Robert-François Damiens

Robert-François Damiens (9 January 1715 – 28 March 1757) was a French domestic servant whose attempted assassination of King Louis XV of France in 1757 culminated in his notorious and controversial public execution. He was the last person to be executed in France by drawing and quartering, the traditional and gruesome form of death penalty used for regicides.

Early life

Damiens was born on 9 January 1715 in La Thieuloye, a village near Arras in northern France. He enlisted in the army at an early age. After his discharge, he became a domestic servant at the college of the Jesuits in Paris, and was dismissed from this as well as from other employments for misconduct, earning him the epithet of Robert le Diable (Robert the Devil).

Damiens’ motivation has always been questionable: historians often describe him as mentally unstable. From his answers under interrogation, Damiens seems to have been excited by the schismatic uproar which followed the refusal of the French Catholic clergy to grant holy sacraments to the Jansenists, a sect which was considered heretical. He appears to have planned a punishment for the king, upon whom he placed ultimate blame.

Assassination attempt

On January 5, 1757, as the king was entering his carriage, Damiens rushed forward and stabbed him with a knife, inflicting only a slight wound. He made no attempt to escape, and was apprehended at once. He was then tortured to force him to divulge the identity of his accomplices or those who had sent him. This was unsuccessful. He was condemned as a regicide by the Parlement of Paris, and sentenced to be drawn and quartered by horses at the Place de Grève.

Torture and execution

Fetched from his prison cell on the morning of 28 March 1757, Damiens allegedly said “La journée sera rude” (“The day will be hard”). He was tortured first with red-hot pincers; his hand, holding the knife used in the attempted assassination, was burned using sulphur; molten wax, lead, and boiling oil were poured into his wounds. He was then remanded to the royal executioner, Charles Henri Sanson who harnessed horses to his arms and legs to be dismembered. But Damiens’ limbs did not separate easily: the officiants ordered Sanson to cut Damiens’ joints with an axe. Once Damiens was dismembered to the applause of the crowd, his reportedly still-living torso was burnt at the stake.

Aftermath

After his death, the remains of Damiens’ corpse were reduced to ashes and scattered in the wind. His house was razed to the ground, his brothers and sisters were ordered to change their names, and his father, wife, and daughter were banished from France.

Because France had not experienced a regicide for a century and a half, Damiens’ infamy endured. Forty years after his death, Arras’ most notorious citizen was used against another Arras native, Maximilien Robespierre. The polarizing dictator of the French Revolution was described frequently by his enemies as the nephew of Damiens. Though completely untrue, the libel held considerable credibility among royalists and foreign sympathizers.

Legacy

The execution was witnessed by famous 18th-century adventurer Giacomo Casanova, who included an account in his memoirs:

We had the courage to watch the dreadful sight for four hours … Damien was a fanatic, who, with the idea of doing a good work and obtaining a heavenly reward, had tried to assassinate Louis XV; and though the attempt was a failure, and he only gave the king a slight wound, he was torn to pieces as if his crime had been consummated. … I was several times obliged to turn away my face and to stop my ears as I heard his piercing shrieks, half of his body having been torn from him, but the Lambertini and Mme XXX did not budge an inch. Was it because their hearts were hardened? They told me, and I pretended to believe them, that their horror at the wretch’s wickedness prevented them feeling that compassion which his unheard-of torments should have excited.

—Book 2, Volume 5, Chapter 3

The philosopher Cesare Beccaria explicitly cited Damiens’ fate when he condemned torture and the death penalty in his classic treatise On Crimes and Punishments (1764). Damiens’s execution is also described and discussed at length in the introduction to Michel Foucault’s study of systems of punishment, Discipline and Punish.

Thomas Paine in Rights of Man mentions Damiens’ execution as an example of the cruelty of despotic governments; Paine argues that these methods were the reason why the masses dealt with their prisoners in such a cruel manner when the French Revolution occurred. An allusion to Damiens’ attack and execution, and Casanova’s account of it, are used by Mark Twain to suggest the cruelty and injustice of aristocratic power in chapter XVIII of A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court.

