The name Constance

These days people name their children all sorts of different things:  a family member's name, the name of a character in a favorite book or show, a name picked out of a baby book, the name of a celebrity or sports star, some made-up word that sounds good.

Medieval people on the other hand chose names quite deliberately to create a connection, usually with a family member, or sometimes for a lord one wished to honor (which is why we speak of "Tom, Dick, and Harry" as "everyman" names, because they became very common in late twelfth-century England, honoring the saint Thomas Becket and the kings Richard I and Henry I).  This was true of both male and female names.  Today I want to discuss a particular female name in the Middle Ages, Constance, an excellent name.

Its origin is Roman.  The ancient Romans, at least among the aristocracy, had had male and female variants of the same name, so Julius and Julia, or Claudius and Claudia.  Constance (Constantia) was a variant of Constantine.

It was not used in the West in the early Middle Ages, however.  The story gets interesting around the year 900 with the emperor Louis, nicknamed "the Blind."  From his nickname you can tell his story is not going to end well, but before he was blinded by his enemies he had a son, whom he named Charles-Constantine.  The Charles was for Charlemagne, from whom Louis's mother was descended, and the Constantine for the original fourth-century emperor of that name--Louis's wife was Byzantine and claimed descent from Constantine.  Louis wanted his son's name to indicate unmistakably that the boy was born to be an emperor.

It didn't work out that way.  But Charles-Constantine had descendants among the counts of Provence, and among them were women named Constance for him (the male version was probably too audacious to use).  One of these women married King Robert II of France around the year 1000 and became queen.  From then on, the name had royal overtones.

One of the French princesses named Constance married the king of Sicily.  And among her descendants was the famous Constance, queen of Sicily (ruled 1194-1198).  She was a daughter of the king of Sicily by his third wife and was not intended to become queen, because she had plenty of brothers and nephews.  In fact, she did not marry until she was 30, old by medieval standards.

But when she did marry it was a great dynastic union.  She married Henry VI, son and heir of Frederick Barbarossa.  The Holy Roman emperors (kings of Germany) had long considered themselves rightful kings of Italy, and a union with Sicily sent a clear message, especially since the kingdom of Sicily included not just the island but also much of Calabria (the foot part of Italy's boot).  Henry and Constance were crowned emperor and empress in 1190, after Frederick Barbarossa's death.

But Constance did not become queen of Sicily until 1194, after the death of the last of her nephews.  In that year she and Henry finally had a son, the future Frederick II.  She was about to turn forty, so, the story goes, she made sure to give birth very publicly, in a tent in the town piazza, so that no one would be able to say that the baby wasn't really hers.  She made the bishop comes and watch.  She also nursed baby Frederick II in public, to make sure there were no doubters.

When she died in 1198, she commended her child, heir to Sicily and (at least potentially) to Germany (where his uncle was ruling), to the new pope, Innocent III.  Little Frederick grew up telling "Uncle Innocent" that he would be a good and faithful friend of the papacy.  Innocent died before discovering how mistaken he was to trust him.

But that's a story for another day.

© C. Dale Brittain 2017 

For more on medieval names and other aspects of medieval history, see my ebook Positively Medieval, available on Amazon and other ebook platforms.

Medieval ancestry

Anyone who tries to trace their family tree hopes, sooner or later, to find medieval nobles in it.  As a medievalist, I get periodic requests from genealogists hoping to figure out if great-grandpappy really was Duke of Something.  The answer is, "Maybe."

First, if you really were in the official line of descent from William the Conqueror, you'd already know about it.  Noble families have kept very close track of their inheritance since the eighth or ninth centuries.  France officially abolished hereditary aristocracy at the time of the Revolution, but 225 years later there are still plenty of families who know, accurately, that they would be viscounts (or whatever) if it weren't for that pesky detail.  England still has hereditary aristocracy, all spelled out in the Peerage.  So let's face it.  We're all peasants.

But that doesn't mean that there might not be an aristocrat back there somewhere.  Plenty of children got born "on the wrong side of the blanket," as some euphemistically put it (see my post on medieval bastards).  And if a duke's daughter married a count (women were more likely to marry down the social scale than men), the count's daughter married a castellan, and the castellan's daughter married a knight, whose daughter married a rich merchant, and so on, then noble "blood" would be in their ancestry, even if it was forgotten after a few generations.

Given that there are far more people of European ancestry alive now than lived in the European Middle Ages, we're all related to each other and all have some common ancestors.  This is true of most Hispanics and African-Americans as well as us whities.  Alex Haley, who famously wrote Roots in the 1970s about his African ancestors, also had Irish ancestors.  (The story, not sure if it's true, is that Irish archivists were happy to have him searching for his Irish ancestors until they found out he was Protestant.)

So how to find Great-grandpappy the Duke?  It's not going to be easy.  For starters, most Americans have no ideas of the names of their great-grandparents, and that's only going back a century or so.  If your family has been in the US for a while, you can probably figure it out using sites like Ancestry.com, which have digitized and made searchable a stunning number of census records, birth certificates, marriage records, street directories, and the like.  I've gotten my own Brittain ancestors figured out back to a Britton who came to New Amsterdam (now New York) from England in the seventeenth century.

But the jump from Europe to the US can be problematic.  For one thing, just knowing one's ancestors were from "Germany," for example, isn't going to make it easy to pin them down, especially if they had fairly common names.  And even if you can get your (peasant) ancestors in Europe traced back into the sixteenth century, it's going to be virtually impossible to get further.

This is because parish registers, recording births, marriages, and deaths, only started being kept in the sixteenth century.  Earlier, no one bothered writing these things down.  And of course parish registers, being local and kept in only one copy, have been lost in huge numbers.

Sometimes people end up tracing just their last name, in the hope that this will identify their ancestors.  But last names, which only started being used for the first time in the late Middle Ages, were usually either nicknames, which could vary within the same family, or loconyms, place names, where everyone, lord and peasant, who came from the same place had the same last name.

Enterprising businesses in the US will sell you "your family coat of arms."  Because there is nothing official about coats of arms in the US, it's easy to do so.  Either they sell you a coat of arms of some aristocratic family with a similar last name, or they'll just make something up.  My dear father-in-law had a "family coat of arms" that he'd bought, mounted over the fireplace.  I never told him that his ancestors were not aristocrats.  His last name came from French peasants (probably from Normandy) who came to French North America in the seventeenth century.

© C. Dale Brittain 2015
For more on medieval families, see my ebook, Positively Medieval:  Life and Society in the Middle Ages, available from Amazon and other ebook platforms.