Several key elements of the
Empire's history play a major part in the story, including the Triarchy of the
title, a triad of priest-kings whose forerunners once ruled a great kingdom,
but who are now essentially a terrorist organisation. And even more prominent is one of the main characters: the dowager
empress Novesh, her own brother's widow.
A crucial aspect of the
empire was that, as the early warrior-emperors (and empresses) gave way to
heirs with no special talent, the attitude grew that the emperors were not only
too sacred to marry anyone but their siblings, they were also too sacred to
sully themselves with the dirty business of ruling the empire. Which meant, of course, that power was
wielded by a variety of ambitious and corrupt ministers and generals.
Royal sibling marriage isn't
unknown in real-world history, most famously in Egypt and the Incan
Empire. Since the latter left no
written records, we know of its customs mainly from the highly biased accounts
of the conquistadors and the somewhat-more-reliable oral traditions passed down
to the descendents of the Incas' subjects.
In the circumstances, we can largely only assume their reasons.
The Egyptians certainly left
written records, but these don't always tell us what we want to know, since
they were often written for the purpose of propaganda, not of history. It can be difficult, for instance, to be
sure just how many Pharaohs actually married their sisters, since the consort
was automatically referred to as his sister, even in cases where Egyptologists
are fairly sure that she was unrelated.
We can be fairly sure that
the main reason (or maybe the excuse) for the practice in both civilisations
was, as in the Sheballan Empire, that the ruler was divine and consequently
could only marry someone equally divine.
Many mythologies portray the gods as marrying incestuously, including
the Greek god Zeus, who married his sister Hera and had a child with another
sister, Demeter.
Was that the only reason,
though? Another plausible motive was to
avoid having annoying in-laws — and, if that sounds like a rather weak joke,
you only have to think how often in history a consort's family has constituted
a major challenge to the royal family.
Two of Henry VIII's wives,
for instance, came from the Howard family, whose head, the Duke of Norfolk, was
one of the most powerful men in the kingdom — and would probably have been even
more powerful if both Howard wives hadn't lost their heads. Jane Seymour gave Henry his heir and
conveniently died of the birth, and her brothers virtually ruled the kingdom
after Henry's death. Today, with a
constitutional monarchy, the Spencers are nothing more than a mild
embarrassment to the Windsors, but five hundred years ago they might have been
raising rebellion to protect the rights of Diana's children.
If we don't know enough
about the Incas' motives and practices, or even the Egyptians', there's rather
more information about the most famous dynasty in western history to practice
sibling marriage: the Ptolemies, who began with Ptolemy Soter, general and
reputed half-brother of Alexander the Great, and finished (barring a six-month
successor) with Cleopatra VII, lover of Caesar, wife of Antony and seductress
of history ever since.
The Ptolemies ruled in Egypt
but, like Alexander, they were Macedonian Greeks. It's been speculated that there may have been some Egyptian or
other African blood in the dynasty by the end — that's not impossible, but
unlikely, and there's certainly no evidence for it. The only non-Macedonian blood known to have flowed in Cleopatra's
veins was actually Persian.
Despite their mythology, the
Greeks — and the Macedonians claimed to be Greek, even if they weren't always
welcome members of the family — had a particular horror of incest. True, their main disgust was aimed at mother-son
relationships, such as Oedipus's, but any hint of incest was distinctly
non-Greek. So what possessed Ptolemy's
family to adopt it so enthusiastically?
Well, for one thing they
were in Egypt. Egyptian culture
fascinated the Greeks, who regarded them as a wise and ancient people, even
while also regarding them as just plain weird.
Although the Macedonian rulers and the Egyptian subjects kept largely
separate, the Ptolemaic king was also crowned Pharaoh, to keep his subjects
happy, and some of the family fell under the spell of Egypt.
The first sibling marriage
in the dynasty was almost certainly a matter of convenience. Ptolemy II was an able ruler, but possibly
not the strongest-willed of men, whereas his big sister Arsinoë knew exactly
what she wanted. Macedonian women could
be formidable, but they didn't have constitutional rights to rule in their own
name — they had to marry a ruler.
Arsinoë had tried this without any great success, and her brother's
first wife (also called Arsinoë — the same names recur a great deal in this
dynasty) had died. Perhaps she knew of
old that she could make her brother do what she wanted. And this was Egypt, so there was a
precedent.
The couple had no children
(Arsinoë was probably past child-bearing age) but she proudly took as her
cult-name Arsinoë Philadelphus: She Who Loves Her Brother. The city of Philadelphia mentioned in the
bible and copied by William Penn and co was named after her. It meant that kind of brotherly love.
Ptolemy III (son of his
father's first marriage) didn't marry his sister, though his wife was a first
cousin, but their son revived the practice.
Ptolemy IV's viciousness was somewhat tempered by his laziness and
obsession with pleasure-seeking, but his favourites made up for the lack,
murdering the entire royal family apart from the King's youngest sister,
another Arsinoë, who was married off to him.
This was certainly to do with having no inconvenient in-laws. Ptolemy's male relatives had had to go
because they might have challenged the favourites, and the King's in-laws could
have had similar power. Poor Arsinoë
had no-one.
In fact, Arsinoë Philopator
seems to have been a remarkable woman.
The great scientist Eratosthenes, who successfully measured the size of
the Earth, had been tutor to the royal children, and he later wrote a memoir
expressing his adoration for her.
Several stories of her life suggest that, like her most famous descendent, she had remarkable charisma.
That didn't help when
Ptolemy died and Arsinoë tried to claim the right to rule as regent for her
infant son. She was assassinated by the
favourites, but the Alexandrian mob rioted at the rumour and lynched them.
Ptolemy V, then, was the son
of siblings, who were the children of first cousins, but there's no sign in him
of any inbreeding problems. That's not
really so surprising. The child of
sibling parents has a slightly higher than normal risk of congenital
abnormalities, but it's still relatively low — it takes two or three
generations of the practice before the threat becomes serious. This pattern may account for the reason why
the various Egyptian dynasties tended to flourish for a few generations and
then decline.
Since he was the only member
left of the royal family, Ptolemy V married a Seleucid princess (Macedonian
rulers of Syria) who brought a new name into the dynasty — Cleopatra. The next few generations, though, were rife
with incestuous marriages; one king married first his sister, who had
previously been married to his elder brother, and then the daughter of his two
siblings.
These Ptolemies and
Cleopatras — vicious and decadent, but showing no sign of debilitating
conditions until perhaps the last generation — fought one another into extinction, leaving only an illegitimate
child to be put on the throne. Ptolemy
XI probably benefited from bringing new blood into the family, though no-one
knows what blood that was. Similarly,
his queen was described as his sister, but this might just have been the old
Egyptian custom, rather than suggesting they were related by blood. Certainly, the most famous of their
children, Cleopatra VII, appeared genuinely interested in Egyptian culture and
frequently dressed up as the goddess Isis.
This has affected the popular image of her appearance, although she was
said to be a redhead under the black wig.
Neither the Incas, the
Egyptian dynasties nor the Ptolemies sustained a run of sibling marriages for
long enough to have the devastating effect on the bloodline that I've portrayed
in The Triarchy's Emissary. The
parallel lack of any political power there meant that having a dribbling idiot
on the throne was no great disadvantage.
Indeed, it could be helpful to those who exercised the true power. Novesh's brother-husband fitted that
description, but Novesh herself — as can happen, even after generations of
inbreeding — somehow escaped the effects.
Like the Ptolemies, her family produced one last magnificent woman at
the very end.
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