Science fiction writer James Morrow draws on the incident for the trial of God in his novel Blameless in Abaddon. There is also a description of the death of Damiens in Peter Weiss’ play Marat/Sade. The incident figures prominently in Hanns Heinz Ewers’ frame-tale “The Execution of Damiens”.

L’Anse aux Meadows

L’Anse aux Meadows (rom the French L’Anse-aux-Méduses or “Jellyfish Cove”) is an archaeological site on the northernmost tip of the island of Newfoundland in the Canadian province of Newfoundland and Labrador. Discovered in 1960, it is the only known site of a Norse or Viking village in Canada, and in North America outside of Greenland.

Dating to around the year 1000, L’Anse aux Meadows remains the only widely accepted instance of pre-Columbian trans-oceanic contact and is notable for its possible connection with the attempted colony of Vinland established by Leif Ericson around the same time period or, more broadly, with Norse exploration of the Americas.

Etymology

The name “L’Anse aux Meadows” made its first appearance as Anse à la Medée on a map of 1862, when it may have derived its name from a ship called Medée. This was then modified by French-speaking fishermen during the 19th and 20th centuries, who named the site L’Anse aux Méduses, meaning “Jellyfish Cove”. The modern name is an English corruption of the French name, from Méduses to Meadows, which may have occurred because the landscape in the area tends to be open, with meadows.

Discovery and significance

In 1960, the remains of a Norse village were discovered in Newfoundland by the Norwegian explorer Helge Ingstad. Archaeologists determined the site is of Norse origin because of definitive similarities between the characteristics of structures and artifacts found at the site compared to sites in Greenland and Iceland from around CE 1000.

Helge Ingstad and Anne Stine Ingstad carried out seven archaeological excavations from 1961 to 1968, investigating eight complete house sites as well as the remains of a ninth.

The L’Anse aux Meadows area was originally inhabited by Native peoples as far back as 6000BP. The area was probably sought because of the areas abundance of marine life and its close proximity to Labrador. The most prominent of early Native inhabitants were the Dorset Eskimo however the during the centuries of Norse exploration of the area there were thought to be no known habitants in the immediate area.

L’Anse aux Meadows is the only known Norse site in North America outside of Greenland and represents the farthest known extent of European exploration and settlement of the New World before the voyages of Christopher Columbus almost 500 years later. It was named a World Heritage site by UNESCO in 1978.

Settlement

Archaeological excavation at the site was conducted in the 1960s by an international team led by archaeologist Anne Stine Ingstad (Helge Ingstad’s wife) and under the direction of Parks Canada of the Government of Canada in the 1970s. Following each period of excavation, the site was reburied to protect and conserve the cultural resources.

The settlement at L’Anse aux Meadows has been dated to approximately 1,000 years ago, an assessment that tallies with the relative dating of artifact and structure types. The remains of eight buildings were located. They are believed to have been constructed of sod placed over a wooden frame. Based on associated artifacts, the buildings were variously identified as dwellings or workshops. The largest dwelling measured 28.8 by 15.6 m (94.5 by 51 ft) and consisted of several rooms. Workshops were identified as an iron smithy containing a forge and iron slag, a carpentry workshop, which generated wood debris, and a specialized boat repair area containing worn rivets. Besides those related to iron working, carpentry, and boat repair, other artifacts found at the site consisted of common everyday Norse items, including a stone oil lamp, a whetstone, a bronze fastening pin, a bone knitting needle, and part of a spindle. The presence of the spindle and needle suggests that women were present as well as men. Food remains included butternuts, which are significant because they do not grow naturally north of New Brunswick, and their presence probably indicates the Norse inhabitants travelled farther south to obtain them. Archaeologists concluded that the site was inhabited by the Norse for a relatively short period of time.

In addition to the European settlement, evidence of at least five or six separate native occupations has been identified at L’Anse aux Meadows, the oldest dated at roughly 6,000 years ago; none was contemporaneous with the Norse occupation. The most prominent of these earlier occupations were by the Dorset people, who predated the Norse by about 200 years.

