Rejected Princesses: Tales of History's Boldest Heroines, Hellions, and Heretics

by Jason Porath

  • ART NOTES •

  From left to right, we have: Anne of Sussex, Charles II, Armand, Hortense, Marie, Lorenzo, Louis XIV, and Marie’s best frenemy, Ortensia.

  Anne is clutching a doll of Hortense, and Armand is carrying a bucket of black paint.

  The building from which they are racing is the old royal palace at the Louvre, since, for most of the story, Versailles hadn’t been built yet. Much of the negotiation of their marriages was done through Louis XIV, so having the institution of the royal palace seemed fitting.

  Marie is wearing a pearl necklace gifted to her by Louis XIV at the end of their relationship. She kept it to the end of her days.

  Armand and Lorenzo are given color designs diametrically opposed to their wives—desaturated blues contrasting with the saturated reds and yellows. Louis XIV and Charles II, however, are given color palettes and clothing in line with (but subtly different from) Hortense’s and Marie’s. Anne’s color scheme is a pale reflection of Hortense’s, while Ortensia’s is a mix of both Marie’s and Lorenzo’s.

  Oh, and Hortense kept monkeys. Hence the monkey. She also kept parrots and black tetra fish. She was a little weird.

  Nzinga Mbande

  (1583–1663, ANGOLA [NDONGO])

  Mother of Angola

  Nzinga Mbande began her political life as her nation of Ndongo (present-day Angola) was fighting off Portuguese invasion. Her brother, a by-all-accounts wimp, seemingly could not bend over backwards far enough for the Portuguese, and once he ascended to the throne the Portuguese tossed him in jail and took over. Nzinga approached the Portuguese and demanded two things: her brother’s return, and the departure of the Portuguese from Ndongo. In a sign of disrespect, the Portuguese offered her no chair to sit in, instead providing merely a floor mat fit for servants.

  In response, Nzinga ordered one of her servants to get on all fours, then sat on her as she would a chair. After the negotiations concluded, according to some accounts (more on that later), she slit the servant’s throat in full view of everyone and informed them that the queen of Ndongo does not use the same chair twice. Shortly thereafter, the Portuguese agreed to let her brother go.

  With her brother now safely home, Nzinga is said (again, more on that later) to have murdered him in his sleep, killed her brother’s son, and assumed the throne herself—because if you’re going to do something right, you better do it yourself. From there, she moved south, started a new country, conquered the ruthless cannibal tribe known as the Jaga, began offering sanctuary to runaway slaves and defector soldiers, and waged war on the Portuguese for 35 years.

  Now, you may have noticed that this write-up has repeatedly used words like “supposedly” and “according to some accounts.” As with many powerful historical women (as you’ve likely noticed by now in this book), Nzinga’s tale is a mixture of fact and fiction, with the two difficult to separate. That she met with the Portuguese and sat on her servant’s back is accurate. Furthermore, there is no doubt that she was a thorn in the side of the Portuguese, that she founded a new nation, and that she was a great leader.

  Where her story begins to look suspicious is in the more salacious details. While some report that she murdered her brother, others report that her brother committed suicide. The slitting of the servant girl’s neck is likely hyperbole. Other outlandish rumors, to be taken lightly, include:

  • After killing her brother’s family, Nzinga ate their hearts to absorb their courage.

  • As a pre-battle ritual, she decapitated slaves and drank their blood.

  • Nzinga maintained a 60-man-strong harem throughout her life. (This is regarded as more likely to be true than most of the other rumors.)

  • The men in her harem would fight each other to the death for the right to share her bed for the night. (This one is more doubtful.)

  • She also apparently dressed some of the harem like women.

  • Conversely, she staffed her army with a large number of women warriors.

  Fact, fiction, self-promotion, or smear tactics, it is hard to tell.

  After Nzinga pushed down the Portuguese for decades (both militarily and economically, cutting off their trade routes), they eventually threw their hands up and negotiated a peace treaty. Nzinga died at the ripe old age of 81. There are statues of her all over Angola to this day.

  • ART NOTES •

  Nzinga’s outfit and ax are derived directly from one of the statues around Angola.

