Princesses Behaving Badly

by Linda Rodriguez McRobbie

  So, in its way, the story of Alfhild is as much a didactic fairy tale as Cinderella or Snow White. It just has more swashbuckling … and snakes.

  Pingyang

  THE PRINCESS WHO LED AN ARMY

  CA. 600–623

  TANG DYNASTY CHINA

  You don’t take down a corrupt emperor all on your own. As a general’s daughter, Pingyang knew this well. So when her father and her brother were struggling to combat the emperor’s army, she didn’t wait around to become war booty. She raised and commanded her own army of more than 70,000. With her help, her father was able to take the imperial throne and start a dynasty regarded as a golden age in imperial China.

  And did we mention she did all that before the age of 20?

  LIKE FATHER, LIKE DAUGHTER

  Pingyang was the daughter of General Li Yuan, a garrison commander in seventh-century China who controlled a substantial army. Li Yuan didn’t exactly want to be a rebel leader—he was a distant cousin of the reigning emperor—but he was influential, powerful, and ambitious. And for that reason he eventually found himself in the sights of the paranoid emperor of the Sui dynasty, Yangdi.

  Yangdi remains, even today, one of the great mustachio-twirling villains of Chinese history. He murdered his own father to secure the throne, and once there, squandered his country’s money and military might on failed expeditions to conquer foreign lands. He also used what was left of the treasury to finance expensive building projects for his own glory. Now broke, he raised taxes. But no one could pay them—Yangdi had conscripted all the able-bodied men for his army, leaving too few behind to farm and earn money. In 613–14, his overburdened people began to revolt—just starving peasants at first, but the rebellion soon spread to opportunistic nobles and government officials. Terrified, Yangdi began to imprison or execute anyone he found suspicious.

  Yangdi had long been wary of Li Yuan, and with good reason. Sure, it was concerning that Li Yuan was an ambitious general with a strong army. But more worryingly, Li Yuan supposedly sported a birthmark in the shape of a dragon under his left armpit, an obvious sign he was destined to be emperor. Yangdi’s suspicions were further confirmed in 615, when a popular street ballad making the rounds foretold that the next emperor would be named Li. Since Li was one of China’s most common surnames, the prediction could have meant just about anybody, but Yangdi was pretty sure he knew which Li posed the greatest threat.

  In 617 Yangdi gave the order to imprison Li Yuan, on the pretext that the general had been caught having sex with not one but two of Yangdi’s concubines, a capital offense. But Yangdi was forced to rescind the command when he fell under the threat of rebels and needed help. Li Yuan, of course, saw which way the wind was blowing and realized he had two choices: seize the moment and rebel openly or be crushed in the emperor’s panic. He chose rebellion.

  Aided by the neighboring eastern Turks, Li Yuan pulled together an army of more than 30,000. He sent secret messages to his son Li Shimin and son-in-law Cao Shao (Pingyang’s husband), informing them of his plans. That made things for Pingyang and her husband a bit tricky—they were living at the emperor’s court, where Cao Shao was head of the imperial guards. Cao Shao told his wife of his plans to sneak away and join her father’s rebel army, but he worried she would be in danger after he left. There was no doubt she would be; Yangdi was more than capable of holding Pingyang hostage or harming her to get back at her father and husband. But Pingyang wasn’t the type to faint or fret or wait around to be tossed in a dungeon. She told her husband she could take care of herself, and a few fraught days after he left the palace, she did just that.

  Pingyang made her way to her family’s estate in the province of Hu. There, she found the people starving—not only was war afoot, but a severe drought had brought widespread famine. So Pingyang opened the food stores to the hungry masses, an act that forever endeared her to them. It also indebted them to her, a clever move for a woman who would soon need to raise her own army.

  THE ARMY OF THE LADY

  Just a few months later, Pingyang’s father’s forces and those of her brother were embroiled in a bloody conflict with the emperor’s army. Realizing that survival depended on superior numbers, Pingyang wanted to augment their troops with her own.

