Marriage, a History

by Stephanie Coontz

  The family values campaign Augustus launched was in part an effort to boost the birthrate. The emperor decreed that Romans were expected to be married by a certain age, and if they were not or if they failed to remarry after divorce or bereavement, they were penalized. An unmarried person could not receive an inheritance or legacy from anyone other than a close relative. Individuals who were married but childless had to forfeit half of any such bequests. Applicants for political office received preference if they were married and a higher preference if they had children.23

  Augustus also decreed that a freeborn woman with three children was exempted from the law that kept a woman under the lifelong guardianship of her husband or father. A freed female slave who was still under the guardianship of her former owner could escape that control once she bore four children.

  Despite his pro-marriage program, Augustus did not try to restrict divorce. In fact, divorce was made compulsory if a woman committed adultery, which became a criminal offense punishable by banishment. Once adultery became an offense to be punished by the state rather than by the woman’s husband and her male relatives, a husband could no longer turn a blind eye to his wife’s behavior if he was so inclined. A husband who did not divorce an adulterous wife could be charged with pandering. If a husband divorced an adulterous wife but did not prosecute her within sixty days, an outsider could pursue the case. A woman convicted of adultery lost half her dowry and a third of any other property she owned and was banished to an island and forbidden to marry again.24

  Emperor Augustus’s profamily legislation was accompanied by a wave of manufactured nostalgia for the supposed virtues of earlier times, when women were not allowed to drink wine and, according to the satirist Juvenal, wives were too tired from working at their looms to engage in adultery.

  The pro-family legal measures and propaganda campaigns had little impact on Roman morality and behavior. Laws promoting the birthrate did encourage young men interested in senate positions to marry and have children a bit earlier, to take advantage of the seniority this conferred. But contemporaries complained that most wives still limited the number of children they bore, whether through crude forms of birth control or by abandoning infants. The morality laws also had unintended consequences. Stiff penalties imposed on upper-class women for violating sexual edicts encouraged some of them to register as prostitutes in order to escape the punishment meted out to respectable matrons for having affairs!25

  But the rhetoric of family values remained a central theme under Augustus, and he put forward his own wife Livia and his sister Octavia (who, you will recall, had been married to Mark Antony) as paragons of female virtue. Their likenesses were placed on coins, and their statues displayed in temples and public buildings. Octavia was especially popular, pitied as a deserted wife and widely admired for her willingness to raise Antony’s children by his first wife and by Cleopatra. That the family values emperor had murdered Antony’s oldest son by his first wife and Caesar’s son by Cleopatra went unmentioned.

  Julia, the emperor’s daughter by his first wife, however, posed a serious public relations problem. One reason Tiberius had been loath to leave his wife for Julia was that she already had a scandalous reputation from her previous marriage. Tradition says that when she was asked why all five of her children resembled her husband, despite her many extramarital affairs, Julia merrily replied, “I never take on a passenger until the cargo-hold is full.”26

  Julia’s marriage to Tiberius did not interfere with her infidelities, which became so blatant that Augustus not only agreed to the couple’s separation but disciplined his daughter publicly. Seneca reports that the emperor wrote to the senate in 2 B.C. “Adulterers were admitted to [Julia’s] house in flocks; the whole state was overrun by her nocturnal debaucheries.”27

  Augustus exiled four young aristocrats who had been Julia’s lovers, ordered a fifth to commit suicide, and banished Julia to an island, where she was ordered to avoid both men and wine. Six years later he exiled his granddaughter for the same offense.

  The empire established by Augustus enjoyed almost two centuries of stability. But by the third century overextension of the army, agricultural problems, urban decline, barbarian invasions, and increasing social unrest had led to a collapse of orderly political succession. Military leaders usurped the throne and in turn were displaced by other leaders with stronger armies or more mercenaries. Between A.D. 235 and 284 there were twenty-six emperors, only one of whom escaped violent death.

  Like Athens, however, Rome left behind a model for organizing political life, military campaigns, and the administration of justice in ways that did not allow powerful aristocrats to manipulate marriage ties and personal loyalties to gain power. It introduced mechanisms for organizing military affairs, tax collection, and legal rights that didn’t depend on marital alliances, blood descent, or local allegiances. In its period of decline, the Roman state came to terms with Christianity, a synthesis that evolved into the Catholic Church, which, as both an institution and an ideology, profoundly changed the history of marital politics in the West.

