Badass

by Ben Thompson

  —GENGHIS KHAN

  * * *

  For every civilization that Genghis Khan conquered, he took the most beautiful woman in that land to be his wife. The number of wives he accumulated in this manner must have been astronomical, because recent scientific studies have found that nearly sixteen million people—roughly 8 percent of the population of Asia—are genetically descended from the great khan.

  Genghis Khan’s great-granddaughter Khutulun was a crazy warrior chick who fought bravely in several Central Asian campaigns. In true badass fashion, this hot babe issued a challenge to all Mongols: she would marry the first man who defeated her in hand-to-hand combat. More than a hundred men answered the call, but when Marco Polo met the beautiful princess in 1280 she was still single.

  Genghis Khan’s birth name was Temujin, meaning “Iron Man.” You know when your parents name you after a Black Sabbath song you’re going to be trouble.

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  THINGS YOU CAN SHOOT OUT OF A CATAPULT

  * * *

  With massive castles and towering stone walls being all the rage back in the Middle Ages, invading armies needed to be able to punch through these defenses quickly if they wanted to get on with the looting, burning, and pillaging that everybody seemed to love so much. Nothing was more effective at this than the catapult, a time-honored method of flinging a multiflavored assortment of deadly objects at your unsuspecting enemies.

  VERY LARGE ROCKS

  Sometimes you have to stick with the basics, and you could do a whole hell of a lot worse than chucking a Volkswagen-sized boulder at your foes with enough velocity to crunch through brick and mortar and splatter foot soldiers across the battlements. There wasn’t a whole lot the standard spearman could do to defend himself from some jerk lobbing an eight-foot rounded chunk of granite at his face, except of course get popped like a pimple, and even the most headstrong wall didn’t stand much of a chance against a steady barrage of humongoid rocks. The only real pain in the ass was finding the ammunition and transporting it to the launch site.

  POTS OF BURNING PITCH OR BOILING OIL

  Another medieval favorite was to load the catapult up with large clay pots filled with volatile materials and then wreak havoc on the enemy castle. Burning tar was a relatively common ingredient, since it did a pretty awesome job of catching the entire city on fire and burning the crap out of everything from hapless citizens to critical food supplies. Boiling oil was another effective way to express-mail third-degree burns, since the sticky substance adhered to human skin and usually resulted in unhappy peasants running around town screaming their heads off like maniacs.

  GIANT BAGS OF CRAP

  When artillery captains got sick of pitching endless waves of giant death-bringing rocks at their adversaries and wanted to spice things up a little, they would sometimes fire off biological materials designed to make the city inhabitants’ lives miserable. Beehives and venomous snakes were a couple of choice payloads, but some commanders would just launch giant buckets of cow manure over the castle walls. Sure, lobbing big bags of crap at your enemies, while unhygienic, isn’t exactly going to inflict copious amounts of death and carnage, but it is pretty goddamned degrading, and in the end, isn’t the whole point of war to completely humiliate your opponent?

  DEAD BODIES

  One of the earliest documented instances of biological warfare dates back to the fourteenth century, when the Mongols started using catapults to launch the dead bodies of plague victims over the walls of towns that didn’t have the good sense to surrender to them. Not only is this diabolical, disgusting, and incredibly deadly, but it also had to be pretty damn demoralizing to see a lifeless corpse come flying toward you at high speed. I also came across some reports that our friend William the Conqueror had a nasty habit of loading his catapults up with the severed heads of slain enemy soldiers and then chucking those over the castle walls as a method of intimidating his opponents. It probably worked.

  PRISONERS

  Of course, why settle for something as tame as dead bodies and severed heads when you could just load the catapult up with still-breathing prisoners of war and then use them as a weapon against their own people? Frederick Barbarossa captured the Italian city of Crema in 1160 by flinging live hostages, including children, nonstop day and night until the horrified inhabitants finally surrendered. He was a sweet guy.

  * * *

  20

  VLAD THE IMPALER

  (1431–1476)

  Here begins a very cruel, frightening story about a wild bloodthirsty man: Prince Dracula. How he impaled people and roasted them and boiled their heads in a kettle and skinned people and hacked them to pieces like cabbage.

