The conception of caste privileges, social birthright (Ebenburtigkeif), is very strongly developed, inasmuch as women lose caste by marriage with inferiors and give up every claim to the inheritance of their blood relations (Sippe); and the caste degradation results at one period in the exclusion from the inheritance of a free father of the children of an unfree woman.
It is but natural that, in the loosening of all the bonds of social order, during the wanderings, the ancient Tacitean purity and monogamy was, to a large extent, lost. Among the high classes, concubinage was the rule, since the lord had absolute power over the unfree maidens, and war and conquest have it in their nature to blot out all natural rights. We meet concubines, called Fritten or Kebse, everywhere in the lives of the great kings and chiefs. The Merovingian Franks are especially famous, or rather infamous, for their sexual sins. Charlemagne and Louis the Pious held concubines. The Church, especially at the synod of Mayence, A.D. 851, began to thunder against licentiousness, but in vain. Nor did the monasteries always remain pure from the taint. Winfrid, or Bonifatius, the apostle of the Germans par excellence, complains of the Prankish diacons (deacons) who kept four or more concubines. Frequently, however, the Church submitted, on political grounds, to a recognition of two or more lawful wives taken by one man. But the sense of dignity and self-respect on the part of the women themselves, as we have seen in the case of Harald Fairhair, finally forced monogamy upon the full blooded, semi-barbarous Teutonic warriors, as the leading principle of a lawful marriage.
Teutonic marriage is concluded when the bridal couch is entered and "one cover touched both" (eine Decke das Paar besetting). To the very end of the Middle Ages the Church function is quite an indifferent matter, though as early as the Carlovingian time the Church prescribed a "confession of marriage in the Church" and "a priestly blessing." In the Nibelungenlied, Siegfried and Kriemhilde, Gunther and Brunhild, marry without mention of a priest, yet on the morning of the bridal night the two couples go to the cathedral where a mass is sung. This latter statement is due to the attempt of the mediæval Christian poet to color, from numberless constituent parts of varied antiquity, the ancient Germanic heroic saga, originating in paganism, to the advantage of the newer religion. The Nibelungenlied arose about the beginning of the thirteenth century, and, with all its grandeur and splendor, is "like unto an ancient grove of the Teutonic gods forced below the roof of a Christian cathedral." The shining Valkyrie-patterned Brunhild, so magnificent in the pagan naturalness of her divinity and her surroundings, appears in the Lied as a gloomy, hermaphroditic being between two different and irreconcilable worlds. She is unfit for the Christian frame and setting that have been given her. Thus it is with Kriemhilde, with Siegfried, with Hagen. Their virtues and qualities and passions are not yet fully infused with the light which emanates from the Crucifixion.
During the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, the legality of marriage first becomes dependent upon the consent of the Church. On the morning after the bridal night the wife, whose hair is now put up, no more allowed to wave freely as that of a virgin, receives the morning gift from her husband. She henceforth enjoys all the marital rights, but remains subordinate to the husband. He is the administrator of her fortune and has, ipso facto, its usufruct. But at his death one-half or one-third of the property acquired during his married life belongs to the wife according to the law of the Saxon and Ripuarian Franks. Chastisement of the wife still belongs to the husband; he might even inflict death or slavery for adultery. Divorce is possible if the wife is barren or the husband impotent.
Most interesting, historically speaking, is the circle of women surrounding Theodoric the Great, for the sagas have associated with him all the powerful women of the legendary history of the German tribes. He may be truly called the political forerunner of the Habsburg dynasty of the Middle Ages in the policy of strengthening dynasties by marrying royal women to powerful kings. Such marriages enhanced the strength and extent of Ostrogothic rule and cemented alliances with the other Teutonic tribes. Following, consciously or unconsciously, the rule of Theodoric, the Habsburgers, during the Middle Ages, built up by their judicious political marriages their tremendous dynastic power (Hausmacht), which finally became superior to that of the Holy Roman Empire itself.
