The Tsar's Happy Occasion: Ritual and Dynasty in the Weddings of Russia's Rulers, 1495–1745

By Russell E. Martin

The Tsar's Happy Occasion shows how the vast, ornate affairs that were royal weddings in early modern Russia were choreographed to broadcast powerful images of monarchy and dynasty. Processions and speeches emphasized dynastic continuity and legitimacy. Fertility rites blended Christian and pre-Christian symbols to assure the birth of heirs. Gift exchanges created and affirmed social solidarity among the elite. The bride performed rituals that integrated herself and her family into the inner circle of the court.

Using an array of archival sources, Russell E. Martin demonstrates how royal weddings reflected and shaped court politics during a time of dramatic cultural and dynastic change. As Martin shows, the rites of passage in these ceremonies were dazzling displays of monarchical power unlike any other ritual at the Muscovite court. And as dynasties came and went and the political culture evolved, so too did wedding rituals. Martin relates how Peter the Great first mocked, then remade wedding rituals to symbolize and empower his efforts to westernize Russia. After Peter, the two branches of the Romanov dynasty used weddings to solidify their claims to the throne.

The Tsar's Happy Occasion offers a sweeping, yet penetrating cultural history of the power of rituals and the rituals of power in early modern Russia.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Northern Illinois University Press
• Release date: May 15, 2021
• ISBN: 9781501754852

Book preview

Figure

The Tsar’s

Happy Occasion

Figure

Ritual and Dynasty

in the Weddings of

Russia’s Rulers,

1495–1745

Russell E. Martin

Northern Illinois University Press

an imprint of Cornell University Press

Ithaca and London

Александре да Петру да Ульяне

Романовымъ дѣтямъ Мартина

Contents

List of Figures and Tables

Acknowledgments

Abbreviations

Note on Dates and Names

Introduction

1. Time to Attend to the Wedding: Origins and Traditions

2. A Canonical Marriage for the Uninterrupted Succession to Your Royal Dynasty: Royal Weddings and Dynastic Legitimacy

3. And Unlike Previous Royal Weddings, There Was Not the Usual Royal Ritual: Continuity and Change

4. To Live Together in Holy Matrimony: Orthodox and Heterodox

5. To Serve without Regard for Place: In-Laws and Courtiers

6. To See Your Royal Children on the Thrones: Brides and Gifts

7. Delight in Exposing the Old Methods of the Country: Transfigurations and Parodies

8. There Will Not Be Any Direful Reversions: Heirs and Successors

Conclusion

Appendices

Notes

Bibliography

Index

Figures and Tables

Figures

1.1. The wedding of Vasilii III and Elena Glinskaia

2.1. Tsar Mikhail Romanov visiting monasteries and churches before his wedding

3.1. Peter I and his first wife, Evdokiia Lopukhina

4.1. Tsar Mikhail Fedorovich with church hierarchs

4.2. The proposed husbands of Elena Ivanovna, 1489–1495

5.1. The banquet at the wedding of Tsar Mikhail Fedorovich

6.1. Tsaritsa Evdokiia Streshneva and the women of the court during her wedding

7.1. Engraving by Aleksei Zubov of the wedding of Peter I and Catherine Alekseevna (Catherine I)

8.1. Engraving by G. A. Kachalov of the fireworks display at the wedding of Peter Fedorovich (Peter III) and Catherine Alekseevna (Catherine II)

A.1. Schematic of the relationship between the sixteenth-century originals, 1624 copies, and Mikhail Romanov’s wedding ceremonial

C.1. Select genealogy of the Daniilovich dynasty from Ivan III, showing marriages and lines of descent

C.2. Select genealogy of the House of Romanov, showing the Miloslavskii and Naryshkin lines

Tables

2.1. Comparison of wedding rituals in manuscript descriptions and Kotoshikhin

3.1. Comparative lists of biblical and extra-biblical couples (and offspring) in wedding prayers and speeches

5.1. Vsevolozhskii, Miloslavskii, and Morozov service appointments at royal weddings, 1647 and 1648

6.1. Gift exchanges at Muscovite royal weddings, 1533–1671

6.2. Classes of gifts disbursed at the first wedding of Tsar Mikhail Fedorovich, 1624

6.3. Classes of gifts disbursed at the first wedding of Tsar Aleksei Mikhailovich, 1648

A.1. Copies of wedding documents made in 1624

Acknowledgments

The origins of this book lie in two reviews of my previous book, A Bride for the Tsar (2012). In one, Daniel Rowland wrote that he would love to have read more of the highly complex wedding rituals … and how these rituals functioned within the court culture. In the other, Valerie Kivelson lamented the book’s avoidance of any consideration of gender. I decided they were right. Wedding rituals and the essential role of royal women in them were regrettable (albeit necessary) omissions from my book on bride-shows, but ones that I had the means to address. Although other projects intervened, the observations of Rowland and Kivelson weighed on my mind until I could get back to this book, where ritual and women (and other themes) are the center of attention. So my first word of thanks goes to these two esteemed colleagues and friends, who bear no responsibility for the arguments to follow beyond their genesis.

