Abstract
This article analyzes the phenomenon of mixed marriages in the areas belonging to Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth whose society was religiously and ethnically diversified. Special attention is paid to the cultural Polish-Ruthenian borderland in two regional contexts: Polish-Ukrainian and Polish-Belarusian, whose population was Roman Catholic (a minority) and the majority Greek Catholic. Based on the census like material, we found that the households of mixed marriages accounted for between 5 and 20 percent of all those recorded in the sources, and there was a good chance in family relationships that both spouses and their children would keep their denomination.
Introduction
In his classic works on social distance, Emory S. Bogardus pointed out that mixed marriages between members of different social backgrounds, including ethnic, racial or religious groups, indicate the best manifestation of social closeness. 1 Inspired by his scale of social distance, researchers have analysed relations between various social groups, genders, religions, races as well as their transformations across the last hundred years. 2 Bogardus’ concept can also be referred to when analysing historical societies. In our case, they will be residents of areas belonging to the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, whose society was religiously and ethnically diversified. The western part of the state was dominated by Polish Roman Catholics, but the majority of population in the eastern areas was of Ruthenian origin (Ukrainian and Belarussian). Originally of the Orthodox faith, after the union of the churches in the course of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, they adopted the Uniate rite. The inhabitants of the Polish-Ruthenian cultural borderland were thus mostly Greek Catholics, living side by side with Roman Catholics, Jews or, less frequently, German settlers of the Protestant faith. 3 The main aim of this article is to determine how common the mixed marriage households were in the Polish-Ruthenian borderlands, what was their religious composition, and whether there existed freedom for parents in mixed marriages to educate their children in their own observance.
The existing studies on mixed-faith marriages in early modern Europe have drawn upon a variety of approaches towards post-Reformation religious transformations, such as confessionalisation 4 or pluralisation, 5 usually using German, French 6 or Dutch 7 examples. Unlike Western European countries, however, in our case we are not so much describing a situation of two denominations, but one—Catholic—of two rites, nonetheless: Western and Eastern. They did not share the same social status. The majority of the country's nobles, and thus the political and economic elite, were, or in time became, Roman Catholics, and Roman Catholic hierarchs sat in the Senate. The kings were also Roman Catholics, as were the highest officials, even though there were no discriminatory provisions concerning the availability of offices or freedom of worship for Uniates. While the Roman Catholic organisation should not, in theory, compete for the believers with the Greek Catholic clergy, in practice, the predominance of Latin structures was evident in many fields of social, political and economic life (Figure 1).
Two regions under study on the map of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth within the borders before the first partition (1772).
Territory and Population Under Study
In 1596 a part of Orthodox hierarchs in the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth recognised the Pope's supremacy, and a Greek-Catholic church was created, which retained the old Orthodox ceremonial but due to its communion in faith with the Roman-Catholic church, it gradually introduced Western elements to the liturgy. 8 The subsequent text concentrates on two regions of the Polish-Ruthenian cultural borderland, where Polish settlements entered the areas inhabited by the Ruthenian population in the late Middle Ages and early modern period.
The first region is Red Ruthenia, annexed by the Kingdom of Poland in the mid-fourteenth century. 9 After the partition of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth it belonged to Austria, then to the re-established Poland, and now in its largest part it belongs to modern Ukraine and to a lesser extent to Poland.
The second region under study is the Grodno region, that is, part of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania, which after the third partition of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth (1795) became part of Russia, after World War I was part of the reborn Poland, and is now mostly within the territory of Belarus and partly within Poland.
According to first censuses conducted in the second half of the nineteenth century, the majority of the population of both regions was of Ruthenian origin: Ukrainian or Belorussian of the Greek Catholic or Orthodox faith (Table 1). In the south (districts: Lviv, Iwano-Frankiwsk/Stanisławów, Tarnopil, Kolomyia, Stryi) they accounted for 71 percent of the rural population, while in the north (Grodno district) the Orthodox (formerly Uniate) population was 58 percent. Roman Catholics constituted an important minority making 17.1 percent of the society in Red Ruthenia and almost 30 percent in the Polish-Belarusian cultural borderland. In both regions, more than 10 percent of the population was Jewish. 10
Main denominations of rural population in the area under study according to censuses from the second half of the nineteenth century.
