by Adams, Max;
An intelligent writer, grammarian, poet, knowledgeable in arithmetic, comprehensive in her learning; none in the palace was as noble as she.2
But this is a frustratingly thin biography. That she was remembered in the twelfth century tells us that her fame lasted. There is little more direct evidence of her life, but various references indicate that she was a slave or a freed slave; that she was perhaps responsible for the acquisition of books for the library. Slaves might come from anywhere, as captives of war or despoliation; as gifts from other rulers; as hostages. They might be base-born, or noble. In the reign of al-Hakam II’s predecessor, Abd al-Rahman III, almost four thousand slaves could be found toiling in the royal palace. Evidently, women of intellect and accomplishment, slave or free, were valued in Córdoba: 120 of them are recorded as having worked at copying the Qur’an; and the skills of the copyist, in an age before printing, should not be underestimated: it is best to think of the scribe in the same way as we do a concert pianist, trusted absolutely with bringing to life a distant, even sacred voice from the past. That women could achieve such accomplishments, in a highly patriarchal society in which they have been very much written out of history, is significant of an educational milieu otherwise difficult to visualise. It seems likely, from what we know of textile production elsewhere in Europe, that women were also intimately involved in the creation of Andalusia’s renowned silks.
In al-Andalus, as in the Germanic societies of the north, women might own and inherit property. Shamsie’s research also celebrates the life and work of a famous and long-lived poet, Wallada Bint al-Mustakfi (994–1091), daughter of a minor caliph, who held literary court at her home in the manner of an eighteenth-century salonière. Like several of the royal princesses of Anglo-Saxon England, she was sufficiently independent to be able to refuse marriage; nor would she consent to wear the prescribed veil. She openly conducted affairs with men and women. In response to accusations of harlotry, she embroidered one side of her robe with the words:
Forsooth, I allow my lover to touch my cheek and bestow my kiss on him who craves it.
While on the other side it read:
I am, by God, fit for high positions… and am going my way, with pride.3
Quite apart from its elegance of expression and the sly, brightly tipped barb against her critics, I find this compelling evidence for the idea that women understood textiles, the principal medium in which female control and agency seems to have been dominant, as canvases on which to inscribe their own stories and identities. Al-Andalus is said to have employed 13,000 weavers, many of them producing tiraz, cloth containing the sort of woven text that Wallada wore with such disdain for her accusers.
Wallada is known to have conducted an affair with an equally famous poet, Ibn Zaydún, whom she would subsequently describe as a sodomite, cuckold, adulterer and pimp, while several of his verses in praise of her also survive. A hundred years later, Abu al-Hasan Ibn Bassam, a writer from a then much-reduced Andalusian state, wrote that Wallada was:
…the first of the women of her time. Her free manners and disdain of her veil indicated an ardent nature… Her house at Cordova was the area in which poets and prose writers were vying with each other. The literary men were attracted toward the light of this brilliant new moon, as if it were a lighthouse in a dark night.4
Córdoba’s fame spread not just through the Islamic and Byzantine worlds but across Europe. In the elite royal abbey of Gandersheim, in what is now Lower Saxony (halfway between Berlin and Düsseldorf), a canoness named Hrotsvitha (c.935–73) had heard much of Córdoba’s greatness, and called it the ‘ornament of the world’. In Hrotsvitha’s time, Gandersheim’s abbess was a niece of the Holy Roman Emperor Otto I, under whose patronage something of an early cultural renaissance was fostered in Saxony. She was familiar with a number of classical Latin poets including Horace, Ovid and Virgil; and a large volume of her work survives, much of it in the form of dramatised hagiography. Her writings were ‘rediscovered’ by the German humanist scholar Conrad Celtes in the late fifteenth century and a twentieth-century English translation of much of her work allows Anglophone historians and dramatists access to it: the first secular drama written in the northern medieval world. Her style is colloquial, her Latin ‘decadent’, according to the translator Christopher St John (who compared some of Hrotsvitha’s characterisations to those of her own contemporary, a ‘Mr. Bernard Shaw’).
