“And Unlike Previous Royal Weddings, There Was Not the Usual Royal Ritual”

This chapter picks up the narrative with the second marriage of the second Romanov tsar, Aleksei Mikhailovich, in 1671, and considers how changing political structures at court, a rising wall of Orthodox confessionalism, and the pious personality of the “most serene” tsar combined to produce further changes to the wedding ritual. The chapter also explores how changes in the way tsars wed reflected in aspects of their own biographies — their religiosity, their physical health, their mental health, and their ages. It elaborates the role that weddings played in this dynamic time when the ritual ground on which all politics rested was shifting tumultuously beneath them. Ultimately, the chapter ends by exploring the vastly reduced weddings of Aleksei's sons in the 1680s, concluding with Peter I's first wedding in 1689.