European Monarchies 'catholic' morality?

  • Thread starter Thread starter PiousTemplar
  • Start date Start date
Status
Not open for further replies.
P

PiousTemplar

Guest
We all know the Church’s stance on marriage and inbreeding/incest, etc. My question is, how did ‘Catholic’ Kings in Europe in the past sometimes have many, many wives? Sometimes it was because they didn’t like each other, but most of the time they got a new wife if the other one wouldn’t produce a heir. How could they do this, as it is blatantly against the Church’s teaching?

Second Question:

Howcome ‘Catholic’ monarchies in the past have used inbreeding to sustain their monarchy’s power? The Habsburgs for example were renouned for their inbreeding to keep the monarchy going in both Austria and Spain. Spanish Charles II is an example of generations of inbreeding. Wouldn’t the Church of done something?
 
Wow, your question involves such wide sweping statements that it becomes unbelievable - you sounds like one of those anti-catholic prots who say ’ all priests are paedophiles’, and such like stuff!

True, Henry 8th employed marriage as if it were a change of clothing. Not sure how many others did… Are you?

As for inbreeding, true, there was a lot of 1st cousin marriages, all to maintain power & wealth within the ‘clan’. This resulted in a number of the off-spring being,erm, less than perfect, shall we say! However, if it were closer - bro/sis - and more widespread I doubt that it would have been sustainable.

So, rather than rely on wide sweeps, how about a specific list of those concerned, especially if you know of anything more than 1st cousin unions?
 
the only cases I can think of off hand with multiple wives, like Henry 8 resulted in his notorious break with the Church as he disregarded her discipline, so please give some other examples. Charlemagne is one and he was rebuked by the Church but bear in mind the papacy had less power at that time. You will also have to prove that such a monarch remained in the good graces of the Church to make your case.

don’t know where you are going with inbreeding because you give no cases or proof.

proof?
sources?
citations?
links?
specific cases?
 
Oh wow, I didn’t mean to come across as a bigot. I thought it was general knowlege…

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_II_of_Spain

His family tree:
xenohistorian.faithweb.com/europe/Charles_II_Inbreeding.jpg

As for having multiple wives:
Phillip II of spain:
Philip was married four times and had children with three of his wives. Even so, most of his children died young.

Philip’s first wife was his first cousin, Maria Manuela, Princess of Portugal. She was a daughter of John III of Portugal (Philip’s first cousin once removed, thus making her also his second cousin) and Philip’s aunt Catherine of Habsburg. The marriage produced one son, at whose birth Maria died in 1545.
Carlos, Prince of Asturias, (8 July 1545 – 24 July 1568), died unmarried and without issue.

Philip’s second wife was his first cousin once removed, Queen Mary I of England. The 1554 marriage to Mary was political. By this marriage, Philip became jure uxoris King of England, although the couple was apart more than together as they ruled their respective countries. The marriage produced no children and Mary died in 1558.

Philip’s third wife was Elisabeth of Valois, the eldest daughter of Henry II of France and Catherine de’ Medici. Their marriage (1559–1568) produced five children. Elisabeth died hours after a miscarriage in 1568. Their children were:
Miscarried twin daughters (1564).
Isabella Clara Eugenia of Spain (12 August 1566 – 1 December 1633), married Albert VII, Archduke of Austria, but had no issue.
Catherine Michelle of Spain (10 October 1567 – 6 November 1597), married Charles Emmanuel I, Duke of Savoy, and had issue.
miscarried or stillbirth son (1568).

