by John Man
Under their queen, Hippolyta, these ‘wild and ruthless’ women kill their menfolk, govern themselves, expel all male interlopers and tax Greek ships. To avenge these ‘crimes’, Theseus raises an army and attacks. He underestimates the Amazons’ skill and spirit. His troops retreat. He re-inspires them: ‘Better for you now to have suffered the pangs of death with honour than to retreat shamefully and allow girls to advance.’ Now the ‘girls’ retreat behind their city walls. Hippolyta tries emotional blackmail, sending a message saying that to make war on women brings shame, not glory. Theseus is adamant: ‘We intend to humble your pride.’ Hippolyta suddenly sees the light: better to surrender, she says, because ‘it is not disgrace for us to be conquered by such an excellent man.’ They meet and marry, as do many on both sides, promising ‘never to return to their folly.’
It works: Fiammetta is so impressed by Boccaccio’s verses and their message that she falls for him. It was successful in other ways as well. There are another eleven books to the Teseida, but it was Book 1, the Amazons’ story, that had the greatest appeal. ‘Appeal’ is a little hard to measure, bearing in mind that this was a century before Gutenberg invented printing with moveable type. Popularity depended on hand-copies and loans. Even so, it was popular enough to become a common subject for paintings on the sides of the marriage chests that rich Florentine families made for their daughters. These cassoni, the equivalents of a Harrods wedding list, were filled with gifts and carried from the bride’s home to her husband’s. So Theseus and the Amazons was a tale inherited by many generations of Florentines. Brides would have heard their parents and husbands saying in effect: look, young lady, this is how to behave, and how not to.
The story also became well known in England, because Chaucer travelled to Italy, perhaps actually met Boccaccio and used the Teseida as the basis for ‘The Knight’s Tale’, the first of the Canterbury Tales, in which we hear the story of Theseus and Hippolyta, Queen of Scythia, being spared the details of the battle between Athenians and Amazons, because (says Chaucer) it would take too long.
But I am getting ahead of myself. There were others who kept Amazonian mythology alive, most of them as tedious as their creations. Christine de Pizanfn1 (c.1363–c.1431) was exactly the opposite of tedious, one of the most remarkable women of her age, some would say the most remarkable. If she had ever chosen to pick up a sword, she would have made a terrific Amazon. As it was, her pen was mightier than any sword: she used it to fight her corner in society, sustain her family and rescue the Amazons from tedium.
Born in Venice, she was taken to France when her father became astrologer-physician to Charles V, known as ‘the Wise’ from his intellectual interests and passion for good government. Given access to his vast library – the Louvre, newly expanded, with 1,200 volumes – she read voraciously, absorbing the spirit of the early Renaissance through new translations of Aristotle and other classics. At fifteen she married the king’s secretary, Etienne de Castel, had three children and seemed set for a conventional life at court when her husband died suddenly. There were problems with his estate. She was twenty-five and had a mother, a niece and two surviving children to support. She drew on her major assets: her intelligence, education, connections and iron will.
She started with love poems, which led to commissions from rich patrons. She moved on into a debate about the merits of the popular verse allegory The Romance of the Rose, the Rose in question being both a name and a symbol of female sexuality. A satire on courtly love and a portrait of women as mere seducers, it is all about sex. In the book a young man avoids various evils – Hatred, Violence, Greed, Avarice and others – and is guided through a small door into the Garden of Love by Ease, wherein he discovers many delights and challenges as he attempts to gain access to the Rose. It is transparently symbolic and, with a little imagination, semi-pornographic. It was very popular, and Christine objected. The language was vulgar, she said. It denigrated both sexuality and women. She spent a good deal of her life defending both against male assaults.
She went on to write a history of women, a book of advice to women, a biography of Charles V, a biography of Joan of Arc, and a history of the Trojan War, all of which emphasize and promote female strengths. Indeed, in her semi-autobiographical Le Livre de la mutacion de fortune she says that becoming a widow changed her into a man. Not literally of course; but it drove her to emulate her mother, whom she called ‘strong and free and more worthy than Penthesilea’.
