The indissoluble union, celebrated by a sacrament, replaced old customs of polygamy, causing a great change in European habits. In 392, Christianity was proclaimed the official religion. Between 965 and 1008 the kings of Denmark, Poland, Hungary, Russia, Norway and Sweden were baptized.
Philip of Macedonia's marriage to Olimpia. Century miniature. XV
From these two facts resulted the format of the marriage, at the beginning of the year 1000, with a totally new face. During the Holy Roman Empire - which succeeded the disappeared Roman Empire -, led by Otto III from 998 to 1002, there was a fabulous transformation of urban Roman societies and rural Germanic and Slavic societies. The unions between men and women were, then, the complex result of pagan resistances, political interests and a powerful evangelization.
"Love:desire that tries to monopolize everything; charity:tender unity; hatred:contempt for the vanities of this world." This brief scholastic exercise, written on the back of an early eleventh-century manuscript, expresses well the conflict between pagan and Christian conceptions of marriage. For pagans, whether Germans, Slavs or even more recently Vikings settled in Normandy since 911, love was seen as subversive, as destroying society. For Christians, like the bishop and writer Jonas of Orléans, the term charity expressed, with the adjective "conjugal", a privileged and tender love within the conjugal cell. This optimism appeared in certain pontifical decrees, through terms such as marital affection (maritalis affectio) or conjugal love (dilectio conjugalis). Evidently, the Christian ideal was to give up the goods of this world in contempt, which constituted an invitation to conventional celibacy.
Pagan Europe, badly baptized in the year 1000, therefore presented a conception of marriage totally contrary to that of Christians. The example of Normandy is even more revealing, as it is very similar to that of Sweden or Bohemia. Vikings practiced polygamous marriage, with a first-rank wife who had all rights, and with second-rank wives or concubines, whose children had no rights, unless the official was barren, or had been put away. Engagement ceremonies organized the transmission of property, but there was no true marriage unless there had been a carnal union. On the morning of the wedding night, the husband offered his wife an often quite significant set of chattels. It was called the morning gift (Morgengabe), which Roman jurists called a dowry. Therefore, the role of the official wife was very important, especially if she had many children, since the main objective was procreation.
These unions were essentially political and social, decided by the parents. It was about building large family units, within which peace reigned. Hence, second-rank concubines were called Friedlehen or Frilla, that is, "peace bonds". In fact, they came from longtime hostile families. From the moment the blood of both families mixed, war was no longer possible. Thus, mothers chose sons' wives, or daughters' husbands, always in the same classical groups, in order to safeguard this peace. If a wife died, the widower would marry her sister. In this way, little by little the great families became more and more close by blood ties (consanguinity), by alliance (affinity) and, finally, completely incestuous. If we add to this picture the bonds between men, the adoption of arms, the oath of allegiance and other feudal bonds that triumphed in the tenth century as a true "supplementary kinship", according to Marc Bloch's expression, and we have proof that these Pagan weddings left no room for feeling.
subversive love
Thus, when love manifested itself, it could only be adulterous, or take the form of a rape, a way of making the marriage irreversible, or of a more or less combined abduction between the kidnapper and the "abducted", in order to deceive the will of the parents. In these cases, love was effectively subversive, as it destroyed the established order. It became synonymous with death and political ruin, as evidenced by the novel, with a true historical background, Tristan and Isolde, transmitted orally by the European world at that time - Celtic, Frankish and Germanic. Tristan, the king's nephew and his vassal, committed both incest, adultery and treason against King Marcus, Iseult's husband. In fact, he himself says, after their first meeting:"Let death come." In ancient societies, obsessed with survival, the will to power, to power, was more important than the will to pleasure, because those tribes of immense families knew no administrative or external limitations.
This situation must have been softened by the fact that they were in contact with Christian countries, or peoples from regions steeped in Christianity, such as the baptized Normans of the 10th century. As a result, two structures coexisted, more or less confused. Around the year 1000, the bishop of Iceland found it very difficult to separate an already married tribesman from his concubine, especially since she was his own sister - a fact which supported the opinion that his brother, the bishop, was no more. of a tyrant. In the 10th and 11th centuries, the Dukes of Normandy regularly had two types of marriage:an official, frank and baptized wife, and one or several concubines.
William the Conqueror, who took England in 1066, was codenamed bastard, having been born of such a union. At the entrance to Falésia, her father, Roberto, the Demon, was called to attention by a young woman who, in the city washroom, pressed her clothes with her feet, naked like her fellow workers, to better beat the clothes. That same night, with the permission of her father, Arlette, the young woman, found herself in the duke's bedroom, wearing a nightgown open at the front, "so that", tells us the monk Wace, who told the story, "that who sweeps the floor cannot be level with the face of his prince". These "Danish" loves demonstrate that women were free, provided they accepted a secondary position.
This duplicity of situation in an officially Christian but still pagan western world was complicated when women gained power, something facilitated by the matrilineality of Germanic origins. Some encouraged their husbands to proclaim themselves kings, as they were of Carolingian imperial origin. Castelãs, ladies of great estates, or women of high nobility, they used marriage as a springboard for their ambition. In Rome, Marozia (or Mariuccia) was the mother of Pope John XI, son of her connection with Pope Sergius III. Widow of her first husband, Guido of Tuscany, half-brother of the King of Italy, Hugo, she invited him to marry her. But Alberic II, his son from his first marriage, expelled that intruder manipulated by his mother from the castle of Sant'Angelo where the nuptials were celebrated.
