Ortaçağda Kadın - Hırs, Tutku ve Hakimiyet

by Tülay Metin, Songül Dumlupınar Alican

Devletleri yöneten, orduları komuta eden, saraylarda strateji üreten, ailelerini besleyip giydiren, sanat ve zanaatta hayranlık uyandıran eserler ortaya koyan Ortaçağ kadınları…

Onlar tarihin göz ardı edilen kahramanlarıydı. Cesaretleri, zekâları ve iradeleriyle iz bıraktılar, ancak hikâyeleri çoğu zaman ya unutuldu ya da arka planda bırakıldı.

Ortaçağ, yalnızca karanlık ve dehşet dolu bir dönem değil; aynı zamanda kadınların etkisiyle aydınlanan, güzellik ve güçle yoğrulan bin yıllık bir tarih sahnesidir. Bu kitap, kadınların bu sahnedeki rollerini derinlemesine inceliyor: Siyasi dehalar, askerî liderlikler, diplomatik manevralar ve devlet yönetimindeki iz bırakıcı etkiler.

Ortaçağda Kadın’da, Doğu ve Batı dünyasının farklı coğrafyalarından öne çıkan, cesaret, azim ve zekâlarıyla tarihe adlarını yazdırmayı başaran pek çok kadının büyüleyici hikâyeleri yer alıyor.
• Haçlı Seferleri’nde kadınların üstlendikleri görevler nelerdi?
• Selçuklu’nun Devlet Anası Atuncan Hatun, devletin kaderini nasıl değiştirdi?
• Moğol İmparatorluğu’nun güçlü kadını Töregene Hatun döneminde neler yaşandı?
• Kraliçe Akitanyalı Eleanor, Sultan Raziye ve Şeceru’d-dürr gibi liderler, erkek egemen dünyada nasıl ayakta kalabildiler?
• Anadolu Beyliklerinde ve Akkoyunlu ile Karakoyunlu Türkmen devletlerinde kadınların taht kavgalarındaki rolleri neydi?
• Selçuklu Sultanlarının kızlarından Hârezmşahlar’ın etkili kadınlarına, Roma İmparatoriçesi Eudokia’dan Gürcü Kraliçe Tamar’a Ortaçağın güçlü kadınlarının hayatları nasıldı?

Ortaçağda Kadın, alanında uzman akademisyenlerin titizlikle hazırladığı yazılardan oluşan, güç, ihtiras, adalet ve merhamet gibi evrensel temalarla örülü bir yolculuk sunuyor. Bu kitap, yalnızca kadınların tarih sahnesindeki rollerini anlamak için değil, aynı zamanda onların cesaretiyle şekillenen bir dönemi keşfetmek için de eşsiz bir rehber. Tarihin gölgede kalmış kahramanlarının izlerini takip etmeye hazır mısınız?

336 pages, Paperback

First published December 16, 2024

Reviews

[Pia G.]

sometimes we start writing a book in our heads before we've even opened the cover. i think that's how i read women in the middle ages. i'd already imagined the european middle ages i thought the title was promising me; i'd begun looking there for women's relationship with power, marriage, religion and the roles assigned to them.

instead, for a long time the book took me somewhere i hadn't expected at all, to the anatolian beyliks. not because the subject itself was without value, but because my curiosity simply wasn't there and as the pages went on, my interest gradually wandered too. then two chapters came along and suddenly i found in them what i hadn't been able to find in the rest of the book.

megalē basilis tōn romaiōn: the great empress of the romans, eudokia makrembolitissa (1021-1096) | esra çıplak

what made me think most about eudokia makrembolitissa wasn't whether or not she possessed power. first she was an emperor's wife, then the regent for her sons and then the wife of another emperor. it was as though the right to rule couldn't simply reside in her as a person, but always had to be attached to a husband, a son, or a dynasty. and yet as the pages went on, the woman i encountered wasn't some quiet custodian preserving an office that had temporarily been entrusted to her.

when konstantinos doukas died, she took over the government on behalf of her young sons, saw the military threat facing the empire, stepped beyond the limits those around her had drawn for her and made the political decision to marry romanos diogenes. to do so, she even broke the oath she'd made to her dying husband never to marry again.

i stopped here and thought about it for quite a while. because if a ruler had done the same thing, we'd probably call it political necessity, dynastic strategy, or reason of state. when eudokia does it, though, other words immediately begin to creep into the narrative: love, desire, weakness, womanhood. that was why i found it so striking that psellos could acknowledge her as exceptionally intelligent, powerful and capable of governing, yet describe her second marriage with imagery that suggests her reason had been shaken by emotion. apparently it's possible to accept that a woman is intelligent, but the moment she uses that intelligence to make a decision men don't approve of, the discussion shifts away from the decision itself and toward whatever emotions might have driven her to it. perhaps when we read women's history, we also need to pay attention to the words in which their actions were recorded.

