Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- ARTICLES
- 1 A Lying Legacy? A Preliminary Discussion of Images of Antiquity and Altered Reality in Medieval Military History
- 2 War and Sanctity: Saints' Lives as Sources for Early Medieval Warfare
- 3 The 791 Equine Epidemic and its Impact on Charlemagne's Army
- 4 The Role of the Cavalry in Medieval Warfare
- 5 Sichelgaita of Salerno: Amazon or Trophy Wife?
- 6 Castilian Military Reform under the Reign of Alfonso XI (1312–50)
- 7 Sir Thomas Dagworth in Brittany, 1346–7: Restellou and La Roche Derrien
- 8 Ferrante d'Este's Letters as a Source for Military History
- Appendix: Selected Letters of Ferrante d'Este (Punctuation and accents added)
- NOTE: Provisions for the Ostend Militia on the Defense, August 1436
5 - Sichelgaita of Salerno: Amazon or Trophy Wife?
from ARTICLES
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 12 September 2012
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- ARTICLES
- 1 A Lying Legacy? A Preliminary Discussion of Images of Antiquity and Altered Reality in Medieval Military History
- 2 War and Sanctity: Saints' Lives as Sources for Early Medieval Warfare
- 3 The 791 Equine Epidemic and its Impact on Charlemagne's Army
- 4 The Role of the Cavalry in Medieval Warfare
- 5 Sichelgaita of Salerno: Amazon or Trophy Wife?
- 6 Castilian Military Reform under the Reign of Alfonso XI (1312–50)
- 7 Sir Thomas Dagworth in Brittany, 1346–7: Restellou and La Roche Derrien
- 8 Ferrante d'Este's Letters as a Source for Military History
- Appendix: Selected Letters of Ferrante d'Este (Punctuation and accents added)
- NOTE: Provisions for the Ostend Militia on the Defense, August 1436
Summary
Sichelgaita of Salerno: Amazon or Trophy Wife?
Sichelgaita of Salerno would seem to present a golden opportunity to anyone interested in studying medieval reports of women waging war. In 1081, her husband, the Norman leader Robert Guiscard, undertook an invasion of the Byzantine Empire. The Byzantine historian Anna Comnena gives a lively account of Sichelgaita on the field at the battle of Dyrrachium:
Our men resisted bravely and the enemy turned back (they were not all picked men). They threw themselves into the sea up to their necks and when they were near the Roman [Byzantine] and Venetian ships begged for their lives – but nobody rescued them. There is a story that Robert's wife Gaita, who used to accompany him on campaign, like another Pallas, if not a second Athena, seeing the runaways and glaring fiercely at them, shouted in a very loud voice: “How far will ye run? Halt! Be men!” – not quite in those Homeric words, but something very like them in her own dialect. As they continued to run, she grasped a long spear and charged at full gallop against them. It brought them to their senses and they went back to fight.
They also won convincingly. As Eleanor Searle once remarked concerning another account of a militarily active woman, “That sounds like the real thing.” But, is it?
Earlier generations of military historians apparently did not think so. There is not a lot in the secondary literature about the goddess-like Sichelgaita. While it is hardly surprising that medieval accounts of women waging war were once greeted with a greater or lesser degree of gender-based incredulity, the case of Sichelgaita stands out because this exploit took place at one of the few engagements between Conquest and Crusade that was of interest to that generation of scholars. C. W. C. Oman’s account of Dyrrachium does not, however, mention Sichelgaita.
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- Information
- Journal of Medieval Military History , pp. 72 - 87Publisher: Boydell & BrewerPrint publication year: 2005