This woman might have been one of the coolest women ever to have ruled Sweden. We’re talking about a teetotal, polyglot, Catholic, lesbian queen.
Not only was Queen Christina, a woman who spoke 10 languages fluently, a supporter of the common people - she stripped the nobility of some of their rights as an effect of a protest initiated by the lower classes - she was very fond of the arts and humanities as well, but sadly her biggest fan Réne Déscartes died shortly after the queen had made him a professor at the University of Uppsala. What is more, she also stopped the witch hunts that her father had initiated, and refused to let any man tell her what to do, or how to rule her country.
Even more interesting - as already mentioned - Queen Christina was a lesbian, and thus refused to marry a man for the sake of keeping the royal family alive, and she was pissed off with the traditional dress codes of her times, and thus often dressed up as a man instead. As a child, she refused to subscribe to a traditional gender system, and consequently refused to learn how to knit, or embroider a pillow, and instead she became a skilled soldier and horse-rider.
And, even more remarkably, considering the fact that the country adored her, when the government told her that she wasn’t allowed to be a Catholic, she told them that she wasn’t going to be untrue to her own heart in order for the country to have a queen, promptly abdicated and moved to Rome in order to become a manager of a royal academy of Italian art.
(via suckthislemon)
