Historical story

You wouldn't want to be a bastard. The whole truth about the life of illegitimate children in the Middle Ages

Royal descent is like winning a lottery ticket? Not necessarily. If your mother was nothing but a fleeting love affair with the ruler, then the worst was waiting for you. Refusal to baptize, disinheritance, and maybe even ...

In the early Middle Ages, barely Christianized monarchs saw no reason to discriminate against illegitimate offspring. The best example was Arnulf of Carinthia, one of Charlemagne's great-great-grandchildren, the fruit of the adulterous relationship between King Karloman and Liutswinda. In 896, he reached for the imperial crown, and Pope Formosus himself placed it on his temple.

"Children conceived in a brothel"

However, this state of affairs was slowly changing. Much of this was due to the growing influence of the Church. As early as the second half of the 6th century, some clergy wanted to discriminate against children born out of wedlock. One of them was Columban, a famous Irish monk at the time.

Frankish Queen Brunhild invited him to baptize her great-grandchildren, the children of King Theuderic II from an informal relationship. The monk refused. Children conceived in a brothel should not wear the scepter - he said, which put him in great trouble and therefore had to run away from the wrath of the old queen .

Other lineages also feared the wrath of Brunhilda. No wonder that Chlotar II, when he got his hands on her, spent her on torture and killed her. Execution according to "De Casibus Virorum Illustrium" from around 1475 (source:public domain).

Church law prevented illegitimate children from becoming a priest. But from that there were dispensations. In addition, there were some backdoors by which bastards could be considered righteous offspring. For example, if both parents were unmarried and then married, their premarital children became legitimate.

But in addition to church law, there was also secular law, which at times became more restrictive. In England, children born before their parents 'wedding could not inherit their parents' property. Even pressure from the Church to liberalize the law did not help in this regard. In 1234, the island barons replied that there was no question of any change.

Not for a bastard inheritance

The illegitimate children of the rulers were definitely removed from inheriting the throne at the turn of the 11th and 12th centuries. William the Conqueror, despite his illegitimate origin, could in 1035 become Duke of Normandy after his father's death. His grandson, Robert of Gloucester, also born of an informal relationship, was not even considered to succeed his father Henry I.

For a little longer, illegitimate children reached for crowns in Scandinavian countries. They also retained a high position on the Iberian Peninsula. Even in 1385, John d'Aviz, the fruit of the adultery of King Peter the Cruel, sat on the Portuguese throne.

Jan Aviz was proclaimed king despite his illegitimate origin. However, he had to fight for power with the son-in-law of the previous ruler, King John of Castile. Only the victorious battle of Aljubarrota in 1385 led to the recognition of Aviz as king by other countries. A miniature from the "Chronicles of England" by Jean d'Wavrin from around 1480 (source:public domain).

This does not change the fact that the Church consistently pushed the extramarital offspring of rulers away from inheriting the throne . In 1260, the pope legitimized the illegitimate son of the Czech king Přemysl Otakar II, while excluding him from the succession.

Over time, the charge of illegitimacy became a weapon used against candidates for the throne. The famous English king Richard III went the farthest. In 1483 he forced the English parliament to declare the marriage of his brother and predecessor invalid. Richard's nephews, standing in front of him in line to the throne, were brutally thrown out of her .

Better to be the illegitimate son of a king than a bishop

Despite this, illegitimate children usually fared well. Many of them were assigned by their fathers to the clergy, where they pursued careers similar to their siblings from legal relationships.

Women became abbots, such as Eudelina, the illegitimate daughter of Louis X Kłótnik, who between 1334 and 1339 became the head of the monastery in Saint-Marcel. Men, on the other hand, sat in episcopal capitals. But sometimes there were also problems with this, because the Church did not allow illegitimate children to become priests.

The fates of Richard the Lionheart's two half-brothers were different. Gotfryd Plantagenet in 1173 became the bishop of Lincoln, and later the archbishop of York, and no one bothered him about it. But when, around 1213, Morgan, also the fruit of a royal romance, was elected Bishop of Durham, Pope Innocent III refused to accept .

The idea was that Morgan's father, King Henry II of Plantagenet, had seduced a married woman, the wife of a certain Ralf Bloet. Formally, it should be recognized that this Ralph was Morgan's father, and that was what Pope Innocent III demanded. Morgan, however, persisted. He preferred to give up the episcopal see than to recognize himself as the son of Ralph and renounce his royal descent .

Although Henry II tried to ensure his bastards prosperity, there was no place for them in the official family tree. In a miniature from the turn of the 13th and 14th centuries, the King of England with eight of his wedding children (source:public domain).

A secular career was also open to the bastards of crowned heads. Illegitimate royal and princely daughters got married well, sons often fulfilled themselves as soldiers, often of great size, to mention John "Bastard of Orleans" (as the nickname indicates - the son of the Prince of Orleans), comrade of Joan of Arc or Antoni "the Great Bastard", the illegitimate son of the Duke of Burgundy.

And this is Poland ...

What was it like in Poland? The origin of Zbigniew, the son of Władysław Herman, is debatable. If you agree with Anonymous called Gall, biased on this point, he was an illegitimate child and yet he reached the throne.

The article was inspired by the series of novels by Maurice Druon entitled "The Cursed Kings" (Otwarte Publishing House 2016).

Apart from the district princes and Czech kings who stayed on the throne of the Piasts for a while, the next monarch with the illegitimate offspring we know was only Casimir the Great . His bastards didn't make a career. Jan and Niemierza, that was the name of the boys, were included in the king's will, but his successor, Ludwik Węgierski, canceled the records.

The daughters did better, but they also had a better starting position. Anna, Kunegunda and Jadwiga were born from a bigamous, because bigamic, but always marriage. Their mother was Princess Jadwiga in Żagań, the last wife of Casimir the Great. All three were legitimized by the Pope, and the Emperor Charles of Luxembourg wanted one of them to marry his son and successor, Wenceslaus IV.

In the end, neither of the girls became empress. Kunegunda died in childhood, and Anna and Jadwiga were sent to the court of their aunt, Hungarian queen Elżbieta Łokietkówna after their father's death. They did not make great careers.

In this painting by Marcello Bacciarelli from 1796, we see the graciousness of Casimir the Great towards the peasants. Only somehow one can get the impression that he lacked it in relation to his own illegitimate descendants (source:public domain).

Anna became the wife of Count Celje, residing in Slovenia - for a daughter of the king of Poland, not a very impressive relationship . The identity of Jadwiga's husband is unknown, in one of the chronicles there is information that he was a pagan. It should be remembered that when they were getting married, their father was long in his grave, and they were only relatives of the reigning Louis of Hungary, king of Hungary and Poland.

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As you can see - as long as the father took care of the children - the illegitimate offspring of rulers in medieval Europe were not too bad. Although at some point they were blocked from succession, it was still better to be a royal child, even an illegitimate one, than a peasant son.