Meditations: Marriage for Love or for Money?

Throughout the Secret History of the Mongols, and further throughout my readings on the Mongol Empire, I encountered a theme that’s common in pretty much all history and a lot of literature: marriage as a political tool. Genghis Khaan would take a wife in order to secure his relationship with (i.e. superiority over) that tribe. When you can have as many wives as you want, this strategy works pretty well. Morris Rossabi put it clearly when he stated that “the Mongols often used marital alliances as a means of binding non-Mongols to them.” The Ilkhan Abakha, for example, established a good relationship with the Byzantines because his wife was a Byzantine princess. Even Edward I of England considered marrying a Mongol in order to secure an alliance with them.

Of course this is not a Mongol innovation; East or West, children of prominent families have often been entered into marriages for political or monetary reasons. In fact, marriage was seen very much as a financial alliance for probably most of history. This is old news to pretty much everyone reading this, so I don’t feel the need to go into too much detail about it.

Reading about it this time, for some reason, I didn’t feel like many people do about the whole thing. The general cultural consensus is that we are much more advanced than those people, that our freer society allows us to marry for love, and that this is a much improved system. In our movies and books, girls (and boys) often escape arranged marriages (Pocahontas, Ever After, The Princess Bride, etc.) and end up in happy relationships with the ones they truly love. Awww.

But using marriage as a method of alliance was actually a very good idea. It does not apply so much anymore, because our political/financial systems just don’t work the way they used to, but I think it’s a mistake to view political marriages as just a cruel arrangement for the parties involved. Sure, a princess might get shipped off to a foreign land and wed to a man she couldn’t stand, but that marriage could potentially save thousands of lives. Wars have been prevented by beneficial marriages, and nations have been founded and developed because of a single partnership. In that sort of a context, a single girl’s romantic unhappiness just looks pretty insignificant. And of course, we need to remember that a marriage then did not mean what marriage now means. Mongol khans may not have spent much time with their wives at all, and even for European royalty, one simply was not expected to try to have some lovely romance with one’s spouse. A life in general then was different from a life now, and it usually was not intended to involve rose petals and affectionate glances. (That’s not to say that people in the past did not long for romantic love, just that it took a very different form and was thought to occur in a very different social context, usually outside of marriage.)

Our modern ideal view of marriage is that it should create a happy family; the old view of elite marriage was that it should create peaceful nations. And that seems to me to be a legitimate cause. So my point is, maybe we shouldn’t boo so much when a king insists his daughter marry the slow-witted neighboring prince. And maybe we shouldn’t cheer so much when she elopes with her true love and leaves the countries in the tension that could have been avoided with a  bit of personal sacrifice on her part.

This brings me back to the namesake of this blog, Our Lady of the Mongols. She seems like a heroine in a modern context, someone who stood up for herself and refused to be a victim of the system. Of course, hers is an extreme example, and being shuffled from one khan to the next isn’t conducive to any sort of happiness, and probably not going to produce much of an alliance, either. I do think it’s admirable that she chose her personal religious devotion over agreeing to be sent off to yet another khan on her father’s say-so. But that doesn’t make her father the villain; he was being a politician, and he probably thought he was choosing his constituents’ security over his daughter’s comfort.

Of course, times have changed, and Malia isn’t going to be betrothed to Prince Harry in this lifetime to preserve that “special relationship.” (Though if they fell in love on their own, the Sun would have a field day!) In our world, we are expected to marry for love, and if two young people are being used as bartering chips in corporate deals, we tend to get a little indignant. So why is this? As I mentioned before, the system itself is no longer one that benefits from marital alliance, so that changes things. But even when examining situations in historical contexts, we often think that people should not be unwillingly wed for the greater good. It seems to me to have to do with our culture’s broader philosophy of individualism. The individual now comes above the greater good, often above family or politics. Is this why we now view political/financial marriages as so barbaric? Because we place a higher value on individual happiness? Do we thus place a lower value on community security/success? Is it really a zero-sum game? Does our modern world value individual happiness because, in the newer system, it is thought to contribute to community security/success?

