Some historians claim that they were morganatically married and that the marriage was annulled by the Russian Orthodox Church, because, according to the "Fundamental Laws of the Imperial House", this marriage was illegal. However, articles 183 and 188, which prohibited marriages without the consent of the emperor, were included in the Fundamental Laws only by the 1887 revision under Tsar Alexander III. The rules valid in 1870 did not prohibit morganatic marriages, but simply excluded their offspring from the succession to the throne. There is no evidence either to the marriage or to the divorce. There is also no evidence that Alexei even requested the permission to marry. As Alexandra Zhukovskaya was not an aristocrat and, besides, the daughter of an illegitimate son of a Russian landowner and a Turkish slave, such a marriage would have been unthinkable.