Magnate
Person (usually a man) in a position of high wealth, power, or nobility
A magnate was a man from the higher nobility, a man who belonged to the high office-holders, or a man in a high social position, by birth, wealth or other qualities in Western Christian countries since the medieval period. It also includes the members of the higher clergy, such as bishops, archbishops and cardinals. In reference to the medieval, the term is often used to distinguish higher territorial landowners and warlords, such as counts, earls, dukes, and territorial-princes from the baronage. In Poland the szlachta (nobles) constituted one of the largest proportions of the population (around 10-12%) and 'magnat' refers to the richest nobles, or nobles of the nobility, even though they had equal voting rights in Poland's electoral monarchy.
01England
In England, the magnate class went through a change in the later Middle Ages. It had previously consisted of all tenants-in-chief of the crown, a group of more than a hundred families. The emergence of Parliament led to the establishment of a parliamentary peerage that received personal summons, rarely more than sixty families. A similar class in the Gaelic world were the Flatha. In the Middle Ages, a bishop sometimes held territory as a magnate, collecting the revenue of the manors and the associated knights' fees.
02Poland and Lithuania
Magnates were a social class of wealthy and influential nobility in the Crown of the Kingdom of Poland and Grand Duchy of Lithuania, and later the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth.
03Similar terms elsewhere
Velikaš is the Serbo-Croatian word for 'magnate', derived from veliko ('great, large, grand'). It was used to refer to the highest nobility of Serbia in the Middle Ages and Croatia in the Middle Ages.
In Spain, since the late Middle Ages, the highest class of nobility hold the appellation of Grandee of Spain and was known earlier as ricohombres.
In Sweden, the wealthiest medieval lords were known as storman (plural stormän), "great men", a similar description and meaning as the English term magnate, see "Swedish nobility" for more.
Sources and credits
This article is adapted from the Wikipedia article “Magnate”, written by its contributors and licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0. Fathomly has changed the layout, removed citation markers, navigation and maintenance notices, and adjusted punctuation. This adapted version is shared under the same license. For references, see the original article.
Images, from Wikimedia Commons:
- Bacciarelli Jan Zamoyski.jpg by Marcello Bacciarelli, Public domain
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