by Jason Porath
The modernizing policies she brought to Korea were controversial. Long viewed as the “Hermit Kingdom,” Korea had recently been forced onto the world stage in response to the colonial ambitions of its neighbors, particularly Japan. Queen Min opened up Korea to Western education, medicine, and technology and started allowing both Japanese and Chinese influence—but also began skillfully playing the two nations off each other. Simultaneously, she began modernizing the Korean military, to prepare it for any foreign threats. This was where she came into conflict with the conservative, isolationist Daewongun.
Although he’d already been forced off the throne by this point, the Daewongun still wielded a quiet and treacherous power. As a testimony to this power, shortly after his forced retirement, explosives went off in Queen Min’s sleeping quarters, causing a fire but no injuries. Soon thereafter, Queen Min’s closest relatives received an ornate box from a messenger—it too exploded, killing them. Neither incident was directly traced to the Daewongun, but as we shall see, they were both entirely in line with his style of wielding power.
In 1882, members of the old Korean military, outraged over Queen Min’s modernization efforts, tried to overthrow the government. Under the aegis of the Daewongun, they attacked police stations, pillaged estates belonging to Queen Min, killed many of her family and supporters, and attempted to kill her. She escaped, and for a time the Daewongun was back in power, undoing as many of her efforts as possible. This ended when she brought in 4,500 Chinese troops, who put the Daewongun on trial in China for treason. As the king’s father, though, he was treated leniently, and he returned to Korea in 1885—over Queen Min’s strenuous objections.
Unfortunately, all this internal strife weakened the ability of Korea to keep out invaders, and in 1894 Japan took advantage of this by launching the First Sino-Japanese War. China, which had nominally been in charge of defending Korea, was easily defeated by Japan.
With Japan seeing Queen Min as a threat to their plans—and rightfully so, as she was now attempting to leverage Russia against them—her days were numbered. The end came when the Daewongun’s allies surreptitiously let 56 Japanese assassins into her palace. They brutally murdered Queen Min, setting her on fire before everyone’s eyes. The Daewongun was never officially tied to the murder, and the Japanese government to this day has never admitted involvement. The 56 were arrested, but the Japanese courts pardoned them, citing a lack of evidence.
The next 10 years saw Korea crumble and become a Japanese protectorate. King Gojong, who had over the years developed a deep respect and love for his capable wife, fell into a deep depression and fled to the Russian embassy. With the king a de facto prisoner of Russia, Japan and Russia began warring over who was to take what parts of Korea and Manchuria, resulting in the Russo-Japanese War. Japan won in 1905, and Korea entered a dark period of its history.
In modern days, Queen Min has been remembered as one of Korea’s great heroines. Sadly, no photos of Queen Min survive. She lives on only in memory and in song.
Micaela Bastidas
(1744–1781, PERU/BOLIVIA)
The Brains of the Túpac Amaru Rebellion
There’s a saying when it comes to war: “amateurs talk tactics, professionals study logistics.” Micaela Bastidas was a professional.
In the late 1700s, the areas now known as Peru and Bolivia were awash in terrifying violence as various movements started warring with the Spanish.* These were collectively known as the Túpac Amaru Rebellion, named after a 20th-century rapper who faked his death by traveling backwards in time a mestizo who declared himself a descendant of the last Incan king and set about kicking Spanish butt.
The right-hand woman of Túpac Amaru?* Micaela Bastidas. She was also his wife.
Now, at this point some may be thinking, Ugh, this woman is just his historical plus-one. Oh, you are so very wrong, conclusion-jumpers. Bastidas, the daughter of an indigenous woman and an African man,* quickly proved herself more fearsome, and more capable, than her more famous husband. For while he took the glory, she did all the behind-the-scenes work during the war:
• She managed the supplies, recruited indigenous people, oversaw payments, collected taxes, distributed passports, posted guards, and ran a spy ring.
• She punished and even executed people who didn’t obey her commands, like a boss. A really tough boss.
• When a Spanish tax collector came to collect money, she punched him in the neck and kicked him out.
• When an enemy tried tricking her into a trap, she showed up with 2,600 troops and shelled his house.
• When Micaela and her troops captured some Europeans, instead of executing them, she put them to work as accountants and weaponsmiths. How much of this was under threat of death is a matter of debate.
• She’d regularly tear down anti-rebellion decrees from church doors and replace them with her own, like a gun-wielding Martin Luther.*
But if you were to believe the accounts of some Spanish contemporaries, there were few people Micaela was harder on than her husband. Surviving letters have her calling him “lead-footed” in his slowness to provide assistance and threatening to turn herself in to the Spanish if he didn’t take things more seriously. She’d vacillate between that and warning him to watch what he ate, fearing he’d be poisoned. Partly this was her, shall we say, managerial disposition—but partly this was just the relationship they had. They loved giving each other a hard time.
In the end, they were overcome, and both Micaela and her husband met incredibly grisly deaths. However, their revolutions didn’t stop right there. Rebels in neighboring areas, including other women like Bartolina Sisa and Gregoria Apaza, continued the fight, although they, too, were doomed to failure. Nevertheless, they sowed the seeds of independence—which sprouted in full a little over four decades later when Peru and Bolivia declared independence.
