to Rome in order to receive the Imperial crown...
...
p457 ... [Sigismond, House of Luxembourg, King of Hungary 1387-, King of Germany 1411-, Emperor 1433-1437] died... 1437, and his Kingdoms of Bohemia and Hungary passed to his son-in-law, Albert of Austria. Thus the vast territories of the House of Luxembourg were added to the Duchies of Austria and Styria. The aim envisaged by the House of Habsburg since its establishment in the valley of the Danube was achieved... All the efforts of so many kings to establish the power of their families had the final result of promoting the Habsburgs to the rank of the most powerful sovereigns in Europe...
...
p461 ... If there were assemblies of the Estates, the bourgeoisie was nowhere powerful enough to counterbalance the nobility, which had the say in everything and enforced its will upon the country. A large proportion of the nobles were not the descendants of freemen... The peasants, who from the middle of the 14th century were entirely at the mercy of the nobles, were beginning to relapse into serfdom... [Footnote: In Flanders serfdom disappeared in the 13th century. In France it was largely abolished in the 14th century.] One of the most striking features of German life was this regression of the people into servitude under nobles of whom many were themselves of servile origin. Here and there the peasants resisted the nobles. The origin of the Swiss Confederation may be referred to such resistance: the three original cantons, Schwiz, Uri and Unterwalden, defeated Leopold of Austria at Morgahten in 1315. This was the beginning of a federation which was joined by Lucerne (1332), Zurich (1351), and Berne (1353), and which was further consolidated by the battle of Sempach, which was fought against Leopold III of Austria in 1386.
I have to confess here that I thought Swiss independence was related to the rise of Calvinism. Perhaps it was the other way round: Calvinism was able to develop in Switzerland because of its independence from the religious authorities of the time.
p462 ...the economic life of the country, down to the middle of the 15th century, was very poorly developed...
In the center of the country there were no important cities. On the whole, the greater part of the country was still rural...
2. The Slav States and Hungary
p463 ... The economic organization of this country [around Kiev after the 5th century] presented a character which was not to be found elsewhere in the territory of any other Barbarian people. It was essentially commercial. The Vikings, who where gathered round their princes in the fortified enclosures (Gorod) established along the Dnieper and its affluents, subjected the Slav population... In the spring of each year their boats assembled at Kiev and carried this merchandise to Constantinople.... When at the beginning of the 11th century the Scandinavians became Slavized, these commercial practices, together with the political exploitation of the rural population, did not disappear, but the aristocracy of boyars, at once military, mercantile and urban, dominated the rest of the nation...
...
p465 ... In 1096... [the Kuman] Khan advanced to the very walls of Kiev; and from that time onwards the attacks of these ferocious Barbarians never ceased. By the middle of the 12th century it was becoming impossible to resist them. The region of Kiev, hitherto so flourishing, was becoming impoverished and depopulated. When the Barbarians occupied the mouths of the Dnieper there was an end of the trade with Constantinople. Gradually the country was deserted, some of the inhabitants migrating to Galicia and Vollynia, and others, more numerous, moving off in a north-easterly direction toward the upper reaches of the Volga (Sousdal).
This migration from south to north determined the future of the Russian people... The Slav colonists of Sousdalia mingled with the Finns, who had hitherto been the sole inhabitants of its immense forests, and from that mingling of peoples modern Russia (Great Russia) emerged. At the same time a purely agricultural life replaced the old commercial activity. Henceforth deprived of all communication with the sea, the Russians were restricted for long centuries to a purely rural economy, which had no outlets. ...the fatality of circumstances made them abandon... [commerce] just when it was beginning to develop in the West... the towns of central Russia -- like the castles of the West in the early Middle Ages -- were merely the residences of the princes, their boyars, and their servants necessary for their maintenance... Novgorod alone, which was assiduously frequented, from the beginning of the 13th century, by the merchants of the Hansa, was a center of commercial importance, and this importance it owed entirely to the foreigner. It was a German factory in Russia...
p466 ...The Greek orthodoxy which the Russians brought from the banks of the Dnieper kept them isolated from Europe, while the civilizing influence of Byzantium... could no longer remedy the disastrous result of this isolation.
