Jonathan Shepard

The evidence of ‘barbarian’ potentates’ interest in forging

marriageties
with ladies of the imperial Byzantine house or, more generally,
with court ladies in the generations spanning the year 1000 is
fairly
full in comparison with that for preceding eras. Allowance must,
of
course, be made for the vagaries of source survival and it is likely
that numerous earlier negotiations concerning marriage-ties or
formal
betrothals came to nothing and have left no trace in our extant
sources. But for a stray allusion by Nicholas Mystikos we would be
unaware of the betrothal of a daughter of Leo VI to Louis III of
Provence.1 And the specific provision made by Constantine VII for
coping with proposals of marriage to senior members of the
imperial
house from the ‘infidel and dishonourable peoples of the north’
implies that such requests had actually been made by the likes of
the Rus, Hungarians and Khazars in the decades before c. 950.2
Nonetheless, the apparent constellation of negotiations and actual
marriages in the generations that followed is not just a mirage
conjured
up by more abundant sources. The Greek and Latin narratives
for the period are not, in fact, especially full and their limitations
are hardly offset by the light which the Rus Primary Chronicle
begins
to cast from that time forth.
2 JONATHAN SHEPARD
In many ways, the flurry of negotiations reflects the empire’s
standing
among neighbouring elites at the end of the first millennium.
This owed much to the military offensives that imperial forces had
sustained to a degree not seen for centuries. But our sketch will
also
present the cluster of marriage-ties around that time as a measure
of change in the world around Byzantium. New political
formations
were emerging and their leaders sought to define their status in
apposition
to older, well-established, seats of authority. Their quest for
recognition and symbols of respect from the basileus was
sometimes
backed up by threats and outright hostilities. Moreover the
marriages
took place against a background of major internal rebellion.
They reflect the brittleness of the imperial order at the very time
of
the expansion of Byzantium’s armed forces, spectacular territorial
gains and renewed aura of triumphalism.
At the same time Byzantium’s rich political culture and Christian
aura appealed to new elites still finding their way to their own
rituals
of rulership, especially Christian overlordship. Byzantine notions
of
the heavenly benediction conferred upon progeny conceived ‘in
the
Purple’ seem to have fallen upon receptive ground beyond the
empire’s
borders.3 For those seeking to reserve hegemonial status for
themselves
and their offspring, visual symbols of authority that were at once
imposing, readily recognizable and, in their lack of particular local
or familial affiliations, ‘neutral’ were of the utmost political value.
A
lady ‘from the palace of the Augustus’, bringing with her
‘countless
wealth in treasures’,4 was a status symbol in herself for a ruler
eager
to distinguish himself and his offspring from other members of
his
kin or nobility. The extent to which brides such as Theophano and
Anna affected the political scenario and cultural life of their host
countries specifically because they were ‘Byzantine’ is hard to
evaluate.
Even so, there are grounds for associating the presence of
Theophano
and Anna with certain cultural and religious developments in,
respectively,
the German-speaking and Rus lands. The princesses could act
as catalysts for tendencies already under way, even when not
delib-
3 See G. Dagron, “Nés dans la Pourpre”, TM 12 (1994), 130–7,
140–1; Liudprand
of Cremona, Antapodosis, IV. 18, in Opera Omnia, ed. P. Chiesa,
Corpus Christianorum
Continuatio Mediaevalis 156 (Turnhout, 1998), 107; W. Ohnsorge,
“Das Mitkaisertum
in der abendländischen Geschichte des früheren Mittelalters”,
repr. in his Abendland
und Byzanz (Darmstadt, 1979), 271–2.
4 Vita Mahtildis antiquior, 15, ed. B. Schütte, Die
Lebensbeschreibungen der Königin
Mathilde, MGH SS in usum schol. 66 (Hanover, 1994), 140–1.
MARRIAGES TOWARDS THE MILLENNIUM 3
erately bringing about change, and they may well have remained
in
close enough contact with the Byzantine palace to enjoy favoured
access to its products.5 Their effect, direct or indirect, on their
respective
host cultures has perhaps been underestimated.
