Slavic Warrior Women, pt. 12: Vlasta

Link to my full dissertation, Amazons, Shieldmaidens, and Daring Polianitsy: Slavic Warrior Women in Medieval Literature and Folklore: https://libraetd.lib.virginia.edu/public_view/r207tq787

Time for Slavic Warrior Women, installment number 12! Today we’ll be talking about the Maidens’ War, a fascinating and bloody part of Czech legendary history. Incidentally, the story has been turned into a manga (which, alas, I cannot find in English translation, only French) but is otherwise little known outside of Bohemian history buffs (or, ya know, Czechs).

Přemysl, as the progenitor of the Přemyslid dynasty, is remembered by history as a king of Bohemia, but he began his reign as the king of only half the Bohemian population. Following Libuše’s death, the women chose another woman to lead them, Vlasta, who had been friends with Libuše. According to the Dalimil author, when the women rise up against the newly instated patriarchy, they choose the fierce and charismatic Vlasta as their leader.^[1] As the embodiment of the prehistoric matriarchy, Libuše had been a gentle leader who guided her people to a state of prosperity and peace. However, her reign was also a precursor and a contrast to the events that followed it. In many ways, Libuše and Vlasta are opposites. Whereas Libuše represents a feminine ideal, Vlasta is a warrior queen in the true Amazon sense of the title, and as such, Vlasta also succumbs to the Amazon’s fate. Her chroniclers could not allow her to stand as an aspirational model, but as a warning for any woman who would cast off her bonds and fight.

In contrast with Cosmas’s version of events, according to the Dalimil Chronicle, the Maidens’ War was lengthy, violent, and ultimately conducted in vain, culminating in the execution of all women involved in the revolt and the enslavement of the remaining women who had not participated. The Dalimil author presents a detailed, almost salacious, narrative, devoting several chapters to the bloody events and giving names to specific actors omitted in Cosmas’s sparser version of events. Dissatisfied with Přemysl’s patriarchal leadership, Vlasta rallies the women to war, inciting them to kill their male family members, and in time she attracts over 600 women to castle Děvín. She then trains them in the use of weapons and cavalry tactics and establishes her own laws, at which point Přemysl finally takes notice of her activities. Prior to Vlasta’s perceived encroachment on his legislative authority, Přemysl could not be bothered with what he viewed as some insignificant feminine rebellion.

Once Vlasta’s followers become a capable army, she leads attacks and raids against the men. Five years of civil war rage, far longer than the four-month Attic War when Amazons invaded Greece, but not all women follow Vlasta’s lead. The “good” women, the Dalimil author proclaims, are content under patriarchy and ashamed of the war fought on their behalf.^[2] Eventually the men begin to win the upper hand, so Vlasta devises a ruse to lure them in. Coercing the most beautiful of her followers, Šárka, into acting as bait, Vlasta ambushes a band of men, capturing the leader and slaughtering the rest.^[3] However, Šárka soon regrets her deception and, betraying the other women at Děvín, frees the man, who is then able to take information back to the male army about the women’s defenses and strategies.

Rather than the narrator as in Cosmas’s Czech Chronicle, in the Dalimil Chronicle it is Vlasta herself who compares the Czech women to Amazons, perhaps implying the Dalimil author’s rejection of the appraisal.^[4] Vlasta also references Tomyris and her defeat of Cyrus, though she does not name the Scythian queen outright.^[5] However, Vlasta is no Tomyris, and Přemysl is no Cyrus. Where Tomyris led the entirety of her people against arrogant foreign invaders, Vlasta leads only a fraction of women against the men they had known since birth. Rather than Tomyris’s defeat of Cyrus, the final battle that follows Šárka’s betrayal is more reminiscent of Penthesilea’s doomed charge outside the gates of Troy. Drawn beyond the safety of her fortress, an overconfident Vlasta rushes toward her death with spear held high. She slaughters many men along the way, her kills described with relish, her most valiant companions fighting at her side.^[6] Like Penthesilea’s accompanying Amazons, the Dalimil author grants these women names, setting them apart from the rest of her anonymous maiden army.^[7] However, Vlasta’s arrogance ultimately causes her downfall. When she finds herself outnumbered and surrounded, unable to wield her weapons in the thick crowd, the men cut her down and throw her remains to the dogs.^[8] Following Vlasta’s death, the rest of the women surrender, yet the men leave none alive lest they rebel again. The Maidens’ War had come to an ignoble end.

The truth of the Maidens’ War likely falls somewhere between Cosmas’s condensed comedy and the Dalimil author’s expanded tragedy. Perhaps the aftermath of Libuše’s death—the struggle for leadership between her widower Přemysl and her friend Vlasta, culminating in the defeat of Vlasta’s all-female army—reflects an actual struggle between matriarchal and patriarchal systems in early Bohemia, giving further credence to the myth of a prehistoric Indo-European matriarchy. As I discussed in the previous chapter, ancient literature and archeological evidence alike suggest that at least several Scythian tribes, whose territory overlapped with the early Slavs during the period of migrations prior to the influx of Scandinavian settlers during the Viking Age, were at one time matriarchal.^[9] Certainly, a transition between two such disparate systems, characterized by a significant loss in status and power for half the population, would not be peaceful. If the Maidens’ War does memorialize such a transition, it would indicate that the prehistoric matriarchy posited by many scholars persisted significantly longer among the Bohemians than any other European group since most of those who subscribe to the theory of a near-universal prehistoric matriarchy believe it ended approximately six thousand years ago.

The contrast between the portrayal of Libuše and Vlasta’s respective reigns also illustrates the medieval Slavic perception of female rulers. Libuše is praised profusely by both authors for her wisdom and leadership, while Vlasta is omitted by Cosmas in his abbreviated version and thoroughly villainized by the author of the Dalimil Chronicle. Libuše leads her entire people with a gentle hand—in other words, an appropriately feminine style of leadership—whereas Vlasta rules only women and does so with an iron fist, as evident in her manipulation of Šárka. Libuše oversees an egalitarian idyl; Vlasta, a brutal matriarchy reflecting the violence back at the patriarchy that replaced that idyl. Yet, Vlasta’s goal is to return things to the way they were before, to reclaim the system they enjoyed before Přemysl became the prophesied tyrant and oppressed the women. It was her methods, her unabashed militarism, that made Vlasta unacceptable. The evolving image of the next queen, from fierce executer of revenge to gentle saint, reflects this disparity as well, but in the opposite order. Queens were one thing – warrior queens, quite another. Warrior queens were only acceptable to the extent they could be tamed.

Next installment, I’ll talk about the woman for whom my band, Olga’s Burning Sparrows, is named: the one, the only, the infamous Olga of Kyiv.

Citations:

[1] Česka Kronika (Dalimil), 8.10-12.

[2] Ibid., 11.35-38.

[3] Ibid., 13.9-10.

[4] Ibid., 10.49.

[5] Ibid., 10.52-54: Vlasta declares, “Ty s císařem Cyrem válku vedly, / ty toho císaře slavně porazily / a javše ho, v krvi utopily.”

[6] Ibid., 10.82-84.

[7] Ibid., 10.85-88: “Mlada, Hodka a Svatava, / Klimka, Vracka a Častava / tu vedle své kněžny vždy byly / a velmi hrdinsky se držely.”

[8] Ibid., 15.25-26.

[9] Melyukova, “Scythians and Sarmatians,” 112; Guliaev, “Amazons in Scythia,” 114.