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

by Jason Porath

  Let’s be clear: said historian, Yagiri Tomeo, is kind of a nut. He’s posited any number of bizarre conspiracy theories that have been discredited, but when it comes to Kenshin, he brings forth some evidence that is not as easily dismissed:

  • Kenshin had severe stomach cramps on a monthly basis, around the 10th of the month. He actually scheduled his military campaigns around this.

  • Kenshin’s cause of death was recorded as a form of uterine cancer—by a doctor who made virtually no mistakes in the rest of the book in which this information is found.

  • When the Uesugi were forced to relocate, they reportedly took Kenshin’s remains with them and refused to tell even the shogun where he was interred. This rules out DNA testing.

  • Kenshin’s personal tastes and appearance were consistently described in feminine terms, which, given the extreme subtleties of the Japanese language, is actually a bigger deal than it might seem.

  • Kenshin was the only man allowed by the shogun to wander among his harem.

  • Kenshin never married and never had children (although he did adopt).

  Why would Kenshin pose as a man? According to the law of the time, a clan’s leader had to be a man or the shogun could divide up the clan holdings and give them away.

  All that said, it’s tremendously unlikely. Kenshin had three older brothers, thus obviating any need for his parents to present a daughter as a son. Given the records of the time, it would be very hard to hide Kenshin’s birth sex or rewrite it later. The most obvious explanation is that Kenshin was intersex, but even that is subject to debate.

  Nana Asma’u

  (1793–1864, NIGERIA [SOKOTO CALIPHATE])

  The Princess Who Loved Learning

  If you lived in western Africa during the 1800s, you were in jaji territory. Roaming across the land in their telltale hats, the jaji were notorious gangs of women. Under the orders of their leader, Princess Nana Asma’u, these take-no-crap ladies would wait until you were home, burst into your house, and educate you to within an inch of your life.

  Yes, the jaji were itinerant female teachers.

  The jaji were born out of Nana Asma’u’s love of education. Fluent in four languages and well versed in many more, the princess of the Sokoto Caliphate translated books, wrote her own, and read everything she could get her hands on. Early in her life, she came to the conclusion that learning without teaching is empty. Thus, jaji.

  The jaji were a clever idea. Tasked with the goal of bettering women’s place in society, the jaji tailored their curriculum to the average woman. They used mnemonics and poetry to teach their largely illiterate students in the comfort of their own homes—often as they took care of household duties. They taught the basics of reading and writing, with the Qur’an as their source.

  Now, it is entirely possible that “wandering bands of female teachers” would not be the first image to pop into your mind when you think about an African Islamic state—which is a shame. The Sokoto Caliphate, birthed in (and maintained by) bloody conflict around the interpretation of Islamic law, was the largest nation in Africa for almost 100 years. It held women in high regard—Nana Asma’u herself served as court adviser, sending orders to governors and debating foreign scholars. She advanced the idea that the search for knowledge is a religious imperative, and that women should be able to move about freely for just that purpose.

  Unfortunately, in recent years, the Sokoto Caliphate (and Nana Asma’u along with it) has figured in the cultural zeitgeist mostly as a “precursor” of sorts to the horrific gang of ignorant murderers known as Boko Haram. This group, whose name translates to “Western education is forbidden,” aims to end the influence of Western cultures in Africa and start their own caliphate. Citing as inspiration the work of Nana Asma’u’s father, who founded the Sokoto Caliphate, these thugs made worldwide headlines in 2014 for kidnapping 276 schoolgirls, inspiring the “Save Our Girls” social media campaign.

  Nana Asma’u deserves to be remembered in a more positive light.

  Julie “La Maupin” d’Aubigny

  (1670–1707, FRANCE)

  The Sword-Slinger Who Burned Down a Convent to Bang a Nun

  At the top of the list of history’s greatest rascals is undoubtedly “La Maupin,” Julie d’Aubigny: sword-slinger, opera singer, and larger-than-life bisexual celebrity of 17th-century France. Her life was a whirlwind of duels, seduction, grave robbing, and convent burning so intense that she had to be pardoned by the king of France twice.

