Badass

by Ben Thompson

  But that’s not to say that people didn’t try. For instance, during this time period, the most powerful assortment of swordsmen in Japan was the Yoshioka clan. This prestigious family of accomplished martial artists had served as the chief weapons instructors to the Ashikaga shogunate for generations and was considered by most people to be the deadliest assortment of fighters alive. Basically, these guys thought they were the most hardcore bastards around.

  They were wrong.

  Musashi challenged the patriarch of the Yoshioka clan to a duel and quickly TKOed the jerkass by thwacking him in the gourd repeatedly with his homemade wooden implement of brain-smashing insanity. Yoshioka’s younger brother showed up seeking revenge and assaulted Musashi with a six-foot-long iron rod, but Miyamoto just kicked the guy down, wrenched the weapon out of his hands, and pummeled him to death with it like a bitch. A few hours later, the rest of the clan ambushed Musashi all at once, and the Japanese sword fighter was suddenly surrounded by more than a dozen guys armed with bows, muskets, wooden spoons, bullwhips, folding chairs, blowtorches, and a gun that shot ninja stars. Musashi silently drew his blades, slaughtered all of his assailants in a thick spray of crimson mist, wiped the Yoshioka clan off the face of Japan, and quietly walked off toward the horizon in search of new adventures.

  Musashi’s most famous duel came against a numbnuts named Sasaki Kojiro, a master of the Ganryu style of fighting—a strength-first school also known as the “School of Rock” (seriously)—and an expert with the massive, Conan-esque two-handed sword known as the no-dachi. This guy was so confident he was a total sack-busting killbot that he refused to hear any talk about how Musashi was the real grandmaster of sword fighting. Obviously, Sasaki was in denial—kind of like how your girlfriend never seems to believe you when you tell her that all of her “best guy friends” really just want to sleep with her. Whatever the case, it was painfully obvious to everyone that the only rational method of settling the dispute was with a gruesome battle to the death on a remote deserted island off the coast of the Japanese mainland, because that’s just the way total hardasses settle their differences. Especially in feudal Japan. Musashi showed up to the duel half an hour late (he believed that this was a good way of psyching out his opponents) and carrying an eight-foot-long wooden sword he’d whittled from a rowing oar on his boat ride out. He fought with his back to the east, forcing Sasaki to do battle with the blinding light of the rising sun directly in his eyes. Then, in the blink of an eye, Musashi and Sasaki both ran up and struck each other at the same time, like the heart-wrenching intro to Ninja Gaiden on the old-school Nintendo. Sasaki dropped immediately. The wounded warrior attempted to slash upward at Musashi, but Miyamoto crushed his skull with one swing of the oar, walked back to his boat, and sailed off without saying a word.

  After this incredible display of his giant tempered-steel balls, the thirty-year-old Musashi decided to settle down, stop violently killing people, and perfect his art. No longer needing to prove how tough he was, he opened a dojo, taught his fighting style, and made a name for himself as a talented artist, poet, calligrapher, sculptor, Zen master, strategist, and writer. When he got bored of that, he climbed a huge mountain, lived in a cave for a while, and composed the definitive treatise on the Zen of decapitation: the Book of Five Rings; a work that now functions essentially as a technical manual in the art of badassery. He died in 1645 at the age of sixty-one.

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  The basan is a nocturnal, fire-breathing ghost chicken from Japanese folklore that lives in the woods and comes into town at night to terrorize the populace. How awesome is that?

  Iaijutsu was the art of quick-drawing swords. These duels were a lot like Old West gunfights, only pointier. Two dudes would stand face-to-face with their weapons in their scabbards, then pull their swords and strike in one fluid motion. The first guy to get cut in half was the loser.

  One of Japan’s greatest and most brilliant armorers, the mentally unstable Sengo Muramasa, produced powerful swords that could cut through even the thickest iron and steel with ease but were considered unlucky, violent, and incredibly bloodthirsty. These cursed blades hungered for death—if the weapon’s owner failed to draw the blood of his enemies in a timely manner, the sword allegedly would drive him completely kill-crazy, forcing him to commit murder or suicide to appease the demonic spirits that haunted the weapon.

