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Pedro Paulo Gaião
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 Posted: Thu 23 Apr, 2015 11:47 am Post subject: |
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| Henrik Zoltan Toth wrote: | There were noble families, probably with possessions in other states (where the became a knight). There is no general answer for your question.
Most of the middle and law nobles in Hungary could not effort a heavy armour, but they could had get it from the royal armoury or from a baron/high curch man. And if somebody was particularly succesful on the battlefield, he could had get a coat of arms (like the one from 1504 of the Máriássi family in your first post) and became a knight. |
This means that in Hungary there wasn't the institution to invest the cavalry? It was unusual or those who had the title of Knight had received these honor outside of Hungary? I thought the Black Army had numerous native hungarian knights. You can say the Hungarian Kingdom was "poor" of had minor metallurgical capacity (with respect to production and the quality of armor and weapons) compared to other medieval kingdoms like France, England, Aragon etc.?
| Jean Henri Chandler wrote: | The term 'black rider' was used back into the 15th Century sometimes to refer to cavalry of the famous Hungarian Black Army (Fekete Sereg) simply because so many of the soldiers (both cavalry and infantry) wore blackened armor. I think the image from your OP is of a knight in the Black Army.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Army_of_Hungary
But it was also a general euphemism for mercenaries, who seemed to wear blackened armor a lot. There were some mercenary companies in northern Europe called the "black band" and so on. |
Yes, it's a Knight of the Black Army. I didn't know that mercenaries used to wear black suits of armour, I though that blackened armour were pretty uncommon
| Quote: | | Yes, there are three things which get associated with knights. Knight as a legal status, somewhat similar to Roman equites, though not identical. This gives you many specific rights like your word being admissible as evidence in some courts, for example, and courtesies related to honor, but it doesn't mean you are a noble or even free. It was often given to certain courtiers and diplomats so as to make their jobs easier, and also many nobles got the status one way or another for similar reasons. |
It would not it be simpler to appoint as the Viscounts (Sheriffs)? It is a title that is not hereditary and is often associated with administrative and juridical services with little military obligation
| Quote: | Then there is 'knight' as a euphemism for the lower nobility. Again, these people may not be knights and in many cases are not. Many times in the European Diets the estates of the 'knights' (gentry, lower nobles, rich peasants etc.) are seperate and sometimes in opposition to the princes.
Knight was a legal status that you were usually given by another knight, and could gain based on battlefield prowess, skill in a tournament, by joining a knightly order, or by being given the status by a prince or a prelate (Church prince) or by a town. |
This helped me a lot. Does that may have some parallel with the knights of the House of Commons in England post Magna Carta?
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A prince could be a baron, a duke, an archbishop (prince-prelate) or some other noble rank by title, but what made him a prince was his level of power. To further confuse the issue not only did many prelates (bishops, abbots, archbishops and cardinals) have the status of prince, so to did many towns and urban republics. |
We could say that the Holy Empire was a collection of sovereign states united by the Kaiser authority? So it seems to me more reasonable of Prince (Furst) nomenclature to dukes and and marquess, such as Saxony, Brandenburg and Montferrat
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Lafayette C Curtis
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| Posted: Mon 27 Apr, 2015 10:24 am Post subject: |
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The Dauphin thing is a can of worms. While we normally associate it with the heir to the French crown, this association didn't really exist before the mid-14th century or so when the owner of the title (a count?) sold the domain to the French king under the stipulation that the French heir-apparent would be designated the Dauphin from then on. But -- and this is a big but -- the Dauphin held his lands as a vassal of the Holy Roman Emperor (not of the French king), and there was also an important stipulation that France should not annex those lands. Of course the French ignored it and annexed the land anyway around the end of the 15th century, but that's a different matter.
Orange was a sovereign principality under the HRE too, so the "Prince of Orange" title had conventional HRE origins. Its survival as a courtesy title in the Dutch monarchy (which was established in the 19th century, not the 18th!) and another noble house (I forgot whether it was a German or a French one) today is more a matter of early modern diplomatic politics rather than any genuine ongoing connection to the medieval principality.
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Jean Henri Chandler
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| Posted: Sun 25 Oct, 2015 9:59 pm Post subject: |
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| Pedro Paulo Gaião wrote: | | Henrik Zoltan Toth wrote: | There were noble families, probably with possessions in other states (where the became a knight). There is no general answer for your question.