Others must be thanked as well. First, of course, there are the institutions that helped fund and facilitate my research. I received financial support over several years from Westminster College (including endowed funds from the Henderson, Hoon, McCandless, and Watto families), which supported my work in archives and libraries in the United States, Russia, and the United Kingdom. These funds brought me into regular contact with the administrators and staffs of several Russian archives, who willingly and knowledgeably helped me collect the extensive archival material on which this study is based, particularly at the Russian State Archive of Ancient Acts (RGADA), which remains a second home for me in Moscow. The new director, Vladimir Anatol’evich Arakcheev, and the associate director, Iurii Moiseevich Eskin (among others), continue the long tradition of expertise and helpfulness that has made RGADA an exemplar of professionalism for archives and archivists around the world. The staffs at the Library of the Russian Academy of Sciences (BAN), Russian Public Historical Library (the storied Istorichka), the Russian State Library (the old Leninka), the Russian National Library (the former Saltykov-Shchedrin), the British Library and New York Public Library (which need no other monikers), and the congenial library at the School of Slavonic and East European Studies at University College London were all enormously helpful to me at various stages of my research and writing. Harvard University’s Widener Library occupies a special place in the project and in my affections. I continue to make my annual summer pilgrimage to Widener to work in the stacks, which brings back wonderful memories of graduate school days and still causes me to marvel at the completeness of the collection. I finally wish to thank the staff of McGill Library at Westminster College, particularly Connie Davis, our (now former) interlibrary loan (ILL) officer, who tracked down even the rarest of publications for me with stunning speed and alacrity. ILL officers are the heroes of researchers in the humanities—but they are not unsung heroes!

Then there are colleagues and friends to thank. Nancy Shields Kollmann, Donald Ostrowski, Carolyn Pouncy, Christine Worobec, and Ernest Zitser read all or significant parts of the manuscript and offered helpful criticism and encouragement. Boris Nikolaevich Morozov was a constant and generous source of answers to obscure questions. Ol’ga Evgen’evna Kosheleva helped me obtain archival documents from afar and buoyed me with her encouragement and sense of humor. Michael Flier supported the project from the start and had advice and answers all along the way. The poet Philip Nikolayev spruced up my translations of Lomonosov. And there were many others who helped in various ways: Aleksei Ivanovich Alekseev, Sergei Bogatyrev, Sally Hadden, Nadieszda Kizenko, Viacheslav Nikolaevich Kozliakov, Eve Levin, Dominic Lieven, Andrei Pavlovich Pavlov, Rachela Permenter, Bryan Rennie, David Schimmelpenninck van der Oye, Aleksandr Nikolaevich Zakatov, and my three undergraduate research assistants—Peter McMaster, Erica McNatt, and Margaret Portmann. I also thank Amy Farranto of Northern Illinois University Press/Cornell University Press for her friendship and support through several different projects over the years, not just this one.

Finally, I thank my family. My parents are gone now, but my in-laws are as close to me as any could ever be. Nancy and Willis (Bill) Kellogg supported this project in many ways: from giving me a ride from their home to the train station in West Concord when I stayed with them during my summer stints at Widener to reading every line of my books, the way only a parent does. Bill sadly passed away during the writing of this book, but Nancy remains me mum. My wife, Sarah Kellogg, puts up with my obsession with, as she puts it, four-hundred-year-old dead guys. I suspect she secretly thinks that it’s cool that I do this stuff, but she’ll never admit it, and I don’t try to get her to concede the point. I merely thank her from the bottom of my heart for putting up with the dead guys and for letting me write when she really wanted me to be doing something else. Finally—and this time around, most importantly—I thank my children, Alexandra, Peter, and Juliana, to whom I dedicate this book. They tolerate the four-hundred-year-old dead guys too, and they have taught me more—about life, love, and myself—than I’ll ever teach the students in my classes about Russian history. This book is for them.

Portions of chapter 2 have been developed from an earlier article, Choreographing the ‘Tsar’s Happy Occasion’: Tradition, Change, and Dynastic Legitimacy in the Weddings of Tsar Mikhail Romanov, Slavic Review 63, no. 4 (2004): 794–817; and from the book chapter Choreographers of Power: Grigorii Kotoshikhin, State Secretaries, and the Muscovite Royal Wedding Ritual, in Secretaries, Ministers and Statecraft in the Early Modern World, ed. Paul M. Dover (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2016), 235–54. Portions of chapter 4 expand on ideas originally published in two articles: Gifts for the Bride: Dowries, Diplomacy, and Marriage Politics in Muscovy, Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies 38, no. 1 (2008): 119–45; and Ritual and Religion in the Foreign Marriages of Three Muscovite Princesses, Russian History 35, nos. 3–4 (2008): 357–81.

Abbreviations

Note on Dates and Names

Dates in this book are drawn from the sources on which this study is based, which reflect the use of the Julian calendar in Russia during the early modern period. The Julian calendar numbered years from the traditional date of the creation of the world (5508 BCE), starting on September 1. Dates in this book are frequently presented in two forms: anno mundi and anno domini. Thus Tsar Mikhail Fedorovich, the first tsar of the Romanov dynasty, was married for the first time in the year 7133/1624. Furthermore, in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries the Julian calendar was either nine or ten days behind the Gregorian calendar (nine days before March 1500, and ten days after). Thus the full date of Mikhail Fedorovich’s wedding, for example, might be rendered September 18/28, 7133/1624, though typically this is simplified in the pages below to September 18, 1624 (the day in Julian, and year in anno domini).

