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Nobility is a government-privileged title which may be either hereditary (see hereditary titles) or for a lifetime. Titles of nobility exist today in many countries although it is usually associated with present or former monarchies. The term originally referred to those who were "known" or "notable" and was applied to the highest social class in pre-modern societies. In the feudal system (in Europe and elsewhere), the nobility were generally those who held a fief, often land or office, under vassalage, i.e., in exchange for allegiance and various, mainly military, services to the Monarch and at lower levels to another nobleman. It rapidly came to be seen as a hereditary caste, sometimes associated with a right to bear a hereditary title and, for example in pre-revolutionary France, enjoying fiscal and other privileges. Today, in most Western countries, "noble status" is a purely honorary dignity that confers no legal privileges; an important exception is the United Kingdom, where certain titles - titles of the peerage, until recently, guaranteed a seat in the Upper House of the UK Parliament; hence its name, House of Lords - still confer some residual privileges.

Nobility is a historical, social and often legal notion, which should not be confused with socio-economic status which is mainly statistical based on income and possessions. Being wealthy or influential does not automatically make one a noble, nor are all nobles wealthy and influential (aristocratic families have lost their fortunes in various ways, and the concept of the 'poor nobleman' is almost as old as nobility itself).

Countries without a feudal tradition do not have a nobility as such. Various republics, including the United States and Italy have expressly abolished titles of nobility. Although many such societies have a privileged 'upper class' with great wealth and power, this does not entail a separate legal status, or different forms of address.

Western nobility

European nobility originated from the feudal/seignorial system that arose in Europe during the Middle Ages. Originally, knights or nobles were mounted warriors who swore allegiance to their sovereign and promised to fight for him in exchange for an allocation of land (usually together with serfs living there). During the time period known as the Military Revolution, nobles gradually lost their role of raising and commanding private armies, as many nations created cohesive national armies. This was coupled with a loss of the social-economic power of the nobility, owing to the economic changes of the Renaissance and the growing economic importance of the merchant classes (or bourgeoisie), which increased still further during the Industrial Revolution. In countries where the nobility was the dominant class, the bourgeoisie gradually grew in power; a rich city merchant was more influential than a minor rural nobleman. However, in many countries at this time, the nobility retained great social and political importance; for instance, the UK's government was dominated by the nobility until the middle of the 19th century and thereafter the powers of the nobility were progressively reduced by legislation (see Reform of the House of Lords).

The nobility of a person might be either inherited or earned. Nobility in its most general and strict sense is an acknowledged preeminence that is hereditary: i.e., legitimate descendants (or all male descendants, in some societies) of nobles are nobles, unless explicitly stripped of the privilege. In this respect, nobility is distinguished from the peerage: the latter can be passed to only a single member of the family. The terms aristocrat and aristocracy are a less formal means to refer to persons belonging to this social milieu. Those lacking a distinct title, such as junior siblings of peers (and perhaps even the children of 'self-made' VIPs) may be considered aristocrats, moving within a small social circle at the apex of a hierarchical social pyramid.

In France, influential high bourgeois, most particularly the members of the parlements (courts of justice), obtained noble titles from the king. The old nobility of military origin, the noblesse d'épée ("nobility of the sword") became increasingly irritated by this newer noblesse de robe ("nobility of the gown"). In the last years of the ancien régime, before the French Revolution, the old nobility, intent on keeping its privileges, had pushed for restrictions of certain offices and orders of chivalry to noblemen who could demonstrate that their family had enough "noble quarterings" (in French, 'quartiers de noblesse'), a reference to a noble's ability to display armorially their descents from armigerous noble forebears in each of their lines of descent to demonstrate that they were descended from old noble families, who bore arms that could be quartered with their own male line arms, and thus prove that they did not derive merely from bourgeois families recently elevated to noble rank (although historians such as William Doyle have disputed this so-called 'Aristocratic Reaction'. (W. Doyle, Essays on Eighteenth Century France, London, 1995). A noble could be asked to provide proof of noble antecedents by showing a genealogy displaying seize quartiers (sixteen quarterings) or even trente-deux quartiers (thirty-two quartering) indicating noble descent on all bloodlines back five generations (to great-great grandparents) or six generations (great-great-great grandparents), respectively. This illustrates the traditional link in many countries between heraldry and nobility; in those countries where heraldry is used, nobles have almost always been armigerous, and have used heraldry to demonstrate their ancestry and family history. (However, it is important to note that heraldry has never been restricted to the noble classes in most countries, and being armigerous does not necessarily demonstrate nobility.)

Nobles typically commanded resources, such as food, money, or labor, from common members or nobles of lower rank of their societies, and could exercise religious or political power over them. Also, typically, but not necessarily, nobles were entitled to land property, which was often reflected in the title. For example, the title Earl of Chesterfield tells about property, while the title Earl Cairns was created for a surname. However all the above is not universal; quite often nobility was associated only with social respect and certain social privileges. An example of the latter would be early 20th-century Polish nobility (szlachta) after their political, economic, judicial and religious privileges were abolished in 1921 and they remained only landed proprietors on the same legal basis as their landed-commoner neighbours. In the modern age, the notion of inherited nobility with special rights has become, in the Western World, increasingly seen as irrelevant to the modern way of life. The founding fathers of the United States rejected anything that could have helped in recreating a nobility; the French Revolution abolished the nobility and its special privileges (though some nobility titles would be recreated by Napoleon I and III, they were mostly honorific).

A list of noble titles for different European countries can be found at Royal and noble ranks. To learn how to properly address holders of these titles, see Royal and noble styles.

