Princesses Behaving Badly Read Online Free PDF

must know.”
    Olga’s conversion to Christianity made her a religious minority in her own country, and it eventually made her a saint. Though her efforts to establish the Orthodox church as the religious authority in Kievan Rus did not succeed in her lifetime, she’s still regarded as the grandmother of the church in Russia and Ukraine.
    Olga’s brutal revenge story is rooted in her pagan past. In the years after her death, she was revered by the faithful for her piety. Later church biographers would claim that “although she was a woman in body, she possessed a man’s courage,” bestowing the “compliment” that she was as “radiant among infidels like a pearl in the dung.” The whitewashing of her record succeeded—these days it’s Saint Olga the Ukrainians remember. In 1997, an Eastern Orthodox monastic order called the Order of Princess Olga was formed, devoted to the bloody saint of Kievan Rus.

Khutulun
T HE P RINCESS W HO R ULED THE W RESTLING M AT
    C A . 1260– CA . 1306
C ENTRAL A SIA
    P rincess Khutulun’s parents were getting nervous. It wasn’t just that their little girl was a bit of a tomboy; most women in thirteenth-century Mongol tribes were capable of playing rough. What was worrying was that Khutulun was approaching 20 years old, practically a spinster, and still wasn’t married. She refused to wed anyone who couldn’t beat her at her favorite sport—wrestling. And so far, no one could. Even worse, the nasty rumors about why she remained single were starting to tarnish her father’s reputation.
    A bold prince who fit all the specs had come forward to accept Khutulun’s challenge; he was so cocksure of winning that he put a herd of 1,000 horses on the line. Khutulun’s anxious parents pressured her to let him win. But would she go to the mat, even for the sake of her kingdom?
R EADY TO R UMBLE
    Khutulun had battle in her blood. Born around 1260, she was the daughter and favorite child of Qaidu Khan, a fierce regional ruler in Central Asia. She was also the niece of Khubilai Khan, the great-great-granddaughter of Genghis Khan, and the only girl in a family of 14 boys. That she took up wrestling is no surprise. But that she turned out to be unbelievably good at it, so good that no man in the kingdom could best her? That was a problem.
    Some chroniclers describe Khutulun as “beautiful,” although that might’ve been a bit of artistic license—she was a big-boned, broad-shouldered girl who, from an early age, was taught to ride and to shoot with bow and arrow. In Mongol tribes, both sexes learned to defend their flocks of sheep, and a bow made an ideal weapon for children and women because it required precision rather than great strength to wield. Unlike other Mongolian girls, however, Khutulun also learned to wrestle. She proved to be exceptional at all of it, which endeared her to her father tremendously. As she grew up, her father came to lean on her for strength, support, advice, and battle prowess.
    Khutulun’s skills were remarkable enough to attract the attention of outsiders like Marco Polo, the nomadic Venetian merchant whose travel chronicles gave birth to the West’s fascination with the East. But in Mongolian royal tradition, she may not have been so unusual. Besides their skill at archery, Mongolian royal women commanded armies, raced horses, and ruled vast territories. Genghis Khan considered his daughters superior leaders compared to his sons, and he awarded them kingdoms that they defended tooth and nail (oftentimes against their male siblings).
    Khutulun was clearly an inheritor of Mongolian X-chromosomal martial strength. When at her father’s side in battle—which was pretty often since Qaidu was perpetually at war with Khubilai Khan’s forces—shewas terrifying. Marco Polo reports that at the right moment, she would “make a dash at the host of the enemy, and seize some man thereout as deftly as a hawk pounces on a bird, and carry him to her father.”
    Stories