Russell E. Martin has produced an impressive study of early modern weddings among Russia's ruling family. Martin draws on his command of obscure sources and the history of this period to tease out a number of worthwhile, and occasionally surprising, insights. Not the least of his accomplishments here is that he has written a book that is fun to read.
Martin has undertaken a deep analysis of surviving wedding documentation, which for the early part of the period is scant and fragmentary. These documents include dowry inventories beginning with the children of Ivan III, the more revealing “wedding musters,” which listed the hierarchy of honorific posts and the names of those who filled them, and the wedding ceremonial itself, which offered a narrative description of the multi-day ritual. From these, Martin analyzes such matters as how royal weddings accomplished and projected solidarity among the country's ruling elite, how interfaith couples could be wed, and how new tsaritsas employed gift giving to curry favor with important boyars.
In the case of the first wedding of the first Romanov ruler, Mikhail Fedorovich, Martin chronicles the extensive choreographic efforts of court ritual experts, who identified and copied archival documents in order to craft a wedding that could project the legitimacy of the Romanovs to the entire Muscovite court. This 1626 wedding emphasized the bridegroom's mini-pilgrimage among the Kremlin churches housing remains of Russia's pre-Romanov rulers, thereby asserting a dynastic continuity that did not, in fact, exist.
One of Martin's themes is that far from being frozen in timeless tradition, Russian royal wedding ritual in fact changed regularly during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, reflecting times of flux and competing dynastic claims. Tsar Aleksei's two weddings saw a reduction in size and spectacle, becoming the famously pious monarch, as well as the removal of vestigial pre-Christian ceremonies such as the spreading of hops over the couple to ensure fertility. By the time of his second wedding, Aleksei felt free to dispense with elaborate demonstrations of dynastic legitimacy, and to expand charitable acts associated with the royal nuptials. Importantly, this wedding to the comparatively low-ranking Natalia Naryshkina was declared to be bez mest, that is outside the court's system of place. Although wedding musters had figured prominently in sixteenth century precedence litigations, it had become increasingly necessary to exclude the tsar's weddings from the mestnichestvo system, in order to install the bride's family in places of honor at the ceremony to which they would not normally be entitled according to their precedence at court, or lack thereof. When courtiers attended these weddings they signaled acceptance of this reality and elite solidarity.
Aleksei's death ushered in a period of dynastic, and consequently, ritual flux that lasted until the birth of Peter III's son, Paul. The sons of Aleksei's two wives represented two branches of the Romanov clan, and the crown passed back and forth between them for several decades. When Peter I took power, he deftly deployed the weddings of his relatives and close associates to display his personal charisma rather than dynastic grandeur.
The wedding of Peter's late half-brother's daughter, Anna Ioannovna, to the duke of Kurland in 1710 proved exemplary. Peter oversaw all the eclectic elements of this template wedding, the first important such rite to take place in the new capital. His mastery of ritual extended in later years to parodic weddings, which mocked the old ways, as well as royal weddings that experimented with the new. For all that, his own marriage to longtime partner Ekaterina Alekseevna in 1712 was marked by several nods to Muscovite precedent in terminology and ritual. Peter's daughter, Empress Elizabeth, proved equally adept at ritual design when she presided over the two-week long festivities that accompanied the wedding of her nephew and heir, the future Peter III, and his German bride, the future Catherine the Great. Public oriented celebrations and cosmopolitan festivities designed to solidify the Naryshkin branch of the Romanov dynasty once and for all proved successful.
Martin is convincing when he insists that weddings constitute a lens too revealing to ignore in the study of early modern Russia. In the end, it is not the presumably eternal Russian character of royal wedding ritual, but its malleability and adaptability, that proves most revealing.
