Seductress (34 page)

But by the time she met Justinian, Theodora seems to have mended her ways. After an amorous tour through the East, she’d returned to Constantinople a born-again Monophysite, a religion that espoused the total divinity of Christ. According to tradition, Justinian saw her through a window at a spinning wheel and “conceived an overpowering passion for her.” He was then forty, heir apparent to the Eastern Roman Empire, and a devout, studious, “fascinating man.” In her early twenties Theodora was more than a picture of feminine piety. Beautiful and fine-boned, with an “elegant figure,” she had black, flashing eyes set in a perfectly proportioned, heart-shaped face. And she “knew how to put forth irresistible powers of fascination.” She percolated with sex appeal—wit, mischief, and off-color heat. Justinian called her his “sweetest charmer,” raised her to patrician status, and made her his wife. When he assumed the emperorship, she became Augusta and the unofficial coregent of the “most magnificent the civilized world had yet known.”

As Justinian’s “Honored Counselor,” Theodora parlayed her lessons in the seduction trade into political capital. Drawing on her theatrical training, she punched up the drama of office. She costumed herself like a walking epiphany with thick cosmetics, cascading diadems, and gowns fringed with diamonds the size of walnuts. Her resplendent apartments and lay-’em-in-the-aisles banquets, aflow with the rarest wines and delicacies, “dazzled and stupefied” visiting emissaries.

When she “wished to please,” ministers and advisers were helpless against her professional blandishments. She paired “consummate intelligence” with fetching affability. She praised, put men at ease, and kidded them if they grew too exigent. She improvised comic skits and once told a supplicant to rise off the floor, where he’d prostrated himself. “My dear sir,” she said, “you’ve got a big hernia on your behind.”

Yet she played the grand empress to perfection. Haughty and imperious, she maintained her own court and entourage and brooked no disrespect. “Mistress Eagle,” she let detractors know she meant business. She threw enemies in labyrinthine dungeons to rot and grow blind and ruthlessly pursued her own ambitions, some avaricious. She was all cosmic theater, a huge, variegated goddess-queen.

Although an able ruler in his own right, Justinian depended on Theodora’s political judgment. He included her in his council, let her handle foreign dignitaries and correspondence, and consulted her on every important question. With a “feel for large affairs and the stamina to see them through,” she had a sure sense of realpolitik. It was she who located the two trouble spots in the empire—rickety finances and religious division—and took measures to repair them.

At her instigation, Justinian passed the great reform of 535, which blew the whistle on embezzlers and sought religious harmony, one of the most divisive issues of the realm. Had Theodora’s policy of toleration toward the Monophysites prevailed, the eastern provinces of Asia, Syria, and Egypt might have been appeased and the empire salvaged.

As Inanna’s agent of sexual equality Theodora also instigated wide-sweeping reforms for women. Divorce laws were revised; pimps and rapists, punished by death; and actresses and prostitutes, granted legal protection. She founded a convent on the Bosphorus to shelter five hundred prostitutes.

Her courage saved Justinian’s regime during the Nika revolt of 532. When a rebel mob torched the city and stormed the palace gates, Theodora barred the path of fleeing deserters. Like the mythic “Brave One,” she called them to account. “If flight,” she exhorted, “were the only means of safety, yet I should disdain to fly. Death is the condition of our birth, but they who have reigned should never survive the loss of dignity and dominion.” “Flee,” she taunted. “For my part, I adhere to the maxim of antiquity, that the throne is a glorious sepulcher.”

Theodora died of cancer at fifty-one, devoutly religious and mourned by a desolated Justinian. Throughout their twenty-five years together he “loved her to distraction,” with blind fidelity. Without her life spirit and political counsel he lost his will to rule and let the kingdom disintegrate under his listless gaze. Her death marked the decadence and the end of the Byzantine Empire.

Theodora has paid dearly for her unwonted preeminence. As heiress of the sex goddess with the snake-entwined staff of sovereignty she’s been branded a “second Eve, a new Delilah” by nervous patriarchs. For centuries historians have preferred to see her going at it with gladiators rather than drafting laws and directing policy on a dais. But she, per the divine design, had both—queenship of the boudoir and “Queenship of the Throne Room.” Even the piously Christian Justinian seemed to sense that. He made members of the Senate “fall down before her as if she was a goddess.”

