The Marriage of Philip I and Bertha

Sources

Divorce. More than two hundred years after Hincmar of Reims and Pope Nicholas I pronounced that a valid marriage was indissoluble, another notorious divorce case demonstrated that the Church was still having difficulty promoting the principle that marriage was indissoluble. The marriage of Philip I, King of France (reigned 1059–1108) to Bertha was arranged in 1072 as part of a reconciliation between Philip and the count of Flanders, Bertha’s stepfather. After nine childless years of marriage, Bertha gave birth to a son, Louis. Three daughters followed. Then, in 1092 Philip repudiated Bertha, shut her up in a castle that was part of her dower, and married Bertrade, the wife of Fulk IV, Count of Anjou. Whether the count consented to this marriage is uncertain. Some sources suggest that love and passion caused Philip’s action, but others suggest that he may have been motivated by a fear for the succession to the kingdom. He had only one legitimate son in an age with a high mortality rate, and Bertha was by then past childbearing age. Philip may well have considered the succession to his crown precarious and wanted to father more heirs to the kingdom, who needed to be the legitimate offspring of a valid marriage.

Church versus State. To lend validity to his second marriage, Philip assembled the clergy of France to bless the union. Ivo, Bishop of Chartres, was one of the few clerics who refused to condone Philip’s behavior, telling the king, “You will not see me in Paris, with your wife of whom I know not if she may be your wife.” These words foreshadowed the development of the consensual theory of marriage; that is, Ivo acknowledged that by virtue of their consent to be wed and their subsequent acts of sexual intercourse Philip and Bertrade were already married and that the blessing of the clergy was only the celebration and solemnization of something that had already occurred. Ivo was unsure, however, whether it was possible for Philip and Bertrade to be wed. Calling for a church council to examine the validity of Philip’s divorce from Bertha and to decide if he and Bertrade were eligible to marry legitimately, Ivo referred the situation to Pope Urban II, who forbade the French bishops to crown Bertrade queen. Bertha’s death in 1094 could have resolved the situation, but neither Ivo nor the pope were willing to let that happen. When Philip again convened a council to affirm his marriage to Bertrade, the Pope excommunicated him. The king continued to occupy the throne under excommunication, and then went through the motions of acceding to the Pope’s judgment. Dressed in penitential garb, Philip and Bertrade swore to abjure one another’s company. In fact, however, they continued to live together and raised three children. Their union gained some measure of public recognition and ended only with Philip’s death in 1108.

Defining Marriage. This case illustrates several important points about marriage as it was understood at the beginning of the twelfth century. First, while betrothal followed by sexual union might form a marriage even without a religious ceremony, the laity agreed that the participation of the Church in the solemnization of the union was not only desirable but necessary. On the other hand, however, the Church still faced significant opposition from secular society about its vision of marriage as indissoluble. Kings, nobles, and the laity in general continued to believe that a husband could and should be able to divorce his wife. Moreover, Philip’s case illustrates a change in the position of the Church in society—it was one of the first instances in which the Church demonstrated the extent of its power and influence by excommunicating a king who refused to obey a Pope in a matrimonial case. The Church was set not only to extend, but also to exercise effectively and aggressively, its jurisdiction over marriage. The case also, however, had some unintended consequences that had considerable influence on marriage for years to come.

Consanguinity and Affinity. One of the greatest canon lawyers in the eleventh century, Ivo of Chartres brought his considerable acumen to bear on the case and in the process introduced a new consideration to the question of divorce. He was less concerned about whether Philip and Bertrade’s marriage was bigamous or adulterous than with the issue of affinity. He had discovered that Philip and Bertrade’s first husband shared a distant relative and thus argued that Philip and Bertrade were barred from marrying through too close a relationship of affinity. He thus opened a new loophole: if a person seeking a divorce could discover a shared relative, either by blood (consanguinity) or by marriage (affinity), the marriage could be declared invalid and, since a bond had never been formed, the couple would be free to separate and remarry. With this decision, invoking the impediments of consanguinity and affinity became widely used by the European aristocracy, who had been deprived of the ability to repudiate a spouse by the successful imposition by the Church of the

doctrine of the indissolubility of marriage. For example, in 1152, after fifteen years of marriage to King Louis VII of France, Eleanor, Duchess of Aquitaine, used this strategy to obtain a divorce on the grounds that she and Louis were related in the fourth and fifth degrees of consanguinity. The Fourth Lateran Council in 1215 finally put an end to the use and abuse of consanguinity and affinity to obtain de facto divorces.

Sources

James A. Brundage, Law, Sex, and Christian Society in Medieval Europe (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987).

Georges Duby, The Knight, the Lady and the Priest: The Making of Modern Marriage in Medieval France, translated by Barbara Bray (New York: Pantheon, 1983).

Duby, Medieval Marriage: Two Models from Twelfth-Century France, translated by Elborg Forster (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Pantheon, 1983).

Constance M. Rousseau and Joel T. Rosenthal, eds., Women, Marriage, and Family in Medieval Christendom: Essays in Memory of Michael M. Sheehan, C.S.B. (Kalamazoo: Western Michigan University, 1998).