Hell Hath No Fury (5 page)

In 32
BCE
the Senate was persuaded to declare war on Cleopatra—in effect a move against Antony, who would not desert her. The Roman poet Horace gloated that Cleopatra would be dispatched “as swiftly as the hawk follows the feeble dove.” The conflict was decided by the Battle of Actium, fought at sea off the west coast of Greece while land-based hosts looked on. Of the four hundred warships under Antony's command, Cleopatra had provided two hundred.

Caesar's great-nephew and adopted son and heir, Octavian, another triumvir, prudently delegated operational command of the Roman fleet to his competent lieutenant Vipsanius Agrippa. Mark Antony was able to break through Agrippa's battle line but lost the day and fled to Egypt with Cleopatra, who had been present at the battle to inspire her own fighting men.

As Octavian's armies closed on Alexandria, they both committed suicide. The ancient sources assert that Cleopatra killed herself with two asps that she applied to her arm, although it is possible that she ended her life with a poisoned hairpin. Her son Caesarion was captured shortly afterward and put to death. Thus ended the line of the Hellenistic rulers of Egypt, and with it the line of the pharaohs. Cleopatra's children by Mark Antony were spared, reared in Rome by his wife Octavia.

As Caesar Augustus, Octavian remodeled the constitution and carried Rome into a new age. Cleopatra was demonized by Horace as “the wild queen” who had plotted the ruin of the Roman Empire. In spite of the destruction of all her plans, Cleopatra nevertheless became a legend, reworked in countless paintings, poems, plays, and, since 1908, movies. She lives again as the baleful silent diva Theda Bara's kohl-stained temptress of 1917; as Claudette Colbert's Art Deco sex kitten in 1934; and in the well-upholstered Elizabeth Taylor, dripping with diamonds and diaphanous nightwear, as she conspicuously consumes Richard Burton's Mark Antony in the 1963
Cleopatra.

Reference: Lucy Hughes-Hallett,
Cleopatra,
1990.

TOMOE GOZEN

Japanese Samurai, b. ca. 1161, d. ca. 1184

An example of the consummate woman warrior, Tomoe Gozen was a legendary fighter at the time of the Genpei War (1180–85), a period that saw the birth of the samurai tradition in Japan. Gozen is not a surname but an honorific applied principally to women.

The sources differ on the details of her life. She was either the wife, concubine, or female attendant of the Japanese commander Minamoto no Yoshinaka. Skilled in the martial arts and fearless in battle, she was one of Yoshinaka's senior officers in the struggle for the control of Japan between the Taira and Minamoto clans.

Tomoe Gozen's beauty and prowess are described in the
Heike Monogatari
(Tales of the Monogatari):

Tomoe was especially beautiful, with white skin, long hair and charming features. She was also a remarkably strong archer, and as a swordswoman she was a warrior worth a thousand, ready to confront a demon or a god, mounted or on foot. She handled unbroken horses with superb skill; she rode unscathed down perilous descents. Whenever a battle was imminent, Yoshinaka sent her out as his first captain, equipped with strong armour, an oversized sword, and a mighty bow; and she performed more deeds of valour than any of his other warriors.

Minamoto no Yoshinaka's ambition to head the Minamoto clan eventually led to his downfall. The clan chieftain, Minamoto no Yoritomo, decided to nip his cousin's designs in the bud and dispatched his brothers to kill him. Yoshinaka did battle with Yoritomo's forces at Awazu in February 1184, where it was said that Tomeo Gozen decapitated at least one of the enemy. With only a few of his soldiers left standing, Yoshinaka ordered Tomoe Gozen to quit the field. One account has her remaining and meeting death at Yoshinaka's side. Another has her surviving to become a member of a religious order. In yet another she casts herself into the sea, clutching Yoshinaka's severed head.

Reference: Helen Craig McCullough, trans.,
The Tale of the Heike,
1988.

WOMEN WARRIORS IN ANCIENT GREECE AND ROME

Pre-Christian Era

Like the tribes of women warriors, fearless individual female fighters crop up so often in the poetry and history of the ancient Greek and Roman world that their existence cannot be dismissed simply as myth (see
Amazons,
Chapter 1). In the early classical period, young girls led a free, open-air life and were given athletic and gymnastic training to promote both fitness and beauty. In Crete, chosen young women trained as
toreras
to take part in the Minoan ritual of bull leaping, while Ionian women joined in boar hunts, nets and spears at the ready.

The freedom of the young, unmarried women in the military city-state of Sparta was so marked that it scandalized others, as the Athenian playwright Euripides records:

The daughters of Sparta are never at home!

