Two women who’ve governed half the world, and one who (briefly) dominated it all.
Today’s feminism is about purging modern society of the abuses of the past. It rarely discusses the strong women in history who beat men at their own game and ruled large parts of the world without concern for universal suffrage or state-sponsored childcare.
These women did not wait for men to make room for them. They were detested by others of their own sex and time and were slandered by later (male) historians who could find no way to ignore their success.
Two, Catherine the Great of Russia and Wu Zetian, China’s only female emperor, are documented historical certainties. Pope Joan, the only female head of the Church of Rome, may be apocryphal, but her historical reality was widely accepted by Catholics for four centuries.
Catherine II (1729-1796) reigned over Russia from 1762 until her death in 1796 at the age of 67, a period considered the country’s Golden Age.
Neither Russian nor named Catherine, she was born in 1729 as the very noble but near penniless Prussian Princess Sophie Friederike Auguste von Anhalt-Zerbst- Dornburg and was invited to Russia at age 15 by the Czarina Elizabeth to improve Romanov bloodlines by marrying her nephew, the future Czar Peter III.
Sophie became Ekaterina (Catherine) on conversion to the Russian Orthodox faith. Though she had been imported to produce an heir, eight years passed without offspring. Some historians say Peter was unable to consummate the marriage, others that he was infertile. Perhaps in an attempt to clarify matters, Peter and Catherine both began energetic extramarital affairs.
However that may be, Peter lasted as czar a mere six months until Catherine arranged his arrest by a group of friendly – and virile, it is said –military officers. Shortly after, he was murdered by a brother of another of Catherine’s lovers – an aspect that, historians say, cast a pall over the early years of her reign.
Pall or not, Russia was revitalised under her leadership, finally gaining recognition as one of Europe’s great powers. Catherine governed at a time of vast Russian expansion. In the south, the Crimean Khanate was crushed following victories over the Ottoman Turks, and Russia colonised the territories of Novorossiya along the Black and Azov Seas. In the west, Poland, ruled by another former lover, Stanisław Poniatowski, was partitioned with the Russian Empire gaining the larger share. In the east, Russia even began to colonise Alaska.
Her reign coincides with the Russian Enlightenment. Catherine corresponded personally with Voltaire and tried her hand at composing an opera. The Smolny Institute for Noble Maidens, Europe’s first state-financed institution of female higher education, was established with her patronage.
Today, the achievements of her long rule – it lasted 34 years – are overshadowed by her unconventional personal life. After her death, enemies at court began spreading the rumour that Catherine had died while engaging in sex with a horse. The drab historical truth is that she suffered a stroke and passed away quietly in her own bed.
Wu Zetian (624-705) was the first, and only, female emperor of China – not empress, not the wife, but huángdì, the imperial sovereign. The accepted version is that, having become a consort of the third Tang emperor, Gao Zong, Wu strangled her own daughter to frame the empress dowager and destroy her influence. Both the older woman and her mother were executed. She then set about removing all other claimants to the throne. At first she preferred slow-acting poisons and then, as her power grew, she invented charges of treason for opponents who were brought before her throne where they were induced to kill themselves. On the death of Gao Zong, her oldest son ascended to the throne and then, as sons will do, proceeded to ignore her. She had him deposed and he was forced to commit suicide. He was replaced by her youngest son, for whom Wu at first ruled as regent. She soon dropped all pretence and formally declared herself emperor of China, the huángdì.
Her reign saw the complete renewal of the dynastic succession as she systematically wiped out all possible competing claimants to the throne. In one year alone, she is said to have destroyed 15 family lines through executions and forced suicides. Politics apart, Wu’s reign was serene and prosperous. She left the general population in peace and oversaw a major expansion of the Chinese empire, extending it far into Central Asia and completing the conquest of the upper Korean Peninsula. Her rule was marked by state support for Taoism, Buddhism, education and literature.
She died, peacefully it appears, in the year 705 at the age of 81 – the only woman to rule China in her own right in 4,000 years. From the mid-13th to the 17th centuries, the tradition that there had been a female pope – Pope Joan – at a date roughly around the 10th century was generally accepted within the Catholic Church.
The first documentary evidence of her existence appears in the Universal Chronicles of Metz (about 1240) which recount that Pope Victor III (d. 1087) was succeeded by a talented woman who, disguised as a man, rose to the rank of cardinal before her election to the papacy. She was eventually betrayed when, mounting a horse, she gave birth to a child. Joan was then tied to the horse’s tail, dragged through the streets of Rome and finally stoned to death.
Martin of Troppau, writing a few decades later, adds details and adjusts the dates of her supposed reign. According to his account, she instead succeeded Pope Leo IV (d. 855) and held the papacy for two years, seven months and four days. He says she was a native of Mainz who, after studies in Athens, settled in Rome where her brilliant lectures and edifying lifestyle caused her to be unanimously elected pope.
The female papacy was taken as fact for four centuries. Both Petrarch and Boccaccio mention Joan as a historical reality. She even figures among the papal busts placed in the Cathedral of Siena around the year 1400. In 1647 the French historiographer David Blondel finally pointed out that there was no contemporary evidence for her existence at any of the suggested dates and that the known facts made it impossible to fit her in.
Two women who’ve governed half the world, and one who (briefly) dominated it all.
