There is a Duke of Moctezuma alive today — he lives in Madrid, runs a marketing agency, and holds a Spanish title, one of many granted to the Aztec nobility that survived the conquest of their empire. The concept of ennobling conquered people makes sense when you consider what the aristocracy actually was.

Nobility was a property to be managed. I enjoy thinking about the concept of aristocracy because it bends the modern brain a bit — social class is so tied to wealth now that the alternative is unimaginable. Being noble was a social status that behaved like a deed to land. You either held it or you didn’t, but its worth varied continuously, and it could be bought, sold, or married into.

In the pre-modern era a wealthy merchant was still a commoner whereas a broke aristocrat, in theory at least, had more in common with the advisor to the king than to that merchant. For us moderns the idea of disjoint wealth and class doesn’t make sense, but it was the title and social standing that mattered not money.

Nobility was binary, you held it or you didn’t, but it could still be gained and lost. Paying for noble status was common throughout Europe, as was marrying into nobility — titles passed via the male line to their kids. The classic trade was a poor noble marrying a rich commoner’s daughter. There were other ways, royalty, for example, could ennoble people. Gaining an officer’s commission in the Royal Navy automatically made the holder a gentleman. A good analogy is how college works in the U.S. It’s a universally recognized credential, purchasable and basically permanent.

You could, however, lose noble status. In France, an aristocrat who engaged in trade temporarily lost noble standing. Accepting insults or behaving poorly was another more common route to being ignoble. By law you still had the title but de facto nobody cared and you were shunned from your social circles.

The title was associated with owning land and specifically with earning land rents. Nobility had the privilege of collecting taxes from the peasants living on their land. They also charged for using the mill, oven, and wine press — as local monopolies.

Nobility was expected to live off of these land rents. British bankruptcy law forbade landed gentry from declaring bankruptcy but allowed merchants to do so. Since land rents were stable, indebtedness could only be due to personal failings or so the thinking went. Merchants could go bankrupt due to risk, which helped stabilize the economy.

Being nobility meant the title had to be maintained. The reason for this was that there was no governing authority to adjudicate nobility — it was determined instead only in the eyes of fellow men. Your social circle decided whether you were part of it. The benefits of nobility were tied to that standing, where if you lost respect, your credit dried up, your career stalled, and your children couldn’t marry well.

Dueling was the main method of adjudicating disputes. It was the only way to control behavior and maintain honor, so it was exceptionally common. It was so common that in 1804 the sitting Vice President of the United States, Aaron Burr, killed Alexander Hamilton, a former Treasury Secretary, in a duel. During Henry IV’s two-decade reign roughly 4,000 people died in duels.

Military service was the prerogative of the nobility, both a requirement and a privilege. This was seen as a way of justifying the aristocracy’s superiority. An interesting self-justification from the time: an officer serving for honor, serving because that’s what he did, was a better officer to serve under than a commoner seeking advancement.1From this you can see the view nobility had of itself at the time — that a person can only be free when they are independent. The noble already had standing and rents. Nothing could be dangled in front of them, so they would only fight for honor (in theory). They would not flatter or cut corners, or so the thinking went.

Obligation interplayed with independence in interesting ways. In the Royal Navy if you were offered a command of a vessel as captain, you had the right to refuse.2 Legally there could be no retaliation, only your reputation could suffer. Once you had command however, you had a legal requirement to do your utmost. Famously Admiral John Byng was executed for not being maximally aggressive — in Voltaire’s phrase, “pour encourager les autres”.

Nobility was a stable arrangement (though not necessarily a good one).3 The aristocracy policed itself and the state got authority without needing to have direct control. When the Aztecs were conquered by the Spanish, the Aztec nobility still existed. They gained noble titles under the Spanish crown and then petitioned for their lands to be reinstated and recognized after the conquest.

Recognizing the asset served Spain. In pre-modern governance the state did not have a strong hold on the land, so it delegated authority in exchange for loyalty. Recognizing the existing nobility was a way to co-opt the existing social structure of Mexico. Honoring Moctezuma’s heirs also solidified Spain’s claim to Mexico.

The asset of nobility was legible to the Spanish, and so Aztec nobles were able to join the Spanish nobility. They intermarried, and were admitted to Spanish military orders that required certified proof of nobility — Spain’s bureaucracy examined Aztec descent and accepted it.

Racial concerns existed at the time, but that these were conquered and different people was overridden by their social standing. It was more important that they were nobles than that they were Aztec.

The final result is that the royal Aztec titles outlived the Spanish Empire. Moctezuma’s family was titled — first as counts, later as dukes — and there still exists a Duke of Moctezuma today, who runs a marketing agency in Madrid.

1

Christopher Duffy, The Military Experience in the Age of Reason (1987).

2

This whole essay started with my reading of the Aubrey–Maturin novels.

3

Arjun Panickssery’s Aristocracy and Hostage Capital, which summarizes Douglas Allen’s The Institutional Revolution, makes a related argument for why the arrangement was stable and partly inspired this essay.