Warrior Queens: Boadicea's Chariot (23 page)

So finally the story of Zenobia and the Romans, as a coda to that of Boudica, reminds one that there could be advantages in being a Warrior Queen – as opposed to a Warrior King – as well as disadvantages; or at least so far as the queen herself was concerned. Boudica was scourged (and her daughters raped), which it has been suggested was a deliberate outrage on the part of the Romans, connected to Boudica’s sex; Zenobia on the other hand betrayed Longinus with impunity, if one leaves out of account her short bejewelled travail on foot. The Only-a-Weak-Woman Syndrome – ‘I am as good as (or even better than) a man when I ride to victory but I’m Only-a-Weak-Woman when I’m defeated’ – is also part of the history of the Warrior Queen.

None of this should detract from the achievements of Zenobia in her prime. There is a figure of Arab legend called variously Zebbâ, al-Zabbà or az-Zabbà: a beautiful warrior who leads her troops to victory in a series of confrontations, as well as indulging in some wily tricks, based on her own charms.
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Zebbâ has two fortresses on the left and right banks of the Euphrates – in some stories her sister called Zainab (the Arab version of Zenobia) occupies one of them – and in one legend at least remains chaste; moreover Zebbâ, like Zenobia, is captured in an incident at a river. Although an exact connection between Zenobia and Zebbâ cannot be made – just as a historical figure like Boudica can never be exactly connected with the legendary Boadicea – nevertheless there are too many coincidences between them to dismiss it altogether.

It therefore seems fitting, as we go forward on the long march of Boudica’s mythical history, to remember that Zenobia also has her own lively myths in her own Arab culture (Zainab is a popular
name in Syria today). A modern play by Assi and Mansour Al-Rahbani ends with Zenobia poisoning herself just before the Roman soldiers bind her in chains. She dies with the words ‘O Liberty!’ on her lips, and her mourning people promise themselves never to forget her (or the idea of liberty).
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It is good to bear this Arab heroine in mind; for we shall find the ‘chaste’ Zenobia appearing from time to time in a somewhat pallid disguise in Europe:

That lovely form enshrines the gentlest virtues

Softest compassion, unaffected wisdom,

To outward beauty lending higher charms
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as an eighteenth-century play had it. It is difficult to imagine this ‘beauteous mourner’ raising her ‘suppliant voice’ for ‘mild humanity’ carving out an empire from Egypt to Asia Minor in defiance of Rome itself. ‘O Zenobia, hast thou dared to insult Roman emperors?’ wrote Aurelian to the real-life Queen: she had and she did. It is Zenobia’s courage which links her to Boudica; her ambition (and her instinct for survival) sets her apart.

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Victoria or Vitruvia, the influential mother of the rebel Gallic Emperor Victorinus (who succeeded Postumus in 268/9); she also helped the next Gallic Emperor, Tetricus, to power.
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Part Two

CHAPTER NINE

Matilda, Daughter of Peter

The daughter of Peter and the faithful hand-maid of Christ.

POPE GREGORY VII
, to Matilda Countess of Tuscany

‘T
o you, my most beloved and loving daughter, I do not hesitate to disclose any of these thoughts, for even you yourself can hardly imagine how greatly I may count upon your zeal and discretion.’ The writer of this letter in late 1074 was Pope Gregory VII. The ‘most beloved and loving’ daughter in question was Matilda Countess of Tuscany, a woman now in her late thirties, who had inherited vast dominions in northern Italy from her father some twenty years back. As she moved towards independence from the various tutelages of mother and stepfather, increasingly she was acting as the ‘faithful hand-maid’ of St Peter – a hand-maid with a sharp sword in her hand and an army at her back.
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The combination of Countess Matilda’s prolonged military endeavours with her own sense of a holy mission is what made her egregious among her contemporaries: ‘For St Peter and Matilda!’ her men shouted as they stormed the fortresses of the Apennines while she termed herself ‘Matilda by the Grace of God’. It also inspired their admiration – if they were on the same side.

The approval which Matilda received from her allies and subordinates, based on her gender, not despite it, clearly related to the apparently ‘holy’ nature of her chosen role. The pious Christian Matilda would not have relished a comparison to pagan Boadicea, with her invocation to Andraste on the eve of battle a thousand years earlier. As a matter of interest, she would
not even have recognized the allusion. Penthesilea was not forgotten and Matilda would receive the usual ration of such comparisons to the Amazonian Queen. However, not only had Boadicea vanished into her unknown grave but her very name had been forgotten, awaiting the rediscovery of Tacitus’ manuscripts in a monastery library in the fourteenth century.
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Yet Matilda’s role represents an important aspect of the subject of the Warrior Queen, that of Holy (Armed) Figurehead. Just as Boadicea must have gained strength from the image of the Celtic goddess in her people’s minds, so Matilda received practical support from the notion of the halo round her head – and the sword in her hand.

Not surprisingly, it was just this shining white garment of virtue which Matilda’s (political) enemies sought to defile. Calumnies included the suggestion of a carnal relationship with the Pope, and the suggestion that the ‘chaste’ Matilda actually had one of her husbands killed, and possibly her children as well. This was a deliberate attempt to counteract the undoubted propaganda value – to the papal side – of the image of Countess Matilda, both pure and powerful, encouraging her troops to the rescue of the Holy Father. The scandals as well as the paeans of praise bear witness to the successful possibilities inherent in the idea of the Armed (Female) Saint.