She adored Amazons. In three different books, she retells the stories of Cyrus, Heracles, Theseus and Hippolyta, occasionally mixing and matching to suit her aim of showing the Amazons as powerful, beautiful, sexy, demanding, virtuous and in all ways deserving of respect, at a time when they were generally considered fodder for male warriors or totally lacking in sexuality. After all (she writes, uncritically improvising on ancient myths), did not their nation, the land of Amazoine, survive for 800 years, making it one of the longest-lasting civilizations of all time? In one of her tales, Hector, the epitome of manhood, is loved by Penthesilea, the most splendid of earthly women. He dies. She vows revenge. She fights Pyrrhus and wounds him. He, humiliated, sets his men on her and then dashes out her brains. Men, Christine de Pizan implies, could beat Amazons only with brute force and unchivalric trickery.
Almost a century later, a series of chivalric romances ensured the enduring literary popularity of the Amazons. They are credited to a Spaniard named Garci de Montalvo, writing on either side of 1500. In fact, strictly speaking, his books were rewrites of stories that had been around for decades, possibly centuries, in French and/or Portuguese, but it was Montalvo who made them famous. The series, Amadís de Gaula (not Gaul or Wales, but some fairytale country), follows Amadís in his knight-errant adventures fighting evil knights, sorcerers and dragons.
In the fifth book, The Exploits of Esplandian (Amadís’s son), published in 1510, Montalvo dreams up a race of warrior women who live under their queen, Califia (probably derived from caliph, Spain having recently escaped Islamic rule), in her realm, California.fn2 It is an island state, somewhere close to the new Spanish possessions in the New World. At the time of its writing, probably about 1500, Columbus was still insisting that he had reached the Far East, which is why he called these lands the Indies and why he thought he was on the verge of finding Eden, or the Earthly Paradise. He thought he had nearly circled the globe. For a time, confusingly, West was East. So Montalvo’s Amazonian island veers from somewhere near Constantinople to the New World. It also owes much to the Spanish obsession with gold, which inspired their imperial drive. This is a translation of the original Spanish:
Know that on the right hand from [or ‘of’] the Indies exists an island called California, very close to a side of the Earthly Paradise; and it was populated by black women, without any man existing there, because they lived in the way of the Amazons. They had beautiful and robust bodies, and were brave and very strong. Their island was the strongest of the World, with its cliffs and rocky shores. Their weapons were golden and so were the harnesses of the wild beasts that they were accustomed to taming so that they could be ridden, because there was no other metal in the island than gold.
Queen Califia (or Calafia, spellings vary) is a medieval version of Daenerys Targaryen in Game of Thrones, the Mother of Dragons. She has 500 ravenous griffins raised on human flesh, which she releases when attacking Constantinople.
Actually, Game of Thrones is not a bad comparison. Montalvo’s books, especially the fifth, were bestsellers, now that Gutenberg’s printing press had spread across Europe. Esplandian was reprinted frequently in Spanish, and was just one of many sequels or ‘continuations’ by different authors in Spanish (12 titles), Italian (28), German (21), French and English. This was mass-market publishing before its time, ensuring that readers across the continent knew of the Amazons. The fad paved the way for rather higher-quality novels, notably Cervantes’s Don Quixote, which is a pastiche of Montalvo’s vainglorious knight-errantry.
The Amadís novels used to be rarities in a few national libraries. Now you can find digital reprints online. I have a French edition of Esplandian, published in 1550. The cover says it’s a translation, but in fact it’s an adaptation for French readers. By that time many people knew about California, and knew that there was no Land of Amazons there. So the translator, Nicolas de Herberay, eviscerated and rewrote. The original 184 chapters come down to 56. There is no mention of the Indies (probably because there were no French there, only Spanish). Now the Amazons do not live on an island, but in a ‘country’, which is within reach of Constantinople, because that is the scene of a battle between Christian knights and Turks.
Just to show how enduring the success of Amadís was, you may at the click of a mouse pick up an English version, dated 1664, of the French adaptation published a century earlier. By the late seventeenth century, Amadís was really beyond its sell-by date. The translation is accurate, with a couple of significant changes. By then, no one would take Calafia or her land of California seriously, so the names have been adapted to Calafre and Califorine,fn3 which is
a most fertile and pleasant country … This country whereof I speak was sometimes [i.e. at one time] peopled with good Knights and men of all quarters, but the women upon malice devised a means to kill them all, establishing a law among themselves, that from that time forwards they would acknowledge for Lady and Queen one of their own country women, governing themselves as the Amazons used to do. Whereby it was not lawful for any of them to use the company of men above once or twice a year, upon the days and times by them appointed … the maiden children were kept alive, burning their right paps, but not the men children, for as soon as they were born they put them to death.