Of course, I don’t have any answers to these questions. (I never do!) But a scenario that lies on the cusp of the marriage as a tool/marriage for love transition showcases all of these themes, and then some. Some of you may have heard of Consuelo Vanderbilt. Consuelo was the only daughter of Alva Smith Vanderbilt and William Kissam Vanderbilt. (I list Alva first very deliberately.) Consuelo’s story is not a happy one; she made her debut in New York society as an elegant heiress, and she was secretly engaged to a man she loved. However, her mother wanted a marital alliance for her only daughter that would be advantageous to the Vanderbilt name, and she threatened/cajoled/manipulated her daughter into breaking off her engagement and instead marrying the Duke of Marlborough, a man Consuelo had met and disliked. The Duke didn’t like her any better than she liked him; Consuelo was marrying him to bring honor to the family name, and the Duke was marrying her for her multi-million dollar dowry. After a few years of unhappiness and the births of two sons, the couple divorced. Consuelo was no longer young, and though she married again, she never lived the Hollywood fantasy that she, as a girl with a secret fiancé and more money than she could possibly spend, could have hoped for. The Duke of Marlborough also married again, and that one ended more poorly than the first.

There was no happy ending for either Consuelo or the Duke; their arranged marriage was not one that ended in love like in the novels. It was just two people whose happiness was sacrificed in order to provide security for their families. But the thing is, it worked. The relatively new Vanderbilt family proved their worth and established themselves, and the Duke filled his family coffers. When I visited Blenheim Palace, the Marlborough family’s estate, one of the tour guides made a joke about me being American and said, “We like American money here. Without American money, we wouldn’t be here like this.” He explained that Blenheim is only privately owned because of the Vanderbilt money. The leftover interest of Consuelo’s dowry is still used to maintain the estate (now supplemented by entry fees), and the Duke of Marlborough lives in a private wing there. Unlike many estates, which could not afford their own upkeep and taxes, Blenheim Palace did not decay due to lack of funds, but flourished because of a single miserable marriage. On the one hand, Consuelo’s life is sad. And if a movie were made about her, we’d probably root for her to marry her secret fiancé. On the other hand, I like visiting Blenheim, and thousands of people now enjoy the estate that was built with a teenage girl’s tears. So what do we think here? Were those tears worth it?  If it were our own daughter, or our own estate, which would we choose, and which should we choose? Our posterity, or posterity in general?

Mongolia is Awesome: Medieval Freedom of Religion (Wait, What?)

The Mongol Empire doesn't exactly have a great reputation for mercy or compassion or pretty much anything that’s not, you know, conquering the known world and then conquering the unknown bits and then finding another known world to conquer. I can’t say they didn’t have a great PR department, though, because actually their reputation for brutality and total war was deliberately cultivated; as a result of it, some cities would raise a white flag just because they heard the word “Mongol” in order to avoid suffering the same fate as Baghdad. But centuries later, in an era with different values, people tend to remember the cruelty of the Mongols and the destruction they wreaked. One word that probably doesn’t spring to mind when we hear “Mongols”: Tolerance.

Yet the Mongol Empire was a member of a rare  breed of medieval society, the religiously tolerant one. The khans, because they conquered such vast expanses of land, governed peoples of many different religions, and they pretty much had no preference as to what religion their subjects practiced. All major religions were allowed to practice freely in lands the Mongols governed, with the result that many towns had populations and of several different religions, mostly sects of Buddhism, Islam, Confucianism, Nestorian Christianity, and (in certain areas) Judaism. There were no forced conversions, no purges, and the khans, to ensure stability in their realms, even had to ensure that they did not offend any particular religious community. Some khans did practice their own religion--Chinggis Khaan relied heavily on shamans, and many khans  (including the originally Nestorian Teguder turned Ahmad) converted to Islam. But most khans were decidedly unreligious, and they catered to multiple religions to gain favor with different religious communities. Kublai Khan, for example, sent messengers to Jerusalem with instructions to worship there on his behalf, and many wives and mothers of Khans were Nestorians, as I’ve pointed out. According to the European diplomat William of Rubrick, who visited Karakorum in the 1250s, the Great Khan actually asked him to participate in a religious debate at the court with a Nestorian, a Muslim, and a Buddhist. The Ilkhan Arghun is a near picture-perfect example of Mongol religious diversity, and the necessary flexibility of the Khans: He was a devout Buddhist married to a Byzantine Christian, and he had his son (who later converted to Islam) baptized into Nestorianism.