And then there was the Mongol invasion of the 13th century.
...In 1223 Juji, the son of Jenghiz Khan, conquered the whole region occupied by the Kumans between the Don and the Volga. His son, Batu, pushed further west, capturing Moscow in 1234 and Kiev in 1240... Their Khan contented himself with imposing overlordship upon the Russian princes and subjecting them to tribute... [Ivan III (1462-1505) annexes principalities around Moscow.] Ivan, allied with the Khan of the Crimea, made an end of what was still left of the Mongol domination. With his reign a new era of Russian history began.
As in the case of the Russians, it was the invasion of an Asiatic people, the Hungarians, which determined the destiny of the Slavs of the South and West... the sudden and unexpected arrival of the Hungarians altered the course of [Slav] history. Making their way into the valley of the Danube, they interposed themselves between the Slav peoples, dividing them into two groups, which henceforth had nothing in common. Cut off from Byzantium, and at the same time separated from the Serbs and Bulgars, the Czechs and the Poles, like the Hungarians themselves, naturally went over to the Roman Church.
...
p468 ...In consequence of the remoteness of the Western Slavs it was long before they emerged from the narrowness and poverty of their isolated existence... The power of the great landed nobility, both in Bohemia and in Poland, was exercised from the beginning by the participation of each of its members in the government of the whole country. This did not lead to the division of the country, for its political and national unity were preserved by the very weakness of a central authority which was dependent on the aristocracy. It should be added that these peoples, being cut off from the sea, had no bourgeoisie until a very late stage in their history.
p469 ... If Rudolph [of Habsburg] had been forced to rely on his own resources he could not have coped with his adversary [Ottocar II of Bohemia]. But now the Hungarians, for the first time, played the part which they were so often to play afterwards, assisting the Germans against the Czechs. Ottocar was defeated and killed in 1274, at the battle of Marchfeld. The Danubian duchies became the property of the Habsburgs, who never ceased to covet Bohemia...
We get the history of this region from the perspective of the Slavs that we've already covered from the German side.
p473 ... The Germans did not settle in great numbers except in Silesia... [around 1241, after the Mongols withdrew] Those who penetrated into the interior introduced urban life there and constituted a bourgeoisie, which... retained its [German] nationality for centuries. It found itself juxtaposed with the Jews, whom the persecution of the era of the Crusades had swept out of Germany and Hungary into Poland in the 11th and 12th centuries.
p474 ... Casimir (the Great) was to Poland much what his contemporary, Charles IV (1333-1370), was to Bohemia... He wished to make of Cracow what Charles had made of Prague, and following the latter's example he established a university there (1364) [University of Prague 1348]... In consequence of a much simpler historical evolution, [than elsewhere] the [Polish] nobles were directly related to the freemen of the Barbaric epoch; they retained the pride of the freemen, and claimed for themselves that they alone constituted the nation. Apart from the nobles [and the scattered, German bourgeoisies] there were only the servile peasants whom they exploited and despised. Above them there was only the king, whose authority they acknowledged on the condition of his reigning only for them and with them. The spirit which inspired the nobility, and never ceased to inspire it, was a spirit of liberty, but a liberty of caste which was to give the Polish State, more and more definitely, until its final collapse, the paradoxical character of an aristocratic democracy.
Casimir III defeats the Teutonic Knights at the battle of Tannenberg (July 15th, 1410) and Poland -- and the Slavs -- regain control over Prussia.
p478 The Slavs of the South -- the Croats, Slovenes, Serbs and Bulgars -- presented a very different spectacle from that of the Poles and Bohemians. In consequence of their weakness, the Croats and the Slovenes soon fell under the domination of Hungary, who took care to deny them the least measure of political autonomy. The Serbs and Bulgars... established on the south of the Danube on the territory of the Greek Empire, and faithful to the Greek Church, profited by the weakness of the Empire, after the reign of Justinian, to penetrate deeply into Macedonia, and even into Greece. While in the long run they became Hellenized, the Slavs of Macedonia preserved their language and their customs, as did the Germans who had occupied the north of the Empire.