Connection with Vinland sagas

Norse sagas are written versions of older oral traditions. Two Icelandic sagas, commonly called the Saga of the Greenlanders and the Saga of Eric the Red, describe the experiences of Norse Greenlanders who discovered and attempted to settle land to the west of Greenland, identified by them as Vinland. The sagas suggest that the Vinland settlement failed because of conflicts within the Norse community, as well as between the Norse and the native people they encountered, whom they called Skrælingar.

Recent archaeological studies suggest that the L’Anse aux Meadows site is not Vinland itself but was within a land called Vinland that spread farther south from L’Anse aux Meadows, extending to the St. Lawrence River and New Brunswick. The village at L’Anse aux Meadows served as an exploration base and winter camp for expeditions heading southward into the Gulf of St. Lawrence. The settlements of Vinland mentioned in the Eric saga and the Greenlanders saga, Leifsbudir (Leif Ericson) and Hóp (Norse Greenlanders), have both been identified as the L’Anse aux Meadows site.

 

Alexander “Sawney” Bean

Alexander “Sawney” Bean(e) was the legendary head of a 48-member clan in 15th- or 16th-century Scotland, reportedly executed for the mass murder and cannibalisation of over 1,000 people.

The story appears in The Newgate Calendar, a crime catalogue of the notorious Newgate Prison in London. While historians tend to believe that Sawney Bean never existed, his story has passed into legend and is part of the Edinburgh tourism industry.

The legend

According to The Newgate Calendar, Alexander Bean was born in East Lothian during the 1500s. His father was a ditch digger and hedge trimmer, and Bean tried to take up the family trade but quickly realized that he had little taste for honest labour.

He left home with a vicious woman who apparently shared his inclinations. The couple ended up at a coastal cave in Bannane Head near Galloway (now South Ayrshire) where they lived undiscovered for some twenty-five years. (The cave was 200 yards deep and during high tide the entrance was blocked by water, and is said to be today’s Bannane Cave, located between Girvan and Ballantrae in Ayrshire).

Their many children and grandchildren were products of incest and lawlessness. The brood came to include eight sons, six daughters, eighteen grandsons and fourteen granddaughters. Lacking the gumption for honest labour, the clan thrived by laying careful ambushes at night to rob and murder individuals or small groups. The bodies were brought back to the cave where they were dismembered and cannibalised. Leftovers were pickled, and discarded body parts would sometimes wash up on nearby beaches.

The body parts and disappearances did not go unnoticed by the local villagers, but the Beans stayed in the caves by day and took their victims at night. The clan was so secretive that the villagers were not aware of the forty eight murderers living nearby.

As more significant notice of the disappearances was taken, several organized searches were launched to find the culprits. One search took note of the telltale cave but the men refused to believe anything human could live in it. Frustrated and in a frenetic quest for justice, the townspeople lynched several innocents, and the disappearances continued. Suspicion often fell on local innkeepers since they were the last to see many of the missing people alive.

One fateful night, the Beans ambushed a married couple riding from a fair on one horse, but the man was skilled in combat, deftly holding off the clan with sword and pistol. The clan fatally mauled the wife when she fell to the ground in the conflict. Before they could take the resilient husband, a large group of fairgoers appeared on the trail and the Beans fled.

With the Beans’ existence finally revealed to the world, it was not long before King James VI of Scotland (later James I of England) heard of the atrocities and decided to lead a manhunt with a team of 400 men and several bloodhounds, soon finding the Beans’ previously overlooked cave in Bannane Head. The cave was rife with human remains, having been the scene of hundreds of murders and cannibalistic acts.

The clan was captured alive and taken in chains to the Tolbooth Jail in Edinburgh, then transferred to Leith or Glasgow where they were promptly executed without trial; the men had their genitalia cut off, hands and feet severed and were allowed to bleed to death, and the women and children, after watching the men die, were burned alive. (This recalls, in essence if not in detail, the punishments of hanging, drawing and quartering decreed for men convicted of treason while women convicted of the same were burned. Presumably—whether or not the story had an actual basis—cannibalism was considered the equivalent of treason.)