Hrotsvitha had a cultivated, dry wit, as the preface to her dramas reveals:
I have been compelled through the nature of this work to apply my mind and my pen to depicting the dreadful frenzy of those possessed by unlawful love, and the insidious sweetness of passion – things which should not even be named among us. Yet if from modesty I had refrained from treating these subjects I should not have been able to attain my object – to glorify the innocent to the best of my ability. For the more seductive the blandishments of lovers the more wonderful the divine succour and the greater the merit of those who resist, especially when it is fragile woman who is victorious and strong man who is routed with confusion.5
This sort of self-deprecation on the part of elite women of talent is surely ironic. Hrotsvitha would have been amused to know of posthumous memorials to her: since 1973, the city of Bad Gandersheim has awarded an annual Roswitha prize to female writers.#
Dhuoda: a mother’s handbook for her son
…I was given in lawful marriage on June 29, 824, in the palace of Aachen, to my lord Bernard, your father. And again, in the thirteenth year of that reign, on November 29, 826, with God’s help as I believe, you were born, issuing forth out of me into the world, mostly dearly desired first-born son.6
So begins the text of a very unusual document: a precious autobiographical window onto the life of a secular woman who lived through a tumultuous period in the Carolingian Francia of the ninth century. Dhuoda was a younger contemporary of the women interred in the Oseberg ship far to the north, a Christian noblewoman living in isolation from her husband and sons and far from happy with her lot. Almost all we know of her life is contained in a brief reflective preface to the extended letter in which she exhorts her son William to be obedient to his father, his lord and his God, and to pray for his mother’s soul.
From her own pen we read that Dhuoda had a second son, to whom she gave birth in the town of Uzès, a little north of Nîmes in the then southern border province of Septimania; but she does not even know his name, because:
He was still a baby and had not yet received the grace of baptism, when your lord and father to both of you had him brought to Aquitaine…
I have [she writes to William] been long deprived of your company, and I dwell in this town because my lord commands it. Though I am happy about the success of his campaigns, I am driven by my longing for you both… Despite the many cares that consume me, this anxiety is foremost in God’s established design – that I see you one day with my own eyes, if such is the Lord’s will.
Towards the end of the tremendously long text, full of biblical allusion, numerology, admonition and advice on morals, courtly behaviour and much more, we learn that Dhuoda is, or believes herself to be, nearing the end of her own life, having suffered many periods of illness and strife. She wishes her son to acknowledge the sacrifices she has made on behalf of her family and, perhaps, to make recompense for them:
In fulfilling my usefulness to my seigniorial lord Bernard, I am fearful that my feudal duties may falter in the March [the lands bordering the caliphate of Córdoba to the south] and in many other places. And to prevent his separating from you and me (as is the custom with many men) I feel I have gone heavily into debt.
In fact, to obtain many necessities I have frequently borrowed great sums with my own hands, not only from Christians but also from Jews. I have repaid what I could and will continue from now on to repay as much as I can. But if after my death any debts remain outstanding, I beg and beseech you to inquire thoroughly after my creditors.
Dhuoda, the
n, despite her elevated status as the wife and effective viceroy of a Frankish borderland state, suffered the fate of grass widows; what Jane Austen, in Persuasion, called ‘the tax of quick alarm’: deprived of company, affection and conversation, constantly fearful that she might be widowed or lose her estranged sons to the world of violent ambition and martial adventure to which they belonged.
