War was unavoidable. According to native accounts, Malinche tried to dissuade the Aztecs from revolting, pointing out that they were outgunned. But at first it was Cortés and his troops who were forced to retreat. Ultimately, though, the uprising was doomed to fail, not because of superior Spanish military might, but because of a much more insidious enemy: smallpox. The Spaniards had carried the deadly disease to the Americas, and native peoples had no natural defenses against it. Within weeks of their initial victory, thousands of Aztecs had died. At the end of April 1521, Cortés, with reinforcements from nearby Spanish-held Cuba, set out once again for Tenochtitlan, and this time he conquered it.
It’s doubtful that without the aid of Malinche, the Spanish could have pulled off such an astounding conquest in the span of two years and with fewer than 1,000 soldiers. So why did she help the enemy? On the face of it, Malinche had little reason to want the precolonial system to endure; all it got her was a one-way ticket to forced bondage. And though she may have felt she had no choice, it’s also possible that she was in love with Cortés. Whatever her feelings, in 1522 she bore him a son, whom they named Martín, after his grandfather.
Once the Spaniards had conquered the Aztecs, Malinche was much less useful, and Cortés was certainly not in love with her. His Spanish wife’s suspicious death in 1522 (possibly at his hands) left him free to remarry, and he didn’t waste the chance to forge a political union by marrying a native. Nevertheless, Cortés never entirely abandoned the woman who had been so helpful to him, and Malinche seems to have been made rich by her efforts; contemporary reports note deliveries of gold to her house. In autumn 1524, she was married off to Juan Jaramillo, one of Cortés’s captains, and as a dowry was given the villages of Olutla and Tetiquipaque. As the wife of a wellborn, well-placed Spaniard, Malinche was able to avoid the fate that befell other indigenous women who bore mestizo (mixed native and European blood) children: being cast aside in poverty and shame.
Malinche and her husband remained in Cortés’s service, and in April 1526 the couple welcomed a baby girl into the world. In 1529, just ten years after the Spanish arrived, Malinche was dead, probably the victim of one of the new European diseases still ravaging native populations.
THE MANY FACES OF MALINCHE
In Mexico today, a malinchista is a traitor to his or her people, just as Malinche supposedly was. She’s been called the Mexican Eve, La Traidora (“the traitor”), and La Vendida (“the sell-out”), among other unflattering names.
It’s impossible, however, to tease the true Malinche from the myth; she never recorded her feelings or thoughts or the reasons for her actions. We don’t know if she was a nobleman’s daughter, whether she loved her husband, or what she died of. The dearth of detail helps explain why it’s so easy to turn a flesh-and-blood woman into a potent symbol—and why what she symbolizes has always been in flux. As the novelist Haniel Long wrote in 1939, “She represents more than any one moment of history can hold.”
In Mexico’s struggle for independence, Malinche became a representation of traitorous female sexuality, partly because she was so revered in the Spanish narrative of the conquest. Díaz del Castillo called her a “truly great princess” who, “although a native woman, possessed such manly valor … that she betrayed no weakness but a courage greater than that of a woman.” In 1945, lashing out against the Spanish narrative, Mexican Nobel laureate Octavio Paz condemned Malinche as the root of Mexico’s “anxiety and anguish.” Calling her “la Chingada” (a naughty word, like “screwed” but more vulgar), Paz claimed that what Cortés did to this weak, passive woman was what the Spanish did to the Mesoamerican people. That Malinche “let” him seduce her is her betrayal; she is the traitor, and Cortés, though a villain, is blameless. That remained the prevailing perception for decades. In 1982, for example, a statue of Malinche and her son, representing the first mestizo of Mexico, was removed after local students protested; they didn’t want a monument to a blood traitor in their neighborhood.
