Hell Hath No Fury (9 page)

There were public executions and secret stranglings, but the most hideous fate was reserved for the eighty-year-old patriarch Andrea Orsi. Dressed in a vest, shirt, and one sock, and with his hands bound, Orsi watched helpless as his house was razed to the ground; he was then dragged around a square by a horse before being disemboweled and dismembered while still alive. His limbs and organs were tossed to a baying crowd.

Caterina was not a woman to cross. The man who had mutilated and murdered Giacomo Feo, one of her many lovers, was done to death as an entrée before his wife and sons were flung down a deep well and left to die. She contrived to establish more friendly relations with the new pope, Alexander VI, and with the Venetians, whose ambassador, Giovanni de' Medici, she secretly married in 1496. When he died two years later, the resourceful Caterina deterred the Venetians from seizing her lands by negotiating an alliance with the Florentines.

However, she eventually managed to fall out with Alexander VI by refusing to allow his daughter Lucrezia Borgia to marry her son Ottaviano. The Pope also had his eye on her fiercely guarded lands, which he had earmarked for his son Cesare. On March 9, 1499, he issued a bull declaring that the house of Riario had forfeited the lordship of Imola and Forlì, which he conferred on his son.

Cesare moved against Sforza with an army reinforced by fourteen thousand French troops. The castle at Imola held out until December 1499. Caterina clung on grimly at Forlì, sending Alexander VI letters impregnated with poison in the forlorn hope that dispatching the pontiff would save her. But she would have needed a very long spoon to poison a Borgia, and her plan came to nothing.

In a desperate throw, she ordered the magazines in her stronghold to be blown up, but the order was disobeyed and the citadel taken in January 1500 after Cesare Borgia had demanded
“la bellicosa signora”
be brought to him dead or alive. On receiving her alive, he raped her and subjected her to the same humiliations that had befallen the women of Forlì, later boasting to his officers that Caterina had defended her fortress with greater determination than her virtue.

Caterina was imprisoned for a year in the castle of St. Angelo. Thereafter she fled to Florence to escape persecution by the Borgias. When their baleful power collapsed with the death of Alexander VI in 1503, she attempted to regain control of her lands but was thwarted by her Medici brothers-in-law. In her final years, she found refuge in a convent and consolation in training her son by Giovanni de' Medici in the art of war.

Reference: Antonia Fraser,
The Warrior Queens,
1988.

TAMARA

Queen of Georgia, b. 1160, d. 1213

Dubbed “King of Kings and Queen of Queens” by her subjects, Tamara presided over an all-too-brief “golden age” in the history of Georgia, a trans-Caucasian kingdom on the very edge of the medieval Christian world. Canonized by the Orthodox Church and, with scant regard for history, characterized by the nineteenth-century Russian writer Mikhail Lermontov as a “sprite from hell,” she extended Georgia's boundaries to their greatest extent in its history while mounting numerous military expeditions and quashing a series of rebellions in a reign of perpetual campaigning.

Georgia first emerged as a regional power during the reign of Tamara's great-grandfather, David Aghmashenebeli (1089–1125)—sometimes known as “David the Builder”—who drove the Seljuk Turks from his kingdom and established the capital city of Georgia in Tbilisi. By the time of his death, his empire stretched from the Black Sea in the west to the Caspian Sea in the east.

In 1178, David's grandson, George III, declared his nineteen-year-old daughter, Tamara, his co-ruler and heir apparent. Proclaiming her “the bright light of his eyes,” he hailed her as queen with the assent of Georgia's patriarchs, bishops, nobles, viziers, and generals. Seated on George's right hand and wearing purple robes trimmed with gold and silver, she was given her official title, “Mountain of God,” while a crown encrusted with rubies and diamonds was placed on her head.

On George's death in 1184, Tamara became sole ruler, although she was placed under the guardianship of her paternal aunt Rusudani. The Georgian nobility, anxious for her to produce a male heir, rushed Tamara into a marriage with George Bogolyubski, a debauched Russian prince. He lasted two years before Tamara sent him into exile. Her second husband, David Sosland, an Ossetian prince, fathered a son and a daughter, both of whom would later ascend the Georgian throne.

