Marriage, a Christian invention

The indissoluble union, celebrated by a sacrament, replacing old ways of polygamy, causing great change in European habits. In 392, Christianity was proclaimed official religion. Between 965 and 1 008 were baptized the kings of Denmark, Poland, Hungary, Russia, Norway and Sweden.

                   
           Felipe wedding of Macedonia with Olimpia. Miniature century. XV


These two facts resulted wedding format, at the beginning of year 1000, with a completely new face. During the Holy Roman Empire - which succeeded the Roman Empire disappeared - directed by Otto III 998-1002, there was a fabulous transformation of the Roman urban societies and rural societies Germanic and Slavic. The unions between men and women were then the complex result of pagan renitências, political interests and a powerful evangelization.

"Love: desire that all attempts to monopolize; charity: tender unit; hatred:. Disdain for the vanities of this world" This short school year, written on the back of a manuscript from the early eleventh century, and expresses the conflict between pagan and Christian conceptions of marriage. For the pagans, they were Germanic, Slavic or even more recently installed Vikings in Normandy from 911, love was seen as subversive, as destructive of society. For Christians, as the bishop and writer Jonas of Orleans, the term expressed charity, with qualifier "conjugal", a privileged love and tenderness inside the conjugal cell. This optimism appeared in some papal decrees, using terms like marital affection (maritalis affectio) or conjugal love (conjugalis dilectio). Of course, the ideal Christian was giving up the goods of this world despise them, which was an invitation to conventional celibacy.

Pagan Europe, badly dubbed in 1000 therefore had a wedding design totally contrary to the Christians. The example of Normandy is even more revealing because it is very similar to Sweden or Bohemia. The Vikings practiced a polygamous marriage with a wife first band that had all the rights, and wives or concubines of the second rank, whose children had no right, unless the official was barren or had been rejected. The engagement ceremonies organized the transfer of goods, but there was no true marriage unless there had been carnal union. On the morning of the wedding night, the husband offered the woman a set of often quite significant movable property. It was called this morning (Morgengabe), the Roman jurists named dowry. Therefore, the role of the official wife was very important, especially if she had many children, since the main goal was procreation.


Such unions were essentially political and social, decided by parents. It was set up large family units, within which peace reigned. So the concubines of the second rank were called Friedlehen or Frilla, ie "bonds of peace." In fact, they came from longtime hostile families. From the moment the blood was mixed both families, war was no longer possible. Therefore, mothers chose the wives of the sons, or husbands, daughters, always in the same classical groups, in order to safeguard this peace. If a wife dies, the widower marry her sister. Thus, little by little the great families became increasingly arrivals by blood (blood), the alliance (affinity) and finally completely incestuous. Let us add to this picture the links among men, the adoption by arms, the oath of allegiance and other feudal bonds that triumphed in the tenth century as a 'supplementary kinship ", in the words of Marc Bloch, and we have proof that these pagan marriages did not leave any space for sentiment.



                               Subversive love

So when love is manifested, it could only be adulterous, or take the form of rape, way to make irreversible marriage, or a more or less combined abduction between the kidnapper and the "kidnapped" in order to deceive the will of the parents. In such cases love was actually subversive, since it destroyed the established order. It became synonymous with death and political ruin, as evidenced by the romance of real historical background, Tristan and Isolde, transmitted orally by the European world then - Celtic, Frankish and Germanic. Tristan, nephew of the king and his vassal, committed while incest, adultery and treason to the king Marco, the husband of Isolde. In fact, he says, after their first encounter: "Come the death." In ancient societies, obsessed with survival, the will to power, power was more important than the will to pleasure, for those tribes of huge families did not know any administrative or external limitation.
This must have been slowed down by the fact they have been in contact with Christian countries, regions or people steeped in Christianity, such as the baptized Normans century X. As a result, two structures coexisted more or less confused. Around the year 1000, the bishop of Iceland had a hard time separating a tribal chief, already married, his concubine, especially since it was his own sister - a fact which supported the view that his brother, the bishop, no more a tyrant. In the tenth and eleventh centuries, the dukes of Normandy had two types of union, regularly: an official, frank and baptized wife, and one or more concubines.

William the Conqueror, who took England in 1066, had the code name bastard, because he was born of a union of this kind. At the entrance to Cliff, his father, Robert the Devil, had called the attention of a young man in the city of washing, wore clothes with their feet, naked as their task companions, to better kneading clothing. That same night, with the permission of his father, Arlette, the young man found himself in Duke's bedroom, using an open sweater in front, "so that" tells us Wace monk, who told the story, "that sweeping the floor can not be the face of the height of her prince. " These loves "the Danish" show that women were free on condition of accepting a secondary position.

This situation of duplicity in an officially Christian Western world, but still pagan, became complicated when women gained power, something facilitated by matrilinearidade of Germanic origins. Some encouraged their husbands to proclaim kings, for they are of Carolingian imperial origin. Castelas, ladies of large estates, or high nobility women, they used the marriage as a springboard for his ambition. In Rome, Marozia (or Mariuccia) was Pope John XI mother, the son of his connection with the also Pope Sergius III. First husband of the widow, Guido of Tuscany, the king's half brother of Italy, Hugo, she called on to marry her. But Alberico II, his son from his first marriage, drove Sant'Angelo castle where the wedding was celebrated, that intruder manipulated by her mother.