They mingle with the young men in wrestling matches,

Their clothes cast off, their hips all naked,

It's shameful!

The hardening of these young women's bodies by sport and the regular practice of nudity had a deliberate aim: to foster their strength, physical ability, and endurance for military service. Both the Spartans and Athenians trained their girls in the art of war and encouraged their participation in competitive war games. Plato stated in his
Republic
that women should become soldiers if they wished, though he later modified that in his
Laws.

Rome followed Greece in this, as it so often did. Musonius Rufus (30-101
CE
) advocated that women and men should receive the same education and training and that any differences should be based on ability and strength, not gender. The Roman heroine Cloelia, taken hostage by the Etruscan king Lars Porsena during an attack on Rome in the sixth century
BCE
, escaped, stole a horse, and swam the Tiber River to get back to Rome to fight.

The Romans promptly handed her back as proof of
Romana fides
(the unwavering truth of a Roman pledge). But Lars Porsena was more impressed by Cloelia's valor than he was by her compatriots' rigid view of honor, and he freed her and all her fellow hostages. Throughout the ancient world there is scattered but abundant evidence of women like Cloelia under arms, fighting in the front-line engagements traditionally believed to be reserved for men. Another was the Roman fighter Camilla, whose story is told by the poet Virgil in his account of the founding of Rome, the
Aeneid,
written between 26 and 19
BCE
.

A daughter of the royal house of the Volscian tribe, Camilla was dedicated by her father at an early age to Diana, the Roman goddess of hunting, and given an early training in the use of weapons and the mastery of horses and dogs. She joined the forces of Turnus, king of the Rutulian tribe in central Italy. Turnus was at war with the neighboring kingdom of the Etruscans over the mastery of this crucial area, and Camilla died in the fighting, killed by the Etruscan warrior Arruns.

In creating his portrait of Camilla around 20
BCE
, Virgil drew on some aspects of the life and character of another famous woman fighter, Harpalyce, daughter of Harpalycus, king of the Amymonei in Thrace (an area of northern Greece that extended into modern Turkey and Bulgaria). Her father brought her up as a warrior after her mother died. She fought at his side and on one occasion saved his life. After his death and the loss of his kingdom, she became a brigand and was finally captured and killed. Despite the lawless ending of her life, Harpalyce was given civic honors after her death. Her tomb became a shrine, and the rituals celebrated at her graveside included a mock fight.

In the Roman Empire, individual women warriors fought in public arenas both as free women and as slaves. They competed at the opening of the Colosseum in 80
CE
. According to the Roman satirist Juvenal, it became fashionable for women of the nobility to train and fight in the arenas until 200
CE
, when the emperor Septimius Severus issued an edict banning all women from gladiatorial combat.

Reference:
The Oxford Classical Dictionary.

ZENOBIA

Znwbya Bat Zabbai, Syrian Warrior Queen, b. ca. 240, d. after 274
CE

Zenobia enters history as the military partner of her husband, Odenathus, a client king of the Romans who had colonized their city-state of Palmyra in modern Syria, a rule Zenobia, like
Boudicca
(see Chapter 1), never accepted. Always described as beautiful, intelligent, and virtuous, she chose a life of action from an early age. Odenathus was a renowned and fearless fighter, and they made many conquests together. But the historians of her era record that Zenobia was as daring and effective as her husband in combat and more reckless in war, able to walk three or four miles with her foot soldiers and drink with them without getting drunk, dubbing her “the better man of the two.” Zenobia rode with Odenathus on many campaigns against the Persians and the Goths until he was assassinated, when she took up the reins of government on behalf of herself and her infant son, Vaballathus.

Riding into battle was an important element of Zenobia's success. Appearing on horseback before a battle makes a warrior woman a powerful inspiration to her troops (see
Isabella I of Spain,
Chapter 2 and
Elizabeth I,
Chapter 2). By presenting herself as a goddess, Zenobia tapped into an ancient Arab tradition, the pre-Islamic belief in the Great Goddess in her incarnation as the Lady of Victory. Boudicca, too, claimed kinship with the Great Goddess in her martial aspect, stirring up women's valor as well as men's passion, and uniting both sexes in the desire to resist.

Zenobia always claimed to be descended from the ruling house of Ptolemy in Egypt, specifically from
Cleopatra
(see Chapter 1), and spoke Egyptian as well as Greek, Latin, and Aramaic. She soon laid claim to Roman territory there, marching her armies into upper Egypt in 269
CE
after Odenathus' death.