Dramatists, novelists, and filmmakers have also reinterpreted the story, with varying degrees of sympathy. In H. Rider Haggard’s 1893 Montezuma’s Daughter, she’s a Pocahontas-like character, saving the conquistadors from being killed by her people; in Gary Jennings’s 1980 historical novel Aztec, she’s a schemer and a traitor. Sometimes Malinche is a mentally unbalanced she-devil who feels deep guilt for the atrocities the Spaniards inflicted with her help. She might be a woman so addled by her love for Cortés that she doesn’t even care he’s using her as a pawn; or she’s a realist who sees that it’s better to survive with the conquistadors than to die as a slave. She’s a scapegoat, taking the blame for the fall of the Aztec nation, or she’s the madwoman who gleefully engineered the bloody destruction of her way of life.
More recently, feminists have reclaimed Malinche, first as an icon of victimhood who was violated by the patriarchy of both the Aztecs and the Spanish, and later as a survivor who forged ahead when those around her died. Modern scholarship sees her as a kind of cultural and linguistic bridge between the Mesoamerican past and the postcolonial present. Her son Martín, the product of her relationship with Cortés, has come to represent the mestizo future.
No other Aztec princess made such an indelible mark on Mexican history, and certainly no other woman played such an integral role in the Spanish conquest of Mexico. But Malinche’s legacy has endured, at least in part, because she is voiceless. She’s been used as a mouthpiece by historians, novelists, feminists, and scholars, as much today as in her own lifetime.
History is full of bloody ends, inscrutable motivations, indecipherable decisions, and choices that we can never fully understand. That’s what makes it so easy to manipulate, especially when facts are as thin as they are regarding this woman whose real name, let alone motivations, remains unknown. Ultimately, that’s the true story of Malinche.
THE WAR BOOTY PRINCESS
For most royal women throughout history, having a title didn’t mean having power. Their actions were mostly dictated by fathers, brothers, or husbands, and during wartime they often became an unwilling prize for the male victor. Such was the case of beautiful Nest of Wales.
In 1093, young Nest was taken hostage by invading Norman forces after her father, King Rhys ap Tewdwr, was killed. She ended up in her oppressors’ court, where she caught the eye of Henry, William II’s younger brother, later bearing one of his many illegitimate sons. After becoming king, Henry married Nest off to one of his mates, Gerald of Windsor. The couple returned to Gerald’s stolen castle in Wales, where she bore him four children.
In 1109 a prince named Owain met Nest at a feast and fell in love with her. Like many local Welsh princes, Owain was trying to shake the yoke of Norman rule, and he and a group of his men decided to lay siege to Gerald’s castle, supposedly to steal Nest away. Gerald escaped through the privy, but Nest was taken hostage along with her children, who were soon returned to their father.
Owain probably didn’t love her, but rather abducted her to start a fight—he was taking a page out of a timeworn playbook that cast royal women as booty. His actions precipitated a war that inflamed the locals and earned Nest the nickname “Helen of Wales.” Henry I, her former lover, leapt to her defense, offering Owain’s rivals land in Wales if they fought to get Nest back. Within the year, Owain had ditched Nest and fled to Ireland. Nest rejoined her husband and children, but strife continued to plague the countryside—the rebellion that Owain started lasted until 1116.
Sophia Dorothea
THE PRISONER PRINCESS
SEPTEMBER 15, 1666–NOVEMBER 13, 1726
CASTLE ALDHEN, GERMANY
It could have been a storybook romance, if the authors were the brothers Grimm, or maybe Stephen King. When Princess Sophia Dorothea was told she was to be married to Prince George Louis of Hanover, she fainted dead away. She collapsed again when she was expected to greet him as her fiancé. And when she was given a diamond-studded miniature portrait of her betrothed, she dashed it aga
inst the wall, screaming, “I will not marry the pig snout!” But on November 21, 1682, marry the pig snout she did. It was probably the worst mistake of her life.
