Marriage, a History

by Stephanie Coontz

  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.5 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.”6

  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.7

  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.8

  One way to reduce these bloody conflicts over succession was to make it harder for kings to take more than one wife, or to swap one wife easily for another, and to encourage kings to remain piously unmarried after they were widowed. Some rulers and reformers saw a solution in Christianity’s matrimonial principles, which prohibited polygamy and sharply limited divorce and remarriage. But a king would agree to such restrictions only if everyone bowed to them at once, and it was centuries before this happened. In the meantime, however, many rulers grasped the benefit of imposing such church precepts on their rivals, giving the traditional intrigues over political marriages and divorces a distinctive shape in the West.

  Charlemagne’s Matrimonial and Religious Alliances

  One of the earliest kings to throw his weight behind Christian principles of marriage was Charlemagne, whose family, later known as the Carolingians, had usurped the royal dynasty founded by Clovis and Clothild in the eighth century.

  Charlemagne initially tried to establish his dynastic claims through traditional marriage alliances, and he certainly didn’t exhibit excessive Christian piety in either his sexual or marital behavior. He already had a son by a concubine when he married a Lombard princess in 770, and he went ahead with that marriage over the strenuous objections of Pope Stephen, who feared any strengthening of Lombard power. A year later Charlemagne repudiated this princess and married the daughter of another powerful family, who provided him with allies in his brother’s share of the kingdom. When this wife died in 783, Charlemagne promptly married the daughter of an ally in his wars against the Saxons. Since he had only three surviving sons from his first marriage, all still young, Charlemagne hoped for more potential heirs, but his new wife bore him only daughters. By the time of her death in 794, however, the three sons were still alive and old enough to make the succession seem secure. For the time being, Charlemagne felt no need to marry again.9

  Meanwhile, the papacy was enmeshed in conflict with the Byzantine Empire and increasingly threatened by Lombard incursions in Italy. The pope was looking for a strong secular ally, and Charlemagne, whose marital maneuvering had already accomplished its ends, now turned his attention to establishing a religious rather than a matrimonial alliance. He offered the pope his military support and agreed to enforce Church rules on marriage. In 789 he decreed that divorced men and women could not remarry, even if one spouse had been the innocent victim of the other’s adultery. Then, in 799, just before the pope arrived at his court for a state visit, he married the lover he had been living with for the past five years. In return for his military and spiritual cooperation, the pope crowned Charlemagne Holy Roman Emperor on Christmas Day 800.

  For a supposedly devout Christian convert, Charlemagne showed remarkable tolerance for nonmarital sexual
ity. His new wife died only a year after his coronation, and Charlemagne never remarried. But he had four concubines in the ensuing fourteen years before his death and fathered several children by them. He also allowed his daughters to live unmarried at his court and conduct numerous love affairs, many of which produced illegitimate children. Was this because, as chroniclers of the day surmised, he loved his girls too much to allow them to marry and leave his side? Or was it because he didn’t want to be saddled with any interfering in-laws and legitimate grandsons who might challenge his only surviving legitimate son and designated successor, Louis?

  After Charlemagne, other rulers began to see the logic of allowing the Church to mediate inheritance struggles and consecrate legitimate rulers. For kings and queens, the Church’s insistence on monogamy and disapproval of divorce, despite its occasional inconveniences, could have the salutary effect of imposing the matrimonial equivalent of an arms limitation agreement.10

  But the way in which the Church developed and implemented its rules about marriage and divorce was itself a chaotic process. Aristocratic families and dynasties pressed for church endorsement of their own matrimonial arrangements and rearrangements and sought condemnation of the practices of their rivals. Feuding husbands and wives tried to enlist the church on their side in marital disputes. Competing church factions often threw their support behind different noble families and waged vicious battles within the Church over whether to validate a particular marriage or divorce.

  The complicated role of the Catholic Church in mediating marriage disputes and brokering political alliances is clearly illustrated in the seven-year battle over the proposed divorce and remarriage of Lothar II. This ninth-century marriage struggle generated every bit as much prurient interest as the marriage of Prince Charles and Princess Diana in the twentieth century but had far more significant repercussions.

  The Marriage Scandal of the Millennium

  Today, when the marriage of a movie star or monarch unravels in public or feuding spouses detail their grievances on daytime television, people often lament the deterioration of standards of decency and hearken back to a time when couples didn’t air their dirty linen in public. If such a tradition ever existed, it certainly didn’t stretch back to the Middle Ages. The salacious details of marital disputes were everyday fare. And the main source of information, the medieval equivalent of today’s tabloids, was the church. Like modern gossip columnists, church officials tracked down the participants in marital disputes, hounded them for details of their sex lives, and became partisan advocates for one party or another.

  Nowhere was this illustrated more dramatically than in the marital crisis of King Lothar II. Lothar ruled over a fertile district encompassing much of what is now Lorraine. He had a son by his long-term consort Waldreda, a local noblewoman to whom he was very attached. But Lothar’s uncles, Charles the Bald and Louis II, coveted his holdings, and he needed an ally to help him defend his southern flank if it came to war. So Lothar put Waldreda aside and married Theutberga, whose brother controlled many lands and abbeys to the south of Lothar’s kingdom.11

  After two years Theutberga was still not pregnant and her brother had yet to provide any significant aid. Fearing that if he had no legitimate heir, his uncles would attack, Lothar decided to repudiate his marriage to Theutberga, formally marry Waldreda, and make their son, Hugh, his heir.