Throughout the Middle Ages troubadours celebrated the “sex symbol” of twelfth-century Europe; she “Draws the thoughts of all upon her/,” they sang, “As sirens lure the witless mariners/Upon the reefs.” The lady was Eleanor of Aquitaine, a formidable seductress, feudal magnate, and queen of two kings.

Instead of the reefs, however, she led both to greater kingcraft. She endowed her husbands with wealth and authority, directed their careers (not always to their liking), and governed astutely in their absence. Like her mythic counterpart Inanna, she equaled, even superseded her monarch-mates. Known as the “woman beyond compare,” she shaped the manners and culture of her time and combined everything in tall tale proportions: looks, style, stature, statesmanship, and seductive power.

Eleanor came by her administrative-amorous flair through birth and upbringing. She was born in 1122 into a “noble race” of gifted rulers and swashbuckling lovers. Her grandfather introduced courtly love poetry to France and was twice excommunicated for abducting the fiery “
Dangereuse
” (Eleanor’s grandmother) from her husband. Indifference to public opinion ran in her blood.

She was exceptional in other ways as well. Unlike most noble-women—illiterate, incarcerated in castles, and treated like feudal pawns—Eleanor grew up in enlightened circumstances. She lived at the epicenter of the medieval cultural renaissance. Schooled in the New Learning and chivalry, with its
courtoisie
and woman worship (an ersatz revival of goddess cults), she developed an unusual “maturity of mind,” “sprightliness,” and sense of self-worth. After her mother’s and brother’s deaths, her father made her his boon companion and took her on progresses through his fiefdoms. On these diplomatic rounds she watched suzerainty in action and soaked up the heady atmosphere of the Provençal courts, teeming with artists, musicians, scholars, poets, and unruly vassals.

Eleanor’s life took a momentous turn when she was fifteen. Her father died suddenly on a pilgrimage, and in one stroke she became heiress to the vast duchy of Aquitaine (roughly the southern third of France) and wife of the sixteen-year-old Louis VII. A culture shock awaited her. Accustomed to luxurious living and the oblations of amorous troubadours, she encountered a Paris still mired in the Dark Ages and an immature, monkish husband.

As she rolled into town with her retinue, Louis was smitten on sight. When merely the absence of deformity made a woman pretty, Eleanor was a major beauty: tall with blue eyes beneath high, arched brows, a straight Greek nose, a bowed mouth, and blond braids that fell to her waist.

She imposed her will on the king from the start. Flouting the hair shirt customs of the country, she enlivened the royal quarters with a posse of minstrels and merrymakers and filled her apartments with light, perfume, cushions, and color. Rondeaux and
pastourelles,
sung to zithers, wafted through the dark stone corridors of the palace.

Nothing like Eleanor’s “devilish” dress had ever been seen on the Île de la Cité. St. Bernard himself mounted the pulpit to inveigh against her ornate jewelry and “garnished” gowns with their long trains of “rich materials.” Her face paint was the mark of Satan; her daily baths were a crime against God; her undulating walk with her breasts “thrust forward” was a Jezebel’s strut.

Eleanor’s character, furthermore, dishonored Christian womanhood. She was capricious, insubordinate, nonmonogamous, and preemptory. She provided herself with a pet jongleur (an enamored Gascon poet), banished her disapproving mother-in-law to the provinces, and meddled in affairs of state. Most of Louis’s first acts on the throne show her hand.

He invaded Toulon to please her, and when he burned a church by accident in the process, he joined the Second Crusade to expiate the crime. Unwilling to be backbenched with other wives, Eleanor left her two-year-old daughter at home and went with him. Like the divine “Whirlwind Warrior,” she dubbed herself “lady of the golden boot” and galloped off to Jerusalem with a cavalcade of women dressed in armor and wielding battleaxes and spears.

En route she overstepped herself more than once. She reprimanded disobedient barons, cut sub-rosa deals with potentates, flirted with the suave Raymond of Antioch, and refused to accompany Louis when he botched the march on Jerusalem. At last, unable to bear his ineptitude any longer, she went over his head to Rome and wheedled a divorce from the pope. “Why do I renounce you?” Eleanor scolded her bereft husband, “Because of your fecklessness. You are not worth a rotten pear.” With mythic panache, she dispatched the defective king off for repairs.