With the succession secure, Tamara was now free to embark on a policy of military expansion, which also had the advantageous by-product of distracting the Georgian nobility from their favorite sports, limiting the power of the monarch and increasing their own. However, she had first to deal with Bogolyubski, who in 1191 attempted to wrest the kingdom from her. She defeated her former husband twice in the field, took him prisoner, and exiled him for a second time.

She then turned her attentions to the Seljuk Turks, fulfilling the roles of queenly figurehead and active strategist in her campaigns. In the field, she always addressed her troops before they went into battle. At Cambetch in 1196, she urged them on with the words “God be with you!” to which the army responded with cheers of “To our king Tamara!” Eight years later, Tamara marched barefoot at the head of the army to make camp on the eve of the Battle of Basiani. The next day she gave the order to mount before taking up a position to watch the Georgian victory from a safe vantage point.

The campaign of 1204 took her troops to Trebizond, on the southern shore of the Black Sea, which became a Georgian protectorate. Tamara exercised a loose sway over Muslim semi-protectorates on her southern marches, while on her northern borders the people of southern Russia paid her tribute. In 1210, she launched a furious response to an incursion by the Sultan of Ardabil, who in the previous year had crossed the Arak mountains, slaughtering and pillaging as he went. Ardabil was seized in a surprise attack, and on Tamara's orders, the emir and thousands of his subjects were put to the sword. The rampage surged deep into northern Persia, and her army returned laden with booty.

During Tamara's reign, Georgian culture flourished alongside martial glory. Shota Rustaveli's epic poem
The Knight in Panther's Skin
was dedicated to her, and she sponsored the building of many churches. Tbilisi, situated athwart busy trade routes, prospered. When Tamara died, a chronicler wrote, “Ploughmen sang verses to her while they tilled…. Franks and Greeks hummed her praises as they sailed the seas in fair weather.”

Sadly, her achievements could not stand the test of time. Twenty-five years after Tamara was laid to rest in the tomb of her ancestors, her daughter Rusudani was driven from Georgia by the Mongols, and Georgia descended into chaos.

Reference: W. E. D. Allen,
A History of the Georgian People,
1932.

THATCHER, MARGARET

British Politician, b. 1925

Thatcher's reputation as “the Iron Lady” was earned during the Cold War and strengthened by her steadfast conduct of the Falklands War, a rare example in the post-1945 era of a female politician's standing being enhanced by the ready adoption of a military solution to international problems.

Born Margaret Roberts, the daughter of a Lincolnshire grocer and local politician, she was not conscripted for military service in World War II and later studied chemistry at Oxford University. While at Oxford, she became president of the university's Conservative Association, the first woman to hold the post.

From 1947 she worked as a research chemist in industry, developing new ice cream products among other things, and pursuing her political ambitions. In 1950 and 1951 she stood unsuccessfully as the Conservative candidate for the Dartford constituency and during this period met and married Denis Thatcher, a successful industrialist and millionaire. She studied law, qualifying as a barrister in 1953, the year in which she gave birth to twins, an early indication of her immense capacity for sustained hard work. It was not until 1959, however, after many attempts, that she obtained a seat in Parliament as the successful Conservative candidate for the north London constituency of Finchley.

When the Conservatives returned to power in 1970, she was appointed secretary of state for education and science. In 1975, following the Conservative defeat in the general election of 1974, she defeated the incumbent Edward Heath to become the first female party leader in British politics.

In May 1979 Thatcher became Britain's first woman prime minister, quickly earning the nickname “Iron Lady” for her robust attitude toward the Soviet Union's invasion of Afghanistan. It was typical of her that she embraced the sobriquet, originally intended by the Soviets as an insult.

In 1979 she agreed in principle with a Foreign Office proposal that the sovereignty of the disputed Falkland Islands, in the South Atlantic, should be handed to Argentina, which also claimed sovereignty, provided that the views of the islanders were taken into account. However, the ruling Argentine military junta was already committed to the occupation of the Falklands, irrespective of the subsequent British negotiating positions. Their resolve had been hardened by Thatcher's backing for the 1981 decision by her defense secretary, John Nott, to withdraw the patrol ship
Endurance
from the South Atlantic. In March 1982 an Argentine force occupied the whaling station at South Georgia, a British dependency some one thousand miles south of the Falklands. At the beginning of April an Argentine task force landed in Port Stanley (the Falklands' main port) and swiftly secured the lightly garrisoned islands.

