Russell E. Martin. A Bride for the Tsar

A handsome young tsar surveys a lineup of lovely young women and selects the most beautiful one, her piety and goodness evident in her bashful, downcast eyes. This fairytale image, a stock item in romantic depictions of early modern Russia, is the focus of Russell E. Martin's lively and insightful study. Martin has produced a book that is engrossing and fun to read, and through the lens of royal marriage he provides a clear picture of the way that tsarist court politics functioned. In chronologically sequenced chapters, he documents the drama of each bride-show, fleshing out the characters and serving up surprising insights. After a lucid introduction, chapter one explores the origins of the practice and its probable Byzantine prototypes. Chapter two examines the mechanics of bride-shows. Chapter three addresses the religious and political issues arising with second marriages, particularly those of Vasily III and his son Ivan IV (the Terrible), and chapter four tackles the remainder of Ivan's many tumultuous unions: marriages three through seven. This action-packed discussion offers a productive lens for considering the violence and excesses of Ivan's rule, although Martin is reluctant to engage with the controversies surrounding the Oprichnina, which he cautiously defines as “understood by some to indicate the division of the country into two parts and the creation of a secret mounted police force dressed in monastic black with severed dogs heads and brooms hanging from their saddles ” (p. 131). His surprising discovery that the church solemnized all seven of Ivan's marriages overturns a common assumption that after he exceeded his quota of three religiously permissible marriages, Ivan's liaisons were condemned as “non-canonical.” Chapter five moves into the seventeenth-century reigns of the first two Romanov tsars, tracing the sad fates of several chosen brides who failed to win general support from court circles. The final chapter leads us to the end of the ritual, cast aside along with so much else from the past by Peter the Great. Helpful charts and tables supplement the text, and three appendices reproduce key sources in Russian. The inclusion of the Excerpts from the Chronograph of the Marriages of Tsar Ivan Vasil'evich among these is puzzling, since Martin dismisses it as a later forgery.

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