The real surprise is that the Tang dynasty would continue for another 200 years, shocking given its members’ murderous (and suicidal) tendencies to kill themselves and each other.
Njinga of Ndongo
THE PRINCESS WHO KEPT MALE CONCUBINES IN DRAG
CA. 1581–DECEMBER 17, 1663
SOUTHWESTERN AFRICA (PRESENT-DAY ANGOLA)
The year was 1621. Princess Njinga was charged by her half brother Mbandi, ruler of the West African kingdom of Ndongo, to meet with Portuguese officials. For decades, the two powers had been fighting an on-and-off war, with the Europeans trying to seize more territory and resources. Now a treaty seemed possible. But when Njinga met with the Portuguese governor, she was faced with a blatant power play intended to humiliate her. While the governor lounged comfortably like a king on a throne, Njinga was not even offered a chair.
The princess was having none of this nonsense. At her gesture, one of her maidservants got down on hands and knees. Njinga then sat on the woman’s back and addressed the governor as an equal. The negotiations were successful, and the peace treaty was signed. And just a few years later, Njinga would be sitting on a throne of her own—and it wouldn’t be made of maidservants.
POLITICS AS USUAL
Njinga was the eldest daughter of the ruler of the Ndongo kingdom, a loose federation of Mbundu-speaking tribes in what is now the Central African state of Angola. At the time of her birth, the country was roughly 100 years into a complicated relationship with the Portuguese; the colonizers had arrived in the area in 1483 and been working hard to enslave or convert the population ever since.
This situation didn’t exactly sit well with the people of Ndongo, though not entirely for the reasons you might think. A slave trade already existed between Ndongo and Kongo, its neighbor to the north, largely in war captives; by the 1500s, the two countries shared this trade with the Portuguese. But the Europeans were always angling for a bigger piece of the pie. The Ndongo nation fought several wars with Portuguese forces over independence and control of the slave trade and profitable salt and silver mines. Of course, that didn’t mean that Africans and Europeans were always at odds. If, say, the king of Kongo was getting a little grabby in their territory, Ndongo rulers called on the Portuguese as allies.
But in 1575, the Portuguese upped the tension by establishing a colony at the city of Luanda, located between the two kingdoms’ territories, and started to stir up dissension among some of the disaffected factions nominally under Ndongo rule. Njinga’s father, Ngola Kilajua (ngola means “king”; the word was later taken by the Portuguese as the name of Angola), went to war against them, kicking off a protracted and bloody dispute.
Princess Njinga was born into this uncertain landscape of shifting alliances and near-constant conflict. Stories about her childhood read like something out of Girls’ Own Adventure. She was a tomboy who could hold a spear like a warrior and preferred climbing trees to doing more traditional girl things. She also didn’t take any crap—she once beat her half brother Mbandi bloody after he stole her beaded necklace, humiliating him in front of the entire village.
The mythos about Njinga tells us that she grew into a strong, proud, decisive princess, the kind who was born to rule. But when her father died in 1617, her gender precluded her from ascending to the throne. It was Mbandi who became king, but only after murdering another brother as well as Njinga’s infant son. As you might imagine, Mbandi was neither a benevolent nor a sensible ruler. One story claims that when Njinga spoke out against his plans to pit his spear-armed warriors in open battle against the cannon-armed Portuguese, he had her forcibly sterilized. The Portuguese also knew his faults and pressed their advantage, sending missionaries and soldiers farther into Ndongo territory.
So in 1621, Princess Njinga was sent by her cowardly, villainous sibling to meet with the Portuguese governor and negotiate the end of hostilities. Njinga forced the governor to meet her eye to eye, both figuratively and literally. The treaty was signed, the Portuguese recognized the sovereignty of the Mbundu-speaking people, and all it cost was the return of a few European captives.
Three years later, Mbandi was dead and Njinga took the throne with the backing of a grateful people. She reengaged the Portuguese after they broke the peace treaty (surprise!) and relocated her subjects to a more defensible location in the highlands. From there, Njinga directed a guerilla war that left the invaders demoralized and weakened, holding them off for four decades. After her death, the kingdom disintegrated. Yet, even as Ndongo became Angola under Portuguese rule, her people still remembered her. In 1860, a Scottish missionary recorded meeting an Angolan man who told him, “In Angola, every living, breathing thing, down to the last blade of grass in your path, still remembers our great queen.”