Most of the middle and law nobles in Hungary could not effort a heavy armour, but they could had get it from the royal armoury or from a baron/high curch man. And if somebody was particularly succesful on the battlefield, he could had get a coat of arms (like the one from 1504 of the Máriássi family in your first post) and became a knight. |
This means that in Hungary there wasn't the institution to invest the cavalry? It was unusual or those who had the title of Knight had received these honor outside of Hungary? I thought the Black Army had numerous native hungarian knights. You can say the Hungarian Kingdom was "poor" of had minor metallurgical capacity (with respect to production and the quality of armor and weapons) compared to other medieval kingdoms like France, England, Aragon etc.? |
I'm not certain of the answer to this question, but I believe instead that it means that in Hungary there was still a pretty strong tradition of light cavalry and that at least some Hungarian knights were part of this tradition. Hungary was also ravaged for centuries by exceedingly brutal warfare, starting with the Mongol invasions in the 13th Century and, just as that began to diminish (thanks to the courage and tenacity of the Hungarians themselves) it was replaced in the late 14th Century by increasingly aggressive raids, probes, and outright invasions by the Ottomans. Not to mention almost continuoul internal strife and contentious power struggles with princes from neighboring regions like Austria and Bohemia. So for sure there were districts within Hungary, especially those close to the borders, that were poor due to the ravages of warfare.
| Quote: | | Yes, it's a Knight of the Black Army. I didn't know that mercenaries used to wear black suits of armour, I though that blackened armour were pretty uncommon |
It was apparently quite common in the 15th Century throughout Central and Northern Europe. Mercenary groups were named due to this blackened armor as far north as Frisia and as far East as Hungary. I would assume that for mercenary companies and soldiers in the field for extended periods blackened armor would pose an important advantage in being more weather proof than so-called 'white' armor.
| Quote: | | It would not it be simpler to appoint as the Viscounts (Sheriffs)? It is a title that is not hereditary and is often associated with administrative and juridical services with little military obligation |
Maybe it would be simpler but the ministeriales were the historical norm in Central Europe. They did also have something like sheriffs in the ubiquitous Vogt and various equivalents, but in practice over time in many areas these people became part of the gentry and independent operators subject to shifting loyalties etc. just as the ministeriales did. The difference from more stable monarchies like England or Castile is probably due to the extremely complex, fluid and frankly chaotic nature of government in Central Europe.
Consider a map of all the major political entities in the Holy Roman Empire in 1400
There were literally hundreds of polities, most ruled by a prince or prelate, but some ruled by large towns, or coalitions of smaller towns, or by diets of knights and minor prelates, or by some sort of hybrid of town, gentry and Church. Silesia, for example, was a sort of lawless area ruled over by petty nobles and prelates for centuries, the closest thing to any authority there during the late medieval period was the town of Wroclaw / Breslau / Vretislav (pick your name and pronunciation) which was typically and often violently at odds with both their neighboring nobles and their nominal princely overlord (the king of Bohemia).
In places like that someone who was managing a castle theoretically on behalf of someone else amid the constantly shifting coalitions and alternating periods of war and peace often ended up just doing as they pleased.
| Quote: | | Quote: | Then there is 'knight' as a euphemism for the lower nobility. Again, these people may not be knights and in many cases are not. Many times in the European Diets the estates of the 'knights' (gentry, lower nobles, rich peasants etc.) are seperate and sometimes in opposition to the princes.
Knight was a legal status that you were usually given by another knight, and could gain based on battlefield prowess, skill in a tournament, by joining a knightly order, or by being given the status by a prince or a prelate (Church prince) or by a town. |
This helped me a lot. Does that may have some parallel with the knights of the House of Commons in England post Magna Carta? |
Honestly I don't know enough about English history to answer that.
| Quote: | | Quote: |
A prince could be a baron, a duke, an archbishop (prince-prelate) or some other noble rank by title, but what made him a prince was his level of power. To further confuse the issue not only did many prelates (bishops, abbots, archbishops and cardinals) have the status of prince, so to did many towns and urban republics. |
We could say that the Holy Empire was a collection of sovereign states united by the Kaiser authority? So it seems to me more reasonable of Prince (Furst) nomenclature to dukes and marquess, such as Saxony, Brandenburg and Montferrat |
Those were just the major regions, and they too often collapsed into multiple factions and fractured alliances especially during interregnums and periods of succession, which were almost always contested. Though in the post-medieval period very powerful princes came to control fairly large areas of Central Europe within one family or another, from the High to the Late Medieval period there were literally hundreds of independent princes in what are now Germany, Poland, Hungary, Belgium, Holland, Czech, Slovakia etc., and a lot of what is now France but back then was part of the HRE.
Look at that map of the HRE and try to let it sink in for a minute. It actually remained that chaotic until the 18th Century, right up to the verge of the French revolution. In many respects you could describe the HRE as a 'failed state' by modern definitions. On the other hand in spite of the political and sometimes military chaos, it was also much more functional than even some organized states are today so the definition doesn't entirely hold true.
Jean
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