Russell E. Martin,A Bride for the Tsar: Bride-Shows and Marriage Politics in Early Modern Russia

Reviewed by: Maureen Perrie, CREES, University of Birmingham, UK

The phenomenon of the royal bride-show is often seen as one of the more exotic features of early modern Russian political culture. Throughout the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries bevies of beautiful young women of modest origin were assembled in Moscow, for the tsar to choose his bride. In this lively and engaging study, Russell Martin traces the development of the bride-show, and places it in the broader context of royal marriage politics in Russia.

The first bride-show is recorded in 1505, resulting in the marriage of Grand Prince Vasilii Ivanovich to Solomoniia Saburova. Martin suggests that the phenomenon was based on Byzantine precedents, and that it was introduced because of the problems that were perceived to exist with the earlier pools of candidates for grand-princely marriages: foreign royalty; native Russian aristocrats (boyars); and the previously independent Russian princes whose territories had by the beginning of the sixteenth century been annexed by Muscovy. Bride-shows drew on a new pool of candidates: girls from provincial gentry backgrounds who had the advantage of being Orthodox in religion (unlike most foreigners) without exacerbating rivalries at court (as was the danger with members of prominent boyar clans). The author provides a convincing account of the mechanisms of the selection process. In the sixteenth century commissioners from Moscow toured provincial towns to inspect candidates who would then be summoned to the capital, where further processes of long-listing and short-listing took place. The tsar himself chose his bride only at the final stage, from a small group that had been hand-picked by his closest advisers, and had undergone medical checks designed to guarantee their fertility. Thus although the leading boyar families at court did not themselves provide candidates for the tsars’ marriages, they played an important role in the selection of prospective brides. Martin describes this as a process of collaboration between tsar and boyars, intended to avoid conflicts at court, but he documents a series of scandals, especially in the seventeenth century, where competition over rival protégées led to all kinds of skulduggery, including the possible poisoning of some potential wives. These conflicts somewhat undermine his claim that the institution of bride-shows demonstrates the validity of the consensual model of Muscovite court politics advocated by some recent American historians (14, 244–5). It is surprising, too, that the author does not investigate the political role of the provincial gentry class from which the brides were recruited, presenting this milieu as significant only for what it was not (foreign or aristocratic) rather than for what it actually was.

Martin has done an excellent job in assembling much previously unfamiliar evidence about bride-shows, but the source base for the practice remains fragmentary, and the author complements his bride-show theme by examining Muscovite royal marriages more generally. Here, however – and somewhat strangely for a historian who claims to belong to the ‘anthropological school’ (14) – he does not draw adequate distinctions between the marriages of royal men and those of royal women. The exorbitant expense of marriages to foreigners, which he cites as a reason for their abandonment, surely applied only to the marriages of women, who required dowries and an ostentatiously equipped entourage. No ‘bridegroom-shows’ of provincial gentlemen were arranged for the tsars’ daughters, and most of them remained as spinsters in the seclusion of the women's quarters of the Kremlin.

Martin's survey of royal weddings includes a useful study of the multiple marriages of Ivan IV (‘the Terrible’). He concludes that in spite of the Orthodox Church's prohibition of more than three marriages, Ivan's later marriages were canonical in so far as they were conducted by a priest. These later marriages also involved bride-shows, and the author suggests that the tsar's performance of all the usual nuptial rituals stemmed from his concern to establish the legitimacy not only of the marriages themselves but also of any children they might produce. Martin fails to note, however, that the legitimacy and right to the succession of Dmitrii of Uglich, Ivan's son by his last wife, Mariia Nagaia, was disputed after Ivan's death; and when a False Dmitrii appeared in 1604 he was denounced not only as an impostor but also as the purported son of an unlawful seventh marriage.

The scandals surrounding the bride-shows for the first Romanov tsars brought the practice into disrepute even before Peter the Great abandoned the practice at the beginning of the eighteenth century, reverting to foreign marriages for both his male and female relatives. The bride-show therefore characterized a discrete period in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Its history is an intriguing topic that casts a revealing light on late Muscovite court politics, and within its somewhat narrow framework Martin's book tells the story well.