  La Maupin (her opera name, which this book will use, since nobody’s 100 percent sure her real name was Julie) had a real piece of work for a father. As the man in charge of training Louis XIV’s pages, her father would fence nonstop during the day and hit up gambling dens, bars, and brothels in the evenings. Given the seedy circles in which he ran, it should be little surprise that his main ideas for daddy-daughter bonding time were (a) teaching her how to use deadly weapons and (b) using said weapons to drive off any potential suitors.

  This paternal embargo on genital contact backfired when our heroine found a loophole: shtupping her dad’s boss, the one guy her dad couldn’t challenge to a duel.

  When said boss became frustrated with La Maupin’s increasingly wild ways, he arranged her marriage to a mild-mannered clerk, thinking that might settle her down. She responded in the only sensible manner—by taking an itinerant swordsman as a new lover and leaving home to wander aimlessly through France.

  She earned her living through singing and dueling demonstrations, usually dressed as a man—a fashion she’d maintain throughout her life. She was already so skilled with the sword (quickly surpassing her new lover) that audiences sometimes would not believe that she was actually a woman. In fact, when one drunken onlooker proclaimed loudly that she had to be a man, she tore off her shirt, providing him with ample evidence to the contrary. The heckler had no comeback.

  If La Maupin had one overriding flaw, it was an allergy to boredom. In fact, she soon dumped the wandering swordsman, pronounced herself tired of men in general, and seduced a local merchant’s daughter. The merchant, desperate to separate the two, sent his daughter to a convent—but again, our heroine found a loophole. La Maupin joined the convent herself and started hooking up with her intended in the house of God. Shortly into their convent stint, an elderly nun died (from natural causes, it would seem), and La Maupin reacted the same way anyone might: by disinterring the body, putting it in her lover’s room, and setting the whole convent on fire.

  The two ladies ran off in the confusion and enjoyed a long elopement. After three months, La Maupin got bored, dumped her nun lover, and ran off into the night.

  For this bout of shenaniganery, La Maupin was sentenced to death. In response, she approached her first paramour (her dad’s boss) and, through his influence, convinced Louis XIV (who by this point had his hands full with Hortense and Marie Mancini) to pardon her. The king did so, and La Maupin took advantage of her new lease on life by running off to Paris and joining the opera.

  And this was all before she was 20! Makes you feel like an underachiever.

  Her behavior grew only more outrageous when she became an opera singer—basically the rock stars of the day. In true theater major fashion, she alternately sparred with and slept her way through her stage contemporaries, and audiences loved her for it. Here are three stories to exemplify her time in Paris:

  • Another opera singer, named Duménil was a notorious trash-talker, and his main target was La Maupin. She responded by ambushing him, pushing a sword in his face, and demanding a duel. When he refused (on the grounds that he was a wimp), she beat him with a cane, stealing his snuffbox and watch. The next day she caught him complaining that he had been assaulted by a gang of thieves. She called him a liar and a coward, threw his watch and snuffbox at him, and declared that she alone had architected his ass-beating.

  • One night while she was out carousing on the town, a particularly ardent man named d’Albert began crudely hitting
on her. She’d just finished singing for the crowd, and he let loose with the one-liner “I’ve listened to your chirping, but now tell me of your plumage”—the 17th-century equivalent of the come-on “Does the carpet match the drapes?” She was, shall we say, unimpressed. In short order, she got into a fight with him and two of his buddies, won, and ran her sword clean through his shoulder. She felt a bit bad about that, so she visited her impaled victim in the hospital and hooked up with him anyway. Although the relationship only lasted a short while, they apparently became lifelong friends.

  • She attended a royal ball (thrown by either Louis XIV or his brother) dressed as a man. She spent most of the evening courting a young woman and thus earned the ire of three of the woman’s suitors. When La Maupin pushed things too far and kissed the young lady in full view of everyone, the three challenged her to a duel. She fought all of them—outside of the royal palace, mind you—and won. According to some accounts, she actually killed them. This entertained Louis XIV so much that he pardoned her from any punishment.