Names are also rendered as they appear in contemporary sources. Variant spellings of names are preserved, though names during and after Peter the Great’s reign (1682–1725) appear in the usual English equivalents (Peter for Pёtr or Pyotr; Catherine for Ekaterina, and so on), as is the convention. Patronymics reflected social rank in Muscovy and these are preserved whenever possible in the pages below. Grand princes, tsars, and the highest-ranking courtiers had patronymics ending in -ovich, -evich, or -ich (for males), as all Russian men do today. Grand princesses, tsaritsas, and the highest-ranking women of the court had patronymics ending in -ovna or -evna, as, again, all Russian women do today. Lesser-ranking servitors had patronymics in syn (son of) and their wives and daughters in doch’ (daughter of). Thus, we find Prince Ivan Vasil’evich Golitsyn, but Denis Timofeev syn Ul’ianov. The first two wives of Tsar Mikhail Feodorovich likely had different patronymics, at least before their weddings: his first wife, a princess, was Mariia Vladimirovna Dolgorukova; his second, the daughter of a middle-level gentryman, was likely born Evdokiia Luk’ianova doch’ Streshneva (before dropping the doch’ and picking up the -ovna on becoming tsaritsa). All names, titles, and terms, whatever their form, are presented in the standard modified Library of Congress transliteration system (omitting the unsightly ligatures over certain letter combinations). Finally, terms that do not translate naturally into English (such as okol’nichii) are left in the original, with a definition at the first instance.

Introduction

On August 20, 1745—the day before the wedding of Peter Fedorovich and Catherine Alekseevna, the future Peter III and the future Catherine II the Great—the famed Russian polymath and father of Russian science Mikhail Vasil’evich Lomonosov presented at the Russian Academy of Sciences an ode he had written for the happy occasion. Comprising two hundred lines grouped in twenty stanzas, the work was titled An Ode to Her Imperial Majesty, the Most Glorious and Most Powerful Great Sovereign Elizabeth Petrovna, Empress and Autocrat of All Russia, and to Their Imperial Highnesses, the glorious Sovereign Grand Duke Peter Fedorovich and the glorious Grand Duchess Catherine Alekseevna, on the festive day of the wedding of Their Highnesses, presented as a mark of sincere commitment, respect, and joy from their most loyal servant Mikhail Lomonosov, Professor of Chemistry.¹ Despite the clumsy title, which was typical of the time, the ode is a masterful early example of eighteenth-century Russian epithalamic verse. Lomonosov extols the goddess-like majesty and wisdom of Empress Elizabeth, who had selected her nephew Karl Peter Ulrich of Holstein-Gottorp (Peter Fedorovich) as her heir. He also praised the pairing of the young Karl Peter with Sophie Auguste Friederike of Anhalt-Zerbst (Catherine Alekseevna), a marriage that portended to be unlike any other before it: realm and dynasty would flourish, and the very order of the cosmos would be put aright by the joining of this man and woman in holy matrimony.

The hyperbole had a purpose. Lomonosov wanted to sing the praises of Empress Elizabeth, the daughter of Peter I, whom Lomonosov regarded as the founder of a golden age of Russian history and her father’s rightful and worthy heir. He also wanted to thank the empress for his recent appointment as professor of chemistry in the Russian Academy of Sciences, which Lomonosov received on August 7, two weeks before the wedding—a rank not referenced in the titles of his other odes.² Perhaps more than anything else, Lomonosov wanted his ode to express in artful and urgent language the expectations of many that this marriage would bring peace, stability, and bounty to Russia and the Romanov dynasty. Art and politics (and perhaps a healthy dose of careerism) intersected in Lomonosov’s encomiastic description of the young couple and their marriage.

Lomonosov begins the ode by comparing eighteenth-century Russia with the biblical Garden of Eden and the marriage of Peter and Catherine with the joining of Adam and Eve:

Is it not the Holy Garden that I see,

Planted in Eden by the Most High,

Where the first legal marriage took place?

Into the great palace the Goddess in glory enters,

She leads the loving couple,

who captivate our hearts and eyes.³

Empress Elizabeth—the Goddess (Boginia); Peter and Catherine—the loving couple (liubezneishie suprugi); Eden—the garden planted by God; Adam and Eve—the first married couple: all these elements are stitched together by Lomonosov in these first lines to set the stage for a laudatory hymn to realm and ruler.

In the next 133 lines (the first fourteen stanzas), Lomonosov describes Russia as a kingdom of love—this other country, where the sublime and pure love of Peter and Catherine permeates and fills all nature and humanity.⁴ Lomonosov asks, Does not love reign here?⁵ His answer comes in the form of a long and learnèd, though somewhat chimerical, list of Russia’s Edenic qualities, drawing on classical tales of both nature and love. Narcissus, son of the river god Cephissus, peers above the clear water and is captivated by his own beauty, and remaining there, falls in love with himself, yet his love pales in comparison to that Peter and Catherine have for each other. Zephyr, the gentle westerly wind that represents spring and fecundity, kisses a hundred times the leaves and sprinkles them with dew. Orpheus, the greatest musician and poet of ancient Greece, strums the harp, and the stones come alive and the trees form a chorus of praise. The naiad nymphs of Delphi (Kastal’ski Nimfi) together celebrate and dance by the gurgling waters of Parnassus and sing the wedding song.⁶ The powers of nature also celebrate Peter’s and Catherine’s wedding. The sun arching overhead, swirling streams, singing and nesting birds, boys and girls frolicking happily and gratefully—all exude the contentment and joy that are the byproduct of the love that unites Peter and Catherine and permeates the realm.⁷ To press the point, Lomonosov alludes to one of the most emblematic elements of any wedding ritual, especially a Russian royal wedding: the wedding procession, here called the regiment (polk). Bystanders marvel as the couple passes by, their path paved with flowers.⁸ The boundary line between rites and reality has become utterly blurred.

