The formation of the bond and the clandestine marriages in the Low Middle Ages

Abstract

The problem of the clandestine marriages was one of the subjects boarded in the Lateran Council (1215-1216). It is difficult to determine the moment in which the number of these unions, allowed by the Church, was considerably increased. The council fathers and the Pontiffs, especially Alexander III, condemned severely, but without success, the clandestine marriages. The policy initiated by the Church –extending the impediment of consanguinity from the fourth to the seventh degree– was directed toward the dilution of the model of ample kinship relationships, replacing it by the nuclear family. It meant the impossibility to be united in marriage to individuals pertaining to the same kin. The causes of this phenomenon are tried to explain in this study. Within the nobility, the consanguinity constituted a serious obstacle for its pretensions to fortify and to perpetuate its economic situation by means of married connections. Something similar also succeeded in the cities to the bourgeois families in order to conserve the cities’ government. And the same can be of the rural world: the shortage of human contingent and the dispersion of the seigneurial property favoured the marriage between consanguineous.