Polygyny has been found even in Christian Europe. No obstacle was put in the way of its practice by kings in countries where it had occurred in the times of paganism. In the middle of the 6th century Diarmait, king of Ireland, had two queens and two concubines. Polygyny was frequently practised by the Merovingian kings. Charlemagne had two wives and many concubines; and one of his laws seems to imply that polygyny was not unknown even among priests. In later times Philip of Hesse and Frederick William II. of Prussia contracted bigamous marriages with the sanction of the Lutheran clergy. In 165o, soon after the Peace of Westphalia, when the population had been greatly reduced by the Thirty Years' War, the Frankish Kreistag at Nuremberg passed the resolution that thenceforth every man should be allowed to marry two women. The Anabaptists and the Mormons have advocated polygyny with much religious fervour.
One cause of polygyny is an excess of marriageable women ; we may safely say that whenever there is a marked and more or less permanent majority of women in a savage tribe polygyny is allowed. But while the existence of available women makes polygyny possible, the direct cause of it is generally the man's desire to have more than one wife. There are various rea
sons for this desire. Among many of the simpler peoples the husband has to abstain from his wife not only for a certain time every month, but during her pregnancy, or at least during the latter stage of it, and after child-birth until the child is weaned, which often means an abstinence lasting for a couple of years or more. Other causes of polygyny are the attraction which female youth and beauty exercise upon the men, the latter's taste for variety, their desire for offspring—which is one of the principal causes of polygyny in the East—and the fact that polygyny con tributes to a man's material comfort or increases his wealth, and thereby also his social importance and authority, through the labour of his wives. The usefulness of wives as labourers partly accounts for the increasing practice of polygyny at the higher grades of economic culture. But it should also be noticed that economic progress leads to a more unequal distribution of wealth, and this, combined with the necessity of paying a bride price the amount of which is more or less influenced by the economic conditions, makes it possible for certain men to acquire several wives while others can acquire none at all.