Abstract
Did marriage constitute an essential element of queenship or even rulership? If so, how? Kings themselves were seldom unmarried, for a variety of reasons: they needed legitimate heirs, and they might need to guard their chastity; historically, they needed partners in ruling. However, they did not need wives in order to be kings. For women the situation differed, especially because marriage itself was usually the avenue to queenship. As Pauline Stafford has suggested for early English queens, marriage legitimated access to the king’s bed and his body; this was an essential, if problematic, dynamic of queenly authority.1 This access, and the institution of marriage that legitimated it, certainly provided the framework for Leonor of England’s queenship and was expected to do the same for her daughters. When queenship was predicated upon inheritance, marriage could provide a stabilizing element to the queen’s authority; this was intended to be the case when Alfonso VI insisted on his daughter Urraca’s marriage to Alfonso of Aragón in 1109 and was probably behind various efforts to marry the daughters of Alfonso IX of León a century later. The strategy was clearly in operation when Berenguela was betrothed to Conrad of Rothenburg (discussed below). A husband might also prove a real liability, undermining a queen’s personal authority or providing a focus for noble rebellion. What a husband could provide—and the real reason marriage was so necessary for queens as well as for kings—was legitimate children. A hereditary queen might not need to be married, but she did need to be a mother.
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Notes
Infante Fernando was twenty-one years old when he died, and only one attempt to find a bride for him is known. His parents sought to betroth him to a Danish princess, who rejected the marriage in favor of the cloister. See M-H. Vicaire, Saint Dominic and His Times, trans. Kathleen Pond (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1964), pp. 46–48 and 53-55; Jordan of Saxony, On the Beginnings of the Order of Preachers, ed. and trans., Simon Tugwell, O. P. (Dublin: Dominican Publishers, 1982), ch. 2, pp. 4-5.
Evelyn S. Procter, Curia and Cortes in León and Castile, 1072–1295 (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1980), p. 77
Joseph F. O’Callaghan, “The Beginnings of the Cortes of León-Castile,” American Historical Review 74.5 (June 1969): 1512–13 [1503–1537]; O’Callaghan, Cortes of Castile-León, pp. 16–18; Alfonso VIII 2: nos. 467-71. These meetings also had a significant impact on the alliance system throughout Iberia. Echegaray, Guerra y pacto, pp. 292–93.
Constance M. Rousseau, “Kinship Ties, Behavior Norms, and Family Counselling in the Pontificate of Innocent III,” in Women, Marriage, and Family in Medieval Christendom: Essays in Memory of Michael M. Sheehan, C.S., ed. Constance M. Rousseau and Joel Thomas Rosenthal (Kalamazoo, MI: Medieval Institute Publications, 1998), pp. 325–47.
Demetrio Mansilla, ed. Documentación pontificia hasta Inocencio III (Rome: Instituto Espanol de Estudios Eclesiasticos, 1955), no. 138.
John W. Baldwin, The Government of Philip Augustus, Foundations of French Royal Power in the Middle Ages (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988), pp. 80–86
Georges Duby, The Knight, the Lady and the Priest: The Making of Modern Marriage in Medieval France, trans. Barbara Bray (New York: Pantheon Books, 1983), pp. 189–206.
Fernando III, pp. 253–55; pp. 265–66; L. Auvray, Les Registres de Gregoire IX, recueil des bulles de ce pape publieés ou analyseés d’après les manuscrits originaux du Vatican, ed. Lucien Auvray, 4 vols. (1896–1908, repr. Paris: Fontemoing, 1955), 1: nos. 267, 628. Centuries earlier, Visigothic canons forebade royal widows to remarry in the kingdom of Leon, but it is unlikely that this tradition influenced Berenguela and her sisters. Collins, “Queens Dowager,” in Medieval Queenship, pp. 84–85 and 90.
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© 2009 Miriam Shadis
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Shadis, M. (2009). Documenting Authority: Marriage Agreements and the Making of a Queen. In: Berenguela of Castile (1180–1246) and Political Women in the high middle ages. The New Middle Ages. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230103139_3
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230103139_3
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