>>95873635
What's going to sound more appealing to a knight:
Having legal nobility given to them, empowering them with a dynastic claim over lands, serfs, legal power, and wealth, along with being given a higher status of being, which will be transferred to his children in perpetuity?

Or getting to be citizen #230529 in a countless hoard of other citizens and maybe getting to have some land and wealthy but it doesn't really set you above everyone else.