Review: The Dark Queens by Shelley Puhak

Synopsis: The remarkable, little-known story of two trailblazing women in the Early Middle Ages who wielded immense power, only to be vilified for daring to rule.

Brunhild was a Spanish princess, raised to be married off for the sake of alliance-building. Her sister-in-law Fredegund started out as a lowly palace slave. And yet—in the 6th-century Merovingian Empire, where women were excluded from noble succession and royal politics was a blood sport—these two iron-willed strategists reigned over vast realms for decades, changing the face of Europe.

The two queens commanded armies and negotiated with kings and popes. They formed coalitions and broke them, mothered children and lost them. They fought a years-long civil war—against each other. With ingenuity and skill, they battled to stay alive in the game of statecraft, and in the process laid the foundations of what would one day be Charlemagne’s empire. Yet after Brunhild and Fredegund’s deaths—one gentle, the other horrific—their stories were rewritten, their names consigned to slander and legend.

In The Dark Queens, award-winning writer Shelley Puhak sets the record straight. She resurrects two very real women in all their complexity, painting a richly detailed portrait of an unfamiliar time and striking at the roots of some of our culture’s stubbornest myths about female power. The Dark Queens offers proof that the relationships between women can transform the world.

Merovingian France may not have been on everyone's radar but it had been on mine for quite a number of years - and I had written about both on a old webpage I created back in the late 1990s (now archived for posterity). And in particular, the incredible and oft times deadly rivalry between two women who managed to wield more power than their contemporaries.

So when the opportunity to read Puhak's book, I jumped at the chance. Puhak describes her main aim as being the resurrection of two women "scratched out of history" - much like two earlier notable women - Hatshepsut of the 18th Dynasty in Ancient Egypt and Wu Zhao of 7th Century Tang Dynasty of China.

Firstly we have Brunhilde/a, Queen and wife of Sigebert, King of Austrasia. A women of pedigree who - like her sister before her - was destined for a marriage of political consequence.  And then secondly we have Fredegund/a, a slave-girl at the court of Neustria, who in this capacity came to the attention of Chilperic I, and who clawed her way to becoming his third wife - a position she had no intention of relinquishing.

Merovingian Kingdom

The rivalry between not only these two women but also by the sons of Clothar I King of the Franks, upon the disintegration of his kingdom, would resonate through the generations to come, resulting in the death knell for the dynasty which came barely two centuries later.

Puhak gives the reader a history of the region and social structure, the dynasty, the family, as well as court politics and religion, before finishing with the legacy and fate of the two queens and their offspring.

Both women suffered the same fate in the end - to either be written out of the history books or the have their reputations so besmirched as to become the epitome of the fallen Eve or Jezebel reincarnate. And the fate of Brunhilde would not rear its ugly head under the Tudor Dynasty, when Henry VIII dispatched the aged Duchess of Salisbury in 1541.

Puhak brings all of her research together to provide the reader with an accessible account of the Merovingian period under these two women. Ample notes and sources will be much appreciated by those seeking to further enrich their own knowledge of the dynasty.