From Heroine to Harridan
As I’ve worked on the subject of women warriors over the last year, a few things have surprised me. One of the surprises was the important role played by women in sieges. Historically, women who fought to defend their city walls were the most common type of women warrior, outnumbering many times over the combined forces of queens, commanders, women who fought disguised as men and women who fought undisguised alongside men in the times and places that allowed that sort of thing., It was always seen as a last ditch measure* and it was always assumed to be temporary. For the most part, women fought in anonymous groups remembered only in the collective. But here and there an individual heroine caught the public imagination. Here’s the story of one of them.
During the Dutch revolt against Spain (1558-1648),* Kenau Simonsdochter Hasselaar (1526-1588), a forty-something widow who was a shipbuilder and owned a timber yard, became a national heroine for her role in the siege of Haarlem, one of the longest and most bitterly fought conflicts within a long and bitterly fought war.
In early 1572, the Spanish king Philip II*** appointed a new viceroy for the Spanish Netherlands, the Duke of Alba, and instructed him to suppress the Calvinist insurrection that was spreading through the Low Countries under the leadership of Prince William of Orange, known as William the Silent.****The Duke sent his son, Frederick of Toledo, and an army of 30,000 men on a a punitive expedition against the Dutch towns that had declared allegiance to William.
Toledo’s army reached Haarlem in December. The city had weak defensive walls and a garrison of some three thousand troops, most of them German mercenaries. Toledo was confident that the city would surrender, given that the Spanish army had left devastation behind it: cities burned to the ground that their citizen’s slaughter. Instead, Haarlem stood its ground. Citizens fought alongside the soldiers, men and women alike. Kenau organized a division of some three hundred women, who fought alongside the men on the ramparts.
Both sides suffered heavy losses through February and March, but the city was able to hold out because William of Orange kept the city supplied by sending skaters and sledges with provisions across the frozen Haarlemermeer, the huge inland lake that separated Haarlem from Amsterdam*****. The turning point in the siege came in the spring, when the Haarlemmermeer was no longer frozen solid and Spanish galleons were able to cut off the city’s supply line. The starving citizens of Haarlem surrendered on July 12 on the condition that the city would not be pillaged. The city was not sacked, but the citizens were massacred all the same.The German and English members of the garrison were dismissed. The remaining soldiers, along with one thousand leading citizens, were executed. Kenau and the women she led were not on the list of those the Spanish considered “war criminals.” Some historians argue that the absence of women on the list of executed citizens refutes the story of their involvement. Letters and diaries of the German mercenaries make it clear that the women of Haarlam fought beside them, both in the “feminine” style of pouring boiling oil over the walls and hand-to-hand combat.
Kenau came to personify the Haarlem defense. Her name entered the common language, at first denoting a spirited woman; it has degenerated over the centuries from its original positive meaning. Today it translates as tartar, battle-ax, or, most tellingly, virago–a word which has also tarnished over time. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, virago originally meant “A man-like, vigorous, and heroic woman; a female warrior; an amazon.” Today, my thesaurus gives the following synonyms for virago: bitch, shrew, vixen, termagant, fury, witch, bedam, she-wolf, she-devil, spitfire, fishwife, scold and battle-ax. There is more than one way to make a woman warrior disappear from history.
*Sometimes literally. Women dug trenches or helped repair battlements during sieges.
*Also known as the Eighty Years War and the Dutch War of Independence, the Dutch revolt was a complicated mess of religion (Protestant vs. Catholic), nationalism, and trade rights. Needless to say, it was ugly.
***You probably know him as the absentee husband of Mary Tudor of England, and the force behind the Spanish Armada.
****The great-grandfather of the William of Orange who became king of England in the Glorious Revolution. Sometimes it’s hard to tell the players without a program.
*****Don’t bother checking your map. It was drained in the nineteenth century and is now a soggy municipality.
Jeannine Davis-Kimball’s Warrior Women
I am ashamed to admit that Jeannine Davis-Kimball’s Warrior Women–An Archaeologist’s Search for History’s Hidden Heroines sat on my shelf unread for months.* I looked at it early on in the research stage. I decided I wanted to own a copy so I could scribble in the margins. (As opposed to scribbling in the Margins.) And once I owned it, there it sat.
