Patrician (post-Roman Europe)

Please note that the content of this book primarily consists of articles available from Wikipedia or other free sources online. Patricianship, the quality of belonging to a patriciate, began in the ancient world, where cities such as Ancient Rome had a class of patrician families whose members were the only people allowed to exercise many political functions. In the rise of European towns in the tenth and eleventh centuries, the patriciate, a limited group of families with a special constitutional position, in Henri Pirenne''s view, was the motive force. With the establishment of the medieval Italian republics, the patriciate was a formally defined class of governing elite burgher families of many medieval republics, such as Venice, Florence, Genoa, Amalfi and Amsterdam and also in many of the Free imperial cities of Germany and Switzerland.... Mehr