But Lomonosov had yet another purpose for this ode. The final sixty lines (the last six stanzas) extol the marriage of Peter and Catherine as the fulfillment of a divine plan to preserve and exalt Russia’s ruling dynasty, specifically the line of Peter the Great, the groom’s grandfather.

O branch from the root of Peter!

Flourish safely for the protection

Of all the northerly kingdoms.

O generous Catherine,

Blossom lovelier than the lily,

And grant us thy sweet fruits.

Russia awaits from you

Happy and quiet years,

Gazing upon you always

As upon the rising light of day.

Continuing in the next stanza:

Now in all the cities of Russia,

And in the villages and on the Asiatic steppes

In one voice they proclaim:

As God will extend for time eternal

The most precious progeny of Peter,

So too the lives of our own offspring will be happy.⁹

Peter III was the refounder of the Romanov dynasty. And, to be sure, the dynasty needed refounding by Lomonosov’s time. The male line had gone extinct in 1730, with the death of Peter the Great’s grandson, Peter II. Elizabeth, Peter’s daughter, was unmarried (officially, at least) and childless. There were, to be sure, the descendants of Peter I’s co-ruler, Ivan V, but Elizabeth’s plan, extolled by Lomonosov, was to keep the throne in the line of Peter I and to exclude the descendants of Ivan V. That meant making Karl Peter Ulrich of Holstein-Gottorp, the son of Elizabeth’s sister Anna, the heir to the throne. That also meant marrying him well and making his wedding into more than just the joining of a man and a woman: it also had to symbolize the relaunching of the Romanov dynasty. It is thus no accident that the ode addresses Elizabeth as much as the bride and groom. God acts through her to bring about His will for Russia, which can only happen through the rule of Peter I’s descendants. Elizabeth is the legitimate ruler of Russia; and from her and to her, dynasty and legitimacy both flow. Lomonosov likens her to the all-knowing and life-giving sun rising, transiting in the sky above, and setting over the ocean horizon:

In the Russian Empire you rise,

And follow the daily path above it,

And in the waves you hide your flame.

You are the witness of our joy,

You see the mark of our zeal

That the Creator has sent us

By means of this blessed marriage.¹⁰

No royal line ever enjoyed the imprimatur of God (and gods and goddesses) more than the heirs of Peter the Great.

Lomonosov’s was not the only ode written for this happy occasion, nor was it the first or only ode written for a Russian royal wedding. Perhaps the first had been written by Johann Werner Paus in 1711 for the betrothal of the ill-fated Tsarevich Aleksei Petrovich, son of Peter I, and Charlotte Christine Sophie of Braunschweig-Wolfenbüttel.¹¹ At least three others, beside Lomonosov’s, were written for Peter Fedorovich and Catherine Alekseevna in 1745.¹² But Lomonosov’s was the one that in many ways furnished the literary formula for subsequent odes by combining the paean with politics. Russia’s royals went to their weddings celebrated as emperors and empresses ordained by God to rule and heralded as the continuators of a blessed and legitimate dynasty.

Ritual and Dynasty

This book is about wedding rituals and dynasties. It describes and analyzes the themes explored by Lomonosov—ritual, dynasty, religion, royal women, and power (and several more)—as they were expressed in royal weddings from the end of the fifteenth through the first half of the eighteenth centuries. Court politics in Muscovy was, as I and others have argued elsewhere, marriage politics, and the marriage of the ruler was the critical moment in every generation of the dynasty. Each time the ruler married, the political elite around him reshuffled, with new royal in-laws joining the ranks of the innermost circle of courtiers in the Kremlin. The tsar’s marriage triggered a cascade of other marriages between and among courtiers and their kin, newcomers and oldtimers alike. Membership in the elite, especially its highest ranks, hinged on kinship ties, however indirect, to the ruler. As Edward Keenan established, it was in this area—in marriage politics, the politics of kinship—that the play of political forces took place, until the time of Peter … and beyond.¹³ As a result, wedding rituals were at the apex of the ritual world of the ruler’s court, more significant to the political culture than even coronations. These rituals were rich with symbolic meaning, and Muscovites invested enormous resources—human and fiscal—in performing them, and performing them right. By right, I mean performing them in ways that reckoned with memory and tradition but also sent timely political and religious messages to the court and to the country. As Nancy Shields Kollmann put it, royal weddings were among the most politically choreographed spectacles in Muscovy.¹⁴ Describing and deciphering these spectacles—until the time of Peter … and beyond—are among the principal goals of this book.

