About five or six centuries ago in central Europe, they just did things differently. At least they did with regard to the nobility. Nobody ever wrote down anything about the common people, so we have no idea.
A case in point is Ulrich, the Duke of Würtemberg. He was born February 8 in 1487, and evidently wasn’t disciplined very much as a child. His mother had died in childbirth, and his father was banished to a remote castle due to insanity. Then his only guardian died when Ulrich was 9. No problem, though, because he was became the Duke of Würtemberg — and thus The Guy In Charge — when he was just 11. Then he was “declared” an adult (possibly by himself) when he was 15.
As a ruler, there’s wide agreement that he was a real stinker. He spent money extravagantly — the kind of guy who, nowadays, would have not one but three superyachts. Würtemberg was not a wealthy region, and the Duke’s subjects were not pleased by his extravagance, nor by his draconian methods of squeezing money out of them to spend on his latest toys.
There was a rebellion in 1514 that Ulrich managed to survive by making concessions to the other noble houses in the area. But he was also having trouble with the Swabian League, which was a sort of federation of sovereign states in the area. To make matters worse, his wife Sabina despised him, and the feeling was evidently mutual. So Ulrich pursued the wife of a knight named Hans von Hutten — and killed the knight. But the knight had powerful friends, who helped Sabina escape Würtemberg, and she took her case to the Holy Roman Emperor (who sort of outranked all the other nobles), and he took her side. So did the Swabian League, which already disliked Ulrich. Everybody banded together, drove Ulrich out of Würtemberg, and sold the whole place off to the Habsburg dynasty.
Ulrich was exiled from Würtemberg, and spent his time for several years in areas that are now Switzerland, France, and Germany. He tried to assemble an army to retake his home city, but it was made up of Swiss soldiers and peasants. The soldiers were recalled to their normal duties, and the peasants were really no help in a battle, so Ulrich had to give it up. He did, however, manage to make at least one friend: Philip the Landgrave of Hesse. He helped Ulrich ally himself with some other nobles who wanted to reduce the power of the Habsburg dynasty (at the time they had control of Würtemberg, among a lot of other things), and in 1534 they mounted their attack, and drove the Habsburgs out of Würtemberg.
Ulrich was back in charge and wasted no time annoying everyone all over again. He had convents and monasteries destroyed, and seized huge amounts of church property. His excuse was the religious struggle between the Roman Catholic church, headed by the Emperor, and reformers led by Martin Luther. But he also got to keep all the loot he seized, so there might have been another reason. I mean, who knows; it was hundreds of years ago.
Ulrich’s next adventure was battling the Emperor’s army in the oddly named “Schmalkaldic War,” where his troops lost decisively and Würtemberg was overrun. They let him keep his title and live in his castle, but took back most of the stuff he’d seized, and it appears that they booted him out of Würtemberg once again (to the residents’ delight, I suspect). He died just a few years later in Germany. There’s a statue of him in the German town of Balingen, and he was buried in another German town, Tübingen, which at least at one time was part of Würtemberg. I couldn’t find any evidence that his grave there is marked, but Tübingen does have one other notable fact: it was the site of Germany’s first-ever Automatic Teller Machine, in 1968. Ulrich would have loved ATMs.
