by Ben Thompson
Chandragupta was evidentially so fired up that he attempted a daring coup d’état in the capital city, storming the palace and single-handedly attempting to overthrow the government with nothing more than a bronze sword and an unquenchable desire for human blood. As you can imagine, this went over like a lead balloon carrying a hippo across the gravity-rich surface of the planet Jupiter. Chandragupta was captured, beaten up, exiled, condemned to death, and thrown in prison in some godforsaken part of the Indian subcontinent. It takes more than a serious beating to keep a good megalomaniac down, and a paragon of insubordination like Chandragupta wasn’t just going to sit in the clink and rot like a chump. He busted out almost immediately, probably by punching a hole in the stone wall with his skull and nonchalantly walking off into the sunset.
It was at this point that Chandragupta Maurya realized that charging into the throne room of the palace and trying to personally wrench power from the hands of the emperor, while awesome, probably wasn’t the most face-searingly brilliant plan he’d ever had. He determined that it probably made more sense to gain the support of the outlying provinces before going after the emperor himself, so he put together a small army of people from his native tribe, won battles against the armies of rival Punjabi rulers, recruited throngs of pitchfork-toting disgruntled peasants, and eventually assembled an army capable of crushing serious balls.
At the head of a now-massive military force, Chandragupta Maurya defeated the Nanda army, marched on the capital, stormed the palace, and personally seized control of the government. He spared the life of the Nanda emperor, telling him that he could leave the palace in peace but was only allowed to bring that which he was capable of carrying with his own two hands. I assume that he just chose to carry his wife out, but you never really know with emperors.
Seated in his angular throne deep in the heart of the wealthiest city in the world, protected by his warrior women and surrounded by remote-operated trapdoors leading into cages of untamed, man-eating beasts, Chandragupta marched his stampeding hordes against the disorganized tribes of India. Before long, the twenty-year-old emperor had forged a kingdom stretching from the Bay of Bengal to the Arabian Sea, and as far north as the Hindu Kush in Afghanistan.
Much of Chandragupta’s military might came from his strategic use of specially trained gigantic freaking war elephants. His men would feed the elephants vast amounts of booze before sending them out onto the battlefield, making them drunk and pissed, and no amount of stabbing could prevent anyone from getting their small intestines stomped flatter than a soda can being run over by a caravan of tour buses carrying the Japanese men’s sumo wrestling team back from an all-you-can-eat dinner buffet. The elephants would either kick people harder than a genetic fusion of Jet Li and a donkey—causing enemy soldiers to explode like giant disgusting human-shaped water balloons filled with V8 juice—or gore them with their tusks and do their best impression of those psychotic orcas that hurl seals into the air for no reason at all. If that didn’t work, the dudes riding on the backs of the elephants would just shoot you in the face with an arrow, a tactic that Chandragupta himself personally excelled at. After seeing their buddies get tossed around all over the place, most of the enemy just pooped their armor and ran as fast as they could to the nearest place that didn’t have intoxicated elephants destroying everything in sight.
This tactic proved especially useful when a Greek provincial ruler named Seleucus Nikator attempted to wrest part of the Punjab region from Chandragupta’s control. Marching a phalanx into a formation of war elephants is kind of like the military equivalent of smashing yourself in the face with a claw hammer until you die from it, and Seleucus succeeded only in getting several thousand of his men trampled to death. After getting his ass handed to him a couple of times, Seleucus decided to sit down at the bargaining table with our fearless emperor. The ensuing deal sent five hundred war elephants over to Seleucus in exchange for all the Greek holdings in Afghanistan, cash considerations, a minor-league shortstop, and Seleucus sending his own daughter to serve in Chandragupta’s private army of face-destroying dominatrices. Sure, it was a bit of a one-sided deal, but then again Chandragupta pretty much had the Greek commander’s nuts in a vise. It ended up working out all right for Seleucus, however—he took those five hundred elephants and used them to smash armies across Persia and Greece, besting his foes with just a fraction of the Indian army’s unbelievable trample power. It probably worked out pretty well for Seleucus’s daughter, too—I’m sure that serving as a sword-swinging ass-kicker was a hell of a lot more exciting than whatever boring crap she was doing back in Greece.
