What was the average age of marriage for royal women in the Early Modern period?

I Procreation

During the Early Modern age, royal women’s marriage was an affair of state. Traditionally, it has been considered that the members of the ruling dynasties of Europe of both genders were married off when they were barely teenagers, if not before, to consolidate strategic alliances with other states and to secure the succession to the Throne as soon as possible. But, regarding this topic, we also need to consider two additional considerations. On one hand, the context is enormously relevant. A shifting of alliances, changes in the political or diplomatic circumstances, or the lack of suitable candidates could seriously delay the age of marriage of a particular princess. On the other, the available women’s age also played an important part in the potential marriage negotiations. Under equal conditions of political convenience, the considerations related to the potential fertility and age of the bride could become deciding factors when a royal marriage was considered. Questions like which was the minimum recommended age for women to have a quick and healthy succession, or when they usually reached menopause, as well as discourses where the advisors remained distrustful of marriages of women who were too young, or that were made between people of very despairing ages and whose window of ideal fertility would be very different, were discussed at length in the highest spheres of the European courts and governments of this period. 

Thus, as a general example, if we examine the most common marriage ages of the royal women who were married off to the sovereign of the Spanish branch of the Habsburg dynasty during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, we can see that, in general, they ranged between fifteen and twenty-two years, with some exceptions of brides of a higher age, like Mary I of England, and younger, like Elizabeth of Valois, Elizabeth of Bourbon and Maria Anna of Austria. [Rocío Martínez]