Royal arranged marriages: how diverse did it ever get?

Factual Questions
1

Not the current fairy tale diversity, where attractive, affluent young women marry the future kings of Great Britain or Denmark, though they themselves are commoners.

Historically, in arranged marriages between royals, how diverse did it ever get? When the last Eastern Roman emperor’s niece was barged up the Volga to become Ivan the Terrible’s grandmother, it was still a marriage between coreligionists. When Queen Victoria’s daughters and granddaughters went out spreading hemophilia across Europe, it was still with, essentially, other ethnic Germans.

Was there any arranged marriages where the alliance was desirable even though the other family was very distant and therefore of a very different culture?

2

Occasionally, though it depends how distant we are talking. For example The Greek-origined given name “Philip” entered the French royal lexicon ( and then spread to western European dynasties everywhere ) via Anne of Kiev, the Russo- Swedish mother of Philip I of France.

In general Greek or Russian-Western European marriages weren’t terribly outré, though also not terribly common. For example Philip ( Philip! ) of Swabia, King of the Germans and would-be HRE, married Irena Angelina, daughter of a Byzantine emperor. And likewise throughout Europe - Portuguese married Danes, Italians married Hungarians, etc… However, say, Christian-Muslim dynastic marriages were considerably more rare, though not completely unknown.

3

This doesn’t apply to all your conditionals, but Abram Petrovich Gannibal was a NE African who went to Russia, became a nobleman, had a marriage (it says forced marriage, which I guess is not technically the same as arrange, but no details). It doesn’t say what the arrangements for the second marriage were, but his descendants counted among the nobles (Pushkin most notably was his great grandson), and likely married other nobles.

4

In the realm of fiction, there was Elaan of Troyius.

5

I suppose it depends on your definition of ‘diverse’. There’s geographically diverse marriages, where the bride and groom came from opposite sides of the (at the time) known world, and then there’s “exotic”, ie inter-religious, interethnic, interracial, etc. marriage.

Arranging a royal marriage was a complicated process! Generally, you wanted to arrange a match that would be politically expedient, with someone of the highest possible status and prestige, with a good probability of producing legitimate heirs to the throne, and that would cause the fewest complications politically and religiously. Some of the scheming that went on would put the Bene Gesserit from Dune to shame. That being said, due to exceptional circumstances, some exceptional pairings did occur.

I would say that for most exotic and diverse, the best place to look would be some of the marriages that took place within the Mongol descendants of Genghis Khan. The Mongols often married nobles from subjugated lands, and also sent Mongol princesses to marry client-kings.

GOLDEN HORDE and the BYZANTINE EMPIRE

Tokhtai, khan of the Golden Horde, married Maria, illegitimate daughter of the Byzantine emperor Andronikos II.

Nogai, kingmaker of the Golden Horde, married Euphrosyne, daughter of the Byzantine emperor Mikhael VIII.

YUAN DYNASTY OF CHINA (Mongol) and KOREA

Chungnyeol, king of Goryeo, married Khudulu Khaimish, daughter of Khubilai Khan

Chungseon, king of Goryeo, son of the preceding couple, married Botasirin (great-granddaughter of Khubilai)

Chungsug, king of Goryeo, married Irinjinbala (great-granddaughter of Khubilai) and Jintong (another great-granddaughter of Khubilai; her sister Botasirin was the wife of Chungsug’s father Chungseon but not Chungsug’s mother – his mother was a lower-ranked Mongol wife named Yesujin who’s father is unknown).

IL-KHANATE OF PERSIA (Mongol) and the BYZANTINE EMPIRE

Abaka, Il-Khan of Persia, married Maria, illegitimate daughter of Byzantine emperor Mikhael VIII (her sister Euphrosyne married Nogai of the Golden Horde, above)

Sidenote: Abaka, although a Buddhist, made one of the VERY few inter-faith marriages recorded in this period for a Muslim princess, when he married Padishah of Kirman, a Persian heiress. After he died, Padishah married her stepson Ghaykhatu. Padishah’s lifelong rival was her half-brother, Jalal ad-Din Suyurghatmish, who himself was married to a a Mongol princess of the Golden Horde, Kurdudjin. After Ghaykhatu put Padishah into power in Kirman, she arrested and killed her half-brother. After Ghaykhatu’s death, his successor and cousin Baidu married Shah Alam, a daughter of Suyurghatmish and Kurdudjin. Kurdudjin, the grieving widow, convinced her son-in-law to have Padishah put to death. What goes around comes back around!

