Noble Bondsmen: Ministerial Marriages in the Archdiocese of Salzburg, 1100-1343 by John B. Freed (review)

534 BOOK REVIEWS Noble Bondsmen: Ministerial Marriages in the Archdiocese of Salzburg, 1100-1343- By John B. Freed. (Ithaca, NewYork: Cornell University Press. 1995. Pp. xvi, 304.) For more than twenty years John B. Freed has devoted most of his scholarly energy to an intensive investigation of the ministeriales of the archbishopric of Salzburg from the tenth to the fourteenth century; this book is the cumulative result of those long labors. Ministeriais were those of unfree origin who through their service to princes slowly rose up to become the core ofthe lower nobility of the late Middle Ages. This development is usually regarded as a peculiarity of Germanophone Europe, although Otto of Freising, for instance, noted with apparent admiration an analogous northern Italian practice of knighting serfs. The difference lay perhaps in the determination of German princes to keep their ministerials in their servile legal position, regardless of their accomplishments. The resulting tensions could sometimes be highly explosive , as is revealed in Galbert of Bruges' famous account of the assassination of Charles the Good, count of Flanders (1109-1127), at the hands of the powerful Erembald clan. Freed's book represents an illuminating contribution to the literature on this vexing problem of medieval legal and social history. While acknowledging Benjamin Arnold's achievement in German Knighthood, 1050-1300 (1985),Freed findsArnold's definition ofministerial as"servile knight"inadequate for the AustroBavarian part of the Empire. Freed also seeks to supplement the classic work on this region, Land and Lordship by Otto Brunner, who chose to ignore the ministerial origins of the lower nobility and hence skewed our understanding of the full picture. Furthermore, instead of pursuing the more customary legal or political approach to this subject, Freed has taken the road of social history, specifically by tracing closely the family history and marriage strategies of 169 lineages. He thus pays far more attention to women ministerials than has usually been paid, and he also imaginatively employs some artistic and literary evidence as well. The painstaking work required has paid offwell here, for among other things Freed expands our comprehension ofthe dynamics involved in the creation of the second largest ecclesiastical principality in Christendom (after the Papal States) and offers a convincing explanation for the resurgence of the dowry in the thirteenth century. No doubt German and Austrian scholars will, as usual, contest the attributions and connections made by an outsider,but I suspect that Freed's treatment will hold up well. In short, this is a book which offers more than its title would suggest—the reverse , I regret to say, of the normal practice these days. It also represents a happy marriage of traditional, precise scholarship grounded in the sources together with recent theories and models of family strategies. University ofDelaware Lawrence G. Duggan ...