Courtier - Description

Description

Monarchs very often expected the more important nobles to spend much of the year in attendance on them at court. Courtiers were not all noble, as they included clergy, soldiers, clerks, secretaries, and agents and middlemen of all sorts with regular business at court. Those personal favorites without business around the monarch, sometimes called the camarilla, were also considered courtiers. Promotion to important positions could be very rapid at court, and for the ambitious there was no better place to be. As social divisions became more rigid, a divide, barely present in Antiquity or the Middle Ages, opened between menial servants and other classes at court, although Alexandre Bontemps, the head valet de chambre of Louis XIV was a late example of a "menial" who managed to establish his family in the nobility. The key commodities for a courtier were access and information, and a large court operated at many levels - many successful careers at court involved no direct contact with the monarch.

The largest and most famous European court was that of the Palace of Versailles at its peak, although the Forbidden City of Beijing was even larger and more isolated from national life. Very similar features marked the courts of all very large monarchies, whether in Delhi, Topkapı Palace in Istanbul, Ancient Rome, Byzantium, or the Caliphs of Baghdad or Cairo. Early medieval European courts frequently traveled from place to place following the monarch as he traveled. This was particularly the case in the early French court. But, the European nobility generally had independent power and was less controlled by the monarch until roughly the 18th century, which gave European court life a very more complex flavour.