The Bulgars threaten the Empire. The Serbs create their own little empire under "Tsar" Stephen IV (1346) which dominates the Bulgars, Macedonia, and Albania.
p479 If one wished to invoke an example in order to prove the unimportance of race in historical development, such an example is certainly provided by the Hungarians. By their origin, and by virtue of their language, these Finns, who were related to the Turks and the Mongols, were completely alien to the ethnographical group of the Indo-European peoples. However, they had barely taken their place in the midst of these peoples and adopted Christianity, when, despite the nature of the blood that flows in their veins, their cephalic index, and the linguistic characteristics of their idiom, their social lives became so similar to that of their neighbors that it would be quite impossible, if one didn't know the facts beforehand, to recognized them as intruders. The fact is that the physical individuality of a people is entirely subordinated to its moral existence... Having become Christians, they were bound to enter the European community, and so prove that they too possessed that pretended "faculty of assimilation" which a certain school of ethnologists claim as peculiar to the "German race," though it is really a characteristic of all Barbarians......
p483 ...These peoples [the Slavs and Hungarians up to the middle of the 15th century] knew nothing of the domainal organization, nor of the feudal system; they played no part in the War of Investitures, nor in the Crusades. For them the only consequence of the great epopee was the advent of the Jews who sought refuge in their territories, having been driven across the Elbe by the followers of Christ... Placed at a disadvantage by their old agricultural institutions, they yielded to the German pressure; retreating along the Elbe before the invaders, they allowed the latter to establish themselves among them, and to found cities which were like foreign islands in the midst of the national population. With the arrival of these newcomers, who looked down upon them but were a necessity for them, there began a period of superficial Germanization which continued until the middle of the 14th century. Then a reaction began to make itself felt... and there was a sudden awakening of national energy. This was manifested... by the explosive outbreak of Hussitism in Bohemia, the conquest of Prussia by Poland, and Hungary's advance toward the Adriatic. It seemed as though the moment had come for the Western Slavs and Hungarians to play an active part in European civilization. But the Turks were advancing across the Balkan peninsula, and the Slavs and Hungarians had to meet the thrust, turning back to the East in order to defend the civilization of the West instead of beginning to collaborate with it.
Link to Chronology
England on top
A History of Europe by Henri Pirenne
University Books, first published 1938 but written during the Great War
Book Eight
The European Crisis
(1300-1450)
The Avignon Papacy, the Great Schism, and the Hundred Years War
Chapter II
The Hundred Years War
1. To the Death of Edward III (1377)
p418 ...A war so long and so bitterly contested was possible only between France and England. They alone had governments disposing of sufficient resources, and peoples endowed with a sufficient national unity, to endure such an ordeal without perishing... After all the shedding of blood, after all the misery and devastation, the two adversaries found themselves still more or less at the point of departure, so that the Hundred Years' War had been merely a futile and terrible calamity... they [the kings of England] had no urgent motive for going to war... For France was not threatening or incommoding England... It is quite comprehensible that France might have attacked England in order to recover... [Guyenne], the last remnant of the Angivin possessions... but it was not France, it was England that provoked the war... In short, from whatever point of view we regard it, the Hundred Years' War is seen to have been a useless war, a needless war... As a matter of fact, it must be regarded merely as a war of prestige. And this, precisely, explains the passion with which the English people followed its kings into this war.
...
p427 Hostilities began in 1337... In the following year... Edward III disembarked at Antwerp, with the intention of doing great things... in order to compel the Count of Flanders to come over to his side, he had... prohibited the export of wool, which was indispensable to the cloth trade of Gand, Bruge, and Ypres... the trade corporations and merchants of the cities had no intention of allowing themselves to be ruined or starved... Gand, where the corporations of the cloth trade had for some years been in power, took over the government of the country, under the direction of a wealthy burgess, Jan van Artevelde... Thus the solidarity of their interests brought about an alliance between Edward's monarchical and dynastic policy and the bourgeois and economic policy of the Flemish cities, an alliance to which Flanders was to show herself unshakably faithful. In this essentially industrial country, where the bourgeoisie was predominant, politics, sooner than anywhere else in the North of Europe, were subordinated to economic considerations.
