The Tsar’s Happy Occasion: Ritual and Dynasty in the Weddings of Russia’s Rulers, 1495–1745 by Russell E. Martin

Abstract

Reviewed by: The Tsar’s Happy Occasion: Ritual and Dynasty in the Weddings of Russia’s Rulers, 1495–1745 by Russell E. Martin Maureen Perrie Martin, Russell E. The Tsar’s Happy Occasion: Ritual and Dynasty in the Weddings of Russia’s Rulers, 1495–1745. NIU Series in Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies. Northern Illinois University Press, an imprint of Cornell University Press, Ithaca, NY and London, 2021. xvii + 359 pp. Illustrations. Figures. Tables. Appendices. Notes. Bibliography. Index. £48.00: $59.95. In 2012 Russell Martin published a book about bride-shows in Muscovy (A Bride for the Tsar, De Kalb, IL), which the present volume complements by describing royal weddings from the late fifteenth century to the marriage of the future Peter III to the future Catherine II (‘the Great’) in 1745. The author has conducted extensive archival research for the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries in particular, and he provides a thorough and meticulous account of these ceremonies. Martin’s main focus is on the Muscovite period. His first three chapters deal with a sample of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century weddings in chronological order. For the sixteenth century he takes the 1526 wedding of Vasilii III and Elena Glinskaia as his main example; for the seventeenth century he focuses on the two weddings of Tsar Mikhail Fedorovich (in 1624 and 1626) and those of Aleksei Mikhailovich in 1648 and 1671, demonstrating how at Mikhail’s weddings the earlier rituals were modified in order to create an aura of legitimacy for the new Romanov dynasty. The following three chapters discuss thematic aspects of Muscovite royal weddings. Chapter four considers marriages of Orthodox and non-Orthodox partners: Elena, the daughter of Ivan III, to the Catholic Alexander of Lithuania in 1495; Maria Staritskaia, a kinswoman of Ivan IV, to the Lutheran Magnus of Denmark in 1573; and the marriages of the First False Dmitrii to the Catholic Marina Mniszech in 1605 and 1606, the first of which took place by proxy in Cracow, and the second in Moscow. In the fifth chapter the author examines the three main categories of participants in the wedding celebrations: members of the dynasty; courtiers and servitors; and the relatives of the bride, noting that since brides were usually recruited from middle-ranking service families, the placing of their relatives at the weddings often required exemptions from the formal system of precedence (mestnichestvo). Chapter six is devoted to the exchange of wedding gifts, especially the distribution of gifts from the bride, as a means of securing the loyalty of courtiers and the prayers of the Church hierarchs. The final two chapters shift the chronology forward to the St Petersburg period. Here Martin argues that Peter the Great moved away from the aim of consolidating the dynasty that had driven royal weddings in Muscovy, in order to promote his own charismatic authority by personally dominating the ceremonies. Peter’s 1722 attempt to determine the succession having failed, however, subsequent [End Page 378] royal weddings reverted to dynastic preoccupations, complicated by rivalry between the Miloslavskii and Naryshkin branches of the family. Martin describes all of these wedding rituals in great detail, and his analyses of their symbolism are generally persuasive. The author is concerned not with the wedding service itself, since that was the domain of the Church hierarchy, but rather with the subsequent celebrations, which normally lasted for three days. In the Muscovite period, the main participants were courtiers, and the primary function of the occasion was apparently to promote the social integration of the court elite. It was only in the St Petersburg period that public processions enabled the monarch’s subjects to witness the marriages of their rulers. Martin, however, pays little attention to the changing audience for royal weddings, and fails to place these ceremonies in the broader context of Russian society. For example, he explains the removal of the remnants of pagan fertility rites from the rituals at the weddings of Aleksei Mikhailovich, and the elimination of the traditional rowdy entertainments, in terms of the tsar’s personal piousness. But the reformist ‘Zealots of Piety’ had been campaigning since the 1630s for the abolition of such improper behaviour, culminating in the...