Princesses Behaving Badly (2 page)

C
A
. 5
TH CENTURY
T
HE ICY WATERS OF THE
B
ALTIC
S
EA

P
rincess Alfhild had a choice to make. On the one hand, a really awesome guy had finally managed to bypass her father’s deadly defenses and call on her without being beheaded or poisoned. She could marry this brave young man and enjoy the life of domestic bliss that women of her era were supposed to aspire to. Or she could give up royal life and become a pirate.

Guess which path she chose?

The only daughter of the fiercely protective fifth-century Goth king Siward, little Alfhild was raised to be modest, almost pathologically so. She was supposedly so modest that she kept her face “muffled in a robe” lest the sight of her incredible beauty provoke any nearby men to go mad with lust.

Alfhild had good reason to be so dedicated to preserving her chastity. Her story appears in the
Gesta Danorum
(Deeds of the Danes), a twelfth-century multivolume work in Latin by historian Saxo Grammaticus. If Saxo is to be believed, virginity was pretty much the only currency a woman had. But covering her face was just one of the measures taken to keep her untouched by a man. According to Saxo, King Siward did what any father of a pretty teenage daughter would do if he could:

There was, however, one young man whose “heated spirits” were inflamed by these strictures, who thought “that peril of the attempt only made it nobler.” His name was Alf, and he was the son of the Danish king Sigar. One day Alf burst into Alfhild’s chamber. Clad in a bloody animal hide (to drive the reptiles insane,
obviously
), he killed the viper by tossing a red-hot piece of steel down its gullet. The snake he dispatched by more traditional means: a spear to the throat.

Though impressed by how the rash young Dane had destroyed his reptilian defenses, Siward would accept him only if Alfhild “made a free and decided choice” in his favor. Alfhild was definitely charmed by the brave suitor who’d just killed her delightful pets; her mother, however, was not. She told Alfhild to “search her mind” and not to be “captivated
by charming looks” or forget to “judge his virtue.”

Swayed by her mother’s wise counsel, Alfhild decided that Alf was not the man for her. Instead, she decided to trade her modesty for men’s clothing and go to sea as a rampaging pirate, leading a crew of lady buccaneers. As you do.

Why Alfhild decided to become a pirate is unclear. Saxo makes no attempt to explain her reasons, nor does he say why the “many maidens who were of the same mind” and accompanied her were of the same mind. Despite her unconventional decision, Alfhild’s story was typical of historical lore of the period in one important way: the overprotection of chastity, to the exclusion of both fun and safety, speaks to the realities and values of ancient Scandinavia. And it’s certainly of a piece with other shield-maiden stories, romantic tales of virgin warrior women who put down needlework and took up arms.

Although he does little to explain her motivation, Saxo took pains to note that Alfhild, though unusual in her adoption of “the life of a warlike rover,” wasn’t entirely unique. Other women, he claimed, “abhorred dainty living” and traded their natural “softness and light-mindedness” for swords and weapons. They “unsexed” themselves, “devoting those hands to the lance which they should rather have applied to the loom. They assailed men with their spears whom they could have melted with their looks, they thought of death and not of dalliance.” Women, according to Saxo, should be off doing lady things and keeping their pretty faces hidden so as not to inflame the passions of unsuspecting men. That men’s unbridled passion was hazardous enough to drive women to take up a weapon doesn’t seem to have crossed his mind.

In any case, Alfhild was a raging success as a pirate. Given that becoming a pirate wasn’t simply a matter of picking up a cutlass and slapping on an eyepatch, exactly how or why she succeeded is lost to the ages. Saxo is rather stingy with the details. But despite his prudish misgivings on the subject of women warriors, he concedes that Alfhild “did deeds beyond the valor of woman” (
harrumph
). She led her lady mateys to great riches,
eventually becoming captain of yet another crew, this time of male pirates who were entranced by her beauty and devoted to her badassness. In time, Alfhild amassed a fleet of ships that preyed on vessels cruising the waters off Finland.

But the good times were about to come to an end. Alfhild hadn’t reckoned on one thing: the doggedness of her rejected snake-slaying suitor. Alf had never given up on the beautiful, modest maiden and pursued her on “many toilsome voyages,” over ice-locked seas and through several of his own pirate battles. While sailing the coasts of Finland, one day he and his crew came upon a flotilla of pirate ships. His men were against attacking such a large fleet with their few vessels, but Alf would have none of it, claiming that “it would be shameful if anyone should report to Alfhild that his desire to advance could be checked by a few ships in the path.” Oh, the irony.

As the sea battle raged on, the Danes, between being massacred, wondered where “their enemies got such grace of bodily beauty and such supple limbs.” Alf, along with his comrade-in-arms Borgar, stormed one of the enemy ships and made for the stern, “slaughtering all that withstood him.” But when Borgar knocked the helmet off the nearest pirate, Alf saw to his astonishment that it was none other than the beautiful Alfhild, “the woman whom he had sought over land and sea in the face of so many dangers.”

At that moment, Alf realized “that he must fight with kisses and not with arms; that the cruel spears must be put away, and the enemy handled with gentler dealings.” Those gentler dealings included getting Alfhild out of those sweaty sailor’s clothes and into Alf’s warm bed. And so the plundering days were over—for Alfhild at least.