This book is also about dynasty. Dynasties came and went in this period, and royal weddings, like other court rituals, were manipulated by wedding choreographers and sometimes by rulers themselves to project a dynastic message. Dynasty is a theme that appears in the earliest sources for royal weddings in Muscovy—from the end of the fifteenth century—but dynastic imagery and symbolism became even more important when the old Daniilovich dynasty died out in 1598 and had to be replaced by another, and then another. Wedding rites and other court rituals were exploited by the upstart tsars as a way to establish their legitimacy. It did not always work, but they always tried. Romanov royal weddings in the seventeenth century projected an unmistakable message of dynastic continuity and legitimacy, two fictions that needed to be accepted if the new ruling house was to survive longer than the ones that had come (and gone) before it. The second major goal of this study, then, is to reconstruct the dynastic messages that were broadcast at royal weddings, and to understand how those messages changed over time. Adding weddings to the study of rituals expands and deepens our understanding of the role of ritual in politics. Scholars in other fields have already begun this work; this study does the same for early modern Russia.¹⁵

Viewing dynasty and politics from the perspective of wedding rituals leads us to other themes. Women occupy a central place in Muscovite royal wedding rituals—both the brides and the elite women performing various ceremonial duties in them—and they therefore occupy a central place in this study. Their roles in the political system as matchmakers, royal mothers, and prayerful intercessors (among others) were foreshadowed in the rites they performed at weddings. Religious identity also comes into sharp relief at Muscovite royal weddings, particularly at the weddings of royal women, who sometimes married into heterodox foreign ruling houses, and in the evolving attitudes Muscovites displayed toward the customary, pre-Christian elements of the wedding rites. Notions of monarchical power in Muscovy were also expressed at royal weddings. While the rites outwardly projected an image of majestic and unrestrained royal power, the rulers’ wedding rites depended on the participation of courtiers in prescribed ceremonial roles. Even the most capricious or revolutionary rulers in these centuries felt constrained to include their courtiers in these rites and to follow past precedent to some degree. Wedding rituals, when read with care, can therefore expose what some have called the façade of autocracy: the collaborative, sacral, and limited nature of the Muscovite monarchy that was concealed by rhetoric and rituals.¹⁶ Finally, and most fundamentally, this study rests on a close reading of texts. As Dominick LaCapra put it, texts are events, and nowhere is that insight clearer than in the rich corpus of Muscovite royal wedding documents.¹⁷ The creation of these texts were genuine events in the political and cultural life of the court, reflecting changes in ruling dynasties, religious attitudes, and political agendas. The wedding rites studied below are reconstructed in detail from these texts. This book, then, sheds light not only on the rites reported in them but on the texts themselves.

Studies and Sources

It was nearly thirty-five years ago that Robert O. Crummey laid claim to the topic of court spectacles for the field of Russian history.¹⁸ It was something of a bold move for the time. To study the customs of royalty had long been to confess intellectual mediocrity, lack of scholarly integrity, or both, as Paula Sutter Fichtner put it in her equally bold attempt to claim the topic for Habsburg historians nearly a decade before Crummey.¹⁹ But this is hardly the case today. Thanks to the pioneering work of Crummey (for Russia) and Fichtner (for the Habsburg monarchy)—and many others—the study of political ritual today flourishes across fields and periods.²⁰ Crummey saw from the start that court rituals, plays, masques, and ballets spoke to contemporaries in a complex symbolic language. Put more crudely, they served as a form of advertising. He continued, court spectacles expressed the political ideals and aspirations of the continent’s rulers. Through ceremonies and entertainments, a king could present a public personality, an image of an ideal ruler that might well have little to do with his private tastes and emotions.²¹ This was not to say that court spectacles were mere empty displays or entertaining pantomime, but that their messages were themselves a discrete and serious subject for study, especially as historians became increasingly interested in the informal mechanisms of rulership, the role of family and marriage, and the place of women in the political system.

Crummey was the modern pathbreaker, to be sure, but he was not the first to ask these kinds of questions. No study of ritual in early modern Russia can ignore the original, if unsystematic, work of Ivan Egorovich Zabelin, whose study of the private lives of tsars and tsaritsas led him to explore the ceremonial side of life inside the Kremlin.²² Zabelin exposed to view the daily routines of the Muscovite tsar, routines that Crummey realized bore a general resemblance to many of its western and central European counterparts, especially Versailles, which was a model for so many rulers of the continent.²³ Zabelin posed prescient questions, and it is hard to imagine how the field would look today without Zabelin’s books. But it took time for these questions to be asked again and to become respectable in the serially blinkered world of the modern historian.