Zenobia also moved into Roman territories in Arabia and Asia Minor to expand Palmyra's trade. By the end of 269
CE
, she had secured most of Egypt and annexed vast swathes of Syria. Within a few years of taking control, she had forged a vast empire out of tiny Palmyra, from Egypt in the south to the Bosporus in the north. She defeated one Roman expedition sent against her, proclaimed her son Vaballathus “Augustus” (emperor), and declared herself independent of Rome by minting her own coinage with her image on it. To the Roman emperor Aurelian, this was a rebellion so grave that he personally took command of the campaign when he sent the Roman army into Syria to crush Zenobia and her son.

Commanding a large army with a heavily armored cavalry, Zenobia confronted Aurelian near Antioch. She was seen in the forefront of the battle, galloping alongside her troops shouting orders. Aurelian instructed his cavalry to flee, luring the Palmyrenes to give chase until the weight of their armor exhausted both horses and men. Then the Roman horsemen turned on their opponents and cut them down.

The battle lost amid horrible slaughter, Zenobia fell back into Antioch, keeping the city loyal by leading through the streets in chains a man who resembled Aurelian, as if she had defeated and captured him. But at the next engagement, the seasoned Roman legions prevailed once more, and Zenobia was forced to flee, losing her treasury to Aurelian in the abandoned city. Setting out by camel to seek help from the Persians, she was overtaken by Aurelian's horsemen and captured on the banks of the Euphrates.

Aurelian executed most of Zenobia's supporters, but displayed a Roman magnanimity toward the vanquished citizens of Palmyra, sparing their lives and contenting himself with seizing all the city's wealth. Facing Aurelian as a woman of beauty, intellect, and sexual allure, Zenobia demanded immunity on the grounds of her sex. One tradition claims that she then committed suicide like her ancestor, Cleopatra, rather than face the humiliation of captivity. But Latin sources state that she was brought to Rome in safety and led through the streets in 274
CE
, shackled in golden chains, to celebrate Aurelian's triumph. Disdaining her royal right to ride in a chariot, she walked defiantly with Aurelian's other conquests, defeated Goths and Vandals and a band of Scythian fighting women the Romans called
Amazons
(see Chapter 1).

After a triumph, Roman captives were normally killed or sold into slavery. Zenobia succeeded in building a new life. Granted a pension and a villa outside Rome, she married a Roman senator and settled down to country life, fading into history like her son Vaballathus, whose end is not known.

Reference: Antonia Fraser,
The Warrior Queens,
1988.

2

THE CAPTAINS AND THE QUEENS

Women Leaders and Commanders, Directing War and Conflict

Though I have the body of a weak and feeble woman, I have the heart and stomach of a king.

—Queen Elizabeth I of England, defying the might of the Spanish Armada in 1588

E
ARLY HISTORY ABOUNDS
in records of women on the battlefield assuming a wide range of roles, including that of commander-in-chief. The rise of patriarchy changed all that. Whether expressed as a religion like Judaism, Christianity, or Islam, as a social and military system like the Roman or Chinese Empires, or as a philosophy like Confucianism, the message to warrior women everywhere was plain: in the words of St. Paul, “I permit no woman to usurp authority over a man.”

This drastic reversal of women's right to equal status put power firmly in the hands of men for thousands of years. Only toward the end of the twentieth century, and then principally in the West, have women such as
Golda Meir
(see Chapter 2) and
Condoleezza Rice
(see Chapter 2) regained the place in councils of war that their sisters enjoyed from the dawn of recorded time.

Their careers, like that of
Margaret Thatcher
(see Chapter 2) lay to rest the sentimental and belittling myth that if the world were ruled by women, they would handle their power in a more kindly and maternal way. Like
Boudicca
(see Chapter 1), who encouraged her troops to commit appalling atrocities against the hated Roman occupiers, especially their women, Condoleezza Rice implemented a US foreign policy that had disastrous consequences for the civilians of Iraq.

As the modern era evolved, and as organized religion drove out older beliefs, especially in Europe, women tended to lose access to military command based on their semidivine status, which had derived from their connection with the Great Goddess and hence the sovereignty of the land. However, they could still gain entry by being born into the sovereign elite, especially if male offspring were in short supply. In the early Middle Ages, the power of the hereditary monarchy often enabled female rulers to act independently, like the tenth-century Saxon queen
Ethelfleda
(see Chapter 2), a sharp strategist and rough handler of Viking raiders.

Equally tenacious was
Matilda of Tuscany,
“the Pope's handmaid” (see Chapter 2), who appeared on the battlefield “armed like a warrior” and later presided over the spectacular humiliation of the Holy Roman Emperor Henry IV at the hands of Pope Gregory VII. In a reign of almost ceaseless campaigning, the twelfth-century
Tamara
of Georgia (see Chapter 2) increased the size of her realm to the greatest extent in its history, while simultaneously crushing a series of internal rebellions and presiding over a golden age of Georgian culture.

