Real royals can be more exciting than fictional ones! If you want to write a story about a princess or a queen and are stuck for ideas, why not look to history for a true-to-life story? You can dramatise these real events in a fictional narrative or use them to get ideas for your own story plot.
In my book ‘It’s True! Women Were Warriors’ I wrote short biographies of many scheming empresses and warrior queens. For example:
In tenth-century Britain, Aethelflaed was daughter to the king of one province and wife to the king of another. After her husband’s death she ruled the province of Mercia alone, fighting the Viking invaders. According to one story, she defeated the Vikings by boiling ale and water in cauldrons and pouring it over the walls to scald the attackers. When the Vikings dressed in protective animal hides, she loosed all the bees of the kingdom and drove the invaders from town.
Nearly 2000 years ago, the Trung sisters, daughters of a powerful lord in what is now Vietnam, drove their Chinese overlords out of the country by leading an army of 80 000 warriors led by 36 female generals. One of the sisters, Trung Trac, single-handedly hunted and killed a rogue tiger that had been killing villagers.
Seventeenth-century African Queen Nzinga of Angola, wasn’t going to let the European invaders take over her country. When she visited the Portuguese governor to discover he had taken the only chair in the room, forcing everyone else to stand, she simply ordered a servant to kneel and sat on him! For the next 18 years she continued to fight the Portuguese with an army of women, attempting to stop them forcing her people into slavery.
These are just a few of the brave and adventurous queens and princesses from the pages of history. My book is a starting point for ideas but you will find many more in the library, encyclopedias and on the internet.
Some more queens, empresses and princesses to research:
Boudicca of Britain
Tamara of Georgia
Cleopatra of Egypt
Eleanor of Aquitaine
Zenobia of Palmyra
Margaret of Denmark
Amina of Nigeria
Caterina Sforza of Milan