Sources: Krzysztof Zamorski, Informator statystyczny do dziejów społeczno-gospodarczych Galicji. Ludność Galicji w latach 1857–1910 (Kraków-Warszawa: 1989), 72−73; Nikolai A. Troynitskiy ed., Pervaya Vseobshchaya perepis’ naseleniya Rossiyskoy Imperii 1897 g. Grodenskaya guberniya, (St. Petersburg: Tipografia MWD,1904), Table 12; Nikolai A. Troynitskiy ed., Pervaya Vseobshchaya perepis’ naseleniya Rossiyskoy Imperii 1897 g. Grodenskaya guberniya, (St. Petersburg: Tipografia MWD,1904), Table 12.
Before 1772, that is, before the First Partition of Poland-Lithuania, Polish-Ukrainian cultural borderlands under study formed three voivodships (provinces) within the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth: Bełzkie, Ruskie and Podolskie. The territory was covered by ecclesiastical administrative structures of two Catholic rites: Greek and Roman. The Greek Catholic majority formed two dioceses: Przemyśl and Lviv. 11 Local Roman Catholics belonged administratively to the Przemyśl bishopric and the Lviv archbishopric, as well as to the Kamianetz Podilskyi bishopric. 12 Based on imperfect documentation of the administration of the Greek Catholic Church in the early 1760s it is estimated that among the entire region's rural population, Ruthenians of the Greek-Catholic rite accounted for 81 percent, Poles of the Roman-Catholic rite 17 percent and Jews 1.7 percent so the disproportion between the majority and representatives of other denomination/faiths was probably greater than in the mid-nineteenth century. 13
The Polish-Belarussian cultural borderland analysed in this article was a part of Troki voievodship (province) of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania. Regarding Christian religious structures, in the case of Greek-Catholics, until the dissolution of the Uniate Church by the Russian authorities (after 1831–1839), the area belonged to the diocese of Brest (established after partition of Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth). 14 Roman Catholics were administratively part of the Roman Catholic diocese of Vilnius. 15
In our analysis, we are concerned with the rural population (cities and towns have been excluded) engaged in agriculture in a typical Eastern European serfdom system. Apart from the Ukrainian, Belarusian and Polish peasants, the area under study was inhabited by the nobility (3 percent of the population) of dominant social status and certain political rights. 16
Sources and Methods
The best way to investigate the scale of mixed marriages would be to analyse the marriage registers from the area under investigation. Unfortunately, this is not possible, because prior to the end of the eighteenth century for both our regions there remain only fragments of the parish records of the Uniate congregations, and in addition to a relatively high proportion of Roman Catholics in the population, it would be necessary to examine also the marriage certificates in the parishes of the Latin rite. For this reason, we decided to use census-like materials, that is, church censuses carried out by the authorities of the predominating Greek Catholic Church. Therefore, the information obtained will not tell what proportion of weddings were mixed, but what proportion of households were made up of mixed marriages. It should be noted that in the case of the cultural Polish-Ukrainian borderland, the censuses were intended to include the population of both rites, including homogamous marriages and not only mixed ones. In the Polish-Belarusian cultural borderland, on the other hand, the censuses included the Greek-Catholic population and the mixed marriages among them, which means that the data obtained will not be complete.