The Pope, assisted by his loving daughter, was involved for most of the years of his reign in an incessant power struggle with the German Emperor Henry V. From the point of view of Countess Matilda, it was an armed struggle which over thirty years would have enabled her to have claimed, with Schiller’s Wallenstein, ‘our life was but a battle and a march’. So in a sense the Countess Matilda did lay down her life for the papal cause – the cause of Christ, as she firmly believed.

The life she dedicated to the cause was that of a wealthy, high-minded and extremely religious aristocratic woman, who might otherwise have ruled her dominions and endowed her pious foundations with the suitable expectation of peace in this life and further peace to come ‘in the heavenly country’. This was the life
she finally led as a very old lady, when these papal–imperial troubles were in any case subsiding, helmet and mail finally, as it were, put away. Yet as the devout and filial language of the ‘hand-maid’ Matilda towards the Pope indicates, fully reciprocating his own intimacy, the sacrifice, if sacrifice it was, was one that she herself felt called by God to make. At one point she borrowed the words of the Apostle to say that neither tribulations nor anguish, nor hunger, nor peril, nor persecution, nor swords, nor death, nor life, nor angels, nor principalities, nor virtues, nor the present could ever separate her from the love of Peter.
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Matilda of Tuscany – Matilda of Canossa as she is sometimes known – was born in about 1046 somewhere in northern Italy.
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Her father was the Margrave Boniface II, head of a family based on the mighty Apennine fortress of Canossa, and invested with the office of Margrave by the Roman Emperor-cum-German King, Conrad II, in 1027. Boniface’s lands stretched roughly speaking from the Apennines to the Alps, sweeping across the wide plain of Lombardy; but he held many of them in feudal tenure to Conrad II since in a revival of the idea of the ‘Roman Empire’ of Charlemagne, the elected German King was in his capacity of ‘Roman Emperor’ currently exercising lordship over northern Italy.

Charlemagne’s ‘Roman Empire’ had been conferred on him in 800 by the Pope and brought back for the German kings in the middle of the tenth century. Officially, therefore, Conrad, like other German kings of this period, owed his position in Germany to election by the German princes; while he had to be crowned by the Pope as Roman Emperor. That at any rate was the theory of the thing.

Matilda’s mother was Boniface’s second wife Beatrice, daughter of the Duke of Upper Lorraine. Hereditarily speaking, Matilda must have owed at least as much to her clever, capable mother as to her rough warlord of a father; while in terms of environment Beatrice’s influence must certainly have been paramount since the Margrave Boniface was killed when Matilda was six.

It was to be a turbulent childhood, a presage of Matilda’s adult life. The death of her father and the deaths of her brothers – their precise number is in question but the relevant point to Matilda’s story is that they did not survive – left Matilda theoretical heiress of Boniface’s extensive lands. But the rules of inheritance, given the vital imperial exercise of Italian overlordship, were not at this date quite so simple. The Emperor Henry III, for example, who had succeeded Conrad II in 1039, claimed the right to invest a male child with those of Boniface’s Tuscan territories which he had held in feudal tenure, although this still left Matilda as heiress to the Canossa family heartlands. Moreover Henry III was in an increasingly strong position to enforce his wishes since the fortunes of the German-ruled ‘Roman Empire’ were waxing. Burgundy had fallen to Conrad II by inheritance; Henry III himself had extended his sway over Bohemia, Bavaria and Hungary, as well as over the Normans in the south of Italy.

In any case the question of female inheritance in this age dominated by force turned more on practicalities than on theories. Where an heiress was concerned, her husband would tend to exercise her military obligations because he was judged physically capable of doing so, although she herself might literally inherit (and later transmit possession of her lands to her children). Similarly, where kingdoms, duchies and counties were at stake, a female’s ability to inherit in fact rather than theory often depended on what masculine support she could muster. This is illustrated by the story of the fight for the English crown between Stephen and his cousin Matilda (or the Empress Maud) to be considered in the next chapter: by modern rules of descent, Maud, the King’s daughter, had a better claim than her first cousin, Stephen, son of the King’s sister. But, as will be seen, such a claim was not necessarily upheld if it could not be enforced. The need for strength or at least protection, and marriage for the sake of protection – these were the elements which dominated the lives of women (and little girls) in high positions, as the need for strength and powerful allies dominated the lives of their menfolk.

Under these circumstances, the swift remarriage of Matilda’s mother Beatrice to her cousin Duke Godfrey of Upper Lorraine a year after Boniface’s death is easily understood; although by choosing a husband who was at the time in open revolt against the German Emperor, she was hardly likely to achieve a reconciliation in that direction. At one point Beatrice and Matilda were taken hostage. It was not until after the death of Henry III in 1056 that some kind of political calm was temporarily established. The new Emperor Henry IV was another child (at six years old, he was four years younger than Matilda) and the regency was left in the hands of his mother, the Empress Agnes. The conditions of Matilda’s own life became less perilous: Duke Godfrey, no longer considered a rebel vassal, was allowed together with her mother Beatrice to govern Matilda’s estates during her minority.