Celibate warriors, married clergy

Did there ever exist a society where "worldly" lords, knights ect, where forced into (atleast officially) celibacy but clergy could freely marry and to some degree pass their titles onto their children?

And if not, where in the world could such a society possibly have arisen? Europe? Japan?
 
I suppose if you consider christendom united a society, the knights templar and hospitaller had vows of celibacy (to my knowledge) and orthodox clergy could marry.
 

Dolan

Banned
umm, you know that Aristocracy definitely comes in package with inheritance, right? There will be no celibate Warrior class without either being also monastic order OR they are the unsullied.

Married clergy is easier, have Constantinople metropole being dominant partner over Rome.
 
If being a warrior, which is a dangerous and expensive occupation that considerably shortens your life expectancy and costs a lot of money to maintain yourself independently without constant looting, is punished by enforced celibacy, whereas being a priest, which is an easy comfortable job that has a striking dominance over the lists of long-lived men (and women) in the premodern era, comes with no social sacrifices, what proportion of free persons would want to be warriors rather than priests?

You have everything to lose and very little to gain, and you don't get to continue your line. Why fight for such a society?

There are some workarounds to that: 1. slave armies, especially in societies riven with slavery, and doubly so in societies where slaves could rise to important positions. So we're thinking Mamluks, Ghulams, Janissaries. Those eventually tend to accumulate power, seize control of the state, and relax rules about marriage and procreation, or else persuade the state to do so. 2. A warrior society that's functionally celibate except for the high achievers and special circumstances, and one that reproduces itself by capturing and training child soldiers or recruiting volunteers. So here I'm thinking about the Imbangala. Any women in the Imbangala armies that had kids either had to kill them or else leave the army, and their kids didn't inherit any status. A bit unusual, but such societies existed. 3. A society where the warriors are disdained and the scholars elevated, so anything Confucian. The nobility is non-martial, the soldiers are conscripts or criminals and live in barracks, so functionally unmarriageable. Same problem as with slave-army societies: the army eventually either rises up and overthrows the priest/scholar domination, either through martial lower aristocracy subverting the state (Japan), popular uprisings (China), or simply becoming an unmotivated and ineffective rent-seeking mass of people who aren't able to stop the next invader whose society treats its warriors better (Korea, China over and over). 4. Mini-societies ruled by say, Christian or Muslim or Buddhist or Neoplatonic martial orders, which combine monasticism and militancy, whatever alt-hist you're in, with the key proviso that this society is largely parasitic on a regular civic society that can support it through rent, tax or charity and produces the members of the monastic parasite society (third sons or whatever).

Those are the examples I can think of. They're all impermanent, IMO.
 
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If being a warrior, which is a dangerous and expensive occupation that considerably shortens your life expectancy and costs a lot of money to maintain yourself independently without constant looting, is punished by enforced celibacy, whereas being a priest, which is an easy comfortable job that has a striking dominance over the lists of long-lived men (and women) in the premodern era, comes with no social sacrifices, what proportion of free persons would want to be warriors rather than priests?

You have everything to lose and very little to gain, and you don't get to continue your line. Why fight for such a society?

There are some workarounds to that: 1. slave armies, especially in societies riven with slavery, and doubly so in societies where slaves could rise to important positions. So we're thinking Mamluks, Ghulams, Janissaries. Those eventually tend to accumulate power, seize control of the state, and relax rules about marriage and procreation, or else persuade the state to do so. 2. A warrior society that's functionally celibate except for the high achievers and special circumstances, and one that reproduces itself by capturing and training child soldiers or recruiting volunteers. So here I'm thinking about the Imbangala. Any women in the Imbangala armies that had kids either had to kill them or else leave the army, and their kids didn't inherit any status. A bit unusual, but such societies existed. 3. A society where the warriors are disdained and the scholars elevated, so anything Confucian. The nobility is non-martial, the soldiers are conscripts or criminals and live in barracks, so functionally unmarriageable. Same problem as with slave-army societies: the army eventually either rises up and overthrows the priest/scholar domination, either through martial lower aristocracy subverting the state (Japan), popular uprisings (China), or simply becoming an unmotivated and ineffective rent-seeking mass of people who aren't able to stop the next invader whose society treats its warriors better (Korea, China over and over). 4. Mini-societies ruled by say, Christian or Muslim or Buddhist or Neoplatonic martial orders, which combine monasticism and militancy, whatever alt-hist you're in, with the key proviso that this society is largely parasitic on a regular civic society that can support it through rent, tax or charity and produces the members of the monastic parasite society (third sons or whatever).

