The Moral Code of Violence: Feuding Noblemen in Early Modern Germany

• In Event: Honor and Violence in Renaissance Europe

Abstract

The paper explores the feuds of German nobles in the fifteenth and sixteenth century. Widespread to the point of causing major political and economic disruptions, yet widely accepted throughout society, the noble feud has been a central (and controversial) theme of German historiography. I will present a new interpretation based on an overlooked fact: contrary to what sociological paradigms might lead one to expect, feud violence was eminently an in-group phenomenon. Nobles feuded mostly not against strangers but against their neighbors, relatives and feudal lords. Re-conceptualizing the nobility as a culture of trust, this new interpretation will seek to explain feuding in terms of a moral system that paradoxically provided powerful incentives to engage in violence.

Author

• Hillay Zmora, Ben-Gurion University of the Negev