Concubinage

• 1. Introduction

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  Concubinage is a word with Latin bones and a history stretching from Babylon to Brazil, from the Forbidden City to the French Caribbean. Its root, concumbere, simply means "to lie together" - yet the institution it names has shaped dynasties, sparked civil wars, and left its mark on legal codes still in use today. The English words "concubine" and "concubinage" first appeared in the 14th century, pulled from Latin through Old French, but the practice they describe dates back at least to ancient Mesopotamia. In Switzerland, the term still carries legal weight as of 2025. How does a social arrangement this ancient persist so widely? And what did it mean for the people inside it - the women who entered it by choice or by force, the children who inherited its complications, and the rulers who used it to manage power? The answers reach across continents and thousands of years, and they are stranger, and more human, than any single story can hold.

• 2. Definitions and Distinctions

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  The term concubine, recorded in English around 1300, carried a precise meaning in Roman law: "one who lives unmarried with a married man or woman." That precision matters, because the word has drifted. In the 21st century it typically refers to an extramarital partner, either a mistress or a sex slave, with less emphasis on cohabitation. The original Latin, by contrast, described a formal institution called concubinatus - a permanent cohabitation between people to whose marriage there were no legal obstacles. France formalized a version of concubinage in 1999 as its equivalent of a civil union. The United States once used the term for cohabitation in law, but the concept never evolved and is now considered outdated.

  The International Encyclopedia of Anthropology identifies four distinct forms the practice has taken. Royal concubinage tied reproduction to politics: concubines became consorts who fostered diplomatic relations and extended royal bloodlines, with examples drawn from imperial China, the Ottoman Empire, and the Sultanate of Kano. Elite concubinage let men of means increase status and satisfy desires, most of them already having wives, with Confucianism providing the justification in East Asia and enslaved women filling the role in the Muslim world. A third form was common-law cohabitation, prevalent in medieval Europe and colonial Asia, where some families actually discouraged younger sons from marrying to prevent the division of family wealth among many heirs. The fourth was sexual enslavement inside patriarchal systems, found in places like Mughal India and Joseon Korea, where the children of a concubine could become permanently inferior to those of a wife.

  Scholar Junius P. Rodriguez groups the cultural patterns differently, offering three broad categories: Asian, Islamic, and European. Each label covers enormous variation, which is part of the point - concubinage has never been a single thing, but a cluster of arrangements that share a name and a structural logic.

• 3. The Ancient World

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  In Mesopotamia, a sterile wife could give her husband a slave as a concubine to bear children; the Code of Hammurabi records the practice and specifies that the children of such unions were legitimate. The status of these concubine-slaves was ambiguous: they normally could not be sold, yet they remained the property of the wife. In the late Babylonian period, reports indicate that concubines could be sold after all.

  Ancient Egypt offers a different texture. Most Egyptians were monogamous, but a male pharaoh kept lesser wives and concubines alongside his Great Royal Wife, partly to allow diplomatic marriages with the daughters of allied rulers. Concubinage was described as a common occupation for talented women in ancient Egypt. Amenhotep III, who reigned roughly 1386-1353 BC, sent a request to Milkilu, Prince of Gezer, for forty concubines described as "beautiful" weavers, offering silver, gold, garments, precious stones, and ebony chairs worth 160 deben as payment - forty shekels of silver per woman. He kept his concubines at his palace at Malkata, described as one of the most opulent in Egypt's history.

  In Ancient Greece, the law was explicit in a striking way: a man could legally kill another man caught attempting a relationship with his concubine. Concubines there were typically slaves or foreigners, though freeborn women from poor families occasionally entered the arrangement by family agreement. By the mid fourth century, concubines could inherit property, but they were still treated, alongside wives, as sexual property.