MARRIAGE ON THE ROCKS
Sophia Dorothea of Celle was born in northwest Germany in 1666, the only child of George William, the duke of Brunswick-Lüneburg. She was a romantic and flighty child but was expected to fetch a fine husband, and at age 16, she did just that. Her fiancé, 22-year-old George Louis, was her first cousin and the son and heir of the elector of Hanover, ruler of the most important principality in Germany. He was also in line for the British crown and would be the future George I of England. The pair had known each other for much of their young adulthood, and they didn’t like each other one bit. Though Sophia Dorothea was reckoned by most to be pretty, witty, and vivacious, George regarded her as his social inferior, a bastard child whose parents didn’t marry until she was nearly 10 years old. Sophia Dorothea thought George was cold, rude, and overly formal. He was known in Hanover as “the pig snout,” owing to both his appearance and his attitude.
The truth is that even George’s own mother didn’t like him very much. In a letter to a niece, she declared him “the most pigheaded, stubborn boy who ever lived, and who has round his brains such a thick crust that I defy any man or woman ever to discover what is in them.” And for all he begrudged Sophia Dorothea her murky birth, George got an early start on making his own pack of illegitimate children, knocking up one of his sibling’s governesses when he was just 16 years old. His mother warned him “not to have his name bawled from the housetops as the progenitor of bastards.”
But as was often the case in royal matrimony, whether or not the couple liked each other was irrelevant. And at first George and Sophia Dorothea seemed resigned to their fate. Eleven months after the wedding, they welcomed their first child, a son and heir they named George Augustus. But the court at Hanover was smothering in its formality, and though her in-laws tried to be welcoming, they found Sophia Dorothea’s etiquette lacking and declared her a “bad influence.” Meanwhile, the young royals’ relationship lurched from bad to worse. George ignored his high-spirited wife, and when he did notice her, he acted as if he were repulsed by what he saw. Even worse, when Sophia Dorothea was pregnant with their second child, her husband suddenly turned violent.
George had begun an affair with the youthful Melusine von der Schlulenberg, one of his mother’s ladies-in-waiting. She was stick thin and a head taller than he was, so they made a pretty distinctive couple when they went out in public. Which they often did—George made no effort to hide the affair. One day his pregnant and tearful wife followed him into his study, demanding he tell her what she could do to win him back. George flew into a rage, shaking Sophia Dorothea violently and nearly strangling her to death. The attack left her bruised and desperately ill; she was confined to bed, and fears that she would miscarry gripped the Hanoverian court. George didn’t visit his ailing wife until forced to by his mother; when he finally did, he sat sullenly by her bed, holding her hand like a bored child. Sophia Dorothea recovered, but the marriage never did.
In March 1687, Sophia Dorothea gave birth to a daughter, and George continued his affair with Melusine. Within two years, husband and wife were openly hostile to each other. George spent much of his time either away at war or in Melusine’s arms—the first of their three daughters was born in January 1692. When Sophia Dorothea complained about her husband’s infidelities to her parents, they advised her just to keep a stiff upper lip and ignore his behavior. When she complained to her in-laws—who were also her aunt and uncle—they also advised her to hold her tongue. As her motherin-law reminded her, George might be king of England someday, and she could expect to be queen. (How a German prince could become king of England comes to down religion: George was Protestant, and British Parliament was about to declare a law that no Catholic could sit on the English throne, thus rendering illegal the succession of more than 50 other royals with stronger claims but the wrong faith.)
But it was only a matter of time before the pretty young princess sought a distraction of her own. She found it in Philip Christopher von Königsmarck, a dashing young Swedish count and colonel in the Hanoverian army. Königsmarck came from a distinguished military family and had a “poetic” nature that contrasted favorably with her husband’s rather vile personality.
By 1689, Königsmarck and Sophia Dorothea were very much in love. He began writing her soppy love letters stuffed with romantic verses; at first she tried to resist such a dangerous flirtation, but by year’s end she was writing back. She sewed his clandestine epistles into the linings of curtains or hid them in playing-card boxes in her room; he would find hers tucked into his hat or gloves by her trusted lady-in-waiting. It wasn’t long before their letters shifted from the courtly pantomime of love to something more intimate. The depth of their affection is clear by April 1691, when Königsmarck signed off with “I embrace your knees.” By March of the next year, their correspondence contained references to the act of monter à cheval (“horseback riding,” wink-wink), the “transports of passion” they experienced together, Königsmarck’s pleasure at “embracing the most beautiful body in the world,” and his desire to “kiss that little place which has given me so much pleasure.”
