304 Cooper
Eleanor Searle dubbed ‘predatory kinship’.34 They could also serve as pledges
of loyalty in alliances between rulers.
Certainly, if she chose marriage, the queen held a powerful card in her
capacity as the principal unmarried woman of the royal household. But it was
a card one wanted to be very careful about using, since it would almost cer-
tainly displace the queen from her position as head of the royal family. The
5th-century empress Pulcheria offered an outstanding example of canny use
of the marriage option, first sidestepping the expectation of marriage and then
using it on her own terms.
By professing herself as a virgin of the church, Pulcheria had fended off suit-
ors in the years following her father’s death in 408. Many years later, in 450
when she was fifty-one, her brother Theodosius II died. At this point she was
able to put her potential as a source of basileia to good use, on terms very dif-
ferent to those she might have commanded as a child bride. After extracting
a promise from the general Marcian for him to respect her virginity she mar-
ried him, which allowed her to control the succession at her brother’s death.35
Later sources claimed that Theodosius had chosen Marcian from his deathbed,
but modern scholarship tends to see the match as Pulcheria’s own choice, with
the story of her brother’s deathbed instructions a cover story.36
Placing a daughter in a potentially hostile household was a gesture of cal-
culated vulnerability. This is especially true in that the brides were sometimes
very young indeed. The bride’s position can helpfully be compared to that of
a male child hostage, since her presence could strengthen the relationship
between two houses, but she was at risk of harm if the parties to the alliance
broke faith.37
A particularly gruesome story about the vulnerability of diplomatic
brides can be found in the Getica composed by Jordanes some years after
Amalasuentha’s death. It concerns an unnamed Visigothic princess, the
daughter of an earlier Theoderic (who reigned over the Visigoths from 418 to
451). This princess was sent to Carthage to marry Huneric, son of the Vandal
king Geiseric. Initially the match was successful and it produced more than
one child. But some years into the marriage Huneric began to mistreat his wife
and their children. He accused her of trying to poison him, maimed her by cut-
34 Searle, Predatory Kinship.
35 Holum, Theodosian Empresses, p. 208.
36 On Pulcheria see Cooper, “Empress and Theotokos”, pp. 39–51.
37 On child hostages see Lee, “Role of Hostages”, pp. 366–74. Kosto, “Transformation of
Hostageship”, pp. 265–82 notes that this period sees the development of multi-directional
hostage exchange.