by Jason Porath
Shajar did not stop there. Her next obstacle was Turanshah, the newly installed sultan of Egypt. By all accounts, Turanshah was a real gem—he drank openly and immediately began ungratefully antagonizing those who put him in power. In fact, one of his first acts was to replace those who’d installed him with his own henchmen. His to-replace list included Shajar, which was what we in the history biz like to call a “huge mistake.”
In short order, Turanshah died in a series of violent acts so lengthy it would put Rasputin to shame. First, he was stabbed, so he fled into a nearby tower. Then the tower was set on fire, so he jumped out and ran for the river. Along the way, he took a spear in the gut, but somehow still made it into the river. There he was treated to a barrage of arrows from shore. Finally, one of the military commanders just waded out into the water and hacked him to death.
Afterwards, Shajar was officially instated as sultan. She was not, as tradition would assume, ruling in someone’s stead. She was full-on sultan, with the support of the military. She minted her own coins and led her own prayers—both of which further solidified her legitimacy.
As you might imagine, some factions in Egypt were not cool with a lady on the throne. To pacify her enemies, she married her dead husband’s former taste tester/accountant Aybek, and officially at least, Aybek became sultan. In reality, Shajar likely kept the reins while often sending Aybek away to deal with agitators. The particulars of this arrangement are debated, but most historians agree that Aybek was unpopular and probably chosen because multiple parties thought him easy to manipulate.
A few years into their marriage, Aybek decided to take another wife (his third) to help solidify his power. The details of what happened next change from account to account, but basically, Shajar was not cool with Aybek’s triple-marrying and had servants strangle him in the bath. In one telling, she was there too, beating him and rubbing soap in his eyes.
Shortly thereafter, Shajar met her end. According to legend, Shajar was caught in the act of killing Aybek, imprisoned, and then executed by Aybek’s first wife. The story goes that Shajar was beaten to death with wooden clogs by servants and her naked corpse was dumped over the wall of the city. This contrasts with the contemporary street-level account of what happened, where she slipped and fell while attempting to kill Aybek’s son. In that version she is held up as a patriot acting on behalf of her country against the unloved Aybek.
The dynasty that Shajar started with her ascension went on to last for over 300 years and repelled Mongol and Crusader invasions until the rise of the Ottomans. The defeat of the Seventh Crusade dealt such a severe blow that after the failure of two more poorly supported attempts, the institution died out for good.
• ART NOTES •
Since Shajar al-Durr means “string of pearls,” she is wearing one around her neck. She also has pearls on her rings.
Her kicked-up wooden shoe is a reference to the method of her grisly demise.
She’s holding a coin, a reference to both her having her own coins and the ransom she got for Louis IX.
While Shajar’s depiction was made in the absence of good source material, Louis IX is rendered pretty accurately.
Amba/Sikhandi
(INDIAN MYTH)
Gender-Swapping Princess Out for Revenge
The first mention of Princess Amba in the Indian epic Mahabharata is almost a footnote. She shows up when the warrior prince Bhishma, on the lookout for wives for his brother, heads to her swayamvara (husband-choosing competition). While there, Bhishma shows how macho he is by straight-out kidnapping Amba and her sisters (while yelling, “The wife is most dear who is stolen by force”) and bringing them all back to his kid brother, presumably so he has options. Amba says, “But wait, I am already in love with another guy,” and so Bhishma and his brother are like, “Well, okay, you can go, I guess,” and she wanders off.
She doesn’t show up again until around a million words later. That’s not an exaggeration—the Mahabaharata is so unbelievably long that the Hare Krishna religion spun out of just 5 percent of the total thing.
When Amba does return, we learn what she’s been up to. While Bhishma’s been out kicking butts, leading to interminable passages about how cool he is, she’s been picking up the pieces of her ruined life. You see, once she left captivity and reunited with her one true love, said genteel lover threw her out on her butt because he was a real turd burglar. The reason he gave was that she wasn’t upset enough when Bhishma kidnapped her and thus was impure/unfaithful/infected with cooties. She pleaded with her dimwitted beau, but since his ears were packed tight with excrement, it didn’t go anywhere.