IL-KHANATE OF PERSIA (Mongol) and GEORGIA

Oljai, daughter of Abaka Khan, married two kings of Georgia in succession: Vakhtang II and Davit VIII.

6

You can find a lady from Geneva marrying the Armenian King.

While I was looking at Armenia, one king was married to a Mongol princess… thats quite a lot of distance genetically, culturally and physically.

7

The most famous in the Middle Ages was probably between Abdullah, Emir of Cordoba, and Onecca Fortunez, daughter of the King of Pamplona.

8

Richard I proposed marrying off his sister Joan to Saladin’s brother, creating a territory including Jerusalem that the two would jointly rule. But the plan fell through when the would-be spouses vetoed it. (Possibly condemning millions to suffering, warfare, and death for millennia to come. But hey, who am I to judge? :wink: )

9

Considering how badly the guy Joan did marry (Raymond VI of Toulouse) treated her, she might’ve been better off taking her chances with Safadin/Al-Adil. Hindsight is 20/20.

A few more royal Muslim-Christian intermarriages:

Queen Rusudan of Georgia married Gıyaseddin, a grandson of the Selcuk sultan Kılıç Arslan II. Incredibly, he converted to Christianity in order to marry her. They had two children: future king Davit VI Narin and Tamar, who married her Muslim cousin Keyhüsrev II.

Uzun Hasan, chief of the Akkoyunlu (White Sheep Turks) married Theodora, daughter of the emperor Ioannes IV of Trebizond. Their daughter Halima was the mother of Shah Ismail I of Persia.

Egilona, the widow of the last Visigothic king of Hispania, Roderic, married 'Abd al-'Aziz ibn Musa, son of the man who had conquered Roderic’s kingdom. The chronicles at the time and just after (such as Al-Hakam) portray Egilona as a beautiful and imperious woman who’s influence on her second husband may have contributed to his assassination.

Mara of Serbia, daughter of Durad Brankovic, entered the harem of the Ottoman sultan Murat II. Mehmet the Conqueror was her stepson.

10

Not to mention her treatment at the hands of Tancred of Sicily, successor to her first husband William II of Sicily. He tossed her in prison after usurping the throne on said husband’s young death and it took an armed threat by her crusading brother Richard I to spring her. Didn’t have much luck in life as princesses went, did poor Joan.

11

Tsar Ivan IV of Russia (aka “the Terrible”) apparently considered the possibility of a marriage with Queen Elizabeth I of England.

12

In the 1300’s, King Jadwiga of Poland, who was a woman–they didn’t have ruling queens, but the king didn’t have to be a man–married the ruler of Lithuania, Jogaila. She was Christian, he was a pagan, but converted to marry her.

13

Nominally converted anyway, in his case it was probably never more than skin-deep. The marriage was very much forced on Jadwiga by the Polish barons when she was twelve. She despised said nobility to her dieing day, which came very young. In her final days she apparently gave praise to the great Tatar victory on the Vorskla River over her supposed countrymen for ‘the humbling of their pride’.

14

It was Smbat, who usurped his throne from his brother Hetum, who married an unnamed Mongol princess. All we know about her is from the chronicler Hayton, who says that Smbat “took as wife a lady who was next to Ghazan [the Mongol Il-Khan of Persia]”. Chronologically, it would seem likely that she was a sister or niece of Ghazan, as she would’ve married Smbat in 1296-ish (when he seized the throne), when Ghazan himself was in his mid-twenties and probably didn’t have a daughter old enough to marry Smbat.