NJINGA WARRIOR
So now you’ve heard the lore. The reality is messier … and bloodier. Rather than deferring to her brother until her country needed her, Njinga had in fact been looking for a path to the throne since her father’s death. Because Ndongo precedent disallowed women rulers, she publicly supported Mbandi while busily amassing supporters and justifications for her own claim to the throne.
When Njinga met with the governor in 1621, she really did use her maidservant as a chair. But that gutsy move may have been motivated more by her own political ambitions than by a desire to represent her people: Njinga wanted the Portuguese to reinforce her claim to the throne. Given the political realities of colonized Central Africa, the best way to accomplish that goal was to share a religion with the invaders, so Njinga was baptized as a Christian in 1622. She took as her new Christian name Anna de Sousa, the name of the governor’s wife.
Mbandi’s death was the opening Njinga needed; pretty much everyone agrees that she created that opportunity herself by poisoning him. Her apologists later claimed that she’d done so only because he was an awful ruler and she was desperate to protect her people. But as ambitious as she was, Njinga was not the popular choice for ruler, owing to her gender and the pervasive suspicion that she’d killed Mbandi. So she initially stepped up as regent for Mbandi’s 8-year-old son. Within two years, however, she had her nephew murdered and assumed power.
Njinga’s power grab precipitated an internal war, prompting her to call on the Portuguese for support. Unfortunately for her, they sided with a rival faction whose male heir was more malleable to their own agenda. Njinga renounced Christianity and made it her life’s mission—for a while at least—to thwart Portuguese efforts to monopolize the slave trade. She even began to offer sanctuary to slaves who escaped Portuguese coastal plantations, in the process swelling the ranks of her supporters.
This succession war led to one of the more grisly aspects of Njinga’s reign: her alliance of convenience with the Imbangala, marauding bands of mercenaries. In probably the first documented instances of African child soldiers, the Imbangala descended upon villages with a bloody ferocity, enslaving children and killing everyone else before moving on to the next town. Starting in 1628, Njinga not only employed Imbangala soldiers but, to keep them loyal, also claimed that she was Imbangala. (It’s unlikely that she was ever initiated formally into the tribe, a gruesome ritual that involved the murder of a child.) Two decades later, she symbolically attempted to distance herself from their bloody rites by reconverting to Christianity, which had the added benefit of allowing her to call on the Portuguese to support her plans for hereditary succession.
WOMAN KING
With Njinga’s tenuous grasp on the throne as the backdrop, some of her stranger actions as ruler make more sense—especially what she did to cast herself as the king of the Mbundu-speaking people. For one thing, she took several husbands at a time, as many as 50 or 60, and called them “concubines.” They were forced to wear women’s clothing and sleep in the same room as her ladies-in-waiting, though if they touched the women with any sexual intent, they were immediately executed. This unusual situation likely engendered the Marquis de Sade’s claim that Njinga immolated her lover
s after spending one night with them, a practice that seems spectacularly wasteful.
Though she probably didn’t burn her lovers alive, Njinga’s genderbending habits asserted her identity as king, as did her martial prowess. She led her troops skillfully in battle and had her ladies-in-waiting equipped and trained as soldiers to serve as her personal bodyguards. It’s even alleged that she cut off a man’s head in a ritual sacrifice and drank his blood directly from his neck. Given how long she ruled, her efforts to cast herself as king seem to have worked.
But eventually, Njinga was forced by the Portuguese and internal factions arrayed against her to decamp to the highlands; her Ndongo lands were given over to a puppet king in service to the foreign powers. Her retreat was a strategic one, however, offering more freedom to engage the Portuguese in the kind of battle her warriors could win: guerilla warfare.
Njinga also took territory as far as 500 miles inland, using war captives to fuel her slave trade. Within a few years, she conquered the kingdom of Matamba and made it her base, turning it into one of the most important and wealthiest states in Central Africa. By 1640, she was the region’s most powerful African king. She ruled much of the land formerly belonging to the Ngola puppet king and controlled a commercial slave trade circuit that sold upward of 13,000 enslaved Africans a year.
