Women Warriors: An Unexpected History by Pamela D. Toler

Author:Pamela D. Toler
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Beacon Press
Published: 2019-02-26T00:00:00+00:00

In the following years, Bouboulina participated in other military engagements against the Ottomans. Her most famous action occurred in September 1821, after the Turkish position at Tripolis fell to besieging Greek forces. The fall of the city was followed by three days of massacre and looting that left thirty thousand dead. Bouboulina led her sailors into the town, where, at the risk of her own life, she defended the women and children who lived in the harem of the city’s ruler—reportedly because of the promise she had made to the sultan’s mother.

At the end of 1824, while war with the Ottomans continued, civil war broke out between opposing factions of rebels over leadership of the new Greek state. Connected by marriage to one of the rival leaders, Bouboulina was deemed a dangerous opponent to the Greek government and arrested twice. Finally, she was exiled to Spetses.

She remained in Spetses until her death on May 22, 1825, five years before the formation of an independent Greek state recognized by the European powers. Instead of dying in the battle for Greek freedom, she was killed by a stray bullet fired in a vendetta with another Spetsiot family. She was impoverished at her death, having lost her sons, her ships, and her considerable fortune in pursuit of Greek independence.

Greece gave her the honorary title of admiral after her death. (And yes, her image appeared on a Greek postage stamp in 1930, commemorating the hundredth anniversary of Greek independence.)

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