• ART NOTES •
Every animated movie needs a cute animal sidekick. Given that they are considered a tasty delicacy in Peru, what more appropriate mascot than a guinea pig? Especially considering that Peruvian guinea pigs are basically beautiful mounds of perfectly coiffed hair.
In the far background, rallying the troops, is Túpac Amaru in the “we’re goin’ to war, boys!” pose that shows up in almost every statue or portrait of him.
The woman in the background walking toward Túpac is Tomasa Tito Condemayta. She was a Creole woman who led a large number of troops alongside Túpac and Micaela. According to some accounts, Bastidas had a hard time trusting her initially, mainly because she was thought to be a Spanish sympathizer, but one account suggests that Bastidas thought Túpac might cheat on her with Condemayta. Possibly spurious, but worth mentioning.
Neerja Bhanot
(1963–1986, INDIA)
Heroine of the Hijack
On September 5, 1986, mere hours before her 24th birthday, Neerja Bhanot turned to see four heavily armed terrorists boarding Karachi’s Pan Am flight 73, on which she was chief flight attendant. She dashed to the cockpit to warn the pilots, but was caught by one of the hijackers, who grabbed her hair. Nevertheless, she managed to shout a secret “hijack code” to the cockpit crew—who, according to regulations unknown to any of the flight attendants, quickly evacuated, leaving the 400 passengers and 13-person flight crew at the mercy of the four enraged terrorists.
With the cockpit crew gone, and Neerja now the most senior crew member, she was in charge.
This was far from the first time she’d had to take charge. The previous year she’d been wedded in an arranged marriage, which had gone sour quickly. She’d gone from a life of glamour as a model in India to one of financial, emotional, and even physical starvation in Pakistan—she lost 11 pounds in two months. Despite enormous humiliation and threats of harm, she separated from her husband and fled.
Once back in India, Neerja had worked herself to the bone, regularly sleeping as little as three hours a night as she worked both as a model and as a flight attendant. She was one of
the top 80 applicants out of 10,000 for Pan Am’s first all-Indian cabin crew. Pan Am 73 was to be their first flight, and it was a job she took very seriously. The night before, when her mother, seeing how sleep-deprived she was, begged her to skip work, Neerja replied, “Mom, duty comes first.”
After the pilots fled, Neerja worked to maintain calm. At the orders of the terrorists—who were part of the Libya-backed Abu Nidal Organization—she collected the passports of all the passengers, taking care to hide or destroy the American ones so the terrorists could not target those passengers.
After 17 hours, as sunset neared, a mechanical failure caused the lights in the aircraft to dim and go out. In response, the terrorists opened fire, at which point Neerja threw open the emergency exit.
Instead of saving herself by sliding down the emergency chute, she used her body to shield three escaping children. She then crawled to a second emergency exit, turning the crank to open it despite having been shot.
She died at the scene, along with 19 other passengers and crew. One hundred others were wounded. The hijackers were arrested in the terminal and tossed into prison.
Her parents received her body on her 24th birthday.
The Many Heroes of Pan Am 73
In 2016, some accounts came to light that complicated the narrative. In the wake of Neerja, a movie based on her life, being released in India, several of the other attendants on Pan Am 73 publicly came forward with their stories for the first time. Emphasizing that their accounts “may differ but the spirit remains the same,” they attributed several of Neerja’s actions—such as alerting the pilots—to others on the flight. In so doing, they wanted to honor the memory of all their colleagues who worked as a group throughout the crisis. In an interview with BBC News, they stressed that “there was no single hero that day, that crew members not interviewed played an equally important role, and that they want survivors of terror attacks like 9/11 and [the November 2015 Paris attacks] to know that life goes on.”
Boudica
(C. 20–60 CE, ENGLAND)
The Headhunter Queen of Britain
At the height of its power, Rome once seriously considered giving up its British holdings entirely. The reason? Queen Boudica, whose brutal revenge spree made her the Roman bogeyman for generations. She killed 70,000 people, burned London to the ground, established herself as the most famous headhunter of all time—and to this day Britain loves her for it.
The first thing to know about Boudica (aka Boudicca or Boudicea) is how little we know about her. We don’t know when she was born, how she died, where she died, where she came from, or whether Boudica was even her name (as opposed to a title). However, what we do know, largely from two Roman historians, is enough to earn her a place in the badass hall of fame.
Boudica ascended to power when her husband, the king of the ancient British tribe of the Iceni, died. At the time, Rome was in control of Britain, and the Iceni had voluntarily allied with them. When the king died, he willed half his belongings to the Roman emperor and the other half to his family—thinking that would solve any problems of succession.
It didn’t. Instead, the Romans, at the apex of their arrogance, set into action an outrageously poor set of decisions. Try to spot where things went off the rails:
• They did not recognize Boudica’s claim to the throne because she was a woman.
• They laid claim to all of the late king’s money.
• They also grabbed a ton of Iceni land.