She also renounced Louis for another reason, a better opportunity. After their return from the Holy Land, Eleanor seduced “one of the most formidable princes of Europe” under Louis’s nose. He was Henry, duke of Normandy, a stocky, high-mettled nineteen-year-old—heir to the northern chunk of France and England—and her husband’s sworn enemy. Although ten years older than Henry, Eleanor had made herself the most desirable, “most talked-of woman of her day.” The two had much in common: the same forceful personality, torrential ambition, political genius, and “robust sexual drive.”

Her conquest was swift. During a state visit in 1153, she swooped on him in form-fitting brocade and monopolized him at dinner. Flourishing her learning, she flattered and amused him and deployed the “hungry falcon politics” she practiced on her vassals: “Dangle the prize before their eyes, but be sure to withdraw it before they taste it.”

She piled on the prizes—hunting parties, steamy tête-à-têtes, and frequent displays of her skills, tact, and charm—then challenged him to a game of chess. When he took her queen as planned, she riposted, “You have taken a queen at chess. Could you, I wonder, capture one in the game of life?”

He rose to the bait. Defying his father, he fought off her enemies and married her. As his “divine ordainer” Eleanor bequeathed him the Angevin Empire, an immense domain extending from Scotland to the Pyrenees. At first they were happy; their strong, high-volt natures clicked. But despite eight children and continued mutual attraction, they grew apart. Henry usurped her authority in Aquitaine and relegated her to administrative dogwork while he stirred up fresh skirmishes with warlords and womanized.

Eleanor, in keeping with her divine lineage, struck back. She acquired a lover, the famous troubadour Bernard de Ventadour, and inveigled Henry into permitting her to rule Aquitaine again. There she ran a magnificent court and inspired an efflorescence of culture and art. Poetry, music, and literature flourished, and under her direction, the art of courtly love (she’d carried Ovid’s
Ars Amatoria
on the Crusades) was codified.

She also studied revenge. She aligned her sons and ex-husband in a three-pronged attack on Henry and would have won except for her children’s blunders. When Henry captured her, she taunted him so insolently that he imprisoned her in Salisbury Castle for fifteen years.

He should have heeded her Inanna-style harangue. Henry never learned, and he died defeated by his sons at Villendry, a disheartened bitter “Old Eagle,” whose last words were “Shame on a conquered king.”

Eleanor, by contrast, left captivity a “sovereign in full sail” in 1189 and ruled England with distinction during her son Richard I’s absence on the Crusades. She procured the lords’ allegiance to Richard, enacted reforms, standardized weights and measures, built hospitals, and defended the coast of England against invaders.

She died at eighty-two with her flags flying. Besieged in a castle defending her lands, she told her attackers she’d be “damned in hell” before she’d surrender. She ended her days peacefully at the Abbey of Fontrevault, where she was a patron of an asylum for abused women.

If the church fathers impugned her during her lifetime, the establishment leagued her with the “very devil” afterward. She was the anti-Madonna, precisely the person women were forbidden to be—powerful in body, mind, sex, and politics. According to the smears, she murdered Henry’s paramour, fomented patricidal havoc, and slept with sultans and slaves like a “common whore.” Even relatively modern portrayals malign her. In
The Lion in Winter
she’s a desiccated, bitter dumpee staring forlornly at her eye pouches in the mirror and upbraiding her husband’s pretty mistress.

She’s hard to fathom through the sexist fog machine. But seen aright, she’s one of the top
Machtweiber
of the pack, a medieval power broker, a king maker and breaker, who queened it over an inhospitable age with class, valor, and supernal sex appeal.

Argentina in the first half of the twentieth century might as well have been the Middle Ages for women. Under South American machismo, they lived as subpersons—uneducated, disenfranchised, homebound, and divided into Madonnas and whores. The Evita anomaly still stumps scholars: how a demimonde adventuress could walk into the control room of the country, take over Juan Perón’s administration, and become an “ideal of feminine power.”

The answer was myth. The wily Evita scrambled the Madonna-whore signals and hit a deeper nerve, the submerged desire for the archaic, all-complete goddess. In her case she drew on an Inanna archetype, the sacred agent of male rule. Without Evita, Juan couldn’t have cut it. Her political antennae and clever mythic strategy won him the presidency and secured their totalitarian control of Argentina for six years.