Rejected Princesses: Tales of History's Boldest Heroines, Hellions, and Heretics

by Jason Porath

  Was Moremi Real?

  The story of Moremi comes from Yoruba oral tradition, and many of its figures—notably Moremi’s husband Oranmiyan—are demonstrably real historical figures from around the 12th century. While certain aspects, notably the parts about the river god, are of course suspect, the base of the story is probably true. Oranmiyan was well regarded as a successful king, having conquered much land to expand Ife territory. It’s likely that the Igbo people of the story were previous occupants, driven to the margins by an invading people.

  In some versions of this story, the Igbo king Obalufon II is actually the rightful heir to Ife. In this version, he’d been driven out by the warlord Oranmiyan, and at the end of the story Moremi uses her political sway to get him back on the throne, marrying him in the process. This then ushers in a new era of peace.

  Regardless, Moremi’s story is widely celebrated to this day—many schools and institutions bear her name, and the annual Edi festival commemorates her story with a monthlong feast.

  As a side note, the Yoruba fell on hard times in the 1800s, after a series of wars devastated their population and slavery scattered them across the globe. One of their main opponents in all of this? The kingdom of Dahomey, which you can read about in this book in the entry on Agontime.

  Sybil Ludington

  (1761–1839, UNITED STATES)

  The True Midnight Rider

  During some of the darkest days of the American Revolution, a courageous patriot risked life and limb to alert the rebels to the approaching British. This hero rode at breakneck speeds on a rain-slick night through dangerous territory, evading enemy soldiers and brigands to rouse the Americans against the menace at their doors.

  Paul who? We’re talking about Sybil Ludington, a 16-year-old girl.

  Sybil was the daughter of Colonel Henry Ludington, local commander of the rebel troops in southeastern New York. Although she was young, she’d had lots of experience with danger. When a royalist named Ichobod Prosser sneaked up to her family’s house with 50 men, intending to capture her father, Sybil enacted a plan straight out of a kid’s movie. Lighting candles throughout the house, she ordered her siblings to march in front of the windows in military fashion, creating the impression of untold numbers of troops guarding the house. Prosser fled.

  So when, months later, an exhausted messenger came to the Ludington house late at night with the news that the British had taken the nearby town of Danville, Sybil stepped up to serve. Since her father needed to stay put and organize the patriot army once they were summoned, and the weary messenger was unfamiliar with the area, Sybil was the only one able to locate and rouse the nearby patriots.

  This was not an easy ride. Not only was the territory wooded and treacherous, but it was home to many bandits. Nevertheless, Sybil took off on her horse Star, armed with nothing but a stick. Sure enough, she was accosted by a “skinner,” who tried knocking her off her horse. She fended him off with her stick and was on her way. She went on to ride around 40 miles over three hours.

  By contrast, a certain other someone famous for a midnight ride only went 12 miles across well-worn streets and was caught by British loyalists at the end of it. Ahem.

  In the end, Sybil’s spirited yells spread the word far and wide. Come morning, Colonel Ludington had an army at his gate, ready to go.

  Scream like a girl indeed.

  Kurmanjan Datka

  (1811–1907, KYRGYZSTAN)

  The Tsarina Who Kept the Peace

  Kurmanjan’s life didn’t go as expected. The daughter of an ordinary shepherd in a Kyrgyz tribe, she was married off early in life to a man from a neighboring tribe. Had things gone as expected, she would have had some kids and lived an unremarkable life, and you would not be reading about her.

  Instead, she ended up running an entire country and standing up to Russia. And it all started with her divorce.

  At that time, divorce was about as well regarded a life choice for women as marrying a horse. When the recently married Kurmanjan reappeared at her father’s house, having run away from her husband, Kurmanjan’s father lost it. Exclaiming that she was possessed by the devil, he pulled in the local datka (general or governor), Alymbek, who happened to be passing by, to mediate. Kurmanjan was not about to give in, though.

  “Is my husband of marriageable age?” she asked. “He was a grandfather when I was a child.”