From there, Amba set out on a path of revenge. Deciding that Bhishma, rather than her ex, was the bigger of the two jerkwads, she set her sights on him. Unfortunately, Bhishma was, as she would have known if she’d read any of the endless descriptions fawning over him, basically invulnerable. Kings wouldn’t fight him, out of fear. Even Bhishma’s teacher, who fought him for 23 days straight on Amba’s behalf—at the end of which both he and Bhishma were full of arrows and still somehow walking, like human pincushions—was unable to defeat him. It boiled down to Bhishma’s special god-given ability: he couldn’t die unless he wanted to.
Frustrated upon hearing this, Amba turned to prayer. Now, this isn’t go-to-church-once-a-week-type prayer. We’re talking 12 years of fasting, standing on her toes, traveling to temples across the land, and meditating. It was so much that even the gods were like, “You might want to tone it down, lady.” Some sages urged her to forgive and forget, to which she replied, “No! I hate him. I want Bhishma to die, and I will never forgive him. . . . I have nowhere to stay and nowhere to go. I have no protection in all the worlds, and for that I would like to destroy those three worlds!”
There was one figure, however, who was very impressed by her devotion to murder: Shiva, the god of destruction. In return for her lifetime of asceticism, he told Amba that she would get to kill Bhishma in her next life as a man. She just had to wait.
She was not about to wait. As soon as Shiva left, she built a funeral pyre and walked into it.
She was reborn thereafter as Prince Sikhandi, who, to the bewilderment of his parents (whom Shiva had told they were going to have a son), had female sex organs. Nevertheless, they brought Sikhandi up as a boy, since you don’t second-guess Shiva. In time, they even got Sikhandi engaged to a princess, who . . . was somewhat perturbed upon getting into Sikhandi’s pants. A lot of high drama later (the princess’s father decided to go to war over the matrimonial bait-and-switch), Sikhandi found a male forest spirit who agreed to swap body parts. Thus was Sikhandi given male genitalia and everyone was happy! Still keeping up?
Now Sikhandi joins Arjuna and his allies in the central story line, where they’re in all-out war against Bhishma and his buddies. No matter how hard Arjuna and company fight, they can’t seem to take their opponents down, because of Bhishma’s invincibility. That is, until Sikhandi shows up. Riding out to Bhishma with the main character Arjuna hiding behind him/her, Sikhandi reveals himself to be a reincarnated Amba. Realizing his poor life choices and general pigheadedness, Bhishma sets down his bow and is promptly filled with arrow after arrow, “piercing him like winter’s cold,” until there is room for no more.
This is the climax of the entire 1.8-million-word story. After Bhishma goes down, although there are many other skirmishes, the tide turns in favor of the protagonists. While Bhishma’s killing blow is attributed to Arjuna, even the book admits that he spent the climax hiding behind his friend Sikhandi, also known as Amba: the world’s best transgender reincarnating suicidal revenge-seeking princess.
• ART NOTES •
Riding on the chariot to attack Bhishma (silver) are Sikhandi and Amba, Arjuna (ducking behind Sikhandi), and Krishna (driving the chariot). Lastly, there’s the monkey god Hanuman, who actually at one point transforms into the chariot they’re using. He’s also the guy who shows up in the Sita entry to leap across all of In
dia with a mountain on his back. Indian mythology is complicated.
Khawlah bint al-Azwar
(7TH CENTURY, SYRIA/JORDAN/PALESTINE [ARABIA])
Warrior Poet of Early Islam
Now, looking at the image for this entry, you may be asking yourself, “Is . . . is that an Arab ninja?” The answer is: yeah, kind of. Meet Khawlah bint al-Azwar: one of early Islam’s greatest kickers of butt.