  Actually, La Maupin didn’t get off scot-free for that last one. The anti-dueling laws of the time were becoming increasingly severe, and even though the king had basically pardoned her (musing that the law governed men but didn’t say anything about women), she still was forced to run off to Brussels until the heat died down. While in Brussels, she (surprise) took another lover, this time the Elector of Bavaria. The two grew apart in short order. Apparently the Elector was a bit alarmed when La Maupin stabbed herself onstage with an actual dagger, as part of a theatrical performance. When she was offered 40,000 francs to leave on good terms, she threw the coin purse at the Elector’s emissary and started swearing at the poor man. In some versions, she also kicked the emissary down the stairs.

  After that, she returned to Paris and died five or six years later of unknown causes at the age, as best anyone can tell, of 37. Her life story was thereafter reported in a number of articles, usually in the pearl-clutching, vapor-having tone a high-society woman might use to describe the bride of Satan. Several of these stories claimed that La Maupin had a massive change of heart late in life, became religious, and (re-)joined a convent. Given that these articles seemingly only exist to use her life as a morality tale, it’s best to take them with a brick of salt. It is generally agreed, however, that she spent the final years of her life reunited with her husband and lived fairly peacefully.

  That’s right, she was technically married through it all. Don’t worry if you forgot about that detail. This author did too. Heck, so did she, from the sounds of it.

  • ART NOTES AND TRIVIA •

  The picture is meant to evoke the sense of La Maupin running madly through France, leaving a trail of chaos in her wake. The lights coming from the house suggest spotlights and the authorities looking for her.

  Her design is consistent with what is known about her looks: that she had blue eyes, light skin, dark curly hair, an aquiline nose, an athletic build, and, apparently, perfect breasts.

  As was French fashion around the time, she has a beauty mark on her face. Depending on where you placed the mole, it would communicate something different. La Maupin’s means “passionate,” which seemed appropriate.

  Her story, although endlessly recounted as verbatim truth, is difficult to verify—and the sources themselves are somewhat suspect. It’s entirely likely that much of the story is hyperbolic at best, but that doesn’t stop it from being a rollicking good time.

  Nanny of the Maroons

  (C. 1680–C. 1750, JAMAICA)

  The Mother of Us All

  Let’s face it, the story of much of the 1700s and 1800s was one of the European powers using the world for target practice. Innumerable are the queens and kings of the rest of the world who met violent and undeserved ends at the ends of European muskets.

  Queen Nanny* of Jamaica’s Windward Maroons was no such figure. For Nanny kicked in the Brits’ teeth. Repeatedly.

  First, some background on the Maroons. When Jamaica was being settled by Europeans, they would routinely bring slaves over from Africa. Just as routinely, said slaves would escape and run off to other parts of the island, often in huge numbers—we’re talking up to 300 people at a time walking off the job. This resulted in two large communities of Maroons (escaped slaves): the western-side (Leeward) Maroons and the eastern-side (Windward) Maroons, led by Nanny.

  In a shocking turn of events, the British weren’t too cool with communities of escapees who routinely raided their settlements and freed their slaves. And so the British set in motion their time-honored tradition of killing their former servants, both bodily and in reputation. While the former did not prove very effective, as you will soon see, the latter served to significantly muddy the waters. So keep in mind that much of what we know about Queen Nanny is a combination of Jamaican oral history and centuries-old smack-talk from angry racists.*

  This is what we do know for sure: Nanny stomped the British. Records on both sides show entire British platoons* being wiped out for every one or two Maroon casualties. How did the Maroons achieve this? According to the histories, they had several methods—see if you can tell where facts start becoming legends:

  • Nanny set several lookouts throughout the island with cow horns (abeng) that they could blow to communicate the number, distance, and armament of oncoming British troops. This communication would move across the island quickly, giving the Maroons upwards of six hours to prepare for any assault.

