Valentine's Day History's Romantics

From poets and presidents to kings and courtesans, history is filled with great romances and timeless love stories.  This Valentine's Day, discover some of history's most famous tales of love and loss.

King Edward VIII

October 1936: Edward VIII and Mrs Wallis Simpson, during a cruise in the Adriatic, before the couple's romance became widely known.

Wallis, Duchess of Windsor; Prince Edward, Duke of Windsor (King Edward VIII)

King Edward VIII

Edward, then Prince of Wales, was introduced to Wallis Simpson in 1931, when she was married to her second husband; they soon began a relationship that would rock Britain's most prominent institutions — Parliament, the monarchy and the Church of England — to their cores. Edward called Simpson, whom others criticized as a financially unstable social climber, "the perfect woman." Just months after being crowned king in January 1936, after the death of his father, George V, Edward proposed to Simpson, precipitating a huge scandal and prompting Britain's prime minister, Stanley Baldwin, to say he would resign if the marriage went ahead. Not wanting to push his country into an electoral crisis, but unwilling to give Simpson up, Edward made the decision to abdicate the throne. In a public radio address, he told the world of his love for Simpson, saying that "I have found it impossible to carry the heavy burden of responsibility and to discharge my duties as King as I would wish to do without the help and support of the woman I love." Married and given the titles of Duke and Duchess of Windsor, the couple lived in exile in France, where they became fixtures of cafe society.

Giacomo Casanova

Giacomo Casanova

The name "Casanova" has long since come to conjure up the romantic image of the prototypical libertine and seducer, thanks to the success of Giacomo Casanova's posthumously published 12-volume autobiography, Histoire de ma vie, which chronicled with vivid detail — as well as some exaggeration — his many sexual and romantic exploits in 18th-century Europe. Born in Venice in 1725 to actor parents, Casanova was expelled from a seminary for scandalous conduct and embarked on a varied career, including a stint working for a cardinal in Rome, as a violinist, and as a magician, while traveling all around the continent. Fleeing from creditors, he changed his name to Chevalier de Seingalt, under which he published a number of literary works, most importantly his autobiography. Casanova's celebration of pleasure seeking and much-professed love of women — he maintained that a woman's conversation was at least as captivating as her body — made him the leading champion of a movement towards sexual freedom, and the model for the famous Don Juan of literature. After working as a diplomat in Berlin, Russia, and Poland and a spy for the Venetian inquisitors, Casanova spent the final years of his life working on his autobiography in the library of a Bohemian count. He died in 1798.

Sappho (Musei Capitolini, Roma)

 

Sappho

Much uncertainty surrounds the life story of the celebrated Greek lyric poet Sappho, a woman Plato called "the tenth Muse." Born around 610 B.C. on the island of Lesbos, now part of Greece, she was said to have been married to Cercylas, a wealthy man. Many legends have long existed about Sappho's life, including a prevalent one — now believed to be untrue — that she leaped into the sea to her death because of her unrequited love of a younger man, the sailor Phaon. It is not known how much work she published during her lifetime, but by the 8th or 9th century Sappho's known work was limited to quotations made by other authors. In the majority of her poems, Sappho wrote about love — and the accompanying emotions of hatred, anger and jealousy — among the members of her largely young and female circle. Sappho gave her female acolytes educational and religious instruction as part of the preparation for marriage; the group was dedicated to and inspired by Aphrodite, the Greek goddess of love and beauty. Her focus on the relationships between women and girls has led many to assume that Sappho was a lesbian — a word derived from the island and the communities of women that lived there — but it is also true that the existence of strong emotions and attractions between members of the same sex was considered far more common and less taboo than in later years.