These marriages gave rise to the proverb: Let others wage wars; thou, happy Austria, get married, for what realms the God of War gives to others are given to thee by the sweet Goddess of Love (Bella gerant alii, tu, felix Austria, nube; nam quce Mars aliis, dat tibi regna Venus). Theodoric married his sister, Amalfreda, to the Vandal king Thrasimund; his daughter Theodicusa to Alaric; his daughter Ostrogotha to the Burgundian prince Sigismund; his niece Amalberga to the Thuringian king Hermanfrid. Political marriages, then, are as old as German history.
Amalasuntha, one of the daughters of Theodoric, shines preeminently in history as the worthy daughter of the greatest German king of the creative epoch. Her contemporaries, the authors Cassiodorus and Procopius, praise her as an ingenuous, high-minded, lofty woman, an excellent ruler, and a noble protector of arts and sciences. Early widowed through the death of Eutharich, also a scion of the race of the Amali, she becomes, upon the demise of her great father, regent and guardian of her minor son, Athalarich. Reared in Græco-Roman culture, Amalasuntha inclined in her life and thoughts toward the Roman element in the state, and was to a certain extent estranged from the semi-barbarous Ostrogoths, who unwillingly submitted to her guardianship over her son, their king, and even more unwillingly to her rule over themselves. Though her rule was mild and wise, yet the discontent of the national party increased. Bitter reproaches were heaped upon the head of the noble queen for keeping young Athalarich removed from the company of the youth of Gothic race, for surrounding him with aged men, "though the mildest and wisest of their people," and for sending him to a Latin school of rhetoricians. For this was the training of a Roman emperor, not of a Gothic king, and their ancestors had taught them to despise such education. The queen was forced to yield to the popular demand, and the consequences of her surrender justified her fears. In the company of young Gothic nobles, Athalarich soon learned all the evil which the young barbarians had drawn from the Roman mire. His new friends had almost roused the youth to open rebellion against the "woman's rule," when, fortunately, he succumbed to the unaccustomed life to which his delicate constitution was not equal. By his opportune death, history is spared the record of the horrible tragedy of matricide which, in all probability, would have been enacted by the misguided prince a tragedy occurring frequently in the history of the Merovingian dynasty.
Amalasuntha's fate is full of tragic pathos. A great ruler and an extraordinary woman, she had indeed the qualities to become the benefactress of her nation, had not the epoch of unrest and agitation, the unsteadiness and the irreconcilable conflict between an overripe Roman civilization and Germanic barbarism, made her a victim of untoward circumstances.
In order to strengthen her tottering throne, she elevated to the position of her husband and king the last prince of the race of the Amali, the unworthy Theodat, a man of whom Procopius says that "the principle of never tolerating a neighbor beside himself had raised him to power and riches." Immediately upon his ascending the throne, he openly sided with the so-called nationalist party against Amalasuntha, and murdered the last friends and partisans of the hapless queen. In her despair she appealed to the eastern Roman, or Byzantine, emperor, Justinian, and implored him for protection and hospitable reception. But she did not escape to Constantinople. Theodat seized her and sent her as a prisoner to a fortress on a small island in the Bolsen lake. Shortly after the arrival of the Byzantine ambassador, who brought her a courteous invitation to the court of Constantinople, she disappeared in a mysterious way, whether by Theodat's orders or through the intrigues of the Byzantine is not known; but the king hated her; and the ambassador, according to Procopius's narrative in his Historia arcana, had been bribed by Empress Theodora, the infamous wife of Justinian, to prevent by any means the appearance at the corrupt Byzantine court of the highly cultured, royal Gothic lady.
The history of the Langobards, a Germanic race which plays a great role in the Migration period in shaping the fate of Italy, and, by driving the Popes into the arms of the Franks, in elevating that race and the Carlovingian dynasty, furnishes us a kaleidoscopic sequence of royal women, who exhibit all the vices and passions, crimes and virtues.