Philip’s fourth and final wife was Anna of Austria, who was also his niece and cousin to her stepdaughter Catherine Michelle of Spain. (This marriage would be the first of three uncle-niece marriages that would be in the pedigree of the great grandson of Philip II, Charles II of Spain. Charles’s genetically caused diseases would end the Habsburg line in Spain.) By contemporary accounts, this was a convivial and satisfactory marriage (1570–1580) for both Philip and Anna. This marriage produced four sons and a daughter. Anna died after giving birth to Maria in 1580. Their children were:
Ferdinand, Prince of Asturias: 4 December 1571 – 18 October 1578, died young
Carlos Lorenzo: 12 August 1573 – 30 June 1575, died young
Diego, Prince of Asturias: 15 August 1575 – 21 November 1582, died young
Philip: 3 April 1578 – 31 March 1621 (future king, Philip III of Spain)
Maria: 14 February 1580 – 5 August 1583, died young
Click to expand...
Carlos II of Spain:
In 1679, the 18-year-old Charles II married Marie Louise d’Orléans (1662–1689), eldest daughter of Philippe I, Duke of Orléans (the only sibling of Louis XIV) and his first wife Princess Henrietta of England. At that time, Marie Louise was known as a lovely young woman. It is likely that Charles was impotent, and no children were born. Marie Louise became deeply depressed[3] and died at 26, ten years after their marriage, leaving 28-year-old Charles heartbroken.

Still in desperate need of a male heir, the next year he married the 23-year-old Palatine princess Maria Anna of Neuburg, a daughter of Philip William, Elector of the Palatinate, and sister-in-law of his uncle Leopold I, Holy Roman Emperor. However, this marriage was no more successful than the first in producing the much-desired heir.
Click to expand...
Philip IV of Spain
With Elizabeth of France (1603–1644, daughter of Henry IV of France) — married 1615 at Burgos
Click to expand...
Infanta Maria Margaret of Spain (1621)
Infanta Margaret Maria Catherine of Spain (1623)
Infanta Maria Eugenia of Spain (1625–1627)
Infanta Isabella Maria Theresa of Spain (1627)
Balthasar Charles (1629–1646), Prince of Asturias
Infanta Maria Anna “Mariana” Antonia of Spain (1636)
Infanta Maria Theresa of Spain (1638–1683), Queen consort of France as first wife of Louis XIV of France

With Mariana of Austria (1634–1696) - his niece - second wife - 1649

Margaret Theresa of Spain ( 12 July 1651 – 12 March 1673), first wife of Leopold I, Holy Roman Emperor
Infanta Maria Ambrosia de la Concepción (1655)
Philip Prospero, Prince of Asturias (1657–1661).
Infante Ferdinand Thomas (1658–1659)
Charles II of Spain (1661–1700)
Click to expand...
By the way, I am not attacking the Church in any way, I am just wondering if the Church ever said anything.
 
Incest is not about some magical taboo thinking, it has certain concrete rationale—family ties, genetically transmitted diseases, new diseases resulting from too close DNA being mixed. There is no absolute ban on marriage between even close relatives. Canon law (the law of the Church) places an absolute ban only between ancestors and descendants, and between siblings (can. 1078 § 3: “A dispensation is never given from the impediment of consanguinity in the direct line or in the second degree of the collateral line,” and that “impediment of consanguinity” stops at first cousins). If anything, the laws on consanguinity have only relaxed since the middle mages.

As for the mediaeval “divorces”, a more proper term would still be “declaration of nullity”, as only a valid marriage is binding. Among royalty there truly were cases where one can’t resist thinking the nullity declaration was political. Marriages, however (and not to defend or justify any actual case of a bogus nullity decree actually being granted to someone), were contracted for political reasons and, what’s particularly troubling from a modern point of view, the husband and wife sometimes didn’t have much to say in the matter. They sacrificed their own happiness for their country or family but sometimes they were required to be obedient to the king and/or head of family to the point that they could even be ordered into marriage. That is what makes me think that many mediaeval marriages may very well have been invalid, as the use of force or threat invalidates.

I’m certainly not pleased when I read about some king not getting a son from his wife and a commission of lawyers looking for a common ancestor that nobody cared about (or cared to find out about) when the marriage was being celebrated. But we shouldn’t sit in judgement of previous generations. We can’t and shouldn’t approve of what evils or wrongs they did but we can’t put them on trial and judge them in our own modern terms. By the way, there’s a lot of modern bad habits we “understand” but people from earlier centuries would have a tendency to be harsh on. I’m saying this to defend the people and not their actions.