In these versions, Queen Califia/Calafia/Califre has only fifty griffins, but that seems to be enough for the French translator who interpolated, in the words of the English edition of 1664: ‘Alas, what pity was it to see soldiers, citizens, knights and others, yea women and little children, and all whatsoever they could get into their claws, taken up into the air, and sometimes having taken them up, they let them fall upon the stones, whereby they had a strange and cruel death.’
The Christians, of course, have to win in the end. Calafia converts and gives up her kingdom. And so, once again, the Amazons fall to the forces of Civilization, in this case Christianity.
These tales did not stay in Europe. They were part of the baggage carried by the Spanish and Portuguese explorers as they opened the world to European domination. Columbus’s son, Diego, had a copy of Esplandian (now in the Biblioteca Colombina, Valladolid). One of Mexico’s conquistadores, Bernal Díaz del Castillo, recalling the sights of Aztec cities, wrote, ‘We were amazed and said it was like the enchantments they tell of in the legend of Amadís.’
The rivalry between Spain and Portugal wrote the agenda of exploration and empire. In the late fifteenth century no one knew what lay across the Atlantic. The two were racing to find out. No other Europeans were serious contenders. The prize was the wealth of the Far East: the spice islands of south-east Asia, and China. While the Portuguese, first off the mark as an outward-looking coastal nation, focused on the route south and east via the southern tip of Africa and India, Spain looked west, thanks to Columbus and his suggestion that it was possible to take a short-cut round the world by sailing the other way, across the Atlantic all the way to China. America, entirely unknown to Europeans, just happened to be in the way, much to Columbus’s surprise when he reached land in 1492. He was convinced that he had reached the East, perhaps ‘the Indies’. Luckily for Spain, the inhabitants were not Chinese, but ‘Indians’ whose lands could be seized without fear of opposition.
For a heady few years, Spain and Portugal thought they could divide the world between them. In 1494, in the little town of Tordesillas, they signed a treaty agreeing a border between their spheres of influence. The border line ran north–south halfway between Portugal’s most westerly possession, the Cape Verde islands, and the territory claimed for Spain by Columbus. Spain could have everything to the west, Portugal everything to the east, which at the time meant the route to Asia via Africa. Spain, heading west in Columbus’s wake, quickly sent out other explorers, who found the freshwater mouth of a great river. In 1500, one of them, Vicente Yáñez Pinzón, sailed up it for about 150 kilometres. He called it Mar Dulce (Sweet – meaning ‘Fresh Water’ – Sea).
A few years later, the Treaty of Tordesillas had unexpected consequences. Amerigo Vespucci, an Italian working for the Portuguese, sailed south along the Brazilian coast. On his return in 1502, Vespucci announced that Columbus’s ‘China’ was actually a new world (for Europe, anyway). So significant was this realization that the first man to include it on a map called the new world America, a version of Amerigo’s name, feminized because land (terra) is grammatically feminine. The land Amerigo had explored jutted eastwards over the dividing line agreed in Tordesillas, which made it Portuguese. That’s why Brazilians speak Portuguese.
But the freshwater sea discovered by Pinzón turned out to be just a little to the west of the line drawn in the Treaty of Tordesillas. So it fell into the Spanish sphere, and was theirs for the taking, except that the tricky coastal currents and fierce local tribesmen kept other Spanish explorers at bay.
Besides, the Spanish were busy on the other side of the continent, driven by an obsession with gold and Amazons. Mexico fuelled their passions. In 1524, Hernán Cortés, having hanged, burned and shot his way to the overlordship of all Mexico, wrote to his king, Charles V of Spain, with promises of yet more wealth. He had, he said, heard of an island inhabited only by women, who were visited at pre-arranged times by men from the mainland. When they give birth, ‘they keep the female children … but the males they throw away.’ The island is, of course, ‘very rich in pearls and gold.’