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  HATTORI HANZO

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  Hanzo Hattori was the grandmaster of the Iga ninja clan in sixteenth-century Japan and is considered by many to be the most badass ninja to ever live. His exploits have become legendary, and all who study the arts of ninjitsu and kicking ass look to Hanzo as the shining example of what it means to be totally awesome.

  Hanzo began his training by climbing a mountain at the age of eight and seeking instruction from the most hardcore ninja master in all of Japan. He busted his nuts every single day for four years, practicing insane martial arts skills like jumping, flying, and stabbing, and was inducted into the ranks of the shinobi by age twelve. By the time he was sixteen, he had already proven himself as a remorseless head-slicing death-bringer, serving in countless battles for the Oda clan and earning the nicknames “Hanzo the Ghost” and “Devil Hanzo”—probably because he would sneak around undetected and then nail people in the face with a flying side kick when they least expected it. Then he’d drop a smoke bomb and vanish into the night, only to reappear moments later chopping off some jerk’s head and doing backflips for no reason at all. When he wasn’t exploding the faces of rival ninja masters with devastating 158-hit combos, he enjoyed climbing the highest mountains he could find and wailing bitchin’ guitar solos so loud, flaming, and technically challenging that they set off explosions and fireworks in the sky above him.

  Hanzo is reputed to have possessed otherworldly skills and supposedly could teleport, turn invisible, and make stuff explode just by swearing at it. He could also allegedly hold his breath underwater for two days straight, and his martial arts moves were so sweet that it made people barf all over their kimonos (in a good way). His ninja clan, the “Men of Iga,” were recruited to battle the enemies of the Tokugawa shogunate and functioned as assassins, bodyguards, saboteurs, spies, and kidnappers. He had ninja operatives working undercover in the castles of many of Tokugawa’s enemies, and his shadow warriors were more omnipresent than the CIA and the KGB smashed together into one giant Voltron of Secrecy.

  Hanzo served the Tokugawa bravely for many years, dying valiantly in battle in 1590. The fifty-five-year-old warrior was chasing down the leader of a rival ninja clan when he ran into a trap and was burned to death by flaming oil, going out in a blaze of glory (nyuk nyuk) and probably looking awesome even in death.

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  22

  PETER THE GREAT

  (1672–1725)

  Some notion of the boisterous high jinks that took place may be obtained from considering the damage done. They broke three hundred panes of glass. They had bust or prised open the brass locks of twelve doors. They had blown up the kitchen floor…they cut up the dressers and several doors. They covered the parlor floor with grease and ink; broke walnut tables and stands. They seem to have had wild games in the beds, tearing up the feather beds, ripping the sheets, tearing canopies to pieces and ruining precious silk counterpanes.

  —STEPHEN GRAHAM, LIFE OF PETER I OF RUSSIA

  PYOTR ALEXEYVITCH ROMANOV, TSAR PETER THE GREAT, FATHER OF HIS COUNTRY AND EMPEROR OF ALL THE RUSSIAS (THERE ARE MULTIPLE), WAS A TALL, THINLY BUILT TOWER OF A MAN. Standing six foot eight, this awe-inspiring autocrat transformed Russia from a second-class nation on the periphery of civilization into a mighty, three-billion-acre empire, a dominant Westernized power, and a major player in European politics for centuries to come.

  But who cares about that crap? History is filled with dudes who took their underdeveloped countries and transformed them into mighty empires; what sets Peter the Great apart is the fact that he was the ultimate partier
, rocking faces across the globe like a badass seventeenth-century Keith Richards. No matter how tough or awesome you think you are, Peter the Great would have drunk your ass under the table before your shot glass hit the bar, and then gone off to nail your girlfriend, burn your house down, conquer two tiny European nations, and hurl a dwarf a hundred feet in the air for no reason at all.

