100 Nasty Women of History

by Hannah Jewell

  Kosem Sultan would rule, directly and indirectly, for nearly five decades, during a period of Ottoman history known as the ‘Sultanate of Women’. This was a 130-year period in which lots of powerful wives and mothers of the imperial harem de facto ruled the empire via their weak husbands and their garbage sons. Kosem asserted her influence through her husband Ahmed, her two sons Murad and Ibrahim, and finally her grandson Mehmet, deploying a combination of milk and poison. The five-year period in which she ruled while Murad was underage was the first time in history that a valide sultan was official regent and therefore directly governing the empire.

  Kosem’s life story – which is now the subject of a popular Turkish soap opera which I would very much like to binge-watch if I weren’t so busy writing an excellent book – shows two very different sides to her personality. As she explained it: ‘I have chosen to let my poison out into the palace and give my milk to the people.’

  Kosem gave her milk to the people by way of giving her wealth to charity, helping orphans and particularly orphan girls to find husbands and receive an education, and by founding shelters and soup kitchens across the empire. She founded a beautiful mosque that still stands in Istanbul today, and she was known to be magnanimous and generous to the people.

  But it’s no small feat to maintain political power, even unofficial political power, for as long as she did. Her manoeuvring involved a lot of intrigue, and, well, a bit of murder on the side.

  While ruling with her son Murad, the two would take part in such mother–son bonding activities as executing the chief legal jurist of the empire, reconquering Baghdad in 1638, and putting down various rebellions. Much as mothers and sons enjoy doing today.

  The way that succession worked in the Ottoman Empire before Sultan Ahmed I meant that any son, no matter if he wasn’t the firstborn, could become the next sultan if he could gain the necessary support for his rule. This made having brothers a risky business – and so many sultans would have their brothers killed. This was, understandably, not a very popular practice among the general public, and so Sultan Ahmet instituted a new policy of putting brothers of the annointed successor in a ‘golden cage’ – keeping them secluded in a part of the palace and so unable to curry the support to threaten the next sultan.

  For the sons of Ahmed I and Kosem, this meant that while Murad was sultan, his younger brother Ibrahim would be isolated from the world. This would seriously damage his health, and later earn him the nickname ‘Ibrahim the Mad’.

  Ibrahim was in fact so unfit to rule that it was his older brother’s dying wish to have Ibrahim killed rather than allow him to rule and therefore carry on the dynasty, but Kosem did not allow it, instead seeing the opportunity to continue her indirect rule via her most incompetent son.

  During Ibrahim’s rule, Kosem had to contend with a harem full of power-hungry wives and concubines, foremost among them Sechir Para, ‘Sugar Cube’, an Armenian woman who had been recruited in order to fulfil Ibrahim’s orders to his advisers to find ‘the largest woman in the empire’. She was his absolute favourite, and convinced him to kill his other concubines.

  As things got out of control, Kosem plotted to depose and execute Ibrahim and replace him with her seven-year-old grandson, Mehmet. Her plot failed, but eventually a revolt would depose Ibrahim, who was then summarily strangled. Once Mehmet was in power, however, Kosem met a rival nearly as ambitious as she: Turhan Hatice, Mehmet’s mother and her daughter-in-law. Kosem next plotted to kill Mehmet in order to install her other grandson, Suleyman, whose mother was less ambitious and just happy to be there tbh. But Turhan got there first, and had Kosem strangled.

  She died in 1651 at the age of 61 or 62, after an unprecedented length of time ruling the harem and so the empire.

  So as we can see from this story, women are generally too meek and docile to make effective leaders, and that is why America can’t have a female president.

  17

  Empress Wu

  AD 624–705

  When a man excels at politics, the navigation of relationships with rivals and allies, and ascends to the very pinnacle of power, he is held up as a Great Man of Politics and gets his own Netflix drama. When a woman has these skills, and puts them to use, she’s a power-hungry schemer, a manipulator, a tyrant, and likely also a witch. This is the legacy of Empress Wu, the only female sovereign in China’s long history to rule in her own right, under her own name, rather than as the regent for some shitty baby or as the ‘real power’ behind her crap husband. To be clear, she absolutely was a tyrant. She has a *very* impressive kill count. I’m just saying that women won’t know true equality until we can murder freely and keep a harem of men, as Wu did, but also be remembered fondly for it.

