> Feudal nobles of Europe resented and despised the merchant class even if they could not utterly suppress it. Sure, and as with all rank, there is an element

> Feudal nobles of Europe resented and despised the merchant class even if they could not utterly suppress it. Sure, and as with all rank, there is an element of pride driving this. You even have racial origin theories like the Sarmatian origin myth that held for a couple centuries among the Polish nobility to distinguish themselves from commoners. But the distaste for merchants I gather is more complex than absence of noble title, or rather, the noble title is presumed to have some association with certain virtues opposed to mercantile activity. For example, pre-industrial Polish nobility were actually forbidden from engaging in all commerce save for commerce of an agrarian nature. Probably whatever else they earned came from some kind of taxation, at least among those rich enough to own villages, towns, or even cities. But why forbid commerce? Either the Crown had managed to check the power of the nobility in some way (who had become obscenely wealthy by the 17th century), or the nobility themselves saw that they should not themselves partake in such commerce for some, ostensibly virtuous, reasons. But the fact is that the wealthier nobility nonetheless had the upper hand and the advantage. Poorer family members were known to work for their richer relatives. So you have segmentation within a given social class by wealth. > There were strict theocracies where the priestly caste would hold sway. Notably, scholars were considered more prestigious in Jewish societies than businesspeople, which might have contributed to the intellectual strength of the nation that is obvious even now. I would say that even in Catholic Europe, which was Catholic-confessional but never theocratic and could not legitimately be by virtue of the Christian distinction between secular and religious estates (something unique in history; e.g. neither Jews nor Muslims understand this concept natively, only as something borrowed ill-fittingly and ad hoc from the Christian worldview), the priesthood was (and among Catholics still is) regarded as the higher calling owing to man's supernatural end. Thus Catholics understand the supreme pontiff as the highest ranking authority on earth and the bishops as very literally the princes of the Church. This places them above the nobility in a certain sense, even if this is more of a partial rather than total order. And of course the clergy were the best educated members of society and among whom no hereditary advantages existed in the strict sense (even if the nobility within its ranks did promote "nephews" to various positions, but this is an aberration). Perhaps we can understand this as the result of the Catholic priesthood being heir to the Jewish priesthood. Which is to say that here, a bishop has higher rank than a wealthy noble.