The first of the analysed sources concerns the southern regions. In 1758, 1763 and 1765 in the Greek-Catholic Eparchy of Lviv three population listings were conducted by the Churches on the basis of data collected by parish priests. Two of these—the 1758 and 1765 listings (of a confessional character)—survive in the form of deanery tables, long-term research objects of Zdzisław Budzyński, who relied on them in his attempts at determining the condition and various aspects of the structure of the Commonwealth's south-eastern borderland populations. 17 In the case of the 1763 listing, we have at our disposal not only the data summed up by deans but also the parish-produced sources. In composing lists of parishioners, parish priests were supposed to act according to four rules: “Primum: each parish priest is obliged to give the number of all parishioners belonging to his parish and observing the parish's ceremonial, including the elderly and the children; Secundum: the number of people of the Latin denomination, living among the Ruthenians; Tertium: men and women listed by names and nicknames who abandoned their rite and converted to the Latin one, including reasons for their conversion and information when that happened given reliably and sincerely; Quartum: number of mixed marriages, as well as numbers of Latin followers without confession or testimonium in a Ruthenian parish married.” 18
In practice, thus formulated rules meant that individuals were listed according to a somewhat simplified form of Roman-Catholic status animarum books with additional information about the mutual relations between Roman and Greek Catholics. 19 The actual range of acquired information depended upon the parochial clerics’ dedication to the task; thus, richness in detail and data representation varied from one account to another. In general, what survived were the listings of the names of individual household heads and their wives, prepared in Ruthenian or Polish (quite often, Greek Catholics were registered in Ruthenian, and Roman Catholics in Polish). Frequently, instead of the names of children, servants and inmates, their number was given, and the individuals were divided into those capable and incapable of confession and communion. Hardly ever was the age of household members noted, if so, then usually in the case of children. The terminology applied to non-related members of a household was also very varied, for example, servants, cooks, hired workers, inmates, lodgers. Kinship between the household members and the head also was not recorded. All these deficiencies mean that the scope of actual demographic analysis of sources of such a type seems severely limited—reconstructing the household composition fully is consequently not possible (more can be said about the biological family) and there is limited information about their size, nevertheless, it does prove worthwhile to consider preparing a methodology facilitating the application of this quite homogenous and rich material, surviving in the form of an impressive number of several hundred parish registers stored in the archives and museums of Lviv and Warsaw. 20
For the purposes of our research, we used the listings of selected 43 rural small-size parishes from the Red Ruthenia area in which mixed marriages were registered in 1763. They usually included population of single villages and have a total of 3799 households. 21
In the case of the cultural Polish-Belarusian borderland, between 1824 and 1829 there were several censuses of Uniat parishioners of the Brest diocese. They have not yet been the subject of detailed historical research. These censuses are in many respects much more accurate than the Ukrainian ones. They keep record of the inhabitants’ age, more frequently marital status, as well as the household structure. For these reasons, the censuses allow for slightly different analyses than the Ukrainian censuses. This, unfortunately, does not render them an ideal source. As in the case of the Ukrainian censuses, the records of mixed marriages are highly simplified. They include the Uniats’ names, surnames and ages, occasionally with other information, but their Roman Catholic spouses appear only in passing in the form of a Latin wife or husband. Sometimes it is possible to deduce the surnames or first names of husbands from such records, as they are sometimes used to describe their Greek spouses, but age is never found there. Worse still, other family members, presumably above all children, are usually only recorded under the term ‘women of the Latin rite’ without any explanation of who we are dealing with or how many people are being referred to. Unfortunately, we also cannot be absolutely certain about the accuracy of such records or possible omissions of some children or relatives of the other religion in the households.
The listings were made by individual parishes within the deaneries and were arranged by house. They were compiled in Polish and are stored in the historical archives in Vilnius. For the purposes of our article, we used data from 12 parishes from Grodno deanery describing 3701 households in 1824. 22
The ensuing analysis will concentrate on mixed marriages and baptisms of children in mixed marriages, for which information is found in the Greek-Catholic parish listings described above from two regions of the former Lithuanian Commonwealth: the Polish-Ukrainian cultural borderland of 1763 and the Polish-Belarusian borderland of 1824. The contents of the records were transferred to nominal databases created according to the principles of historical demography and were analysed using statistical methods with the aid of the R programming language.