...
p428 ...In 1346... [Edward III] suddenly landed in Normandy. This was the beginning of a complete change of policy. A new system of tactics, based on the role of the archers on the battlefield, gave the English a series of brilliant victories... The battle of Crecy... proved the quality of his army... The victor profited by this un-hoped-for success to besiege Calais, which was taken after a siege of eleven months, and was not restored to France until 1558... On the Pope's intervention a truce was concluded in September 1347. This, owing to the appearance of the Black Death, was prolonged into the following year, and... was terminated only in 1355.
p429 ...The new King of France, Jean II the Good (1350-1364), had decided to convoke the States-General, which had furnished him with the means of equipping 30,000 men. These he led against the Black Prince, who was ravaging Guyenne. The battle of Maupertuis... [Poitiers] on September 19th, 1356, ended in a catastrophe even more overwhelming than that of Crecy. Jean himself was taken prisoner and sent to England as a captive.
p430 In France this disaster immediately provoked the first of the crises with which the monarchy was repeatedly confronted until the middle of the 15th century. The States-General of 1355, in which the influence of the bourgeoisie was predominant, led by the Provost of the merchants of Paris, Etienne Marcel, had demanded, in return for voting the taxes required by the king, a considerable voice in the government. They had stipulated that they themselves must levy and administer the new taxes, and they demanded guarantees in respect of their right to assemble in the future, and the introduction of administrative reforms... Unassailed and undisputed for a century past, the monarchy was asked to share its power with the nation... [In France] the bourgeoisie -- that is to say, the commercial and industrial class -- headed the movement. Now between this bourgeoisie and the nobles no understanding was possible. [Unlike in England where all the classes had been united against John Lackland.] The privileges of the one class were opposed to those of the other, giving rise to a mutual hostility, which the disasters of Crecy and Poitiers, for which the bourgeoisie held the chivalry responsible, increased to a maximum... If a few grands seigneurs [like Charles the Bad, King of Navarre] supported the efforts of the Third Estate, this was only by reason of personal interest, resentment, or ambition, and on the first opportunity they abandoned the allies whom they despised. The same may be said of the clergy... the States-General, composed of three orders which debated and voted separately, constituted in reality three distinct assemblies of privileged persons, incapable of agreement... Every one of their convocations corresponded with a crisis of the Treasury: they were assembled only that they might be asked for money. And it was precisely this fact that gave the bourgeoisie the preponderant role in the States. For... it was the bourgeoisie above all that was called upon to make payment... And it was precisely this fact that gave the bourgeoisie the preponderant role in the States...
Peace of Bretigny May 9th, 1360 gives Gascony, Guyenne, Poitou, Calais and the County of Guines to Edward III.
p434 Charles V (1364-1380), who succeeded his father Jean II in 1364 could not hope to break the peace which had barely been concluded. The kingdom was exhausted... The Count of Flanders, Louis de Maele... consented to the marriage of his daughter (June 29th, 1369) with the King's brother, Philip the Bold, who in 1361 had received the Duchy of Burgundy as his appanage. It seemed that the "Flemish question" which had so greatly preoccupied the Crown since the reign of Philip Augustus was on the point of being solved, since the succession of the powerful County was assured to a royal prince.
This period ends with the deaths, in 1377, of both Edward III and new French King, Charles V, with children inheriting both crowns leasing to periods of Regency.
