What we group together as the "nobility" in Hungary actually changed throughout medieval and early modern Hungary. In the beginning, nobles were the leading office-holders around the ruler. This meaning overlapped after the mid-twelfth century with the idea that a nobleman is one whose ancestry is noble. After the fourteenth century, though, nobility really meant landowners. Owning land meant possessing "free landholdings" and "based on these landholdings, [the nobility] was beneficiary of the common law and of political freedom." (Quote from Akos Timon, Magyar alkotmany es jogtortenet, p. 122; For an English source, see Martyn Rady, Nobility, Land and Service in medieval Hungary, pp. 1-6).

As nobility status became dependent on landowning, inheritance was one way to make new nobles quickly. By the fourteenth century, Hungarian nobles used to divide their lands between their sons, which led to some sons inheriting 12 households, half villages, a few mills or so. Doing so increased the number of nobles but also the share of impoverished ones. Some nobles were just immersed into the peasantry, as they were unable to live off the surplus of food their own peasants produced. As some of them accumulated debt in vain attempt to live like nobility was supposed to live in the rich gentry fiction that abounded, many lost their meager inheritance. (See Rady above, esp. chapter 3).

The fiction of the serving nobility that owns land in return for their service lasted way longer than the reality behind it. The rights and privileges of the nobility were codified first in the Golden Bull of 1222, but it was only in 1608 that the unicameral Hungarian Diet, which represented the nobility, broke into two houses; only the titled aristocracy gained spots in the upper house.

The lower nobility, in due course, often became service nobility without land. They could become retainers of barons but also, especially after the eighteenth century, just rich men who could afford to buy a title. William O. McCagg, Jr., published in 1972 a book about Jewish Nobles and Geniuses in Modern Hungary which reconstructs "the function relation between the ennoblement of Hungary's Jewish capitalists and the emergence of Hungary's great scientists onto the international stage", though he includes converted Jews as well. 346 Jewish families were ennobled between 1800 and 1918, which hints at another step in the development of the Hungarian nobility: a mark of wealth for the higher echelons of the bourgeoise, for whom this was a coveted prize.