The language Saxo uses to describe Alfhild’s return to princess life is particularly telling: he writes that Alf “took hold of her eagerly,” “made her change her man’s apparel,” and “afterwards begot on her a daughter.” What Alfhild wanted, and how she felt about giving up her roving adventures, is unknown, probably because Saxo didn’t really care; the words he chose make it clear that Alfhild did not have a choice. After that, history (or Saxo, at least) has nothing more to say about her.

Saxo’s tale of the modest princess-turned-pirate may or may not be true. After all, the
Gesta Danorum
is a “history” that includes giants, witches, and dragons alongside real-life heroes and rulers. Still, Alfhild’s life as a woman warrior is likely based in a real tradition, and whether true or not, her story (and others in Saxo’s rich tapestry of historical lore) was claimed to be instructive by later scholars and historians in understanding early and middle Scandinavian culture.

But what exactly did it teach future generations, those children who would have listened to the tale all snuggled up around the fire on one of those endless Scandinavian winter nights? It’s hard to say. To the modern reader, it’s disappointing to see Alfhild’s exploits subdued by man and marriage. Why couldn’t she have been a wife
and
a mother
and
a pirate? But before judging the story by a yardstick of twenty-first-century feminist values, let’s remember that Saxo was recording his version of Danish history for a Christian audience living some 700 years after Alfhild’s lifetime.

In Saxo’s hands, Alfhild’s saga, itself based on centuries-old pagan oral tradition, reinforces Christian gender norms. Alfhild is modest and chaste but also handy with an axe and a sword, in keeping with shield-maiden folklore. Alf must somehow overcome her fierceness to be worthy of her. And of course everything works out in the end, because Alfhild gives up the life of a “warlike rover” to settle down to her role of wife and mother. Saxo makes it clear how he feels about such women-in-arms—in fact, he spends more time lamenting them than he does describing Alfhild’s life.

So, in its way, the story of Alfhild is as much a didactic fairy tale as Cinderella or Snow White. It just has more swashbuckling … and snakes.

Pingyang

C
A
. 600–623
T
ANG
D
YNASTY
C
HINA

Y
ou don’t take down a corrupt emperor all on your own. As a general’s daughter, Pingyang knew this well. So when her father and her brother were struggling to combat the emperor’s army, she didn’t wait around to become war booty. She raised and commanded her own army of more than 70,000. With her help, her father was able to take the imperial throne and start a dynasty regarded as a golden age in imperial China.

And did we mention she did all that before the age of 20?

Pingyang was the daughter of General Li Yuan, a garrison commander in seventh-century China who controlled a substantial army. Li Yuan didn’t exactly
want
to be a rebel leader—he was a distant cousin of the reigning emperor—but he was influential, powerful, and ambitious. And for that reason he eventually found himself in the sights of the paranoid emperor of the Sui dynasty, Yangdi.

Yangdi remains, even today, one of the great mustachio-twirling villains of Chinese history. He murdered his own father to secure the throne, and once there, squandered his country’s money and military might on failed expeditions to conquer foreign lands. He also used what was left of the treasury to finance expensive building projects for his own glory. Now broke, he raised taxes. But no one could pay them—Yangdi had conscripted all the able-bodied men for his army, leaving too few behind to farm and earn money. In 613–14, his overburdened people began to revolt—just starving peasants at first, but the rebellion soon spread to opportunistic nobles and government officials. Terrified, Yangdi began to imprison or execute anyone he found suspicious.

Yangdi had long been wary of Li Yuan, and with good reason. Sure, it was concerning that Li Yuan was an ambitious general with a strong army. But more worryingly, Li Yuan supposedly sported a birthmark in the shape of a dragon under his left armpit, an obvious sign he was destined to be emperor. Yangdi’s suspicions were further confirmed in 615, when a popular street ballad making the rounds foretold that the next emperor would be named Li. Since Li was one of China’s most common surnames, the prediction could have meant just about anybody, but Yangdi was pretty sure he knew which Li posed the greatest threat.

In 617 Yangdi gave the order to imprison Li Yuan, on the pretext that the general had been caught having sex with not one but two of Yangdi’s concubines, a capital offense. But Yangdi was forced to rescind the command when he fell under the threat of rebels and needed help. Li Yuan, of course, saw which way the wind was blowing and realized he had two choices: seize the moment and rebel openly or be crushed in the emperor’s panic. He chose rebellion.

Aided by the neighboring eastern Turks, Li Yuan pulled together an army of more than 30,000. He sent secret messages to his son Li Shimin and son-in-law Cao Shao (Pingyang’s husband), informing them of his plans. That made things for Pingyang and her husband a bit tricky—they were living at the emperor’s court, where Cao Shao was head of the imperial guards. Cao Shao told his wife of his plans to sneak away and join her father’s rebel army, but he worried she would be in danger after he left. There was no doubt she would be; Yangdi was more than capable of holding Pingyang hostage or harming her to get back at her father and husband. But Pingyang wasn’t the type to faint or fret or wait around to be tossed in a dungeon. She told her husband she could take care of herself, and a few fraught days after he left the palace, she did just that.

Pingyang made her way to her family’s estate in the province of Hu. There, she found the people starving—not only was war afoot, but a severe drought had brought widespread famine. So Pingyang opened the food stores to the hungry masses, an act that forever endeared her to them. It also indebted them to her, a clever move for a woman who would soon need to raise her own army.