  “Well,” Alymbek replied, “it’s Allah’s will that you should marry.”

  “No, this is my father’s will. He wanted 20 sheep and some silver, and he sold me for it. Allah would want me with someone my own age.”

  “Maybe your husband has a young soul. Don’t judge a book by its cover.”

  “Why should I start a long journey on a limping horse?”

  At this point, the village elders were losing their minds with rage. Alymbek, on the other hand, was laughing himself silly. To everyone’s surprise, he granted the divorce—and soon thereafter married Kurmanjan himself.

  She proved a great match for Alymbek, saving his life on multiple occasions. Alymbek was an ambitious man, hell-bent on uniting the 40-plus tribes of Kyrgyz peoples under one banner and finally driving out the Khans, who’d been ruling them for years. This regularly put the couple in danger to such an extent that Alymbek and Kurmanjan made a promise: if she sent her silver-handled horse whip to him, he would drop everything and head to her side, no questions asked.

  So one day, while Alymbek was out scheming in the big city, he received her whip and rode back to her side—only to find her just hanging out, saying that she missed him. As she cooked him dinner she said that she’d overheard that some men were aiming to assassinate him. He responded with some old-timey misogyny: “It is not for nothing that people say a woman’s mind is shorter than her hair. I respect you as a mistress, but could a sheep teach a mountain goat to leap through the air? It is better for you to do housework. The female eagle should watch a nest, the male should fly in the sky. I am going [back to the city] in the morning!”

  He then passed out. Because she’d drugged his tea.

  She proceeded to wrap his comatose body in a tarp, toss him in a cart, and sneak past the legions of assailants now looking for him. The following day he awoke in a yurt outside of town, assuming he’d had too much to drink the previous night. She kept him there several more days, using a combination of flattery, guilt trips (“it’s our anniversary!”), and flat-out bribery (“I have a great gift for you, but you can only get it tomorrow!”).

  After several days, one of Alymbek’s servants arrived to inform him of the attempt on his life—and how it’d been thwarted by his wife. Kurmanjan explained that in handling all the tribe’s trade deals, she’d secretly assembled a massive spy network—which informed her of an imminent attack on her pigheaded husband. Because Kurmanjan was rad like that.

  Aghast, he exclaimed, “You saved my life!”

  “I promised you a great gift, didn’t I?”

  Eventually, despite Kurmanjan’s best efforts, Alymbek was assassinated. Immediately thereafter, in a surprise move, the Khans, who’d subjugated the Kyrgyz tribes, summoned her to appear before them—to interview her to be his replacement as Datka. The conservative Khan leaders were somewhat shocked by what they saw.

  “Are you actually Muslim?” they asked. “You wear no veil.”

  “Veils are for covering shameful things. Does my face look shameful?”

  She got the job.

  The Khans installed Kurmanjan mostly because they thought a female ruler would keep things peaceful. They were wrong.

  In short order, she consolidated various Kyrgyz tribes in opposition to the Khans, working both political and military angles. While her troops staged mountain pass ambushes on the Khans, she skillfully used her double life as a politician to block new taxes. Simultaneously, a petition quietly snaked its way to Russia, asking for the Kyrgyz to be accepted as Russian citizens, which would free them from the Khans. Kurmanjan was playing many games a
t once.

  Eventually the Khans fell apart, and the Russians began annexing the area. While some Kyrgyz started fighting Russia, afraid that they’d be subsumed into Russia, Kurmanjan didn’t. Seeing the Russians’ immense technical advantage—they were in tanks while her people rode horses and hurled wooden spears—she sued for peace. It was primarily through her negotiations that the seeds were laid for modern-day Kyrgyzstan—a nation culturally and politically independent from Russia today.

  It wasn’t easy. Many Kyrgyz continued to bristle at Russian interference and being treated as second-class citizens—few more than Kurmanjan’s son. After killing a border guard, her son was sentenced to death, a penalty that outraged many Kyrgyz. For a second, it looked like the fragile Russian alliance was about to fall apart.

