What were the political and social roles of nobles?
TTHE EXPANSION OF CENTRALIZED ROYAL POWER AND LAW involved limiting the power of the nobility, but rulers also worked through nobles, who retained their privileged status and cultural importance. In fact, the nobility continued to hold real political and social power in Europe into the nineteenth century.
Saint MauriceThis sandstone statue from Magdeburg Cathedral, carved around 1250, shows the warrior Saint Maurice. Some of the individuals who were held up to young men as models of ideal chivalry were probably real, but their lives were embellished with many stories. One example was Saint Maurice (d. 287), a soldier apparently executed by the Romans for refusing to renounce his Christian faith. He first emerges in the Carolingian period, and later he was held up as a model knight and declared a patron of the Holy Roman Empire and protector of the imperial army in wars against the pagan Slavs. His image was used on coins, and his cult was promoted by the archbishops of Magdeburg, who moved his relics to their cathedral. Until 1240, he was portrayed as a white man, but after that he was usually represented as a black man, as in this statue. Historians have no idea why this change occurred. (Courtesy, The Menil Foundation, Houston)