  As a young man, Prince Peter hung out in the Foreign Quarter of Moscow, throwing wild parties with his Swiss buddy (and future grand admiral of the Russian navy), Francis Lefort. They would get wasted, spend thousands of rubles on strippers and booze, and then go drunkenly launch fireworks at two in the morning, pissing off their neighbors, causing massive explosions, melting stuff, and torching off their eyebrows. One time they even killed a Russian nobleman by busting him in the damn face with a bottle rocket, which is kind of hilarious in a weird way. Growing up, Peter also enjoyed archery, fencing, and musketry. Basically, if it had the potential to cause someone grievous bodily injury, Peter and his buddies would get so wasted that they couldn’t see straight and then partake in these life-threatening hobbies. Once, drunk Peter slashed Lefort in the face with his sword when the dude wasn’t even looking, then laughed so hard it broke every pane of glass within a hundred-foot radius.

  Peter was appointed tsar in 1682, but it’s not like a little thing as trivial as having near-limitless power to command the one hundred million citizens under his rule kept him from being totally awesome and irresponsible, and participating in stuff that no self-respecting aristocrat would be caught doing. Here is a brief list of the stuff Peter liked: ships, sailing, booze, women, bears, and midgets. Seriously. The guy had an insane amount of energy, so he would be out until like one in the morning every single night drinking enough booze to choke an army of donkeys, banging Russian babes, and screaming “Woo!” at passing oxcarts, and then he’d be up at five a.m. working at the dock and telling the imperial shipbuilders how awesome ships are. No kidding, the tsar of Russia would be on the wharf with a two-by-four and a hammer building boats by hand before dawn after a night of endless partying. No matter how much alcohol this guy consumed, he was almost never hung over, and he somehow sustained himself on about four hours of sleep a night and a diet about as nutritionally sound as eating tacks and chugging bleach-and-gasoline smoothies.

  Peter loved his boats, but unfortunately the problem with Russia is that it’s pretty much a desolate, inhospitable frozen wasteland that doesn’t border a whole lot of water that isn’t ridiculously freezing-ass cold all the time. So, to rectify that problem, Peter marched his armies against the Ottoman Empire for control of the Black Sea, which would provide the Russians access to the Mediterranean. After a couple of intense campaigns, the tsar wrenched power away from the Turks, captured land on the Black Sea, and set up the first permanent naval base in Russia’s history.

  Whaling on the Ottoman Empire with a garden rake was just the beginning, and Peter decided he was going to go around Europe trying to recruit help fighting the Turks. He lined up a badass European tour, known as the Grand Embassy, and visited England, Holland, Prussia, Austria, and Poland. The tsar tried to go incognito under the fake name Peter Mikhailov, but it’s kind of difficult to conceal your secret identity when you’re six foot eight and traveling with an entourage of dwarves, strippers, court jesters, and dancing bears. While the Embassy failed to recruit people to help fight the Turks, or really accomplish anything of value at all, Peter did get the opportunity to examine Western shipbuilding practices and party his ass off.

  The Grand Embassy wasn’t your typical diplomatic mission, and Peter wasn’t your typical international ambassador. The Russian delegation, referred to as “baptized bears” by the Prussian baron de Blomberg (who remarked that he had never seen such hard drinkers before in his entire life), were like an unruly hard-partying rock band, smashing up every palace they stayed at and trashing more hotel rooms than the Sex Pistols. They utterly destroyed the house of Lord John Evelyn of England over the course of several nights of drunken insanity, and nearly every place that extended Peter hospitality eventually forbade him ever to return. Unfortunately, the party ended and Peter had to return home when there was a major revolt back in Moscow, organized and run by the tsar’s wicked power-hungry stepsister.

  If Peter the Great was a 1980s-style rock star, he would have been Ted Nugent or Glen Danzig because he partied hard, but didn’t screw around when it came to busting people’s heads open with a pipe wrench when he had to. He rode into Moscow, quelled the revolt, tortured and executed twelve hundred traitors, buried some people alive, and forced his bitchy stepsister to become a nun. Then he divorced his wife and forced her to become a nun, too (just for good measure).