Of course, reading about the Mongol Empire of tolerance, my mind can’t help but draw comparisons between it and another tolerant realm—medieval Spain. There are plenty of differences between the nature of tolerance in the two kingdoms. The Mongol khans, as I pointed out, generally had no strong religious affiliations, and even if one did, a new khan would eventually replace him, and probably one of a different religion. In Spain, however, minority religions were usually ruled by the majority, with Christian kings allowing Muslims (and Jews) in their domains, or vice versa. This meant that although religions were tolerated, one was preferred. Furthermore, certain rulers or certain political climates would often have tragic results for minority religious communities, as eventually the reign of Ferdinand and Isabel did for tolerance itself in Spain. In the Mongol Empire, however, religiously motivated violence was not tolerated, keeping people mostly in line. Yet in both realms, the atmosphere could be tense, and outbreaks of religious violence did occur, though more frequently in Spain than in Mongol-ruled lands. Yet it was in the khans’ best interest to keep all religious communities happy, so the communities were, in a sense, forced to get along (or at least accept the existence of the others).

This is another similarity with Spanish tolerance—it was very much practically motivated. Simply put, the khans could not have held onto so much land if they insisted on a single religion. Their policy of tolerance was one meant to keep them in power, and their attempts to appease all religious groups (to gain their favor) demonstrates this. Khans who overstepped this boundary could be quickly ousted and replaced, while khans like Kublai who were careful not to step on any toes were more likely to last. The sparsely populated nature of both the Mongol realm and the Spanish meseta also necessitated this policy; there weren’t enough people to make any sort of religious demands, as everyone who could be spared was needed to work and protect the land. Furthermore, when people of certain minority religions had valuable skills or resources, it was in rulers’ best interest to accept these religions and keep these people around. This was the case with Jews in Medieval Spain; since they spoke Hebrew and often Arabic, and because of their vital position as money lenders (and their even more vital tax revenue), they were key figures in both Christian and Muslim Spanish courts. Similarly, educated Nestorian monks were valuable to Mongol khans, when neither literacy nor governance were strong suits of the Mongols. (This was likely behind Kublai’s request that Marco Polo send 100 Nestorian monks back to his capital so that they could “help convert people.”) And in both these cases, favoring minority religions could lead to unrest with the majority religions. In both Christian and Muslim-ruled Spain, courtiers often resented the presence and influence of Jews; this sometimes erupted in violence, as in the 1066 pogrom in Granada and the multiple pogroms of the fourteenth century. In the thirteenth-century Ilkhanate (the Mongol khanate governing Persia and sometimes, its surrounding lands), Islam was the majority religion, and Muslims often felt that the Mongols favored foreign religions, partially because courts were filled with educated members of the Nestorian clergy, and partially because most Ilkhans at that time were not Muslims.

So although the Mongol version of tolerance and the Spanish version of tolerance were different in significant ways, religiously diverse communities in the Middle Ages fell victim to the same sorts of woes: tension, outbreaks of violence, and a tolerance that was practical rather than ideological. I wonder if/how we have managed, in a modern world, to leave all of these woes behind.

But this isn’t a meditation; I just wanted to let everyone know that, though the Mongols may not have won Miss Congeniality at the pageant, while people (myself included) are looking to the “community of tolerance” in Spain for lessons, they may be missing out on something even more Awesome: an Empire of Tolerance.