The town of Girvan, located near the crime scene, has another legend about the cannibal clan. It is said that one of Bean’s daughters eventually left the clan and settled in Girvan, where she planted the Hairy tree. After her family’s capture, the daughter’s identity was revealed by angry locals who hanged her from the bough of the Hairy Tree.

Sources and veracity

Sawney Bean is often considered a mythic figure. A 2005 article by Sean Thomas notes that historical documents, such as newspapers and diaries during the era when Sawney Bean was supposedly active, make no mention of ongoing disappearances of hundreds of persons. Additionally, Thomas notes inconsistencies in the stories but speculates that kernels of truth might have inspired the legend:

… from broadsheet to broadsheet, the precise dating of Sawney Bean’s reign of anthropophagic terror varies wildly: sometimes the atrocities occurred during the reign of James VI, whilst other versions claim the Beans lived centuries before. Viewed in this light, it is arguable that the Bean story may have a basis of truth but the precise dating of events has become obscured over the years. Perhaps the dating of the murders was brought forward by the editors and writer of the broadsheets, so as to make the story appear more relevant to the readership … To add to the intrigue, we do know that cannibalism was not unknown in mediæval Scotland and that Galloway was in mediæval times a very lawless place; perhaps nothing on the scale of the Bean legend took place, but every story grows and is embroidered over time.

The Sawney Beane legend closely resembles the story of Christie-Cleek, which is attested much earlier — in the early 15th century.

The legend of Sawney Bean first appeared in the British chapbooks (rumour magazines of the day), which today leads many to argue that the story was a political propaganda tool to denigrate the Scots after the Jacobite Rebellions. Thomas disagrees by noting:

If the Sawney Bean story is to be read as deliberately anti-Scottish, how do we explain the equal emphasis on English criminals in the same publications? Wouldn’t such an approach rather blunt the point?

 

 

Doña Manuela Sáenz

Doña Manuela Sáenz (December 27, 1797, or possibly 1795, – November 23, 1856) was born in Quito, Viceroyalty of New Granada (Present-day Ecuador) and died in Paita, Peru. She was a revolutionary hero of South America, who also became the mistress of the South American revolutionary leader, Simón Bolívar. She married a wealthy English merchant in 1817 and became an aristocrat and socialite in Lima, Peru. This provided the setting for involvement in political and military affairs, and she became active in support of revolutionary efforts. Leaving her husband in 1822, she soon began an eight-year collaboration and intimate relationship with Bolivar that lasted until his death in 1830. After she prevented an 1828 assassination attempt against him and facilitated his escape, Bolivar began to call her, “Libertadora del Libertador”, the liberator of the liberator and she was celebrated and given many honors. For many years after their deaths, their contributions to the revolutions of South America were suppressed and although those of Bolivar were revived a decade later and he was returned to the status of a hero, Manuela’s role generally was overlooked until the late twentieth century.

Life

Manuela was born in Quito, the illegitimate child of Maria Joaquina Aizpuru from Ecuador and the married Spanish nobleman Simón Sáenz Vergara (or Sáenz y Verega). Her mother was abandoned by her modest family and young “Manuelita” went to school at the Convent of Santa Catalina where she learned to read, to write, and express herself. She was forced to leave the convent at the age of seventeen, when she was discovered to have been a victim of seduction by army officer Fausto D’Elhuyar, the nephew and son of Juan José and Fausto de Elhuyar y de Suvisa, who was one of the co-discoverers of tungsten.

For several years, Manuela lived with her father, who in 1817 arranged for her marriage to a wealthy English merchant, James Thorne, who was twice her age. The couple moved to Lima, Peru, in 1819 where she lived as an aristocrat and held social gatherings in her home where guests included political leaders and military officers. These guests shared military secrets about the ongoing revolution with her, and, in 1819, when Simón Bolívar took part in the successful liberation of New Granada, Manuela Sáenz became an active member in the conspiracy against the viceroy of Perú, José de la Serna e Hinojosa during 1820.