The number of diplomatic exchanges about imperial or ‘courtly’
marriages recorded for the generation or so leading up to 1000 is
greater than that recorded for earlier periods, but not strikingly
so,
while the quantity actually contracted is modest. Exchanges
between
Otto I and Nikephoros II began with Otto’s bid in 967 for the hand
of a Porphyrogenita for his son, whom he had already designated
heir and co-emperor, the twelve-year-old Otto II. The proposal
presented
by Otto’s Venetian envoy was followed by Liudprand’s journey
to Constantinople to fetch the girl, bring about the marriage
and thereby end the hostilities that had broken out in the
meanwhile.
6 After the failure of Liudprand’s mission and another bout of
military conflict in Southern Italy, a third embassy was sent by
Otto
in 970–1 to negotiate peace and at the same time reach a
marriageagreement.
The envoys, among whom Liudprand himself may well
have figured, returned together with a bride for Otto II. She was
‘not the maiden sought after’, that is, a Porphyrogenita, but
Theophano
Skleraina, a niece-by-marriage of the newly acceded emperor,
John
Tzimiskes.7 Some sixteen years later, the newly installed king of
the
5 A significant, albeit not precise, analogy is provided by Maria
Lekapena, who
brought many household goods with her to the Bulgarian court,
and who reportedly
‘often’ returned to Constantinople in the early years of her
marriage: Theophanes
Continuatus, ed. I. Bekker (Bonn, 1838), 422; J. Shepard, “A
Marriage too Far?
Maria Lekapena and Peter of Bulgaria”, in A. Davids (ed.), The
Empress Theophano.
Byzantium and the West at the Turn of the First Millennium
(Cambridge, 1995), 135.
6 Liudprand has Nikephoros say that ‘we were friends and were
thinking to enter
into an indissoluble partnership (societas) by means of a
marriage-tie’, that is, the
marriage between the Porphyrogenita and Otto II agreed with
Dominicus: Legatio,
6, 7, 31, 36, in Opera Omnia, ed. Chiesa (above, n. 3) (Turnhout,
1998), 190, 200–01,
202. While highlighting the written restrictions upon his authority
to negotiate,
Liudprand indicates in verses that he had journeyed east ‘for love
of peace’ ( pacis
profectus amore): Legatio, 26, 35, 57, pp. 198, 202, 213, line 951.
See also R. Macrides,
“Dynastic Marriages and Political Kinship”, in J. Shepard and S.
Franklin (eds.),
Byzantine Diplomacy (Aldershot, 1992), 273–6; D. Nerlich,
Diplomatische Gesandtschaften
zwischen Ost- und Westkaisern 756–1002 (Bern, 1999), 58–9,
128, 299–300; W. Brandes,
“Liudprand von Cremona (Legatio cap. 39–41)”, BZ 93 (2000),
437–9.
7 Thietmar of Merseburg, Chronicon, ed. R. Holtzmann, MGH SS,
n.s. 9 (Berlin,
1935), 56. Liudprand’s participation in the third embassy was
considered likely by
K. Leyser, “Ends and Means in Liudprand of Cremona”, in J.
Howard-Johnston
(ed.), Byzantium and the West c. 850–c. 1200 (Amsterdam,
1988), 120–1. The ancestry
of Theophano has been demonstrated beyond reasonable doubt:
see G. Wolf, “Wer
4 JONATHAN SHEPARD
West Franks, Hugh Capet, had a letter directed to Basil II and
Constantine VIII, requesting a ‘daughter of the holy empire’ for
his
only son, Robert, ‘himself, too, a king’, soon after Robert had been
anointed as such in December 987.8 Around the same time, at the
other end of Europe, Prince Vladimir of Rus was engaged in
exchanges
that culminated in his marriage to Anna Porphyrogenita and,
presumably,
his repudiation of Rogneda of Polotsk, earlier described by
the Rus Primary Chronicle as having been taken to wife by him.9
Then,
from the mid-990s, Otto III sent a total of three embassies in
quest
of a bride and, at last, the third embassy returned in the opening
months of 1002, bringing a daughter of Constantine VIII
Porphyrogenitus.
10 Unfortunately her intended bridegroom had died on January
23 or 24, 1002 and the Porphyrogenita ‘went back to her
homeland
with all her attendants’.11 At the lowlier level of regimes
nominally
subordinate to the empire, John Orseolo, the son of Doge Peter II
of Venice, was married to Maria Argyropoulina, a member of a
family well-connected with the court, in 1005–06. This marriage
was
contracted in response to pressure from the Byzantine emperors.
