Marriage, a History Read Online Free PDF Page B

thoroughly overshadowed their husbands’. Imperial princesses were exempted from many of the rules that governed wives in China, and only the emperor could discipline them. During the rule of the Southern Dynasties (A.D. 317-589), one Chinese princess argued that she, like her brother the emperor, was entitled to a harem. Her wishes prevailed, and she was assigned thirty male “concubines.” 10
    When a powerful ruler sent his daughter to be the primary wife of a lesser king or prince, he expected that she would represent his interests in her new husband’s household. In places as far apart as Assyria, the Inca empire of the Andes, and the African state of Dahomey, princesses who became wives of their fathers’ vassals wielded great power over their husbands as their fathers’ agents. They frequently had their own independent retinues and were answerable only to their fathers. One Egyptian king’s wife arrived with 317 attendants that he had to incorporate into his court. 11
    As we saw with the daughters of Zimri-lim and the sister of the king of Babylon, these women were very vulnerable if their fathers would not or could not enforce their authority over resentful or arrogant husbands. On the other hand, a husband who slighted the sister or daughter of a mighty ruler might live to rue the day. In the eighteenth century B.C., the king of Assyria wrote a worried letter to his son admonishing him to be more discreet with his “women-friends,” so as not to humiliate the daughter of the powerful king of Qatna, with whom the king had contracted a diplomatic marriage alliance on his son’s behalf. 12
    In pre-Columbian Mexico, Moquiuixtli, ruler of the city-state of Tlatelolco, could have used similar advice. Moquiuixtli had married the sister of the highest ruler in the land, the Aztec emperor Axayacatl. According to the chronicles, however, the bride “was skinny, and she had no flesh, and because of this her husband never wished to see her. He took all the presents that her brother Axayacatl sent her and gave them to his secondary wives. . . . And king Moquiuixtli would not sleep with her: he spent his nights only with his concubines.” When the emperor learned of this, he “grew furious” and attacked Tlatelolco, destroying the kingdom. 13
    When a king neglected a royal wife for a concubine or secondary wife of lower status, contemporaries sometimes lamented that personal emotions had prevailed over self-interest. Roman historians reporting on the origins of the war with Egypt asserted that Cleopatra had bedazzled Mark Antony, clouding his judgment so that he left his Roman wife, infuriated her powerful brother, and thus wrecked his political future. Similarly, in Aztec Mexico, a chronicler reported in consternation that the secondary wife of the king of Texcoco had somehow brought the king “very much under her domination,” even though she “was only a merchant’s daughter.” 14
    Yet there were logical reasons for a king to prefer the charms of a concubine or a merchant’s daughter over those of his highborn wife. A commoner had no powerful kin to dilute her loyalty to the king.
    A highborn wife and her in-laws, by contrast, had a greater interest in the well-being of her son than of her husband. There are many examples of a wife and in-laws plotting to displace a royal husband so that either a son might succeed to the throne or the widow and her family advisors could rule as re-gents for the minor. Sometimes, because of his ties to his father’s family, even a woman’s own son was considered an obstacle to be removed. So the political marriages of royalty and aspiring royalty were always fraught with danger as well as opportunity. The benefits of having wealthy and powerful in-laws had to be weighed against the possibility that they would try to usurp power or tilt policy in their favor.
    Rulers tried many strategies to cope with this threat. Powerful kings whose social status and military might did not