Fulvia (d. 40 BCE) is best known as the extremely politically active wife of Marc Antony. She is known for going beyond the limitations imposed on her because she was a woman and stirring up conflict between those around her.  The problem, of course, with his image of her is that we have no idea how much of it was true and how much was purely propaganda.  She was a convenient target, both for those who wanted to tear down her husband and later for Octavian and Antony when they reconciled after her death and blamed their entire conflict on her.
 
Fulvia was the daughter of Marcus Fulvius Bambalio and Sempronia.  She married Publius Clodius Pulcher around 62 BCE and had two children by him, a son and a daughter.  Unlike many Roman wives of the time, she may have accompanied him on most of his travels.  The first we know of her in the historical record comes with her husband’s death in 52 BCE, when she publically mourned over his body, causing a riot due to his popularity.  Her second marriage was to Gaius Scribonius Curio.  He died not three years later, while fighting for Julius Caesar in Africa.
 
Her third marriage is the most famous, to Marc Antony.  This is where claims about her political activity and her dominating personality mostly come from.  She was certainly politically active, accompanying Antony to the military camps at times and at other times staying in Rome to drum up political support for her husband and herself.  As for her personality, Plutarch claims that she dominated her husband as “she wished to rule a ruler and command a commander.”  How much of this is true is uncertain.  Some of it certainly was, but how much?  It certainly made her a convenient target for both Octavian and her husband after the Perusine War.  Since she fled to Greece and died there shortly after said war, she couldn’t argue when the pair of them blamed the entire mess on her.  Her son by Antony, Iulius Antonius, would be raised by Octavian’s sister, Octavia Minor.

Sources/Further Reading:
Plutarch, Life of Antony - Lacus Curtius
Delia, Diana. "Fulvia Reconsidered." In Women's History & Ancient History, edited by Sarah B. Pomeroy, 197-217. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1991.

Slightly less romanticized than many modern images of her.  Slightly.
[Statue of Matilda of Flanders, 1850, Carle Elshoecht, Luxembourg Gardens, Paris, source: Wikimedia Commons]

Matilda of Flanders (c. 1031-1083) was the first woman to be crowned and titled Queen of England.  She was a powerful woman, not just because of her personality and intelligence, both of which were considerable, but also because of her familial connections to the counts of Flanders, the kings of France, and the earlier kings of England.  She was active both as Queen and as Duchess of Normandy, ruling both England and Normandy alongside her husband, William of Normandy.*
 
Matilda was the daughter of Baldwin V of Flanders and Adela of France.  Through her father she was descended from Alfred the Great of Wessex, while through her mother she was niece and granddaughter to the French kings.  She was betrothed to William of Normandy when she was 19 or thereabouts and married him a few years later, despite a papal ban on grounds of consanguinity.  In 1059 the couple would found a pair of monasteries in Caen to make up for their defiance.  They would go on to have at least eight, possibly nine children together, all of whom were very well educated, at Matilda’s insistence.
 
During the next several years Matilda would act as one of William’s most trusted advisors.  When he sailed for England, he left their eldest son Robert nominally in charge but gave Matilda the real power in Normandy, making her regent.  She was a shrewd ruler, and managed to bring stability to a duchy that was said to be “notoriously susceptible to anarchy.”  When news of William’s victory in England arrived Matilda rejoiced, but she would not actually join him in England for another year.  She was the first woman to actually be crowned Queen of England** and her coronation made clear just how much power she was to have.  William, seeing how well she ruled Normandy, had declared that she could with his authority anywhere in his domains.
 
Over the next several years, Matilda acted both with her husband and separately from him, both in England and in Normandy, including accompanying him in the Harrying of the North.  She was particularly involved not only in religious work (a traditional sphere of influence for queens), but also in the administration of justice and is known to have judged several major disputes.  When their son Robert rebelled, Matilda supported him monetarily, but seems to have preferred to act as mediator between father and son.  She died in 1083 with William at her side and was buried in her monastery, the Abbey of Sainte Trinité, where her daughter Cecelia was a nun.
 
 
*Also known as William the Conqueror or William the Bastard.
**Her ancestor, Judith of Flanders was both crowned and anointed 855, but as Queen of Wessex, not Queen of England, and even this was highly unusual.

Sources/Further Reading:
Matilda of Flanders - Epistolae
Borman, Tracy. Queen of the Conqueror: the Life of Matilda, Wife of William. New York: Bantam Books, 2011.
Douglas, David C. William the Conqueror. Yale University Press, 1964, 1999.

Servilia Caepionis (1st century BCE) maintained ties to and influence over several important men in the Late Roman Republic.  She was the mother of Brutus, Julius Caesar’s lover, Cato the Younger’s half-sister, and mother-in-law to Cassius.  Though she helped Brutus and Cassius after Caesar’s assassination and represented their interests in Rome while they were away, she escaped persecution and lived to a ripe old age.
 
Servilia was the daughter of Livia Drusa and Quintus Servilius Caepio.  Her parents divorced when she was quite young and her mother remarried Marcus Porcius Cato, giving Servilia a younger half-brother, Cato the Younger.  After her mother and stepfather died, she was raised by her maternal uncle, Marcus Livius Drusus.  She married at a young age and in 85 BCE gave birth to a son, Marcus Junius Brutus, who was given the same name as his father.  Her husband was killed by Pompey in 77 BCE.
 
Shortly thereafter, she remarried, to Decimus Junius Silanus, and had three daughters and a son by him.  It was also around this time that Servilia’s affair with Caesar began.  It would last longer than any of his other relationships and seems to have been more passionate as well.  She matched him in education, intelligence, and ambition and so held his attention, as he held hers in the same way.  It was not a well kept secret.
 
In 63 BCE, during a debate in the Senate about the Catiline conspirators, Caesar was handed a note.  Cato the Younger, Servilia’s half-brother, accused Caesar of siding with the conspirators and demanded to read the letter aloud.  It was a love-letter from Servilia.
 
When civil war broke out, Servilia’s son Brutus sided against Caesar, who wound up ordering that the young man not be harmed, possibly out of affection for both Servilia and her son.  Servilia and Brutus would soon be at odds themselves though.  She opposed his marriage to his cousin, Porcia Catonis and may have resented the younger woman.
 
Even so, both women were present at the meeting of the conspirators after Caesar’s assassination and, much to Cicero’s disgust, her voice was listened to.  When the conspirators fled, she represented their interests in Rome.  She would outlive all of them.  After her husband’s death, she retired into the care of Cicero’s friend Atticus and eventually died of old age.

Sources/Further Reading:
Cornelius Nepos, Atticus - Epicurus.net
Suetonius, "Julius Caesar," Lives of the Caesars - Lacus Curtius
Plutarch, "Cato Minor," Parallel Lives - Lacus Curtius
Plutarch, "Brutus," Parallel Lives - Lacus Curtius
Salisbury, Joyce E. "Servilia." In Encyclopedia of Women in the Ancient World, 319. Santa Barbara, CA: ABC-CLIO, Inc., 2001.
Goldsworthy, Adrian. Caesar: Life of a Colossus. Yale University Press, 2006.
James, Sharon L. and Sheila Dillon. A Companion to Women in the Ancient World. Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 2012.
Bauman, Richard. Women and Politics in Ancient Rome. London, Routledge, 1992.

Am I the only one who finds it weird that they're all the same height?
[Marriage of Frederick and Isabella, 13th century, source: Wikimedia Commons]

Isabella II of Jerusalem (1212-1228), also known as Yolande of Brienne, Queen of Jerusalem, never in her own right, partially because the men in her life ruled for her, partially because she died at the age of 16.  We know very little of her actions beyond her marriage, but her position as the Queen of Jerusalem made her the focus of a lot of political attention.  Her father, John of Brienne, and her husband, Holy Roman Emperor Frederick II Hohenstaufen, clashed several times over power, leaving Isabella to be seen as a simple pawn between them.
 
Isabella was the daughter of Maria of Montferrat, Queen of Jerusalem, and John of Brienne.  Her mother died shortly after she was born, leaving Isabella to become queen at only a few days old.  We don’t really know much of anything about her childhood. Her father ruled as regent, having no direct claim to the throne himself.  She was probably raised in the city of Acre.  Though she was titled Queen of Jerusalem, the city itself had last been in her people’s hands during her grandmother’s lifetime.  But plans were being made by Western European leaders to try and take it back and Isabella would come to figure in those plans.
 
Pope Honorius III felt that the Kingdom of Jerusalem needed a strong leader who would be invested in taking back the lands that had been lost to the Saladin and his successors.  The solution was to marry Isabella to Frederick, who would then be King of Jerusalem and would have a much stronger reason to actually try and take the city back.  In 1225, Isabella, then aged 13, married by proxy at Acre and was officially crowned Queen.  She then sailed to Italy to marry in person.
 
As it turned out, Isabella’s father and her husband did not get along and most of our sources were written by John’s sympathizers.  They accuse Frederick of shutting Isabella up in a harem and preferring to sleep with mistresses than with his wife.*  Other evidence does suggest, though, that she may have traveled around Italy with him on more than one occasion.  Even married to the Queen of Jerusalem, Frederick still put off actually going on crusade.  Isabella died in 1228, at the age of 16, before he had even gotten around to it, leaving Frederick no longer King of Jerusalem, but merely regent for their infant son, Conrad.
 
 
*To be fair, she was thirteen.  How do we know she wasn’t glad he wasn’t sleeping with her much?  Or that she didn’t ask him to leave her alone?

Sources/Further Reading:
Abulafia, David. Frederick II: A Medieval Emperor. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988.  [Note: found on Google Books here]
Isabella II of Jerusalem - Wikipedia
Le Quattro Mogli di Federico II - Stupormundi.it

The theater of Alinda, Ada's stronghold.
[Theater of Alinda, Ancient Carian City, Turkey, photographed by Ana al'ain, 2009, source: Wikimedia Commons]

Ada of Caria (died c. 326 BCE) ruled Caria first alongside her brother-husband Idrieus, then as a rival claimant to her youngest brother Pixodaurus, and finally on her own and seemingly unopposed as client-king to Alexander the Great.  She was not the first woman to rule Caria alone and in her own right, as Artemisia I and her own sister Artemisia II had done so before her.  She was also the first local ruler in Asia Minor to remain in power instead of being replaced after Alexander came through with his army.
 
Ada was the younger of the two daughters of Hecatomnus of Caria.  At some point she married the middle of her three brothers, Idrieus.  When their father died, her elder brother and sister Mausolus and Artemisia took the throne.  Following Mausolus’ death, Artemisia ruled alone.  On Artemisia’s death, Idrieus and Ada succeeded her, ruling together for seven years from 351 to 344.  Though Caria was a satrapy or client state* to the Persian Empire, Idrieus and Ada seem not to have been on terribly good terms with the Persians, preferring to maintain close ties with Greece.
 
Ada should have become the sole ruler when Idrieus died in 344, but her youngest brother Pixodaurus had other plans.  He seized power and drove her out of Halicarnassus, Caria’s main city.  Ada kept control of Alinda and the surrounding areas and contested her brother’s right to the throne but Pixodaurus had the support of the Persians and she was unable to take power back from him on her own, for all her popularity with the Carian people.
 
Ada saw her chance in 334 when Alexander the Great brought his army through Caria.  She allied herself with him and adopted him as her son.  He, in turn, besieged Halicarnassus for her and took the city back.  When he moved on, he left her in charge of the last of the fighting, specifically the siege of the acropolis and made her Queen, not just satrap, of Caria.  This was a first for Alexander.  All of the other rulers he had put in power were Greek, and therefore foreigners.  By adopting him, she gained his help, while he gained control of Caria as the legitimate heir of its queen.  Ada died eight years later, ruler of Caria in her own right.
 
 
*Which it was is rather unclear.

Sources/Further Reading:
Strabo, Geography 14.2.17 - Perseus
Sears, Mathew. "Alexander and Ada Reconsidered" - Academia.edu
Ada - Livius.org

Maria of Montferrat (1192-1212), Queen of Jerusalem, inherited the throne from her mother Isabella of Jerusalem at the age of 13.  Both her reign and her life were relatively short and she ruled without a regent for only three years.  As a result, we know little of her life and reign beyond the usual concerns about marriage and continuing the line despite the fact that she was the Kingdom of Jerusalem’s third Queen Regnant in a row.
 
Maria was only child of Isabella of Jerusalem and Conrad of Montferrat.  She was born after her father’s death and her mother’s subsequent remarriage to Henri of Champagne.  Isabella was actually visibly pregnant at the wedding.  Maria herself was born at the end of both the Third Crusade and Guy of Luisignan’s attempts to remain King of Jerusalem.  The city itself had long since been lost and the crusaders were unable to get it back.  As a result Maria probably spent much of her childhood in the cities of Tyre and Acre.
 
Isabella died in 1205 and since Maria’s only half-brother, the four-year-old Amalric, Isabella’s son by Amalric II, had died earlier that same year, Maria was crowned Queen of Jerusalem at age thirteen.  Her uncle, John of Ibelin, Isabella’s half-brother and son of Maria Komnene and Balian of Ibelin, ruled as regent until she turned seventeen.
 
Once she came of age, the issue of Maria’s marriage became a major political issue, as it had been for her mother and her aunt Sibylla.  She soon married the French nobleman John of Brienne at the suggestion of the king of France Philip Augustus.  The couple would only rule together for three years, maintaining a policy of peace with the neighboring Muslim sultanates.  In 1212 Maria gave birth to their only child, a daughter, Isabella II of Jerusalem, also known as Yolande.  The child survived.  Maria did not, dying a few days after the birth and leaving her infant daughter as the next Queen of Jerusalem.

Sources/Further Reading:
Maria of Montferrat - Epistolae
Setton, Kenneth Meyer, Robert Lee Wolff, and Harry W. Hazard. A History of the Crusades, Volume 2. Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 1969.
Maria of Montferrat - Fact Index

Note: As usual, to reduce confusion and make things flow better, “Cleopatra” here refers to Cleopatra IV.  All others will be given further identification.


Cleopatra IV (d. 112 BCE), like her sisters Tryphaena and Cleopatra Selene I, ended up being more heavily involved in Seleukid politics and wars than in affairs in Egypt, where she was born.  Though some make her out to be merely the victim of others’ plots, she acted on her own as well, helping on one occasion to turn the tide for her last husband, Antiochos IX Cyzicenus.
 
Cleopatra was the child of Cleopatra III and Ptolemy VIII, probably the middle of their three daughters who survived to adulthood.  She grew up on Cyprus, well away from the civil war between her parents and stepmother/aunt/grandmother, Cleopatra II.  She first married the elder of her two brothers, the future Ptolemy IX, and had at least one son sometime before their father died.  With Ptolemy VIII’s death, Cleopatra III would have preferred to make her younger son king, but when forced to choose the elder, she made him divorce Cleopatra and marry Cleopatra Selene instead.
 
Cleopatra herself was still on Cyprus when she found out she had been divorced and deprived of a throne.  She assembled an army, mostly persuading the men of the Seleukid king Antiochos VIII Grypus, her sister Tryphaena’s husband, to follow her instead.  Rather than march on Egypt though, she took them to Antiochos IX Cyzicenus, Grypus’s younger brother and rival and offered him both the army and her hand in marriage.  He agreed and the two were married.
 
With the army Cleopatra brought him, Cyzicenus finaly had enough men to rebel against his brother, starting a civil war.  Tryphaena, however, took her sister and sister-in-law’s actions as a very badly and accused Cleopatra of invading the country out of rivalry and envy and of bringing in a foreign army to deal with a dispute between brothers.  When Cleopatra was trapped in Antioch and too refuge in a temple, Tryphaena had her dragged out and killed.  Tryphaena herself would not live even a year beyond that.  Cyzicenus captured her and had her executed in revenge for his wife’s murder.

Sources/Further Reading:
Justin, Epitome of the Philippic HIstory 39.3 - Attalus.org
Cleopatra IV - Egyptian Royal Genealogy
Cleopatra IV - Livius.org

Aaaand back to new stuff!

I like how some of the people in the background aren't even paying attention.
[Marriage of Amalric I and Maria Komnene, 13th century, source: Wikimedia Commons]

Maria Komnene (c. 1154 – before 1217), Queen of Jerusalem, held power by virtue of both her connections to the Byzantine Imperial family and her first marriage to King Amalric of Jerusalem.  How well she used that power continues to be debated and people’s positions seem at least partially based on their opinions of her second husband, Balian of Ibelin.  She lived in tumultuous times, seeing the fall of the city of Jerusalem (though not the Kingdom) to Saladin and playing her own significant role in the events of the time, first as Queen, then as Dowager.
 
Maria was the daughter of John Doukas Komnenos and Maria Tronitissa.  Through her father she was grand-niece and cousin to the Byzantine emperors while through her mother she was descended from Armenian royalty.  She grew up in Constantinople, where she received a broad education befitting a Byzantine princess.
 
In 1167, when she was about 13, Maria was crowned Queen of Jerusalem and married its king, Amalric as his second wife.*  The couple had only one surviving child in their seven years of marriage: a daughter, Isabella.  Amalric died in 1174, leaving Baldwin IV as king and Sybilla as his heir, the children of his first wife.  Maria, now the dowager queen, retired with her daughter to Nablus, left to her by her husband for her lifetime.
 
For several years Maria mostly stayed out of politics.  She was against the betrothal of her daughter Isabella to Humphrey of Toron, but was unable to stop it.  She eventually married Balian of Ibelin** and had at least four children with him.  Once Baldwin IV died, Maria and her husband reentered politics, opposing Sybilla’s husband Guy of Lusignan.  It was Maria who eventually persuaded Isabella to agree to a divorce from Humphrey so she could marry Conrad of Montferrat instead.
 
When Saladin besieged Jerusalem, Maria was among those trapped in the city.  Balian arrived to secure safe passage for her and her children, and Saladin granted it on the condition that Balian not take up arms.  Balian went back on his word.  Saladin, however, still provided safe passage, probably in large part because he didn’t want to anger the Byzantine Emperor by injuring part of his family.
 
Maria continued to play a role in selecting her daughter’s husbands as each died.  She also had a hand in negotiating the marriage of her granddaughter Alice of Champagne’s marriage in 1208.  She disappears from the historical record after this, leaving her ultimate fate unkown.
 
 
*He’d been required to divorce Agnes of Courtenay, his first wife before becoming king.  Maria’s coronation actually happened before her marriage, though she only became queen because of said marriage.
**As far as we can tell it was for no reason other than that she wanted to.

Sources/Further Reading:
William of Tyre, History of Deeds Done Beyond the Sea - Internet History Sourcebooks Project
Claster, Jill N. Sacred Violence: the European Crusades to the Middle East, 1095-1396. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2009.
Maria Comnena, Byzantine Princess and Dowager Queen of Jerusalem - Defender of Jerusalem
Maria Comnena, Lady of Ibelin and Founder of Two Dynasties - Defender of Jerusalem

Tryphaena (d.111 BCE) was a Ptolemaic princess who like her ancestor Berenike Phernophoros and her sisters Cleopatra Selene I and Cleopatra IV, she was more heavily involved in the politics of the Seleukid Empire than in the goings on in Egypt.  She was an active queen, who seems to have been comfortable acting independently of her husband on several occasions.
 
Tryphaena was the daughter of Cleopatra III and Ptolemy VIII Physcon.  She was born during their reign with Cleopatra II and married Antiochos VIII Grypus at around the same time the three of them reconciled in 124.  The Seleukids had been dealing with their own internal strife with several different men claiming the throne.  Tryphaena’s marriage brought Egyptian political support and troops in to support her new husband Grypus.  Her resources swung things in his favor and soon he was king, with her as queen.  The couple went on to have probably five sons and one daughter.
 
In 115, things changed.  Her sister, Cleopatra IV, was divorced from her husband, Ptolemy IX Soter, on the orders of their mother.  Rather than pursue queenship in Egypt once more, she raised an army and offered her own hand in marriage to Antiochos IX Cyzicenus, Grypus’ half-brother, cousin, and rival for the throne.  Tryhpaena was furious.  She accused her sister of bringing a foreign army into a dispute between brothers and of marrying outside of Egypt without their mother’s permission.  Three years later, she saw her chance.  When Cleopatra took refuge in a temple, Tryphaena ordered her executed there, despite people’s warnings about angering the gods by such an act.
 
Tryphaena herself would not live long after this.  Her brother-in-law captured her less than a year later and had her executed.  Her sister Selene eventually married Grypus herself.

Sources/Further Reading:
Justin, Epitome of the Philippic History of Pompeius Trogus 39.2-3 - Forumromanum.org
Flavius Josephus, Antiquities of the Jews 13.13.4 - Perseus
Tryphaena - Egyptian Royal Genealogy
Tryphaena - Livius.org

Husband one of four.  And possibly the one she liked the best.
[Marriage of Isabella of Jerusalem and Humphrey of Toron, 13th century, source: Wikimedia Commons]

Isabella of Jerusalem (1172-1205) reigned as Queen of after her elder half-sister Sibylla despite the city’s technical capture by Saladin in 1187.  She married four separate times, mostly for political reasons as keeping the throne would be a lot easier with an apparently strong and ambitious husband at her side.
 
Isabella was the daughter of Almaric I of Jerusalem and Maria Komnene.  Though her father’s previous marriage had been annulled, her half-siblings Baldwin and Sibylla were considered legitimate and were ahead of her in line for the throne.  Since Baldwin had contracted leprosy and it was unexpected that he would have children, Sibylla became his heir, though there were some who wanted to contest her legitimacy and put Isabella on the throne.
 
A few nobles actually tried to do this, but Isabella’s first husband, Humphrey of Toron, would have none of it.  The pair had been betrothed when she was 8 and he 14.  They married three years later.  Instead of trying to take the throne though, Humphrey, who did not want to be king, did homage to Guy of Lusignan, Sibylla’s husband, recognizing him as his lord.
 
When Sibylla died in 1190 and Guy refused to give up his crown, Maria insisted Isabella find a new husband who could take it back for her.  Isabella next married Conrad of Monferrat and the pair were acclaimed King and Queen of Jerusalem.  But it didn’t last long.  In 1192 Conrad got himself stabbed to death, leaving Isabella pregnant with a daughter, Maria.
 
Isabella chose to remarry very quickly, this time to Henry II of Champagne, who was closely connected to the kings of England and France and was politically a fantastic match.  The marriage only lasted three years though and ended when Henry fell out a window and died, leaving her with three more daughters.
 
She last married Almaric of Cyprus, Guy of Lusignan’s brother by whom she had two daughters and a son, who died in infancy.  They ruled together for seven years, dying days apart from each other in 1205.  Isabella's thirteen-year-old daughter Maria succeeded them as Queen.

Sources/Further Reading:
Isabella of Jerusalem - Epistolae
Queens Regnant: Isabella I of Jerusalem - History of Royal Women