In addition to being a destroyer of armies, a ruler of men, and a conqueror of cities, Chandragupta was also awesome because he was more paranoid than a crazy pothead conspiracy theorist on a guided tour of the Pentagon. I’ve already discussed the hot chick bodyguards who surrounded him day and night, but I should also mention that he never slept in the same room of his massive palace twice, actually going so far as to have additional bedrooms built on to his citadel as he needed them. He had food tasters try everything before he ate it, he probably installed a laser trip wire system in his throne room, and he actually put together what is believed to be the world’s first secret police force—a hardcore organization of spies, secret agents, and government assassins so insanely all-powerful that it makes the Patriot Act look like the United Nations’ Universal Declaration of Human Rights.
Eventually, Chandragupta got bored of being the most powerful man in the known world, so he abdicated the throne to his son, moved out to the desert, lived as a Jain monk, and became so hardcore Xtreme (capital X) that he fasted himself to death. He had laid the foundation for the first great empire in India’s history, and his grandson, Asoka the Great, would be remembered as one of his country’s most successful and benevolent rulers.
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Chandragupta was a tireless administrator, often times presiding over court business from dawn until dusk. Of course, it’s good to be the king—he usually had a team of four servants massaging his back and shoulders while he sat on his throne and arbitrated over disputes.
Chandragupta founded the Mauryan Dynasty in 320 BCE. He is not to be confused with Chandra Gupta, who founded the Gupta Dynasty in 320 CE.
While pretty much everybody enjoys talking about “thug life” and “busting caps in some punk asses,” few people realize that the word thug is actually derived from a supersecret organization of Indian highwaymen known as the Thuggee. This loose association of brigands and murderers devoted to the worship of the Hindu death goddess Kali terrorized the countryside for centuries, killing unsuspecting dumbasses and stealing all their stuff. These dudes would pose as travelers or merchants wandering the countryside, and when you least expected it they would choke you out with a silk scarf and then ritualistically disfigure your body and toss it in a ditch. An estimated two million people “disappeared” in this manner over the course of several centuries. The British finally exterminated the cult in the 1830s.
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BADASS CHICKS
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SHIELD MAIDENS
Viking women didn’t take crap from anybody, especially their husbands, and they enjoyed more rights than women pretty much anywhere else in the world during the Middle Ages. Numerous Viking sagas and histories mention savage bands of sea-roving chicks going into battle and performing prostate-bashing acts of bravery in hand-to-hand combat. Wives were known to go on raids with their husbands, dressing up in full chain mail and stuffing spears into people’s faces alongside the men, and many women soldiers fought tenaciously in numerous military engagements across Scandinavia. Some particularly liberated shield maidens were known to have forsaken married life altogether in order to pursue a life of adventure and ass-kicking on the high seas.
KUNOICHI
In feudal Japan, female ninjas known as kunoichi were just as highly valued as the most smoke-bomb-dropping, shuriken-flinging, flying-sidekicking male sha
dow warriors. Trained in hand-to-hand combat, infiltration, evasion, and espionage skills, these women entered enemy camps disguised as everything from servants and nurses to geishas and cosplay Final Fantasy characters. Once they secured the trust of a rival lord, they would sabotage key strategic points, report troop movements to their superiors, poison food supplies, and assassinate high-ranking officials. After completing their mission these subversive chicks would simply vanish into the night without a trace, and anybody who tried to stop them usually ended up with a stiletto lodged in his trachea.
THE DAHOMEY AMAZONS
Patriarchal European dumbasses really got a taste of girl power with multiple r’s when they faced the Dahomey Amazons of West Africa in the 1800s. An elite unit of pitiless warrior women armed with muskets, three-foot-long machetes, and remarkably bad attitudes, the Amazons had long been considered the most dominant fighting force in Africa, winning countless battles for their kingdom and collecting the severed heads of their slain enemies. Despite being heavily outgunned by superior European firepower, these fearless warriors threw down with the French Foreign Legion on multiple occasions; fighting fiercely with rifles, knives, fists, and whatever else they had available at the time. One account exists of how a French soldier disarmed one of the warriors only to have her take him down with a judo shoulder throw and tear out his jugular with her teeth.