  The servant she used as a chair was actually female, not male.

  She’s wiping a bit of something red from her mouth as a reference to the blood-ingesting legends.

  Hypatia

  (350 [370]–415, EGYPT)

  The Martyr Mathematician

  Few women’s legacies have been more of a political football than that of Hypatia of Alexandria. She was not only the first female mathematician in recorded history, but also an expert astronomer, philosopher, physicist, and overachiever. Unfortunately, Hypatia’s death at the hands of a mob of Christian zealots in particularly grisly fashion turned her life story into a point of contention for centuries to come.

  We don’t know much about Hypatia, but we do know that, unlike a lot of women at the time, she was firmly in charge of her own life. By most accounts, she never married (although she turned down many proposals), instead becoming headmistress at the contemporary equivalent of MIT. She advised the town magistrates, who all agreed that she was pretty sharp. According to one account, she would regularly walk into the middle of town and engage random pedestrians in discussions about Plato and Aristotle, like the world’s most hypereducated sidewalk busker.

  The problem was, at the time Alexandria was politically unstable, and as a result, a lot of people wilded out on the regular. A months-long series of incidents (originally stemming from Jews dancing too much—seriously) had ended up with two sects at each other’s throats. On one side, you had the town prefect, Orestes, who was basically trying to keep the peace. On the other side, you had the bishop of the town church, Cyril, who was trying to look after his own. Cyril had recently undermined Orestes’s power by expelling all the Jews from the city. (They’d killed a bunch of Christians—and maybe burned down a church? It’s complicated.) In any event, Orestes was all “respect my authoritah,” Cyril was like “whatever,” the two started butting heads, and thus: wilding out.

  Hypatia got dragged into the middle of this mess when Orestes sought out her advice—because she was, as has been established, a capital-S capital-L Smart Lady. The mob under Cyril latched on to a rumor that Hypatia was prolonging the conflict by giving Orestes bad advice, so they did what mobs do: went to her house (in some accounts, her classroom), stripped her naked, and killed her. The translation here is subject to debate, but the instrument of her death was either roof tiles or sharpened oyster shells. Many of the “oyster shell” camp interpret the story as the mob using them to flay off her skin (ugh), apparently to prevent her soul from reaching the afterlife. Afterwards, her remains were burned and scattered around the city.

  And this happened during Lent. Evidently these guys could give up meat for six weeks, but not murder.

  After Hypatia’s death, she became a figure for many groups that adapted her story to suit their agendas:

  • 500s: Byzantine historian Damascius: “She was the last Hellenic intellectual!”

  This guy claimed that Alexandria fell into an anti-intellectual slump almost right after Hypatia died. In reality, the intense intellectual climate there continued for a number of years, although Hypatia’s life did mark its last peak. From his writings, you get the impression that Damascius was falling into the “back in the day everything was better, kids these days” fallacy. He also provides a really bizarre anecdote of Hypatia warding off a student who had a crush on her by waving her menstrual rag in front of him and saying, “I’m not so beautiful all the time.” He holds this up as a symbol of chaste virtue, which is . . . well, different.

  • 600s: John of N
ikiu: “She was the devil!”

  John of Nikiu corroborates the main facts about Hypatia’s story, but also provides a lot of flavor text about her “Satanic wiles” and devotion to “magic, astrolabes, and instruments of music,” adding that she had “beguiled [Orestes] through her magic.” He characterized the mob lynching as the glorious eradication of the last remains of idolatry in the city. John of Nikiu was kind of a jerk.

  • 1788: Edward Gibbon: “Cyril was just jealous!”

  In Gibbon’s telling, Cyril was jealous that everyone liked Hypatia. He also heavily implies that Cyril had a total crush on her and thus spread the rumor that incited a mob to kill her, taking the “be mean to the girl you like” tactic to ludicrous heights.

  • 1853: Charles Kingsley: “Catholics are awful, and I’ll tell you why in my erotic fanfic!”

  Kingsley wrote a novel about Hypatia’s life in which he sexes her up, makes her a hapless heathen-to-be-saved, and uses her story to rail against the Catholic Church. The book carries the distinction of being described by The Oxford Companion to English Literature as “ferociously racist.”