and yet it isn't difficult to see something far more concrete than a romantic story in eudokia's choice of romanos. with the empire's borders threatened by the normans and the seljuks, she understood that they needed a ruler capable of rebuilding its military strength. even more interestingly, she didn't surrender her own position when she placed romanos on the throne. in the words attributed to her when speaking to her son, she makes it clear that his stepfather wouldn't take his place, that he would be not a ruler but a subject. for me, that shifted eudokia's entire story onto different ground. because here, marriage too was one of the tools she used.

that's why the section about the coins affected me so much. written sources can interpret women's intentions and portray them as excessively ambitious, emotional, or dangerous, but the hierarchy on a coin feels like a more stubborn kind of testimony. the fact that eudokia appears on some coins without her sons, that she's called the great empress of the romans, and that she's even depicted larger than the other figures in certain images all seemed like small but extraordinarily powerful details to me. because from among all those questions of 'whose wife was she, whose mother was she?' another reality emerges: the people living in her own time saw her face on their money and knew she was one of the highest authorities in the state. centuries later, while we're still debating how much of her power truly belonged to her, the coins of her own age seem far less hesitant.

though one of the most painful parts of eudokia's story begins right around here. romanos diogenes' defeat at manzikert and the struggle for power that followed also determined her political fate. she returned to the head of government and refused to accept romanos' deposition, but eventually she was removed from power by those seeking to secure the reign of her own son and sent to a monastery. there's a strange irony in a woman who once made decisions about the fate of the empire being removed from political life in the name of preserving that very dynasty. women being called into power to secure the continuation of a son, a husband, or a dynasty, only to become expendable once that continuity is assured, is particularly clear in eudokia's story.

and yet her story didn't end with her confinement to a monastery. reading that eudokia was intellectually formidable as well cast the whole narrative in a different light. her interest in mathematics and the natural sciences, the fact that she was considered learned enough to be associated with hypatia and her compilation of ionia, a mythological, biographical and historical work, were sides of her i'd never known about. her political power may have been taken from her, but it feels as though no one could take away her right to think. perhaps that's what brought me closest to eudokia. throughout her life, her identity was constantly written alongside other people: someone's daughter, someone's wife, someone's mother, a ruler's regent. and thankfully, somewhere among all those relationships, a small space remained in which her mind belonged only to herself.

i think this is the question that stayed with me while reading about eudokia:   when can we truly call a woman's power her own? when she inherits the throne from her husband, when she rules on behalf of her sons, when she breaks an oath forced upon her and enters into the marriage she believes the state requires, or when coins are struck bearing her own face? perhaps in all of those moments. but history seems to have kept looking for the source of her power somewhere other than in her.

queen eleanor of aquitaine | esra güneş

after eudokia, when i came to eleanor of aquitaine, i found myself thinking about something else: how many men's names can we use to divide a woman's life into periods before we lose sight of the woman at the centre of it?

eleanor first appears as the wife of louis vii, then henry ii and as the mother of richard and john. but whenever i tried to read her story around those men, something always seemed to be missing. because eleanor wasn't a woman who acquired significance through her marriages. quite the opposite: when men married her, they were also marrying the heiress to one of the wealthiest and most strategically important territories in europe.

when she married louis, aquitaine entered the french crown's sphere of influence; when the marriage ended, the lands left with eleanor. very shortly afterwards, her marriage to henry plantagenet shifted the balance of power once again and when henry became king of england, the territories controlled by the english crown stretched across an even larger area than those held by the king of france. at the centre of all this was the question of whom one woman married, but what interested me more was that aquitaine was never separated from eleanor through either marriage. husbands changed, but her right to the land remained.

marriage is such a strange institution for medieval women. at once something that could restrict a person's freedom of movement and one of the most powerful instruments in the political world. in eleanor's life, marriage didn't simply add her to a man's story; it changed the geography of kingdoms. perhaps the freedom available to her wasn't freedom in the sense we'd understand it today; after all, the body, inheritance and children of a noblewoman were all part of dynastic politics. even so, eleanor seems to have refused to be merely something moved around within that system. of course, she was on the chessboard, but sometimes she decided for herself which direction the piece would move.