Less cultured and even more brutal was
Caterina Sforza
(see Chapter 2), the illegitimate daughter of Duke Francesco Sforza of Milan. But her career of ruthless leadership, savage feuding, and murderous reprisals was interrupted in 1500 when she was forced to surrender her stronghold to Cesare Borgia, who consolidated his victory by raping her.

Almost all these women had husbands, but they were creatures of such overriding will that they were capable of acting as leaders on their own account with all the ruthlessness required.
Isabella I
(see Chapter 2) proved a notable exception when she achieved the reconquest of Islamic Spain at the end of the fifteenth century by working hand in glove with her husband, Ferdinand of Aragon. In Antonia Fraser's memorable phrase, the two monarchs “came to resemble two great oaks whose roots were inextricably entwined somewhere below the surface.”

Perhaps the most famous of all female ruler-commanders was
Elizabeth I
(see Chapter 2), an implacable opponent of the overmighty Spain created by Ferdinand and Isabella's success. Like many women rulers, Elizabeth only came to power in the absence of any male heir, and all her advisers assumed that she would swiftly marry and put that right. But with an assurance beyond her twenty-five years, she deftly avoided marriage and remained sole ruler for the rest of her life, using her single status to powerful political effect by offering herself around as a potential bride.

Elizabeth constantly presented herself as one entitled by God and the people to act with all the powers of a man, but who still remained a woman at heart. This technique was later used with similar success by Margaret Thatcher, who gloried in her reputation for masculine strength and dominance, but who was equally at home posing as a housewife managing the family budget and trumpeting the infallibility of “a woman's instinct” to force through some particularly unpopular piece of legislation.

This assumption of the role and prerogative of men in order to achieve the status of an honorary male is shared by many commander queens. Just as Elizabeth I positioned herself as the daughter of Henry VIII, her near contemporary, the African queen
Jinga Mbandi
(see Chapter 10) always donned male attire for ritual sacrifices. Even the austere and devout Spanish Catholic wife Isabella I of Spain would appear at sieges wearing armor, a sight that invariably drove the troops into a frenzy of excitement. In the same spirit,
Catherine II of Russia
(see Chapter 2) wore a borrowed uniform from a crack regiment to seize power in a 1762 coup d'etat.

But as with male supreme commanders in wartime, the presence of women war leaders on the battlefield gradually became symbolic rather than real, and fewer and fewer thrust themselves into the thick of the fighting. Like
Tamara of Georgia
(see Chapter 2), they would retire to a secure vantage point to protect themselves before battle began. Tamara was known throughout Georgia as “King of Kings and Queen of Queens.” But high birth was never a prerequisite of leadership. In the twentieth century, women in most Western countries gained the vote, and with it access to political power, enabling some women to rise to supreme power by sheer force of ability and outstanding drive.

As a result, a small number of women politicians, such as
Indira Gandhi
(see Chapter 2), Golda Meir, and Margaret Thatcher, found themselves at the helm, holding crucial decision-making positions in time of war. They seldom had any direct military experience—indeed, Margaret Thatcher had remained inactive in her hometown of Grantham during World War II when she could easily have joined one of Britain's auxiliary services (see
Conscription,
Chapter 6).

Like Catherine the Great, these women relied heavily on the advice of their male military commanders. Golda Meir confessed at the time of the Yom Kippur War that she had only the haziest notion of the strength of a division. However, they more than compensated for this deficiency with their resilience and willingness to “bite the bullet.” Margaret Thatcher in particular relished the task, and during the Falklands War was famously described as “the only man in the [British] cabinet.”

Never a feminist, Thatcher undoubtedly relished the chance to live up to this characterization in the manner of her wartime hero, Winston Churchill. In a striking example of deliberate image-making, she was photographed riding triumphantly in a main battle tank like a modern-day Boudicca, giving her own unspoken V-sign to the generations of men who had deemed women unfit for combat or command. She and other twentieth-century women war leaders have seen women in both the West and the East once more directing military campaigns and leading their countries in war, as their sisters in command did thousands of years ago.

Meanwhile, far from the sheltered calm of cabinet rooms and the luxury of democratic decision making, women in war-torn regions are still leading their troops into battle all over the globe.

