3 things leaders did in the name of love
SUMMARY
Warriors guard their hearts underneath a stoic resolve because showing emotion is often misunderstood as a weakness. Leaders often weigh the needs of the many against the needs of the few to build a brighter future for their people to live and prosper. Love is an unstoppable force that can influence the influencer or conquer the conqueror. What can those in command do when love is true but the world is wrong?
They change it.
They moved mountains — King Nebuchadnezzar II
The Hanging Gardens of Babylon were built by Babylonian King Nebuchadnezzar II for his wife Queen Amytis. He knew his queen's happiness stayed in the green mountain valleys of her childhood home in Media. In order to make his wife happy, he built one of the seven wonders of the ancient world between 605 and 562 BC in what is now known as modern day Iraq.
The word 'hanging' that gave the wonder its name sake comes from trees planted on elevated balconies. The wonder used raised platforms, aqueducts, and a system of irrigation centuries before their time to water the vast collection of plants and trees.
He literally built his wife a mountain.
Archaeologists debate whether the wonder was built in Nineveh (back then called New Babylon) instead of Babylon itself. The ruins shared the same fate as Cleopatra's Tomb of being lost in the sands of time.
Emperor Hongzhi seen here not cheating on his wife with 10,000 options.
They refused concubines and consorts — Emperor Hongzhi of China
High status men in late imperial China over the age of forty were encouraged to take on a second wife or a mistress. It was also common that your mistress would try to kill your first wife and all your children. In the case of Emperor Hongzhi, he had his mother killed by one of his father's mistresses.
The death of his murdered mother by a mistress was enough to highlight the advantages of monogamy. He had no children outside of his one marriage to his empress and had no extramarital affairs.
He loved his wife and five children so much that he did not want to risk their safety over loose women and swore them off completely. The importance he placed on monogamy was seen as out of place since most emperors during those times had a man-cave harem with 10,000 available women, empire wide, determined to show you the privileges of being a ruler.
Dr. Kenneth Swope, of the University of Southern Mississippi describes Hongzhi as the "most uninteresting and colorless of all the Ming emperors."
He chose to have his life be seen as a model of morality and his morals as the center piece for his anti-corruption campaign. He used his love for his one and only wife to shape his empire in peace.
"That was still an expensive divorce, Henry."
The Simpsons
They changed religions — King Henry VIII of England
Marriage and religion are touchy subjects, especially when conversions are involved. Henry VIII had fallen in love with with a young woman named Anne Boleyn, but there was a problem: he was already married. He became convinced his marriage to Catherine of Aragon was cursed because she was his brother's widow. The king commanded asked the pope to annul his marriage.
However, Catherine's nephew was the Holy Roman Emperor Charles V and he commanded urged Pope Clement VII to not annul the marriage.
The king then decided that he didn't need the pope's permission to do anything so he declared himself Supreme Head of the Church of England, changed England's religion, decreed his daughter Mary illegitimate, and got a divorce. In 1533 Henry and Anne Boleyn were married.
She then bore him a daughter so he had her beheaded.
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