Crales, a Serbian prince, as Nicephorus Gregoras relates in book 6 of his Roman History, was an eager suitor to Eudocia, the emperor’s sister. Although her brother very much wanted the marriage, she could not bear the man, for he had had three previous wives, all shamefully ill-treated.

But the emperor, still “valuing Crales’s friendship highly,” because he was a powerful prince and a troublesome neighbour, greatly desired an alliance by marriage. To that end he betrothed his own daughter Simonida to him, a little girl of five; the man was forty-five, five years older than the emperor himself. Such unequal and ill-suited matches can wealth and a splendid fortune bring about.

Yet that is not all: it is not only money. Sometimes, at the other extreme, vainglory, pride and ambition do as much harm as miserable greed itself. If a yeoman has an only daughter, he must marry her above her birth and station—to a gentleman, indeed! Her large dowry makes her too good for someone of her own rank, he supposes.

A gentleman’s daughter and heiress must marry at least the eldest son of a knight baronet; and a knight’s only daughter must marry a baron himself, or an earl, and so on upwards: her great dowry deserves it. Thus, striving to add higher rank to their wealth, they ruin their children. Many troubles follow, and they often destroy their families.

Paolo Giovio gives the example of Galeazzo II, that noble duke of Milan: “He sought foreign marriage alliances, splendid indeed in their royal pomp, but harmful and almost fatal to himself and his descendants.” He married his eldest son, Gian Galeazzo, to Isabella, the king of France’s sister; but she was “so costly to her father-in-law that she cost him two hundred thousand gold pieces.” Her reception at Milan was so expensive that it almost ruined him.

His daughter Violanta married Lionel, duke of Clarence, the youngest son of Edward III, king of England. But “at his arrival such wealth was poured out with such astonishing generosity that it seemed to surpass the splendour of the wealthiest kings.” He was welcomed with such incredible magnificence that a king’s purse could scarcely have borne it.

For besides many rich gifts of horses, weapons, silverware, money, jewels and so on, he gave a single dinner for Lionel and his company, at which there were thirty-two courses and so much food left that “the dishes taken from the table would suffice for ten thousand people.” But soon afterwards Lionel died, “devoting himself to his new bride and untimely banquets,” and so on; and, at great loss to the duke, the celebration was over.

Thus titles, honours and ambition can make many splendid but unfortunate marriages, with ulterior motives on every side, even though both parties are unsound in body and mind, utterly unwilling, averse and often ill-suited. So love is banished, and in the end we suffer for it. But perhaps I have been too expansive on this subject.

Another obstacle or hindrance is strict and severe discipline, laws and rigorous customs that forbid people to marry at certain times and in certain places: apprentices, servants, members of colleges, holders of copyhold estates for lives, or those in some low and subordinate offices. In such cases, as the poet said, “You may desire, but you may not possess.”

They can only gaze, like prisoners through a grating; they long and reach, but “Tantalus, from his lips,” and so on. Their love is wasted, and in such a position it is useless to try. “It is most painful to love without possession”: it is a grievous thing to love and not enjoy.

Some of them may indeed marry if they wish and have a free choice—I do not deny it. But all the while their case is desperate: “They hold a wolf by the ears”; they must either burn or starve. It is “a horned dilemma,” hard to resolve. If they marry, they forfeit their livelihoods, ruin themselves, and starve through poverty and want. If they do not marry, this passion of love makes them rage furiously; they are tormented and torn apart by their ruling affections.

Not every man has the gift of sexual self-restraint. Then let him pray for it, as Beza advises in his treatise On Divorce, because God, by taking away the means of marriage, has thus called him to a single life.

Paul wished to go from Mysia to Bithynia, but the Spirit would not allow him; and perhaps you would wholeheartedly wish to be a married man, but that protecting angel does not judge it fitting. The devil too may sometimes turn people aside with his evil suggestions and spoil many good marriages, just as the same Paul wished to visit the Romans but could not, because Satan hindered him.

There are those who think they are constrained by fate, that their stars have so decreed; and therefore they grumble at their hard fortune. They are quite willing to marry, but one obstacle or another is always in the way.

I know what astrologers say on this subject: Ptolemy in the Four-Part Treatise, book 4, chapter 4; Schöner, book 1, chapter 12; Leovitius in his first example of a nativity, which Sextus ab Heminga takes to be the horoscope of Hieronymus Wolf; Pezelius, Origanus, and Leovitius’s commentator Garceus, chapter 12; Junctinus, Protanus, Campanella and the rest.

Leaving aside those Arabian conjectures drawn “from the Part of Marriage, from the Part of Lust, the triplicities of Venus,” and so on, and those answers to questions such as “whether he will possess his beloved,” they determine “whether the native will have a spouse; whether he will obtain a bride easily or with difficulty; how many wives are allotted to him, at what time, and of what kind; and the mutual love of spouses,” in the birth charts of both men and women.