  The Emergence of Christianity

  Christianity, which began as a movement within Judaism, was one of many popular religions and mystery cults that flourished in the waning days of the Roman Republic. What distinguished early Christianity from Judaism in its approach to marriage and family was the belief that the kingdom of God was close at hand, and people must therefore break with worldly ties to prepare for the imminent arrival of God’s kingdom. In subsequent centuries this aspect was played down, but early Christianity was hostile to marital and kinship obligations to a degree unimaginable to any previous reformers aside from Plato. Jesus insisted that marriage and kin ties took second place to the urgent need to prepare people for the coming kingdom of God. “If any man come to me, and hate not his father, and mother, and wife, and children, and brethren, and sisters, yea, and his own life also, he cannot be my disciple” (Luke 14:26). When a new disciple asked if he could slip away to attend his father’s funeral, Jesus told him to stay and “let the dead bury their own dead” (Matthew 8:22).

  Many early Christians believed that marriage undermined the rigorous self-control needed to achieve spiritual salvation. “He that is unmarried careth for the things that belong to the Lord, how he may please the Lord: But he that is married careth for the things that are of the world, how he may please his wife. . . . The unmarried woman careth for the things of the lord, that she may be holy both in body and in spirit: but she that is married careth for the things of the world, how she may please her husband” (1 Corinthians 7:32-34).

  Christian attitudes toward marriage and sexuality stood in sharp contrast with those of most ancient religions. To Hindus in India, marrying was a holy act, and a celibate or unmarried person was considered impious, or at least incomplete, and was ineligible to participate in some religious ceremonies. The Old Testament and later Jewish teachings called marriage God’s commandment and celebrated sexuality within marriage. The Talmud said that scholars of the Torah should marry before embarking on their studies, “for one who is not married will be possessed the day long with sexual thoughts.”28

  The founders of Christianity agreed with Jewish scholars that it was better to marry than to be preoccupied with lust. But their acceptance of marriage was much less enthusiastic. “It is better,” Paul grudgingly conceded, “to marry than to burn” (1 Corinthians 7:9). Pope Gregory the Great explained early in the sixth century that although marriage was not sinful, “conjugal union cannot take place without carnal pleasure, and such pleasure cannot under any circumstances be without blame.”29

  Although Christianity was deeply ambivalent about marriage, it also had a stringent prohibition against divorce. Jesus declared that Moses’s acceptance of divorce, which was integrated into Jewish marriage laws, had been a concession to people’s weakness and stubbornness. God’s true intention, Jesus said, was that husband and wife should become one flesh. “What therefore God
hath joined together, let not man put asunder” (Mark 10:9). Unlike most other world religions, Christianity applied this injunction against divorce equally to men and women.

  Early Christianity’s condemnation of divorce and polygamy was unequivocal. In practice, however, during the first thousand years of its existence the Christian church was flexible about allowing divorce. For a long time it even waffled in its support for monogamy. The conflict between theory and practice added a new wrinkle to political marriage struggles as the church’s power and influence grew in the waning days of the Roman Empire.

  One of the great appeals of Christianity to the polyglot population of the Roman Empire was that it was a religion that did not limit its message to one ethnic group or to the supposed descendants of a mythical common ancestor. The church offered membership and brotherhood to all, and it had special appeal to the lower classes and slaves with its insistence that humility, charity, and spirituality were superior to worldly wealth and power.

  In its early years Christianity faced little official opposition and spread quickly along Rome’s trade routes and military roads. But as its appeal grew, some Roman rulers worried that the Christians’ refusal to participate in the worship of state gods was subversive, and in the third century several emperors tried to quash the new religion through violent persecution of its adherents. In the fourth century, however, such repression receded, and in 313 the emperor Constantine issued an edict of tolerance for Christianity. Under the reign of the emperor Theodosius, Christianity became the empire’s official religion, and church officials began to act as tax collectors, record keepers, and legal representatives of the state as well as spiritual leaders of the people.

  Over the next two centuries the Christian church expanded its geographical reach and took on more quasi-governmental functions. Meanwhile the bishop of Rome gained authority over his fellow bishops in the provinces and came to be known as the pope (from the Latin word papa, or father). When the Roman Empire fragmented and collapsed, the pope headed one of the few institutions still able to raise money, administer law, preserve records, teach literacy, conduct international diplomacy, and claim overarching moral authority.

  As the empire broke up, and local aristocracies struggled to control the fledgling kingdoms that emerged in its place, the church’s administrative and ideological resources grew indispensable, as did the pope’s sanctification of a king’s authority. Would-be rulers maneuvered relentlessly to get the pope’s stamp of approval, and many popes maneuvered right back.

  Early Christianity had been indifferent, even hostile, to the things of this world and had elevated celibacy over marriage. But the church’s evolving political role and economic power were to embroil it deeply in the politics of marriage, divorce, and family life in the new kingdoms of Western Europe.

  Chapter 6

  Playing the Bishop, Capturing the Queen: Aristocratic Marriages in Early Medieval Europe

  In 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.1

  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.2

  It was almost a thousand years before any Western ruler established the kind of reliable professional army, enforceable legal code, elaborate bureaucracy, o
r 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.3

  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.4 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.