Mixed Marriages in Church Regulations
Recent research into the communities of south-eastern borderlands of the Commonwealth tends to pay more attention to the occurrence of mixed marriages between Roman and Greek Catholics, which in the context of the eighteenth century often denoted Polish-Ruthenian marriages. In fact, sources frequently refer to Roman Catholics as Poles (or Latins), and Greek Catholics as Ruthenians. Scholars still differ when it comes to determining how often such unions took place. Research conducted by Zdzisław Budzyński has shown that in Przemyśl eparchy (diocese) between 1786 and 1795 mixed marriages accounted for only 2.55 percent of marriages contracted in Roman Catholic churches (130 out of 5041) and 0.35 percent of marriages contracted in Uniate churches (56 out of 16 210). 23 Marriage registers of both Roman Catholic and Greek Catholic parishes were used in this research. Budzyński also noted that the further east toward Lviv, the higher the frequency of such relationships. 24 Konrad Rzemieniecki, who analyses the population of the Roman Catholic the Monasterzyska parish, claims that the percentage of mixed marriages was much higher. The analysis of Roman Catholic parish registers indicates that at least ca. 10 to 12 percent of marriages among local populations were mixed, but the analysis of marriage announcement books, in which we also have information on marriages celebrated in Uniate churches, suggests that the real share of mixed marriages was 24.5 percent. 25 However, there were parishes with an even higher frequency of marriages between Roman Catholics and Greek Catholics. In the parish of Wiśniowczyk between 1784 and 1812, 44.6 percent of marriages were mixed. 26 Aside from Budzynski's book on the western part of Red Ruthenia, all of these studies were surveys based on the analysis of marriage registers of one rite and one parish, and can hardly be considered representative of the entire region. Unfortunately, even such preliminary studies for the Polish-Belarusian borderland have not to date been conducted for the peasant and urban populations, but attention has been drawn to the mixed marriages among the noble and magnate elite. 27
Spouses professing Catholicism according to the two rites, Latin and Greek, were bound by regulations established by a decree of Pope Urban VIII in 1624, which forbade the admission of Uniates into the Latin Church. They were confirmed by the Congregation for the Propagation of the Faith in 1710. 28 General papal regulations were not a sufficient obstacle to the transition of Ruthenians from the Eastern to the Latin rite, although the papal authorities and the church hierarchy repeatedly affirmed their desire to maintain a separate Uniate rite. The dominant role in the state of the Polish and Lithuanian Roman Catholic nobility, especially after the wars of the mid-seventeenth century, the privileged political position of the Latin clergy, whose representatives sat in the Senate, and the better financial standing of the Roman Church all attracted Ruthenians of the Greek and Orthodox rites, even those who for a time favoured Protestantism. 29 In areas of mixed denominations and rites, the representatives of the local hierarchy of both Roman Catholics and Greek Catholics, when regulating the ritual (ceremonial) rules for the administration of the sacraments, had to address the issues of baptism and marriage in mixed unions. In 1714 by Jan Skarbek, the Latin Archbishop of Lviv promulgated a set of rules to be imposed on the clergy of both rites. 30 The laws established that Latin clerics should not dispense sacraments to the Greeks, and, similarly—that Greek clerics should not dispense sacraments to Roman Catholics. Despite a partial separation and respect for each other's traditions, controversies must have arisen, especially with regards to mixed marriages. The laws stated that when a Pole was marrying a Ruthenian woman—or a Ruthenian a Polish woman—the banns should be announced in both churches; afterwards priests on both sides were supposed to declare that there were no impediments to marriage; according to custom, the wedding ceremony was to take place in the bride's parish and in accordance with the traditions of her religion; lastly, neither the husband, nor the wife should attempt to bring their spouse round to their religion. 31 Also the rules for the baptism of children from mixed marriages were strictly regulated: “The baptism of children should follow the father's religion … Our priests are not allowed to baptise Ruthenian children, nor Ruthenian priests Polish children, unless in the case of the danger of death.” 32 The general regulations of the synod of the Greek-Catholic Church in the Poland-Lithuania held in Zamość in 1720, valid not only in the Polish-Ukrainian but also in the Polish-Belarusian borderlands, also emphasised that a priest of the Greek rite could baptise a child of the Latin rite only in case of “emergency,” or with the consent of the Latin parish priest. Confirmation of baptism should also be sent to a Roman Catholic clergyman. 33
The censuses of the Polish-Ukrainian borderland from 1758 to 1765 indicated information about conflicts inherent in both entering into and functioning of a mixed marriage. According to Zbigniew Budzyński, who compared statistical data on mixed marriages and conflicts between the representatives of both rituals contained in the decanal summaries submitted to the bishops of Lviv, in the 1,903 Greek Catholic parishes 54 unlawful marriages were concluded during this time—0.03 percent of the total number of marriages. The major law infringement was the choice of an improper place for the marriage to be sanctified—instead of at a Greek-Catholic church of the bride, the marriage would take place in a Roman-Catholic parochial church of the groom. Other incidents included bigamy, that is, when one of the spouses abandoned their partner from a union in the old ritual and married a new partner in the new ritual. Another problem was restricted access to sacraments. 34
