Marriage in Medieval Times

[EatYerGreens]

I've heard before that marrying off you daughters into a faction makes that faction more likely to marry their princesses into yours.

That's encouraging to hear. I shall look out for that. THe thing I always forget is what age they disappear to the nunnery, if left unmarried. Last time that happened to me was in unpatched V1.0 and age 30 springs to mind. Now I'm using VI (v2.01), I've seen other faction's princesses still floating around at age 32 so either I remember wrong, or they've changed it.

From my own experiences this seems to be true, but sometimes faction wont marry no matter what you do!

There's several good reasons I can think of for them to do that.

1) A previous marriage has successfully established the alliance between you and a further marriage would achieve nothing additional for them.
2) In fact another marriage into your faction would deprive them of a 'freebie' agent with which to spy on the goings-on around the world.
3) It would also give them one less opportunity to seal an alliance with another faction, should the need to do so arise all of a sudden.
4) Perhaps they are not currently allied to you and do not wish to be allied either because they have designs on your lands... :sly:
5) The only unmarried princes in your faction are not in direct line to the throne, which negates the 'claim to heirless lands' angle.
6) Your remaining unmarried princes have undesirable, even dangerous, vices.
7) The past mutual exchange of princesses was a generation or more ago, making a request to marry their latest princess to your king or his sons turn out to be one between cousins, cousins-once-removed, twice-removed etc.

I was reading an old thread the other day, about how to assure good stats in princes and someone raised the point about 'king marries daughter of a noble' being the track towards declining heirs stats. I wonder about this.

In reality, the royal families of Europe went to great lengths to intermarry with one another and, as far as I know, generally managed to avoid this course of action. Ironically, this means that they're more at risk of becoming inbred than the rest of us are. It would be fascinating to know if the game actually keeps track of who's related to whom. Also, it's a pity that the alliance screen doesn't help to to distinguish plain alliances from marriage-related ones, so you can avoid marrying into another faction twice uninentionally and getting the inbred vice in your royal line.

Then again, I've had generals start off okay and suddenly they develop 'inbred' or 'odd number of toes' so I've a feeling that the V&V's arise spontaneously anyway. For instance, I've seen ones with completely contradictory V&V's and have also seen princes coming of age with 'great warrior', 'traumatised', 'captured', and other seemingly unjustifiable traits, rather than developing these purely as a result of things which happened to them in the campaign.

EDIT:
P.S. Cross-reference this thread with the recent "Civil War " thread.

P.P.S. Today's session saw Nicephorous IV father another heir, at 51. So don't start rushing into CivWars just cos they're in their 40's.