Marriage Strategy among the German Nobility, 1400–1699

Abstract

Marriage Strategy among the German Nobility, I400-1699 Studies of family strategy among the early modern Western European elites generally assert that upward social mobility took place primarily through the marriage of daughters of new to husbands of higher rank, and that women attracted much stronger social disapproval for marrying beneath their rank than men did. According to Dewald, A long succession of alliances joined aristocratic young men with wealthy women from lower ranks, the daughters of officials, bankers, and merchants; marriage of impoverished but noble women with wealthier men happened much less often but was certainly not unheard of. Stone, too, states that in the view of the English gentry, it was permissible to marry your son to the heiress of a tradesman, but not to marry your daughter to a tradesman or even to his son.1 In Germany, however, studies analyzing the connubium, or marriage connections, of individual noble families or regional groups of nobles from the Middle Ages through the early modern period have not found this pattern of marrying daughters up and sons down. Rather, they suggest that within the German nobility, sons tended to marry spouses of higher status than their own, and daughters to marry spouses of lower status. Two historians of the medieval German noble family recently argued that the unique characteristics of the German nobility are responsible for the development of this marriage strategy. Freed traces its origins to the legal disabilities attached to unequal marriages between members of the freeborn high nobility (counts and barons) and those of the unfree lower nobility. Spiess points out that the strategy would have been encouraged by the dowry system of the