#Didda

“Every fact about Didda descends from a single book written a century and a half after her death by a man who despised her — and even he ends her story with a stable kingdom, a chosen heir, and a queen who died in her bed. Learning to read Kalhaṇa on Didda is learning to read every hostile witness history has ever produced about a powerful woman.”

“A princess written off as unmarriageable — female, lame, then widowed — took a kingdom that devoured its kings and held it for forty-five unbroken years, through a son, three grandsons, and finally alone; and everything we know of her comes from one chronicler who could not forgive her and could not diminish her.”