Surviving decanal summaries from 1758 to 1765 register 835 people who converted from Greek Catholicism to Roman Catholicism 35 —a rather marginal occurrence since the entire community of followers of the former amounted to ca. 750,000, and thus the practice involved only 0.12 to 0.13 percent of the total number of followers. 36 Among people whose sex is identified by the sources, 53 percent are men. The motivations behind such conversions are not always entirely clear, but it has been established that in the case of 236 people (27.1 percent) the conversion occurred as a result of entering into marriage with a Pole. The second most popular circumstance (at least 25 percent of cases) was when a Ruthenian served in the Polish army or worked as a servant for a Polish nobleman. 37 Conversions took place among people representing all social strata. Even though 79.7 percent of converts were peasants, 15.3 percent townspeople, and only 2.5 percent were members of the nobility and clergy, a comparison of the number of conversions to the size of each social group gives sufficient ground to ascertain that the representatives of the much less numerous nobility converted much more frequently than peasants and townspeople. 38
Within the same time period, the number of Latins converting to Greek Catholicism is estimated to be about 100; however, due to source limitations they remain difficult to describe and analyse in as much detail as the Greek to Catholic conversions. 39
Mixed Marriages in Polish-Ukrainian Cultural Borderland in 1763
We analysed the listings of 120 parishes from Eparchy of Lviv; in 43 of them mixed marriages were recorded. The remaining parishes were inhabited either by Ruthenians of the Greek Catholic denomination, or by Ruthenians and a small group of Poles of the Roman Catholic ritual.
As our sources are not marriage certificates but census listings, it makes it impossible to determine the proportion of mixed marriages among all marriages concluded. It is possible, however, to estimate the proportion of households where mixed marriages occurred. In 43 parishes, there were 77.6 percent of households formed by Greek Catholics, 17.5 percent by Roman Catholics, and only 4.9 percent by spouses belonging to two different Churches, which is 194 individual cases. Unfortunately, complete information about spouses and their children (their names and surnames) was rarely recorded; especially in the case of the latter names, sex and religion were usually omitted and all we know is how many of them there were in the household. Complete information is available for 121 mixed marriages (Figure 2).
Religious affiliation of households in studied parishes from Lviv eparchy.
The vast majority of the total of 194 mixed marriages (75.8 percent) was the unions between Roman Catholic males and Greek Catholic females. Parish listings include information about nine people who changed their religion after they got married: eight women of Ruthenian birth converted to Roman Catholicism practiced by their husbands and so did one Ruthenian husband married to a Roman Catholic wife. As we can see, all conversions were from Greek to Roman Catholicism. One parish priest described the practice in the following way: “A noble Catherina, being heretofore of a Greek rite, married in this present year a Pole called Kazimierz Brzezicki, and she immediately, for the reason to me unknown, became a Pole herself.” 40
Such occurrences were not frequent—conversions took place in only 4.6 percent of mixed marriages—but they did exist, even though they were formally illegal practices. One of the reasons for this rarity of conversions is that Church laws that guaranteed spouses in mixed marriages the freedom of religious practices seemed pretty effective in protecting husbands and wives, especially the Ruthenian wives, against the pressure from their Roman Catholic partners. Another reason is that although Roman Catholicism may have been perceived as an attractive alternative to Greek rites, abandoning one's tradition in a community dominated by the Ruthenians was a difficult decision to make.
It is interesting to see what happened to children when one of their parents changed religion. We learn from one of the entries in parish listings that when a mother abandoned her Greek Catholicism, her children automatically followed her: “Stanislaus, the coachman of the noble master Jordan, married to Theodosia of Greek-Ruthenian denomination, who forced by her husband changed to the Latin rite nine years ago and so did her children Matthew, Alex and Catherina.”
41
Now, let us take a look at 121 mixed marriages for which we possess the most complete data, that is, where we know the sex of the children (Table 2). In less than 40 percent of families the rule that sons follow their father's religion, while daughters profess the religion of their mothers was kept. When we single out 60 families with at least two children, sons AND daughters, it turns out that the rule was followed by only 25 percent of them.
Marriages where the rule of inheriting religion was followed (sons from fathers, daughters from mothers)
Most frequently, the rule of inheriting religious affiliation was broken by baptising and bringing up all the children, regardless of their sex, in the religion of one of their parents (75.4 percent). In all other cases when the rule was broken, it was done not with all, but with individual children.