Khawlah’s story begins with her brother, Dirar. These two children of a tribal chief were inseparable—everything that he’d do, she’d do. Fast-forward to adulthood, and you have two expert warrior/rider/nurse/poets (hey, they had a lot of interests). Dirar became such a powerful warrior that infamous military leader (and buddy of the Prophet Muhammad) Khalid ibn al-Walid recruited him to lead men into war against the Byzantines. Dirar did pretty well, fighting bare-chested like an ’80s action star, until he was finally overpowered and taken hostage.
Khalid gathered 1,000 men and launched a rescue operation—only to find one was already under way. A mysterious soldier, dressed all in black and green, was mowing down Romans like grass . . . or, to use the colorfully strange description of the time, “it was like lightning striking the heads of two or four youths, then burning to ashes another five to seven.”
After sowing fear (and death blows) among the Byzantines to the point that the survivors ran off, the mysterious knight attempted to blend into the crowd of Khalid’s men and disappear—an attempt thwarted by the fact that the knight was completely drenched in blood, like “a crimson rose petal.” After catching up, Khalid demanded to know the identity of the terrifying stranger.
It was, as you’ve probably guessed, Khawlah bint al-Azwar.
Khalid, who knew a good thing when he saw it, quickly integrated her into his forces, and she rode with him on other raids against the Byzantines. Often Khawlah rode solo, reciting poems while assaulting the Byzantines’ rear guard, like Maya Angelou with a scimitar. After battles, she interrogated the survivors one by one, always with the same question: “Where is my brother?”
Eventually, they caught a break when Khalid thought to describe Dirar as “that bare-chested action hero guy,” or something along those lines, and learned where he was being taken. Khawlah rode out with 100 fighters and ambushed Dirar’s Byzantine captors (just as Dirar was reciting a poem—the al-Azwars were some serious Action Poets). Khawlah quickly freed him, killed a ton of Byzantines, and peaced out. Warred out. Whatever.
When next we hear of Khawlah, she’d gone back to being a nurse along with the rest of the women of her tribe—only to be captured unawares! Imprisoned by lusty Byzantines hell-bent on taking liberties with them, the women, all unarmed and most middle-aged, resigned themselves to their fates. Khawlah, not so much.
Paraphrasing, she asked, “Do you want to be these guys’ property?! Where is your courage and skill I’ve heard so much about?!”
“Look, Khawlah,” said one of the women. “We’re plenty brave, but you know what would be useful against an army? Weapons.”
“That’s no excuse. Let’s just uproot these tentpoles and pegs and kill them with those.”
“By Allah! What a wonderful and appropriate suggestion.”*
Bringing down the tent and circling into a defensive formation, the women began working their way out of the camp. In so doing, they shouted poems of rage,* as well as threats: “We have decided that today we will rectify your brains with these tent pegs and shorten your life spans, thus removing a spot of disgrace from your ancestors’ faces.”
After several forceful brain rectifications, the Byzantine leader ran out and tried to pacify the women in the most arrogant, mansplaining manner imaginable. He started by letting Khawlah in on a secret, one sure to put a smile on her face: that he was willing to marry her and be her master, and that he was quite the catch. All the Christian ladies wanted him. Additionally, he was rich and totally best buds with the Byzantine leader! Didn’t that sound great?
Khawlah’s verbatim response: “You wretched unbelieving son of an unchaste adulterer! By Allah! I will take this peg and gouge your eyes out. You are not even worthy of herding my camels and sheep, let alone claim to be my equal!”
If, at this point, you want to be best friends with her, you are not alone.
The women continued to hold off the Byzantines for some time (killing 30 in the process) until Khalid and Dirar arrived with reinforcements.* The Byzantine leader, claiming that he had somehow fallen out of love with Khawlah, handed her over to Dirar. Dirar replied, “Why thank you! Unfortunately, I have nothing to give in return except the point of a spear. So take it.” And stabbed him to death.
And then, as if that was not enough of a one-liner, Dirar dropped a verse from the Qur’an: “When you are greeted with a greeting, greet back better than that or at least return it equally.” Stone cold, Dirar. Stone cold.
