316 Chapter 17than shirts. Such distinctions existed across Europe. In
the east, a few families of grand seigneurs owned most
of the land (and the serfs on it) while thousands of aris-
tocrats owned little or nothing. The Polish aristocracy,
known collectively as the szlachta,included 700,000 to
one million people, but only thirty to forty magnate
families possessed the wealth and power normally asso-
ciated with the nobility. Part of the szlachtaworked on
the estates of great nobles as bailiffs, stewards, or tenant
farmers; most of this caste lived as small farmers on
rented land, and many were so poor that they were
known as the golota,a barefoot aristocracy.
The Privileged Status of the Aristocracy
The wealth and power of the high nobility present one
of the most vivid images of the corporative society of
the Old Regime. Some aristocrats enjoyed dizzying
wealth and a life of luxury. In the Austrian Netherlands
(now Belgium), the duke of Arenberg had an annual in-
come eighteen times the income of the richest mer-
chant. In Poland, Prince Radziwill kept ten thousand
retainers in his service. In England, the top four hun-
dred noble families each owned estates of ten thousand
to fifty thousand acres. In Russia, Empress Catherine
the Great gave one of her discarded lovers a gift of
thirty-seven thousand serfs, and Prince Menshikov
owned 100,000 serfs. In Bohemia, one hundred noble
families owned one-third of the entire province, and
the poorer members of this group owned land encom-
passing thirty villages. In Spain, the count of Altamira
owned the commercial city of Valencia.
Such wealth produced breathtaking inequality. The
count of Tavannes in France paid a gardener or a maid
on his provincial estates seventy livres per year, and the
valued chef at his Paris residence earned 945 livres per
year; yet the count lavished twenty thousand livres on
clothing and jewelry. The count’s monthly expenditure
on coffee and cognac totaled nearly a year’s wages for a
servant, and his budget for theater tickets would have
cost the total yearly earnings of twenty-eight servants.
Sustaining a life of such extreme luxury led many lesser
nobles into ruinous debt. Extravagance and debt be-
came so typical of the nobility (including royalty) in
the eighteenth century that some countries, such as
Spain, made arresting aristocrats for their debts illegal.
In addition to enormous wealth, nobles held great
power. They dominated offices of the state, both in the
government and in the military. In some countries, no-
tably Sweden, Prussia, and Russia, the concept of aris-
tocratic service to the throne had led to an arrangementin which the aristocracy accepted compulsory state ser-
vice and received in return a legal monopoly over cer-
tain positions. The eighteenth-century Russian Charter
of the Nobility, for example, stated: “The title and priv-
ileges of the nobility... are acquired by service and
work useful to the Empire.” Therefore, it continued,
whenever the emperor “needs the service of the nobil-
ity for the general well being, every nobleman is then
obligated... to perform fully his duty.” In return for
this compulsory service, the Charter of the Nobility
recognized the right of nobles to buy and sell villages,
excluded nobles from some taxes that fell on common-
ers, gave nobles a monopoly of some positions, and
spared nobles some of the punishments (such as flog-
ging) specified in Russian law. In much of Europe, only
aristocrats could become army officers. Nobles univer-
sally dominated the highest positions in government.
At the beginning of the eighteenth century, the chief
minister of the king of France was a marquis, the prime
minister of the king of Prussia was a count, the head of
the state council of the Habsburg Empire was a count,
the chief minister of the tsar of Russia was a prince,
and the chief adviser to the king of Spain was a cardi-
nal. For the century before the French Revolution of
1789, the chief ministers of the kings of France were (in
order): a marquis, a cardinal, a duke, a duke, a cardinal,
a marquis, a count, a minor aristocrat, a duke, a duke,
and a count.
In addition to personal wealth and powerful offices,
aristocrats of the Old Regime usually held a privileged
position in the law, exceptional rights on their landed
estates, and great power over the people who lived on
their land. In most countries, nobles were governed by
substantially different laws than the rest of the popula-
tion. Some countries had a separate legal code for aris-
tocrats, some had legal charters detailing noble
privileges, some simply adopted laws granting special
treatment. Legal privileges took many forms. Exemp-
tion from the laws that applied to commoners was one
of the most cherished. Aristocrats were exempted from
most taxes that fell on peasants or town dwellers, and
they tenaciously defended their exemptions even as the
monarchy faced bankruptcy. In Hungary, the Magyar
nobles were free from all direct taxes such as those on
land or income; they guarded this privilege by giving
regular contributions to the throne, but nobles con-
trolled the process and the amount themselves. Aristo-
crats were exempt from the corvée,a labor tax by which
peasants were obliged to maintain roads and bridges
(see illustration 17.2). Penal codes usually exempted
nobles from the corporal punishment common, such as
flogging and branding.