But that time has come. Since Crummey, the study of rituals in Russia has expanded enormously, and the work of specialists on ritual has been some of the most impressive research done in the early modern period. Michael Flier and Daniel Rowland have analyzed the political motifs in court ceremonies, religious art, and architecture.²⁴ Sergei Bogatyrev explained the ritualized consultations in Ivan IV’s court, and Irina Borisovna Mikhailova surveyed an array of court ceremonies in the early modern period, both linking rituals to larger questions of the ruler’s power.²⁵ Boris Andreevich Uspenskii and others applied the rich tools of semiotics to understanding key court rituals.²⁶ Iurii Moiseevich Eskin and Nancy Shields Kollmann explored the role of honor in the ritual world of the Kremlin.²⁷ Isolde Thyrêt and Gary Marker applied the methods of new cultural history to the lives and roles of Russia’s royal women, and Cynthia Hyla Whittaker fleshed out the complex relationship between dynasty and literature.²⁸ Ernest Zitser revealed the serious side of Peter I’s parodic weddings and other buffoonery, offering an original and essential reinterpretation of the man and the reign.²⁹ Jan Hennings and Ol’ga Genievna Ageeva examined status and ceremonial discourse in the rituals of diplomacy.³⁰ Finally, Richard Wortman has, in his many magisterial works, drawn a graceful and synthetic depiction of the rituals and images of monarchy in Russia that will frame the Problematik for a generation to come.³¹ This list is necessarily shortened for reasons of space—with profuse apologies—but is long enough to show that Crummey was heeded by his colleagues when he called for more studies of specific rituals so that, piece by piece, we could construct a more accurate picture of both the rituals themselves and the political culture underlying them.

The Muscovite wedding ritual was discovered in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. It was discovered in that, beginning then, an increasing number of ethnographers, philologists, and amateur and professional historians began to pay serious attention to these rituals and even to identify weddings as a discrete subject for research and publication. This new interest in weddings, like any discovery, inspired all sorts—the serious researcher, the alert publisher, the writer of popular histories, and the artist—and many of the early publications of textual descriptions of royal weddings were faulty.³² These publications were highly successful, however, from a commercial point of view, and so interest in them and in Russian and Slavic wedding customs only grew. The seemingly exotic nature of Muscovite nuptial rituals attracted a broad reading audience, and the texts found their way into a wide range of publications in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

As if in reaction to these popular publications, serious scholars also began to take note of wedding rituals, apparently with the unstated goal of correcting the false impressions projected by the popular literature that had begun to appear. Some scholars—including the early pioneers in this field, Nikolai Fedorovich Sumtsov and Aleksandr Vital’evich Smirnov—conducted onsite observations and compiled descriptions of wedding rituals in various regions of prerevolutionary Russia, both among Christian and non-Christian populations, and formulated taxonomies of wedding rituals.³³ Others attempted to understand the origins of contemporary wedding customs. Surveying the range of nuptial practices among the population of the Russian Empire, scholars like Aleksandr Vlas’evich Tereshchenko, Grigorii Petrovich Georgievskii, Orest Ivanovich Levits’kii, and others attempted to reconstruct the genealogy of these rites back to premodern times, often with results that were more patriotic than academic.³⁴

It was in these early studies that two fundamental and enduring conclusions were drawn about weddings in the East Slavic spaces, both of which come under considerable scrutiny in the pages below. The first was that Muscovite royal weddings included two incompatible elements that had been forcibly and inelegantly combined: pre-Christian (that is, pagan) fertility rites and Christian sacramental theology and liturgy. The wedding rituals of tsars, as described in official texts, and those of the common people of the Russian Empire in the nineteenth century, as attested in observations of field researchers, both showed the same incongruities: the Christian rites were layered on top of the older customary rites, and the two were poorly integrated ritually because they were in basic conflict with each other. After all: What can light and darkness have in common? as St. Paul asked (2 Cor. 6:14). The second major conclusion was that wedding rites were both ancient and natively Slavic. The similarities observed in the weddings of tsars and commoners and in weddings from Moscow to Mozhaisk led to the inexorable conclusion that these were stable rites that perhaps experienced some class-based and regional variation, but not much. Wedding rituals were ancient things. For their part, Soviet-era specialists could only confirm many of these earlier findings. They continued the comparative work of compiling and analyzing the nuptial customs in various regions of Soviet Russia, though always through the limiting class-based interpretive lens required of them.³⁵ But despite the strictures imposed by the obligatory Marxist point of view, Soviet researchers contributed a great deal to the comparative study of East Slavic wedding ritual, opening the door to broader and more systematic comparisons with other Slavic communities and with non-Slavic wedding rites.³⁶

Today there is an encouraging amount of new research being conducted by Russian historians, and their results are beginning to shape the study of ritual and power in the Muscovite and imperial periods. Vladislav Dmitrievich Nazarov’s publication of several key sixteenth-century texts in the 1970s called new attention to royal weddings and supplied some of the most important source material for further studies.³⁷ The first important step in the modern reconstruction of royal weddings came a decade later, with Daniel Kaiser’s analysis of the weddings of Ivan IV the Terrible.³⁸ Since then, several innovative books and dissertations have appeared, focusing on the textual sources that describe weddings in the sixteenth through twentieth centuries.³⁹ This book is a part of the broader effort to understand Muscovite royal wedding rites and to reconsider generally what rituals mean in the political life of a premodern society.