WHO KNEW? (WHO DIDN’T?)
The affair was meant to be a secret, so of course everyone at court knew all about it. The lovers relied on too many people to help them pass their notes, which were written in an easily decipherable code. Though they used Sophia Dorothea’s lady-in-waiting’s room for trysts, or met in the garden at night, they gave themselves away in public with longing glances and prearranged signals. Still they believed they were getting away with it all: Königsmarck wrote to Sophia Dorothea, “What delight, ma petite, for us to communicate with impunity in the presence of thousands of people!”
Though everyone knew about the affair, no one quite knew what to do about it. Despite measures taken by Sophia Dorothea’s in-laws and her parents to keep the lovebirds apart (including sending Königsmarck to the front—this being Europe in the 1690s, a war was always handy), the lovers still managed to sneak letters back and forth. Königsmarck even signed some in his own blood as a testament to his burning ardor. As the infatuation grew more intense, Sophia Dorothea’s brittle, fragile marriage crumbled. An episode from 1693 highlights just how bad it was. While walking one night on the grounds of the Hanoverian palace, Sophia Dorothea came upon a small outlying building. She opened the door to find her husband holding hands with his mistress and gazing adoringly at his newborn daughter, his second child by Melusine. Affronted by this clandestine scene of domestic bliss, the princess began screaming at her wayward husband. George Louis responded by trying to strangle her once again and had to be pulled off by her ladies-in-waiting.
Unsurprisingly, Sophia Dorothea was now actively looking for a way to escape with Königsmarck. But upon reviewing her marriage contract, she was shocked to find that she had no money of her own—her father had signed over her entire dowry when she wed. She refused to live under the same roof as George, fleeing to her parents and demanding to live with them or be given her own household. But again her father failed her, refusing to allow her to stay longer than a few months.
Back at court in June 1694, a desperate Sophia Dorothea and her lover worked out a plan: they’d make for the German principality of Wolfenbüttel, where they could seek sanctuary with the sympathetic Duke Anthony Ulric. On July 1, Königsmarck found a letter in his rooms from Sophia Dorothea, asking him to come to her private apartment at 10 that night. A disguised Königsmarck snuck onto palace grounds and made his way to her room, where he gave their old signal (whispering “The Spanish Follies” at the door). She let him in, happy to see him, but was surprised—she hadn’t sent any letter. Despite this ill omen, the couple agreed to skip town the next morning so that she could say goodbye to her children before leaving. They parted, elated and excited. Sophia Dorothea never saw Königsmarck again.<
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In fact, the meeting was a trap set by Countess Clara Elizabeth von Platen, the mistress of Sophia Dorothea’s father-in-law and rumored to be an ex-lover of Königsmarck who was looking for an opportunity to remove Sophia Dorothea from court. When Königsmarck arrived at the princess’s apartments, the countess ran to tell the elector, Sophia Dorothea’s father-in-law, that the brazen couple was in the very act of making love. She could catch them, she said, and arrest them. The elector agreed.
When Königsmarck left Sophia Dorothea’s apartments, the countess and her four accomplices were waiting for him. The men set upon him, swords drawn. Though Königsmarck managed to wound three of them before his sword broke in half, they soon overpowered him. As he lay bleeding to death, he gurgled his last words: “Spare the princess; save the innocent princess!” The countess reportedly then kicked him in the face with her diamond-buckled shoe.
Only then did she realize what she’d done. The elector had agreed to let her arrest Königsmarck, not to kill him. He was a nobleman, and a widely known one; people were bound to come looking for him. Panicked, the countess ran back to the elector and told him what had happened; he authorized her to do whatever was necessary to get rid of the problem. And so the countess had her courtiers stuff Königsmarck’s body in a sack, weigh it down with stones, and dump it in the river. Those in court who knew about the murder now needed to cover it up.
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