russianmarriage

Variations of russian german marriage marriage were also practised by non-European dynasties, such as the Royal Family of Thailand, the polygamous Mongols as to their non-principal wives, and other families of Africa and Asia. Germanic tribes, and the church drove its adoption into other countries in order to improve the wife’s security by this additional benefit. The bride received property from the bridegroom’s clan. Genghis Khan followed the contemporary tradition by taking several morganatic wives in addition to his principal wife, whose property passed to their youngest son, also following tradition.

King Erik XIV of Sweden married the servant Karin Månsdotter morganatically in 1567, and later secondly, but this time not morganatically, in 1568. Late in his life, the widowed ex-king Fernando II of Portugal married the opera singer Elise Hensler, who was created Countess von Edla. The 1900 marriage of Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria, whose subsequent assassination triggered World War I, to Countess Sophie Chotek was morganatic at the insistence of the Austrian Emperor Franz Joseph I. She married one of her guards in a secret marriage.

Princess Stéphanie of Belgium, the widow of Crown Prince Rudolf of Austria, married Count Elemér Lónyay de Nagy-Lónya et Vásáros-Namény after the death of her first husband. Succession to the Danish throne followed the specifications of the Lex Regia until the Danish Act of Succession was passed in 1953. Neither of the children of Queen Margrethe II has married a person of either royal birth or of the titled aristocracy. Members of the Royal Family may still lose their place in the line of succession for themselves and their descendants if they marry without the monarch’s permission.

Morganatic marriage was not recognized in French law. Antiquity of nobility in the legitimate male line, not noble quarterings, was the main criterion of rank in the ancien régime. Moreover, there was a French practice, legally distinct from morganatic marriage but used in similar situations of inequality in status between a member of the royal family and a spouse of lower rank: an “openly secret” marriage. French kings authorized such marriages only when the bride was past child-bearing or the marrying prince already had dynastic heirs by a previous spouse of royal descent. Perhaps the most famous example in modern times was the 1900 marriage of the heir to the throne of Austria-Hungary, Archduke Franz Ferdinand, and Bohemian aristocrat Countess Sophie Chotek von Chotkowa. Although the issue of morganatic marriages were ineligible to succeed to their families’ respective thrones, children of morganatic marriages have gone on to achieve dynastic success elsewhere in Europe. Occasionally, children of morganatic marriages have overcome their non-dynastic origins and succeeded to their family’s realms.