Using a modern analogy, while some mediaeval bishop might have pronounced a marriage null when sympathetic to a king’s need of a heir, a modern ecclesiastical judge could grant a nullity decree when moved by the petitioner’s (plaintiff’s) plea of not getting the emotional support from a lousy husband that would sometimes also get drunk or resort to violence (which are serious wrongs but do not mean the marriage was invalid from the begining (and marriage can never become invalid when it was valid in the beginning)).

The Church consists of sinners and only sinners and has its own share of particularly bad or particularly overt cases, both among the lay members and the hierarchy. On earth, we are all sinners. But please understand this analogy: if a member of a family, or an employee of a company, steals something, it doesn’t mean the whole family or company (and all the members in the world) are collectively guilty of than one theft and thus thieves etc. on that single account.
 
Hmmm, certainly a lot of 1st cousin unions - no surprizes there! But a lot of widowhood too! It all seems perfectly reasonable, in a medieval, maintenance of power sort of way 🙂

but I think chevalier has it right - we cant judge these things with 21st century heads. Producing an heir and continuing the line was an obligation, a respnsibility that was taken inspite of personal preference… which is possibly why concubines were highly fashionable items, which, btw, the Church called adultery> Didn’t stop it though. At least, according to wide-spread sweeping statements would have you believe! 😉
 
In a monarchy, the heir is very important, and women often died in childbirth. So if the queen died, the king would need to remarry for an heir. Even when there were children, royal marriages were also a diplomatic tool.

We do not commonly think about this, but a lot of wars were fought when succession was unclear. Should a daughter or a nephew succeed? Uncle or nephew?
 
Ok thanks for your replies. Your post is very interesting chevalier.
 
St_Francis said:
In a monarchy, the heir is very important, and women often died in childbirth. So if the queen died, the king would need to remarry for an heir. Even when there were children, royal marriages were also a diplomatic tool.

We do not commonly think about this, but a lot of wars were fought when succession was unclear. Should a daughter or a nephew succeed? Uncle or nephew?
Click to expand...
Your right about that - even today the War of the Roses is re-enacted via a cricket match between Lancashire & Yorkshire!

But the need for a peaceful sucession was an important one. Although the above mentioned war was a ‘family squabble’ the death toll was awful - 28 000 in the battle of towton alone!
 
PiousTemplar said:
We all know the Church’s stance on marriage and inbreeding/incest, etc. My question is, how did ‘Catholic’ Kings in Europe in the past sometimes have many, many wives? Sometimes it was because they didn’t like each other, but most of the time they got a new wife if the other one wouldn’t produce a heir. How could they do this, as it is blatantly against the Church’s teaching?

Second Question:

Howcome ‘Catholic’ monarchies in the past have used inbreeding to sustain their monarchy’s power? The Habsburgs for example were renouned for their inbreeding to keep the monarchy going in both Austria and Spain. Spanish Charles II is an example of generations of inbreeding. Wouldn’t the Church of done something?
Click to expand...
If your wife dies you are free to remarry, marriage is until death not forever. If one of the couple is incapable of having children the marriage can be declared null because AFAIK people incapable of children can’t validly be in a marriage. Children were extremely important to the aristocracy.

The Habsburg family was the only family to do so on such a massive scale.
 
PiousTemplar said:
Ok thanks for your replies. Your post is very interesting chevalier.
Click to expand...
Thank you!
Dakota_Roberts said:
If your wife dies you are free to remarry, marriage is until death not forever. If one of the couple is incapable of having children the marriage can be declared null because AFAIK people incapable of children can’t validly be in a marriage. Children were extremely important to the aristocracy.
Click to expand...
Infertility itself is not an impediment (a circumstance invalidating marriage). Can. 1084 § 3 states “§3. Sterility neither prohibits nor nullifies marriage, without prejudice to the prescript of can. 1098,” and 1098 is about deceit (“A person contracts invalidly who enters into a marriage deceived by malice, perpetrated to obtain consent, concerning some quality of the other partner which by its very nature can gravely disturb the partnership of conjugal life,” where the consent of a so deceived person is not valid matrimonial consent).

