“To See Your Royal Children on the Thrones”

Abstract

This chapter examines the way rites of passage and gifts interacted to create social cohesion in the Muscovite court. It presents the gifts' variety of functions at weddings: they helped integrate the bride (and her family) into the social hierarchy of the Kremlin, they reified lines of attachment and loyalty between the court elite and the dynasty, and they solicited the public and prayerful support of religious leaders of the Russian Church in distant locales across the tsardom. These gifts went to the high-ranking and the low, to courtiers in Moscow and to those in locations far from the capital, and to churchmen across Muscovy. Gifts were, consequently, an essential element of the larger goals of all royal weddings: to project an image of power, legitimacy, continuity, solidarity, and beneficence. Ultimately, the chapter focuses particularly on gifts given to church hierarchs, who in turn offered prayers for the newly wedded couple. Themes of dynasty and continuity weaved through the words of these prayers and highlight the essentially political nature of royal weddings.