Female Warriors, Volume I by Ellen C. Clayton

EUROPE, during the two or three centuries after the downfall of the Roman Empire, bears a strong resemblance to Greece during the heroic age. In the Nibelungen, the Iliad of those days, we read of godlike heroes, Herculean warriors, giant princes, and Amazon queens. That was an age when might constituted right, when rulers led their own armies in the field, where the lead was given to the strongest or the most daring.

The Salique law seems in those days to have been very generally disregarded -- if indeed it had been introduced as yet; for we read of more than one queen who ruled alone over the more or less barbarous kingdoms of Europe. AEneas Sylvius narrates how a warlike queen named Libyssa ascended the throne of Bohemia on the death of her father, King Crocus. Her husband, Przemislas, whom she espoused in 632, being originally only a peasant, was probably a humble, weak-minded individual, ruled by his wife; for the queen proceeded to enrol the greater number of her female subjects into a species of militia. They were trained, like the Amazons, to the use of arms and to ride on horseback. After the death of Libyssa, the narrator further says that the principal favourite of the queen, Valasca, with the assistance of the female troops, seized the throne, and held it until her death, which occurred seven years later.