THERE HAS BEEN AN INTEREST in the histories of the medieval noble families of France since at least the eleventh century. The chronicler Alberic de Trois-Fontaines paused in his chronicle to give the complicated history of two related Burgundian families of the twelfth century, then apologized for his digression by saying, “May it not be irksome to anyone that I have given this list of persons, as their names appear frequently in monasteries’ charters.”¹ The only family trees written down before the eleventh century had been those of kings—and indeed these were as heavily influenced by the biblical lists...

THE QUESTION OF THE ORIGINS of the French nobility of the High Middle Ages has been debated since at least the eleventh century: were these nobles “new” men—recent descendants of soldiers of fortune—or were they the direct descendants of the dukes and counts of Carolingian or even Merovingian times? Scholarly consensus long inclined toward the former opinion, but in the last generation or so a number of historians sought to establish the latter. In either case, the question has been treated as a strict “either-or” issue: if nobles were “new,” they could not in any way be descended...

THE MARRIAGES that linked older and newer lineages together, as discussed in the previous chapter, were specifically Christian marriages, carrying a symbolic and religious weight that had not been found in late antiquity. Ecclesiastics first developed the theory of marriage as a sacrament between the ninth and twelfth centuries.¹ While powerful families continued to arrange their children’s marriages, churchmen began to insist that the free consent of the partners was the essence of a valid marriage. During this period, divorce gradually diminished until the only ground for divorce was the discovery that the marriage had not been valid initially (this...

THERE CAN BE NO QUESTION that the period from the ninth to eleventh centuries in western Europe was one of political upheaval and change for the aristocracy. Charlemagne’s empire was invaded, fought over, divided into new kingdoms and principalities. Even the sorts of men who wielded power changed, as discussed in the preceding chapters, when new lineages, first of counts and then of castellans, appeared and married into previously established lines.

This political change, scholars have generally agreed, was accompanied by some sort of change in the family structure of the aristocracy, but there has been a good deal of...

THE CAROLINGIAN AGE, that is the ninth and tenth centuries, was a period in which several powerful lineages rose rapidly to power and to a royal or even imperial title—and often lost that power again nearly as rapidly. Besides the Carolingians themselves, these lineages included the early Capetians, the Rudolphian kings of Burgundy, the Berengarian kings of Italy, the Ottonians in Germany, and, in Provence, the Bosonids.

The Bosonids are not nearly as well known to modern scholars as are the other family groups mentioned above. And yet, in spite of their rather amusing-sounding name, the Bosonids were the...

BOTH MEN AND WOMEN of the medieval nobility were generally named for their relatives. Before the widespread adoption of thecognomenin the twelfth century, a noble’s given name was normally the only name he or she had. Even after nobles began to be identified in the charters by theircognominaas well as their given names (so that a noble would, for example, be identified as Milo of Noyers rather than simply Milo), their personal names usually identified them more closely with their relatives than did theircognomina. A noble’scognomen, if geographical in origin (as most were), might...

AMONG THE UPPER ARISTOCRACY of western Europe, especially in royal lineages, parents gave their daughters names virtually exclusively from the paternal, rather than maternal, sides of the family. As I argued in the previous chapter, princesses of the ninth through eleventh centuries were named for their fathers’ sisters, paternal aunts, mothers, and paternal grandmothers, rarely for their own mothers, even more rarely for any of their mothers’ relatives, and virtually never for women in their fathers’ maternal ancestry. But whether a woman was a “maternal” or a “paternal” relative changed in every generation. That is, a wife was never a...

THE GENEALOGICAL SEARCH for relatives of the great lords of the past may sometimes seem the merest exercise in antiquarianism. But as I shall demonstrate in this chapter, determining how people were or were not related does much more than allow one to draw family trees. The process casts important light on the exercise of political authority, and the extent to which office and power were—or were not—hereditary. Here I shall use the example of the counts of Autun, the men who held this office in the ninth and tenth centuries, and of Countess Adelaide of Chalon, a...

THE INCREASING NUMBER of surviving documents for the twelfth and later centuries—there are probably more still in existence for the twelfth century than for all the years from the Merovingian era through the eleventh century put together—makes it possible for the first time to follow over the generations lineages less exalted than those of dukes and counts. These increasingly numerous documents also allow one to ask questions about family structure which would be difficult to answer with fewer primary sources.

In this chapter I focus especially on one example, the members and household of a Burgundian castellan family,...

AS THE YEAR 2000 APPROACHED, with its vague but ominous threat (or promise) of transformations, ranging from the most mundane computer glitches to the mystical birth of a spiritual New Age, scholars looked with new interest at the year 1000.¹ The modern West, with its emphasis on individualism and self-fulfillment, is a different world from that of our ancestors a millennium ago, where individuals, both in their own eyes and in the eyes of their contemporaries, were identified with and by their families, those related to them by blood. Yet medievalists know better than anyone how much these people were...