  Rome institutionalized the practice most formally. Concubinatus was a monogamous union recognized socially and to some extent legally as an alternative to marriage. It evolved in part as a response to Augustan moral legislation that criminalized some forms of adultery and other consensual behaviors outside marriage. Senators were penalized for marrying below their class, so many took a concubina instead. A single tombstone might list multiple wives or concubinae in series; the role was socially acceptable enough to appear in family memorials. The emperor Vespasian's relationship with Caenis, a freedwoman and secretary to Antonia Minor, was described by Suetonius as a marriage in all but name; it lasted until her death in AD 74. Concubinage occupied an entire chapter in the 6th-century legal compilation known as the Digest - though that chapter survives only in fragments.

• 4. China and the Imperial System

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  Lady Yehenara, known to history as Empress Dowager Cixi, entered the Qing court as a concubine to the Xianfeng Emperor and gave birth to his only surviving son, who became the Tongzhi Emperor. After her husband's death she became the de facto ruler of Qing China for 47 years - the most dramatic example of the power a concubine could accumulate within a system designed to limit her.

  The standard Chinese term for concubine, qiè, has been in use since ancient times. In premodern China, having more than one wife was illegal and socially disreputable, but concubines were fully sanctioned. Men bought concubines similarly to how they purchased slaves, though concubines held a higher social status than slaves. From the Eastern Han period (AD 25-220) onward, the law set a ceiling on how many concubines a man could have, calibrated to his rank. Wives brought a dowry; concubines did not. A concubine could not remarry after her master's death, nor return to her family home as a widow. Early records describe concubines allegedly buried alive with their masters to keep them company in the afterlife.

  A concubine's children were legitimate but ranked below the wife's children, and above illegitimate children. Each child of a concubine owed filial duty to two women: the biological mother and the wife of the father, who held the legal mother's role. After the concubine's death, her sons made offerings to her - but her grandsons did not; their offerings went only to their grandfather's wife.

  Until the Song dynasty (960-1276), promoting a concubine to wife was considered a serious breach of social ethics. During the Qing dynasty (1644-1911), conditions shifted: a concubine could be elevated if the original wife had died and the concubine was the mother of the only surviving sons. Many concubines of Qing emperors came from freeborn, prominent families. Imperial concubines in the Forbidden City were guarded by eunuchs; those in Ming China (1368-1644) were selected through a formal system, with candidates aged mainly 14 to 16 evaluated on virtue, behavior, character, appearance, and physical condition.

  Concubinage as a social texture is examined in Dream of the Red Chamber, one of the Four Great Classical Novels, believed to be a semi-autobiographical account of author Cao Xueqin's family life. Three generations of the Jia family are sustained by a single concubine of the emperor, Jia Yuanchun, the full elder sister of the male protagonist. The novel's concubine-born characters, Jia Tanchun and Jia Huan, develop what the text describes as distorted personalities because of their origins. The Chinese Communist Party outlawed concubinage when it came to power in 1949; Hong Kong followed by abolishing the Great Qing Legal Code in 1971.

• 5. Islam, the Ottomans, and Abolition

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  Almost all Abbasid caliphs were born to concubines. The sultans of the Ottoman Empire were often sons of concubines as well. This was not incidental but structural: Ottoman sultans appeared to have preferred concubinage to marriage, and for a time all royal children were born of concubines. Scholar Leslie Peirce argues that this was because a concubine would not possess the political leverage of a princess or a daughter of the local elite.

  The Arabic term for concubine, surriyya, may derive from sarat, meaning "eminence" - a hint at the elevated status a concubine held over other female slaves. The Quran does not use the word surriyya but refers to "that which your right hands own," a phrase that appears 15 times in the text. Islam introduced regulations to the practice: it endorsed educating female slaves and encouraging manumission if they converted. Abu Hanifa and others argued that a concubine should be established in the home with her chastity protected, and should not be shared with friends or kin. A child acknowledged by the master was generally considered legitimate, and the mother of a free child became free upon the enslaver's death under the custom called umm walad.

  Ottoman sultans appeared to have kept one son per concubine - once a concubine bore a son, intercourse with her ceased. This deliberate limit on each son's claim to the throne constrained the power of any individual concubine's offspring. Some concubines nonetheless built social networks and accumulated personal wealth, rising considerably in status. The consorts of Ottoman sultans were often neither Turkish nor Muslim by birth.

