Quote:
Originally Posted by ericthered
I don't think you're going to see any more active form than this, and I suspect it was intended to be a lot more active than past statements have implied.
The problem is that you want most of your population to be married, and if your ambassador is married to someone loyal to you, the "Women are immune" benefit goes away. So you have to marry them to someone on the other side, and if you do that, it may as well be as high up the chain as you can get. Foreign marriages were absolutely about diplomacy.
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Yes but they were usually about tying the two geneologies together in the hopes that they would regard each other as cousins. And about obtaining property claims. The woman who married exogamously was not herself expected to be a pathway of negotiation between the blood family and the in-law family. Or at least it is not talked ablout much in history.
"Immunity of women" is a real political consideration, for in tribal conflict that gives them the ability to cross no mans land. The benefit of the immunity of women in exogamous matches is not that she won't be attacked: all diplomats are immune in that sense. It is that she will also not be expected to fight for her family. That is in an exogamous match, if there is a feud a matrilocal male really does have a conflict of interest. A patrilocal female is on the contrary potentially serving mutual interest. It is making a bug into a feature essentially.
The point I was making was that endogamy was a way to keep down the risk of conflicting loyalty. Exogamy could be used to harness it but seems mysteriously to have been neglected. Whareas the more abstract usages, of gaining theoretical blood ties and property claims were eagerly sought but may have been less useful then they seemed.