Kayna (Lauren_Wu)Feb 1, 2023
Laurie Voss
Well! It has been a while since I did a historical bio thread. Project #EuropeanBios is over and so is Twitter. The successor is a new medium, Mastodon, and a new project, #OneThousandYearsOfWomen, historically important women from approximately 1000CE to present. Here is Empress Matilda, born 1102, who spent decades trying to become queen of England and failed, and had to accept as consolation seeing her son become king and being direct ancestor to all British royalty right up to today.
Feb 1, 2023 at 2:53amWeb
Show threadLaurie VossFeb 1, 2023
The #EuropeanBios threads have been rescued from the sinking ship of Twitter and are currently being cleaned up and edited into at least a website, possibly a book. #OneThousandYearsOfWomen doesn't have a primary list or a website or anything yet, so this is the first one but may not end up being first chronologically. Forgive me, this isn't my full time job or anything.
Show threadLaurie VossFeb 1, 2023
Matilda's dad was King Henry 1 of England, himself the son of William the Conqueror, the French/Viking dude who conquered England in 1066. Henry had become king by being physically nearby when his brother William Rufus, king at the time, died in a hunting accident. Henry basically grabbed the crown, jammed it on his head and shouted "no backsies" which was at the time considered a reasonable method of becoming king assuming you had a lot of armed men to back you up.
Show threadLaurie VossFeb 1, 2023
This method of royal succession -- grabbing power by force -- would eventually be replaced by more peaceful heredity, but it hadn't yet. Specifically to become king you had to have a coronation, literally have the crown placed on your head by an important religious figure, in England's case the archbishop, in London. If you didn't physically get the crown you weren't king no matter how good your claim. This fact is key to Matilda's story.
Show threadLaurie VossFeb 1, 2023
Matilda's dad was also notable for having an absurd number of children, so many we're literally not sure how many, somewhere between 22 and 25. Most of them were children of "various mistresses" rather than his official wife though, so only Matilda and her brother William were considered legitimate, and because William was a boy he was the only one eligible to inherit the crown (although, see earlier, passing the crown to your children was convention rather than a law).
Show threadLaurie VossFeb 1, 2023
Being surplus to requirements, Matilda was used as a bargaining chip to cement a political alliance: she became engaged to be married at age 8 to the king of Germany, Henry V, who was 24 years old at the time. This is pretty creepy but was run of the mill at the time. The marriage itself would be completed when she "came of age" which was considered age 12, no less creepy. She was sent to Germany to live with her future husband, learned than language and became thoroughly Germanicized.
Show threadLaurie VossFeb 1, 2023
We have no idea what Matilda looked like, or Henry for that matter. This was before Europeans had got the hang of drawing and painting people, and in any case the artists and chroniclers were terrified of their powerful subjects and so would only give vague, flattering descriptions like "noble" and "well formed" to describe basically every royal person.
Show threadLaurie VossFeb 1, 2023
Henry V (her husband not her dad) was just then in the middle of a boring and complicated religio-political dispute with the Pope, which had unexpectedly resulted in him kidnapping and imprisoning the pope in order to get his way. The pope said whatever Henry V wanted to get released and then immediately reneged and excommunicated Henry, a big deal at the time, so Henry re-invaded Italy to discuss matters but this time the pope fled Rome rather than be kidnapped a second time.
Show threadLaurie VossFeb 1, 2023
This is relevant to Matilda because Henry was also trying to get himself crowned as Holy Roman Emperor (a German title since Charlemagne's time) and without the pope present that couldn't be done. Henry fudged and got the highest-ranking available bishop in Rome to crown him and Matilda Emperor and Empress, titles which despite being invalid they used for the rest of their lives.
Show threadLaurie VossFeb 1, 2023
At some point during this period there was a rebellion back home in Germany and Henry had to head back to take care of that so he left Matilda, then aged 16, to rule all of Italy in his place. This went surprisingly well and she by all accounts did a decent job and got a taste for absolute power, something it's hard to give up once you've acquired it.
Show threadLaurie VossFeb 1, 2023
Unfortunately Henry died of cancer just 7 years later. This left Matilda as a widowed empress, very popular in Germany, a pretty decent outcome and she could have retired in reasonable comfort for the rest of her life. But she was just 23 and not inclined to spend her entire life somebody's widow, especially since a series of unlikely events had put her a lot closer to being queen of England than previously.
Show threadLaurie VossFeb 1, 2023
The kingship of England had been set to fall neatly on William, Matilda's younger brother (because sexism) but an event called the White Ship Disaster had seen William and also nearly every other young royal of the 1120s board a fancy new ship, get really drunk, try to go too fast in the dark, hit a rock in the harbor and sink. The disaster messed up the succession of England, since William and also nearly every other male relative of his all died at the same time.
Show threadLaurie VossFeb 1, 2023
Matilda's dad started trying to have another male child immediately but as a backup he declared that if he couldn't manage to produce a boy child then Matilda would become king (there was not yet, linguistically, a name for a queen who actually ruled the country and wasn't just the king's wife). This was very unusual and controversial so he got all of his nobles and barons to swear, one by one, personally, in front of him, that they would support Matilda's claim to the throne.
Show threadLaurie VossFeb 1, 2023
Meanwhile he married Matilda off again, this time to Geoffrey of Anjou, a French/Viking noble back in Normandy where their family had come from originally. Unlike her first husband, Matilda did not get along with Geoffrey at all. Showing what was again highly unusual independence for a noblewoman on the 1100s she left Geoffrey and went back to England, but after much arm-twisting by her father she agreed to go back and dutifully produced 2 sons, delighting Henry-her-dad since they were male.
Show threadLaurie VossFeb 1, 2023
Then in 1135 Henry-her-dad died. Matilda was inconveniently pregnant with a third child and far away in France when this happened, which allowed a man called Stephen of Blois, a nobleman who was just physically nearby at the time of the king's death, to become king through the jamming-crown-on-head-no-backsies technique mentioned earlier. Nearly all the nobles who'd sworn loyalty to Matilda immediately reneged and backed Stephen, primarily because they were sexist and wanted a male king.
Show threadLaurie VossFeb 1, 2023
This left Matilda, 33, married to a man she didn't like in a country she didn't want to be in because she'd agreed to do those things in exchange for a crown she was suddenly not going to get. Predictably enraged, she invaded England and kicked off a completely brutal, decades-long civil war with Stephen and the shifty nobles on one side and a handful of loyal nobles on her own.
Show threadLaurie VossFeb 1, 2023
War is dull and civil war is confusing on top of that as people keep changing sides so I am going to skip nearly all of it. But Matilda was a hands-on general, getting into several dangerous scrapes. At one point Stephen captured her and, for reasons understood by nobody, let her go. She went right back to war with him. The war went back and forth with both sides laying waste to the countryside and setting fire to various quite large towns, to the distress of the citizenry.
Show threadLaurie VossFeb 1, 2023
Eventually Matilda cornered and captured Stephen. Things were looking up but, remember, you're not king until a bishop jams the crown on your head and the bishop was in London, which was still loyal to Stephen. Matilda got as far as arranging her coronation and throwing a party only to have it all snatched away at the last minute when London revolted against her, preventing the all-important jamming-on-head step. The civil war immediately resumed for another decade.
Show threadLaurie VossFeb 1, 2023
Eventually everybody just got sick of being at war. Several of the important generals simply died of old age, some became monks (a sort of retirement plan for nobles), others went to join the crusades, and as previously mentioned the country was so ravaged by war that there was increasingly less to fight over.
Show threadLaurie VossFeb 1, 2023
Everyone's heart wasn't in it any more. At one point Matilda's eldest child, also called Henry, now a teenager, invaded England with some knights he'd hired on credit (yes really) and was so embarrassingly bad at this that the campaign ended in disarray and he had to ask his uncle Stephen -- Stephen the king, the one whose country he had invaded and crown he was trying to steal -- for money to pay for his travel back. Amazingly, Stephen really did give him the money.
Show threadLaurie VossFeb 1, 2023
Conveniently at this point, Stephen's own son Eustace died, leaving him also without an heir. This allowed a settlement to finally be reached: Stephen would stay king until he died, at which point Matilda's son Henry (also Stephen's nephew) would become king. To avoid questions about how this succession would work, Stephen legally adopted Henry so he was technically passing the crown to his son when it happened.
Show threadRobey ☠️Feb 1, 2023
@seldo if you ever find yourself with copious amounts of free time, the "history of english" podcast tells this story, but from the pov of changes to the english language!, in epis 76 - 79: https://historyofenglishpodcast.com/episodes/
Episodes | The History of English Podcast