What more, then, can we say of her circumstances, and of the fortunes of the men she loved? The venue for her marriage, Aachen, in what is now western Germany, hard against the borders of the Netherlands and Belgium, had been Charlemagne’s capital, from where he prosecuted wars against Saxons and Danes and administered the vast imperial machinery of a new Holy Roman Empire before his death in 814. Dhuoda is a Frankish name, so her background and milieu may have been northern. Her husband, Bernard, inherited lands around Toulouse and rose to prominence at the court of Louis the Pious, Charlemagne’s son. As Count of Barcelona and Septimania, he found himself policing the front line between an aggressive Islamic caliphate on the Iberian Peninsula and an empire in a state of fragile equipoise between factions wishing to succeed to parts of Louis’s bloated empire.
Bernard’s competent handling of southern affairs won him a privileged and powerful position as chamberlain at Louis’s court in about 829. From this time, with sons aged respectively five and three, Dhuoda must have found herself living an estranged life – as her husband’s deputy; as estate manager and feudal lord across large tracts of southern Francia; as absent mother to young children.
Bernard’s first reverse came when he was denounced for engaging in an adulterous affair with Louis’s famously desirable queen, Judith. In the competing factional conflicts that occupied the next decade, two of his brothers and his sister were killed. Somehow he survived, seemingly keeping his loyalties divided and avoiding direct conflict with the emperor until Louis’s death in 840. Thereafter, his position in the court of Charles the Bald, the Empress Judith’s son, was weak and in 841 he was forced to send his son William to court to join the royal household: as a warrior-in-training and noble foster-son, effectively a hostage. In the aftermath of the ensuing civil war between Louis’s sons, Bernard picked the wrong side and, a year after his wife had finished her letter to their son, he was executed on the orders of the king. His son William, taking up arms in vengeance, first allied himself with Pippin II, a grandson of Louis; then with Abd al Rahman II of Córdoba. By 850 he too was dead; his mother may not have lived to learn his fate.
Dhuoda left a poignant but hardly uplifting epitaph, which she hoped might be inscribed on a tomb enclosing her mortal remains, wishing that ‘passers-by who read it may worthily pray to God for me, unworthy woman that I am’.
Dhuoda’s body, formed of earth
Here lies buried in the tomb
Great king, receive her
Her frail body’s filth this ground enfolds
In the depths of the pit.
Kind king, grant her mercy
Ulcerous, humid her body lies now,
For her there is only the crypt’s dim shade
You, king, absolve her faults
On your journeying to and fro,
Men, women, of any age, pray thus I beg:
‘Great and holy, unbind her chains.’
Deep in the cave of the sepulchre’s dire wound
She has reached the end of her sullied life.
You, king, pardon her sins
And lest the worm of darkling gloom
Should seize her spirit, say this prayer:
‘God of mercy, succour her.’
No wayfarer shall pass this way
Without reading this. I beg all to pray:
‘Grant her rest, kindly one.’
Eternal light shall illumine her
With the saints. Decree, loving one.
May the amen welcome her after death.
The first letters of each verse, in her own Latin and in the modern English translation by Marcelle Thiébaux, spell her name as she would have written it, Dhuodane. With this last epigraphic play, she ends her letter to her son. We have no record of the site of her tomb. We can only say that in her loneliness and anguish, writing seems to have been her consolation.
Anna Comnena
Time in its irresistible and ceaseless flow carries along on its flood all created things, and drowns them in the depths of obscurity, no matter if they be quite unworthy of mention, or most noteworthy and important… but the tale of history forms a very strong bulwark against the stream of time, and to some extent checks its irresistible flow and, of all things done in it, as many as history has taken over, it secures and binds together, and does not allow them to slip away into the abyss of oblivion.7
So begins the sweeping, lyrical preface to Anna Comnena’s Alexiad, the epic fifteen-volume biography of her father, Emperor Alexius I of Constantinople (ruled 1081–1118). Anna (1083–c.1153) is the first Western female historian whose work survives and the Alexiad, written in Greek, is the principal near-contemporary Western source for the history of the First Crusade (1095–9), that immense, unwieldy expedition to the Holy Land precipitated by her father’s plea to Pope Urban II for military assistance. The Alexiad begins with an account of the wars against Norman invaders in the 1080s and her father’s rise to power – he is her Odysseus, steering his people through troubled seas. With herself as a bit-part player, Anna goes on to describe the chaotic arrival of the so-called People’s Crusade of 1096, led by Peter the Hermit, which overwhelmed the resources even of Constantinople; the barbarity of those whom she disparagingly calls ‘Latins’; the ferrying of the vast forces of the crusaders across the Bosporus and the locust-like effects of their progress through Asia Minor in 1097. Her father’s righteous distrust of the Norman Count Bohemond, prince of the crusader state of Antioch from 1098, is a centrepiece of her narrative.