LAS SOLDADERAS
Brave Chicanas played a major role on the front lines of Central American warfare from the time of the conquistadors up until the twentieth century. Many of these women served primarily as camp followers, traveling with their loved ones and functioning as nurses, cooks, and quartermasters, but they didn’t hesitate to drop whatever they were doing and bust caps in people’s dumb asses when the opportunity presented itself. Many women courageously fought in the Mexican revolutionary army in 1910, battling for their freedom against the corrupt and tyrannical rule of presidente por vida Porfirio Díaz. Soldaderas not only fought with distinction on the battlefield but also served as officers and commanders of revolutionary military forces as well.
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6
LIU JI
(247–195 BCE)
It was while dressed in rough cloth and wielding a three-foot sword that I conquered the empire.
BACK IN WHAT HISTORIANS LIKE TO CALL “THE DAY,” THERE WAS A BAD, BAD MAN BY THE NAME OF QIN SHIN HUANGDI. Qin dedicated his entire life to burying Confucian scholars alive, torching monasteries, subjugating the countryside, and crushing his enemies like insignificant bugs beneath his heel. He put together a massive army, conquered everything before him, pillaged, plundered, et cetera, and united the people of China under one ruler for the first time in history. He then forced everyone to bow to his evil will and ruled as a brutal tyrant until he inadvertently killed himself by drinking mercury, a practice that he thought would bring him eternal life. It didn’t.
After the emperor unwittingly poisoned himself to death like a dumbass, his son took over. Just as Qin was a bastard, his kid was the son of a bastard, and was so utterly incompetent and powerless that the Chinese nobility eventually forced him to do the world a favor by following in his father’s footsteps and having the good sense to die a premature and unpleasant death. China fell into a period of brutal warlordism, where everybody basically started beating the bejesus out of each other in an effort to grab small, insignificant chunks of land for themselves.
Liu Ji—also known as Liu Bang, Liu Pang, Gaozu, Han Kao-Ti, Taizu, Liu Chi, Kao-Tsu, Gao Di, and probably half a dozen other crazy-ass names (none of which even contain any of the same letters), wasn’t your typical scrotum-demolishing conqueror. He didn’t push orphans headfirst over cliffs, he didn’t construct evil armies of cybernetic killbots with buzz saws for hands, and his muscles weren’t so freakishly jacked that he could crack a Brazil nut by putting it between his bicep and forearm and flexing really hard—he was just a jovial, charismatic, broke-as-hell Chinese peasant with a habit of spending his evenings sitting at the bar in the local pub drinking bowl after bowl of cheap wine, telling tall tales, singing bad karaoke, and running up a massive tab that he had absolutely no chance of ever being able to pay off. He worked as a local police officer in charge of transporting prisoners across his home province of Kiangsu, and, as it is with most crappy jobs, he was pretty much at the point where he would rather have jammed large pointy objects into his eyes than gotten out of bed most mornings.
One day, Liu Ji was in the middle of one of his much-hated cross-province prisoner transports when all of a sudden a bunch of his convicts broke free and escaped into the countryside. Liu, fearful that this failure would cost him his job, just decided to say, “Screw it.” He popped open a flask of wine and used his charismatic charm to organize the ex-cons into a goddamned bandit outfit, and under his command they started launching raids on unsuspecting travelers and government officials across the province. This crew of merry men became so popular that poor peasants flocked to join up with him and pillage the rich imperial stores of all the wealth and booze they could carry. The band of brigands grew so powerful that they actually began to morph from a roving troop of plundering thieves into an organized cadre of freedom fighters battling against the corrupt empire on behalf of the underrepresented populace, kind of like a weird mix between Oz and Red Dawn.
