Marriage, a History Read Online Free PDF Page A

repudiated his queen in order to elevate his new bride to the position of principal wife. Zimri-lim subsequently married off eight of his daughters to rulers of vassal cities. A document of the day described succinctly what the king expected from a son-in-law: “He is the husband of Zimri-Lim’s daughter and he obeys Zimri-Lim.” 1
    Few rulers took account of their children’s desires when they arranged such political marriages. When one Syrian princess threatened to kill herself if she was not allowed to marry the prince she loved rather than another man preferred by her father, the scribes found it extraordinary that the king relented.
    Zimri-lim was not so indulgent. After he conquered the city of Aslakka, for example, he married off a daughter to the king there, installing her as the queen and principal wife of his new son-in-law. But as soon as her father returned home, her husband brought back his first wife to serve as queen. The new bride wrote to her father complaining that the first wife “made me sit in a corner holding my head in my hands like any idiot woman. Food and drink were regularly put in front of her, while my eyes envied and my mouth watered.” 2 She begged her father to be allowed to return home, but to no avail.
    Seventeen hundred years later and a world away, Liu Xijun, of the royal family of Chu’u, on the Yangtze River, was sent to marry the ruler of the Wusun, a nomadic Central Asian society. The feelings she expressed in a poem she wrote in 107 B.C. would have been instantly recognizable to Zimri-lim’s daughter in Mesopotamia so many centuries earlier. Liu Xijun wrote:
    My family has married me
In this far corner of the world,
sent me to a strange land,
to the king of Wu-San [Wusun]. . . .
My thoughts are all of my homeland,
My heart aches within.
Oh to be the yellow crane
winging home again. 3
Moving forward fourteen hundred years, to sixteenth-century Europe, we hear a similar lament from the sister of the Holy Roman Emperor: “It is hard enough to marry a man . . . whom you do not know or love, and worse still to be required to leave home and kindred, and follow a stranger to the ends of the earth, without even being able to speak his language.” 4
    Political marriages, like diplomatic treaties, had to be periodically renewed, especially if one of the parties died. The ancient records are full of successive (and sometimes simultaneous) marriages between one king and the sisters or daughters of another, as well as the establishment of new marriages between the descendants of each. Several years after Liu Xijun wrote her plaintive poem, her fellow countrywoman Liu Jieyu, the granddaughter of the Chu’u king, was sent to Wusun to marry the next ruler. When he died shortly after the marriage, she was promptly remarried to his cousin, who became regent. After this husband’s death, Liu Jieyu was married to her stepson, to whom she bore an heir. When this third husband was murdered, their son became ruler of the largest segment of the kingdom. After her son died in 51 B.C., Liu Jieyu, at age seventy, was finally allowed to return home, where the emperor rewarded her with houses, estates, and slaves.
    Marital “treaties” were sometimes thinly disguised forms of domination. In the fourteenth century B.C., for example, the king of Egypt commanded the ruler of a city on the Nile River to “send your daughter straightaway to your king and lord; also send your presents: twenty healthy slaves, silver-coated chariots [and] fine horses.” This was followed by the not-so-subtle warning that “the king is as well as the sun god in the sky; his soldiers and his chariotry are in very, very good condition.” 5
    Many families voluntarily offered their daughters or sisters to rulers with the aim of gaining a useful family connection. An upper-class woman would arrive at her new husband’s home with a rich dowry and her own retinue, furnished by her family in the hope that her future son