Documenting Authority: Marriage Agreements and the Making of a Queen

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.