But in 1650, after nearly 25 years of warfare, Njinga again found it politically palatable to make friends with the Portuguese. Her Dutch allies, who’d long supported her efforts to harass the Portuguese, had left the region in 1648; not only that, Njinga was getting older and had begun worrying about who would take over after she was gone. An alliance with her old friends/foes promised some measure of security. So she reconverted to Christianity, introduced Portuguese missionaries and ambassadors into her court, adopted European dress, and reestablished trade with the Portuguese slavers. All was made official in a peace treaty in 1656.
Njinga died in 1663, at age 82; her death prompted a struggle for succession that led to the disintegration of the Ndongo-Matamba kingdom. She had held it together by sheer force of will, and no one else could do that. In the 350 years since her death, Njinga has been rehabilitated into the heroine of colonial resistance who rejected the yoke of foreign rule. She was never more important as a symbol than during Angola’s struggle for freedom in the twentieth century, which culminated in independence in 1975. Although the details of her mythology aren’t exactly accurate, there’s one point her legend does get right: Njinga was a warrior who forced the colonials to deal with her as an equal.
Justa Grata Honoria
THE PRINCESS WHO NEARLY WRECKED THE ROMAN EMPIRE
CA. 417–452
THE ROMAN EMPIRE
When Roman princess Justa Grata Honoria found herself about to be packed off to some backwater to be the docile wife of a yes-man in service to her brother, Emperor Valentinian III, she sat down to write a letter. To Attila the Hun. Seeking help from Rome’s worst enemy didn’t endear her to the emperor. And it didn’t exactly solve her problem, either. But if the emperor thought his sister would take de facto banishment gracefully, he’d obviously forgotten who she was.
PRACTICING PATIENCE
Honoria was the daughter of strong-willed Galla Placidia Augusta, herself the daughter of the late Roman emperor Theodosius I, and Galla’s second husband, Constantinius III, emperor of the Western Roman Empire. About 424, Constantinius died, leaving Galla with two young children, 7-year-old Honoria and 6-year-old Valentinian, and a crisis of succession on her hands. By this time the Roman Empire was in deep trouble. External pressure from raiding barbarian hordes was fueling internal political combustion; the empire was already split in two and ruled by coemperors. Honoria grew up in an atmosphere of intrigue and uncertainty, witnessing her mother manipulate and bully those around her.
Eventually, Galla’s faction prevailed, and Valentinian III was crowned emperor of the western half of the empire. Honoria was forced to live out her days in the dull but strategically important city of Ravenna. By order of her brother the emperor, she was forced into a life of Christian celibacy, a political rather than a pious decision, given that any man she married could lay claim to the empire. Adding insult to injury, Valentinian III was a “worthless man of pleasure,” according to one classicist, and by no means her intellectual equal. For Honoria, consignment to days of quiet desperation in a dead-end Roman village probably felt like a life sentence without parole. The situation became even less tolerable when Valentinian married and had two daughters, who quickly began to eclipse her in political importance.
In 449, Honoria’s frustration reached a breaking point. Now 31 years old—about the same age as her mother when her second husband died—she became romantically involved with a man named Eugenius, steward of her estates. According to some less-than-kind, and probably less-than-accurate, biographers, Honoria plotted with Eugenius to murder her brother and seize the throne. It’s likely this accusation was a meritless effort on the part of a few Christian historians to cast Honoria as a ruthless grasper; how such a scheme could have succeeded is unclear. But engaging in unapproved sex with an imperial princess was considered high treason, and when the relationship was found out, Eugenius was executed.
HEY, HUN
Honoria was sentenced to a kind of living death: her lover murdered, she was banished to Constantinople, capital of the Eastern Roman Empire, and betrothed to a boring Roman senator loyal to her brother. Unsurprisingly, Honoria was not pleased. And that was when she pulled out her stationery set and started writing. Her plan was to hitch her wagon to a man with a track record of success.
