Morganatic marriage, sometimes called a left-handed marriage, is a marriage between people of unequal social rank, which in the context of royalty or other inherited title prevents the principal's position or privileges being passed to the spouse or to any children born of the marriage. The concept is most prevalent in German-speaking territories and countries most influenced by the customs of the German-speaking realms.
Generally, this is a marriage between a man of high birth (such as from a reigning, deposed or mediatised dynasty) and a woman of lesser status (such as a daughter of a low-ranked noble family or a commoner).Webster's Online Dictionary . Retrieved 2008-07-10.Diesbach, Ghislain de. Secrets of the Gotha (translated from the French by Margaret Crosland). Chapman & Hall, Ltd., London, 1967. pp. 18, 25–26, 35, 179–182, 186–187. Usually, neither the bride nor any children of the marriage have a claim on the husband's succession rights, titles, precedence, or entailed property. The children are considered legitimate for all other purposes and the prohibition against bigamy applies."Hugh Chisholm, editor. Encyclopædia Britannica Eleventh Edition. Volume 18. Morganatic Marriage. University Press, 1911, p. 835. In some countries, a woman could also marry a man of lower rank morganatically.
Etymology Morganatic, already in use in English by 1727 (according to the Oxford English Dictionary), is derived from the medieval Latin morganaticus from the Late Latin phrase matrimonium ad morganaticam and refers to the gift given by the groom to the bride on the morning after the wedding, the morning gift, i.e., dower. The Latin term, applied to a Germanic custom, was adopted from the Old High German term *morgangeba (modern German Morgengabe), corresponding to Early English morgengifu. The literal meaning is explained in a 16th-century passage quoted by Du Cange as, "a marriage by which the wife and the children that may be born are entitled to no share in the husband's possessions beyond the 'morning-gift.Oxford English Dictionary, 3rd EditionPhilological Society. A New English Dictionary on Historical Principles. Morganatic. Clarendon Press, 1908. p. 663.
The morning gift has been a customary property arrangement for marriage found first in early medieval Germanic cultures (such as the Lombards) and also among ancient 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. It was intended to ensure her livelihood in widowhood, and it was to be kept separate as the wife's discrete possession. However, when a marriage contract is made wherein the bride and the children of the marriage will not receive anything else (other than the dower) from the bridegroom or from his inheritance or clan, that sort of marriage was dubbed as "marriage with only the dower and no other inheritance", i.e., matrimonium morganaticum.
History
Denmark Succession to the Danish throne followed the specifications of the King's Law until the Danish Act of Succession was passed in 1953. Prominent morganatic marriages include the 1615 marriage of King Christian IV of Denmark to noblewoman Kirsten Munk. Kirsten was titled "Countess of Schleswig-Holstein" and bore the King 12 children, all styled "Count/Countess of Schleswig-Holstein". King Frederick VII married the ballerina Louise Rasmussen, who was raised to the rank of "Countess Danner" in 1850. There were no children of this marriage. When Christian IX's brother, Prince Julius of Schleswig-Holstein-Sonderburg-Glucksburg married Elisabeth von Ziegesar in 1883, the king granted her the title "Countess of Røst".Bricka, Carl Fredrik and Laursen, Laurs. Dansk Biografisk Lexikon. Julius af Glucksborg. Gyldendalske Boghandels Forlag, 1894. Volume 8, p. 617. (Danish).
Until 1971, Danish princes who married women who did not belong to a royal or noble family were refused the sovereign's authorization, renouncing their right of succession to the throne and royal title (Prince Aage of Denmark morganatically eloped with Matilda Calvi, daughter of Count Carlo Giorgio di Bergolo, in January 1914 but renounced his dynastic rights and titles subsequently).History of Roskilde. Royal House: Rosenborg. Retrieved 2012/5/2. Danish. They were granted the non-royal prefix of "Prince" and their descendants bear the title Count af Rosenborg in the Danish nobility.
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.
France Morganatic marriage was not recognized as a concept in French law.de Montjouvent, Philippe. Le comte de Paris et sa descendance. Introduction sur la Maison royale de France. Du Chaney Eds, Paris, 1998, p. 11. French. . Since the law did not distinguish, for marital purposes, between ruler and subjects, marriages between royalty and the noble heiresses to great fiefs became the norm from no later than the 12th century through the 16th century. The practice of marrying non-royal noble heiresses helped to aggrandize the royal demesne and the House of Capet while gradually diminishing the number of large domains held in theoretical vassalage by nobles who were, in practice, virtually independent of the French crown. The last of these marriages, of Catherine de' Medici to the future King Henry II in 1533, brought the last of these lands, the county of Auvergne, to the crown of France.