The sources for this study are rich in detail and sufficiently plentiful. Royal wedding documentation for the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries—including descriptions of rituals, rosters of courtiers in attendance, and ancillary memoranda and other chancellery paperwork—are mostly housed in the Treasure Room (Drevlekhranilishche) and other collections of the Russian State Archive of Ancient Acts (RGADA) in Moscow. Sources for eighteenth-century weddings are there as well, but many reside in other archives and libraries in Moscow and St. Petersburg. Most of the material is unpublished and much of it is in draft form. There are also vitally important foreigners’ accounts, nearly all published, which describe royal weddings and fill in gaps when no indigenous sources survive. Foreigners interpreted what they saw through their own lenses and experiences, and so their descriptions of weddings can be faulty or naïve. Chronicles and literary sources also provide texture to the narrative, although they too require caution and corroboration at every turn. The Domostroi, the guidebook for managing households in sixteenth-century Muscovy, holds a special place among literary sources, its descriptions of Muscovite elite weddings adding color to the official sources of royal weddings. Grigorii Kotoshikhin’s mid-seventeenth-century exposé of the Muscovite court and politics, On Russia in the Reign of Aleksei Mikhailovich, also provides an essential description of how tsars married. All told, weddings are perhaps the best documented type of court happening in Muscovy. Consequently, it is possible, with some care, to reconstruct the history of royal weddings in remarkable detail over a long period of time.

Chapters and Themes

The structure of this study is partly chronological and partly thematic. In chapters 1 through 3, I take a chronological approach to the Problematik. Chapter 1 tackles the questions of the origins of the Muscovite royal wedding ritual and considers Muscovite rituals in comparison with ancient Greek, Roman, and Byzantine antecedents. The chapter then traces Muscovite wedding customs from 1495 (when we have the first dedicated documents describing a royal wedding) to the end of the sixteenth century, focusing particularly on the 1526 wedding of Grand Prince Vasilii III and Elena Glinskaia. Finally the chapter plots Muscovite weddings according to Arnold van Gennep’s model of les rites de passage—separation, liminality, and incorporation—which turns out to be a very useful lens for interpreting Muscovite weddings. Chapters 2 and 3 divvy up the seventeenth century. Chapter 2 explores in detail the changes made to the sixteenth-century model by the choreographers of the wedding of the first Romanov tsar, and how these changes were aimed at solidifying Romanov rule after the chaos and violence of the Time of Troubles (1598–1613). Chapter 3 picks up the narrative with the second marriage of the second Romanov tsar, Aleksei Mikhailovich, in 1671, and considers how changing political structures at court, a rising wall of Orthodox confessionalism, and the pious personality of the most serene tsar combined to produce further changes to the wedding ritual. The chapter ends by exploring the vastly reduced weddings of Aleksei’s sons in the 1680s, concluding with Peter I’s first wedding in 1689.

Chapters 4 through Chapter 6 tackle the Problematik thematically. Chapter 4 takes up the question of religious symbolism in royal weddings, comparing in detail three interfaith dynastic marriages: Elena Ivanovna, daughter of Grand Prince Ivan III, and Alexander of Lithuania (1495); Mariia Staritskaia, a cousin of Tsar Ivan IV, and Magnus of Denmark (1573); and the First False Dmitrii and Marina Mniszech (1605 and 1606). This comparative analysis reveals that Muscovites were more suspicious of heterodox (Catholic and Protestant) rites than they were of their own pre-Christian ones, which they regarded as utterly harmless. The three case studies also reveal how religious attitudes were evolving, and how those attitudes produced liturgical and ritual adjustments to wedding rites over time.

Chapter 5 examines wedding choreography. Royal weddings assembled members of the dynasty and the bulk of the court to participate in the key political occasion of every reign. The focus of the chapter falls on the three categories of guests: royal relatives, courtiers and servitors of various ranks, and the bride’s kin—the new royal in-laws. The roles played by the groom’s royal relatives at the wedding had enormous symbolic significance for the stability and familial structure of the dynasty. The presence of the ruler’s brothers or male cousins symbolized their approval of the match and their acquiescence to being bumped down in the line of succession, should the couple produce heirs. Courtiers of various ranks (sometimes hundreds of them) served at royal weddings, and their service in positions of honor and responsibility at weddings likewise showed their endorsement of the match. The placement of courtiers could also symbolize the healing of rifts among the great clans at court or signal the rise or fall of factions. Royal in-laws were a key group of participants at most weddings. Brides typically came from middle-level Russian servitor families rather than the great boyar clans, and so were almost always outsiders. Integrating them and their male and female kin into the Kremlin was a delicate negotiation. The process began with the placement at the wedding of in-laws in high and honorable positions—positions that they would not have held but for their kinship ties to the bride. The wedding thus served as a ritualized introduction of the bride’s family into the inner circle of the Kremlin in a way that was acceptable to everyone else already living there. The chapter concludes with a study of the precedence system (mestnichestvo) at weddings, the system of assigning honors and tasks to courtiers by rank. Mingling so many guests with such different social ranks eventually prompted the creation of a wedding exemption to the system of precedence, to avoid disputes over appointments. How that exemption evolved tells us a lot about the relationship between tsars and courtiers, and about monarchical power in Muscovy generally.

Chapter 6 focuses on brides and gifts. Brides appear throughout the book, but here the focus is on the way they participated actively in the rites of passage. Perhaps the most symbolically important marker of the bride’s transformation from maiden to wife and commoner to royal consort were those moments when she distributed ceremonial gifts to the members of the court. These gifts went to the high-ranking and the low, to courtiers in Moscow and to those in locations far from the capital, and to churchmen across Muscovy. Even so, their purpose was the same: to integrate the entire realm—prince, priest, and peasant—around the new regime that the marriage represented. The chapter focuses particularly on gifts given to church hierarchs, who in turn offered prayers for the newly wedded couple. Themes of dynasty and continuity weaved through the words of these prayers and highlight the essentially political nature of royal weddings.

