In the early years of the nineteenth century, wealthy
shipowner Laskarina Bouboulina (1771–1825) commanded a fleet in the War of
Greek Independence against the Ottoman Empire.
Bouboulina was the daughter of a Greek ship’s captain from
the island of Hydra, Stavrianos Pinotsis, and his wife, Skevo. Stavrianos was
imprisoned for his participation in a failed rebellion against the Ottomans in
1769–1770. Bouboulina was born in the prison in Constantinople (modern
Istanbul) where he was held. Her father died soon after. It is not unreasonable
to assume she grew up with a grudge against the Ottomans.
After her husband’s death, Skevo took her infant daughter
home to Hydra. Four years later, she married again. Her new husband was also a
sea captain, this time from the island of Spetses. According to some accounts,
Bouboulina’s stepfather encouraged her interest in ships and the family
business—both the interest and the encouragement were unusual for the time and
place.
Like her mother, Bouboulina married twice: the first time at
the age of seventeen to Dimitrios Yiannouzas and again at the age of thirty to
Dimitrios Bouboulis. Both her husbands were Spetsiot sea captains. Both died in
sea battles with the Algerian pirates who often raided the coasts of Greece.
The death of her second husband in 1811 left Bouboulina a
wealthy widow with six children. Many women in her position would have relied
on a male relative to manage their fortune. Bouboulina took over management of
both of her husbands’ mercantile shipping businesses. She proved to be a
successful businesswoman.
In 1816, Ottoman officials gave Bouboulina a new reason to
dislike the Turkish government: it tried to seize her fortune on the grounds
that her second husband had fought on the Russian side in the Turco-Russian
wars. She retained her fortune, reputedly helped by the sultan’s mother, who
convinced her son to intervene on Bouboulina’s behalf.
Bouboulina was not the only Greek to resent Turkish rule in
the early nineteenth century. Greeks had been part of the Ottoman Empire for
roughly four hundred years. For much of that time, they had enjoyed a
privileged position. Educated Greeks dominated the Ottoman administration and
Greek merchants held a near monopoly on trade in the Turkish Mediterranean.
Privilege is not the same thing as independence, however. In the late
eighteenth century, vague discontent turned into Greek nationalism thanks to
two international movements. Romantic Hellenism created an interest in ancient
Greek mythology and literature throughout Europe, bringing with it a renewed
sense of ancient Greece as the birthplace of democracy. At the same time, the
revolutionary ideals of the American and French revolutions led nationalist
groups across Europe to dream of new states based on shared languages and
culture rather than imperial provinces shaped by the political maneuvering of
the great imperial powers.
In 1816, members of the Greek merchant diaspora in Odessa
founded a secret society dedicated to liberating Greece from Ottoman rule, the
Filiki Eteria. By the early 1820s, hundreds of wealthy and educated Greeks
belonged to the society—intellectuals, shipowners and sea captains, members of
the clergy, landowners, and merchants. Bouboulina purportedly became the only
female member of the Filiki Eteria, though her name does not appear among the
1,093 names on the surviving membership lists. Whether she was an official
member of the organization, or an unofficial one-woman ladies’ auxiliary, she
devoted her fleet and her fortune to the independence movement.
Buying arms and ammunition in foreign ports and smuggling
them into Spetses in her ships was risky enough, but Bouboulina also
commissioned a Spetses shipyard to build a warship, the Agamemnon§—an
in-your-face act of rebellion that brought Bouboulina to the attention of
Ottoman officials once again. The Ottomans imposed strict limits on how large
Greek-owned ships could be and the size and number of armaments they could
carry. The Agamemnon did not meet those standards. The Ottomans accused Bouboulina
of secretly building a warship—as in fact she was. She bribed the officials and
completed the construction of the ship without incident. At 108 feet long, with
eighteen heavy cannons, the Agamemnon was the first and largest ship in the
Greek fleet.
The War of Greek Independence began on March 25, 1821, with
an unsuccessful raid into Moldavia by a band of Greek expatriates led by
Alexander Ypsilantis, the head of Filiki Eteria. Two weeks later, the region
known as the Peloponnesus, including the island of Spetses, rose in revolt.
Fifty-year-old Bouboulina paid for and commanded four ships
in addition to the Agamemnon, and a small private army of Spetsiots. Her ships
were captained by her sons and half-brothers, several of whom died over the
course of the rebellion. She called her troops her “brave lads”; they named her
Kapetanisa (Lady Captain).
Soon after the war broke out, Bouboulina blockaded the port
at Nafplion, a key Ottoman stronghold. Nafplion was guarded by three fortresses
and armed with three hundred cannons. “Everyone” considered the fort to be
impregnable. Bouboulina proved everyone wrong. Nineteenth-century Greek
historian Anargyros Hatzi-Anargyrou wrote an eyewitness account of her assault
on Nafplion:
On December 4, 1821,
as I remember, on board her own vessel, she alone gave orders for the boats to
attack the fort. They immediately sail forward but a rain of bullets and cannon
fire from the seaside fortifications make her brave lads fall back for a
moment. Like an angry Amazon, watching the battle over the side of her boat,
she then shouts—Are you women then and not men? Forward! Her officers obey,
regroup and attack—they fight but die in vain, since the fort was impregnable
by sea. For this reason, she herself lands with her forces and stays until the
fall of the fort on 30th November 1822, leading her men in battle, spending her
fortune.”
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.)