  So what exactly did Wu get up to in the 7th century? She started from the bottom. Wu was among the lowliest-ranked of 122 wives in the palace of the Emperor Taizong, who had gained power in 626 AD after killing off his brothers. Boys will be boys! Wu’s position in the concubine pecking order pretty much meant she was a glorified chambermaid. Nevertheless, she caught the eye of the emperor while helping tend to his stables, engaging him in his favourite topic of conversation, horses. It’s like when men try to flirt with you by talking about feminism. It didn’t hurt that she was a looker, like when you don’t mind a man explaining feminism to you if he’s also quite hot.8

  In Tang China, the great historical roulette of arbitrary beauty standards had spun and landed on ‘stout’, and Wu was considered one of the most beautiful women in the land. She rose to the top of Taizong’s favourites, but Wu’s position became precarious when Taizong died. Men ruin everything! Luckily, though, Wu had also caught the eye of one of the emperor’s sons, Gaozong, while helping to nurse the ill Taizong. Crucially, Gaozong was not one of Taizong’s many garbage sons, as before Taizong died he had had to eliminate four of his crap princelings for their various treacheries, and their women along with them. No, Gaozong was just fine, and easily manipulated, to the delight of court advisers, and of Wu, who had survived the purge of princes and concubines.

  In the 7th-century Tang dynasty, the girls had gone wild. Inspired by their Turkic neighbours, women were brazenly riding horses, shortening their veils to sluttier and sluttier lengths, and committing that gravest crime any woman can sink to: trouser-wearing. The absolute slags. The timing was ripe for Wu to rise higher in power than any Chinese woman ever had, or ever would. It wasn’t a simple matter of just marrying Gaozong, however. After the death of an emperor, his wives were meant to shave their heads and retire to a life of quiet reflection and prayer far from court. Wu, though, was a saucy minx, who encountered Gaozong while apparently mourning for his father, as a good and pious woman would. Gaozong was super into it, and Wu was allowed against all tradition to return to the palace and become the wife of her first husband’s son, which is pretty gross tbh.

  The other trouble was that Gaozong already had a chief wife, the Empress Weng, who Wu served as a lady-in-waiting. Wu had a plan to replace her, however, and ho-ho-holy shit was it dark. Wu had already borne several children for Gaozong, while Weng hadn’t yet given him an official heir. The Empress Weng’s fate was sealed, however, when one day she came to visit a baby girl that Wu had recently birthed. She found herself alone with the baby, presumably just said, ‘What’s up,’ to it (or whatever it is people say to babies) and left, but when Wu returned, she cried out that her baby was DEAD. She demanded to know who had been the last person alone with the baby, and oh look at that, it was Empress Weng, who then appeared to be a baby-murderer in the eyes of everyone in the palace. In the ensuing fallout, Empress Weng made things even worse for herself by trying to exact revenge on Wu with a bit of witchcraft, which was truly a no-no. After some careful lobbying on the part of Wu and Gaozong around the palace advisers, Empress Weng was demoted, and in 655 Wu was made the new chief wife and Empress.

  How the fuck did that baby die? I don’t want to know because oh lordy it’s all bad. Even if it was a natural
cot death, Wu absolutely used her baby’s death to political ends. Yikes, Wu!

  Anyway Wu took it upon herself to put Empress Weng and another concubine who’d helped with the witchy stuff under house arrest, and eventually had them brutally killed, subjecting them to torture and leaving their still-alive bodies to stew in vats of wine for days until they died. Sounds like my plans for Friday night, amirite?!