  • The Maroons manipulated the entryway to their town to the point where people could only approach one at a time, in single file. Combined with the advance warning, the British were basically sitting ducks.

  • Nanny would camouflage her soldiers in tree branches and vines, teaching them to stand still and slow their breathing for long periods of time. One British record states that their troops would come to a clearing, hang their coats on a tree, and promptly be decapitated by the same “tree” a couple minutes later.

  • She would set out a cauldron that boiled without fire and cast several herbs into it. The British, upon encountering it, would pass out from the fumes and fall off a cliff.*

  • She could catch bullets and throw them back at the British with deadly force. This led to the modern-day Jamaican saying to chastise selfish people, “Granny Nanny didn’t catch bullets for you alone.” British chroniclers of this legend, in their characteristic sophistication, claimed that she caught bullets (and tossed them back) with her buttocks. Stay classy, y’all.

  • When the Maroons ran low on food, Nanny procured more through magical methods that were part “Jack and the Beanstalk,” part Hanukkah: when her people were near starvation, she planted several pumpkin seeds, and they grew into full-fledged pumpkins almost overnight.

  Regardless of the boundary between fact and fiction, the Maroons remained undefeated, and after almost two decades of warfare the British negotiated a peace treaty. Although she is mentioned in the negotiations, Nanny didn’t sign the peace treaty (one of her headmen did),* and from there she falls into the fog of history.

  One of the most mysterious facets to Nanny is her origin. Oral tradition describes her as Ghanian royalty and says that she arrived in Jamaica a free woman with a retinue of slaves.* Some tellings paint this series of events as Nanny sending herself by boat to the New World in order to rescue her kinsmen. Various tellings describe her as having one sister and up to five brothers.

  After her death, her legacy lived on. Her face adorns the Jamaican $500 bill, and her name graces any number of schools, offices, and towns. The Windward Maroons, still mostly governed by women, live in Moore Town, formerly known as New Nanny Town. The site of the original Nanny Town, abandoned around 1743, remains a sacred site for the Maroons. Superstition has it that any bakra (white person) who tries entering the area will get lost, fall ill, or die. Seeing as this actually happened around a dozen times in the 19th and 20th centuries, it would seem there’s something to it.

  Xtabay
/>   (MESOAMERICAN MYTH)

  Siren of the Yucatán

  Before you continue reading, look at the art. Gather your initial impression. Got it? Good—remember that.

  Now, if you’ve heard of Xtabay, you probably know she’s a demonic temptress who lures unsuspecting (read: horny) men to their deaths in fields of Yucatán cacti. She’s another variation on the Siren myth, like Iara. You may then ask, “Why is she in this book? We already have a Siren entry!” The answer is the part most people don’t know about: Xtabay’s backstory.

  A long time ago, in an Edenic little village, there lived two beautiful Mesoamerican girls: Utz-Colel and Xkeban.* Utz-Colel was chaste and pure, virtuous to a fault. Xkeban was . . . not. She was quite open with her favors, so to speak. She liked the fellas, you could say. Not shy around the menfolk, if you know what I’m saying.

  Madonna/whore complex. I’m talking about the Madonna/whore complex.

  However, things were not as simple as all that. Xkeban’s wide-ranging affections extended to helping the homeless, the sick, and the poor. She’d sell the gifts suitors gave her to raise money for the less fortunate. Utz-Colel, by comparison, took her virginal austerity to extremes, refusing to even smile at the less fortunate. Helping the downtrodden wasn’t exactly on her social calendar.

  One day a sweet perfume began wafting over the village. Tracking it to its source, the villagers, to no small shock, found Xkeban dead in her house. Utz-Colel didn’t believe for a second that the smell was actually emanating from Xkeban: she reasoned that since Xkeban had been so “dirty” in life, she could only emanate a mighty stink in death. She continued thinking this even after Xkeban was buried and sweet-smelling flowers* sprang from her grave.