by Jason Porath
This trial was a big deal. Over seven interminable months, under the eyes of virtually all of upper-class Italy, Artemisia was subject to drawn-out interrogations. Midwives checked her time and time again to verify that she had been a virgin prior to the incident. She was subjected to torture, being put into thumbscrews and asked the same series of questions over and over, with the misguided goal of illuminating any false testimony.
She didn’t crack. She kept her story consistent, raging at Tassi as they put on the thumbscrews, “This is the ring you give me, and these are your promises?!”
Tassi was not nearly so consistent in his testimony, which mostly consisted of an endless stream of inflammatory accusations. He claimed that Orazio had raped his own wife; that Orazio had an incestuous relationship with Artemisia; that Orazio had sold Artemisia to his friends for as little as a loaf of bread. He said Artemisia was “an insatiable whore” and even called his friends in to testify that they’d slept with her. His allegations became so outlandish that the judge started publicly berating him for his staggering flights of fancy.
As if this was not enough evidence that Tassi was history’s worst use of carbon, in the trial it came out that he’d been imprisoned twice before—once for sleeping with his sister-in-law, and once for attempting to murder his wife.
In the end, Tassi was found guilty, but his court sentence hardly was fitting: he was given a year of exile from Rome. He only had to serve four months. That does not mean he got off easily, though. Artemisia would see to that.
As the trial was under way, Artemisia began work on one of her most famous paintings, that of the biblical story of Judith and Holofernes. In the story, Holofernes is an invading Assyrian jackhole whom the virtuous Judith seduces. Once he falls asleep, Judith cuts off his head. Virtuously.
In Artemisia’s painting, Judith looks conspicuously like Artemisia herself. The gruesomely mutilated Holofernes? Tassi. Moreover, the scene itself, popular during this time, is given a much more forceful interpretation. While, say, Caravaggio’s painting of Judith portrays her action as almost effortless, in Artemisia’s version there’s a clear sense of effort as she saws through Holofernes’s body. She even has assistance from another woman, who holds him down while Judith kills him.
This painting made waves and catapulted Artemisia’s artistic profile to new heights. She became the first woman to ever enter the prestigious art academy, the Accademia delle Arti del Disegno, where she became buddies with Galileo. She went on to have a long career as a court painter in Florence, Naples, and England. Contrary to the tastes of the time, the vast majority of her paintings (most of which are lost to history) portrayed women as protagonists or as equals to men.
That’s not to say she didn’t have to work hard—quite the opposite. Despite her fame, she was one of the only women in an overwhelmingly male arena, and there are many records of her having to drive hard bargains in order to get her due. Late in her life she wrote to a friend, “You feel sorry for me because a woman’s name raises doubts until her work is seen; if I were a man, I can’t imagine it would have turned out this way.” Her death was met with the sort of vitriolic comments one might see today in the most misogynistic sub-basements of the Internet.
Artemisia was virtually forgotten until the 20th century—it wasn’t until 1991 that she got her first art exhibition! Since then, historians have worked hard to restore her work to a position of prominence, and she has become a modern-day feminist icon.
Tassi, on the other hand, will be remembered forever as a vaguely man-shaped pile of excrement.
• ART NOTES AND TRIVIA •
This piece is done in the same high-contrast style characteristic of the Gentileschis’ work. The style was pioneered by Caravaggio, whom Artemisia’s dad, Orazio, befriended while in jail. Both were colorful characters.
On the bed that Artemisia is ostensibly using for visual reference is her earlier painting of Susanna and the Elders. The painting portrays a biblical story in which a woman is assaulted by men. Lying on top of the painting, also for visual reference, is a sword—the same one used in the Holofernes painting. The sword is angled in such a way as to give Susanna a weapon to use against her assailants, whose faces are obscured by blood. In the context of the piece, the Susanna painting stands in as a proxy for Artemisia herself. In the trial proceedings, Artemisia even said that during her rape she had assaulted Tassi with a nearby knife.
