Why do you seldom hear of western aristocrats fighting for family property?

　　I don’t know if you are surprised, but in the West, the richer and richer the family, the less family property disputes will be staged.
　　In the history of Europe, the bigger the nobles, the more they regarded property disputes within the family as a matter of disgrace, and the few family property wars only occurred in the disputes of distant relatives when there was a vacancy in the legal heir of a certain noble.
　　The tradition of Western aristocrats not to fight for family property has something to do with their ancestors. The ancestors of Western Europeans, the Germans, originally followed the law of equal inheritance. After the collapse of the Roman Empire, the Charlemagne Empire, which was once the most promising to unify Western Europe, staged a drama of “fighting for family property” after experiencing glory. Its territory was eventually divided equally by three grandchildren, which became France, Germany and Northern Italy respectively. . But the problem with this equal share method is that the national power is weakened. Western Europe followed a feudal system, and once the property of the vassals was divided equally, it often meant that their children could not have enough strength to provide military service for the lord.
　　In order to avoid this disadvantage, Western European countries began to implement the “Salik Inheritance Law” since the middle of the Middle Ages, which stipulated in the form of law that after the death of a nobleman, his estate and the feudal obligations attached to it must be owned by his surviving eldest son. inherit. Property in the Middle Ages consisted primarily of estates. The king or the big nobles can still find a way to squeeze out a piece of territory and give their younger sons a smaller noble. The younger nobles can only watch their younger sons become ordinary people after their death.
　　In the eyes of most people, such an inheritance law is biased, but the “Salik Inheritance Law” has achieved an unexpected consequence in European history: because nobles are worried about the future of their younger sons, they often choose to invest in education. Invest so that they can make a good living after their own death. As a result, we see that European universities began to spring up like mushrooms in the High Middle Ages. The University of Bologna in Italy was founded in 1119, the University of Paris in France in 1150, and the University of Oxford in England in 1249. The original main force of students in these universities was actually the young sons of nobles. These college students have to study extraordinarily hard to get a good job as a prelate after graduation. Yes, that’s how European “noble education” first came about.
　　Of course, for those young sons of the nobles who really couldn’t learn, another path was also open for them, and that was to become mercenaries. In the various mercenary groups that traveled all over Europe in the Middle Ages, there were a large number of young sons of low-level nobles or knights, and some mercenary groups even simply used the name “So-and-so Second Sons”.
　　After the opening of the Age of Discovery, the younger sons of the nobles had a new way out, that is, to ask their father or elder brother for a sum of money, and go to the other side of the ocean to make a living. These people became the elite and main force in the European colonial movement. Their hunger for success drove Europe’s expansion into the New World.
　　”What is left to the eldest son is the land, and what is left to the second son is the skill.” This concept has continued to later generations, and gradually evolved into a tradition that European nobles attach importance to education and the cultivation of their children’s abilities and connections. Therefore, when we see that many of the top richest people in the West donate most of their property to charity and only leave a little “settlement allowance” for their children, you must not think that this is a “stupid” behavior. You need to know their Property has long been changed from real money to other forms and passed on to children, and this kind of inheritance not only avoids property disputes, but also avoids taxes. This is the “most valuable” way of inheritance.