ABSTRACT
A study of the marriage strategies adopted by ruling families is a useful exercise in itself. They were in most medieval societies an integral part of the political and diplomatic process, but in terms of prosopography their study might seem a somewhat basic undertaking. The fact of the matter, however, is that there has been no systematic study of the marriage alliances of those families that established the Latin Empire of Constantinople in 1204; still less has there been any attempt to create a prosopography of the Latin Empire, even though the foundations are there in the shape of Jean Longnon’s Compagnons de Villehardouin, which provides a prosopography of those who took part in the Fourth Crusade.1 Despite unrivalled knowledge of the families of the Latin Empire, Longnon was never tempted to examine their marriage strategies. The closest thing we have is Donald Nicol’s ‘Mixed Marriages in Byzantium in the Thirteenth Century’,2 but it is concerned far more with their canon law implications than it is with their political and social importance. Nevertheless it provides a useful starting point.