Who can’t validly contract marriage is someone who is perpetually impotent, or someone who for psychic reasons can’t comprehend (Can. 1095 § 2) or accept (1095 § 3) the obligation to be open to having children. That would be e.g. a person compulsively avoiding intercourse to the point it’s not just a difficulty but incapacity to accept the obligation.

Also, Can. 1097 § 2, which deals with a type of error (the so called error determining the will) says that, “Error concerning a quality of the person does not render a marriage invalid even if it is the cause for the contract, unless this quality is directly and principally intended.” Therefore a person “directly and principally” desiring (interpreted as desiring the quality more than the specific person himself or herself) a fertile spouse, will invalidly marry someone believed to be fertile.

Also, Canon 1102 § 2 provides that a marriage may be contracted subject to a condition about the present. Being fertile or not (as opposed to e.g. becoming fertile or infertile at some point) could be such a condition. In order to be licit, i.e. lawful, the condition requires the consent of the “ordinary” (typically your bishop) but the marriage is still valid or invalid depending on whether the condition is true or not. So one could make fertility such a condition.

(It’s possible that such conditions were made or such “direct and principal” desires existed in the kings or aristocrats of old… which could actually make those marriages invalid under current canon law. By contrast, I doubt the marriage of an orphan heiress to a man nominated by her feudal overlord (the king or a more powerful noble), with the threat of poverty or whatever punishment for refusal, or even just the pressure itself, would survive scrutiny in a modern ecclesiastical court.)
 
Amalric I of Jerusalem
In 1163 Amalric had agreed, on the insistence of the High Court, to renounce his wife, Agnes of Courtenay (daughter of Count Joscelin II of Edessa), before assuming the crown of Jerusalem. The official grounds for the annulment of their marriage had been consanguinity - they were third cousins- but the underlying cause may have been suspicions that Agnes would seek to promote the interests of the largely landless Courtenay clan in Palestine at the expense of the incumbent aristocracy. Amalric and Agnes had already produced two childre, Baldwin and his elder sister Sibylla, and it was agreed that their legitimacy would be upheld, even though Amalric was soon to be remarried to the Bysantine princess Maria Comnena
Click to expand...
The Crusades - Thomas Asbridge page 299

I suppose all that means is that marriages were dissolved as well as contracted for political gain.
 
PiousTemplar said:
Oh wow, I didn’t mean to come across as a bigot. I thought it was general knowlege…

g.
Click to expand...
in all these examples the wives died before the royal husband remarried
so what is your point if it is not bigotry?

you left out a lot of examples you could have used such as Richard I the Lionheart
but even with those examples you are going to have to prove that the church approved of or connived at the irregular marriages.

civil law and canon law did not forbid cousin marriages at all times and places, and some near relationships could be dispensed on certain contitions

to make the global assumption OP makes you will have to come up with proof yourself that the Church allowed incestuous marriages or irregular multiple marriages, not ask us to provide rebuttal.
 
puzzleannie said:
the only cases I can think of off hand with multiple wives, like Henry 8 resulted in his notorious break with the Church as he disregarded her discipline, so please give some other examples.
Click to expand...
I was under the impression that Henry the VII didn’t get the annulment he requested because he ran afoul of Charles V, Catherine of Aragon’s nephew. Clement VII did have reason to fear Charles V more than Henry VIII after Charles’ troops sacked Rome in 1527.
 
KostyaJMJ said:
Love and romance? I thought marriage was about siring lots of dutiful young Catholics. 🙂
Click to expand...
Well that too, but … sometimes I wish the 2-dozen yellow roses and the clunky anniversary-of-answering-your-craigslist-post poem could be cashed in for a set of brake pads. I mean, women have needs.
 
Status
Not open for further replies.
Back
Top