  • 1980: Carl Sagan: “She was a pagan intellectual martyr!”

  Here’s where the modern resurgence of Hypatia’s fame largely began. What Sagan says about Hypatia in Cosmos (both the book and the TV series) is factually accurate, if a bit inflammatory. Where he gets a little outside the realm of straight fact is in characterizing the conflict as one of pagan intellectualism versus Christian mob mentality. This overlooks a couple things:

  » Hypatia taught both Christians and pagans all the time. By all contemporary accounts, neither group had particular issues with her lessons. John of Nikiu’s burn-the-witch hysterics came over a century later.

  » The real conflict was between Cyril and Orestes, and they were both Christian.

  » There’s no actual evidence connecting Cyril to her death.

  » Sagan also implies that Hypatia’s death was a predecessor of the destruction of the Library of Alexandria, a claim for which there’s not much support. (Most people date its destruction to partway through Hypatia’s lifetime at the very latest, but probably centuries earlier.)

  • 2009: Amenabar: “One woman stands between civilization and chaos!”

  There was a wildly exaggerated movie about her life called Agora, the trailer for which claims that she, uh, tried to unite all of mankind. It didn’t do very well.

  Basically, what you should take away from all of this is: being the wrong person, at the wrong place, at the wrong time, made Hypatia a victim of politics. It is entirely probable that her life would have been spared had she not been an intellectual, or not been a pagan, or not been a woman—but that’s all speculation. What’s sad is that, likely because of the vilification prior to her death, none of her works survive to the present day. While many of her students went on to make important contributions to mathematics and other scientific fields, we’ll never know what Hypatia herself contributed.

  • ART NOTES •

  The setting is one of the classrooms where Hypatia might have taught—accurate as to the general floor plan. (The mob is entering from the side as opposed to the front door.)

  The outfit she’s wearing is a Greek tribon. It’s supposed to be made of very poor cloth, signifying the philosopher’s detachment from material things.

  Hypatia’s ethnicity is a bit of a question mark. She was ostensibly a Hellenic Greek in fifth-century Egypt, but it is entirely possible (some argue probable) that she was ethnically part Egyptian. (Her mother’s identity is a mystery.) Her skin is thus an ambiguous tone, and the crowd is a varied mix of ethnicities, as a nod to the cultural makeup of the time.

  Yeah, that student in the front is a callback to Damascius’s charming tale.

  Jezebel

  (9TH CENTURY BCE, KINGDOM OF ISRAEL)

  The Most Maligned Woman in the Bible

  It’s hard to find a woman more roundly despised than Jezebel: Israelite queen, makeup aficionado, and thesaurus entry for “slut.”

  This is totally nuts, because nowhere in the Bible is she mentioned as having sex with anyone, including her husband. Not even close! Does she worship gods other than the Jewish one? Yes, definitely. Make questionable real estate deals? Without a doubt. Get torn apart by dogs? Unfortunately, yes—this is Old Testament Yahweh* we’re talking about here, the same guy who turns people into pillars of salt.* But have a fireman’s calendar worth of dudes in her bed? Not so much.

  So, here’s the actual story of Jezebel, best as anyone can tell:

  Jezebel, like a lot of women, first shows up in the history books when she gets married. In this case, she marries a guy named Ahab (King Ahab to you), who was considered a capital-G capital-W Great Warrior. Ahab and his dad had established a surprisingly stable kingdom in northern Israel after endless years of warfare and shaky government. (The predecessor to Ahab’s dad spent seven days on the throne before getting assassinated.) By marrying Jezebel, Ahab is establishing stronger ties with Phoenicia, where she’s from. This is a good thing!

  The problems start when Jezebel makes her Israelite debut with around a thousand priests in tow and starts making a temple to two of her gods, Baal Shamem and Astarte. Neither of whom, you may notice, are Yahweh. This proves not to be a popular move with the Yahweh lovers in the crowd, particularly prophet and hairy man extraordinaire Elijah, whose name subtly translates to “My God is Yahweh.”