Punishment for libido

In the eyes of many ecclesiastical writers, as the bishop of Verona Ratherius, female libido was dangerous and should be severely repressed. The fact that old countries like Spain, Italy and the kingdom of the Franks, though Christians had five centuries, had not yet integrated the wedding doctrine - the point, for example, the king Hugo have had two official wives and three concubines - proves how much this doctrine was against your time. And yet it had been clearly stated and repeated since Ambrose declared in 390 that "consent makes the marriage." To this, the Council of View had added, in 755: "Let all the wedding are public" and "One law for men and women."

Claim the free consent of the spouses and the equality of man and woman's condition was utopian, especially in a patriarchal Roman society. However, major advances have occurred in the tenth century, thanks to the repetition of the wedding apology, symbol of the indissoluble union between Christ and the Church. After the unyielding attitude of Hincmar Archbishop and Pope Nicholas I, the divorce of Lothair II repudiation by his wife Teutberga - due to its sterility - it became impossible after 869, the year of his death. Incomprehensible to contemporaries, the marriage was not based only on procreation. The alliance was more important than a child. More than anyone else, away from discourses about the superiority of virginity, Hincmar had shown that a consent without consecutive carnal union was not a wedding. He thus prefigured the notion of nullity established by Graciano decree in 1145. As a result, the rituals, as he wrote to Worms by the year Burchard 1000, translated the wedding discipline level the optimistic doctrine of the Carolingian moralists.

The carnal union, a result of consent between a man and a woman (not a number) is the space of sanctification of the spouses. The ideal of monogamy, fidelity and indissolubility became all the more possible because the end of the tenth century disappeared the old type of slavery in Mediterranean countries. A new space opened to Christian marriage, thanks to the emergence of concubinage with slaves, who had no freedom. This was also the time when the decisions of the councils became mandatory validity of the marriage of the not freed.

But another battle reached its climax in 1000: the prohibition of incest. It started from the sixth century and almost successful in Italy, Spain and France, but this interdiction faced strong opposition in Germania, in Bohemia and Poland. Prohibited in principle within the fourth degree between first cousins, marriages of consanguinity and affinity were punished, and separate guilty. Later, from Gregory II (715-735), the ban was extended to the seventh degree (nephews stylish Britain) as well as the spiritual kin (godfather and godmother): there would be no alliance other than with strangers, who was another (God or the coming of the opposite sex), but by no means with that or the one with whom existed a connection type.

The social consequences of this doctrine were incalculable. It forced each one to seek a spouse away from his village and its castle. Ultimately destroyed the great families of dozens of people who lived under the same roof, and favor the formation of a core group of conjugal type. She suppressed thus matrilineal succession and the choice of the spouses by women. The exogamy became mandatory. Europe would open to the outside.

Virginity praise

In Germany, from the Councils of Mainz in 813, and Worms in 868, cases of incestuous marriages kept by the stubbornness of the women were numerous. In Bohemia, the second bishop of Prague Adalbert, great friend of Emperor Otto III, had succeeded in 992, a public edict authorizing him to try and separate the incestuous couples. It was a resounding failure as he disliked forever from his episcopal task. Preferred to go evangelize the Prussians, the martyred on 23 April 997.

The dynasty of Otto, who had restored the empire in 962 in Germany and Italy, by no means ceased to support the Church in its business transformation and Christianization. And their wives set an example, as Edit (946), Matilde (968) and Adelaide (999) were considered holy. Clerics who reported their lives, particularly that of Matilde, insist not widowhood or in acts of foundation of monasteries, but in the role of wife and mother. His holiness came primarily wedding and advisory role, along with her husband imperial. Reading the letters of holy Matilde's life passages did not have a negligible influence on popular audiences.

If Germany was then a pioneer front in wedding Christianization was not quite the case of the Frankish kingdom. Ema, betrayed wife of the Duke of Aquitaine, William V, avenged himself from his rival by sending her to be raped by all his bodyguard. Berta, daughter of King of Burgundy, barely having widowed, landed his gaze on the young Roberto, son of Hugh Capet, to make a hipergâmico marriage.

This example is revealing. The Church's legislation on Christian marriage was against the mentality of the time. Yet the conjugal love of charity (dilectio Caritatis) began to stand the possession of love (dominandi libido). Around the year 1000, urban expansion and the beginning of the clearing and fields of culture allowed the monogamous nuclear family to multiply. Rural cells were destroyed by the need to pick a spouse further. Only the nobility and the oldest ruling families resisted, closed in their feudal relations, unlike the newcomers to power, Oto, who have welcomed and embraced the Christian doctrine as a release and fell boldly toward the east, Besides the Elbe, the new frontier of European expansion.

Thus, the concept of love as subversive and creator of death passed to a constructive love, life promoter. The desire has been integrated into marriage to carnal union, mutual enjoyment of space. Procreation became a good marriage, among others. Polygamy disappeared. The wedding advertising settled. The incest prohibitions enabled them to discover the need for otherness and the affirmation of sexual difference as building strength. That moment of optimism and victory over the love of pagan death, stylish Tristan explains the prodigious impetus of Europe at the beginning of the year 1000. But it would not go beyond the end of the eleventh century. Also around the year 1000, the diatribes of St. Peter Damian and Ratherius of Verona against the marriage of priests announced another fight that would end the Gregorian reform and the triumph of conventional celibacy.

As a result, the virginity of praise has become more and more prevalent as to the triumph of a pessimistic view of marriage. This is so true that the history of Christian marriage is made of alternating between successes and crises.