Some con artists also sell fake titles of nobility, often with impressive-looking documents to back them up. These may be illegal, depending on local law. They are more often illegal in countries that actually have nobilities:such as European monarchies. In the U.S., such commerce would be a form of fraud, but it would only victimize the buyer of the supposed titles and would not threaten an established class of nobles with enforceable titles.

"Blue" blood

Blue blood is an English idiom recorded since 1834 for noble birth or descent; it is a translation of the Spanish phrase sangre azul, which described the Spanish royal family and other high nobility who claimed to be of Visigothic descent, in contrast to the Moors. There is no connection between the phrase and the actual blood color of nobility; however, in the ancient and medieval societies of Europe, much of the upper class may have had superficial veins that appeared blue through their untanned skin, in contrast with the working class of the time, mainly agricultural peasants who spent most of their time working outdoors and thus had tanned skin. An alternative traditional explanation, argyria (a disease causing a blue-grey skin tone after digestion of silver), is considered less valid, as table silverware was not yet regularly used by much of the nobility. Another explanation has also been put forward:methemoglobinemia, caused by in-breeding.

Robert Lacey explains the genesis of the blue blood concept:

It was the Spaniards who gave the world the notion that an aristocrat's blood is not red but blue. The Spanish nobility started taking shape around the ninth century in classic military fashion, occupying land as warriors on horseback. They were to continue the process for more than five hundred years, clawing back sections of the peninsula from its Moorish occupiers, and a nobleman demonstrated his pedigree by holding up his sword arm to display the filigree of blue-blooded veins beneath his pale skin—proof that his birth had not been contaminated by the dark-skinned enemy. (Robert Lacey, Aristocrats. Little, Brown and Company, 1983, p. 67)

The same expression is encountered in other languages, such as:

Albanian	gjak i kaltër (djak i kalteur)	Bulgarian	синя кръв (sinya krăv)	Catalan	sang blava
Czech	modrá krev	Croatian	plava krv	Danish	blåt blod
Dutch	blauw bloed	Estonian	sinivereline	French	sang bleu
Filipino/Tagalog	dugong bughaw	Finnish	siniverisyys	German	blaues Blut
Greek	γαλαζοαίματος (galazoaímatos)	Hungarian	kékvérű	Icelandic	blátt blóð
Indonesian	darah biru	Italian	sangue blu	Latvian	zilās asinis
Lithuanian	mėlynas kraujas	Macedonian	сина крв	Maltese	demm blu
Norwegian	blått blod or blåblodig	Persian	Najabat or نجابت	Polish	błękitna krew
Portuguese	sangue azul	Romanian	sânge albastru	Russian	голубая кровь (golubaya krov’)
Serbian	плава крв (plava krv)	Slovak	modrá krv	Slovenian	modra kri
Spanish	sangre azul	Swedish	blått blod or blåblodig	Turkish	Soylu

Nobility in Eastern countries

Medieval Japan developed a feudal system similar to the European system, where land was held in exchange for military service. The daimyo class, or hereditary landowning nobles, had great social and political power. Like their European counterparts, they commanded private armies made up of samurai, an elite warrior class; for long periods, these held real power without a real central government and often plunged the country into a state of civil war. Although there are differences, the daimyo class can be compared to European peers, and the samurai to European knights, but with important differences, such as the distinction between the European code of chivalry and the Japanese code of bushido. These feudal titles and ranks were abolished in Japan with the Meiji Restoration of 1868 and replaced by the kazoku, a five-rank peerage system after the British example which granted seats in the upper house of the Imperial Diet, but this too was abolished in 1947, following Japan's defeat in World War II.

Many other non-Western nations have had noble or aristocratic classes of various kinds: these are so diverse that it is somewhat misleading to try to translate them all into western feudal terminology. For the feudal hierarchy on the Indian subcontinent, see princely state.

In some Islamic countries, there are no definite nobility titles, but the closest to that are given the title Syed or Sayyid. This exclusive title, given only to certain descendants, literally means, 'Sir' or 'Lord'. There are no special rights concerning the title: they are considered more religious than the general population, and many people come to them for first-hand religious questions.

In Iran, the nobility titles are Mirza, Khan, ed-Dowleh, Shahzada, etc... . Nowadays, these titles don't exist anymore, an aristocrat family can now being recognized by his family name (often derived from the post the ancestors had, considering the fact that family name in Iran only appeared in the beginning of the 20th century) .

In East Asia the system was often modelled on imperial China, the leading culture, where the emperor conferred degrees of nobility, which were not permanent but decreased a rank each generation. China had a feudal system in the Shang and Zhou dynasties, but the system gave way to a more bureaucratic system beginning in the Qin dynasty (221 BC). By the Qing dynasty, titles of nobility were still granted by the emperor, but served merely as honorifics: under a centralized system, governance in the empire was the responsibility of the Confucian-educated scholar-officials and local gentry.

In tribal societies, such as and the Polynesian Island states, the system of often (semi-)hereditary tribal chiefs can also be compared to a form of noble class; in Tonga, after Tongan contact with Western nations, the traditional system of chiefs developed into a Western-style monarchy with a hereditary class of barons, even adopting that English title.

Nobility by nation

For full categorized countries, see Category:Nobility by nation; some other follow:

Sources and references

External links

The German nobility
WW-Person, an on-line database of European noble genealogy
Paul Theroff's An Online Gotha
Genealogics, an extensive database of European nobles
Worldroots, a selection of art and genealogy of European nobility
RoyalArk- ruling houses in many non-European countries
Web site on the Royalty, the Nobility, the History and the Patrimony
The Armenian nobility
The Maltese Nobility and its ilks.
The Russian Nobility Association in America
Italian dynastic genealogies (in Italian, with an introduction in English)
Worldwidewords
Fake titles