Marriage, a History Read Online Free PDF

would inherit the throne or estate of the husband’s family and show favor to his mother’s kin. A lower-class woman might bring only her beauty and charm, hoping to become a favorite consort or even eventually to supplant the primary wife.
    But this was a dangerous game. A secondary wife or concubine who found favor with the ruler might well be murdered by a primary wife or her kin. Sometimes the primary wife had the political or legal clout to ensure that the secondary wife remained subordinate even if the husband personally preferred her. One Babylonian marriage contract specified that the second wife had to prepare the first wife’s daily meal and carry her chair to the temple. 6
    Even a princess from the highest royalty was vulnerable when sent as a bride to her husband’s city, far away from her customary support networks. In the fourteenth century B.C., Amenhotep III of Egypt wrote to the king of Babylon, asking that a princess be sent to him as a wife. The Babylonian ruler wrote back indignantly that his father had already sent his sister to Egypt several years earlier: “Indeed, you want my daughter to be a bride for you even while my sister, whom my father gave you, is there with you, although no one has seen her now or knows whether she is alive or dead.” 7
    Amenhotep didn’t bother to reassure the Babylonian king that his sister was alive and well. He merely noted slyly that since the last Babylonian emissaries to Egypt did not know the princess personally, they would not have been able to recognize her. Egypt was far more powerful than any Mesopotamian state, and the king of Babylon did not press the issue.
    In the modern world, we tend to think that “marrying up” is something only women do, as when a woman snags a rich husband or handsome prince. In many ancient societies, however, it was often men who sought wealth and power by marrying women higher up the social scale. “Someday my princess will come” could have been the theme song of fairy tales and male fantasies in the ancient Middle East and in Homeric Greece.
    New kings or dynasties tried to validate their claims to power by marrying the widow or daughter of a previous ruler. Lower-ranking nobles competed to win wives from higher-status households. In some societies, a commoner had a shot at marrying a princess if he could bring enough wealth or fighting men to her father’s household. 8
    In China, even a lowly scholar with no fighting skills could gain higher status by marrying a highborn bride. In the eleventh century, when the Chinese state began to determine entry into the governing bureaucracy through rigorous examinations, a lowborn man with exceptional scholarly talents might have a wife bestowed on him by a noble family that hoped the son-in-law had enough talent to rise through the ranks and keep the family in the governing circles. 9
    The marriage jackpot for a man was to wed the daughter of a deceased or soon-to-die king and to live with her in her father’s household, where he might inherit the throne. Legends and folktales from ancient kingdoms are full of such marital rags-to-riches stories, in which a man gains fame and fortune by winning the hand of a noble lady or an emperor’s daughter. In Greek mythology, Pelops won the princess Hippodamia—and her throne—after he had defeated and killed her father in a chariot race. An even more satisfying fantasy for would-be Cinderfellas was the legend of how Hippomenes won Atalanta for his bride. He defeated her in a footrace, simultaneously winning a kingdom and establishing the proper power relations between husband and wife.
    Not all men who married princesses were so lucky. Those who married into the imperial house of China in the first millennium A.D., for example, had no chance of inheriting the empire or seeing their sons inherit. Neither the sisters of the emperor nor their descendants were eligible for the throne. But the status and privileges of Chinese princesses