No group better embodied the traditional noble ideal in the late Holy Roman Empire than the pedigreed knights, Protestant and Catholic, of Electoral Mainz. This study traces the transnational "geocultural" landscape in which they thrived and its transformation by social, political and national revolution. It explores the comparative history of the knights who became divided between those who emigrated to the Habsburg Empire (where their geocultural landscape survived) and those who remained in Germany and forged a new identity as nobles in the cultural world of the "nation".