Doomed Queens (14 page)

All children, even sons of empresses, grow up. When Xiaoming turned fifteen, he relieved his mother of her rule. Hu was not pleased. She undermined Xiaoming’s reign by utilizing loyal government officials who would follow her will. To limit his mother’s influence, Xiaoming arranged for her lover to be executed. Hu retaliated by poisoning Xiaoming to death.

This time Hu had gone too far—even her fiercest allies withdrew their support. To save her skin, the empress hid in a Buddhist convent, where she shaved her head to take the vows of a nun. Nonetheless, her enemies tracked her down. They punished Hu with the only absolute that would stop her.

Empress Hu was drowned in the Yellow River in 528, almost two decades after her son’s risky birth. As a posthumous slap, Hu was granted the not so honorable title of Empress Ling—“the unattentive empress.”

CAUTIONARY MORAL

To hold on to power, be consistent in your dealings.

535

ucked within a scenic corner of Tuscany, Lake Bolsena lies inside the crater of a dormant volcano. It is a large lake—expansive enough to host several islands, and filled with pristine waters that plunge some five hundred feet down. The legends associated with Lake Bolsena are as dark as the lake is deep. One tells of the fourth-century martyr Christina who, after suffering the usual array of imaginative tortures necessary for beatification, was thrown into the lake while wearing a heavy stone necklace. She instantly bobbed back to the surface cradled within the arms of an angel. Two centuries later, the Ostrogoth queen Amalasuntha was exiled to one of Lake Bolsena’s more remote islands. Alas, no heavenly visitor manifested to save her life when she was strangled in her bath one spring morning.

It was a brutal end for a monarch whose main sin was an attempt to import the enlightenment of Roman culture to the war-loving Goths. Consider Amalasuntha a victim of Dark Ages anti-intellectualism.

Amalasuntha was the only daughter of Theodoric the Great, king of the Ostrogoths, and Audofleda, a Frankish princess. By all accounts, Amalasuntha’s education was extraordinary. She was educated in Ravenna, where the best of the Byzantine and Roman empires mingled in a high-culture cocktail party. She spoke fluent Latin and Italian as well as her native language. Besides being notoriously literate, the princess was noted for her political acumen and great beauty.

In other words, Amalasuntha had the whole package, if you were a man not intimidated by erudite women. She won the approval of Eutharic, a prince from neighboring Spain; he wed the princess, thus uniting the two branches of their tribes in holy political might. The contemporary historian Jordanes described Eutharic as “a young man strong in wisdom and valor and health of body.” Nonetheless, Eutharic died early in their marriage, leaving her the mother of a son, Athalaric, and a daughter, Matasuentha. A short time later in 526, Amalasuntha’s father joined her husband in the grave.

With the two big guys buried, eight-year-old Athalaric inherited the throne, elevating Amalasuntha as his regent until he reached maturity. It is here that most women of her era probably would have lain low to protect their assets—but not Amalasuntha. Instead, she decided to use her lofty position to refine the unwashed Goth masses. The best way to do this? Through King Athalaric, whom she determined would have the best Roman education available.

The public outcry was as if Amalasuntha had switched the channel from WWE to PBS mid-match—for their monarch, the populace wanted a vava-voom warrior, not some la-di-da student. Her best intentions were criticized as an attack on Goth values. After all, the Goths had conquered the Romans, not the other way around.

Undeterred, the regent hired the most eminent scholars of her time to shape her son’s mind. As for Athalaric, he embraced his studies with spring break enthusiasm and drank himself to death by the age of sixteen.

Amalasuntha was smart enough to read the writing on the wall; Jordanes wrote that she “feared she might be despised by the Goths on account of the weakness of her sex.” To protect her overeducated self, she arranged for three of her enemies to be murdered and invited her Tuscan cousin Theodahad to keep her company on the throne. This turned out to be a very bad move. Within several months, Theodahad pushed Amalasuntha off the throne and into exile in Tuscany.

Amalasuntha’s end arrived quickly. She lasted only a few days on that lonely island on Lake Bolsena before death visited as she bathed. After all, a clean corpse is a godly corpse.

CAUTIONARY MORAL

Don’t let your education
make you stupid.

568

nce upon a time there were two sisters who were beautiful princesses. The sisters were fathered by Athanagild, the Visigoth king of Spain, and given the fanciful names of Galswintha and Brunhilde. They were raised at the glittering court at Toledo, where it was assumed that they would marry brilliantly and live happily ever after. When the time came, their father agreed for them to wed two powerful brothers, tying the sisters in marriage as well as by blood.

And here is where the two sisters’ fairy tale went seriously awry.

Brunhilde, the younger sister, was the first to tie the knot in 567. She married King Sigebert, who ruled the realm of Austrasia, which was part of the Frankish kingdom (now France) ruled by the Merovingian dynasty. Sigebert, aka King Charming, was enchanted by his bride’s virtue, comeliness, and intelligence. The couple fell madly in love. As for Galswintha, she drew the short stick. She wed King Charming’s brother Chilperic, who ruled Neustria, Austrasia’s next-door neighbor in the Frankish kingdom.