"To the ancient country so chaotic, by the Lord young mother Zhuang ye. The female protagonist lives alone and arrogant, sexually promiscuous, and cannot be forbidden. Ru does not smell the evil of Lü Hou! So I had to go first. ——" Zizhi Tongjian
This passage was said by the seventy-year-old Emperor Wu of Han when he killed Lady Hook Yi. At that time, Emperor Wu of han, who was deeply disgusted by the dictatorship of foreign relatives, chose to "establish a son and kill a mother" in order to prevent the situation of "a weak mother and a strong mother" from happening again, and this was also the first implementation of the system of killing mothers.
However, after all, the Han Dynasty was the time when Confucianism prevailed, and the concept of filial piety was deeply rooted in the hearts of the people. Under the background of the era relying on "filial piety" as the legal basis, this cruel system without humanistic care has separated the nature of mother and child, and with the passage of time, it has gradually withdrawn from people's sight, and even has not reappeared in the following hundreds of years.
However, this does not mean that this system has completely disappeared since then, and during the Southern and Northern Dynasties, the Xianbei people once again copied this cruel system, and even standardized it and derived it into a system, which became an unwritten rule for many years in the early Northern Wei Dynasty. At that time, from the time of Tuoba Jue, the Emperor Daowu of the Northern Wei Dynasty, to Emperor Xiaowen, a total of six emperors did this.
Logically, if we follow the law of the development of the times, such cruel means do not have any progressive nature of the times, and should no longer be welcomed by the rulers, but it still happens after all. So what is the reason for the resurgence of the system? The specific cultural environment of the Northern Wei Dynasty at that time was the decisive factor.
First, when the Xianbei people transitioned from primitive society to feudal society, there were still some inferiorities that had not been eradicated, and a series of drawbacks brought about by these unperied defects gave the Northern Wei Emperor the motivation to implement the "lizi and kill the mother" in the early days.
During the Southern and Northern Dynasties, as the Xiongnu forces that overthrew the rule of the Western Jin Dynasty gradually weakened and were forced to move west, the Xianbei people took the opportunity to occupy the rich Hetao Plain and gradually developed and grew. At that time, in order to consolidate their rule, the Xianbei even combined with the remnants of the xiongnu to assimilate (mainly cooperation, marriage and mating) to form a tribal alliance.
This nature of the tribal alliance determines that the Northern Wei Dynasty is still very backward compared with the brilliant Central Plains civilization, because although the tribal alliance is the first step in the transformation of the tribe to the nation, it is actually an element of the primitive society (late period) in essence.
In the late primitive society, there will still be two more prominent characteristics, one is that there are still some matriarchal society imprints, and the other is that dealing with problems is sometimes more brutal and rude. These two characteristics had a considerable impetus to the emergence of "lizi killing mothers" in the early Northern Wei Dynasty.
1, first of all, let's talk about the "branding of matriarchal society", the existence of this determines that the social atmosphere of the Northern Wei Dynasty is bound to respect the matriarchy, and it is the norm for women to have a higher status than men in the Northern Wei Era. In Yan Zhitui's "Yan Family Training. It is mentioned in the Zhijia that the women of Northern Qi are: "Women hold the portal, mostly by internal affairs", and he attributed the origin of this custom in Northern Qi to northern Wei (northern Qi can also be regarded as inheriting northern Wei to a certain extent). In addition, in Wei Shuo's "Book of Wei", women are compared to "heavenly women", from which we can quite intuitively see how high the status of women in Northern Wei was at that time.
When women's status is high, high and even becomes a norm for everyone to accept, it is doomed that Northern Wei women will be quite eager for power, and this phenomenon is even more vividly displayed in the royal magnates (empresses, empresses) at the top of the female pyramid. However, the emperor of the country, looking at the female emperor's dictatorship, as a ruler, has a feeling of being gradually elevated, and in this context, the Emperor of the Northern Wei Dynasty cannot but resent it, so the "motive" of implementing "lizi and killing mother" is also established.
