Among the chief problems in determining the boundaries of the early modern period in Russian history is die reign and reforms of Peter I the Great. In this article, Russell E. Martin situates Peter's reign within the context of dynastic marriage politics from the sixteenth through the eighteenth centuries. He argues that the centuries from roughly 1500 to 1800 constitute a single, coherent period. Court politics were dominated by concerns of kinship and marriage: in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, by the search for a domesdc bride for the Russian rulers through bride shows; then, in the eighteenth century, by the gradual transformation of court politics away from domestic brides and toward a more traditional use of dynastic marriage as a tool in foreign policy. The early modern period ends, Martin argues, only with the promulgation of a new law of succession by Paul I (as modified by Alexander I). The so-called Petrine divide, then, is elided in a periodization of Russian history that very much mirrors the boundaries that are conventional in the west.
This article examines the Law of Succession and the Statute on the Imperial Family, texts which were issued by Emperor Paul I on April 5, 1797, and which regulated the succession to the throne and the structure of the Romanov dynasty as a family down to the end of the empire in 1917. It also analyzes the revisions introduced in these texts by subsequent emperors, focusing particularly on the development of a requirement for equal marriage and for marrying Orthodox spouses. The article argues that changing circumstances in the dynasty—its rapid increase in numbers, its growing demands on the financial resources of the Imperial Household, its struggle to resist morganatic and interfaith marriages—forced changes to provisions in the Law and Statute, and that the Romanovs debated and reformed the structure of the Imperial Family in the context of the provisions of these laws. The article shows how these Imperial House laws served as a vitally important arena for reform and legal culture in pre-revolutionary Russia.
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