  Germanic kings had been doing this sort of thing for more than two centuries. But the Church had recently stepped up its opposition to divorce, and Lothar knew that his uncles would use Charlemagne’s earlier ruling against remarriage to try to deny his son’s inheritance rights. Charles the Bald was already aligning himself with Theutberga’s clan; he soon married her niece. Together, these families might have the power to thwart Lothar’s repudiation of Theutberga and overturn his marriage to Waldreda.

  Lothar needed especially compelling grounds for the divorce if the Church was to sanction his marriage to Waldreda and legitimize his heir. Although adultery was still cause for divorce and several popes had declared that the innocent party in such cases could remarry, the current pope had more restrictive ideas. So Lothar upped the ante, accusing his wife of incestuous adultery with her brother.

  Theutberga offered to prove her innocence by submitting to the ordeal of boiling water. In this method of determining guilt or innocence, boiling water was poured on the limbs of the accused—or a stand-in “champion”—and the wounds were bandaged. If the wounds were infected when they were unwrapped three days later, the accused party was judged guilty. Theutberga’s champion—one has to wonder if he was a volunteer—passed the three days without infection, so she was declared innocent.

  Ignoring the verdict, Lothar locked up his wife until she agreed to confess. But the bishops who heard her confession were divided about whether to allow Lothar to remarry. The opposition hardened when Archbishop Hincmar, one of the region’s most respected theologians, presented a learned treatise on why Lothar’s remarriage should be disallowed.

  Hincmar was hardly a disinterested spectator. He was the personal chaplain of Lothar’s uncle Charles the Bald. Moreover, Hincmar’s marital principles were quite elastic when his patron’s family interests were at stake. He didn’t object when Charles the Bald’s daughter married her stepson, in defiance of Church rulings on incest, and he protested only mildly when Charles forced his own son to leave a legal marriage and take a new wife. In Lothar’s case, however, Hincmar wrote a forceful argument on the indissolubility of marriage, and it carried the day.

  But the drama was not over. Lothar appealed to the archbishops of Cologne and Trier, who were sympathetic to him and his allies. The Archbishop of Cologne hoped his own niece might marry Lothar once he won his divorce. In 862 a synod at Aix, led by these archbishops, was convened to resolve the dispute. Lothar emotionally described the enormity of his queen’s betrayal and shamefacedly confessed that he did not think he could refrain from seeking sinful sexual gratification if he were not allowed to wed again. The prelates, moved to tears by his suffering according to the chronicles, annulled the marriage and gave Lothar permission to remarry.

  To the dismay of the Archbishop of Cologne, Lothar promptly married Waldreda and crowned her queen. But Theutberga’s brother protested to the pope, who revoked the annulment, ordering Lothar to return Theutberga to his bed.

  At first Lothar ignored the pope’s orders. But in 865, when Charles and Louis threatened to enforce the pope’s decision, removing him from power if necessary, Lothar took Theutberga back, nine years after he’d first married her and seven years after he had begun trying to divorce her. Still, Theutberga remained childless, and a year later Lothar bullied her into requesting a divorce. The pope ruled that she could leave her husband and become a nun, but that childlessness was not sufficient cause for divorce and Lothar could not remarry.

  Lothar had gambled and lost. Without the right to remarry, his separation from Theutberga brought him no political gain. In 868, his consort, Waldreda, wrote to the pope, expressing her contrition and her desire to enter a nunnery. Lothar himself traveled to Rome the following year to receive forgiveness and died on the way home. Upon Lothar’s death, his uncle Charles the Bald promptly invaded his kingdom, which he then divided up with Louis.

  Lothar’s struggle was an important turning point in the matrimonial politics of the Middle Ages. It demonstrated the potentially ruinous bind facing a king whose legal wife did not produce an heir and who did not have the cooperation of the church in seeking to remarry. Aristocrats and kings continued to defy the Church when they felt it necessary, but they increasingly tried to sidestep such confrontations by acquiescing to the principle of indissoluble marriage and leading their lives in a way that provided them with more acceptable excuses when they really couldn’t avoid seeking a divorce. Kings who had fertile wives and good enough political alliances with their in-laws tried to avoid repudiating one wife for another. If they had heirs, they often resisted tempting offers to remarr
y even after a wife’s death.

  Monogamous marriage did not mean monogamous sexuality. One of the advantages of monogamous marriage, in fact, was that it provided a way for a royal to have his cake and eat it too. A king could continue to father sons, who could be useful to him in military campaigns and could call for assistance from their mothers’ families, but who were excluded from any chance of inheriting because they were not the offspring of a legitimate marriage. If all the legitimate children died, an illegitimate son might be designated as heir. But once church and state made common ground on the principles of legitimacy, this was very rare, and the position of a bastard could never be fully secure. Legitimate brothers were all too likely to go to war over an inheritance. Bastards had to hitch their fortunes to the king and his designated heir, and many kings produced them with abandon.

  Watered-down blood frequently proved thicker than full blood, and illegitimate sons were often the most loyal defenders of a regime’s integrity. Henry I of England (1068-1135), himself a youngest son who had stolen the throne from his older brothers, was a king who manipulated the marital and nonmarital production of children with what one historian calls “consummate ability.” He sired “twenty-one noble bastards on whom he and his successor might rely, while limiting his legitimate family to two boys and a girl.”12

  A king whose wife did not produce a legitimate heir, however, could not rely on such creative adaptations of Christian marital doctrine. He needed a way to circumvent restrictions on divorce and remarriage in order to try again with another woman. Rulers facing this dilemma often found an escape hatch in a peculiarity of medieval Church marriage doctrine, an extremely broad definition of incest.