A couple of weeks ago I was writing about the discovery of what appeared to be ancient women warriors in burial mounds at Pokrovka, on the Russia-Kazakstan border. I was having trouble keeping Scythians, Sakas, Samartians, and Sauromatians, straight in time and place.** The source I was using had fabulous pictures but was confusing on the details. The reputable internet sources were just as bad. In desperation, I pulled two books off my shelf hoping for a solid place to stand: my well-thumbed copy of Adrienne Mayor’s The Amazons*** and Davis-Kimball’s Warrior-Women. I opened Warrior Women first, and hit the jackpot. Not only does Davis-Kimball have a neat little sidebar on the chronology of the four ancient S-cultures mentioned above, she was one of the lead archaeologists on the Pokrovka excavations. Problem solved. And imagination engaged.
Davis-Kimball’s Warrior Women is not a scholarly report on an archaeological dig, though a quick glance at the bibliography makes it clear that she has written plenty of them. Instead it is the story of an intellectual quest, complete with archaeological adventures, difficulties with travel arrangements, political stand-offs, and thrilling discoveries. The style is engaging but never dumbed down. She asks questions about not only her own finds, but existing interpretations of earlier finds. I will admit to some discomfort with the final chapters of the book, where she wanders off the Eurasian steppes that are her area of expertise and into the Celtic world. At that point she makes some speculative leaps without a net that left me a little dizzy.
Warrior Women would have made the nerdy nine-year-old me who fell in love with C.W. Ceram’s Gods, Graves and Scholars very happy. For that matter, it made nerdy fifty-nine-year-old me pretty dang happy, too.
* This is not actually unusual. I acquire books at a much faster rate than I read them, which means that some books have sat unread on my shelves for YEARS. But not books titled Warrior Women when I am writing a book with the working title of Women Warriors. *headsmack*
**Can you blame me?
***Which I’ve neglected to review here. Short version: it’s really good.
Who Was the First Female Historian?
Over the course of my Christmas blog break, I read two separate claims that someone was the first known female historian. Two separate women in very different times and places. I was so excited when I read about the first one that I almost interrupted my scheduled silence to share it with you. When I read about the second I was really glad I didn’t, since she is even earlier.
The first of the two that I stumbled across was Byzantine princess and scholar Anna Comnena (1083-1153)–also spelled Komnene for those of you who want to look her up. We don’t know much about how she was educated, but we know a lot about what she read: Homer, Aristophanes, Plato, Aristotle et al. She was a self professed history buff long before the word was invented: Thucydides and Polybius were her favorites. She was less taken with works of theology, which she said made her “dizzy”. She is best remembered for her Alexiad, a history of the life and reign of her father, the emperor Alexius I Comnenus– Including, among other things, an eyewitness account of the knights of the First Crusade (1095-1099), who passed through Byzantium on their way to the Holy Lands. (The short version? She wasn’t impressed with the “Frankish barbarians”.)
Then I stumbled across someone even earlier, the Chinese historian Ban Zhao (45 – c. 116 CE)–or Pan Chao depending on which romanization the sources you check use. (To put her in historical context: she was a contemporary of Plutarch, the Greek philosopher and biographer.*) She was the youngest child of Bian Bao, one of the Chinese literati, and the sister of the court historian Ban Gu. Like Anna Comnena, she received an unusual education for a woman of her time, like Anna Comena she was well-versed in the classics and the histories of her culture. She wrote in a variety of literary styles, including a type of work known as annotation, which I think of as a conversation between the original author and the annotator for the benefit of a third reader. When her brother Ban Gu died, leaving his monumental and influential History of the Han Dynasty (Han shu) incomplete, the emperor ordered Ban Zhao, who he described as “erudite and competent in writing prose” to finish the work in conjunction with the eminent scholar Ma Xu. The Han shu became the model on which other later dynastic histories were based.
Several thoughts come to mind:
• Both of these women are considerably later than Herodotus (ca. 484-425 BCE) and his Chinese counterpart Sima Qian (ca. 145-86 BCE) .
• Neither of them are “forgotten.” I stumbled across them by accident when I was poking around in Byzantine and Chinese history. Presumably anyone who spends much time in either culture is at least familiar with the name.
• Is there another woman with a better claim to being the “first woman historian”? If you’ve got a candidate, or would like to weigh in on the troubling issue of “first woman [fill in the blank], let me know.
*I don’t know about anyone else, but dates flapping on the page don’t do me much good when confronted with something new. I need a contemporary event that I already know to ground me in time.