Concubinage

[8] Such concubinage was also widely practiced in the premodern Muslim world, and many of the rulers of the Abbasid Caliphate and the Ottoman Empire were born out of such relationships.

Widowed or divorced men often took a concubina, the Latin term from which the English "concubine" is derived, rather than remarrying, so as to avoid complications of inheritance.

[11] In European colonies and American slave plantations, single and married men entered into long-term sexual relationships with local women.

[21] In the twenty-first century, it typically refers explicitly to extramarital affection, "either to a mistress or to a sex slave", without the same emphasis on the cohabiting aspect of the original meaning.

[22] Concubinage emerged as an English term in the late 14th century to mean the "state of being a concubine; act or practice of cohabiting in intimacy without legal marriage", and was derived from Latin by means of Old French,[20] where the term may in turn have been derived from the Latin concubinatus,[23] an institution in ancient Rome that meant "a permanent cohabitation between persons to whose marriage there were no legal obstacles".

[24][2] In pre-modern to modern law, concubinage has been used in certain jurisdictions to describe cohabitation, and in France, was formalized in 1999 as the French equivalent of a civil union.

[2] In the past, a couple may not have been able to marry because of differences in social class, ethnicity or religion,[2] or a man might want to avoid the legal and financial complications of marriage.

In Roman law, where monogamy was expected, the relationship was identical (and alternative) to marriage except for the lack of marital affection from both or one of the parties, which conferred rights related to property, inheritance and social rank.

[52] Concubinage was practiced most often in couples when one partner, almost always the man, belonged to a higher social rank, especially the senatorial order, who were penalized for marrying below their class.

[56] By contrast, the pejorative paelex referred to a concubine who was a sexual rival to a wife—in early Rome, most often a war captive and hence unwillingly—and by late antiquity was loosely equivalent to "prostitute".

[58] Concubines occupied an entire chapter, now fragmentary, in the 6th-century compilation of Roman law known as the Digest, but concubinatus was never a fully realized legal institution.

[59] It evolved in ad hoc response to Augustan moral legislation that criminalized some forms of adultery and other consensual sexual behaviors among freeborn people (ingenui) outside marriage.

[60] Even Roman legal experts had trouble parsing the various forms of marriage, the status of a concubina, and whether an extramarital sexual relationship was adultery or permissible pleasure-seeking with a prostitute, professional entertainer, or slave.

[61] Roman emperors not infrequently took a concubina, often a freedwoman, rather than remarrying after the death of their wife to avoid the legal complications pertaining to succession and inheritance.

[79] An examination of concubinage features in one of the Four Great Classical Novels, Dream of the Red Chamber (believed to be a semi-autobiographical account of author Cao Xueqin's family life).

[citation needed] Emperors' concubines and harems are emphasized in 21st-century romantic novels written for female readers and set in ancient times.

Genghis Khan frequently acquired wives and concubines from empires and societies that he had conquered, these women were often princesses or queens that were taken captive or gifted to him.

[106] The Annals of Ulster depicts raptio and states that in 821 the Vikings plundered an Irish village and "carried off a great number of women into captivity".

Emperor Justinian in his great sixth-century code, the Corpus Iurus Civilis, granted to concubines and their children the sorts of property and inheritance rights usually reserved for wives.

[123] Some contend that concubinage was a pre-Islamic custom that was allowed to be practiced under Islam, with Jews and non-Muslim people to marry a concubine after teaching her, instructing her well and then giving her freedom.

[126][127] Sikainiga writes that one rationale for concubinage in Islam was that "it satisfied the sexual desire of the female slaves and thereby prevented the spread of immorality in the Muslim community.

[137] When slavery became institutionalized in Colonial America, white men, whether or not they were married, sometimes took enslaved women as concubines; children of such unions remained slaves.

[citation needed] From lifelong to single or serial sexual visitations, these relationships with enslaved people illustrate a radical power imbalance between a human owned as chattel, and the legal owner of same.

[148] This led to generations of multiracial slaves, some of whom were otherwise considered legally white (one-eighth or less African, equivalent to a great-grandparent) before the American Civil War.

Eventually, to ensure his own safety and that of his host, the Levite gives the men his concubine, who is raped and abused through the night, until she is left collapsed against the front door at dawn.

The crime is considered outrageous by the Israelite tribesmen, who then wreak total retribution on the men of Gibeah, as well as the surrounding tribe of Benjamin when they support the Gibeans, killing them without mercy and burning all their towns.

The inhabitants of (the town of) Jabesh Gilead are then slaughtered as a punishment for not joining the 11 tribes in their war against the Benjaminites, and their 400 unmarried daughters given in forced marriage to the 600 Benjamite survivors.

[165] Other Jewish thinkers, such as Nahmanides, Samuel ben Uri Shraga Phoebus, and Jacob Emden, strongly objected to the idea that concubines should be forbidden.

[166] In the Hebrew of the contemporary State of Israel, pilegesh is often used as the equivalent of the English word "mistress"—i.e., the female partner in extramarital relations—regardless of legal recognition.

Attempts have been initiated to popularise pilegesh as a form of premarital, non-marital or extramarital relationship (which, according to the perspective of the enacting person(s), is permitted by Jewish law).