Marriage, a History (17 page)

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n 1981, 750 million television viewers around the world watched the fairy-tale wedding of Prince Charles, heir to the British throne, to Lady Diana Spencer. They stayed tuned over the next eighteen years as the marriage degenerated into accusations of mutual infidelity that still fascinate the public years after Diana’s death.

Prince Charles had bowed to pressure from the royal family and married a much younger woman with good bloodlines, good looks, and good health. She promptly produced what the monarchy was looking for, two sons to serve as “an heir and a spare.” With the continuation of his dynastic line assured, Charles returned to the arms of his longtime lover, Camilla Parker-Bowles. Princess Diana later took lovers of her own, but her husband’s earlier infidelity swayed public opinion in her favor. Diana famously complained to one television interviewer that she hadn’t realized at the time of her wedding that there would be three persons involved in her marriage.

For aristocrats and monarchs in the kingdoms that emerged in Western Europe after the fall of the Roman Empire, having only three people involved in their marriages would have seemed downright lonely. In medieval Europe, dozens of people took part in the unions of the nobility, and even more were involved in the marriages of kings and queens.

The huge cast of characters in medieval marriage dramas included all the players who had been involved in political marriages of the ancient world: parents, in-laws, rival nobles, secondary wives, concubines, siblings, uncles, and children by former wives or mistresses. But in medieval Europe, bishops, archbishops, popes, and church reformers also demanded a say. When a divorce or remarriage was at stake, the conflicts among these interested parties turned even more volatile. It was not unusual for such questions to be resolved on the battlefield.

As the Roman Empire disintegrated over the fourth and fifth centuries, it split into two very different parts. The capital of the Roman Empire was moved to Constantinople in 330, and Greek-speaking dynasties took control over the area that became the center of the Byzantine Empire. Although the Byzantine emperors continued to claim sovereignty over the whole of the old Roman Empire, their sway extended only to the eastern portions. But ruling over the large and wealthy cities of Constantinople, Nicomedia, Antioch, and Alexandria, the Byzantine rulers had the financial resources to establish a strong theocratic state with an elaborate bureaucracy. With their powerful state apparatus, supported by a centralized church, the Byzantine emperors were able to dominate the military and the aristocracy and hold their ambitions in check.

In the western part of the old Roman Empire, however, Germanic warrior tribes established a patchwork of chiefdoms and petty kingdoms during the fifth and sixth centuries. In this fragmented world, where weak new kingdoms constantly formed and fell apart, marriage and kinship politics once more rose to the fore. The Germanic conquerors used marriage to establish peace treaties, forge alliances with Roman landowners in the territories they claimed, and bolster their pretensions to aristocratic status or royal authority. Kinship and marriage politics were crucial to the struggle for power in these unstable Western kingdoms in a way that was foreign to Byzantium.

In the centralized theocratic state of the Byzantine Empire, the powerful emperor didn’t need to choose a wife for her family connections. In fact, Byzantine rulers often selected their wives at a “bride show” that resembled a modern beauty pageant. Prospective brides from around the empire were paraded before the emperor, who could pick any woman, of any class, who caught his fancy. In the medieval West, few kings were secure enough in their power and status to place beauty above birth and connections.
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Marriages of political and economic convenience certainly took place in the upper classes of the Byzantine Empire. But noble families were rarely able to use marital alliances as a springboard to political dominance. The emperor had enough power to prevent ambitious upstarts from contracting marriages that might produce a rival dynasty or concentrate too many resources in one family. When an emperor found a marriage alliance threatening, he simply broke up the match, forcing the husband or wife—or both—to enter a religious order.

In the West, kings who interfered too much in the marriages of their noble followers were likely to be murdered or deposed. The Western church was not directly allied with any one ruler, or even united in its own views, so a Western king could not count on its support for such interference.

Because the Byzantine rulers did not have to enter political marriages to consolidate their power, they didn’t need to dispense patronage to noble in-laws or risk taking secondary wives who might produce rival heirs. Instead, they minimized battles over succession to the throne by appointing eunuchs, castrated former slaves, as court officials. The eunuchs, incapable of producing children of their own and bitterly resented by the aristocrats, were far more dependent on their sovereign and thus far more loyal to him than the average royal wife and her in-laws in the West.
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It was almost a thousand years before any Western ruler established the kind of reliable professional army, enforceable legal code, elaborate bureaucracy, or unified church apparatus that existed in Byzantium. Until then no Western ruler had anything close to a monopoly of military force, moral authority, or legal jurisdiction.

Most significant for the politics of marriage, no Western ruler had a unique claim to either spiritual authority or noble descent. When the Germanic peoples rushed into the void left by the Roman Empire’s collapse, they did not have a hereditary aristocracy, although some of their warrior kings claimed descent from the gods. But those gods meant nothing to the Romans they conquered, and many of the warrior chiefs who set themselves up as petty kings in the Early Middle Ages had only dubious claims to royal blood before they took the throne. Nor could the new rulers drape themselves in the mantle of the Roman Empire; that was the provenance of Byzantium. Questions of legitimacy, succession, and government were up for grabs.
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In this context, family ties and marital alliances were critical to constructing a new ruling elite and fighting for supremacy within it. With no army and no state officials to keep order and administer justice, individuals again had to rely on their broader kin group for protection and support. Just as in Homer’s Greece, a crime was treated as an offense against the family rather than the state and was avenged by the victim’s relatives. Members of influential families routinely flouted the king’s laws, persecuted anyone who tried to enforce royal edicts with which they disagreed, and violently resisted attempts to punish any of their relatives or followers.