Basil II and his brother are represented as speeding on the ‘day of
union’ by arranging for the patriarch to conduct the wedding in a
palace chapel and the two emperors played a prominent role in
the
wedding festivities. They placed golden crowns over the heads of
bride and groom and led them to a hall where for three days they
acted as ‘fellow banqueters at table’, eventually dismissing each
guest
with gifts.12
war Theophanu?”, in A. von Euw and P. Schreiner (eds.), Kaiserin
Theophanu. Begegnung
des Ostens und Westens um die Wende des ersten Jahrtausends,
II (Cologne, 1991), 385–6;
O. Kresten, “Byzantinistische Epilegomena zur Frage: wer war
Theophano?”, ibid.,
403–10; Nerlich, Gesandtschaften, 59–60, 302.
8 Gerbert d’Aurillac, Correspondance, ed. and trans. P. Riché and
J.P. Callu, I
(Paris, 1993), 268–71.
9 The Rus Primary Chronicle clearly represents Vladimir as
initiating the proposal
that he should marry the emperors’ sister, although the precise
course of events is
obscure: Povest’ Vremennykh Let, ed. V.P. Adrianova-Peretts and
D.S. Likhachev (St
Petersburg, 1996), 36, 37, 50; S. Franklin and J. Shepard, The
Emergence of Rus
750–1200 (London, 1996), 161–3.
10 Nerlich, Gesandtschaften, 62–3, 303–05.
11 Landulph, Historia Mediolanensis, II. 18, ed. A. Cutolo, Rerum
Italicarum
Scriptores, 4.2 (1942), 53; Nerlich, Gesandtschaften, 305.
12 John the Deacon, Cronaca Veneziana, in Cronache Veneziane
Antichissime, ed. G. Monticolo
(Rome, 1890), 167–8. Basil’s zeal for sealing this knot had much
to do with
the spiritual bonds with the Orseolos that Henry II had just
tightened through
sponsoring the confirmation of another of the Doge’s sons, who
became his namesake:
MARRIAGES TOWARDS THE MILLENNIUM 5
With the exception of the Venetian match and a bid to marry
Basil and Constantine themselves to Bulgarian princesses at a
time
of crisis in 969,13 the initiative for all these matches came from
outsiders
and this is noteworthy in itself. For the rounds of marriage
negotiations between Byzantium and major western leaders in the
preceding two centuries give the impression that the first move
came
from the eastern emperor. One may highlight a few examples with
the aid of Daniel Nerlich’s full and systematic study. In 765
Constantine
V took the initiative in seeking Pippin’s daughter, Gisela, as the
bride
for his son and heir, Leo (IV), and subsequently it was Leo and
Empress Irene who sought the hand of Charlemagne’s daughter,
Rotruda, for their son, Constantine (VI).14 Something of a pattern
emerges in the exchanges between the mid-ninth and the mid-
tenth
century, the period when Muslim sea-raids loosened Byzantium’s
hold over the Central Mediterranean, while simultaneously
impinging
upon Frankish royal dominance even over the southern coastline
of Francia. Several attempts were made by the basileus to secure
by marital bonds a military alliance with a Frankish emperor or,
in
default of such an emperor, a potentate disposing of significant
force
majeure. The Muslims were the prime target of the intended
operations,
but there were occasions when a martial northern ally was of
use in distracting or overawing Lombard princes ensconced in
Salerno
and Benevento. Once Sicily ceased to offer a safe base for
Byzantine
fleets and armed forces, there was need of counterweights against
the Lombards. Their further incursions could make a mockery of
the emperor’s residual claims to dominion in Italy.
It is worth considering east-west exchanges between the mid-
ninth
and the mid-tenth century in slightly more detail. In 841–2
Theophilos
reportedly ‘promised’ his daughter as bride for the son and heir of
Emperor Lothar, Louis II.15 The rationale of his demarche to the
K. Leyser, “The Tenth Century in Byzantine-Western
Relationships”, in D. Baker
(ed.), Relations between East and West in the Middle Ages
(Edinburgh, 1973), 31–2. See
also J.-F. Vannier, Familles byzantines. Les Argyroi (IX–XII
siècles), Byzantina Sorbonensia
1 (Paris, 1975), 43–4.
13 See