  It’s important to take a moment here to recognize that ancient Yahweh priests were often not very nice. At the time, virtually everyone worshiped multiple gods—heck, Ahab’s kingdom was politically strong precisely because it accepted multiple cultures. But Yahweh priests, with their “there are no other gods but me” edict, were not down with that.*

  Thus, the Yahweh priests would belittle other gods in the time-honored tradition of middle schoolers everywhere: simplistic name-calling. Elijah, for instance, referred to Baal Shamem (“lord of heaven”) as Baal Zevul (“lord of dung”)—or, as you may know him, Beelzebub. They even slurred the pronunciation of Jezebel’s original Phoenician name—generally thought to mean “Where is the Lord/Prince?”—to something more like “Where is the dung?” Classy stuff.

  So Elijah pops up, curses Israel with a drought, lets them deal with that for three years, then shows up again to challenge the Baalites to a god-off. The rules are simple: each side sets up a sacrifice to their god, then waits for their god to set it on fire. Since this story comes to us courtesy of the Bible, the outcome is pretty obvious. Baal’s sacrifice stays notably uncombusted, while Yahweh’s is instantly hit by a heavenly fireball and goes up like a Roman candle, even after Elijah shows off by dousing it with water.

  Elijah then graciously celebrates his victory by murdering the Baal priests. All 450 of them. At least after this truly exhausting amount of homicide, he is polite enough to lift the drought.

  Somewhat understandably, Elijah making it rain both water and blood does not endear him to Jezebel, and she promises to kill him in the next 24 hours. He promptly skips town and heads to the mountains, where he runs into Yahweh. Yahweh, being the kindly boss-man that he is, greets Elijah with a curt “What are you doing here?!” and then basically fires Elijah. His final orders are to deliver a few prophecies, then find and train his replacement, Elisha.

  Fast-forward a couple years, and Jezebel finds herself in a real estate kerfuffle. Her husband, Ahab, is knee-deep in a sulk-fest because he can’t get one of his subjects to sell him his vineyard so that he can turn it into a garden. Jezebel, who has up to this point been portrayed as wily and clever, then concocts an incredibly ham-fisted plot to frame the owner for treason, kill him, and seize the land, even though seemingly everyone is aware of her scheme.* It works, but not before Elijah drops in one last time to wag his finger, tell her she’s a bad person, and inform her she’s going to be eaten by dogs. Subtle foreshadowing: not one of Elijah’s virtues.

  The prophet Elisha then succeeds Elijah, who
, in characteristically understated fashion, is sucked into heaven by a whirlwind while riding a magic flaming chariot. Elisha, if anything, is even more extreme than Elijah. One of Elisha’s first miracles on record comes when a wandering herd of 42 unsupervised children make fun of him for being bald. In return, Elisha summons up two bears, who proceed to tear every single underage youth into bloody strips.

  For those keeping track, that is now 492 gratuitous murders attributed to the ostensible heroes of this story, against Jezebel’s one.

  The story comes to a close when Elisha, on orders from Yahweh, crowns Jehu, one of Jezebel’s generals, as king. By this point, Ahab has died in battle and Jezebel’s son is on the throne. Jehu promptly starts a coup by stabbing said son in the back, then heads off to take the crown from Jezebel, infamously calling her a harlot in the process.

  To her credit, Jezebel doesn’t run away. Instead, she calmly dons her best dress and finest makeup and greets the army. Because if you’re going to die, you might as well leave a beautiful corpse.

  In the fulfillment of Elijah’s last prophecy, Jezebel is then thrown from a tower by disloyal servants, trampled by horses, and eaten by dogs. The Bible even goes on to describe how the dogs poop her out, presumably to fit in the aforementioned pun with her name and “dung.”

  Jehu then proceeds to run the country into the ground. He massacres hundreds more people, including most of Ahab’s family, and cuts off ties with other countries. Within a year, he’s been conquered by the Assyrians. According to the prophet Hosea, this Assyrian defeat was a punishment from Yahweh for killing Ahab’s family—an act that Yahweh had basically ordered him to carry out, by way of Elisha’s instructions. Yahweh is, at times, not a very consistent god.