Early medieval kings did try to bring the great families into line. Late in the ninth century in Anglo-Saxon England, Alfred the Great decreed that if a man fought on behalf of his king, he was exempt from vendettas or blood revenge. An individual could fight on behalf of a blood relative, King Alfred conceded, “if he is attacked unjustly,” but no one was allowed to defend his kindred against the king or the king’s representatives.
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The Christian Church also tried to limit the private exercise of vengeance. But it was to be many centuries before kings or popes could prevent aristocrats from placing their family loyalties above the law.

With traditional kin-based family ties so strong, and the influence of the papacy and secular institutions still weak, marriage once more became central to the conduct of politics and war. The role of wives as “peace weavers” was already crucial in containing the clan rivalries that were rampant in Germanic and Viking societies.
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But in this new environment, wives and mothers could be kingmakers as well as peace weavers and alliance builders. Conquerors routinely married the widow of an ousted king to strengthen their claims to the crown. If a conqueror died, his son and heir would reaffirm his claim by marrying his stepmother. As historian Pauline Stafford puts it, “the master plan of a sixth- or seventh-century usurper had three stages: murder the king, get the gold-hoard, marry the widow.”
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The complex maneuvering that might accompany such a strategy is illustrated by the history of the most powerful early Germanic kingdom in Western Europe, founded by the warlord Clovis in 481. As a young local monarch Clovis hoped to increase his power by marrying Clothild, the orphaned niece of the king of Burgundy, whose lands lay south of Clovis’s realm in what is now France. But when Clovis sent envoys to propose the match, Clothild’s uncle rejected his suit. She, however, secretly accepted a ring from Clovis’s envoy and hid it in her uncle’s treasury.

The following year Clovis pressed his claim for Clothild’s hand again, pointing out that she had accepted and kept his ring. In Germanic custom, and throughout the medieval period, accepting such a token created a binding obligation. Refusal to honor it could lead to war. Mastering his fury, her uncle agreed to the match.

Clothild’s acceptance of the ring was probably not girlish naiveté. If she married a man of her uncle’s court or kin, her dowry would remain de facto under her uncle’s control. Marriage to Clovis would make her a queen. For his part, Clovis gained Clothild’s dowry and could now claim kinship with the Burgundian king. But perhaps the most important service Clothild rendered her husband was to convert him to Catholic Christianity. Other Germanic rulers embraced an interpretation of Christian doctrine that denied the authority of the papacy. The pope, eager to ally with a ruler who acknowledged his supremacy, reciprocated by giving Clovis and his descendants the official support of the Roman Catholic Church.

Clovis and Clothild had four sons, each of whom they duly baptized in the Catholic faith. Following the custom of that era, the four sons divided Clovis’s kingdom among themselves after their father’s death. But when Clovis’s son Chlodomer died in 524, his brothers Clothar and Childebert had Chlodomer’s two oldest sons murdered. Fearing for his life, Chlodomer’s third son became a monk, thus eliminating all of Chlodomer’s heirs as contenders for power. Clothar then married Chlodomer’s widow and added his brother’s kingdom to his own. Despite his profession of Christian faith, Clothar neglected to divorce his earlier wife, and she continued to share his bed until he married her sister in 537. Eventually he added a fourth wife, the daughter of the King of Thuringia, whom he had captured in war.

Clothar was not alone in practicing polygamy in the early Middle Ages. Being able to have several wives allowed kings to make wider alliances. Having multiple wives, whether at the same time or serially, also made it more likely that a king would have a male heir who survived to adulthood. The high death rates of young men forced fathers to lay in reserves of heirs. (The mortality rate from hunting accidents was remarkably high, ranking with war and murder as an occupational hazard of noble blood.) Having only “an heir and a spare” was far too risky. Lack of an heir not only meant the dynasty would end on the ruler’s death but also made him an inviting target for assassination by those impatient to hasten the process of regime change. Kings needed to produce plenty of sons.

Despite the advantages of multiple marriages, they left Western European kingdoms vulnerable to the kind of instability and bloodshed we saw in the Hellenistic dynasties of Asia Minor. Wives, in-laws, and rival heirs from different mothers schemed to further their own ends. Having too many heirs to the throne could be as much of a problem as having too few. If all the heirs survived, the stage was set for struggles over how to divide the realm.
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Even remarriage after the death of a wife was a gamble. On the one hand, a king whose wife died after producing only one or two sons needed to produce a backup set of heirs. But if one of both sets lived, trouble often ensued. In 964, the Anglo-Saxon king Edgar lost his wife. His two sons were still young, so Edgar took a new wife and had two more sons with her. But Edgar’s eldest son and heir, Edward, was still alive when the king died, and so was one of Edgar’s sons with his second wife.

Upon the monarch’s death, supporters of the two half brothers, both still under age, battled over the throne. Edward’s faction won, and he was crowned king in 975. Four years later, when he arrived in Dorset to visit his half brother, Aethelred, his stepmother came out to greet him with a welcoming cup. As Edward drank, her servant thrust a dagger between his ribs. The young Aethelred was horrified at his half brother’s murder. His unrestrained grief reportedly led his mother to beat him severely with a candleholder, a punishment that was said to have left the boy with a lifelong fear of candles. But Aethelred fulfilled his mother’s ambition and succeeded his half brother on the throne.
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