The Politics of Marriage "B ella gerant alii , tu, felix Austria, nube" (Others wage wars, you, happy Austria, marry). This famous aphorism about the Habsburgs' marital triumphs, attributed to King Matthias Corvinus of Hungary (1440-90), is a reminder, pace Clausewitz, that marriage as well as war is a form of diplomacy. It is thus not a mere coincidence that much of the extant evidence about the archbishops' use of marriage as a political weapon comes from periods of crisis in the principality's history: the outlawing of Duke Frederick II in the 1230S, the papal-Hohenstaufen conflict in the 1240s, the Salzburg interregnum, and the war between Archbishop Conrad IV and Duke Albrecht of Austria in the 1290s. Although the marriages of the archbishops' own relatives were hardly as significant as the dynastic alli ances of princely houses like the Habsburgs or Wittelsbachs, the archbishops used marriage to subject noble lineages to their authority, to procure the services of the ministerials of other lords, to create the principality, and to consolidate their territorial supremacy. 1 Almost nothing is known about the archbishops' role in arranging the ministe rials' marriages during the twelfth century, but it seems unlikely that unions that proved advantageous to the church occurred without their knowledge or approval. I suggest, for example, that Archbishop Adalbert's price for consenting to the Babenberg acquisition of Styria in 1192 may have been several marriages between Styrian and archiepiscopal ministerials that benefited Salzburg. Generally, how-I. Some examples of the archbishops' involvement in their relatives' marriages are Frederick II's
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