Concubinage offered marriage-like bonds without full marital rank
Concubinage is an ongoing sexual relationship short of full marriage—similar yet exclusive of wedlock. China's institution protected some concubine rights until the twentieth century. Rome's concubinatus often paired status-mismatched partners; Hammurabi records barren wives presenting slave concubines whose children counted as legitimate.
The English words date from the fourteenth century and come from Latin concubina and concubinus, built on concumbere, to lie together. Roman concubinatus meant lasting cohabitation between people who could legally have married, and it differed from marriage mainly in lacking marital affection, which carried rights over property, inheritance and rank. Some Roman groups, soldiers among them, were barred from marrying, so concubinage filled the gap. In some Western countries today concubinage is a gender-neutral legal term for cohabitation, including between same-sex partners.
Couples turned to it when class, ethnicity, religion, an existing marriage or bigamy laws stood in the way, or when a man wanted to avoid the legal and financial entanglements of a wedding. The concubine usually ranked below her partner and might be a foreigner, a slave or a daughter of a poor family seeking a noble connection. In slave-owning societies most concubines were enslaved. Where polygyny was allowed, powerful men in parts of Asia and the Middle East kept as many as they could afford, and some royal households held thousands.
The International Encyclopedia of Anthropology sorts the practice into four forms: royal concubinage tied to succession and diplomacy, as practised in imperial China, among the Ottomans and in the Kano sultanate; elite concubinage, justified in East Asia by Confucianism; common-law partnerships, widespread in medieval Europe and colonial Asia, where some families steered younger sons away from marriage to keep estates whole; and outright sexual enslavement, as in Mughal India and Joseon Korea, where a concubine's children could stay permanently beneath the wife's. In Mesopotamia a slave handed over by a barren wife usually could not be sold, though late Babylonian reports suggest otherwise.
Source: Concubinage