  Back in Moscow and with his base on the Black Sea firmly established, Peter then directed his attention to the Baltic Sea, going up against Charles XII of Sweden in the Great Northern War. He marched a massive force of thirty-seven thousand men into Sweden, and promptly had his army completely annihilated by just eighty-five hundred Swedes. Then Charles, who was an incredibly brilliant military genius, did a very unwise thing and attempted to invade Russia. You can’t really blame him for embarking on this exercise in flaccid futility, however—he was one of the first people to try to march east toward Moscow and didn’t yet realize that this was one of the stupidest things any human being could possibly attempt. Peter withdrew his army, avoiding direct combat, burning anything the Swedes could use, and massing his army for a counterattack—a solid strategy that would be reused time and time again by future Russian leaders to whip up on pretty much every militaristic megalomaniac dictator Europe has ever seen. The Russian army decisively defeated the Swedes at the Battle of Poltava, sent Charles packing, captured Sweden and Finland, and established a dominant presence on the Baltic Sea.

  There was much rejoicing. Peter threw a huge party after his victory, and then every single year on the anniversary of the Battle of Poltava he hosted some of the biggest, most insane keggers in history. People would hang out in the courtyard of his massive palace, bears would serve people wine and beer on platters (and growl at people who didn’t partake), and the Russian Imperial Guard would patrol the festivities and make sure everybody was getting appropriately wrecked. Anybody deemed too sober usually got punched in the face by the tsar (seriously).

  Victory over the Swedes asserted Russia’s dominance in Europe and started the rise of the mighty Russian Empire. Peter built up the navy, consolidated his power, and worked to modernize (read: Westernize) every aspect of the Russian people. Beards and arranged marriages were abolished, and the Orthodox Church was strongly encouraged to adopt more Roman-like practices.

  While he made these moves as tsar, in his personal life Peter was much more interested in worshiping at the hedonistic altar of St. Trixie of the Sacred Thong. He created the Most Drunken Council of Fools and Jesters, a parody of the Holy Synod of the Orthodox Church, and held frequent meetings where everybody would get bombed and sing obscene parodies of well-known church hymns. Vodka was scattered from holy water sprinklers, topless babes carried drinks around on silver platters, and everybody would have wild parties and hurl in the Dumpster behind the local 7-Eleven. Every Christmas, the council would parade through the streets on sleighs pulled by bears and goats, stopping at the homes of prominent noblemen and singing profane Christmas carols at the top of their lungs. When they decided to elect a new “prince-Pope” for their council in 1718, the synod members pounded one shot of vodka every fifteen minutes for eight days straight. And you pussies think power hours are badass?

  Peter the Great lived large, partied hard, and his urine, straight up, was at least sixty proof. He died of a gangrenous bladder (alcoholism is a nasty thing) in 1725 at the age of fifty-two, the ultimate rock star of imperial Russia and one of the most over-the-top world leaders to ever live. So, the next time someone asks you the trite “Which historical figure would you most want to have dinner with?” question, you’ll know how to respond.
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  Even though his invasion of Russia went fubar, Charles XII was still badass because he was an emotionless automaton who didn’t register physical pain, only spoke when threatening someone, and won every major battle he commanded (he was sick when the Swedes were defeated at Poltava). The guy was humorless, calculating, and super-omega tough. He brought Sweden to prominence as the most powerful nation in Europe, and when he went down he made sure the entire country went down in flames around him.

  Under Empress Catherine the Great, vodka taxes and licenses accounted for roughly 25 percent of the Russian government’s total revenue.

  In 1812, Napoleon lost half a million men attempting to invade Russia. Hitler’s 1941 expedition into the Motherland cost him twelve times as many troops.

  Peter founded the city of St. Petersburg, and in 1710 put out a declaration encouraging all the dwarves in Russia to come live in his city. He liked to play practical jokes on his friends by bringing them giant cakes and then having naked midgets jump out of them.