IUS PRIMAE NOCTIS. — That in the Middle Ages, particularly in the centuries from the eleventh to the thirteenth, but also much earlier and much later, feudal lords possessed and exercised a right to spend the first night of marriage with the wives of their subjects (i. p. n., or, more crudely, ius cunnatici), is an ill-founded opinion, which the imaginative Scottish historian Ettore Boece (1526) was the first to set in circulation and which, subsequently embraced even by serious writers, was disseminated beyond the bounds of decency by an abundant and for the most part poor-quality literature.
Beginning with Girolamo Muzio (1553), who reported traditions which, in his view, were not remote, some came to believe in the existence of such a right in Italian territory as well, and certain documents and narratives from various regions and periods—Venetian, Piedmontese, and southern, from the twelfth century onward—were interpreted as alluding to II.
How much truth and how much arbitrariness are contained in what is related about the i. p. n. cannot be established except by making distinctions. A custom whereby the bride was deflowered by an authoritative personage of her tribe, or of her own family, is attested among primitive peoples, and its origins are variously explained by ethnologists. Nor is it any less certain that nameless abuses, in disparate places and periods, were perpetrated by feudal lords to the detriment of their subjects’ brides. It is not, however, proved that this pagan custom continued among the Christian peoples of the Middle Ages, nor that those feudal abuses ever rose, in any place or period, to the status of a genuine right. What is proved only is that many feudal lords, in Italy and elsewhere, imposed marriage taxes on their subjects, payable in some places on a single occasion and in others at specified intervals (yearly or weekly) throughout the duration of the marriage: taxes that have left, down to our own times, some slight trace in the customs of certain regions, including Italy.
These taxes should not be regarded as the price of redemption from a hypothetical i. p. n., and perhaps not even as a transformation of the Germanic purchase of the bride; rather, and more simply, they were compensation for the lord’s consent to the marriage. This is all the more likely because in the Middle Ages a similar tax was often collected by the ecclesiastical authorities for dispensation from the obligation imposed upon the newlyweds to preserve chastity during the first night, or the first three nights, of marriage.