Türk Tarihinde Görülen Siyasi Evliliklere Bir Örnek: Levirat

Abstract

The family, which is one of the most basic elements of societies, is the smallest social community created by individuals interrelated to each other by kinship relations. The family haa monogamous and elementary structure dominated the father’s authority in pre-Islamic Turkic societies. In former Turkic communities, marriage was generally based on the principle of taking their spouse from outside their own group (exogamy). There was also “leviratus” (marriage to the widowed wife of a deceased brother, or to a widowed but childless stepmother). The difference between levirate marriages in Turks and in other societies is that boys could marry their stepmothers after their fathers died. There were also practices such as marrying the widowed wife of one’s uncle or cousin’s wife. In Turks, the elder brother’s wife is the inheritance in the framework of responsibilities. In other words, it is the aunt who is inherited by the man, not the bride. In fact, levirate marriages are a process of the policy of penetrating the region by becoming the dominant power by establishing kinship, which was also a policy of the previous Turkish States. Because the women to be married has already been chosen to serve a political interest, the demise of this system was prevented with the death of her husband, the woman was not allowed to return to her own family, and the system was ensured to continue by remarrying from within the dynasty. This tradition is very common in all Turkic peoples living nomadic lives, Kazakhs, Turkmens, Uzbeks, Kyrgyz, Karakalpaks… etc. In the present study, the place of levirate marriages, which is one of the marriage types made for political purposes in Turkish history, was evaluated by giving examples of levirate marriages in the historical process.