In 1822, she left her husband and traveled to Quito, where she met Simón Bolívar. They felt an instant attraction to each other and, for the following eight years, she dedicated her life to Bolivar. She exchanged love letters with him, visited him while he moved from one country to another, and supported the revolutionary cause by gathering information, distributing leaflets, and protesting for women’s rights. As one of the first women involved, Manuela received the “Order of the Sun” (“Caballeresa del Sol”), honoring her services in the revolution. During the first months of 1825 and from February to September 1826, she lived with Bolívar near Lima, but as the war continued, Bolívar was forced to leave. Manuela later followed him to Bogota. On September 25, 1828, mutinous officers attempted to assassinate Bolívar, but with Manuela’s help he was able to escape, which made him later call her “Libertadora del Libertador”.

Bolívar left Bogotá in 1830 and died in Santa Marta from tuberculosis while he was in transit, leaving the country to exile. He had made no provision for Manuela. She became a thorn in the side of Francisco de Paula Santander, who returned to power after Bolívar’s death. Santander then exiled Manuela, and she went to Jamaica.

When she attempted to return to Ecuador in 1835, the Ecuadorian president, Vicente Rocafuerte, revoked her passport. She then took refuge in northern Peru, living in the small coastal town of Paita. For the next twenty-five years, a destitute outcast, Manuela sold tobacco and translated letters for North American whale hunters who wrote to their lovers in Latin America. While there she met the American author Herman Melville, and the revolutionary Giuseppe Garibaldi.

In 1847, her husband was murdered in Pativilca and her enemies made sure that she was denied her 8,000 pesos inheritance. Disabled after the stairs in her home collapsed, “Manuelita” died in Paita, on November 23, 1856, during a diphtheria epidemic. Her body was buried in a communal, mass grave and her belongings were burned. She had contributed many items, however, to the collection of papers preserved about Bolivar. On December 17 of 1830, at the age of forty-seven, Simón Bolívar died after a painful battle with tuberculosis in the Quinta de San Pedro Alejandrino in Santa Marta, Gran Colombia (now Colombia). On his deathbed, Bolívar asked his aide-de-camp, General Daniel F. O’Leary to burn the remaining, extensive archive of his writings, letters, and speeches. O’Leary disobeyed the order and his writings survived, providing historians with a vast wealth of information about Bolívar’s liberal philosophy and thought, as well as details of his personal life, such as his longstanding love affair with Manuela Sáenz. Shortly before her own death in 1856, Sáenz augmented this collection by giving O’Leary her own letters from Bolívar.

Recognition and 2010 reburial

On July 5, 2010, Manuela Sáenz was given a full state burial in Venezuela. Because she had been buried in a mass grave, no official remains of her existed for the state burial; instead “symbolic remains,” composed of some soil from the mass grave into which she was buried during the epidemic, were transported through Peru, Ecuador and Colombia to Venezuela. Those remains were laid in the National Pantheon of Venezuela alongside those of her lover, Bolívar, who is memorialized at that monument.

There is an impressive statue of Manuela outside the entrance to the Mitad del Mundo Equatorial Line Monument outside Quito, Ecuador

Harry Houdini

Harry Houdini (March 24, 1874 – October 31, 1926), was a magician, escape artist, and daredevil who captivated much of the Western world with his exploits in the first quarter of the twentieth century. He amazed and excited crowds with his death defying escapes. He wore shackles and handcuffs and ordered his assistants to lock him in trunks or submerge him underwater. Houdini became world famous by traveling across America and the world thrilling his fans. In performing his escapes and feats of physical and psychological endurance, Houdini pushed his mind and his body to extremes, proving himself to be an athlete as well as a magician. He was able to control the mind-body dynamic to extraordinary lengths. He also believed in the reality of the after-life and thus of a spiritual dimension to human existence. He achieved such fame for his exploits that the name “Houdini” remains synonymous with the art of escapism.