Punishment for the libido
In the eyes of numerous ecclesiastical writers, such as Bishop Ratherius of Verona, female libido was dangerous and should be severely repressed. The fact that old countries like Spain, Italy and the kingdom of the Franks, although Christian for five centuries, had not yet integrated the doctrine of marriage - to the point, for example, that King Hugh had two official wives and three concubines - proves how much this doctrine was against its time. And yet it had been clearly stated and repeated since Ambrose had declared in 390 that "consent makes the marriage." To this the Council of See had added, in 755:"Let all marriages be public" and "One law for men and women."
Claiming the freedom of consent of the spouses and the condition of equality of man and woman was utopian, especially in a patriarchal Roman society. However, important progress took place in the tenth century, thanks to the repetition of the apology of marriage, symbol of the indissoluble union between Christ and the Church. After the irreducible attitude of Archbishop Hincmar and Pope Nicholas I, the divorce of Lothair II for repudiation of his wife Teutberge - due to her sterility - became impossible after 869, the year of his death. Incomprehensible to contemporaries, marriage was not based solely on procreation. The alliance was more important than a son. More than anyone, far from speeches about the superiority of virginity, Hincmar had demonstrated that a free consent without consecutive carnal union was not a marriage. He thus prefigured the notion of nullity instituted by the decree of Gratian in 1145. As a result, the rituals, as Burchard of Worms wrote around the year 1000, translated the optimistic doctrine of the Carolingian moralists at the level of the discipline of marriage.
The carnal union, consequence of the consent between a man and a woman (and not several), is the space of sanctification of the spouses. The ideal of monogamy, fidelity and indissolubility became all the more possible because at the end of the 10th century slavery of the ancient type disappeared in the Mediterranean countries. A new space opened up for Christian marriage, thanks to the emergence of concubinage with female slaves, who had no freedom. This was also the time when the ordinances of the councils made the validity of the marriage of the unfreed mandatory.
But another struggle reached its culmination in the year 1000:the prohibition of incest. Initiated in the 6th century and almost successful in Italy, Spain and France, this ban faced strong opposition in Germany, Bohemia and Poland. Prohibited in principle up to the fourth degree between first cousins, marriages of consanguinity and affinity were punished, and the culprits separated. Later, from Gregory II (715-735), the ban was extended to the seventh degree (nephews in the style of Brittany), as well as to spiritual relatives (godfather and godmother):there would no longer be any alliances except with strangers, with anyone else (God or a neighbor of a different sex), but in no way with the one with whom a type of connection already existed.
The social consequences of such a doctrine were incalculable. She forced each of them to look for a spouse far from their village and castle. It ended up destroying the large families, of dozens of people, who lived under the same roof, and favoring the formation of a nuclear group, of the conjugal type. It thus suppressed matrilineal succession and women's choice of spouses. Exogamy became mandatory. Europe would open up to the outside.
praise of virginity
In Germany, since the councils of Mainz, in 813, and of Worms, in 868, cases of incestuous marriages maintained by the obstinacy of women were numerous. In Bohemia, the second bishop of Prague, Adalbert, a great friend of Emperor Otto III, had obtained, in 992, a public edict authorizing him to judge and separate incestuous couples. It was such a resounding failure that he was forever disgusted with his episcopal task. He preferred to go and evangelize the Prussians, who martyred him on April 23, 997.
The Otto dynasty, which had restored the empire in 962 in Germany and Italy, nevertheless supported the Church in its undertaking of transformation and Christianization. And their wives set an example, as Edite (946), Matilde (968) and Adelaide (999) were considered saints. The clerics who recounted their lives, in particular that of Matilde, insist not on widowhood or the acts of founding monasteries, but on the role of wife and mother. Her sanctity came essentially from her marriage and her role as a counselor with her imperial husband. Reading the letters of passages from the life of Saint Matilde did not have a negligible influence on popular audiences.
If Germany was then a pioneer front in the Christianization of marriage, this was not quite the case in the kingdom of the Franks. Emma, the betrayed wife of the Duke of Aquitaine, William V, took revenge on her rival by ordering her to be raped by her entire personal guard. Berta, daughter of the King of Burgundy, barely a widow, set her sights on young Robert, son of Hugo Capet, to make a hypergamous marriage.
This example is revealing. Church legislation on Christian marriage ran counter to the mentality of the time. And yet the conjugal love of charity (dilectio caritatis) began to overshadow the love of possession (libido dominandi). Around the year 1000, urban expansion and the beginning of clearing and culture of the countryside allowed the monogamous nuclear family to multiply. Rural cells were destroyed by the need to seek a spouse further afield. Only the nobility and older ruling families resisted, locked in their feudal relationships, unlike the newcomers to power, the Otto, who welcomed and adopted Christian doctrine as a liberation and dared boldly head east to beyond the river Elbe, the new frontier of European expansion.
In this way, from the conception of love as subversive and creator of death, we pass to a constructive love, promoting life. Desire was integrated into marriage with carnal union, a space for mutual enjoyment. Procreation became a good of marriage, among others. Polygamy disappeared. The wedding publicity set in. The incest prohibitions allowed the need for otherness to be discovered and the affirmation of sexual difference as a force of construction. This Tristan-style moment of optimism and victory over pagan love of death explains the prodigious elan 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 Saint Peter Damian and Ratherius of Verona against the marriage of priests announced another struggle that would end in the Gregorian reform and the triumph of conventional celibacy.
As a result, the praise of virginity became more and more prevalent, to the point where a pessimistic view of marriage prevailed. So much so that the history of Christian marriage is one of alternations between successes and crises.