The 1997 movie Artemisia actually portrayed Tassi and Artemisia as star-crossed lovers. Ugh.
Wu Zetian
(624–705, CHINA)
China’s Only Female Emperor
Meet Wu Zetian,* first and only female emperor of China—seen here poisoning her own infant daughter.
Now, that’s actually a bit historically inaccurate: the poison was used to knock off her other family members.* Her young daughter she strangled, in order to frame her rivals to the throne for murder. It worked. Her rivals—the old queen and the old queen’s mother—were executed, and according to lore, they haunted Wu from that point forward.
Now, let’s be clear upfront: it’s impossible to know if any of this actually happened, because the historical sources on Wu are an absolute trainwreck. Although she’s documented by a surprisingly large number of sources, the creators of said documents were, shall we say, not exactly paragons of impartiality. Some authors gleefully recorded her tales of torture and backstabbing, while others—ones she likely bankrolled—could not stop singing her praises. Getting to the bottom of Wu’s actual story has been an ongoing struggle for historians for over a thousand years.
After bumping off her rivals, Wu ascended to the position of Emperor Gaozong’s main consort. This was unusual in the extreme—having started her political career as consort to Gaozong’s father,* she was supposed to have entered a convent after the late emperor’s death. But even after Gaozong’s father died, Gaozong kept her around. She shared power equally with him, even running the government herself when he was sick (which was often). They were referred to as the Two Sages.
She was, even by the most damning accounts, a good ruler, rooting out corruption and helping the commoners.
Once Gaozong died, she took full charge, albeit after some drama around succession. Her oldest son took a swing at ruling, but drastically overstepped his authority and angered others in government, so she drubbed him out of office. She replaced him with his younger brother, who really didn’t want to rule. Wu, claiming that the young new king had a speech impediment, proceeded to “speak for him.” Shockingly, she spoke for him quite openly.
And so we come to her “reign of terror.”
As one might imagine, some government officials were not on board with taking orders from a woman—let alone one as bossy as Wu. She put down their inevitable uprising fairly easily, but now faced with the reality that others were gunning for her, she set about rooting out all of her enemies.
The next three years saw the complete rearrangement of dynastic succession, as she systematically wiped out any and all other claimants to the throne. In one year alone, she destroyed 15 family lines, mostly through executions, trumped-up treason charges, and enforced suicides—in which she summoned her rivals and made them kill themselves in front of her.
That’s cold.
How did she drum up her accusations of treason, you may ask? By putting what was, essentially, an anonymous comment box (well, urn) on display. While its ostensible purpose was to help root out corruption, in practice it became a repository for tattle-tale letters, often put there by her spies and secret police. Those who displeased her would inevitably be ratted out by the comment box and then put to the sword—usually their own. This is almost undoubtedly the most hardcore use of an anonymous comment box in history.
Enforced suicide, however, was one of the better fates for those who crossed Wu. Her secret police were not shy about employing brutal torture. In fact, two of them, Lai Jungchen and Wan Gaojun, actually authored a how-to interrogation guide
called the Manual of Entrapment. Among the poetically named horrors ascribed to them were “piercing the hundred veins,” “dying swine’s melancholy,”* and “begging for the slaughter of my entire family.”
Moral of the story: do not mess with Empress Wu.
After the three-year “reign of terror,” Wu declared a new dynasty, the Zhou dynasty*—and with it, she crowned herself emperor. She was largely able to do this because, despite the horrors she’d inflicted on the nobility, she’d been very good to the people. Her bureaucratic inquisition, in destroying thousands of lives, had rooted out a lot of institutional corruption, and she implemented standards to steer the government toward meritocracy thereafter. She opened up civil examinations to a wider variety of people, making for greater diversity in local and regional governments. From the viewpoint of the people, she was actually a good ruler.