Show threadLars TrieloffFeb 1, 2023
@seldo I’ve seen this episode on HBO
Show threadBioalchemy13 🇺🇸🇺🇦Mar 8, 2023
@seldo And that was before there were any pulp novels with the words “and make it look like an accident.”
Show threadMoof! 🔜 #JetLagTheGame NLFeb 1, 2023

@seldo I’m happy to see this new project of yours, and Matilda sounds like an amazing woman.

Just a minor Mastodon Etiquette thing, which is apparently long standing practice from before we got here: when replying to people, and especially making long threads like this, make your replies unlisted, so that they don’t flood people’s timelines. People will see your first post on their timeline and can click in to see more.

Show threadLaurie VossFeb 1, 2023
@moof all my posts are unlisted by default, or are supposed to be? Will check that setting.
Show threadMoof! 🔜 #JetLagTheGame NLFeb 1, 2023

@seldo Well, that reply shows up as "public" on my feed...

This one I'm writing is specifically set up as "unlisted"

Show threadLaurie VossFeb 1, 2023
@moof I think the settings are not preserved across clients, so this one is doing it but Elk was not.
Show threadMoof! 🔜 #JetLagTheGame NLFeb 1, 2023

@seldo Correct. It's not a Mastodon server setting as far as I can tell (they have a "secondary toot button" option which makes little sense to me)

Elk does not have user options regarding this behaviour yet, it seems to copy the previous toot's visibility setting.

You may want to add your support to https://github.com/elk-zone/elk/issues/760

Setting for choosing default reply visibility · Issue #760 · elk-zone/elk

When I reply to other people's posts, I often want to set the reply as 'unlisted'. Sometimes I accidentally leave it as 'public' which is annoying because I have to delete the p...

GitHub
Show threadKaterina MarchánFeb 1, 2023
@seldo I’m very excited about seeing this series again
Show threadbkardellFeb 1, 2023
@seldo you could almost make a game out of showing fragments of these and asking people if it's based on real history or GoT
Show threadPhilippeFeb 1, 2023
@seldo brilliant thread, but Mastodon (at least this Android app) ought to work on grouping them better as a 1st...last bundle as the bird site does...
Show threadLaurie VossFeb 1, 2023
@elsassph honestly Twitter is pretty bad at that too!
Show threadMichal Migurski 🍉Feb 1, 2023
@seldo here’s one for the series: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=sl4WtajjMks
Europe's Hidden Matrilineal Dynasty | House of Garsenda

YouTube
Show threadKayna (Lauren_Wu)Feb 1, 2023
@seldo @fediversereport Thanks for this wonderful thread! I wonder if this is the inspiration for the TV show "House of the Dragon"
Show threadlive, laugh, loniFeb 21, 2023
@seldo omg yay