Dynastic marriage

Dynastic marriage was crucial in the Middle Ages.  Kings and great dukes and counts wanted their children to marry spouses from the highest aristocracy.  Because for much of the Middle Ages there were strict prohibitions on consanguinity, that is marrying cousins, aristocrats had to look far afield to find suitably elevated non-cousins.

When we talk about avoiding cousin marriage, we usually mean first cousins.  Until the thirteenth century, the prohibition went all the way to fourth or fifth cousins, that is people who shared a common ancestor six or seven generations back.  Given that the number of one's ancestors doubles with every generation (two parents, four grandparents, eight great-grandparents, etc.), this was going to be quite a challenge.

So marriage in the Middle Ages created a network  of family ties stretching hundreds of miles, from England to Scandinavia to France to Spain to Italy to eastern Europe to Byzantium to Russia.  During the tenth century both the Scandinavian kings and the Russian leaders, who announced that they were kings, converted to Christianity, which meant that their family members were eligible to marry aristocrats in the Christian west.  (The Russians, or Rus as they are more properly called, had their capital at Kiev, so maybe they should be considered Ukrainian rather than Russian.)

Among famous long-distance marriages was Theophanu, the Byzantine wife of the German emperor Otto II (d. 983).  From Constantinople she was sent off to Germany, where this Greek-speaking princess had to adjust to a foreign country, a foreign language, a foreign climate, and a foreign court, in which nonetheless she soon wielded considerable power.  Another example is Anna, Russian wife of King Henry I of France (d. 1060).  She too arrived in a court where everything would have seemed completely foreign, although, unlike Theophanu, she would have known about bitterly cold winters before arriving in western Europe.

Interestingly, the name Philip, which became a very common name among French kings, began with Anna's son, Philip I.  She named him for Philip of Macedon, the father of Alexander the Great.  The Russians claimed that not only had they adopted an orthodoxy derived from Greek Orthodoxy, but they were really Greek the whole time, only better!  I doubt many people believed this, but connecting the French royal house to a great hero of antiquity was very appealing.

In all these long-distance marriages, the assumption was that women would give their full attention and loyalty to the family into which they married.  In practice, however, these women stayed in touch with their natal families if they possibly could and often arranged advantageous positions or even further marriages for their brothers and sisters, nieces and nephews.

Dr. Christian Raffensperger has compiled a data base of great dynastic marriages of the eleventh and twelfth centuries, with a special focus on those who married members of the Rus, and created a map which shows all the marriage connections over hundreds of miles.  The map is sponsored by the Harvard Ukrainian Research Institute and is accessible here. 

© C. Dale Brittain 2019

For medieval marriage and so much more, see my ebook, Positively Medieval:  Life and Society in the Middle Ages.