Although she never remarried, she had dalliances with a number of colorful characters. One, described as a man of “unusual ability,” was monk* Xue Huaiyi, who frustrated the aristocracy to no end with his casual vulgarity. An example: during a trial on his moral character, Huaiyi barged into the courtroom on horseback, stood around for a bit, then galloped off. While it’s uncertain that they were lovers, virtually every history of Wu at least heavily hints that they were. She would have been in her sixties during their relationship. (Go, Wu!)
The other quite literally colorful men with whom she famously spent her waning years were the 20-something Zhang brothers. Two flamboyant men who wore operatic makeup and flashy outfits—many histories depict them in a romantic relationship with the by-then-70-year-old Wu. However, it seems more likely that they were gay (and/or possibly castrated). The Zhangs were party animals, taking full advantage of Wu’s good graces to run the government offices like a brothel. Finally, they infuriated others to the point where a group of nobles stormed Wu’s palace, cut off the Zhangs’ heads, and took control of the government. Wu’s response? To gently chide the rebels and go back to bed.
By that point, Wu was tired, worn down from a lifetime of fighting. She renounced her title, forgave her enemies, and soon thereafter, died peacefully.
As previously mentioned, when it comes to Wu, it’s nearly impossible to know what was true and what was not. Generations of scholars have done their best to clear things up, and the consensus one gets after synthesizing a lot of writing on her is that, while she was almost undeniably iron-fisted, she was not quite the monster she’s often made out to be.
Many of the most diabolical parts of her story, such as the murdering of her own baby, are almost certainly fake. One of the more likely explanations was that the child died of monoxide poisoning, a serious danger due to the charcoal braziers and poor ventilation present at the time. Whether Wu took advantage of the child’s death for personal gain is hard to tell. Some histories sprinkle in more detail about her underhanded torture of the deposed queen and dowager queen, with Wu chopping off their limbs and tossing them in a stew. This is almost certainly untrue. Similarly, the offenses of her secret police are likely exaggerated, although the bureaucratic purges definitely happened.
At the foot of Wu’s undisturbed grave rests a large slate. Unlike the slate of her husband, which lists his many accomplishments, hers is blank. As tradition goes, Wu’s successor was to decide what to make of her. Nobody could find the words.
• ART NOTES •
The throne room is based on ones in the Forbidden City, although Wu would have lived in Daming Palace.
The characters on the baby bottle spell “gold silkworm,” a reference to the type of poison she likely used—a slow-acting poison made from the bodies of silkworms. Another source claimed that the poison used was one called “gu,” but this was probably just slander, as the language used had connotations of wild sexuality and aphrodisiacs. Quite possibly it would have been one called Zhen , said to be made from the feathers of a rare bird.
Wu was probably much plumper than this, a fact realized too late for the illustration. The beauty standards of the Tang dynasty (which Wu’s Zhou dynasty interrupted) preferred full-figured women.
Arawelo
(C. 15 CE, SOMALIA)
The Greatest—or Worst—Queen of Somalian History
Depending on who you ask, Arawelo was either Somalia’s greatest queen, its greatest villain, or its most overzealous circumciser. Or all three.
According to most accounts, by the time Arawelo hit the scene, things in Somalia were pretty crappy. The kingdom had been rocked by decades, if not centuries, of senseless warfare between senseless monarchs—and hoo boy, there was nobody more senseless than Princess Arawelo’s dad. The king spent his time deflowering virgins and refusing to eat anything but the fresh marrow of she-goats (perhaps one of the ancient world’s weirdest diet crazes). Proper governing, though? Not high on his agenda.
Arawelo, however, picked up the slack. When the kingdom was debilitated by years of severe drought, she and her corps of warrior women would fetch water from faraway spots, thus saving her people. She was clearly doing a much better job than her dear old dad.
But then she officially took power. And here’s where things get weird.
