margrave

a German nobleman ranking above a count. Margraves were originally counts appointed to govern frontier provinces, but all had become princes of the Holy Roman Empire by the 12th century

Collins Discovery Encyclopedia, 1st edition © HarperCollins Publishers 2005

The following article is from The Great Soviet Encyclopedia (1979). It might be outdated or ideologically biased.

Margrave

originally an official in the Carolingian empire and the Holy Roman Empire.

The office of margrave was established by Charlemagne to administer marches. The margrave enjoyed broader powers than an ordinary count—particularly permanent military authority. With the development of feudalism, margraves became semi-independent or independent rulers of entire regions; in Germany they became princes. In France, Spain, and Italy, margrave (marquess) is one of the highest titles of nobility.

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References in periodicals archive

After securing pledges of support from its ally Ulm, in October 1544 Augsburg's council installed an evangelical preacher named Hans Hess in the vacant parish of Mindelaltheim, a hamlet in the Habsburg Margraviate of Burgau.

"One does not live by bread alone": rural reform and village political strategies after the Peasants' War

Upper and Lower Lusatia, a region between Berlin and Dresden and west of the Oder River, had more Slays than Germans, and the German Margraviate was not as centralized as it was in Meissen-Saxony.

Local Lutheran boy finally makes good, sixty years late

On the other hand, the largest territorial principalities of Southwest Germany--namely, the Electoral Palatinate, the Margraviate of Baden, (33) the Duchy of Pfalz-Zweibrucken, and the counties of Leiningen and Nassau-Weilburg--were prepared to offer long-term toleration agreements to these Anabaptist refugees, now known as "Mennonites." (34) Thus, the six families settled permanently in these territories, where they created geographically extensive kinship networks and developed a new set of agricultural skills, since their knowledge of Alpine agriculture did not readily apply to the regions southwest of the Rhine, which were topographically quite different.

Middle-class formation in rural society: Mennonite peasant merchants in the palatinate, Rhine Hesse, and the northern Rhine valley, 1740-1880

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