The empress who'd rather have been a queen

I hope you all are braced for the next Polar Vortex, which will be impacting much of the US and Canada; my sympathies, too, to my friends Down Under, where it has been hellishly hot. Now here is my entry for Today in Medieval History.
On January 27th, 1186, Constance de Hauteville, aunt of the Sicilian king William II, was wed to Heinrich von Hohenstaufen, King of Germany, and heir to the Holy Roman Empire. She was thirty-one, he was twenty, and I think we can safely say that theirs was not a loving marriage. Heinrich was well educated, fluent in Latin, a poet like his enemy, the English king Richard, and very intelligent. He was also a sociopath. Wives of sociopaths rarely lived happily ever after. But Constance was a remarkable woman, courageous and resourceful. The more I learned about her, the more I found myself wanting to write about her. I did not expect to be able to do it, though. But then I was asked to write a short story for George R.R. Martin and Gardner Debois’s anthology, Dangerous Woman. Once I stopped laughing at the idea of me doing a short story, I started to give it serious consideration, and the result was The Queen in Exile, which may be the first short story to have an Author’s Note! While Constance also appears briefly in Lionheart and she has several scenes in A King’s Ransom, I was very pleased to have this opportunity to give her more time on center-stage.
Her life was filled with high drama. Left behind in Salerno by Heinrich, she came close to being killed when the citizens rebelled against her hated husband. She was saved in the nick of time, but was then turned over to Heinrich’s enemy, Tancred, King of Sicily. Tancred treated her well, and eventually sent her under guard to be a hostage of the pope. She seized her chance when they encountered some of Heinrich’s imperial guard on their way to Rome, and they came to her rescue after she’d identified herself as their empress. Because of their age difference and her failure to conceive during the first eight years of their marriage, Constance was widely believed to be barren. But to the amazement and skepticism of the medieval world, she became pregnant in the spring of 1194, and was delivered of a healthy son in late December of that year, who would later gain greater fame than either of his parents. She was forty by then and Heinrich’s enemies—who were legion and well-deserved—claimed the entire pregnancy was a hoax, a scheme concocted by Heinrich to get a male heir. Constance was outraged by this malicious slander and countered it by inviting the women of the town of Jesi to watch her give birth, determined that none would be able to deny the legitimacy of her son. Heinrich’s cruelties soon drove the Sicilians into rebellion and Constance is said to have conspired with them. Heinrich apparently believed it, and her future looked very bleak, for now that she’d given him a son, he no longer needed her to lay claim to the Sicilian crown.
. I have great admiration for Constance, wed to a man who had neither honor nor mercy. She deserved so much better, and I am grateful to that medieval mosquito who infected Heinrich with malaria and brought about his unexpected and sudden death in 1197—assuming that he did die of malaria, for dysentery has also been suggested, as has poison. While there is no evidence of the latter, if it was true, the question would not have been, Who would have wanted to murder Heinrich? It would have been, Who would not have wanted to murder him?
Constance at once took control of her island kingdom, expelled Heinrich’s hated Germans, and devoted the remaining year of her life to safeguarding the Sicilian throne for her young son. Sadly, she died too soon, at only forty-four, but before her death, she entrusted young Frederick to a very powerful patron, Pope Innocent III. It was a shrewd move and would benefit Frederick greatly as he launched his remarkable career, becoming King of Sicily, then Holy Roman Emperor, and even King of Jerusalem. Constance has been neglected by history, as is too often the case with women. But Dante placed her in Paradise.