  She started recruiting soldiers from among the people she’d just saved from starvation, enlisting the fittest and ablest to join her so-called Army of the Lady. Then she cast a wider net, reportedly ordering a young servant to try to convince a local highway robber and his merry band to join her cause. She then sent out other servants to track down additional bandits and ask them to join her as well. Why these brigands agreed is unclear, but Pingyang did have the benefit of being on the side that seemed likely to win. She made alliances with the largest and most capable of the disparate rebel groups operating in Hu. She even convinced imperial allies to desert Yangdi, including the emperor’s prime minister and a general with more than 10,000 troops under his command. Within months, Pingyang had amassed more than 70,000 troops under the banner of the Army of the Lady; they swept through the countryside and went on to take the capital of Hu.

  Pingyang’s keen public relations instincts served her well as a general. She made her soldiers swear an oath not to pillage or loot the villages they captured. Even more surprising, after their victories, the troops distributed food to the territories’ inhabitants. As the story goes, people saw the Army of the Lady as liberators, rather than just another horde of ravening locusts. Her ranks continued to swell.

  The Army of the Lady’s escapades in Hu forced the emperor to send troops to deal with this brave woman warrior. She roundly defeated them, enabling her brother’s and father’s forces to take down the bulk of the emperor’s army. Less than a year after she had fled the court to join the rebellion, Pingyang, along with her father, her brother, and her husband, marched with their forces on the imperial palace in Daxingcheng. The emperor didn’t stand a chance. Gazing in the mirror as his country burned around him, he reportedly said to his empress, “Such a fine head. Who will be the one to hack it off?” Yangdi fled south before the approaching armies, abandoning his palace and his throne. In the end, he wasn’t beheaded—he was strangled in a bathhouse by his own advisors in 618.

  Li Yuan swept into the palace and became the new emperor, establishing himself as the first leader of the Tang dynasty—still regarded as the high-water mark of imperial China—and taking the name Emperor Gaozu, or “High Progenitor.” One of his first acts was to honor Pingyang as princess and bestow on her the status of marshal, a rank that came with its own military aides and staff.

  Barely five years later, Pingyang died. The details remain unknown; she was only 23 years old, so the likeliest prospects are illness, death in childbirth, or, given that this is imperial China, assassination. When her father planned an elaborate funeral, complete with military honors, for the daughter whose courage and bravery had helped bring him the empire, his court asked why he would bestow such an honor on a woman. Li Yuan responded, “She was no ordinary woman.”

  In Pingyang’s time, Chinese women of all ranks enjoyed a bit more respect and freedom than women in other contemporary societies; emperors’ wives, for example, were often their husbands’ acknowledged political advisors. But Pingyang was unique. In her day, women might exert control from behind the scenes, but jumping on a horse to command an army was extraordinary. Had she lived, she might have someday been empress in her own right.

  As it was, her father abdicated the throne in 626, just three years after Pingyang’s death, and her brother became Emperor Taizong. Although punctuated by a series of rebellions and civil conflict, the Tang is regarded as the last of the great Chinese dynasties, a golden era of military might and beautiful poetry. Pingyang was the PR-savvy warrior princess who helped make it happen.

  SEVEN WARRIOR QUEENS OF ANTIQUITY

  These horse-punching, armor-wearing women who sipped wine from the skulls of vanquished foes and rode on fire-breathing steeds we
re tough as nails. These are ladies you do not want to cross.

  FU HAO

  In 1976, Chinese archeologists uncovered the remarkably well preserved and unlooted tomb of Fu Hao, the consort of King Wu Ding of the Shang dynasty; she’d died around 1200 BCE.

  Much of what is known about Fu Hao came from oracle bones found in her tomb. On these fragments, ancient Chinese diviners inscribed questions to the gods. The bones were then heated until they cracked; diviners interpreted the patterns for answers and then inscribed what they read onto the same bone. It was probably about as accurate a form of divination as augury (i.e., reading bird entrails), but it did afford modern archeologists a glimpse into what people of earlier times were worried about. Many of the questions about Fu Hao were pretty standard, such as whether her impending childbirth would be easy or whether that toothache would go away. (The answer to both: probably not.) But other questions weren’t so usual, even for one of the king’s three main wives: whether she’d be victorious in battle, for example, or when would be the best time for a specific sacrifice. Fu Hao wasn’t just Wu Ding’s wife; she was also his shaman and commander of his military forces. She conducted important religious rituals, including human and animal sacrifices, and led the Shang armies to victory against neighboring tribes. How highly Fu Hao was esteemed is perhaps best indicated by the grand fashion in which she was sent to the afterlife. Buried with her were 468 bronze objects, including many weapons; 755 jade objects; and a stunning 6,900 pieces of cowry shell, a form of currency often buried with the dead for use in the afterlife. She was also kept company by 16 human sacrifices, including an armed man and six dogs, one of which was buried directly underneath her coffin.

