Mediaeval Latin Christians only recognized indissoluble monogamy as marriage

Evidence

It needs to be kept in mind that Latin Christians define the married relation as inherently indissoluble except by death. The word marriage could not accurately, therefore, be used of any other sexual relation; it could not, for example, be used of many relations defined as marriages by the laws of modern European States. This was not pedantry; mediaeval Europeans simply understood only indissoluble monogamy by the word ‘marriage’. On the other hand, it was well known that in Islam there was polygamy. Latins always found it difficult to call any polygynous relation marriage. — Norman Daniel, Islam and the West, 753

Categorization

• DEFINE: Clarifies that ‘marriage’ was not a generic category in mediaeval Christendom but named a specific indissoluble-monogamy institution, so polygyny literally could not be called marriage.
• XREF: This linguistic/conceptual refusal to apply a category name to the other’s practice parallels the way ‘Islam’ itself is denied the status of a religion proper in the vault’s Anidjar thread.