Warrior Princess

 

A local high school senior wrote a newspaper essay recently about the problem of women in history still being passed over or getting very few words in books and articles written by men.  We're missing out on true stories that make mass-market fictional characters look pale by comparison.  Let's take the Way Back Machine to a thousand years ago to meet "the closest approximation in history to a Valkyrie."*

Lombard princess Sikelgaita of Salerno (Italy)  was titled the Duchess of Apulia when she became the second wife of the Norman Duke Robert Guiscard.  He divorced first wife Alberada to make this union, and he could not have found a closer equal.  Guiscard was called "the weasel;" despite the nickname he was anything but, being much more like a Kodiak bear.  "He had a thoroughly villainous mind...was a man of immense stature...his bellow put thousands to flight.," according to a contemporary Byzantine account.   Not content with his domain in southern Italy, after taking Bari, the last Italian outpost of the shrinking Byzantine Empire , he crossed the Adriatic to begin a conquest of the rest of it.

Sikelgaita was right by his side in all her six feet of armored glory, charging into the battle for the port city of  Dyrrhachium shouting, long hair streaming, a real life Brunnhilda and true daughter of Wotan.  When the Anglo Saxon axemen in the employ of the defending Byzantine Emperor boldly attacked the mounted Norman knights, sending them running (they were still pretty ticked off about the Norman conquest of their England fifteen years earlier),  "Gaita" loudly called on her horsemen to return:  "Stand and fight like men!"   When that did not have an effect, she seized a spear and took after them.  Shamed or inspired, they returned and destroyed every one of the Saxons.

Guiscard had to abandon the invasion to deal with rebellion at home.  Gaita accompanied him on his return three years later to trash the Empire again.  And once again Fate intervened to stop his victorious advance, when Robert and many of his army succumbed to a typhoid epidemic.  His loyal wife and warrior was with him until the end.

That was not all Sikelgaita was, although she had even commanded a successful siege of the city of Trani by herself.  She had also studied medicine in the most advanced school of the time, and somehow found time to have eight children! 

After spending time in religious seclusion in the Abbey of Monte Cassino, the princess, duchess and general died five years after Robert.  

Maybe Sikelgaita should return to educate some male writers (this one gets a pass).

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*from author John J. Norwich