  ARACHIDAMIA

  Women in third-century-BCE Sparta were all-around badasses. But Queen Arachidamia, wife of Eudamidas I, was among the toughest.

  About 272 BCE, the mercurial military genius Pyrrhus of Epirus was persuaded to lay siege to Sparta by a jealous lord who had been passed over for the throne. Pyrrhus’s armies were better equipped and far greater in number, so the Spartan Senate decided to gather the women and children and send them to safety in nearby Crete. According to the classical historian Plutarch, that decision didn’t sit well with Arachidamia. She marched into the Senate, sword in hand, and declared that the women were going to stay in Sparta to face the Epirians alongside the men.

  Part of the Spartan defense plan was to dig a deep trench parallel to Pyrrhus’s camp. Arachidamia organized the women and children to help with the digging, completing a third of the trench themselves. Once the fighting began, these battle-hardened broads stayed to fight and nurse the wounded. Pyrrhus was forced to flee before the Spartans’ snarling rage (and, it must be said, an infusion of fresh reinforcements from Macedonia).

  BOUDICCA

  Boudicca was wife to the chief of the Iceni tribe in East England. While her husband was alive, the Romans, who had spent the last 40 or so years trying to maintain their slippery grip on Britannia, considered him an ally and left the area alone. But after his death, they reconsidered the pact. They already held southern England, why not shoot for the whole thing?

  First, the Romans tried to claim Boudicca’s lands; when those weren’t forthcoming, they stripped her naked, whipped her, and raped her two teenage daughters. Enraged, Boudicca raised an army of Iceni and allied tribes in AD 60. At the vanguard of what was claimed to be 120,000 warriors, both men and women, she must have made for a terrifying sight. According to Cassius Dio, a second-century Roman chronicler, she was incredibly tall and graced with curly red hair that tumbled to her hips, a sharp eye, and a “harsh” voice.

  A fierce leader “possessed of greater intelligence than often belongs to women,” Boudicca led her rebel forces on a path of destruction through the countryside. They destroyed the Roman Ninth Legion and sacked the capital at Colchester, and when they made it to Londinium—the commercial settlement that would later become London—they burned it to the ground. Over the course of the rebellion, thousands were killed.

  In her final battle, Boudicca gave what sounds like a pregame pep talk that could rival Henry IV at Agincourt, William Wallace in Braveheart, or that guy in Varsity Blues. She rallied her troops from atop a chariot, declaring that the gods were on their side and that she, a mere woman, was prepared to die for her freedom. “Let us show them that they are hares and foxes trying to rule over dogs and wolves!” she cried.

  And then her forces were destroyed, ending a tremendous run of violence and righteous rebellion. The fierce Boudicca was laid to rest, having died of illness or self-administered poison to avoid capture.

  TOMYRIS

  Queen Tomyris was the fourth-century ruler of the Massagetai, a nomadic people in what is now Iran. According to Herodotus, they were a warrior race, handy with a bow and arrow and good on a horse. A few more interesting details from Herodotus: they used weapons made out of gold (which sounds incredibly impractical); their wives were held in common by all tribesmen; and when a man reached old age, his relatives would ritually sacrifice and eat him.

  Tomyris became their queen after the death of her husband, the king. Cyrus the Great, ruler of the Persians, thought her time of mourning would be the ideal opportunity to make a play for her kingdom. He sent an emissary to her court, pretending to be in the market for a wife, but canny Tomyris knew that wasn’t what he really wanted.

  After she called him on it, Cyrus set artifice aside and launched an invasion. At first, things did not go well for Tomyris: clever Cyrus divided his army, leaving some troops behind to act as bait. Led by the queen’s son, the Massagetai attacked the camp, slaughtered the troops, and promptly drank all of their enemy’s wine. Cyrus’s soldiers then returned and massacred the drunken Massagetai, taking Tomyris’s son hostage.