Link to Chronology
A new nobility
A History of Europe by Henri Pirenne
University Books, first published 1938 but written during the Great War
Book Eight
The European Crisis
(1300-1450)
The Avignon Papacy, the Great Schism, and the Hundred Years War
Chapter I
General Characteristics of the Period
1. Social and Economic Tendencies
p389 [continued] ...the cities...were acquiring a political importance in the outer world which they had never before possessed... now that bands of mercenaries and fleets were playing a greater part in warfare, it was becoming more costly than ever. The old sources of revenue were insufficient... the only thing to be done was to apply to the Third Estate -- that is, to the cities -- and to ask them to open their purses... From the beginning of the 14th century the necessity of taxation dominated the prince's policy, and compelled him to accede to the demands of the cities and the Estates, which wrested privileges from him, and would presently even claim the right to participate in his policy... The 15th century was the epoch in which the bourgeoisie began to play a political as well as a class role. It took its place beside the clergy and the noblesse... [Footnote: It was in the 14th century that the financiers began to acquire political importance.]
p391 The financial needs of the princes made the 14th century a century of parliamentarianism, or shall we say, a century of Estates... [Not long ago, "princes" was used to denote the powerful nobles the kings were in conflict with, but now "princes" seems to include the kings.] every assembly of Estates was always to the advantage of the Third Estate. It was the Third Estate alone which supported the institution and profited by it, because it disposed of the finances. And it was the Third Estate alone which made conditions and demanded guarantees.
But the Third Estate was itself merely a class of privileged persons, and beneath it was the majority of the nation, the Fourth Estate, which was never mentioned, though it bore the burden. Undoubtedly its condition was much less tolerable after the 14th century than it had been for two hundred years. We have seen how the rise of the cities... shattered the domainal system, releasing great expanses of territory and great numbers of rural inhabitants. At that time the rural classes gave evidence of unusual energy. They cleared uncultivated ground, they emigrated, and yet the population was rapidly increasing. But there was an end to all this during the first half of the century... the available land was occupied... and the cities were closing their gates. Meanwhile taxation was heavier than ever and still increasing. Moreover, there was a surplus of workers, so that the situation of the peasants was most unfavorable. The nobles took advantage of this, endeavoring to re-establish their old feudal rights, and, in a general manner, to exploit the peasants, for the old patriarchal relations of the domainal epoch no longer existed. In maritime Flanders a terrible rebellion broke out, which lasted from 1324 to 1328. The peasants hunted the chevaliers, and refused to pay their tithes. A true social hatred finds expression in the Kerelslied. [Subversive songs?] This rising ended in the massacre of Cassel, and in wholesale confiscations. In France, the so-called revolt of the Jacques in 1357... gave evidence of a profound hostility between the rural masses and the noblesse... The English rebellion of 1381, which is that concerning which we are best informed, was due to attempts on the part of the nobles to re-establish the old corvees, in order to avoid paying the higher wages which were one of the consequences of the Black Death...
p393 Generally speaking, people began to despise the peasants as a helot who stood outside society... The cities too oppressed the rural districts, taking care that no industries should be practiced there. All through the 14th century Gand was organizing expeditions which destroyed the looms and the fullers' vats in the villages and country towns. And the monasteries no longer extended the old social protection over the "villeins," but added to their wretchedness by their exaction of the tithe.
As for the nobles, they too were passing through a serious crisis... I cannot find that anything remained of the old idealism, apart from certain outward gallantry... The chief preoccupation of the chevalier was now his fief... What did survive was the military character of the noble class. But this often assumed the aspect of mercenary military service... Knights-errant began to make their appearance, fighting on all fronts and for all causes... These were professional soldiers, who were not very far removed from the condottiere -- leaders of bands, experienced captains to whom war was a lucrative calling... At heart these knights were adventurers: very valiant men, but also violent and greedy... Some also went to break a lance in Granada.
...
p394 ...it was no longer by this military noblesse that battles were won. Artillery, which was first heard at Crecy, still played only a secondary part in any campaign, but the infantry was gradually recovering the position which it had lost since the Carolingian epoch. At Cortrai it destroyed the French chivalry; the Swiss infantry had been winning battles since 1315; the foot-soldiers were the backbone of the English army, where they were formed into companies of archers; and the tactics of Johann Ziska, leader of the Hussites, was based on the infantry... And while, from the military point of view, the nobles were in retreat... They played no part in government, and they were not becoming more cultivated... The upper ranks of the clergy... became the monopoly of the younger sons of noble families. The democratic character of the Church was disappearing... In the upper ranks of the ecclesiastical hierarchy there was a stupendous moral and intellectual decadence; in accordance with the tastes of society, the clergy were becoming worldly.
