Eleanor of Aquitaine, Caterina Sforza, Lucrezia Borgia, Catherine de? Medici, Ma: Five Renaissance Wonders - Tapa blanda

Reseña del editor

The world has always known women of exceptional intelligence and courage, from Greek Sappho to the women who harnessed themselves to the wagons they pulled across the Great Plains to the home of my birth, the Great Salt Lake. For me the most intrepid was Eleanor of Aquitaine, the only woman to be Queen of France and Queen of England, married to perhaps the greatest of all English kings, Henry II, and mother of the warrior Richard Coeur de Lion. Caterina Sforza defended Rome from the walls of Castel Sant’Angelo, abandoned by her husband whom the pope had placed at the head of his troops. Deflowered at age 10 by a sociopath that her adored father had given her for husband, defeated and abused by Cesare Borgia, she gave birth to the very last of the condottiere, Giovanni della Bande Nere. Cesare Borgia strangled his sister Lucrezia Borgia’s beloved husband Alphonso, and she was present when he caught up with her lover Petro Calderon who had run into the apartments of Pope Alexander VI, taking shelter in his robes, the pope shielding the boy’s head while Cesare knifed him through the holy vestments, his blood splattering the pope’s face. Catherina de’ Medici spent her life trying to bring peace between French Catholics and Protestants, but was finally forced to trigger the greatest massacre in French history until the Revolution. She governed France as regent under three kings, all of whom were her sons. Lastly, Mary Queen of Scots, a woman who used life and allowed life to use her, the very reason for our existence, who studded her nights with lovers, as did Lucrezia Borgia, Eleanor of Aquitaine and Caterina Sforza, and was finally defeated by a fellow woman who had Mary’s decapitated head held high by the roots of her gray hair, the reason there will be no chapter on the self-proclaimed Virgin Queen. This book is dedicated to such women, all of whom took their destinies in hand, ancient marvels, proof that women need beg men for nothing; proof of their ability to rule and thrive and cause us all to wonder.