Europe is crisscrossed by ancient boundaries of which one is constituted by different kinship systems. How did they come about? And do they still matter?
Cousin – or endogenous – marriages are a characteristic phenomenon widespread in Mediterranean countries balancing a more exogenous tradition in Northern Europe. Traditionally, this cultural difference between kinship and inheritance patterns is best explained as a functionality of the difference between two different traditional agrarian systems.
To the North, farming was, in the olden days, dependent on the manure gathered from overwintering cattle. An old saying claims that “Meadows are the Mothers of Manured fields” (Eng er agers moder). For this reason, any farm had to have access to not just fields and pastures for summer grazing but also meadows where hay for winter fodder might be harvested. Hence, to make a success out of a Northern European farm, it had to be “kept together”, fostering a system of primogeniture where the rest of the children were fitted (bought) out with (Viking) boats or “sold” off as strategic marriage partners in the more or less distant countryside. As an ideal type, the farm and the family – and not the village – were the constituent social unit, and women were “sold off” for a bride price.
Opposed to this, farming in the Mediterranean depended on irrigation and water rights, typically organised in societal tribunals or guilds, where rights depended on wielding influence through clans and kinship. To forge and renew these social structures, cousin marriages were excellent societal tools cementing connections through time immemorial. Also, any Mediterranean farm in a Southern European context would consist of not just tilled fields with adjoining meadows. Rather, they would be created out of a myriad of resources, the utilisation of which were not dependant on each other – an olive grove, a piece of grazing land, some fishery, a shrubbery, etc. All these items of property might easily be given as part of an inheritance in the form of a dowry, leading to a strategic interest in keeping daughters “close” by marrying them off to next-of-kin.
Therefore, while exogamous marriage patterns were characteristic in the North, endogamous patterns of consanguinity ruled in the South.
Of course, these two ideal types of social organisations were malleable in real-time. History will be full of examples of how different productive units organised themselves differently according to number of children, the need for manpower etc.. However, the basic difference is still apparent between the two societal systems. In the North, the association of equal partners was opposed in the South to the clans of unequal patrons and clients. (1)
Two questions, though, may be raised: Does this crude natural-geographical explanation hold? And secondly, what might this mean in a modern day context.
Ideology matters
To answer the first question first: it appears that natural and geographical explanations were historically superseeded by ideological interventions.
The story goes like this: In the 6th century, the Catholic Church implemented a series of prescriptions to hamper the endogenous model by trying to further a set of prohibitions which ultimately led to a distinctive family system characterised by a low prevalence of marriages among blood relatives. This agenda was particularly pressed in the wider Carolingian world. However, parts of Southern Europe – for instance, Spain, Portugal and Southern Italy were late-comers to the Catholic world. As Muslim-dominated regions, they continued to adhere to the ancient Mediterranean system.
In a recent study, Roberto Ezcurra from the University of Navarre has thus found that the prevalence of cousin marriages in present-day Europe correlates well with medieval church exposure (counted as numbers of bishoprics) and the prevalence of Carolingian governmental influence in the 7th and 8th centuries. I appears that he more influence the church wielded historically, the less familiar the institution of cross-cousin marriages was.
Moreover, his correlation continues to be statistically significant in modern-day Europe, where the ancient agricultural systems must be characterised as patently obsolete. The difference still pertains, neatly creating a boundary across Northen and Southern Italy reflecting its history
Modern Europe
However, following this, he has also examined the present-day situation to see if the relationship between kin-based institutions is closely correlated to what might be termed “quality of government” in the regions of Spain, France, and Italy.
The results show that the rate of cousin marriage during the twentieth century is a strong predictor of the modern-day quality of government in the regions of these three countries.
“Regions characterised by a higher prevalence of cousin marriage tend to have on average worse governance outcomes”, he writes and continues: “This finding holds after accounting for country fixed effects and different variables that may be correlated with both consanguinity and regional quality of government, including an extensive array of geographical, historical, and contemporary factors (such as for instance precipitation, height above sea level etc.)
Thus, the observed association between cousin marriage and the quality of government persists. Furthermore, the paper also provides evidence consistent with the idea that the effect of cousin marriage on the quality of government operates through its impact on a series of cultural traits such as impersonal trust, fairness, and to some degree, conformity-obedience, as measured by the large European Social Surveys (ESS)
To sum it up, people living in those parts of Europe where kin-based institutions still dominate tend to be politically less trustful, less willing to deploy fairness, and more fixated upon conformity and obedience.
Also, this difference does not reflect geographical differences but rather the medieval cultural imprint wielded by the Catholic Church after the 7th and 8th centuries.
PHOTO:
Charlemagne and his wife – Abbaye Saint-Paul en Lavanttal (Autriche), Stiftsbibliothek, Codex Blasian 4, v. 813-823
NOTES:
(1) See Todd E (1990) L’invention de l’Europe. Seuil, Paris
SOURCE:
Kin networks and quality of government: a regional analysis
By Roberto Ezcurra
In: The Annals of Regional Science 2024
Open Access/CCBYNA04