Liu Ji eventually decided to attach his misfit merry men to the revolutionary army of a hardcore military warlord named Xiang Yu. Xiang was everything a good classical-age ass-beater was supposed to be—tough, cruel, and unscrupulous. For years, the X-Man had been shredding faces up and down the countryside, forging a kingdom out of unrelenting cold steel and arterial blood spray, and fighting his way toward the recently vacated throne. He executed prisoners of war, showed no mercy to his enemies, and maliciously gutted any man who deserted his army or showed cowardice in battle.
In contrast to Xiang’s inflexible, blood-and-guts attitude, Liu Ji was totally chill; he spent his time hanging out with his motley crew of rejects, convicts, and peasants, traveling the land preaching revolution, earning the support of the people, eradicating the armies of tyrannical local warlords, and uniting the peasants against the despotism of the corrupt nobility. When people surrendered to him, Liu gave them a sword and let them fight alongside his own troops, and everywhere he went he was warmly received by the cheering populace.
The rebels handily crushed the imperial army, and in 207 BCE, Liu Ji and his dashing band of rogues sauntered into the fortress city of Chang’an (also known as Sian, Shensi, Hsi-An, Xi’an, Ch’ang-an, etc.) despite being strictly forbidden from doing so by General Xiang. It wasn’t exactly Liu Ji’s fault, however—when the people of Chang’an saw Liu’s army camped outside their gates and realized that the legendary peasant/drunkard/hero was approaching the city, they lowered their drawbridge, greeted him with open arms, and bought him a round at the local tavern.
Xiang Yu heard what was going on and immediately marched his conquering juggernaut of an army toward the capital, destroying and ransacking everything in his path like an unstoppable ball-crushing steamroller. He busted through the iron gates of the city, plundered it for three months, massacred the entire population, and burned every building down to the ground. He then appointed himself lord protector of China, divided the empire into several kingdoms, and immediately went to work mercilessly assassinating and executing his chief political rivals.
Liu Ji wasn’t about to trade one tyrannical jackass for another, so he decided to put together a coalition of tribal leaders and revolt against this new government. He recruited thousands of eager peasants to assist him in his noble cause, and triumphantly marched his army out to face the battle-hardened, highly organized, well-equipped forces of the mighty lord protector.
He got his face wrecked. Badly.
Liu regrouped and attacked Xiang again, and even though he outnumbered Xiang’s forces nearly three to one, his peeps were completely mowed down with the realness. The über-surly, ultrapo
werful Xiang then wiped out what was left of Liu Ji’s army and trapped our hero in his own castle, but Liu somehow managed to narrowly escape through a secret passage and run for his life.
Well, Liu Ji is the ultimate proof that badassitude doesn’t always come from supreme ass-kickings—sometimes it’s just about being totally awesome and uniting people in a common cause. For every victory that Xiang Yu achieved, every village he torched, and every prisoner he bitch-slapped, more and more people began to flock to Liu’s banner. The guy was like the pied piper of disgruntled, pissed-off peasants who weren’t going to take it anymore. As a laid-back, charismatic guy, Liu just kept on recruiting people who didn’t want to put up with Xiang’s bullcrap anymore, and finally at the Battle of Gaixia in 202 Liu fielded an overwhelmingly massive force and won a decisive military victory against the armies of Xiang Yu, defeating them and wiping out the battle-hardened core of the lord protector’s army. General Xiang felt so disgraced that he’d been defeated by a damn hippie that he committed suicide right there on the battlefield by decapitating himself with a machete.
This was like the ancient Chinese equivalent of the 1980 U.S. Olympic hockey team taking out the Soviet Union. Peasants were cheering, everybody was going nuts, Al Michaels was asking people whether or not they believe in miracles, and the forty-four-year-old peasant-turned-outlaw was anointed Emperor Gaozu of Han in 202 BCE. In the span of five years he had gone from a friendly drunk at the local bar to ruler of the world’s most populous empire—one of only two members of the peasant class to ever be crowned emperor of China.