For embattled businessmen, an appealing response to the difficult times was flight from the marketplace into social realms that promised more stability. Land offered one such option, and the early modern period witnessed a rapid increase in land purchases by the urban rich. The later sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries apparently were the focal point for such purchases, for after 1650 falling rents made landowning much less attractive, and new forms of safe investment had become more readily available. By that point, however, leading bourgeois in most European cities controlled substantial shares of the surrounding territories. A second possibility fitted well with this option, that of acquiring positions in the growing bureaucracies of the period. Civil services expanded everywhere during the early modern period, giving bourgeois at all levels opportunities to abandon the uncertainties of commerce for the reliable income and social prestige of public office.

France, where public positions were bought and sold, demonstrates in quantitative terms the allure of this mode of life: Between 1600 and 1660, office prices there rose about fivefold, as monied families sought to secure for their sons the tranquil security of officialdom. Though less easily measured, there seems to have been similar enthusiasm for office in the other European states. Most of these new landowners and officials continued to reside in the cities, but they now resembled Europe's traditional elites, its military nobilities, and at their highest levels they began to claim noble status. At the French Estates General of 1614-1615, royal officials had sat with the commoners, but by 1650 the leading judges and officials were generally recognized as nobles, with the full range of noble privileges. In Spain, England, and the German states as well, society generally agreed that such figures counted among the gentlemen, whether the title was formal (as in most of Europe) or informal (as in England).

The accession of new families to noble status was one of several changes affecting Europe's ruling elites during the early modern period. By their very presence, the new nobles brought higher levels of education and urbanity to the nobilities, and in this their impact closely paralleled the growing importance of court life for many nobles. Seventeenth-century monarchs were eager to have their greatest nobles nearby and established elaborate courts for the purpose. Louis XIV's Versailles, to which he moved permanently in 1682, was only the most dramatic example of this policy. By 1700 imitations of Versailles had sprung up all over Europe, and even the court of the Dutch Republic had acquired a new prominence. As a result, the seventeenth-century nobility in general was far more urban than its sixteenth-century predecessors. In Spain and Italy nobles had always played a prominent role in city life, but in the seventeenth century northerners too were drawn to the entertainments and elegance of the city, and urban centers responded to their needs. In the years around 1600, a number of urban development projects were undertaken in London, Paris, Madrid, and other cities so as to make these cities more attractive to this new class of resident. . .

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