Marriage Strategy Among the German Nobility, 1400–1699

xxix Journal of Interdisciplinary History, :2 (Autumn, 1998), 169–195. Judith J. Hurwich MARRIAGE STRATEGY AMONG THE JUDITHGERMAN J. HURWICHNOBILITY Marriage Strategy among the German Nobility, 1400–1699 Studies of family strategy among the early modern Western European elites generally assert that upward social mo- bility took place primarily through the marriage of daughters of “new men” 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 ofªcials, 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 Judith J. Hurwich is a member of the faculty, Department of History, Hackley School, Tarrytown, N.Y. She is the author of “Lineage and Kin in the Sixteenth-Century Aristocracy: Some Comparative Evidence on England and Germany,” in A. L. Beier, David Cannadine, and James M. Rosenheim (eds.), The First Modern Society: Essays in English History in Honour of Lawrence Stone (Cambridge, 1989), 33–64; “Inheritance Practices in Early Modern Ger- many,” Journal of Interdisciplinary History, XXIII (1993), 699–718. © 1998 by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the editors of The Journal of Interdisciplinary History. 1 Jonathan Dewald, The European Nobility, 1400–1800 (Cambridge, 1996), 169; Lawrence Stone and Jeanne C. Fawtier Stone, An Open Elite? England 1540–1880 (Oxford, 1984), 26. Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/002219598551661 by guest on 29 September 2021 170 | JUDITH J. HURWICH medieval German nobility. Since dowries were ªxed by rank, the son’s wife would bring in a larger dowry than the family would have to pay out to the daughter’s husband.2 This article analyzes the marriage strategy of German nobles during the late Middle Ages and early modern period to determine whether sons did in fact marry up and daughters down and, if so, to determine whether such a strategy was unique to Germany. It compares evidence from regional studies on two marriage characteristics among the German nobility—the proportions of sons and of daughters marrying, and the extent of intermarriage between different social groups—with ªndings concerning a group of southwestern German counts and barons associated with the Zimmerische Chronik. The study also examines whether the Ref- ormation brought about signiªcant changes in the marriage strategies of German nobles, and it compares the strategies of Catholic and Protestant nobles in southwestern Germany to those of other Catholic and Protestant elites in early modern Europe. The Zimmerische Chronik, or Chronicle of the Counts of Zim- mern, was written in the 1560s by the Swabian Count Froben Christoph von Zimmern (1519–1566/67). I have compiled a database of demographic information about the Zimmern and ten other families with whom they intermarried during the ªfteenth and sixteenth centuries and for whom published genealogies are available—384 men and 369 women who were born, married, or died between 1400 and 1699 and who survived to the age of ªfteen.3 2 John Freed, Noble Bondsmen: Ministerial Marriages in the Archdiocese of Salzburg, 1100–1343 (Ithaca, 1996); Karl-Heinz Spiess, Familie und Verwandtschaft im deutschen Hochadel des Spätmit- telalters: 13. bis Anfang des 16.Jahrhunderts (Stuttgart, 1993). 3 References to the Zimmerische Chronik are to the most recent edition: Hansmartin Decker-Hauff (ed.), Die Chronik der Grafen von Zimmern (Sigmaringen, 1964–1972), 3 v. (hereafter cited as ZC). The best guide to the chronicle is Beat Jenny, Graf Froben Christoph von Zimmern—Geschichtsschreiber—Erzähler—Landesherr (Lindau, 1959), which contains an extensive bibliography. The families included are the Grafen von Eberstein, Schenken (later Grafen) von Erbach, Grafen (later Fürsten) von Fürstenberg, Herren von Geroldseck, Herren von Gundelªngen, Grafen von Kirchberg, Grafen von Königsegg, Schenken (later Grafen) von Limpurg, Grafen (later Fürsten) von Oettingen, Herren (later Grafen) von Zimmern and Grafen (later Fürsten) von [Hohen]zollern. Genealogical data are taken from Wilhelm Karl Isenburg, Europäische Stammtafeln: Stammtafeln zur Geschichte der Europäischen Staaten (Marburg, 1975; 2nd rev.ed.), 5 v. For discussion of the inheritance and career strategies followed by these families, see Hurwich, “Inheritance Practices in Early Modern Germany,” Journal of Interdisciplinary History, XXIII (1993), 699–718. Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/002219598551661 by guest on 29 September 2021 MARRIAGE STRATEGY AMONG THE GERMAN NOBILITY | 171 It is impossible to tell to what extent these eleven families are representative of the southwestern German nobility as a whole. However, the Zimmern were nearly average in wealth (judging by the dowries that they gave and received) for counts and barons in this region, and the families into which they married repre- sented the entire range of the nonprincely high nobility. Although most of their marriages involved other Swabian families, a marriage alliance with the Oettingen in 1474 gave the Zimmern connections to Franconian families as well. Some of the families with whom the Zimmern intermarried are also included in Spiess’ study of the counts and barons of the Mainz region from 1200 to 1550, Böhme’s study of the Franconian counts from 1475 to 1525, and Schmidt’s study of the counts of Wetterau from 1450 to 1648. Since my sample includes families that became Protestant and families that remained Catholic, it allows me to compare the marriage strategies of noble families who shared similar social characteristics but belonged to different confessions. Doing so has not been possible in previous local studies, which dealt either with the period before the Reformation or with a region in which a single confession dominated.4 structure of the german nobility In the late Middle Ages and early modern period, the nobles of southwestern Germany were divided into three constitutional orders (Stände): the princes (Reichsfürsten), consisting of dukes (Herzogen), margraves (Mark- grafen), and landgraves (Landgrafen); the higher nobility (Hochadel), consisting of counts (Grafen) and barons (freie Herren); and the lower nobility (Niederadel), consisting of “mere” noblemen (Edel) and knights (Ritter). The lower nobility were descended from the unfree ministeriales, or “serf-knights,” a class unique to Germany.5 Membership in the Hochadel, the order to which the families in this sample belonged, was based on free birth, landed posses- 4 For Spiess, see note 2; Ernst Böhme, Das fränkische Reichsgrafkollegium im 16. und 17. Jahrhundert (Stuttgart, 1989); Georg Schmidt, Der Wetterauer Grafenverein: Organisation und Politik einer Reichskorporation zwischen Reformation und Westfälischem Frieden (Marburg, 1989). Of the families that survived through the male line into the late sixteenth century, Eberstein, Erbach, Limpurg, and the main branch of the Oettingen became Protestant; Fürstenburg, Königsegg, Zimmern, [Hohen]zollern, and three collateral branches of the Oettingen remained Catholic. 5 For a brief overview of the development of the nobility in western Germany from the thirteenth to the sixteenth century, see Spiess, Familie und Verwandtschaft, 1–4. Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/002219598551661 by guest on 29 September 2021 172 | JUDITH J. HURWICH sions, and rights of government over estates (Herrschaftsrechte). Nobles holding titles of ofªce from the emperor (Grafen, or counts) outranked nobles without such titles (freie Herren, or barons). By the end of the fourteenth century, ministerials were legally free, and kings and emperors began to grant the titles of baron and count to members of some ministerial families in exchange for services and payment. A few families of ministerial origin gained social acceptance as “equal to barons” and membership in the Hochadel, even without being granted new titles. They continued to bear titles reºecting their original ofªces at court, such as Schenk (cupbearer) or Truchsess (steward). In the early sixteenth century, Hans Truchsess von Waldburg liked to boast that “he and his ancestors had mixed themselves in with the counts and barons like mouse-droppings in the pepper.” In the same period, Wilhelm Schenk von Limpurg complained that the high nobility was being diluted by intermarriage with families whose claims to be “equal to barons” were more recent than that of the Limpurgs. Wilhelm taunted his mother-in-law—a countess of Leiningen whose husband came from the somewhat dubious von der Laiter family—by talking in her presence about lesser nobles marrying into families of counts and barons. “But with each odious example he would say, ‘But my lady, I don’t mean you.’”6 The rise of the territorial princes at the end of the ªfteenth century established new political and social barriers between the lower and the higher nobility.

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