ABSTRACT
This chapter analyses two important strategies of lordship: how lords bequeathed their property and how they married off their sons and daughters. It considers the development of inheritance rights. A decisive change in the inheritance rights of the principalities and counties first appeared in the second half of the twelfth century and became standard in the course of the thirteenth. The transference of concepts of private property to the principalities and counties had considerable repercussions for the social and economic situation of each family, and also altered the political landscape of the German empire. While daughters were only given a subsidiary inheritance right to the lordship, each son through birth was entitled to the inheritance and thus entitled to exercise lordship, and through marriage to found his own lineage. In terms of content, inheritance renunciations are very similar one to another. They covered both paternal and maternal inheritance.
