So I have the decision of letting her go or forcing her marriage, which she might end up stressed, on an extra marital relationship, or even eloping with the dude. I imagine situations where I want to marry my daughter to an allied family, but she's being courted by a low born guy and ends up in love with him. What an excellent idea, this sounds like a mechanic with a very high potential for heavy sandbox roleplay. All gift horses should have their teeth thoroughly examined before being accepted. Securing important political-military alliances, cementing claims to wealthy and powerful titles, and bettering relations with foreign rulers who could stand to be of some future assistance should be priorities, and betrothals started early on, but a willingness to dissolve them as circumstances change is also a required skill for anyone who hopes to excel at the medieval marriage market. The short version being: betrothal to the son of a count or duke of some standing may very well be supplanted by a better offer, if the son of a king or emperor comes knocking. This set off alarm bells for the Pope, hardly wanting to be caught between the two hostile allied powers, who promptly saw to resurrecting the Anglo-Sicilian marriage plan with Joanna, which finally went through. Manuel made sure to drag out negotiations with the Sicilians to keep from having to commit too soon to either rside, profoundly annoying the Sicilian king in the process, at which point Barbarossa decided to repeat his trick with a marital offer for William, too. By this point, word of the pending arrangement had reached Barbarossa, who decided to torpedo the whole scheme by offering one of his own sons in a Holy Roman-Byzantine imperial-marital alliance, the Holy Grail of medieval European marriage politics. Since the Byzantine throne was no longer in the cards for Béla and Manuel no longer had to depend on him as an heir, the Hungarian prince was promptly dumped (they had issues), at which point Manuel went back to a Norman alliance. The deal fell through when Thomas Becket was murdered (the Pope took it poorly), and William went back to Manuel, who now had a son to displace Maria. ![]() William II, perhaps discouraged by this preexisting arrangement, then entertained an agreement with the English king Henry II for marriage to the princess Joanna: both kingdoms were of Norman descent, wealthy and powerful in their own respective spheres, and Sicily would be a strong ally to the English crusaders in future religious-martial endeavors in the Holy Land. Manuel, apparently, took no issue with shopping Maria around for a better deal. Maria was, at the time, however, already betrothed to a Hungarian prince, Béla, alias Béla-Alexios (later the third of his name to reign over Hungary), who was already designated to be Manuel's successor through Maria, much to the consternation of the Byzantine nobility (just imagine what they'd have thought of a Norman husband?). An exceptional dowry, all would agree, and one Manuel might just have been willing to pay for an alliance to strengthen him against the preeminent western emperor of the day, Frederick Barbarossa. Having no son at the time, this would have ultimately led to a Norman succession to the Byzantine throne (a longtime ambition of Guiscard and his descendants - a topic for another day). Let's look at just one mind-boggling example: William II of Sicily, grandson of the great Roger II, was sought after as a husband by no less august a personage than Manuel Komnenos, the Byzantine emperor, for his only daughter Maria. The truth, on the other hand, is considerably more complex: there's a whole world of negotiation between betrothal and marriage, and your first choice isn't necessarily your last. At present, marriage works on something of a first come-first served basis: if you can get in there ahead of the competition when they're still an infant, you're golden, but wait too long and all the good matches have evaporated completely. Marriage and the betrothal process could both stand to gain from a bit more exploration. ![]() Marital-diplomatic negotiations, more like. Click to expand.Courtship is really not the ideal term for this sort of thing.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |