* Female names were not preserved in Japan. Lady Murasaki was a descriptive nickname, based on the character in her novel, but her real name may have been Fujiwara no Kaoruko, one of the ladies-in-waiting mentioned in Michinaga’s diary.
* Yet everything revolved around male power; men had several wives and concubines. As Li’s experience shows, it was a struggle to be an independent woman – and even that freedom did not last as later women less lucky than Li became confined to the house, their movement agonizingly confined by a new practice designed to emphasize female delicacy: foot-binding.
Seljuks, Komnenoi and Hautevilles
ARSLAN RAMPANT LION AND THE AGELESS ZOë
‘God created them in the shape of lions,’ wrote a courtier of the Seljuk Turks, ‘with broad faces and flat noses, muscles strong, fists enormous.’ A Turkmen warlord named Seljuk had fought for the Jewish Khazar khagans in his youth. The names of his sons – Israel, Yusuf and Musa – suggest the family may have converted to Judaism, but in the 990s Seljuk switched to Islam, embracing jihad as his mission, and gathered a federation of tribes in Transoxiana, assisted by warlike sons. ‘They ascend great mountains, ride in face of danger, raid and go deep into unknown lands.’ Seljuk and son were just one of the Turkic warrior clans carving up the Arab empire.*
After Seljuk’s death in 1009, his grandson Tugril defeated the Ghazni sultans before moving on to the big prize. In 1055, his troops galloped into Baghdad, rescuing Caliph al-Qaim from the Shiites. While fighting the Fatimiyya and the Romans and conquering an empire, Sultan Tugril, like many a Turkish warlord, aspired to the Persianate culture of Baghdad. His nephew Alp Arslan – Heroic Lion – was the greatest potentate of his time, ruling from Pakistan to Türkiye. He promoted a Persian vizier, Abu Ali Hasan, granted the title Nizam al-Mulk – Order of the Realm – who embellished the Seljuk capitals Isfahan (Iran) and Merv (Turkmenistan) with mosques, libraries and observatories.
As the Seljuks attacked the Roman marches, the heiress to the glories of the Basil Bulgar Slayer was his niece Zoë. After a disappointing trip to Italy to marry a German emperor who died before her arrival, Zoë spent the rest of her life with her two sisters in the
On the day he died, her father Constantine VIII married Zoë, now fifty, to a sexagenarian aristocrat, Romanos Argyros, who at once became emperor. ‘Every part of her,’ wrote historian Michael Psellos in his
In April 1034, when Zoë was fifty-six and Michael twenty-five, they strangled Romanos in his bath and married the next day. As his passion for Zoë cooled, Michael IV became anxious that she would turn against him. When Michael was incapacitated, Zoë and Joannes the Eunuch promoted his nephew to Caesar. This was Michael the Caulker. The Eunuch became a monk and retired, ostensibly just serving as
But the Basil family was still loved. In the hippodrome, Michael was bombarded with fruit, then besieged in the palace by the women of Constantinople, united in female solidarity. Zoë, now sixty-four, returned to power; the Caulker was blinded and castrated. Zoë and her nunnish sister Theodora were enthroned. Two months later, Zoë married (an old lover) Constantine Monomachos, who as emperor moved his mistress into a ménage à trois. The Romans feared that their beloved old sisters were in danger, and they were pacified only by the appearance of Zoë and Theodora in the hippodrome. Just as Zoë planned to reconquer Italy, five sword-swinging Norman brothers changed everything.
IRON-ARM WILLIAM, WILY ROBERT AND AMAZONIAN SICHELGAITA
