The Dark Queens offers proof that the relationships between women can transform the world.

She resurrects two very real women in all their complexity, painting a richly detailed portrait of an unfamiliar time and striking at the roots of some of our culture’s stubbornest myths about female power. In The Dark Queens, award-winning writer Shelley Puhak sets the record straight. Yet after the queens’ deaths-one gentle, the other horrific-their stories were rewritten, their names consigned to slander and legend. With ingenuity and skill, they battled to stay alive in the game of statecraft, and in the process laid the foundations of what would one day be Charlemagne’s empire.

They fought a decades-long civil war-against each other. They formed coalitions and broke them, mothered children and lost them. The two queens commanded armies and negotiated with kings and popes. And yet-in sixth-century Merovingian France, where women were excluded from noble succession and royal politics was a blood sport-these two iron-willed strategists reigned over vast realms, changing the face of Europe. Her sister-in-law Fredegund started out as a lowly palace slave. The remarkable, little-known story of two trailblazing women in the Early Middle Ages who wielded immense power, only to be vilified for daring to rule.īrunhild was a foreign princess, raised to be married off for the sake of alliance-building.

Fredegund and Brunhild by Larry Perkins