In the case of 108 mixed marriages it is possible to see what circumstances increased the likelihood of the emergence of a pattern that sons tended to follow their fathers’ religion, whereas daughters professed the religion of their mothers. In 92 marriages it was a father who was a Roman Catholic, while a mother was Greek Catholic. Their 129 sons were predominantly baptised according to Roman Catholic rite (71.3 percent). All the remaining sons were baptised as Greek Catholics. Among daughters, 60 out of 106 registered girls (56.6 percent) were baptised in their mothers’ Greek Catholic Church.
Let us now look at the sixteen mixed marriages in which it was a husband who was Greek Catholic, while a wife was Roman Catholic. In these families, 23 out of 39 sons kept their fathers’ religion (59 percent), and 23 out of 40 daughters were brought up in Roman Catholic religion by their Roman Catholic mothers (57.5 percent).
For statistical purposes, the level of significance can be assessed with the use of a Pearson's chi-squared test. The result is high only in the case of sons inheriting their Roman Catholic fathers’ religion (p < 0.001). In the case of Greek Catholic fathers, the significance level is p = 0.215, which can be interpreted as a lack of statistical significance. Such results indicate an imbalance in denominational inheritance, with religious inheritance pattern being stronger for Roman Catholic fathers compared to Greek Catholic fathers (Figures 3 and 4).
Relation between fathers’ and children's religion in families headed by Roman Catholic fathers in the studied parishes the Eparchy of Lviv.
Relation between fathers’ and children's religion in families headed by Greek Catholic fathers in the studied parishes the Eparchy of Lviv.
Mixed Marriages in Polish-Belarussian Cultural Borderland in 1824
The censuses from the Grodno deanery, although dating back to the early nineteenth century and much more accurate, can be considered comparable as they are close enough in time to the Ukrainian censuses. Regrettably, the above mentioned shortcomings of the sources as well as the fact that they did not aim to describe the entire population but only the Uniate community, mean that the results we have obtained in the subject of mixed marriages must be considered minimal.
Figure 5 presents data showing what percentage of mixed marriages were recorded in the censuses from each parish. It presents a wide variation, from as little as 2.5 percent in the case of a parish (Mostowlany parish) to as much as 56 percent (in Świsłoczany parish). Importantly, such high values can hardly be attributed to some random phenomenon, as they concern parishes that are relatively large, 42 where mixed marriages amounted to dozens or even hundreds. Overall, households with mixed marriages account for 20 percent of the total (i.e., 747 or 3701 of all households). We are using the term households, not marriages, because sometimes the census records the presence of Roman Catholics without explaining how they are related to the head of the farm. It may be speculated, however, is that these are either spouses of resident Uniates or relatives who entered the family household as a result of some previous marriage. It may have been discontinued at a certain point in time due to the death of one or even both spouses, but some people—most likely children, or perhaps sometimes in-laws or other relatives—were still living in the Uniate household. Estimating the total number of people living in such multi-religious households is, unfortunately, impossible, as we do not know exactly how many Roman Catholics stayed there. Only some of them are mentioned by name in the censuses, and sometimes there is only information that someone has a Latin spouse or that there are also Latins on the estate, but without specifying their actual number. What we are able to determine is the number of Uniate residents themselves. According to the registers, that would be 2104 people. In other words, about 11 percent of the Uniates shares households with Latins.
Share of mixed marriages among all unions registered in the different surveyed parishes in the Grodno deanery in 1824.
While recognising the prevalence of interfaith marriages themselves, it is also worth considering whether there existed a balance between cases where Roman Catholics married Uniate women and male Uniates married Roman Catholic women. We are describing this phenomenon from the male perspective, because in societies characterised by strong patriarchalism 43 it was men who had more influence over the choice of spouses. Furthermore, sociological research indicates that under conditions of prestige differences between ethnic groups, women from lower-ranking communities are more likely than men to marry a member of a higher-ranking group. 44
The percentage distributions presented in Figure 6 clearly indicate an imbalance in the selection of spouses in religiously mixed marriages. Among women forming such marriages, Greek Catholics were by far the majority, while men were overwhelmingly Roman Catholic. 45 If there were similar mechanisms of mixed marriages in the community under study to those described by contemporary sociologists, one might suspect that this implies a higher social prestige for Roman Catholics compared to their Uniate neighbours.