  The practice declined as slavery was abolished across the Muslim world. Slavery in Saudi Arabia was banned in 1962; in Oman, in 1970. The Arabian Peninsula was among the last regions to close this chapter.

• 6. Colonies, Slavery, and Mixed Populations

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  In the Dutch East Indies, concubinage between Dutch men and local women produced the mixed-race Eurasian Indo community. In India, Anglo-Indians descended from marriages and concubinage between European men and Indian women. Throughout Africa, from Egypt to South Africa, slave concubinage resulted in racially mixed populations.

  Early colonial administrators sometimes actively encouraged European men to practice concubinage, believing it would reduce reliance on prostitutes and lower the risk of venereal disease. They also calculated that a relationship with a native woman would help white men understand local culture and provide domestic labor, removing the need to import wives from Europe. The calculation shifted when these relationships produced mixed-race children who administrators feared would destabilize colonial rule. Colonial policy then reversed: white women were encouraged to travel to the colonies instead.

  In colonial Brazil, the Catholic Church condemned concubinage and the Council of Trent threatened excommunication for those who practiced it. White men still outnumbered white women, so some took concubines from among female slaves and former slaves. Free white men were expected to marry women of equal status and wealth; the concubinage arrangement was an acknowledged alternative that existed despite church pressure.

  In Louisiana and former French territories, a formalized system called plaçage emerged. European men took enslaved or free women of color as mistresses after arranging a dowry, a house, or other property transfer; sometimes they also offered freedom and education for the children. A third class of free people of color developed, particularly in New Orleans. French-speaking and Catholic, these women blended French and African-American culture into an elite positioned between those of European descent and enslaved people. Their descendants are generally known today as Louisiana Creole people.

  In the Colony of Virginia from 1662, and later in other colonies, law encoded the principle of partus sequitur ventrem - children took their mother's status. This produced generations of multiracial slaves, some of whom were legally classified as white by the standard of one-eighth or less African ancestry before the American Civil War. The relationship between Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings is named in the source as an example of long-term arrangements where some men gave freedom to enslaved partners and their children, and provided apprenticeships, education, and capital - though such arrangements were more common in the American South during the antebellum period than elsewhere.

• 7. Concubinage in Judaism

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  The Israelite account of the unnamed Levite in Judges 19-20 makes explicit that concubinage was not reserved for kings in ancient Israel. The Levite in the story is described as an ordinary member of his tribe, whose concubine was a woman from Bethlehem in Judah. After she left him and returned to her father's house, the Levite traveled to bring her back. The events that followed her return - her rape in the city of Gibeah, her death, the dismemberment of her body sent as a summons to the other tribes - resulted in a full civil war against the tribe of Benjamin. The story was considered outrageous by the Israelite tribesmen, who killed the men of Gibeah along with surrounding Benjaminites and burned all their towns.

  In the Babylonian Talmud, tractate Sanhedrin 21a, Rav Yehudah citing Rav rules that a concubine differed from a legitimate wife in receiving no ketubah and in not having a formal betrothal precede cohabitation. Rashi's reading from the Jerusalem Talmud puts it directly: "wives are those with kiddushin and ketubbah, concubines are those with kiddushin but without ketubbah." Maimonides held that concubines were strictly reserved for royal leadership and that a commoner could not have one. Nahmanides, Rabbi Samuel ben Uri Shraga Phoebus, and Rabbi Jacob Emden strongly disagreed and objected to any prohibition. Despite theological disputes, concubinage remained widespread among Jewish households in the Ottoman Empire and closely resembled the practice in Muslim households there.

  In modern Hebrew in contemporary Israel, the word pilegesh - borrowed originally from the Ancient Greek pallakis, meaning "a mistress staying in the house" - is commonly used as the equivalent of "mistress." Attempts have been made to revive pilegesh as a recognized form of non-marital relationship that, according to proponents, is permitted under Halakha.