  —EXCERPT FROM A FIFTEENTH-CENTURY PAMPHLET

  FORGET VAMPIRES. Forget those irritating glow-stick techno raves where the repetitive bass-heavy house music makes you want to bash your face into a wall repeatedly until you die from it, forget the black-caped 1920s-era cheesy Nosferatus with bad European accents, slicked-back hair helmets, and pointy glow-in-the-dark fangs, and forget those effeminate Hollywood pretty boys who try to act all mysterious and sexy and evil but only come off as being trite ass-clowns who look like they just stepped out of a really freaky underwear commercial. Though his nickname—Dracula—may conjure up images of stiff-legged pale old men with overly developed canine teeth, a serious aversion to garlic bread, and a penchant for sleeping in old coffins, nobody ever said that Vlad III Tepes of Wallachia was a vampire—Dracula is really just the Romanian way of saying “son of the dragon” (or, alternatively, and perhaps more appropriately, “son of the devil”) and was a way of differentiating young Vlad III from his father, Vlad II Dracul. The real Dracula wasn’t an undead beast who spent his days hanging upside down from the ceiling in an unlit dungeon only to venture forth and suck the blood of wayward bimbos in the glow of the full moon—he was a complete wack job who made it his personal mission to take as many people as possible and stick them ass-first onto giant sharpened wooden stakes purely for his own amusement.

  Born in Transylvania in 1431, Dracula had a pretty rough childhood. At the age of eleven he was captured by the sultan of the Ottoman Empire and shipped off to Adrianople, where he would spend the next six years growing up as a prisoner of the Turkish court. Being the total bastard that he was, Vlad was always, causing trouble, bitch-slapping people and telling the Turks to go have sex with assorted varieties of farm animals, so as a result he spent much of this time being alternately whipped, beaten, or tortured for insolence. Meanwhile, back in Christian Europe, some turbo-douche named Vladislav seized the throne of Wallachia, and a bunch of disgruntled noblemen pulled Vlad Dracul’s face off until he died from it. Dracula’s older brother had his eyes burned out with a red-hot poker and was buried alive, which also sucked.

  Eventually Vlad got his ass out of Turkey, raised an army, and marched determinedly into Wallachia with one thought on his mind—cruel, bloody, delicious vengeance. He crushed all resistance he faced, personally killed Vladislav in a sword fight, and seized the throne for himself in 1456. Dracula exacted his revenge on the nobility pretty much immediately, ramming them onto wooden stakes and conscripting their wives and children into forced-labor chain gangs tasked with building his evil castle, an undertaking that most of them did not survive. Saxon merchants living in Transylvania, who for some reason were deemed the enemies of the Romanian people, were dealt with just as harshly. Dracula’s troops razed most of Transylvania to the ground, burned anything larger than a breadbasket, boiled people alive, looted, and dragged anyone stupid enough to surrender back to Wallachia so they could be impaled. He also went after the poor, the homeless, criminals, mimes, telemarketers, vagrants, graduate students, horses, and pretty much anybody else he deemed to be either utterly useless or a potential threat to his rule.

  You see, Vlad the Impaler apparently got a charge out of running the kingdom of Wallachia with an iron fist and a wooden spike. Whenever anybody would cross him, he’d just jam the
m onto a large pointy object of some kind and call it a day. This was not only a sufficient way of keeping his subjects in line, it was also a highly effective crime deterrent and pretty much worked wonders for homeland security. Legend has it that crime dropped about 3,000 percent while he was in power, which is understandable.

  Interestingly, Dracula is still fondly remembered by the people of Romania as a national hero who defended his people against the incursions of the Ottoman Turks (everybody else pretty much thinks he was a total nut job, but whatever). I have a hard time believing that being ruled by Muslims was a fate worse than having someone stick a kebab skewer so far up your ass that you cough up splinters, but who am I to judge? The fact remains that Wallachia was unconquered during Vlad’s reign of blood, and his people were big fans of that arrangement.

  Now, Vlad grew up in the same court as Sultan Mehmed the Conqueror, and these two guys seriously hated each other’s guts. When Dracula seized control of the blood-soaked throne of Wallachia, he immediately stopped the age-old practice of paying tribute to the Turks. When Mehmed was like, “What the hell is your problem, dude?” Vlad responded by launching a massive campaign along the Danube River in 1461, burning everything in sight, destroying enemy garrisons, capturing forts, and mercilessly slaughtering tens of thousands of Turks. Mehmed sent two emissaries to see what was going on, but when the men refused to remove their turbans in the Wallachian prince’s presence, Dracula had their headgear permanently hammered into their brains with huge-ass nails.