Leader of the Huns since murdering his brother in 445, Attila was the most threatening of the barbarian invaders who had been eating away at the Roman Empire. The Western Roman Empire, under Honoria’s brother, was ready to fight him, but the East—where Honoria now resided—was somewhat more obsequious. They’d already tried, unsuccessfully, to pay off the Hun to avoid an invasion. Taking her cue from the eastern court, Honoria asked Attila to “avenge her marriage,” as fifth-century historian John of Antioch put it; her letter, conveyed by her trusty eunuch Hyacinthus, was accompanied by money and a ring.
Attila eagerly agreed. This was his big chance to take a bite out of the Roman Empire and do it without too much trouble. Whatever Honoria promised him is unknown, but Attila claimed that she offered her hand in marriage. Producing the ring as evidence, he demanded half the Western Roman Empire as dowry from Theodosius II, the emperor of the eastern portion. Taken aback, Theodosius sent a messenger to coemperor Valentinian advising him to placate the Hun and hand over his sister.
Valentinian would have none of it; giving up Honoria meant giving the Hun a claim to the throne. Torturing Hyacinthus into a confession, Valentinian learned the full story of Honoria’s treasonous plans. After lopping off the eunuch’s head, he then took aim at his sister’s. Only the intercession of their mother, still the real power behind Valentinian’s throne, kept it firmly attached to her neck. As penance, however, Honoria was stripped of her Augusta title, forcibly hitched to the senator, and exiled from both courts.
Attila, meanwhile, dispatched an embassy to Valentinian’s court, declaring Honoria innocent of all treason, insisting that her imperial title be restored, and, oh yes, demanding that they hand her over as his rightful bride. He was rebuffed—she was married after all. But that didn’t stop him from trying again in 452, using the marriage claim as a pretense to invade Italy. Though he didn’t manage to conquer Rome, he left a lot of the countryside in ruins while trying.
What happened to Honoria after this disastrous episode is unclear. By 455, just six years after the unfortunate affair with Eugenius, she dropped off the radar, probably dead (whether of natural causes or by order of the emperor is up for debate). What is known is that, having fallen out of power and out of favor, she did not live happily ever after.
Neither did the Roman Empire. Honoria, it seems, inspired other princesses to try to get out o
f bad marriages by inviting barbarians over for a bit of tea and sympathy. In 455, for example, Licinia Eudoxia, forced to marry the successor of her murdered husband, Valentinian, took a cue from Honoria and invited the Vandal king Gaiseric to lay waste to Rome. Gaiseric did so with gusto, sacking the city and taking Licinia and her two daughters as willing “hostages.” Ultimately, Attila’s repeated attacks, which lasted until his death in 453, Gaiseric’s invasion, the predations of other barbarians, and internal struggles led to the hacking off of the empire’s gangrenous western half. In 476, when the last western Roman emperor was deposed by a Germanic prince, the great superstate was downsized to the much more manageable Byzantine Empire in the east.
And Honoria is remembered as the treacherous princess who held open the door for the invading barbarians.
Isabella of France
THE “SHE-WOLF” PRINCESS
1295–1358
CIVIL-WAR-TORN ENGLAND
French princess Isabella was only 12 years old in 1308 when she sailed into the court of English king Edward II as his wife. And he, the 24-year-old freshly crowned monarch, was very much in love … just not with her.
The person Edward was in love with was a young knight named Piers Gaveston. That Edward had a lover wasn’t shocking, nor was it a big problem that his lover was a man. The problem, as the English court saw it, was how “immoderately” Edward loved the glamorous, arrogant Gaveston—enough to risk his entire kingdom and the lives of thousands of soldiers. When Gaveston was around, Edward was worse than useless, barely able to hold a conversation, much less govern. When Gaveston wasn’t around, Edward was a wreck.
THREE’S A CROWD
While Edward and Isabella were married in France, Gaveston stayed in England with his own child bride, Edward’s 15-year-old niece. Less than a month later, Isabella witnessed firsthand just how deep the man’s hooks went into her husband’s heart. During the ceremony at Westminster Abbey investing Isabella with the title of queen, it was Gaveston who held the crown. At the coronation feast afterward, he sat next to the king under tapestries that depicted not the emblems of Edward and Isabella but the arms of Edward and Gaveston. And just to turn the dagger a bit more, Edward handed over the wedding gifts from Isabella’s father—jewels, warhorses, the whole lot—to his one true love.
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