Among the cultural changes produced by the sixteenth century, there is a special place for those who have started the process of the birth of the modern family, consisting of the nucleus

married couple that coexists with the minor children. These elements should add two assumptions: that the married couple is formed by free choice of man and woman and that love has had a major role in pushing for marriage than economic and social considerations. The modern family, also enjoys a wide autonomy in relation to the economic origin of the spouses, and finally the relationship between parents and children have a strong emotional charge, and parents in ensuring their health and their education, assume that almost all of them will survive. Until a few decades ago, historians believed that the modern family had been preceded by the patriarchal society, characterized by, living together under one roof for three generations (grandparents, parents and children) and some collateral branch – brothers, sisters, married or not – as well as outsiders to the blood relationship, as servants or other partners. In fact, the large families of ten, fifteen or more persons were quite common in aristocratic circles – in the fifteenth-century, but we can say that the family coniu was the most common European type since the X century and in the countryside. However, the number of persons living together was less significant because of the relationship between the family and the whole circle of relatives. In this respect it is difficult to have doubts: the medieval family was bound in a thousand ways to the entire network of kin and any relevant act or decision could take place outside the presence of a large number of relatives. One of the phenomena which favored the subordination of the conjugal family lineage was formed, in the fourteenth century, the age at which the young contracted marriage. As we can tell the women of marriageable age began at fourteen years or so is a constant “of the most different and distant civilizations of the earth, evidence for the ancient Romans.”

Not when we know from the development of medieval Europe that there developed a model marriage that resulted in an age somewhat higher for women, but almost certainly already in the thirteenth century, women married around twenty years. In the two centuries after the age of marriage, they moved another few years, offsetting a large part of female fertility and demographic consequences of great importance: the early referral of two to three years of marriage in these conditions and it became a way to practice birth control and adapt to the prevailing economic conditions. When the marriage takes place at fifteen or sixteen years for women and at a greater age for the man, the family model that resulted has been uniform and unchanging over time, but when age is considered normal for several years there may be so many situations which are greater in time and space: in the XIV – XV century, the further postponement of marriages tablets in the birth rate, in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, their relative advance was freed again.