The research on nobility investigates certain lifestyles, strategies, and activities of social elites in Croatia, Bosnia, Serbia, and Hungary from the mid-thirteenth to the late fifteenth century. This time frame covers a period from the formation of the landed nobility as a distinct social group in these territories to the emergence of an even more distinguished group among them, the aristocracy (barones). Although thematic sessions of a conference from where these articles derived can hardly lay claim for completeness, this group of papers offers a remarkable cross-section of the many facets of this complex social category. The contributions by eleven young historians and archaeologists tackle – through well researched examples based on the analysis of written and non-textual primary sources – all those issues that were essential for the social distinction that the nobility embodied: ownership of land on some scale, performing military duties, holding offices in the governance and jurisdiction of a certain area, gaining access to diplomatic circles, which were, by the beginning of the fifteenth century, being dominated by highly-educated individuals, as well as being patrons of churches and monasteries. All this, of course, in addition to the descent from particular lineages or kinships. In the following we shall highlight some important points from the five articles along these lines.

The ownership of land was an indispensable – and in the most literal sense of the word fundamental – prerequisite of the eminence of the nobility. In case of the bans of Slavonia and Dalmatia-Croatia tackled by Judit Gál's article, it was taken for granted that only members of families with substantial landed properties qualified for these offices, and all three officeholders in the mid-thirteenth century – Denis Türje, Stephen Gutkeled, and Roland Rátót – stemmed from kindreds with huge ancestral estates and undisputed pedigree. On the contrary, rights and claims for nobility had to be acquired through merits and virtue by members of a specific group, the castle warriors (iobagiones castri) of Slavonia, the protagonists in Éva B. Halász's study. Families of this legal standing were ‘survivors’ of an earlier system based on the military service performed in connection with specific strongholds, from which their right to landownership derived.