But where might it be? Hernán Cortés told his brother Francisco to look on Mexico’s west coast, and then northwards, where perhaps the Amazons referred to in ‘ancient histories’ were to be found. It seems he, like many others, actually believed the Amadís story to be true. Somewhere just over the horizon there really was ‘an island called California’, where ‘women lived in the way of the Amazons’. So when in 1542 Juan Rodríguez Cabrillo, rich from the gold mines of Guatemala and Honduras, sailed up the west coast, he referred to the land as California, and so it has remained. Moreover, there was indeed an ‘island’, or so the first Spanish explorers thought. It was in fact the peninsula of Baja California. The assumption that this must surely be the home of the Amazons sustained the idea that the peninsula was an island for another thirty years.
To the south, with Amazons and gold always over the next river or mountain range, the conquistadores approached the Inca empire, ruling present-day Ecuador, Peru and Chile. On the way they heard rumours of El Dorado, the Golden Man, a ruler who once every year was covered in gold and immersed in a lake. It was true, in a small way: the chief of the Muisca people of Colombia had gold dust blown on to him, then washed it off in Lake Guatavita. This small reality seemed to confirm the legend that somewhere there was a gold-rich empire, waiting to be ravaged. The Spanish were also eager to find cinnamon, the bark of trees that supposedly grew on the eastern slopes of the Andes. If true, the find would make Spain independent of traders bringing this expensive spice from the Far East.
To find these mythical regions, in February 1541 Gonzalo Pizarro led 4,000 manacled Indian porters, 5,000 pigs and 340 horse-riding Spaniards armed with guns and crossbows out of Ecuador’s high and temperate capital, Quito, over the eastern cordillera of the Andes and down into sweltering rainforests. Today, you can fly down in a few minutes or drive in a couple of hair-raising hours, skirting cliffs, with rivers raging below you and huge snow-capped volcanoes looming over the forests. Back then, weeks of clambering down single-track paths, hacking through forests and undergrowth and building bridges over ravines led only to disease, starvation, exhaustion and death. Every day it rained. The
re was no cinnamon, just scattered treesfn4 with buds that Pizarro called cinnamon when he wrote up his journey. Of El Dorado there was no sign. By the end of the year, the pigs were eaten, the horses were mostly dead, and almost all of the porters too.
Camping on the banks of the Coca River, Pizarro decided to build a good-sized boat to explore downriver, into the 500-metre-wide Napo and beyond, ‘until I should come out in the Northern Sea [the Atlantic]’, thus asserting Spain’s claim to all the unknown lands in between. His men forged nails for the boat-building from the shoes of the dead horses. Two days and 250 kilometres further on, with the surviving horses being led along the bank, across tributaries and bogs, they had found no villages, no willing traders, no food.
Actually there was a lot of food. You just had to be extremely skilful and experienced to get it, as I discovered when I lived with a tribe of Indians who used to hunt over these forests. Once known as Aucas (‘savages’ in the language of the nearby Quechuas), they call themselves Waorani (in English orthography) or Huaorani (in Spanish, because Spanish has no w). They may not have been there when the Spaniards passed by, because over the next two centuries the European invasions from east and west would set off chain reactions of migrations all across the Amazon basin, but for those with the right skills, the rainforest was always a resource to be exploited, in the form of monkeys, birds, tapirs, pigs, fish, fruit (in season) and occasional glorious gobs of honey, if you can stand a few bee-nips (yes, they nip; if there are bees that sting, I didn’t encounter them). To live at all, let alone well, you need astonishing expertise. The rainforest is rich – but the wealth lies mainly in the canopy. It is hard to find food on the jungle floor. The traditional homeland of the Waorani is the size of Wales, for a semi-nomadic population of only 600, who defended their territory by spearing any outsiders they came across. The hardware needed includes palm-fibre hammocks, fire-sticks, spears, fish-poison, blow-guns and darts (or bows and arrows, depending on the culture), and poison for dart- and arrow-tips (either the boiled-down juice of curare vines or the toxic secretion from various species of frog). To develop the techniques took centuries of inherited, evolving skills. To know the materials, gather them and use them demands years of experience. The Spaniards and their highland slaves lacked all this know-how, let alone a knowledge of local languages and the tribal attitudes towards outsiders. Some tribes traded, others were implacably hostile. For example: pre-contact in the late 1950s, the Waorani were the most murderous tribe ever recorded. All outsiders were fair game, and 40 per cent of male Waorani deaths were the result of revenge spearings. Given what they faced, Pizarro’s army of highlanders had no chance.