There are as many different versions of Arawelo’s history as there are tellers of it. In some versions, she led all Somali women in a peaceful seizure of power, grabbing all the weapons while the men were off doing man stuff.* In another version, while out hunting one day, she was raped by a man who soon came to regret it.
In any event, when she took power, Arawelo put women in charge. Reasoning that men had cocked everything up for years* and that women were naturally more peaceful and better suited for governance, Arawelo consigned men to taking care of children and managing the household.
Relegating men to the background took balls—literally. In a move that understandably came to overshadow everything else she accomplished, Arawelo began to castrate men by hanging them by their testicles. Now, the details of this part of the story diverge massively depending on the telling. In some versions, she only castrated criminals, and even then, sometimes only metaphorically (by imprisoning them). In other, longer versions, she castrated everyone. Even the little boys.
Of course, one version is the one more often told by men. The other by women. Gold star if you can figure out which is which.
In the latter versions, Arawelo was inevitably overthrown by some combination of her grandson (who’d been hidden away from her) and/or an old man named Oday Biiq (“Wise Coward”) who saved his genitals by convincing everyone he had already been castrated. In some versions, after passing himself off as a eunuch, Oday Biiq secretly impregnated Arawelo’s daughter, thus producing the grandson who’d challenge Arawelo.
In the years following, one or both of the noncastrated men rose to challenge Arawelo. When Arawelo made ridiculous demands of the male population, such as “bring me a bunch of fruit on the bare back of a camel without using tools!” they outwitted her—in that case, by covering the camel’s back in mud and sticking the fruit on the camel. Eventually, they caught her unaware and killed her.
Now, did Arawelo actually exist? Historians seem to think so, but can’t confirm any of the particulars, or even the era when she was supposed to have lived.* The tale of Arawelo has historically been used by certain factions to “prove” that women can’t, or shouldn’t, rule. Some even go so far as to use the castration legend to legitimize the practice of female genital mutilation. Thankfully, the image of Arawelo has begun to be rehabilitated in recent years—a movement that has suspiciously coincided with a larger movement against the tradition of female genital mutilation.* Imagine that.
• ART NOTES •
You can see the women in the background carrying away loads of spears, swords, and bows with them. The men, conversely, are overloaded with children and looking pretty harried.
The child in the basket is the grandchild who would one day come to overthrow Arawelo. In some of the versions, he is hidden in a basket in the reeds by th
e river—suspiciously like Moses.
The grave of Arawelo, believed to be in Sanaag, is alternately honored and disrespected by female and male visitors, who leave flowers and throw rocks, respectively. This is reflected in the presence of rocks and flowers.
Caterina Sforza
(1463–1509, ITALY)
The Tigress of Forlì
The first thing you should know about Caterina Sforza is that her (very apt) surname is Italian for “strength.” The second thing you should know is that it friggin’ fit.
Caterina was born in Renaissance Italy, a place famous for underhanded schemers, debauched nobility, and the pope—but let’s not repeat ourselves. The bastard daughter of a mid-tier noble (who, to his credit, loved her to bits and treated her as a fully legitimate offspring), Caterina seemed predestined for the fate of so many women of the time—she’d get married off to cement some political ties, have kids, keep the house tidy, and eventually die in childbirth.
That very emphatically did not happen.
Caterina came to center stage after her first husband passed away. He died of natural causes—it being perfectly natural to die after being stabbed several dozen times. The stabbers in question were the Orsis, a vengeful family who managed to catch Caterina’s household by surprise and took her prisoner. Having taken out the rulers of the city (Caterina and her husband), the Orsis figured they had their coup all sewn up. But they forgot about one thing: Ravaldino.
Ravaldino was a fortress outside of Caterina’s home of Forlì, and it would come to be central to Caterina’s life. She’d won Ravaldino over to her cause some months earlier, when she seduced its persnickety caretaker into leaving his post to join her outside for a spell—and then promptly had him arrested for desertion of his post. It’s worth mentioning that she accomplished this feat after riding to Ravaldino several months pregnant.
