Princesses Behaving Badly (7 page)

Or maybe not. Egyptologists have long been divided on just how Tuthmosis III really felt about Hatshepsut. On the one hand, she had ruled in his place, and he reacted by destroying or claiming everything she’d ever made. Which helps explain why earlier historians felt obliged to cast her as the wicked stepmother, declaring her “vain, ambitious and unscrupulous” and “of a most virile character.” On the other hand, consider that Hatshepsut didn’t have Tuthmosis III killed, which was certainly an option. And instead of hiding him away, she allowed him to receive military training. That was a potentially dangerous decision, because it could have easily allowed
him to amass loyal followers and gain strength to back up his right to rule. Tuthmosis also seems to have held his stepmother-aunt in some regard. He didn’t destroy her body, which would have been the logical place to start had he really wanted to sabotage her afterlife. Moreover, his revisionist efforts didn’t begin until decades after her death, meaning that he had either very long simmering resentment or other reasons altogether.

Modern Egyptologists believe that Tuthmosis acted out of not anger or resentment but rather political expediency. By all accounts a rational, clearheaded ruler, T-III simply wanted to subsume Hatshepsut’s glorious reign into his own. That’s why he left untouched certain images of her as queen regent. Tuthmosis was probably also worried about the succession of his son, Amenhotep II: rewriting history was one way of discouraging rival claims to the throne and ensuring that Tuthmosis’s line remained in charge.

Even if Tuthmosis’s attack on Hatshepsut’s memory was nothing personal, it was something of a fatal blow. It has taken more than 150 years to piece together a satisfying biography of the princess who became pharaoh, and gaps still puzzle and confound. Fortunately, Tuthmosis’s crew of statuechiselers didn’t get everything. One of three sarcophagi Hatshepsut made for herself was unearthed in 1903 (it was empty), and the stones that covered the inscriptions on her obelisks had helped preserve them.

Hatshepsut’s mummy was found in the early part of the twentieth century; it had been unceremoniously dumped on the floor of an obscure tomb in the Valley of the Kings and robbed of its jewelry by looters. For more than two decades archeologists were unable to connect this sad pile of bones, bereft of golden afterlife accessories, to the woman who had ruled Egypt. It wasn’t until 2007 that scientists were able to definitively claim that this was the body of the mysterious female pharaoh.

Still, the discovery of her mummy can’t explain why Hatshepsut did what she did—why she shoved aside the rightful ruler, crowned herself pharaoh, and embarked on a prodigious campaign of propaganda to legitimize her claim. Dynastic crisis, a thirst for power, political wrangling, a need to assert authority, a hunger for glory—all are possibilities that historians have batted around. None are truly satisfying. At the end of the day, all we really know is that Hatshepsut was a remarkable woman: one who assumed supreme executive power, and did so without apology.

Most cultures have incest taboos, but throughout history many royal families have been exempt. Why?

First and foremost, the practice is a way of ensuring that power stays within the same family. Brother–sister and even parent–child marriages were not uncommon in ancient Egypt, Incan Peru, or nineteenth-century Thailand and were a crafty way to keep sovereignty concentrated within a single family.

Second, some cultures believed that incest reflected the behavior of their gods. Emulating the practice strengthened the link between divinity and earthly rulers. In the early 1800s, for example, the chiefs of Hawaii encouraged a marriage between Princess Nahi’ena’ena and her brother, King Kamehameha III, citing a precedent among the old deities. That didn’t go over so well with the newly arrived Christian missionaries, and instead the princess was married off to someone else, though she and her brother continued to have a sexual relationship until her death in 1836.

Third, incest set royalty apart, giving them license to do something no one else could. If you were a dutiful Catholic monarch, you could even get papal dispensation to allow your consanguineous marriage, making it acceptable in the eyes of God and man. The average Joe, meanwhile, can’t even skip Sunday mass without putting his immortal soul in jeopardy.

But let’s not forget that there’s one very good reason why marriage between close relations is a bad, and almost universally reviled, idea: the lack of genetic variation between sexual partners can cause a match-up of harmful recessive genes, leading to significant congenital defects. The famous Egyptian
pharaoh Tutankhamun’s partially cleft palate and clubfoot can probably be attributed to his parents being full siblings. Like King Tut, children of the royal houses of Europe were also victims of the need to consolidate and retain power. Marriage between cousins, even first cousins, was fully within bounds well into the twentieth century, with such unfortunate consequences as mental illness and hemophilia.

The Spanish Hapsburgs offer a cautionary tale of the problems that can come from incest. The family ruled Spain for nearly 200 years, all the while encouraging ever-closer relations to wed. The line came to a spectacular end with Charles II, the son of an uncle and his niece who were themselves mildly inbred. Charles was born mentally and physically disabled, afflicted by a tongue so large he couldn’t speak until the age of 4 and a body so weak he didn’t walk until 8. Later in life, he exhibited signs of mania, demanding, for example, that the bodies of his dead relatives be exhumed so he could look at them. Charles died without an heir in 1700, just five days before his 39th birthday. That he’d lived so long was a shock to most of Europe; the coroner who examined his body reportedly claimed that it “contained not a single drop of blood, his heart looked like the size of a grain of pepper, his lungs were corroded, his intestines were putrid and gangrenous, he had a single testicle which was as black as carbon and his head was full of water.”

Wu Zetian

F
EBRUARY
17, 624–D
ECEMBER
16, 705
T
ANG
D
YNASTY
C
HINA

W
u Zetian had “a heart like a serpent and a nature like that of a wolf,” “favored evil sycophants and destroyed good and loyal officials,” and “killed her sister, butchered her elder brothers, murdered the ruler, poisoned her mother. She is hated by gods and men alike.”