Those are the examples I can think of. They're all impermanent, IMO.

You have some very good ideas, thank you.
 
Celibacy is really, really hard to enforce - the sex drive is so deep in most humans. One way around this is to promote/enforce homosexuality in the warrior class - sex drive satisfied and children prevented. This requires a culture that is accepting of homosexuality (think of ancient Greece where male-male relationships among warriors was totally acceptable). Another is marriage/permanent bondings are not allowed but military brothels abound and are free (also in conjunction with acceptance of homosexual relations). Pregnancies are therefore "anonymous", and pregnant women are moved away from the local where they might bond with the putative father, and such children are potentially raised to be warriors. A more drastic solution is all warriors are eunuchs, who can benefit from military victories in various ways but obviously have no offspring, and depending on when this is done, much reduced sex drive. All of these solutions have been tried to some extent, though never fully. They also require cultures that accept the diminished procreative situation of the warriors, which is much harder than you imagine.
 
This reminds me of the old joke:

Religion teacher: "Why did the church introduce celibacy?"
Student: "So the priests wouldn't multiply too much."
 
One way around this is to promote/enforce homosexuality in the warrior class - sex drive satisfied and children prevented. This requires a culture that is accepting of homosexuality (think of ancient Greece where male-male relationships among warriors was totally acceptable)

More often Bisexuality, so far as I understand it, and Hellenic Greece didn't really have a class who's proffesion was solely to fight (outside of the Spartans), since the idea was all landowners were expected to equip themselves when needed to defend the interests of the Polis (And, being landowners, have the whole inheritance deal. And even in Sparta's case, the records of the sexual aspects of the "beloved/belover" relationship are hardly universal, and they were expected to get married and have children.

Another is marriage/permanent bondings are not allowed but military brothels abound and are free (also in conjunction with acceptance of homosexual relations). Pregnancies are therefore "anonymous", and pregnant women are moved away from the local where they might bond with the putative father, and such children are potentially raised to be warriors

More possible, but that requires a strong centeral State that's able to pay the cost of raising and paying all these kids, organizing the management of the state prostitutes and housing. ect. That needs money and skilled bureaucratic manpower and strong oversight, so I don't see this working on either a very large or very small scale (Either Roman-Empire levels of city-state) and dosen't flex very well. You can't use feualism either, for the same reasons.

A more drastic solution is all warriors are eunuchs, who can benefit from military victories in various ways but obviously have no offspring, and depending on when this is done, much reduced sex drive

Which means, since you can't foster a warrior culture via family education of young children in the household, children raised in a military/camp follower based environment by their parantage, ect. you need to have your society constantly and actively feeding fresh meat into the system. That's resource-intensive on the treasurary and administrative manpower of the state, since you either need to HEAVILY compensate your soldiers to convince people to join the proffesion, will have to provide fully from the centeral treasury (Since they aren't coming from families of means... as the military has no families) and/or will need to have a system to raise new soldiers confiscated from families at a young age.
 
A more drastic solution is all warriors are eunuchs, who can benefit from military victories in various ways but obviously have no offspring, and depending on when this is done, much reduced sex drive.

AIUI, to reduce their sex drive you'd have to castrate them before puberty, but this would also affect their development so as to make them less physically fit and hence less effective as soldiers.
 
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