Ius primae noctis

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The painting Das Herrenrecht by Wassili Dmitrijewitsch Polenow (1874) shows how an old man brings his daughters to the feudal lord.

The Ius (also: Jus ) primae noctis (German law the first night , French droit de cuissage, in English -speaking du droit seigneur ) the alleged right referred to a magistrate , in the marriage of persons of two of his rule people the first night with the bride to spend or to demand a monetary substitute (groschen). The legal custom or the associated erotic fantasy was presented in the early modern period and in the Enlightenment in literary and political publications in a way that attracted the public and promoted sales. Whether it ever actually existed is highly controversial. In the age or in the literature of the Enlightenment it was thematized as inhuman and thus feudalism as well as the medieval past was criticized. This was done in particular in Voltaire's work Essai sur les moeurs . A popular representation can also be found in The Great Day or The Marriage of Figaro .

Historical development

The first literary traditions of the sovereign right of the first wedding night are historically documented in the epic Gilgamesh (3rd millennium BC) (panel 2, line 144). According to this, the ruler Gilgamesh demands the ius primae noctis for himself as a sign of his power .

This lordship was first mentioned in the Middle Ages in 1250 in a poem about the farmers of Verson (near Mont-Saint-Michel ) in France . This form of behavior of an existing master's right appears to be fully developed in the Baudouin de Sebourc , a novel of the time of the Crusaders written in northern France around 1350 . The emergence of these literary publications was closely connected with the rejection of the dowry tax, which was perceived as unjust and which had to be paid to the court lord at the time of marriage. Through this verse novel, a gentleman's right to the first night with the bride of a rural couple, which had existed since the High Middle Ages, probably became known throughout Europe.

A marriage tax common in the Middle Ages in what is now Belgium and the Netherlands , the translation of which from the Latin language appears in the sources as a guarantee obligation, points the way to the payments of the bride's mundium common in the early Middle Ages . This payment by the Lord himself to a free woman on the occasion of her marriage to an under serfdom had standing man believed to be the after-effect that it in later times by the spread in oral tradition link between dowry and Mr. Law to the grand privilege on the right of the first night could have led. With the payment of the mundium , a man in the older Germanic marriage law also acquired the right to “bring the bride home”, the first sexual intercourse. Although this “legal claim” was not intended in the special case of the acquisition of a free woman as a wife for a muntling of the Lord, it inevitably resulted from the payment of the mundium by the Lord to the originally free woman.

Since the second half of the 14th century, the idea of ​​a sovereign privilege on the wedding night is said to have spread for the first time in common rural law . It was integrated into the legal life of gentlemen by masters or their administrators. With the writing , it has continuously developed from the recording of rural customary rights to the written law of inheritance subservience . The gentlemen's law had been expanded to legitimize tax payments on the occasion of a wedding celebration of subjects as court lords and to initiate substitute actions for the non-payment of a required tax in money. The tax payments, which were required in the rural legal texts, were not dowry taxes, but participation of the landlord or his administrator in the course of the wedding feast or license fees for the implementation of the marital side camp on the land of the landlord. Payers and payees in the High Middle Ages allegedly believed in the legal validity of such a gentleman's right of the first night, which has existed for "eternal times".

The belief in a gentleman's right of the first night, which was widespread in some places at the end of the late Middle Ages , achieved a certain popularity in the second half of the 15th century, so that in some places symbolic legal acts arose from the oral tradition. In France , the droit de cuissage was invented as "thigh right" based on the custom of symbolic execution of marriage by a procurator , who for this purpose placed an unclothed leg in the marriage bed with the bride . In Catalonia the gentlemen strode over the wedding bed in which the bride had been laid. These symbolic acts were perceived by the peasants as humiliation, as a show of power by the rulers.

On the historical sources

The only two written documents in the German-speaking area come from the Zurich area: There was a Meier in Maur who not only took care of the management of the estate as an administrator, but also exercised lower jurisdiction. The opening of 1543 guaranteed him in writing the right of the first night , according to which he could spend the wedding night with every bride in the community. This right can also be found in the opening for Hirslanden and Stadelhofen - today districts of Zurich. Whether and when the manager made use of this ius primae noctis can no longer be verified. In terms of strength or interests, he could have waived it or demanded a sum of money from the groom as a substitute for the act of defloration ("groschen"), less as a substitute for the possibly lost pleasure, which would be equivalent to paying for a service, but rather as payment for dishes , Wood and meat that the estate management was obliged to contribute to the wedding couple in inheritance :

“The courtiers also say whoever is getting married here should invite Meyer and his wife. Meyer should lend the bridegroom a port so that he can boil a sheep in it. Meyer is also supposed to bring a load of wood to the wedding . He and his wife are supposed to bring a quarter of a pork ham. And when the wedding is over, the groom should leave Meyer with his wife on the wedding night or pay five shillings and four pfennigs. "

The ius primae noctis as a musical and literary motif

The best-known literary processing of ius primae noctis is the theatrical comedy The Great Day or The Marriage of Figaro ( La folle journée ou Le mariage de Figaro ) (1778) by Pierre Augustin Caron de Beaumarchais , on which the opera The Marriage of Figaro ( Le nozze di Figaro , 1786) by Lorenzo da Ponte and Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart . The somewhat earlier comic opera Le droit du Seigneur by Jean-Paul-Égide Martini (Paris 1783) based on François-Georges Desfontaines-Lavallée deals with this landlord's right.

The writer and lawyer Ildefonso Falcones uses the ius primae noctis as a central element of his novel The Cathedral of the Sea and states in the afterword that law was actually part of the Usatges , the Catalan code of law, in 1486 .

In the novel 1984 by George Orwell the ius primae noctis is mentioned (part 1, chapter 7):

“There was also something called the jus primae noctis which would probably not be mentioned in a textbook for children. It was the law by which every capitalist had the right to sleep with any woman working in one of his factories. "

“There was also something called the jus primae noctis that probably wouldn't have been mentioned in a children's textbook. It was the law according to which every capitalist had the right to sleep with every woman who worked in one of his factories. "

The ius primae noctis stands in this novel in a series of clichéd descriptions of the ills of capitalism based on the ills of feudalism , which were considered to be abolished by the French Revolution .

Even the novel The Dark Valley by Thomas Willmann ( filmed in 2014 ) has the droit du seigneur to the core issue.

literature

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Detailed article on www.tvtropes.org about the Droit du Seigneur as a literary trope (English).
  2. ^ Classen, Albrecht: The medieval chastity belt: a myth-making process . Macmillan, 2007, ISBN 978-1-4039-7558-4 , pp. 151 .
  3. ↑ Jörg Wettlaufer: The man's right of the first night of marriage, rule and marriage interest in the Middle Ages and in the early modern period . Campus Verlag , Campus Historical Studies series, Volume 27, 1999, ISBN 3-593-36308-9
  4. ↑ a b Felix Aeppli: History of the community of Maur . Municipality of Maur, Maur 1979.
  5. ↑ Jörg Wettlaufer: The master's right of the first night . Frankfurt am Main, S. 251 ff . ( limited preview in Google Book Search [accessed December 2, 2015]).
  6. ↑ Manuel Senn, Lukas Gschwend, René Pahud de Mortanges: The opening of Maur. (PDF; 57 kB) (No longer available online.) In: Rechtsgeschichte. 2009, archived from the original on December 6, 2016 ; Retrieved July 5, 2012 . Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. based on: Bruno Schmid: The rule of law Maur . In: Swiss History Journal . tape @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / www.rwi.uzh.ch 12 . Zurich 1963, p. 309-312 .