Anna’s own notorious role in a coup against her brother, her exile and final seclusion, are stories left for others to tell, although she alludes to the
…tale of my woes [which] would not cause a movement in place, nor rouse men to arms and war, but they would move the reader to tears…8
Anna was in her early teens when the crusaders arrived; the magnificent figure of the great warlord Bohemond left a lasting impression on her:
…for he was a marvel for the eyes to behold, and his reputation was terrifying… he was so tall in stature that he overtopped the tallest by nearly one cubit, narrow in the waist and loins, with broad shoulders and a deep chest and powerful arms. And in the whole build of the body he was neither too slender nor overweighted with flesh, but perfectly proportioned… His skin all over his body was very white, and in his face the white was tempered with red. His hair was yellowish, but did not hang down to his waist like that of the other barbarians; for the man was not inordinately vain of his hair, but had it cut short to the ears. Whether his beard was reddish, or any other colour I cannot say, for the razor had passed over it very closely and left a surface smoother than chalk… His blue eyes indicated both a high spirit and dignity… A certain charm hung about this man but was partly marred by a general air of the horrible… He was so made in mind and body that both courage and passion reared their crests within him and both inclined to war. His wit was manifold and crafty and able to find a way of escape in every emergency. In conversation he was well informed, and the answers he gave were quite irrefutable. This man who was of such a size and such a character was inferior to the Emperor alone in fortune and eloquence and in other gifts of nature.9
At birth, Anna had been betrothed to Constantine Doukakis, a future candidate for the imperial throne. She was fostered in his mother’s household and showed early promise as a scholar:
I was not ignorant of letters, for I carried my study of Greek to the highest pitch, and I was also not unpractised in rhetoric; I perused the works of Aristotle and the dialogues of Plato carefully, and enriched my mind… It is not bragging to state what nature and my zeal for learni
ng have given me.10
Her future husband’s prospects were shattered by the birth, in 1087, of her brother, John, who became heir apparent and who inspired in his sister a malevolent hatred. Constantine’s claims to the throne were forfeit. He died shortly afterwards and instead Anna was married to the statesman, historian and military commander Nicephorus Bryennios the Younger (1062–1137). They raised four children and Anna was an enthusiastic promoter of his interests. After her father’s death in 1118 she seems to have been actively involved in a plot to bring her husband to power by murdering her brother at the funeral. In the aftermath of its dramatic failure her lands were forfeit and she was exiled to the convent of Kecharitomene.
Nicephorus died in 1137. Anna now gathered his historical materials and writings and developed them into the Alexiad as we know it: a propagandist apologia for her father’s career but also a masterpiece of scholarship and epic narrative. Its value as a source for the period lies in Anna’s detailed access to the imperial archives and her inside knowledge of a formative period of Middle Eastern history:
…as a rule I was with my father and mother and accompanied them. For it was not my lot to be brought up in the shade and in luxury, but even from my cradle… toils and afflictions and continual misfortunes beset me, some from without and some from within.11
The Alexiad is also unique for Anna’s interest in the fates of women caught up in the vicissitudes of war; of orphans, veterans and the sick. Contemporaries regarded her as an accomplished physician in her own right. Her self-conscious reflections on the writing of history and on her own place in it give modern readers a rare and marvellous balcony view onto an elite intellectual and cultural milieu in a time of great change.