  Kurmanjan, now an older woman, traveled to her son’s scheduled execution. But instead of calling for action against the Russians, she stood stoically by to watch the proceedings—only to see the hangmen bungle the job.

  Seeing the noose slip off his neck, she yelled to her son to put the rope around his neck and show them how it was done. He did. And thus died like a gangsta.

  Kurmanjan eventually died of old age, a rare feat for a military commander. After her death, Kyrgyzstan achieved independence and commemorated it by building a Kurmanjan museum, putting her face on its currency and stamps, and, in 2014, producing her own live-action movie—the biggest-budget production in Kyrgyzstan’s history.

  Andamana

  (C. 14TH CENTURY, CANARY ISLANDS)

  The Lady Who Laid Down the Law

  Admit it: somewhere, deep in your heart of hearts, you regret not knowing more about the indigenous people of the Canary Islands. Maybe you always meant to spend an afternoon online learning about the Canarios’* early legal system. Perhaps you thought about googling the greatest queen of these little-known people living off the northwest coast of Africa. But you didn’t. And you have to live with that, day in and day out. Knowing full well that your every friend secretly holds you in utter contempt for your disgusting cultural illiteracy.

  But it’s okay. Your long nightmare of shameful ignorance is soon to end.

  In the 1300s, the Canarios were a fractured bunch. Living an isolated Stone Age existence, they were messily divided into villages that traded and bickered with each other in equal measure. Part of the reason for this friction was that laws were different from village to village and even case to case.

  Punishments, fees, and the like were decided ad hoc by wildly inconsistent magistrates. It was, as you might imagine, a suboptimal system of government.

  Well, one woman got fed up and took matters into her own hands. Andamana, a wise lady living on Gran Canaria Island, started dispensing advice and settling disputes, just like the judges, but with one major difference: she didn’t charge for her services. She quickly grew so popular that her village chief called a council meeting to discuss her power grab—only to have her crash the meeting herself, insult them, and dare them to point out a single time she’d been wrong. They couldn’t.

  From there, Andamana got more ambitious. She established a set of consistent laws that punished bribes and eliminated personal interpretation on the part of officials. Although these laws were a hit in her village, she soon learned other villages were not as enthusiastic when she began receiving the decapitated heads of her messengers in reply to her suggestions.

  This didn’t stymie Andamana. She next approached Gumidafé, the island’s fiercest warrior, with an offer: her hand in marriage in exchange for his help in laying down the law. He jumped at the opportunity, and their combined forces began sweeping across Gran Canaria in a torrent of justice and legality. Also butt-kicking. But mostly justice.

  Her reign as the first queen of a united Gran Canaria was long and strife-free. Her descendants continued independent rule until the 1400s, when the Spanish came a-conquerin’. The Canarios didn’t go gently, though—they held off both the French and the Spanish for many years, thwarting numerous conquest attempts with a great combination of brawns, brains, and badass rulers.

  • ART NOTES AND TRIVIA •

  The Canarios were said to be pretty enormous. Some European accounts describe men who were 9 and 14 feet tall, although math was likely not a key competency for the authors of said accounts. An anecdote survives about a Canario wrestler who dared a Spaniard to make him spill a single drop of wine as he slowly raised a glass to his lips. The Spaniard proceeded to fail hard.

  While outwardly similar to Europeans, the Canarios were actually most genetically similar to the Tuareg people of northern Africa (see the entry on Tin Hinan)—even though they have relatively light skin and blond hair! Anthropologists currently think they sailed to the Canaries or were dropped off by some other seafaring people and then, for reasons unknown, seemingly forgot how to make boats. Truly, we live in a world of mystery.

  The sitting council member with the finger in his mouth is practicing the traditional whistling language of the Canarios. Their original language has died out, but their whistle-based communication was adapted to work with the language of their foreign invaders. It continues to this day in the form of Silbo Gomero, the world’s strangest form of Spanish communication.

  Although the clothing of the Canarios was pretty simple, they would occasionally decorate themselves with flowers and the like (as seen in Andamana’s hair). The flowers in the illustration are, of course, indigenous to the Canary Islands.