The book resumes the chronological narrative in the final two chapters, which analyze the efforts of Peter I and his immediate successors to choreograph a new royal wedding ritual. Chapter 7 shows how Russia’s first emperor drew on a range of antecedents—Muscovite weddings, parodic weddings of jesters and fools, and foreign models—to retool royal wedding rites for his own purposes. Whereas dynasty, legitimacy, and continuity were repeated themes in weddings in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, Peter made himself the focus of the royal weddings during his reign. Weddings under Peter served his larger purpose of declaring and advancing his charismatic authority, even at the expense of his own dynasty. Petrine royal weddings, then, were fundamentally linked to Peter’s new law of succession of 1722, the first ever formal law regulating the succession in Russia and the only one to ignore succession by hereditary right.

Chapter 8 extends this analysis to the mid-eighteenth century. Symbols of dynasty and continuity returned to wedding rituals when Peter’s daughter, Anna Petrovna, married in 1725. With Peter now gone and the dynasty in something of a shambles, there was again a need for a useful notion of dynasty to help regulate power and the succession. Charismatic authority proved in the end not to be heritable. The chapter traces the intertwining narrative of dynasty and weddings down to the wedding of Peter Fedorovich and Catherine Alekseevna in 1745, about which Lomonosov wrote his effusive ode. Royal weddings were part of the back and forth in the succession between the two branches of the Romanov dynasty—the Miloslavskii line (descended from Ivan V) and the Naryshkin line (descended from Peter I). Each swing of the pendulum between these two lines was marked by a wedding designed to keep the succession in one or the other, once and for all. Only when Lomonosov’s exalted Peter and Catherine—the refounders of the Romanov dynasty—married in 1745 did the story of the tsar’s happy occasion, a story that stretches back to the end of the fifteenth century, arrive at its denouement. It is therefore then, in 1745, that this study closes as well.

Chapter 1

Time to Attend to the Wedding

Origins and Traditions

On January 21, 1526—a Sunday—Grand Prince Vasilii III sat in the Kremlin’s Wooden Dining Pavilion (Brusianaia izba stolovaia), dressed in royal regalia and surrounded by high-ranking courtiers, all of whom were also dressed in their finest court costumes. It was the grand prince’s wedding day, and the sequence of movements and rituals that made up a wedding in sixteenth-century Muscovy began, for him, there in the Dining Pavilion. Meanwhile, his bride-to-be, Princess Elena Vasil’evna Glinskaia, was in her apartment (v svoikh khoromekh) in the Terem Palace, where she had been residing since shortly after her selection in a bride-show. She, too, was dressed in her finest court costume and surrounded by the women of the court (boiaryni), many of whom were the wives of the men with the groom. At the appointed time, the grand prince sent instructions for the bride to go to the Middle Golden Palace (Sredniaia palata) and await his arrival. The Middle Golden Palace had been richly decorated for the occasion: tables were covered in rich linens and benches were positioned on both sides of the table with richly embroidered cushions topped by two forties of sable skins. When the bride and her retinue arrived, they all took their assigned seats, with the groom’s seat temporarily occupied by the bride’s younger sister, Anastasiia. Then Grand Prince Vasilii III’s brother, Prince Iurii Ivanovich, instructed a senior boyar (boiarin bol’shoi) to summon the groom. This boyar then went to the Dining Pavilion and uttered the prescribed words that set events in motion, words that hardly changed over the next century and a half: Grand Prince! Sovereign! Prince Iurii Ivanovich orders me to say to you, beseeching God’s help: It is time to attend to the wedding.¹

Vasilii III was surely not the first to hear these words summoning him to his wedding. Royal grooms in previous generations had probably heard them too. But Vasilii III’s wedding was the first time they were ever recorded in a wedding ceremonial (svadebnyi chin)—the official document describing a royal wedding.² Vasilii III’s and Elena Glinskaia’s ceremonial would serve as a model for later weddings up to 1624, when the first Romanov tsar married.³ Secretaries (d’iaki) in the grand-princely chancery—ritual experts, in Catherine Bell’s apt phrase—turned to it again and again as a reference source for how to arrange the wedding of a ruler: the Tsar’s Happy Occasion (Gosudareva radost’).⁴ The original ceremonial is today only a tattered fragment. It provides a description of events only on the first day of the wedding and part of the second, though we know the wedding was actually three days in length.⁵ Even so, few sources mark the beginning of a ritual tradition as well as this one.

Figure 1.1.

The wedding of Vasilii III and Elena Glinskaia, in the Litsevoi letopisnyi svod. Wikimedia Commons.

Like the secretaries in the royal scriptorium, this chapter takes Vasilii III’s and Elena Glinskaia’s wedding as a starting point. It explores the origins, structural elements, and symbolism of the wedding ritual over the course of the sixteenth century. It compares Muscovite weddings with ancient Greek, Roman, and Byzantine weddings and explores the question of the origins of these rituals in the East Slavic space. The chapter also applies Arnold van Gennep’s model of rites of passage to Muscovite weddings and finds that these rituals—whether borrowed,