My curiousity was piqued by this site, which says that there are approximately 40,000 nobles, i.e., members of formerly noble families, in Germany today. IIRC the population of Germany today is >100 milliion, so this implies that the percentage of nobles is only about four hundredths of one percent. I’m no historian, but that strikes me as absurdly low. Given that in feudal times it would have required a certain minimum number of high-born people just to fullfill the traditional duties of the noble class…ruling and fighting…you would think that it would have required more than .04%, and that they would have left more descendants than that today.
So, why so few? Was the proportion always so small, or have some families died out or changed their names having become fed up with all this nobility stuff? And have statistics of this type been worked out in any other European countries?
I doubt if it’s inbreeding. From the article I cited, it’s fairly clear that “nobility” in Germany wasn’t just your higher peers, like earls and dukes, but everyone from princes on down to hereditary knights, as well as untitled nobles who ranked below knights. Every member of every noble family was considered noble, unlike in England where only the patriarch legally holds all titles and everyone else is technically a commoner. There were hundreds of families, so it ought to have been possible for members of the lower nobility to find suitable mates other than cousins.
Anyway, if you go back far enough we’re all slightly inbred.
I was being flip. I meant marrying within the nobility, which will occur a lot. I had some other suggestions, but you got most of those in your post already.
That site doesn’t say specifically where the figure of 40,000 comes from but that may be derived from the number of people included in the Genealogisches Handbuch des Adels (Genealogical Handbook of the Nobility. If so, the site also says that:
I was reading about the Pour Le Merite (the so-called"Blue Max") in WWI and while I began with the assumption that it would have been easier to get if you were of the nobility, I found that there were very few “von” anyones who got it, and most of those who did were “ennobled” as a result of the honor of recieving the medal, not the other way around.
I don’t know, but guess this nobility became hereditary.
Apparently, the Kaiser or someone (perhaps also the King of Bavaria) could make you a noble in 2nd Reich Germany. I infer that after 1918, no new nobles could be (or were) created. Is this correct, or could we petition the German government of today for the creation of a “Cecil von Adams”?
“von” names are definitely rare over there, and they almost always indicate noble heritage. During the entire year I lived in Germany I encountered only two “vons”; one of whom, a <Name removed>-, said that her name wasn’t noble, but just a “from” name similar to all those “vans” on the Dutch side. Poor thing, she must be spending her life explaining her name to people!
There are around 3 000-4000 families of proven nobility in France. As for the feudal times, it rather irrelevant, since there are few families which date back to so early a period. Over time, a lot of lineages go extinct. Most noble families have been created much more recently, like say during the XVI°-XVIII° centuries. Also, you include the knights in your estimate, but such untitled nobility wasn’t registered as such and the title “knight” fell into disuse before dissapearing, AFAIK…
I just checked and found a reference stating there was only 312 french families from the foedal nobility, and around 1400 older than the XV° century.
And I assume that some families go extinct each year. Apparently, there still was around 5000 french noble familes in 1900, which would mean that 1/3 or so of the families dissapear in one century…