JUS PRIMAE NOCTIS. — That feudal lords, particularly from the 11th to the 13th centuries but also much earlier and much later, possessed and exercised a right to spend the first night with the wives of their subjects (the so-called *jus primae noctis* or, more crudely, *jus cunnatici*), is an unfounded opinion first circulated by the imaginative Scottish historian Hector Boece (1526) and later adopted by even serious writers, before being spread beyond the bounds of decency by an abundant and largely mediocre literature.
Beginning with Girolamo Muzio (1553), who reported traditions he claimed were not long past, some have believed in the existence of such a right even in Italian lands, interpreting certain charters and narratives from various regions and periods—Venetian, Piedmontese, southern Italian—as allusions to it, dating from the 12th century onward.
To determine how much truth and how much arbitrariness is contained in what is recounted about the *jus primae noctis*, one must distinguish carefully. A custom of having the bride deflowered by an authoritative figure from her tribe or even her own family is attested among primitive peoples, and its origins have been variously explained by ethnologists. It is no less certain that unspeakable abuses, in diverse places and times, were perpetrated by feudal lords against the wives of their subjects. What is not proven, however, is that this pagan custom persisted among the Christian peoples of the Middle Ages, nor that those feudal abuses ever rose anywhere or at any time to the level of a genuine legal right. What is proven is only that many feudal lords, in Italy and elsewhere, imposed marriage taxes on their subjects, payable either as a one-time levy or at regular intervals (annually, weekly) for the duration of the marriage. These taxes have left faint traces in the customs of certain regions, even in Italy, down to our own day.
In these customs, one should not see the “price of redemption from a hypothetical *jus primae noctis*,” nor perhaps a transformation of the Germanic purchase of a bride; rather, more simply, they represent compensation for the lord’s consent to the marriage. This is all the more plausible since, in the Middle Ages, a similar tax was often levied by ecclesiastical authority for dispensation from the obligation imposed on spouses to observe chastity on the first or first three nights of marriage.