La ‘famiglia dei re’: reticolarità matrimoniali da Teoderico a Carlo Magno

The concept of Familie der Könige has often been used to investigate dynastic relations between early medieval sovereigns. However, a static approach prevails in historiography, which often focuses on marriages and prosopographical data and pays little attention to the diachronic evolution of this phenomenon. The adoption of a perspective based upon social network analysis makes it possible to fully exploit the potentialities inherent in the category of the “family of kings”, while at the same time also taking into consideration diplomacy and military alliances, as well as episodes of cooptation within a royal family that cannot be traced back to a marriage bond, such as the adoptio per arma. This approach enables us to grasp both the exceptional nature of diplomatic exogamy, which acquires a significant periodising value, and the main turning points in early medieval history, which are mirrored by the appearance or disappearance of networks of dynastic relations.