On Saturday, April 3, in an emergency session of the House of Commons, Thatcher announced that “a large task force will sail as soon as all preparations are complete. HMS
Invincible
will be in the lead and will leave port on Monday.” She was able successfully to negotiate the opening phase of the Falklands War for a number of crucial reasons: her own unbending determination to expel the Argentines; support from the Royal Navy's high command, who assured her that an opposed landing in the Falklands, if it came, was feasible although fraught with danger; and the incompetence of the Argentine junta, whose intransigence enabled the British to seize and retain the moral high ground in the United Nations. Later, Britain's ability to sustain the operations to retake South Georgia and the Falklands was ensured by the considerable active logistical and diplomatic help of the Americans. Although Thatcher was determined to fight if she had to, she also recognized the importance of seeming to pursue every diplomatic channel offered by her US ally.

In the following ten weeks, Thatcher assumed an almost Churchillian mantle, imperiously rounding on querulous journalists after announcing the recapture of South Georgia and commanding them, “Just rejoice at the news…rejoice!” She displayed immense stamina and a voracious appetite for detail and did not shrink from tough decisions, notably when on May 2, 1982, the elderly Argentine cruiser
Belgrano
was torpedoed and sunk by the submarine
Conqueror
outside the maritime exclusion zone established by the British around the Falklands.

On June 14, Thatcher told the House of Commons that “the Argentine forces are reported to be flying white flags over Stanley.” The prime minister herself and the Conservative Party drew immense benefit from the British victory. Margaret Thatcher had risked all and won. Her handling of the Falklands conflict was a classic example of the fundamental military principle of maintenance of aim.

Her role in the run-up to the conflict was less clear. That she and her government had unwittingly played a part in encouraging the Argentine military junta to invade the Falklands was apparent in the circumspect words of the Franks report on the war in the South Atlantic, published in January 1983. However, Lord Franks and his colleagues shrank from attaching personal blame to Mrs. Thatcher and her cabinet. Thereafter she reveled in her warrior image, captured in one iconographic photograph as she rode in the turret of a Challenger tank, resplendent in a white anti-flash suit, a modern
Boudicca
in a twentieth-century chariot (see Chapter 1).

In 1987 Margaret Thatcher became the first British prime minister to win a third term in office, and the word “Thatcherism” entered the language. But she drifted out of touch with the British electorate and fell to fighting with her partners in the European Union. Her cabinet came to the reluctant but inevitable conclusion that Margaret Thatcher was now an electoral handicap to her party, and confronted her with the bitter truth—she had to go. On the night she left No. 10 Downing Street for the last time, the pitiless cameras caught bitter tears in the eyes of the Iron Lady. She was later created Baroness Thatcher.

Reference: Margaret Thatcher,
The Downing Street Years 1979–1990,
1993; and Denys Blakeway,
The Falklands War,
1991.

TZ'U-HSI

Hsiao-ch'in, Empress of China, b. 1835, d.1908

The empress dowager of China was one of the most formidable women in modern history. Famously beautiful, she was a good friend and a fearsome enemy, who never shrank from war and sought ways to profit from it. She was greedy, ruthless, and an immensely skilled manipulator of the tortuous court politics of the moribund Manchu Empire.

Her father was a minor bureaucrat, a government clerk and later a provincial administrator. In 1852 she was selected as a low-ranking concubine of the young but degenerate Emperor Hsien-feng. She rapidly rose in status, working as his secretary, gaining insights into the administration of the state, and bearing his only son, T'ung-ch'un, in 1856.

When Hsien-feng died in 1861, Tz'u-hsi was still in her twenties and the mother of the new six-year-old emperor. T'ung-ch'un was advised by a council of eight elders, but none of his decrees could be passed without the approval of his grandmother the empress dowager, who became the effective ruler of China together with the late emperor's chief wife, Tz'u-an, who became co-regent. Together with Hsien-feng's brother, Prince Kung, they rode out a succession of crises, including the Taiping Rebellion (1850–64), which was triggered by famine and only finally put down with the help of Western military leadership, notably that of Britain's General Gordon.