The boundaries of identity that we have considered in Jenatsch's life so far—nationality, ethnicity, and religion—should feel quite familiar to modern readers, though they did not necessarily work the same way in the seventeenth century as they do today. Ethnicity and language did not yet possess the seemingly natural connection to political order that gives the modern nation-state much of its potency, yet Jenatsch's life illustrates that linguistic and local identity could unite some people and exclude others in a way that resembles more recent conflicts. Similarly, religious difference, including conflict between those for whom religion is central and those for whom it is not, continues to divide the modern world, nor do we find it any easier than Jenatsch's contemporaries to separate religiously inspired action from politics clothed in religious garb. This chapter, however, turns to a way of grouping people and establishing boundaries between them that differs in essential ways from modern patterns: social estate.

The idea that orderly human societies consist of three distinct estates, defined by their different contributions to the common good, coalesced within the European tradition during the tumultuous eleventh century, and it remained a potent ideology—even though far from a reality—during Jenatsch's era. As analyzed by historian Georges Duby, a group of thinkers active around the year 1000 proposed that three distinct estates defined most human relations (by “estate” they meant status or condition).