Apologies for the really vague timeline, but I'm thinking of when Phillip of Spain married Queen Mary, we know a good chunk of the population wasn't too happy with a Spanish (and Catholic) prince consort, Catherine of Aragon writing in Latin to Prince Arthur because they couldn't speak any other common language, Emperors of China having concubines from different tributaries, and when Michael VIII sent his 2 daughters to marry Mongolian rulers to secure alliances. I've specified the Medieival/Elizabethan period since that's what popped into mind first (with the above examples all coming from roughly that period), but if there are any accounts from any other time period I'd be interested too.
Royal intermarriage throughout history was seemingly common to consolidate land and create alliances, but do we know how these princesses/princes felt when they were sent to a foreign country to marry someone they couldn't communicate with (or even disliked)? Did royalty prefer to marry vassals for this reason? How did people work out these cultural differences? Did they just avoid each other as much as possible? Was there any outright racism/racial tensions? Are there any accounts of public reactions to these marriages? Thanks!
I answered a previous question that was somewhat similar: Would medieval princesses ever see their families again after being married off to far away kingdoms? I'll post it again here since this question is getting a lot views:
Anna of Kiev married Henry I of France in 1051 and she never saw her family again, although she did bring a retinue with her, so there were likely a few Kievan people living in France with her, at least for a little while. She could communicate with her family through letters, but otherwise Kiev and Paris were too far away for regular travel, so she never returned, and none of her family visited France. Her sisters were also married to foreign kings - one was married to the king of Norway and another to the king of Hungary. They probably never returned home either (although Hungary wasn't as far from Kiev as Norway or France).
Anna stayed in France when Henry died and acted as regent for their son, King Philip I (whose Greek name was probably introduced to France by Anna). She eventually married again, to a relatively minor aristocrat, and died in France at some point, no one is sure exactly when.
Philip I’s great-grandson (and Anna’s great-great-grandson) Philip II also married a foreign princess, but from a bit closer to home, Ingeborg of Denmark. In that case, Philip I rejected her immediately and she was stuck in France with a husband who didn’t want her but wouldn’t let her leave. Why did he hate her so much? No one knows, but personally my favourite explanation is that she performed a spell on him on their wedding night and he couldn’t...you know…
Whatever the reason, he forged a genealogical tree to say they were too closely related to be legally married, which didn’t fool anyone. He also tried to marry another woman and got in a lot of trouble with the church. So, Ingeborg had contact with her family, and with the Pope, who were all working to bring her back home or convince Philip to take her back. But it was all through letters, and she never saw her family again either.
Philip II’s sister Agnes is another example. Agnes married the Byzantine emperor Alexios II Komnenos when they were both children, and she never returned to France. By the time she was 14, Alexios II had been murdered, and she had to marry Andronikos Komnenos (the guy who murdered Alexios), but then Andronikos was overthrown and murdered too. She eventually married another aristocrat named Theodoros Branas. She did see some of her relatives again completely by accident when the Fourth Crusade ended up conquering Constantinope. The crusaders:
“asked about the sister of the king of France, who was called the French empress, if she were still living. And they said yes, and that she was married; that a high man of the city, Branas was his name, had married her, and she was living in a palace near there. So the barons went here to see her, and they saluted her and made her many fair offers of service, but she met them with very bad grace and was very angry with them, because they had come there and had had this Alexius crowned [i.e. another Alexios, Alexios IV, not from the Komnenos family that Agnes had married into]. And she was unwilling to talk with them but had an interpreter talk for her, and the interpreter said that did not know any French at all. But Count Louis [of Blois], who was her cousin, made himself known to her.” (The Conquest of Constantinople, pg. 79)
Anna and Ingeborg were known for not being able to speak French, but Agnes, apparently, forgot all about her French origins and had been completely Byzantinized.
At least for the time period I work on, it's hard to find anything documented for women in general, even royal ones. They didn't write very and not many people wrote about them either. Hopefully others can answer for other places and periods that might be better documented.
Sources for Anna, Ingeborg, and Agnes:
W.V. Bogomeletz, "Anna of Kiev: An Enigmatic Capetian Queen of the Eleventh Century", in French History, vol. 19, no. 3 (2005)
George Conklin, "Ingeborg of Denmark, Queen of France, 1193-1223" in Queens and Queenship in Medieval Europe, ed. Anne J. Duggan (Boydell, 1997)
Robert of Clari, The Conquest of Constantinople, trans. Edgar Holmes McNeal (Columbia University Press, 1936, repr. 2005)