Edler

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Edler (Edler von), was until 1919 a title for the lower nobility in Austria-Hungary, as well as Germany. It was mostly given to civil servants and military officers, as well as those upon whom the second rank of an Order (decoration) had been conferred. Women were styled Edle (Edle von).

Originally, from the Middle Ages, under the feudal system (in Europe and elsewhere), the nobility were generally those who held a fief, often in the form of heritable land worked by vassals.

To preserve the feudal naming practice, even in cases where upper ranking bureaucrats were the recipients of patents of nobility on the basis of long service and/or merit, as in the 18th, 19th, and early 20th centuries (see bureaucratic nobility), the old practice of denoting a noble with a territorial designation was continued out of a sense of tradition.

Thus, landless nobles were created under the formula, "Edler von XYZ", where the surname, XYZ, or possibly a place name, XYZ, followed the German preposition 'von', which, in this context, was taken to denote nobility. The English translation of this is normally "Noble of XYZ", where "XYZ" is classically a place name, but often a surname. Frequently, the nobiliary particle von (English 'of', or, more commonly, the French particule de noblesse 'de', meaning the same thing), was represented simply by the abbreviation 'v.' to specify that it was being used to denote a member of the nobility, and not simply as the ordinary German-language preposition 'von'.

An example of such a person's name and title is 'Josef Draginda, Edler v. Draginda'. His wife would have been, for example, 'Johanna Dragina, Edle v. Draginda'.