Dangerous Women in History that the Law Couldn’t Contain

7. A Dangerous Medieval Power Couple

In 1058, Sichelgaita met the Normans’ leader, Robert Guiscard, and the two fell passionately in love. Guiscard, a Norman knight who had settled in southern Italy in 1047, was widely known as the Wily or the Weasel, and was impressed by the six foot Amazon who went into battle, fully armed and armored. He divorced his wife and married Sichelgaita, and the duo became one of the medieval era’s most dangerous power couples. For the next eighteen years, she was the Weasel’s constant companion, both on and off the battlefield.

Sichelgaita helped Guiscard consolidate his and her family’s hold on southern Italy, and one of those consolidations was of her birthplace, the Duchy of Salerno. In 1076, clad in shining armor and mounted astride a stallion, she rode up to the walls of Salerno, which was ruled by her own brother, and demanded the city’s submission. When her brother refused, Sichelgaita and Guiscard put the city under siege, and starved it into surrender. She then took command of Salerno, and sent her brother into exile.

6. A Woman Who Not Only Fought, But Led Men in Combat

Sichelgaita did not only fight at her husband’s side, but also led men on her own in independent commands. An ambitious couple, she and Robert Guiscard attempted to take over the Byzantine Empire by marrying one of their children into the imperial household. A palace coup in Constantinople foiled those plans, however, so the duo decided to take over Byzantium the hard way, through straightforward conquest. In 1080, while her husband attacked Taranto in southern Italy, Sichelgaita led a siege against Trani on Italy’s Adriatic coast.

Her greatest exploit came a year later at the Battle of Dyrrhachium on the Albanian coast, on October 18th, 1081. There, the dangerous warrior princess, clad in full armor, led an advance force ahead of the main body. She ran into a powerful Byzantine army that offered fierce resistance. Sichelgaita determined to press the attack and keep the Byzantines pinned in place until Guiscard arrived with reinforcements, but her men faltered, and some fled. As seen below, Sichelgaita turned the tide with a bravura battlefield performance.

5. A Medieval Amazon’s Greatest Battlefield Performance

As a near-contemporary wrote of the Battle of Dyrrhachium: “Directly Sichelgaita, Robert’s wife (who was riding at his side and was a second Pallas, if not an Athene) saw these soldiers running away. She looked fiercely after them and in a very powerful voice called out to them in her own language an equivalent to Homer’s words “How far will ye flee? Stand and fight like men!” And when she saw that they continued to run, she grasped a long spear and at full gallop rushed after the fugitives; and on seeing this they recovered themselves and returned to the fight.” She was badly wounded, but held part of the battlefield until reinforcements arrived to turn the tide and win the hard-fought engagement.

Despite the victory, the plans to conquer the Byzantine Empire had to be discarded because of developments back in Italy, when a conflict broke out between the Pope and the Holy Roman Emperor. In 1084, Sichelgaita and her husband Guiscard resumed the attempted conquest of Byzantium. The dangerous power couple won some initial victories. One of them was a ferocious naval battle against a combined Venetian-Byzantine, that gained them the islands of Corfu and Cefalonia. Soon thereafter, however, Guiscard took ill and died in 1085, and the campaign fizzled out. Sichelgaita retired to Salerno, where she died five years later, in 1090.

4. India’s Dangerous Bandit Queen

Famous – or infamous, depending on whether viewed from the perspective of admirers or detractors – Indian bandit queen Phoolan Devi was born in 1963 in Utter Pradesh, India, into a lower caste family that ranked barely above the Untouchables. The lot of lower castes – especially of impoverished lower caste girls like Phoolan – was no bed of roses, as she learned all too soon. She did not simply accept it, however, and from early on, Phoolan gained a reputation for her willingness to stand up to oppressors and resist injustice.

When she was ten-years-old, Phoolan defied an uncle who wanted to cut a tree on her father’s tiny land plot, and organized her village’s girls to conduct a sit-in. They resisted efforts to remove them by force, and their sit-in only ended when Phoolan was knocked out unconscious with a brick. At age eleven, Phoolan’s family married her to a man in his thirties, who abused her physically and sexually. She fled several times, but her family kept returning her to her husband until the marriage finally ended when Phoolan was sixteen.