  That was the last straw. Mehmed the Conqueror put together a force of a hundred thousand pissed-off Turkish warriors seeking vengeance. Vlad had no chance to survive with his small force of (at most) twenty thousand men, but he decided to see if he couldn’t take some of the invaders with him anyway. After a month or so of fighting a losing battle, Vlad decided to launch a balls-out night raid on the sultan’s camp. The Impaler and about seven thousand of his men disguised themselves as Turks (Dracula actually spoke fluent Turkish, having learned it while in captivity), snuck into the Ottoman camp in the middle of the night, and started setting everything on fire. In the confusion, the Wallachians were able to slay thousands of enemy soldiers, but were eventually beaten back before they could assassinate the sultan himself. This last-ditch effort, while daring, was ultimately unsuccessful in halting the Turkish advance on the Wallachian capital.

  However, Dracula had one more trick up his sleeve, and holy cow, it was a foul one. As Mehmed’s armies approached the grounds of Castle Dracula, they were greeted by the sight of twenty thousand Turkish prisoners of war impaled on stakes. The Turks were so freaked out by what they dubbed “the Forest of the Impaled” that they crapped themselves, turned around, and ran like frightened slasher-movie teenagers, screaming their heads off all the way back to Adrianople.

  Even with his amazing, improbable victory over the Turks, Vlad’s position as the all-powerful ruler of Romania still wasn’t safe. Eventually everyone got sick of being stabbed in the ass and the people of Wallachia overthrew him. He was killed in battle with the Turks in 1476, and his head was brought back and put on a stake high above Istanbul to prove to the people of the Ottoman Empire that the vile Lord Impaler truly was no more.

  * * *

  Mehmed the Conqueror got his excellent epithet by capturing Constantinople in 1453. The twenty-one-year-old sultan besieged the fortified city for two months before assaulting the walls with endless waves of Turkish warriors. The outnumbered defenders were slain, the emperor was killed, the Byzantine Empire was destroyed, and the city was renamed Istanbul. I’m told that the reason behind this renaming is really nobody’s business but the Turks.

  Vlad campaigned against the Turks alongside the Hungarian lord Stephen Báthory, great-uncle of the infamous (and completely mental) “Blood Countess,” Elizabeth Báthory. Elizabeth was a crazy lunatic who is widely believed to be the world’s most prolific serial killer. This psycho hose beast lured hundreds of women to her castle, where she tortured them, killed them, and bathed in their blood, believing that this would somehow keep her looking youthful forever. She died by starving herself to death while under house arrest for her crimes, which is pretty hardcore.

  * * *

  Section III

  The Age of Gunpowder

  21

  MIYAMOTO MUSASHI

  (1584–1645)

  When you are even with an opponent, it is essential to keep thinking of stabbing him in the face with the tip of your sword in the intervals between the opponent’s sword blows and your own sword blows. When you have the intention of stabbing your opponent in the face, he will try to get both his face and body out of the way. In the midst of battle, as soon as an opponent tries to get out of the way, you have already won.

  THE JAPANESE WORD KENSEI, LITERALLY TRANSLATED, MEANS “SWORD SAINTS.” The peerless warriors upon whom this honorific title was bestowed were such hardcore blade-swinging bastards that they were actually believed to have possessed otherworldly abilities with their weapon of choice. These fierce warriors were considered perfectly tuned fighting machines who had literally ascended to a plane where they had become one with the sword. Their movements were precise, their reactions instinctive, their form as flawless and graceful as it was deadly.

  At the forefront of this pantheon of warrior-gods stands one legendary man: Miyamoto Musashi.

