ministerialis

The ministeriales (singular: ministerialis) were a legally unfree but socially elite class of knights, administrators, and officials in the High Middle Ages in the Holy Roman Empire, drawn from a mix of servile origins, free commoners, and even cadet sons of minor noble families, who served secular and ecclesiastical lords and often rose to hold hereditary land, noble titles, and political power indistinguishable from the free nobility. The word and its German translations, Ministeriale(n) and Dienstmann, came to describe those unfree nobles who made up a large majority of what could be described as the German knighthood during that time. What began as an irregular arrangement of workers with a wide variety of duties and restrictions rose in status and wealth to become the power brokers of...