her participation in the second crusade is one of the clearest examples of this. eleanor setting out on campaign alongside the nobles of aquitaine hardly fits the image of the passive queen expected of women in her time. and yet the narratives surrounding her quickly shift here too, away from what she did and toward what kind of woman she supposedly was. the rumours about her closeness to her uncle raymond in antioch, her conflicts with louis and the stories that grew around the collapse of their marriage almost built another personality on top of eleanor's political presence. after a while it becomes difficult to tell how much of the woman in the sources is eleanor herself and how much is made up of the fears and expectations of those writing about her.

while reading eudokia, i'd been thinking about how easily women's political decisions are translated into emotion. with eleanor, i came across another version of the same thing: the political will of an independent woman being turned into a question of moral character. male rulers form alliances, break them, wage war, betray one another and all of it can be narrated in the ordinary language of power. when eleanor resists, though, her loyalty, her marriage, her sexuality, even her womanhood become part of the discussion. perhaps one of the most effective questions directed at powerful women throughout history hasn't been 'what did she do?' but 'what kind of woman was she?' because the moment the second question is asked, morality begins to take the place of politics.

her marriage to henry plantagenet after separating from louis doesn't feel like simply a second marriage for that reason either. eleanor took her inheritance with her and carried it into the centre of another political world. when henry became king, she was now queen of england, yet she still didn't abandon her authority in aquitaine entirely. she maintained her ties to her own lands, managed her court and household and tried to have a say in the futures of her sons. in short, the title of queen wasn't the whole of her political identity. on the contrary, it was only the visible face of other forms of power she possessed.

then her relationship with henry deteriorated and eleanor sided with her own sons in the rebellion they launched against their father. to me, this is one of the most interesting moments of her life. because by this point we're talking about a political actor with her own idea of the dynasty's future. the price was heavy: henry had her captured and eleanor spent years in captivity. it's painful that a woman who had once altered the balance of power between two kingdoms, joined a crusade and ruled vast territories could suddenly have her freedom of movement made dependent on someone else's permission.

and yet for eleanor, this long captivity wasn't the end of her political life. when henry died, eleanor was no longer young; by the standards of the period, she had reached an age when she might have been expected to withdraw from public life altogether. instead, when richard came to the throne, she returned to the centre of government. she managed the kingdom's affairs in her son's absence, helped raise his ransom when he was captured on his return from the crusade, maintained political alliances and undertook long journeys when necessary. after men had spent her youth trying to place her under their guardianship, in old age the person they turned to in order to keep the kingdom standing was eleanor once again.

sometimes owning land can be power, sometimes being able to end a marriage, sometimes supporting one son against another, sometimes waiting for years and then reappearing. power doesn't always begin with sitting on a throne, nor does it necessarily end when someone is removed from one. eleanor's political life is an example of that: queen of france, queen of england, rebellious wife, captive, king's mother, regent.. her titles change, but the woman herself never quite disappears from the political world.

and of course, the men in her life were part of her story, but if we think of eleanor only as the sum of those relationships, we almost place the woman who changed the political map of europe several times inside parentheses. perhaps that's what made both eudokia and eleanor stay with me so much. when i look at their lives, the men are never absent; husbands, sons, advisers, clergymen, historians are always there. but if i look a little longer, the line of these two women's own wills begins to emerge between them.

yes, i can't say i felt the same enthusiasm for the book as a whole. for much of it, there were times when i turned the next page more out of determination to finish than curiosity. but i think sometimes what remains with us from a book isn't the whole book, just a few chapters. that's what happened to me here. if i closed it still thinking this much about eudokia and eleanor, then somewhere among all those pages i struggled through, i must have found what i was looking for at least twice. because sometimes two women are enough to remember an entire book by.

[Caterina]

Değerli hocaların yazdığı, makalelerden oluşan bir eser. Bu bağlamda makaleler içinde anlatılanlar birbiriyle devamlılık içinde değil. Buna dikkat etmeden başladığım için bütünlük eksikliğinden gelen odaklanma problemi yaşadım.

İçerikte Altay Tayfun Özcan hocam başta kıymetli içerikler mevcut fakat bazı makalelerin kapsamı öyle geniş bir açıdan ele alınmış ki, makaleye adını veren konuya birkaç paragraflık yer kalmış.

Alan ilgililerinin makaleleri kontrol etmesi kaydıyla kendilerine hitap edip etmeyeceğini göz önüne alarak okunması iyi olacaktır. Yoksa içerik “Ortaçağ’da kadın” gibi bir genel anlatı değil. Belli dönemlerde, belli kadınların yaşamı ve dönem incelemesi şeklinde.