Khawlah continued on to fight in other battles, showing a level of endurance on par with a caffeinated rhino. When a squadron of male cohorts fled an overwhelming battle, she insulted them back into service, like a seventh-century Mai Bhago. When a squadron of women did similarly, she yelled, “Yes, flee! Your presence only makes us weak!” When she was hit in the head and bled so much that it was certain she was going to die, she rested a bit and then got up and started getting water for everyone, despite her gaping wound.
So here’s to Khawlah bint al-Azwar: early Islam’s unforgettable,* unstoppable warrior poet.
Princess Caraboo
(1791–1864, ENGLAND)
The Princess Who Faked It
Something weird happened in rural England in 1817: They got a visitor. A princess. From the South Asian island of Javasu.
Not that it was easy to figure even that out. Princess Caraboo, as they eventually determined her name to be, didn’t speak English. Or French. Or any other language that anyone knew. They eventually had to rely on the services of a visiting Portuguese sailor (who’d spent time in Indonesia) to help translate. Turns out she had quite the tale: After her mother had been killed by cannibals, Caraboo was kidnapped by Spanish pirates and then traded from boat to boat before escaping by eventually jumping ship—only to later wash up onshore nearby. Within months, she’d become quite the celebrity, a draw for visitors from all around and the subject of breathless newspaper articles.
If that sounds too incredible for you to believe, you’re not alone. Even as Caraboo greeted people with her unique customs—performing her unique “salaam” gestures and dances, refusing alcohol, exercising with a homemade bow and arrow, and writing in an alphabet alien to everyone—her good-natured country hosts thought there was something fishy about this particularly light-skinned Asian princess. And they were determined to get to the truth of the matter.
They tried everything to get her to slip up. They listened by her bed for her to talk in her sleep. They would wake her suddenly to see if she’d speak English in her confusion. They left huge amounts of cash lying around the house to see if she’d grab it. When she was sick, they brought in a doctor who stood by the door and gave a fake terminal diagnosis, then watched for her reaction. Every attempt failed—she would just smile pleasantly, ignorant of any goings-on.
That is, until she got a little too famous.
After one newspaper article spread farther than usual, Caraboo’s hosts were contacted by a woman who’d previously hosted Caraboo, until her guest suddenly ran off. The only discrepancy the previous host noted with her experience was that the princess had had no issues with imbibing alcohol while with her.
And with that, the jig was up.
Tearily, Caraboo admitted that her actual name was Mary Baker, and that far from being an Indonesian princess, she was a homeless runaway. Her history was beyond depressing: put out to work in her teens by her parents, she’d been mistreated to the point of suicide. For years, she’d wandered from home to home, working odd jobs or sometimes begging, staying with clergymen and thieves.
Eventually she married a
sailor named Baker, who regaled her with stories about his time in Malaysia and Indonesia.
Her husband abandoned her shortly after getting her pregnant. When their child died in infancy, Mary began to wander the streets again, reinventing herself over and over. At first she pretended to be Spanish, then French, until she decided that her goal was to make a new start in America—for which she settled upon the identity of Princess Caraboo, with the ostensible goal of hustling up fare for a boat ticket. She made her act work by studying her visitors for context clues of what they expected her to sound like and playing on their vanities.
When her hosts finally sussed all of this out of Mary, their reaction was entirely unexpected: they bought her a ticket to America. Not only that, but they arranged lodging and booked her ticket under her maiden name, Mary Willcocks, so that she could travel anonymously and start a new life. She stayed in America for seven years, playing a version of her Princess Caraboo persona onstage to middling success. Eventually she remarried, returned to England, and lived a quiet life to the end of her days.
Astoundingly, the contemporary document that details her story went to extreme lengths to verify as much as possible. Everyone interviewed, including her parents, verified most of the details presented to them, then offered an entirely new aspect of her history—like that she’d taken up with a group of Romani people, or that her husband had died instead of running out on her. They all describe her as an imaginative yet harmless eccentric, with a seemingly malleable grip on her own history.
In the end, nobody knows the unvarnished truth about Mary Baker, alias Princess Caraboo. Which is just how she would have wanted it.
