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.”
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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.
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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.”
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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.”
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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 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.
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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.”
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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.
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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.
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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 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.”
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.”
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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 need bolstering by dynastic marriage sometimes took commoners for their primary wives. Amenhotep III of Egypt (1417-1379 B.C.) had wives sent to him by the king of Babylonia and other fellow rulers. But he chose the commoner Tiy, daughter of his high priest, to be his “Great Royal Wife.” Their son, Amenhotep IV, followed his father’s example and chose the elegant commoner Nefertiti for his primary wife.
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To rule out conflicts of interest between in-laws, an Egyptian pharaoh sometimes married a sister or, more frequently, a half-sister—a woman born by a different wife to the same father. This bolstered the claim to dynastic continuity both for the rulers and for any children they produced and eliminated the risk that husband and wife would be torn in different directions by the machinations of their respective kin. But it did not always prevent brother and sister from falling out, as we shall see in the story of Cleopatra.
Ancient Chinese emperors also tried to restrict the influence of their in-laws and prevent wives from putting the interests of their kin or sons before those of their husbands. During the Ming dynasty, rulers purposely chose women from weak or low-status kin groups as their wives. The Manchu dynasty took this one step farther, choosing the emperor’s successor from among his consorts’ sons so that the empress would not be tempted to poison her husband to hasten her son’s succession.
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Egyptian kings, in their long campaign to bring Thebes under their control, created a different kind of political marriage. They set up a marriage alliance with the gods rather than with potentially troublesome human beings. During the eighth century B.C. the king of Egypt revived an old Theban practice of elevating a priestess to be the “divine wife of Amun,” an Egyptian god very popular in Thebes. But the king filled the position with his own daughter rather than a lady of Thebes. From then on, the Divine Wife was always a daughter of the Egyptian king. Residing in Thebes, she managed great estates and made major political decisions but was expected to remain celibate to prevent her from founding a rival dynasty to undermine the king’s power. The Divine Wife was required to adopt as her successor the daughter of the next king who ascended the Egyptian throne. That king then appointed a chief steward to administer the new Divine Wife’s estates and help her carry out his wishes.
Even this strategy could backfire if daughters entertained their own political ambitions. One Divine Wife, Nitocris, outlived her father without adopting a successor and managed to maintain her independence from the next three kings by appointing her own men as stewards, making her essentially the independent ruler of Thebes. The Egyptian kings, left out of the loop, were in a tight spot. It was one thing to send your advisers and agents as the invited guests of the Divine Wife. But if she refused to recognize them, the city of Thebes might well rally behind her. Not until 594 B.C., when she was in her eighties, did Nitocris finally adopt her great-niece as her successor, giving the Egyptian king of the time the chance to send his own representative to serve in the retinue of the heir apparent.
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