3. A Social Outcast Turned Bandit

For a wife to leave her husband was a major taboo in Phoolan Devi’s neck of the woods. So when she ditched her abusive husband, she became a social outcast. Her prospects grim, the teenaged Phoolan fell in with and joined a gang of rural bandits. She was the only female in her outlaw outfit, and the gang’s leader decided to take advantage of her and make her his concubine. He took to assaulting her, until another bandit stepped in, killed him.

Her assailant’s killer took over the gang, and soon, he and Phoolan became lovers. Once she had established herself as a bandit in her own right, one of her first acts as an outlaw was to visit vengeance upon her abusive ex. So she swept into that unworthy’s village at the head of a group bandits, to exact payback. She dragged her ex out of his house, gutted him with a knife, and pinned a note to him, in which she warned men not to marry little girls.

2. India’s Female Robin Hood

After she took care of her ex, Phoolan Devi became known as more than just a dangerous outlaw. She earned a reputation as a Robin-Hoodesque figure, who robbed from the upper castes and shared her loot with the impoverished. That phase of her life ended when an internal gang struggle ended with the murder of her lover, and his replacement as gang leader by two upper caste brothers. They seized Phoolan and imprisoned her in their out-of-the-way home village, Behmai. There, she was assaulted by many men, and was subjected to sundry humiliations such as being paraded naked around the village.

She eventually fled, but vowed to come back and pay her tormentors back, with interest. She formed a new bandit crew, this one exclusively of lower castes like her. On the evening of February 14th, 1981, several months after her escape, Phoolan returned to Behmai at the head of her gang. She demanded that the villagers produce the brothers who had imprisoned her, but they could not be found. So she demonstrated just how terrible a mistake the villagers had made to mess with such a dangerous woman, with an epic vengeance that rocked India.

1. A Dangerous Bandit Queen’s Epic Revenge

Phoolan Devi lined up about two dozen of the village of Behmai’s young men, whose numbers included some who had assaulted her, and ordered them killed. What came to be known as the Behmai Massacre rocked India. A massive manhunt was ordered, but Phoolan evaded her pursuers, helped by the region’s poor, who saw her as a heroine. Two years after the massacre, tired of life on the run, Phoolan negotiated a surrender for herself and the remnants of her gang.

As more than 10,000 people watched, she and her followers laid down their rifles, and were taken into custody. A villain to some, a heroine to others, Phoolan was kept in pretrial detention for eleven years, until the charges were finally dismissed and she was released in 1994. She became a women’s rights activist, and in 1995, one year after her release, she was elected to India’s parliament. Her eventful life was cut short in 2001, when a man who sought vengeance for the upper caste men killed by Phoolan assassinated her as she exited her Delhi home.

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Where Did We Find This Stuff? Some Sources and Further Reading

History Collection – The Life and Mysterious Death of Old West Gunslinger Belle Starr

All That is Interesting – How Female Pirate Jeanne de Clisson Terrorized the King of France

Badass of the Week – Ranavalona the Cruel

Clements, Barbara Evans – Bolshevik Women (1997)

Devi, Phoolan – I, Phoolan Devi: The Autobiography of India’s Bandit Queen (1996)

Encyclopedia Britannica – Ranavalona I

Futurist Dolmen – Rozalia Zemlyachka: An Incomplete Biography

Gonick, Larry – The Cartoon History of the Universe, Volume III (2002)

Head Stuff – Jeanne de Clisson, the Bloody Lioness of Brittany

History Collection – The Lawmen and Outlaws Who Built the Old West

James Adams Historic Enterprises – Jean de Belleville, Pirate or Politician?

Laidler, Keith – Female Caligula: Ranavalona, the Mad Queen of Madagascar (2005)

Legends of America – Belle Starr, the Bandit Queen

Owlcation – 10 Famous Female Outlaws of the Wild West

Prabok – Rosalia Samilovna Zemlyachka

Rayfield, Donald – Stalin and His Hangmen: The Tyrant and Those Who Killed For Him (2004)

Shirley, Glenn – Belle Starr and Her Times: The Literature, the Facts, and the Legends (1982)

Wikipedia – Anne Dieu-le-Veut

Wikipedia – Phoolan Devi

Wikipedia – Sikelgaita