Patrician society

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A patrician society is the union of members of a medieval German urban upper class - called "the sexes" - consisting of members of the lower nobility , wealthy merchants and ministerials . The purpose of this association was primarily to ensure the continuity of both the city's politics directly and indirectly to maintain its own power, and often also to conduct joint business, especially in high-risk long-distance trade .

features

The Alt-Limpurg house (left) of the Alten Limpurg Society in Frankfurt am Main, founded in 1357 as the Zum Römer room society
Former seat of the circle society in Lübeck

One of the oldest patrician societies, if not the oldest at all, is the Richerzeche in Cologne , which originated in the 12th century, but whose power was already extinguished in the 14th century. Other patrician societies, which were not founded until the 14th century, existed in some cases with several changes for several hundred years until the end of the German Empire in 1806. Some patrician societies still exist today, for example in Frankfurt am Main the Alten Limpurg society , founded in 1357 as Stubengesellschaft Zum Römer , and the (historically somewhat less elitist) Gesellschaft Zum Frauenstein (from 1382), further for example in Bern the Gesellschaft zum Distelzwang (around 1390) and in Zurich the Gesellschaft zur Constaffel (from 1336).

Patrician societies were often organized on the model of room societies or brotherhoods . Patricians were also merchants, but - in contrast to those who sold “by yard , pound and lot ” - they devoted themselves exclusively to wholesale and long-distance trade .

Where joint property was acquired and passed on to heirs Nachrückende, the legal form was often ganerbschaft selected. If business risks were shared, however, the legal form resembles a forerunner of our current general partnership . The guilds of the Middle Ages either emerged from patrician societies or consisted largely of their members. In a broader sense, the entire German Hanseatic League can even be understood as an amalgamation of patrician societies, whose numerous Artus courts in the Baltic Sea area also served as meeting rooms , namely for the St. George brotherhoods . In addition, terms such as society, guild, guild, office, guild, brotherhood were often not delimited from one another and were therefore used synonymously.

It is significant that patrician societies were "closed societies" in every way, which is shown quite drastically in the 1521 dance statute of the city of Nuremberg . That means: Nobody could join such a society of their own volition, but outsiders were accepted, if at all, by co-opting the existing members. Often the admission into such a society decided on admission to the patriciate and thus on the eligibility for election to the city council. The societies' "swear letters" resembled early constitutions, which for example regulated the distribution of seats between patricians and guilds. In many cases the patricians only defined themselves as a closed, separate estate through these associations and their legal rights.

The marriage policy was operated correspondingly restrictively; marriage was therefore only permitted between persons whose parents all belonged to the same society. This goes so far that - contrary to the opinion still widespread in historians' circles, that the "old citizens" had allied themselves with the royal officials, the imperial ministerial officials, to consolidate their position - they actually only did this in a few cases and even more rarely have sealed family ties. Because the activity of a merchant did not correspond to the tasks or the sense of class of a ministerial, nor could the merchant offer the merchant the prospect of increasing his fortune if he married into his family, since he did not conduct any commercial transactions and his property remained fief-bound , so that the mutual interest in a connection remained rather low. It was not until the end of the 13th century that the dividing line between patriciate and knighthood began to blur. Some of the most respected Nuremberg patrician families had previously been Staufer ministerials who, after the end of the Staufer period , moved to the city from the surrounding area, which had previously belonged to the imperial estate and which the burgraves now appropriated, where they soon became rich through long-distance trade. While the imperial knights despised the patricians half haughty, half enviously, but not infrequently also took credit from them, the patricially ruled cities fought the impoverished robber barons .

The demarcation of the patricians from the knighthood went so far that such undesirable marriages of the bourgeois upper class were sanctioned. For a Viennese bourgeois daughter, for example, marrying a miles , a knight of service, resulted in the decline of freedom and wealth; In Liibeck, too, a bourgeois daughter was only allowed to take with her what she was wearing in such a case.

In the course of time, most of the patrician families united in such societies became aristocratic themselves, but not through connection with ministerials, but through an increase in rank as a result of merit, which was always accompanied by an improvement in the coat of arms. The claim to nobility by birth was a kind of unwritten law, which in Nuremberg , for example , led to the fact that after 1806, when the patriciate was incorporated into the Bavarian nobility, most of the "old" families were accepted into the baron class . Significantly, the Nuremberg patriciate , which had ruled up to that point, only founded its own interest group after the dissolution of the old estates and the incorporation of the Free Imperial City into the Bavarian state in 1799, the select of the Nuremberg patriciate , which has existed to this day and which previously existed due to the factual sole rule of the Nuremberg patrician families inside Council of the city had not been required.

Well-known companies

Haus zum Rüden (from 1348), until today the seat of the Constaffel Society in Zurich
Society House Zum Distelzwang , Bern

The number of patrician societies that once existed is vast; most of these societies have left little traces historically. In contrast, the following are still known today:

literature

  • Lexicon of the Middle Ages , 9 volumes, Metzler, Stuttgart 1999. ISBN 3-4760-1822-9 . Here in particular the keywords Braunschweig and Diocese of Augsburg .
  • Edith Ennen: The European city of the Middle Ages . Vandenhoeck Collection, Göttingen 1987.
  • Gerhard Fouquet et al. a. (Ed.): Gender societies, guild drinking rooms and brotherhoods in late medieval and early modern cities . Jan Thorbecke Verlag, Stuttgart 2003. ISBN 3-7995-6430-6 .
  • Eberhard Isenmann : The German city in the late Middle Ages. 1250-1500. City structure, law, city government, church, society, economy. Stuttgart 1988.
  • Rainer Koch : Basics of bourgeois rule. Constitutional and socio-historical studies on civil society in Frankfurt am Main (1612-1866). Wiesbaden 1983.
  • Hans Körner: Frankfurt patrician. Historical-genealogical handbook of the noble inheritance of the Alten-Limpurg house in Frankfurt am Main . Munich 1971.
  • Wolfgang Reinhard: Oligarchic entanglement and denomination in Upper German cities . In Antoni Mączak (Ed.): Client systems in Europe in the early modern period . Oldenbourg, Munich 1988
  • Fritz and Luise Rörig: The European City and the Culture of the Middle Ages . Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, Göttingen 1955.
  • Tatiana Sfedu: Founding a museum and civic self- image . The Leiner family and the Rosgarten Museum in Konstanz . Dissertation University of Konstanz, Humanities Section, History and Sociology Department, 2006, in the Konstanz online publication system KOPS .