Читать книгу The Women’s History of the World - Rosalind Miles - Страница 25

As Pulcheria’s story shows, women learned very early on how to operate the machinery of power, how to manoeuvre successfully within frameworks which may have constricted their actions but never prevented them from achieving their deeper goals. So the magnificent Theodora, one-time bear-keeper, circus artiste and courtesan who fulfilled every Cinderella fantasy when she married the Prince Justinian, heir to the Byzantine Empire in A.D. 525, proposed her measures to the Councils of State, ‘always apologizing for taking the liberty to talk, being a woman’.³⁶ Yet from behind this façade Theodora pushed through legislation which gave women rights of property, inheritance and divorce, while at her own expense she bought the freedom of girls who had been sold into prostitution, and banished pimps and brothel-keepers from the land.

Unlike Theodora, who used her borrowed power with magisterial altruism, other women displayed an appetite for realpolitik in its cruellest forms. The Roman empresses Drusilla Livia (c.55 B.C.–A.D. 29) and Valeria Messalina (A.D. 22–48) were among many who engaged in endless violent intrigues, including the free use of poison on any obstacles to their designs. Poison was also one of the weapons of the legendary beauty Zenobia. This Scythian warrior queen routed the Roman army, went on to capture Egypt and Asia Minor, and, when finally defeated by the Romans, escaped death by seducing a Roman senator. She later married him, and lived on into a gracious retirement until her death in A.D. 274.

Unquestionably though, the female Bluebeard of dynastic power games must be Fredegund, the Frankish queen who died in A.D. 597. Beginning as a servant at the royal court, she became the mistress of the king, whom she induced to repudiate one wife and murder another. When the sister of the dead queen, Brunhild, became her mortal enemy as a result, Fredegund engineered the death of Brunhild’s husband and plunged the two kingdoms into forty years of war. Fredegund’s later victims included all her stepchildren, her husband the king, and finally her old enemy Queen Brunhild, whom she subjected to public humiliation and atrocious torture in the face of the army for three days before Brunhild’s death put an end to her sport: after which she died at last peacefully in her own bed.