  And so Empress Wu gained the nickname ‘Treacherous Fox’, and lived a number of happy years as Gaozong’s chief wife. They passed their days scheming, meting out punishments to traitorous family members, and enjoying a spot of weird sex stuff. One of the reasons Wu had risen to be Gaozong’s favourite, apparently, was because she was the only one willing to do ~some unknown sex thing~ that remains a mystery but has probably since been inadvertently described in the pages of Cosmo. Whatever it was, they supposedly enjoyed doing it in a bed surrounded by mirrors, the better to check out their hot, stout bodies. Courtly advisers grew concerned that the pair was in fact too monogamous, which was seen as dangerous to a man’s health; wasting all his semen and energy on a single succubus such as Wu rather than drawing from the life force of dozens of young ladies, as was “natural”.9

  Wu had climbed to great heights, both politically and sexually speaking, but would rise even higher – on both fronts. In the year 660, Gaozong had a stroke, and entrusted Wu to manage more affairs of state. Everything was going according to plan: Empress Wu saw herself as being the one true emperor after her husband’s death. It would take a couple more sly poisonings and a banishment or two, some decrees to placate the people, and a handful of auspicious omens and before long Wu was well on her way along the path to power. Her only trouble was a deep fear of being haunted by the ghosts of her tortured and murdered enemies, because you fucking would be terrified of that after the wine thing, wouldn’t you?

  Wu had two sons left standing by the time Gaozong died in 683. One of them, Zhongzong, she kinda hated, but as the elder he was installed as the next emperor. The other, Ruizong, was mummy’s little princeling, and another easily manipulated man for Wu to rule through. What mummy wants, mummy gets, and Zhongzong managed only six weeks in power before Wu declared him a traitor and had him deposed. Once Ruizong was in power, Wu told everyone he had a speech impediment, and that she would do all the talking for him, naturally. After six years of Ruizong’s powerful, impressive, not-at-all-secondary-to-his-mother’s rule, he finally said, totally of his own accord, that wouldn’t it be nice if he just abdicated and Wu took over instead.

  And so Wu came to power in 690. She wasn’t just the empress, she was the emperor, the sovereign, the ~Sage Mother of Mankind~ and a living god. She ruled for 15 years this way, which were actually quite uneventful, apart from the continued weird sex stuff. In 699, Wu created something called the Office of the Crane, which was tasked with coming up with potions and elixirs to help her elude death. It was also staffed by hot young men who chilled in silky robes and wore make-up to enhance their beauty. After all, if sex with young women was meant to prolong the life of an emperor, why shouldn’t Wu enjoy the same health benefits? Her two faves among her toy boys were the Zhang brothers who, when she fell ill in her old age, were the only ones allowed near her. Even into her 80s, Wu was getting it on, the saucy minx.

  Eventually, though, Wu would get a taste of her own medicine. Fed up with the sexy weird court his mother presided over, Zhongzong, Wu’s ousted son, arrived with conspirators one night to behead the hated Zhang brothers (RIP) and carry out a coup. Wu left the palace a few days later, after five decades of running China in one way or another. Say what you will about her murdering ways, but Wu had a good run.

  Wu’s legacy has mixed reviews. She was the subject of a 16th-century porno novel entitled The Lord of Perfect Satisfaction which involved an older Wu getting it off with a handsome, bedicked youth, who she would call ‘Daddy’ in the novel. Centuries later, she has featured in less X-rated novels and biographies as well as films. A Chinese-language biography of Hillary Clinton from 1996 had the subtitle Empress Wu in the White House, which is pretty lol considering all of the above.

  Was Wu an extra bad baddie, for all her court machinations? Or was she actually just par for the course as far as imperial scheming goes? But also, wow did she murder people! She suuuure did.

  If nothing else, we can all agree that the Empress Wu deserves an Oscar-winning biopic. Maybe Scarlett Johansson can play the lead? Or whoever the latest white lady is who gets to play Asian roles – unless of course Hollywood someday decides to change its lily-white ways.

  18

  Laskarina Bouboulina

  1771–1825

  Laskarina Bouboulina proved that you’re never too old to get started as a naval commander. She was 40 years old, twice widowed, the mother of seven children, single, and ready to mingle by the time she set about building up her shipping empire.

  Laskarina was born in 1771 inside a prison in Istanbul where her mother was visiting her father, who had been jailed for his participation in a 1770 independence uprising against the Ottoman Empire. The family hailed from the Greek island of Hydra and like most Greeks in maritime communities they were skilled sailors. Laskarina was a hard drinker and, as the story goes, so ugly the only way she could get laid was to point a pistol at a man and threaten him. What is the truth of it and what is the locker room talk of sexually rejected men, we will never know.

