Also back in monarchy times, people used to marry to unify their families' powers, especially royals.
An awful lot of European wars great and small were more (eg. the Wars of Spanish or Austrian Succession) or less (the Hundred Years' War started as one) explicitly succession wars - who the ruling classes married was Serious Business for very good practical reasons as it was directly tied to rights of inheritance. Cue Hell of a lot of dynastic maneuvering and trouble whenever someone died without valid direct heirs and the closest claimant(s) were somewhere inconvenient and politically problematic...
This didn't really stop until the 19th century, by which point the whole concept of statehood and territorial ownership had changed (the French Revolution rather changing the whole playbook wasn't entirely unrelated).
Applied to the lower classes too though, as property rights were hardly less important for the hoi polloi - they just couldn't start wars to dispute mere private inheritance issues. (They could and did take up arms over issues pissing them off on a more collective level ofc, usually against some new law or tax imposed on them they considered going too far; success varied.) Plus there was usually a lot of social prestige attached to such particularly when it came to land ownership; for example in most parts a very real (as in, de facto blocking eligibility to intermarriage) status difference existed between landed and landless peasants, and often that didn't disappear until the early 20th century. (More or less serious domestic trouble from disgruntled landless rurals may or may not have been involved in motivating such land reforms, depending on the case.)
There's also the fact that in days before any meaningful social security people's fundamental safety network was the extended family - and among the labouring classes the only thing really supporting those too old and infirm to work anymore was their own offspring. Hence why getting children grandchildren into the family lineage was Hell of a Big Deal, and still is in such benighted parts of the world as where people cannot rely on the State (if it even exists in any meaningful form and/or isn't actively hostile to their particular reference group) to assist them in times of need.
last edited at Apr 24, 2021 7:08PM