Antiquity of nobility in the legitimate male line, not noble quarterings, was the main criterion of rank in the ancien régime.de la Roque, Gilles-Andre. Traite de la Noblesse. Du Gentilhomme de nom et d'armes. Etienne Michalet, Paris, 1678, pp. 5, 8-10. Unlike the status of a British peer's wife and descendants (yet typical of the nobility of every continental European country), the legitimate children and male-line descendants of any French nobleman (whether titled or not, whether possessing a French peerage or not) were also legally noble ad infinitum. Rank was not based on hereditary titles, which were often assumed or acquired by purchase of a noble estate rather than granted by the Crown. Rather, the main determinant of relative rank among the French nobility was how far back the nobility of a family's male line could be verifiably traced. Other factors influencing rank included the family's history of military command, high-ranking offices held at court and marriages into other high-ranking families. A specific exception was made for bearers of the title of duke who, regardless of their origin, outranked all other nobles. But the ducal title in post-medieval France (even when embellished with the still higher status of "peer") ranked its holder and his family among France's nobility and not, as in Germany and Scandinavia (and, occasionally, Italy, viz. Savoy, Medici, Este, della Rovere, Farnese and Cybo-Malaspina) among Europe's reigning dynasties which habitually intermarried with one another.
Once the House of Bourbon inherited the throne of France from the House of Valois in 1589, their dynasts married daughters of even the oldest ducal families of France — let alone noblewomen of lower rank — quite rarely (viz., Anne de Montafié in 1601, Charlotte Marguerite de Montmorency in 1609 and, in exile from revolutionary France, Maria Caterina Brignole in 1798). Exceptions were made for equal royal intermarriage with the princes étrangers and, by royal command, with the so-called princes légitimés (i.e., out-of-wedlock but legitimised descendants of Henry IV and Louis XIV), as well as with the nieces of Cardinal-prime ministers (i.e., Richelieu, Mazarin). Just as the French king could authorize a royal marriage that would otherwise have been deemed unsuitable, by 1635 it had been established by Louis XIII that the king could also legally void the canonically valid, equal marriage of a French dynast to which he had not given consent (e.g., Marguerite of Lorraine, Duchess of Orléans).Blet, Pierre. Le Clergé de France et la Monarchie, Etude sur les Assemblées Générales du Clergé de 1615 à 1666. Université Grégorienne, Rome, 1959, pp. 399-439.Degert, (Abbé). "Le mariage de Gaston d'Orléans et de Marguerite de Lorraine," Revue Historique 143:161-80, 144:1-57. French.
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. The marriage ceremony took place without banns, in private (with only a priest, the bride and groom, and a few legal witnesses present), and the marriage was never officially acknowledged (although sometimes widely known). Thus, the wife never publicly shared in her husband's titles, rank, or coat of arms.Pothier, Robert. Traité des successions, Chapitre I, section I, article 3, § 4. French. The lower-ranked spouse, male or female, could only receive from the royal spouse what property the king allowed.
In secret marriage, Louis XIV wed his second wife, Madame de Maintenon, in 1683 (she was nearly 50, so no children were likely); Louis the Grand Dauphin wed Marie Émilie de Joly de Choin in 1695; Anne Marie d'Orléans (La Grande Mademoiselle) wed Antoine, Duke de Lauzun in 1682; and Louis Philippe I, Duke of Orléans wed the Marquise de Montesson in 1773. The mechanism of the "secret marriage" rendered it unnecessary for France to legislate the morganatic marriage per se. Within post-monarchical dynasties, until the end of the 20th century the heads of the Spanish and Italian Bourbon branches, the Orléans of both France and Brazil, and the Imperial Bonapartes have, in exile, exercised claimed authority to exclude from their dynasty descendants born of unapproved marriages — albeit without calling these marriages "morganatic".
German-speaking Europe The practice of morganatic marriage was most common in the German-speaking parts of Europe, where equality of birth (Ebenbürtigkeit) between the spouses was considered an important principle among the reigning houses and high nobility. The German name was Ehe zur linken Hand ("marriage by the left hand") and the husband gave his left hand during the wedding ceremony instead of the right.
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. The marriage was initially resisted by Emperor Franz Joseph I, but after pressure from family members and other European rulers, he relented in 1899 (but did not attend the wedding himself). The bride was made Princess (later Duchess) of Hohenberg, their children took their mother's new name and rank, but were excluded from the imperial succession. The Sarajevo assassination in 1914, killing both the Archduke Franz Ferdinand and his wife Sophie, triggered the First World War.
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. Descendants of the 1851 marriage of Prince Alexander of Hesse and by Rhine to the German-Polish noblewoman Countess Julia von Hauke (created Princess of Battenberg) include Alexander, sovereign prince of Bulgaria, queen-consorts of Spain (Victoria Eugenie of Battenberg) and of Sweden (Louise Mountbatten), and, in the female line, Charles III (through his paternal grandmother, Alice of Battenberg).