  They primarily lived in caves like the ones visible in the background.

  Mary Seacole

  (1805–1881, JAMAICA/CRIMEA)

  and Florence Nightingale

  (1820–1910, ENGLAND/CRIMEA)

  The Odd Couple of Crimean Nursing

  The Crimean War saw two amazing women front and center. One was a beloved caretaker, who spent her every waking hour looking after the wounded, ill, and homesick. The other was Florence Nightingale.

  These two mothers of modern nursing, despite their limited interaction in life, make a classic odd couple: Florence Nightingale was a buttoned-up, by-the-book Victorian who put her stock in measurements and results, whereas Mary Seacole was a loud, cheery Jamaican who swore by folk remedies and the occasional swig of liquor.

  Mary started life in the hustle and bustle of Kingston, Jamaica. With her interest in medicine piqued by her mother, Mary would practice a blend of folk and Western remedies on cats, dogs, and dolls as a child. Her sunny disposition and quick wit were to be her defining traits. Famously, when at a banquet she was given a backhanded compliment on her fine characteristics despite her race,* she replied, “Seeing how all you white people act, I’m glad I’m not!”

  Florence, by contrast, was born into upper-class British society and was expected to become a wife and mother. She loudly bucked this expectation* by announcing that she was instead pursuing nursing—a plan that, to her family, was roughly equivalent to joining the circus.

  Mary spent her early years as a traveling businesswoman, but then changed course to nursing when she met her lifelong nemesis: cholera. In her writings, she referred to cholera in personal terms, describing her efforts at calling its bluff and physically fighting it. It ravaged many of the places where she lived and eventually frustrated her so much that she broke one of the greatest social taboos in her fight against it. After a one-year-old died of cholera, she bribed a gravedigger to let her examine the child’s body to try to learn more about the disease.

  Meanwhile, to hear Florence describe her profession, God Herself had prescribed her calling. After some travels abroad, Florence had felt more strongly than ever that she needed to help people. She took a job at the Institute for the Care of Sick Gentlewomen, but it was just a prelude to her achievements in the Crimean War.

  The Crimean War, a conflict that basically consisted of world powers picking over the bones of the Ottoman Empire, was a dirty affair. Conditions on the ground were so filthy that disease proved deadlier than the war itself. Once reports
of this situation made it back to England, an entire generation of women were inspired to head to Crimea and offer help—including Mary and Florence.

  Florence was first on the ground and instantly improved conditions. Within a year, she had helped bring down the death rate from 42 percent to 2 percent by improving procedures and petitioning the local sanitary commission to actually do its job. None of this was easy—during much of her time there she slept in a crowded room with 14 other people. Her wanderings at night among the wounded by lamplight would earn her the title “Lady of the Lamp.” By all accounts, she nearly killed herself from overwork.

  Mary had a harder time getting to Crimea. She described cheerily “laying siege” to the British secretary of war with the aim of joining the nurse corps, but was ultimately unsuccessful. Why, exactly, is lost to time, but given that she was old, eccentric, and black (characteristics that disqualified other applicants), it’s not a stretch to imagine these were the reasons. Undeterred, she decided to open a British hotel in Crimea, near the war front.

  It was here that Mary met, and came into conflict with, Florence. Mary aimed to dispense comfort above medical care, providing nutritious meals, free tea, and a comfortable, homey atmosphere. She charged for virtually everything she provided, which included alcohol—a substance that the temperate Florence abhorred. As one might imagine, her provisions, combined with her sunny disposition, made Mary quite popular among the soldiers. Florence, on the other hand, grew to dislike Mary so much that she started describing her hotel in terms reserved for brothels.

  Florence’s characterization of Mary is unfair—far from merely being a purveyor of entertainment, Mary put herself in danger on a terrifyingly regular basis. She would run into combat zones, delivering sustenance while literally dodging bombs. When an ammo supply exploded, injuring many soldiers, Mary’s first instinct was to run directly into the melee.