1. Urban hereditary nobility
Scholars dispute what exactly “urban nobility” means, and whether the term is suitable at all for defining particular groups of urban dwellers (Town). On the one hand, it is used to denote a type of (lesser) nobility that lived a unique, to some extent quasi-bourgeois lifestyle. This was the urban nobility in its purest form, that is, hereditary nobles who lived in towns, and who also conducted substa…