Selection of spouses in mixed marriages in the surveyed parishes in the Grodno deanery in 1824.
The question of the religion of mixed marriage children and its possible link to the parent's gender is hampered by the fact that the censuses often fail to register children who are Roman Catholics. Nonetheless, certain regularities can be discerned. Uniate fathers are almost four times more likely to have sons than daughters among their offspring. Nor do the censuses show any case of a Roman Catholic by whom a daughter of the same religion is recorded, while we can find sons professing their father's religion. In contrast, reverse situations where a Latin man has a Greek-Catholic daughter occur in as many as 270 marriages, or half of all marriages with children. The reasonable conclusion would be that there was a tendency in the studied population to associate the child's denomination with that of the same-sex parent.
Concluding the conducted analysis of mixed marriages from the Grodno deanery, it should be emphasised first of all that they were a relatively frequent phenomenon, which was expressed both in their percentage in relation to all registered unions as well as in the number of Uniates living in households that also included Roman Catholics. This fact is mainly explained by the strong mixing of the two populations, which led to a high availability of potential spouses of a different religion. The prevalence observed in the censuses of situations where it was a Roman Catholic who married a Greek Catholic woman suggests that, also in this mixed region, it was Latin men who enjoyed higher social prestige. On the other hand, after marriage, efforts were made to observe the rule that the child's religion was linked to that of the same-sex parent.
Conclusions
The two regions of the Polish-Ruthenian cultural borderland, where the same ecclesiastical regulations applied, differed considerably in the incidence of religiously mixed marriages. In the Ukrainian-Polish borderland, less than 5 percent of households were based on marriages concluded between representatives of both rites, while in the Belarusian-Polish borderland, the percentage was considerably higher, reaching 20 percent among Greek households registered in the censuses. It should be borne in mind, however, that in reality the percentage was probably smaller, as we do not know the full number of uniform Roman Catholic marriages, which, although in the minority, influenced the total number of households. Notwithstanding the imperfection of our sources, it can be argued that despite the same church regulations in both regions, mixed marriages were much more common in the Grodno deanery than in Red Ruthenia. This may have been influenced by the smaller disparities in the share of representatives of the various denominations in the social structure. In the Grodno district, eastern rite Christians made less than 60 percent of the population and Roman Catholics almost 1/3 of the society. With such proportions in the relatively homogenous, socially and economically, population, it was difficult to create two separate matrimonial markets, and we can guess that the more religiously balanced the population of each village or parish, the greater the chance for mixed marriages to occur. In addition, for centuries the area around Grodno was part of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania, where there was a long tradition of relatively peaceful coexistence of different nationalities and religions, including large Jewish communities, characteristic of many places in Central and Eastern Europe, and also Muslim ones, which is a rarity. Many of the region's villages were founded as a result of colonisation processes in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries drawing settlers from the east (Ruthenians) as well as the west (Poles) and common coexistence had a long tradition and was not associated with significant political conflicts.
Roman Catholics were less numerous in central and eastern Red Ruthenia. It is also worth noting that although the western part of Ukraine had been within Poland's borders for centuries, it was affected by considerable political unrest related to the Cossack uprisings, which, in addition to complex religious issues, influenced the Ukrainian awareness of separateness and awakened the national identity much earlier than what happened to the Belarusians in the north. Both the Poles and the Roman Catholic Church were more often viewed by the Ruthenian community as an external, foreign element, treated by the vast majority with detachment, although, according to a number of studies, a certain attraction was also noted in belonging to the religious community of Roman Catholics, that is, the community of the upper strata of rural society.
Marital selection was similar in the analysed regions. Marriages between a Roman Catholic man, and thus a representative of a minority, and an eastern rite woman predominated. The social prestige of Roman rite men was therefore arguably far greater in both cultural borderlands. In both populations, children tended to observe the religion of the same-sex parent, but the canonical and customary rule was not fully observed. In the Grodno deanery all boys, sons of men of the Latin faith, retained the rite of their fathers and, in the case of the Polish-Ukrainian borderland, were most likely to maintain it. In a radically different situation were the daughters of women living in the eastern rite, although even in this case in both regions most of them retained their mother's rite.
The Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, nicknamed a state without stakes, is commonly considered to be relatively tolerant in comparison with other European countries. The second half of the seventeenth century and the century that followed exacerbated relations between the various Christian denominations, but the disputes occurred mainly between Protestants and Roman Catholics, for example in the cities of Royal Prussia, or between Greek Catholics and Orthodox Christians in the eastern part of the country. Relations between representatives of the two strands of Catholicism, western and eastern, did not generate as many conflicts, but in areas of mixed religions and nationalities there was no shortage of tensions among the clergy of both affiliations, who fought for the government of souls. In addition, the progressive occidentalisation of the Uniate liturgy and the expansive use of Polish in the Greek-Catholic church bureaucracy collided with strong Ruthenian influences (Ruthenization) on the Latin Church in areas dominated by the Ukrainian and, to a lesser extent, Belarusian populations. 46 All possible religious pretexts for aggravating relations between Poles and Ukrainians or Belarusians were used at the end of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries by the authorities of the partitioning states: the Russian and Austrian. 47
In the case of the Polish-Ruthenian borderland, one cannot speak of a separation along the lines of the Catholic and Protestant communities of Augsburg, where religiously mixed marriages were infrequent (1 percent). 48 On the other hand, German countries also provide examples of regions where mixed marriages in the seventeenth and first half of the eighteenth century accounted for up to 20 percent of unions in communities populated by Catholics and Protestants, as in Lower Saxony 49 or the Palatinate. 50 Researchers noted, however, that marriages were more common between Lutherans and reformed Evangelicals than between representatives of Protestant denominations and Catholics, presumably due to fewer theological and doctrinal differences. 51 A similar practice was observed in the Netherlands, where, in the large Dutch cities (Amsterdam, Rotterdam, Leiden), mixed Calvinist-Catholic marriages ranged from 0.24 percent in Amsterdam, to 1.8 percent in Leiden, to a maximum of 2.8 percent in Rotterdam, while intermarriages between representatives of different Protestant denominations accounted in the eighteenth century for 5 percent of marriages or more. 52 The frequency of mixed marriages between representatives of both Catholic rites in the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth was thus much higher than that of Catholic-Protestant marriages in Western Europe, and equaled or even exceeded the frequency of unions between adherents of different Protestant denominations. The theological and doctrinal differences between the two Catholic rites in the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth were minimal, and also in doctrinal terms we can speak of a high degree of unification. The most important difference in the context of marriages concerned not the seculars, but the clergy, who were allowed to have wives in the Greek-Catholic Church. Thus, what was important was the distinctiveness of liturgy and customs, which, although influencing the identity of the borderland inhabitants, was hardly an effective barrier in Red Ruthenia, and in the Grodno district mixed marriages were even more socially acceptable.
In his research, Benjamin Kaplan observed that entering into a mixed marriage in the Netherlands resulted in spousal conversion in almost 41 percent of couples. 53 We do not have analogous statistics concerninig Polish lands, but a study of Red Ruthenia found that 27 percent of cases of religion change from Uniate to Roman Catholic were due to marrying a Latin. The clergy of both Catholic rites did not approach mixed marriages with enthusiasm, 54 but the ecclesiastical regulations within the Catholic Church assumed spousal autonomy, and the scope of the phenomenon of rite change was smaller than in Western Europe.
The method of passing on religion to children in mixed marriages, that is from fathers to sons and from mothers to daughters, was practised in the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth and widespread in Europe, found, for instance in the Netherlands, Ireland, Scotland, France, Transylvania and Germany. 55 This arrangement ensured a demographic balance between the different faiths and fostered preparation for the social roles assigned to men and women. Consequently, other ways of organising religious life were relatively rare, such as the model found in the Netherlands of passing on the denomination of successive children alternating between a father's and mother's affiliations, or the model of patriarchal upbringing that would follow the father's denomination found in Scotland. 56 Hence, it seems reasonable to repeat Kaplan's observation concerning the Netherlands: in the case of the Polish-Lithuanian commonwealth, although the level of patriarchy was high, “it did not determine the religious affiliation of spouses and children in religiously mixed marriages.” 57
Footnotes
Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The authors declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The authors disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: This work was supported by the Narodowe Centrum Nauki (grant number 2016/23/B/HS3/03050).