CATHERINE II

“Catherine the Great,” Empress of Russia, b. 1729, d. 1796

Known as an enlightened absolutist, Catherine was a clever and calculating ruler, the ultimate small-town girl made good. The wars she waged took up only six years of her twenty-five-year reign but nearly doubled the population of Russia. She once cannily observed, “We need population, not devastation. Peace is necessary to this vast empire.”

She was born Princess Sophia Augusta Frederika of Anhalt-Zerbst, in Stettin, now Szczecin in modern Poland. At the age of fifteen she visited Russia to meet the heir to the throne, sixteen-year-old Grand Duke Peter, whom she married in 1745. The marriage was unsuccessful and was not consummated for nine years because of Peter's impotence and mental immaturity.

At the beginning of 1762, Peter succeeded to the throne as Peter III, but his eccentricities and the great unpopularity of his pro-German policies led to his overthrow six months later by his own guardsmen, who then proclaimed Catherine their empress. Peter was imprisoned and later killed—supposedly accidentally—by Aleksei Orlov, younger brother of Gregory Orlov, one of Catherine's many lovers.

The short, stout Catherine was gallantly but inaccurately characterized by William Richardson, the tutor to the children of the British ambassador, as “taller than middle-sized, gracefully formed, but inclined to corpulence.” To the deeply conservative Russian nobility, she was seen as an egregious example of the monstrous regiment of women and a threat to the traditional morals of “Mother Russia.”

Presenting herself as an enlightened ruler, a “philosopher on the throne,” Catherine corresponded with French writers and thinkers such as the philosopher Voltaire, who dubbed her “the Star of the North.” With considerable drive she initiated an ambitious program to reform the laws, education, and administration of Russia. By the end of her reign, however, the Russian nobility were even more entrenched than when she had taken power. And in spite of the establishment of her capital, St. Petersburg, as a vibrant cultural center, all intellectual protest was stifled.

In foreign policy, Catherine was an ambitious expansionist. She extended the borders of the Russian Empire westward and southward at the expense of two rival powers, the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth and the Ottoman Empire. Voltaire was a great supporter of her wars against the Turks, principally on the grounds that Catherine's adversaries did not speak French. In November 1768, a month after she had gone to war against the Ottoman Empire, Voltaire wrote to Catherine, “Clearly, people who neglect all the fine arts and who lock up women deserve to be exterminated.”

Victory in the first Russo-Turkish War (1768–74) gave Russia access to the Black Sea and to vast tracts of land in what is now southern Ukraine, where the new city of Odessa was founded. In 1783 Catherine annexed the Crimea, which nine years earlier had gained independence from the Ottoman Empire. She attended the twice-weekly war councils that planned the campaign and in all probability was the originator of the daring indirect strategy in which the Russian Baltic fleet sailed five thousand miles around the coasts of Europe to engage the Ottoman enemy. In 1787 the Ottomans launched a catastrophic second war, which was ended by the Treaty of Jassy (1791) and the legitimization of the Russian claim to the Crimea. However, the ambition she nursed to seize Constantinople was unrealized.

Catherine also established herself as a formidable power broker with the nations of western Europe and acted as a mediator in the War of the Bavarian Succession (1778–79) between Prussia and Austria. In 1780, mindful of her enlightened image, she refused to intervene in the American Revolution in support of the British. In the Russo-Swedish War of 1788–90, she thwarted Swedish designs on St. Petersburg. The grounds around the imperial palaces at Tsarskoe Selo were littered with columns and obelisks marking her military victories—all seventy-eight of them.

During her long reign, Catherine hugely enjoyed recreational sex and took many lovers, the last of whom, Prince Zubov, was forty years her junior. She was controlling but notably generous with her lovers, although she was a harsh mother to her son, Paul, who was kept in a state of house arrest and denied any independent authority. To the end of her life, she remained supremely aware of her image. When she consolidated the coup d'etat of 1762 in which her husband was overthrown, she borrowed the green and red uniform of a suitably short lieutenant in the Semeonovsky regiment to create an iconic symbol, and throughout her life attended carefully to every nuance of her appearance as a public figure. Sometimes military and masculine, she was once noted as greeting a delegation of French diplomats like “a charming lady on her country estate,” an effect that was minutely choreographed to linger in her visitors' memories. Her own memoirs were written in different versions for different readers and allies.

Catherine suffered a stroke while taking a bath on November 5, 1796, and died the following day. She was buried at the Peter and Paul Cathedral in St. Petersburg. Palace intrigue ensured that a scurrilous fiction about the details of her death quickly gained circulation and has survived to this day. She is supposed to have expired in the throes of being serviced by a stallion, a cautionary myth that clearly reveals the depth of fear, loathing, and incomprehension that attend any woman of power and voracious sexual appetite.