• And said that some money they’d given the late king was a loan, due back (with interest) immediately.
• They publicly flogged Boudica.
• And raped her two daughters.
You can probably tell at this point that the rest of this story isn’t going to go well for the Romans.
The amazing thing is, this incident was just another in a series of stupid moves by local Romans! When Boudica subsequently raised a mob and began marching on the nearby town of Camulodunum (essentially a retirement home for Roman veterans), several other blunders came to light:
• Camulodunum had dismantled its own defenses so more people could build houses.
• The local Roman magistrates had been overtaxing all the neighboring tribes, mostly because they could.
• All the collected money had gone to building a fancy temple, which was effectively a giant middle finger to their subjugated neighbors.
• Lastly, when the Romans got word that some rowdy barbarian lady was acting up, they laughed and sent 200 soldiers to scare her off. The 120,000 men she’d gathered laughed back and killed everyone in the city.
Fun science fact: if you apply a sustained fire to an entire Roman city, you can turn it into a molten pile of sickly red clay. This fact comes to us courtesy of Boudica, warrior scientist of the first century, and the six-inch-thick layer of detritus that is current-day Camulodunum (located several feet below Colchester).
She repeated her experiment with two other cities, including Londinium, the precursor to London. Along the way, her army, which had at this point become a roaming 230,000-man block party, killed an armed Roman legion and around 70,000 civilians and became Rome’s worst nightmare. In order to understand how terrifying this was for Rome, one should understand some specifics of Boudica’s uprising:
• Her army cut off the breasts of Roman noblewomen, sewed them to their mouths, and hung the bodies or mounted them on spears.
• The Iceni decapitated people as a matter of religious principle, embalming the heads of their enemies and mounting them on chariots. The rest were thrown into rivers (and their skulls are still occasionally found to this day).
• The Roman Empire was huge to the point of unwieldy at this time. Stories of Boudica’s untrained mob wiping out Roman veterans left and right raised the specter of uprisings happening everywhere.
• “Moreover,” a prominent Roman historian wrote, “all this ruin was brought upon the Romans by a woman, a fact which in itself caused them the greatest shame.”
Unfortunately, Boudica’s success had largely been predicated on surprise and did not last long. When they went up against entrenched Roman soldiers, the Iceni fell apart. A mere 15,000 Romans were able to rout Boudica’s massive army, killing 80,000 in the process. So sure had the Boudican mob been of their victory that they’d brought their families out to the battlefield in wagons—wagons that later pinned them in and prevented them from retreating.
Boudica’s final fate is unknown. Some claim she swallowed poison, and others that she was killed in battle. Her story was all but forgotten for centuries, until the rediscovery of documents from Roman historians. After that, she became a national hero of Britain in short order, soon appearing in textbooks, on statues, and in movies.
All this adoration despite the fact that her methods of revenge—religious decapitation—are almost directly equivalent to the actions of more traditionally reviled parties, such as tribal headhunters and religious extremists. Boudica’s actions are held up as those of a vengeful heroine, while the aforementioned others’ actions are decried as those of deranged villains. Food for thought.
• ART NOTES •
Boudica is described as tall, broad, and powerfully built. The outfits and props are all period-accurate. There’s some disagreement over whether the Iceni used facial paint, though, so it’s only portrayed on her daughters.
The pattern on Boudica’s outfit fits the historical description of a many-colored striped garment, which most historians interpreted to be a proto-tartan. Even though the Iceni were located around present-day Norfolk, they were a Celtic tribe and were later pushed out toward areas like Wales and Scotland.
Boudica is said to have released a rabbit from her dress as a fortune-telling omen before one of her battles. The rabbit would undoubtedly make for great comic relief. Presumably along with the mounted skulls on her chariot.
Artemisia Gentileschi
(1593–1653, ITALY)
The Queen of Baroque Painters
Artemisia Gentileschi could go toe-to-toe with any painter of the Baroque period. Look her up in almost any other book, and you’ll probably read the phrase “one of the best female painters of the Baroque,” but forget that noise: she was one of the best painters of the Baroque, period, full stop. And she got this way by almost exclusively painting powerful women—and getting rather public revenge on her enemies by doing so.
To explain requires a bit of backstory, and here things get rather dark. If you are sensitive to descriptions of public shaming and rape, you may want to skip this entry. But there is light at the end of the tunnel.
Artemisia was a master painter before she could read. The daughter of renowned painter Orazio Gentileschi, she was inducted into the family business early. It was in her father’s workshop that she encountered her father’s associate, Agostino Tassi, landscape painter and human-shaped pile of garbage. When Artemisia was 17, after many months of attempting to get her alone, Tassi finally succeeded, tossing her down on a bed and raping her.
What follows gets murky. While their initial sexual encounter (Artemisia’s first ever) was decidedly non-consensual, after Tassi promised to marry her (although he was already married at the time), they had other, apparently more consensual, sexual encounters. However, after several months of “I swear I’ll marry you, baby,” Tassi flat-out refused to carry through on his promise.
So the Gentileschis brought him to court.