2, and the characteristics of "dealing with problems barbarism" is quite easy to understand, dealing with problems barbarism will lead to the Northern Wei rulers in solving most complex problems, choose the most cruel means of killing, which is the simplest and most brutal, but also the most effective. Indeed, after the implementation of this system, it immediately played a deterrent role, and in a short period of time there was much less dictatorship of foreign relatives.
Second, the imperfection of the early political system of the Northern Wei Dynasty, and even the obvious defects, led to the lack of means for the rulers to strengthen the authoritarian centralization, giving foreign relatives the opportunity to abuse power, in order to consolidate their own rule, often can only choose this way of "establishing children and killing mothers".
At that time, the Northern Wei Dynasty chose tribal marriage in order to consolidate its rule. Earlier we also highlighted the marriage with the tribes of the Huns. In fact, the original marriage was not limited to marriage with foreign tribes, and the xianbei nobles would also choose to marry each other internally, after all, the big policy was so, and the marriage did not reflect much risk at first, so the ruler would not restrict it too much.
But over time, the risks come out. Why the risks? After all, the circulation of the humble nobility naturally includes the phenomenon of the emperor marrying the daughter of the nobleman, and if this phenomenon continues to repeat, it will cause a rather serious consequence - the women in the harem have powerful foreign forces behind them, and each one is not easy to provoke.
The Xianbei nobles were originally powerful and powerful, and now they are foreign relatives, with the honorable status of imperial relatives and state relatives, which is tantamount to adding wings to the tiger. And it is precisely because of this dual identity that the humble nobles, who are mainly foreign relatives, naturally have great opportunities to challenge the imperial power.
Of course, with only one point, although the power of foreign relatives is large, they cannot completely limit imperial power, and there is a deep reason why foreign relatives have upgraded from challenging imperial power to surpassing imperial power. Because the Xianbei nobles recognized the superiority of their own blood, they did not accept the fairer selection system of the early Han people in the early days, and their political bureaucracy was completely built by blood as a link.
And this nature determines that if the Xianbei nobles are in power, then this period of control will be quite long- and their influence will become more and more durable and stable over time, and they can use their identity and the power in their hands to cultivate cronies during this period, continue to expand their power, and eventually surpass the imperial power is not a big problem.
And here it is also worth mentioning that we also said earlier that the early Northern Wei Dynasty actually belonged to the stage of transition from the late primitive society to the feudal society, although it occupied the Central Plains, it had not yet formed a complete set of authoritarian centralized system, and there was no systematic and systematic centralized system as the basis, it is obvious that the Northern Wei rulers not only could not achieve the desired separation of powers, checks and balances, and even their own power will be quite easy to be divided.
The Emperor of northern Wei was naturally well aware of his own national conditions, and he knew that the phenomenon of "foreign relations despotism" might appear again, but because he had not yet created an effective system of separation of powers and checks to limit, he could only solve the superficial problems first, and learn from Emperor Wu of han to use "lizi to kill his mother" to restrict foreign relatives, after all, if he killed his mother, at least the "uncle party" would no longer exist.
3. Summary
From the above, we can know that due to the retention of some inferiority in primitive society and the imperfection of the political system, the influence of these two specific cultural environments at that time led to the system of lizi killing mothers once again having the soil for survival in the Northern Wei Dynasty.
However, it is worth mentioning here that although the system of establishing children and killing mothers is essentially established to restrict foreign relatives from interfering in politics, it only worked in a short period of time, and its role was not very obvious in the future. In a short period of time, due to the cruelty of the means of killing, it may have a deterrent effect, but this deterrent effect is not always effective.
Moreover, Lizi's killing of his mother only solves the superficial problem, when the new emperor's mother is killed, although the "pro-uncle party" foreign relatives are gone, but in the end there will be an adoptive mother to take over the position of empress, and because the two have weak affection, if they do not get along properly, it is easier to create a phenomenon of power struggle, so the "killing children and mothers" system is ultimately a symptom rather than a cure, so it was eventually abandoned after the Northern Wei was gradually Sinicized.