  Musashi’s life was like something out of a nitro-badass Clint Eastwood or Toshiro Mifune movie. This lone warrior would quietly roll into town, get involved in a bunch of crazy adventures, start trouble with the toughest dudes in town, slaughter everyone with a pulse, get a hot chick to fall in love with him, and then ride off into the sunset without stopping to say good-bye to the rotting piles of corpses he left in his wake. Musashi got his start early, killing his first man at age thirteen when he challenged some idiot samurai to a duel and bashed his brains in with a wooden sword Legend of Zelda–style. By the time he was thirty, he had won over sixty life-or-death duels, taught hundreds of students, and fought in six massive, epoch-defining battles that raged across the Japanese countryside.

  At the age of sixteen, Musashi left his quiet home province to wander the land in search of pointy adventures. Despite the fact that he had received very little formal martial arts training of any kind, anyone who entered the dueling circle with this young doom-bringer could generally expect to find themselves face-planting a katana blade at high velocity. He won several fights against powerful martial arts adepts and slaughtered all who opposed him, but it was when a massive war broke out across Japan that Musashi really got the opportunity to hone his skill against a few hundred thousand worthy opponents. Serving in the army of the feudal lord Toyotomi Hideyoshi, Musashi fought on the front lines of several key engagements during Japan’s ultra-brutal Warring States Period. Leading the charge in the vanguard during the epic, Kurosawa-esque battles of Fushimi, Gifu, and Sekigahara, Miyamoto Musashi was like Iron Chef Awesome slicing up the country’s mightiest samurai like blowfish in the hands of an expert sushi master. When Hideyoshi’s armies were eventually defeated, Musashi didn’t exactly go home crying or anything—he wandered off the battlefield, climbed the tallest mountain he could find, sharpened his sword while listening to eighties hair metal, and then got right back to the job of wandering the countryside in search of dumbasses who needed a tempered steel blade implanted in their abdominal cavities.

  Now, Miyamoto Musashi wasn’t your stereotypical neck-severing samurai death machine. First off, he had severe eczema on his face, which left him considerably scarred, disfigured, and more intimidating than the LSATs. He never cut his hair, seldom changed clothes, and bathed just infrequently enough for it to be disgusting (he was worried that he would be caught off guard while in the shower—he must have seen Psycho one too many times). He also didn’t wear armor, and, even more interestingly, he rarely even fought with real swords! For many samurai this was unthinkable—the katana was the warrior caste’s most prized possession, yet Mus
ashi was perfectly content to just bludgeon his foes into submission with a katana-shaped hunk of hickory wood he’d carved from the mangled remains of a tree that was pissing him off.

  When he wasn’t slapping people around with his wood, Musashi dual-wielded swords in combat, a highly uncommon practice in the days of feudal Japan. While all semi-legitimate feudal samurai carried two swords—the long sword (katana) and the short sword (wakizashi)—they generally fought solely with the katana, preferring to hold it in two hands to maximize the weapon’s speed and power. The wakizashi was primarily used to ritualistically disembowel yourself for failing your master and/or not adequately disassembling the face of every warrior who stood against you (a practice known as seppuku). Musashi had no real interest in severing his own abdominal aorta just because some self-righteous jackass in a silk robe told him to, and decided instead to just use both swords at the same time.

  While the obvious benefit of using two blades is that you have an extra weapon to dice, mince, and puree the cerebral cortex of any man foolish enough to cross you, Musashi also used to just haul off and wing his short sword at people in the middle of a duel. I think we can all agree that this is pretty sweet. One time Miyamoto faced off against a master of a weapon known as the kusari-gama. A long chain with a razor-sharp sickle attached to one end, the kusari-gama was basically like the Grim Reaper’s nunchucks. The battle-hardened warrior was swinging the chain around like crazy, whipping the sickle through the air in a series of lightning-quick maneuvers, but Musashi didn’t even flinch. He pulled out his two swords and proceeded to chuck the short one right into his opponent’s chest (he allegedly could hurl the thing with deadly accuracy at anyone or anything within ten feet of him, like a cross between Peyton Manning and a harpoon gun) while the dude was in the middle of his ridiculous pretentiousness. The guy stopped for a second, looked down at the giant-ass sword sticking out of his gut, and then glanced up just in time to see Musashi run up and slice him in half. The master’s disciples, seeing that their leader had just gotten completely hosed, all jumped Musashi at once, but the blade-master fought them all off and escaped. During his adventures, Musashi also took on the masters of swords, lances, staves, and other crazy exotic weapons. No man could match him.