If we examine them closely, shall we not see among the nobles... a tendency analogous to that which we may observe in the patriciate of the bourgeoisie? Neither class was undergoing any further development; they were digging themselves in... Their only care was to preserve their privileges and their property... Not one of them was distinguished for his piety or his beneficence. And here I am speaking of those who played some part in the life of the world. The others hunted, looked after their estates, and oppressed the peasants. It is surprising to discover how completely sterile were the nobles of the 14th and the beginning of the 15th century, despite their numerical strength.
p395 ...In the 14th century we see the first traces of what may be called the noblesse de cour. In the 13th century it hardly existed...
p396 ...the nucleus of this new court [which appeared as the monarchy regained power] consisted not of nobles, but of commoners: councillors, servants in charge of the king's plate and his wardrobe, etc., with a few clerks. But was the king to be surrounded by plebeians? The court is a resort of the nobility. Consequently the king proceeded to ennoble his officers and his functionaries. This was a new nobility, entirely different from the old military chivalry. It was now conferred for civil services, and intelligence or learning... And this new nobility was entirely dependent on the sovereigns... The king alone was the source of nobility, and so he remained until the end of the ancien regime. From the end of the 13th century, anyone who was ennobled was ennobled by the king alone. The nobles of the robe... took their place beside the nobles of the sword.
p396 Here was a novel factor of very great social importance. To my thinking, it saved the noblesse, which was decaying as a military caste, and could not enrich itself, because it constituted a juridical caste, which was becoming more and more a closed social category. In the person of these newcomers it received fresh recruits, and they were commonly very wealthy recruits, thanks to their participation in the government. It despised them, but it was they who saved it.
... In point of formation, and in respect of its occupation, the noblesse de robe was a kind of lay clergy. It had nothing in common with the old nobility in whose ranks it now installed itself. Why then did the new nobility enter the old? Because there was no other place for it in the society of those days. It could not, on coming to court, remain in the ranks of the bourgeoisie, which would have continued to influence it and to detach it from the prince... The social habits and interests of the new class merged themselves in those of the old. And with this the nobility acquired a more comprehensive status. Henceforth it included the entire elite of the nation. To be an homme convenable [I'm having a hard time finding a translation for this. In the context I would expect it to me "a man of consequence"] a man must be a member of the noblesse. The consequences of this fact were hardly perceptible in the 14th century and the beginning of the 15th. They were to be incalculable later, and even to this day there are many States which have not yet shaken them off. The Renaissance was powerless to dissolve this social block. This was reserved for the modern democracies. However profound the influence of the bourgeoisie might be in the State, the noblesse, during the whole of the ancien regime, retained its primacy of social rank, and every man who emerged from the bourgeoisie endeavored to enter it.
There's an idea I thought I had gotten from Fernand Braudel (though now I'm doubting everything but the information on camels and the importance of geography on the history of the Mediterranean basin), that the transition from middle class to upper class was based on the ownership of land. The successful merchant would eventually invest his capital in land and become, quite literally, a landlord. The best example I can think of for this is the case of Voltaire. He started his fortune with his writing, invested it in trade, and then bought substantial properties in France and Switzerland where he spent the end of his life tending his garden as a seigneur.
After a generation or two, the interests and manners of such landowners would be indistinguishable from those of the Guermantes.
Take 2: I love the idea that some family could trace their nobility back to the 14th century and still not be of the "true" Carolingian noblesse. Though we have already seen that even that noblesse was of mongrel parentage, with the only common denominator being land ownership on a large scale.
And were the descendants of this noblesse of the robe still distinguishable from the "true" noblesse by the 18th century? Or did they, like the Carolingians before them, blend into a new, equally bloody minded Second Estate?