  Laskarina’s second husband, Dimitri Bouboulis, from whom she got the name Bouboulina, died in 1811 in battle with pirates, a leading cause of death in the day. He had four ships to his name, which she took over and began to build up into a formidable fleet, crowned by the massive warship Agamemnon, evoking the Trojan War. Laskarina and her fellow Greeks had been preparing for another independence uprising for years as part of the innocently named underground organisation ‘The Friendly Society’. She recruited a private army of men from the island of Spetses, and spent the fortune she had inherited from her husbands on feeding and paying her men. Laskarina had also been secretly amassing arms and keeping them in her house. Imagine an Ottoman official coming to inspect this middle-aged Greek mother’s home and finding the building blocks for a private army. ‘Oh, these? Oh no, just a hobby, don’t mind silly old me!’

  When the Greeks rose up in their bloody bid for independence, Laskarina commanded her ships all round the Greek islands, fighting in key blockades and battles and sieges of Turkish forts, and assisting Greek forces wherever they were. Though outnumbered, the Greeks were better sailors and a mighty match for the Ottomans. When sea battles weren’t enough for her, Laskarina came ashore to fight the revolution on horseback.

  When the Greeks captured the town of Tripolis, Laskarina negotiated a prisoner swap with the defeated Turkish commander in order to save the lives of the Turkish women and children of the harem of the Ottoman governor Hourshid Pasha. She had made a promise years earlier to the mother of the Sultan that she would protect Turkish women in need, in exchange for returning her confiscated fortune. And so in the midst of a war marked by brutal massacres of civilians, she commanded her soldiers not to harm these women and children, warning them that, ‘Whoever attempts to do so will have first to pass over my dead body.’ The women and children were safely evacuated.

  The Greek War of Independence lasted from 1821 until 1832 and resulted in an independent Greek state, but Laskarina wouldn’t survive to see it. After all her daring feats at sea and on the battlefield, Laskarina was killed in 1825 in a family dispute, when her son ran off with the daughter of another family and someone shot her. It just goes to show that no amount of revolutionary spirit and battle experience can save a person from their family drama.

  19

  Ching Shih

  1775–1844

  Listen. The most important thing you need to know about Ching Shih, or Zheng Shi, is that not only was she a pirate who fucked up vast stretches of sea in the 19th century but she was the most successful pirate in fucking history. Sh
e fucked up that glass ceiling that’s been holding lady pirates back too long. She commanded a goddamn fleet of motherfucking tens of thousands of pirate underlings.

  She fucked up the British. She fucked up the Portuguese. And the British and the Portuguese were some of the worst motherfuckers on the sea! She saw the Qing dynasty, she thought, ‘Why hello there’, and fucked it up too.

  Ching Shih was born in 1775 in Guangdong, China, and started out as a sex-worker in a brothel. Does this matter? Fuck no. It doesn’t matter who you are or where you start from so long as you work hard and become the most fearsome pirate of all time.

  She started her proper pirating after marrying her pirate boo, and together they joined in pirate activities. At some point, he fucking died. Men always let you down.

  Ching Shih carried on commanding their fleet of ships and turned it into an even bigger one. Her fleet had it all. It had loot. It had men. It had bigass ships. It menaced the goddamn ocean. It was so rich and so successful that it ended up a fully fledged business empire, thriving off taxes from captured coastal towns. She taxed her pirate underlings on their booty (lol) and got really fucking rich. Ching Shih’s pirate empire had fucking laws. If you broke the laws, RIP you. If you captured a wife but weren’t faithful to her, RIP you. If you raped someone, you were dead. It was a very well-oiled machine, and they called her ‘The Terror of South China’, which is pretty metal.

  The Chinese government was so sick of her shit that they offered her and all her pirates amnesty if she would just stop fucking them all up for a second. They even let her keep her loot. She was such a fucking good pirate that she lived long enough to retire from piracy, and take up bingo or some shit instead. (She actually got married, had a kid, and opened a gambling house.)