A diplomatic plot of the Livonian war times: scandalous wedding in Novgorod

In the second part of the historical essay, the author explores the practical value of theoretical derivation of the flexibility of a medieval wedding ceremony, expressed in the first part of the essay. As an example the author is using five known intermediate discharges of Magnus and Princess Maria Staritskaya’s wedding to show techniques combining the four “standard” versions of the wedding ceremony. Those techniques were used by the tsar’s clerks during private talks with the King of Livonia on the order of marriage ceremony. Variability combinations of betrothal and church wedding ceremonies allowed the Moscow government to make a number of documents that meet the standards of both inter-religious marriage (for the Catholic groom and the bride professing Orthodox faith) and “mono-religious” (for the bride and groom professing the same faith). The interpretation of the documents’ content could determine the legal right of Magnus to own wife’s dowry. But this interpretation depended on the will of Ivan IV. The author concludes that the royal clerks masterfully used bureaucratic methods to achieve the goal, which was profitable for Moscow. As a result of such manipulations there were at least five documents in “indoor” tsar archive that could be used to compromise Magnus at a certain reading. It was profitable for Moscow to present the case as if Magnus was married on an orthodox ceremony, in other words, he betrayed the Christian faith of the Augsburg Confession (Lutheran). The threat of reading of the documents in this way allowed the tsar to put pressure on Magnus and use him as a “puppet” in the struggle for influence in Muscovy in the Baltic region. The author emphasizes the importance of Magnus’s wedding intermediate “discharges” (the orders of marriage) as a valuable source for the study of Russian secret foreign policy in the era of Ivan IV.