Or so people said. Teasing out the real story from the tangle of official histories, which tend to be heavily weighted against female rulers, is tricky. In these accounts, she comes off as sadistic, cruel, and power hungry.
But she managed to accomplish what no other woman did in the 3,000-year history of imperial China: rule in her own right. That she had to kill a few people to do it—including, allegedly, her own week-old daughter—was the price of power.

Perhaps the most horrifying story about Wu was how she became empress. A minor princess of the Tang dynasty, Wu was a royal concubine who had long plotted to move up the ranks. When she had a baby girl by Emperor Gaozong—not her first child with him—she saw her chance. As was custom, the current empress came down to Wu’s apartments to coo over the new child. After Empress Wang left, Wu quickly smothered the baby. When Gaozong arrived to visit, he found his daughter dead in the crib, with a distraught and weeping Wu claiming that Wang must have killed her. Gaozong believed the lie, and the empress was packed off to a deep, dank dungeon, soon to be joined by another of Wu’s rivals: the emperor’s second-favorite concubine. As if that wasn’t bad enough, once Wu became empress, she went down to the prison to punish her former nemeses. She had them beaten with a hundred lashes, their hands and feet chopped off, their arms and legs broken, and then ordered the women—who were
still alive
—dumped into a vat of wine to drown. As she watched them struggling vainly, she cackled, “Now these two witches can get drunk to their bones.”

If true, that is the kind of evil even a horror movie franchise wouldn’t touch. But though Wu did have a murderous, Machiavellian-before-Machiavelli streak, it’s also true that her demonization by historians was fueled by a lot of false propaganda. Many thought Wu disrupted the Confucian order of things just by being a woman, and even more so by first ruling through her husband and then usurping the throne from her own sons. Folks didn’t look too kindly on such behavior, and if you’re going to write a cautionary tale, why not throw in all the infanticide and grisly murder you can?

To understand how Wu came to power, and why she did what she did, you have to understand that Tang dynasty China was a viper pit. A glorious viper pit—the height of Chinese ancient civilization, a golden
age of poetry and legal enlightenment, and all sorts of great stuff (and which owed its existence to Princess Pingyang; see
chapter 2
)—but a viper pit nonetheless. Inconvenient people were “invited” to commit suicide, and often helped along if they failed to comply. Murder, especially among relatives, wasn’t uncommon. Even more often, citizens brought false charges against political rivals in the hopes their enemies would be executed. If some historical texts are to be believed, the palace halls must have run red with the blood of the executed, the assassinated, and the conveniently suicidal.

Before she was slaughtering rivals, Wu was the daughter of a governor and a lady; she was a princess, but just barely. And though as a teenager she was a concubine in the imperial household, she was really little more than a maid, chiefly employed to change the emperor’s bed linens. Though Wu appears to have been endowed with remarkable physical beauty as well as intelligence, such attributes would not have been enough to get her into the royal bed she turned down so faithfully. Still, Emperor Taizong did notice her, calling her his “Fair Flatterer,” after a popular song. According to some sources, Wu would perform a certain sexual act (exactly what has been lost to history) that other ladies would not, earning her additional affections from the old ruler.

Taizong’s death in 649 seems to have led directly to Wu hooking up with his son, Gaozong, who also had taken a shine to the concubine princess. According to the official dynastic history, Gaozong first noticed Wu, now in her twenties, when she was nursing his sick father on his deathbed. Other reports claimed that Wu offered Gaozong a bowl of water to wash his hands after he went to the bathroom. When he inadvertently flicked water in her face, marring her white makeup, she said, “I accept Heaven’s favor of rain and mist,” apparently a naughty poetic reference to sex and some really interesting foreplay. However they met, the two were definitely intimate before the old emperor was dead. (In true Tang imperial fashion, Gaozong’s way to the throne was cleared by the fortuitous deaths and executions of four of his brothers.)

Confucian law declared that relations between a son and his father’s concubine constituted incest, so Wu and Gaozong’s budding relationship was kept secret. Moreover, custom dictated that after the emperor’s death,
Wu had to shave her head and be committed to a convent, although she spent only a few months sequestered (and didn’t cut off her hair). Evidently, Gaozong liked her enough to knock her up and
then
spring her from the nunnery to serve as one of his concubines.

Wu soon became the emperor’s favorite, through a combination of sexy insect-inspired eyebrows, duplicitous cunning, and near-constant pregnancy. One contemporary wrote, “Lady Wu, with her lovely eyebrows arched like the antennae of a butterfly, yields to no woman, but coyly hides her face behind her long sleeve and applies herself to slandering others, knowing her vixen charms hold the power to bewitch the emperor.” Meanwhile, in her first five years in Gaozong’s harem, Wu produced three, possibly four, children, and there’s nothing so appealing to an emperor as fertility.

It was around this time that Wu supposedly smothered her own child and did away with her rivals in remarkably grisly fashion. The infanticide is probably untrue, given Wu’s later reluctance to harm her own children
directly
(exile was her preferred method for dealing with disobedient offspring). It’s quite possible the baby died of natural causes, and Wu took the opportunity to blame her rival for the death. Either way, that wasn’t what brought down Empress Wang—it was her inability to produce a male heir. Ultimately, Gaozong (likely prompted by Wu) claimed that his wife, along with his second-favored concubine, was plotting to poison him. Sentencing them both to prison was the perfect pretext for making room for baby-making Wu.