  Tomyris gave Cyrus an ultimatum: either turn over her son and leave peacefully or face the full wrath of the Massagetai. If Cyrus refused, Tomyris wrote, “I swear by the sun, the sovereign lord of the Massagetai, bloodthirsty as you are, I will give you your fill of blood.”

  Cyrus, of course, wasn’t about to give up. So Tomyris mustered all the warriors in her kingdom and led them into battle against the Persians. It was a fiercely pitched struggle, but eventually the Persians fell, Cyrus included. When she found his body among the fallen, Tomyris decapitated it and dipped his head in blood, making good on her threat. Legend has it that she also kept his skull as a drinking cup.

  SIKELGAITA

  In 1058, when the Norman Conquest hacked its way to northern Italy, the Lombard princess Sikelgaita was married off to the chief conqueror, Robert “the Weasel” Guiscard. These unions were pretty standard practice: conquest may have been won on the point of a sword, but it was often cemented in front of the altar.

  Though Sikelgaita could have become just another pawn in first her family’s and then her husband’s political maneuvering, she didn’t. In fact, she was awesome enough to merit a mention 100 years later in the writings of another royal from a rival empire. According to Anna Komnena, a twelfth-century Byzantine princess and historian, Sikelgaita disapproved of the Normans’ campaign against the Byzantines in 1081. Robert had already taken much of southern Italy, including Salerno, and Sikelgaita tried to persuade him not to press his luck with the neighboring superpower. But after Robert made up his mind to ignore her advice, Sikelgaita decided to do more than her wifely duty called for. Donning armor (“she was indeed a formidable size”), she marched with her husband to Brindisi, on the coast of Italy, and crossed the Adriatic with him to face the Byzantines on their own turf.

  Robert and his Normans were no match for the Byzantines. Terrified for their lives, Robert’s men began to retreat, which pissed off Sikelgaita mightily. Glaring “fiercely” at them, she shouted, “How far will ye run? Halt! Be men!” (Maybe not quite in those Homeric words, but something like them in her own dialect, according to Komnena.) The story continues: “As they continued to run, she grasped a long spear and charged at full gallop again
st them. It brought them back to their senses and they went back to fight.”

  And they won, at least in the short term. Within two years, Robert was forced to return to Italy and defend his ally the pope against the grabby Holy Roman Emperor. But two years after that, Sikelgaita returned to Byzantium with her husband, ready to rally the troops. This time, her pep talks weren’t enough, and to make matters worse, her husband died of a fever in the middle of staging their comeback. The Normans never really regained the lands they had lost to the Byzantines.

  When Robert was on his deathbed in 1085, Sikelgaita was involved in some more bold behavior, this time of a more questionable nature. Supposedly, she tried to poison Robert’s son by his first wife, paving the way for her own son to rule. Her scheme was found out by her dying husband, and she was forced to provide an antidote. (Also supposedly, she then poisoned Robert, if just to hasten his death.)

  Sikelgaita worked out her differences with Robert’s first son, and her own child was allowed to become a duke. She lived out her years as a powerful duchess until her death, in 1090.

  QUEEN DURGAVATI

  That Queen Durgavati resisted the Mughal conquest of her lands is impressive enough. But that she did so with an arrow stuck in her eye is even more so.

  Born in 1524 in what is now north-central India, Durgavati was a descendant of the Chandel kings, a 300-year-old line of rulers. Her marriage to a prince of the Gondwana kingdom united two independent dynasties. When her husband died in 1545, Durgavati’s infant son was too young to rule, so, like many queens before and since, she became his regent. For the next two decades, Durgavati’s rule was marked by both an expansion of her nation’s economic wealth and her brave resistance to the invasion threats of the neighbouring Malwa and Bengal states.

  But in 1564, Durgavati faced an enemy even greater and more implacable: the Mughal emperor Akbar, who wanted to add the Gondwana lands to his own. First, Akbar sent a message saying that should Durgavati agree to become his vassal and pay him tribute, he would leave her kingdom unharmed. Durgavati refused, declaring that it would be better to die in freedom than to live as a slave to this foreign king. So Akbar sent an army in an effort to either affect the latter or hasten the former.