Early Life

Houdini was born as Erik Weisz in Budapest, Hungary to a Jewish family; upon immigration to America the family name was changed to Weiss by immigration officials and his first-name spelling to Ehrich. His father was a rabbi and his mother was Cecilia Steiner.

He immigrated with his father at the age of four on July 3, 1878, on the SS Fresia. On June 6, 1882, his father, Rabbi Weiss became an American citizen and moved to New York City with Ehrich in 1887. They lived in a boarding-house on East 79th Street. Rabbi Weiss later was joined by the rest of the family once he found more permanent housing. As a child Ehrich took several jobs, one of which was as a locksmith’s apprentice. He made his public debut as a 9 year old trapeze artist, calling himself, “Ehrich, the prince of the air.”

Magic

Weiss became a professional magician in 1891 at age 17, and began calling himself “Harry Houdini” because he was influenced by French magician Jean Eugène Robert-Houdin. The first part of his new name, Harry, was an homage to Harry Kellar, another of Weiss’ largest influences. Initially, his magic career resulted in little success, though he met fellow performer Wilhelmina Beatrice (Bess) Rahner in 1893, and married her three weeks later. For the rest of his performing career, Bess would work as his stage assistant.

Houdini initially focused on traditional card acts. At one point he billed himself as the “King of Cards” and “King of Handcuffs.” One of his most notable non-escape stage illusions was performed in London’s hippodrome: he vanished a full-grown elephant (with its trainer) from a stage, beneath which was a swimming pool.

Harry Houdini’s “big break” came in 1899, when he met the showman Martin Beck. Impressed by Houdini’s handcuffs act, Beck advised him to concentrate on escape acts and booked him on the Orpheum vaudeville circuit. Within months, he was performing at the top vaudeville houses in the country. In 1900, Houdini traveled to Europe to perform. By the time he returned in 1904, he had become a sensation.

Houdini performed with great success in the United States. He would free himself from handcuffs, chains, ropes and straitjackets, often while hanging from a rope or suspended in water, sometimes in plain sight of the audience. In 1913, he introduced perhaps his most famous act, the Chinese Water Torture Cell, in which he was suspended upside-down in a locked glass and steel cabinet full to overflowing with water. He held his breath for over three minutes.

In 1919 Houdini became president of Martinka & Co., America’s oldest magic company. The business is still in operation today. After his amazing career in magic, Houdini became obsessed with two things: Flight and Movies. In 1910, while on a tour of Australia, Houdini brought with him a primitive bi-plane with which he made the first controlled powered aeroplane flight in Australia, at Diggers Rest, Victoria.

Possible spying career

A new biography of Houdini, The Secret Life of Houdini: The Making of America’s First Superhero, by magic historian William Kalush and author Larry “Ratso” Sloman suggests that he worked for both Scotland Yard and the US Secret Service. It suggests that he used his escape act tours to cover intelligence gathering. This assertion was documented in a journal kept by Scotland Yard Inspector William Melville, who worked for British intelligence. The author’s conclusions have been endorsed by former CIA director John McLaughlin who wrote the preface for The Secret Life of Houdini.

Death

Houdini’s last performance was at the Garrick Theater in Detroit, Michigan on October 24, 1926. The next day he was hospitalized at Detroit’s Grace Hospital. Houdini died of peritonitis from a ruptured appendix at 1:26 p.m. on Halloween, October 31, 1926, at the age of 52.

The most widespread account is that Houdini’s ruptured appendix was caused by multiple blows to his abdomen from a McGill University student, J. Gordon Whitehead, in Montreal on October 22. The eyewitnesses to this event were two McGill University students named Jacques Price and Sam Smilovitz. Houdini was reclining on his couch after his performance, having an art student sketch him. When Whitehead came in and asked if it was true that Houdini could take any blow to the stomach, Houdini replied in the affirmative. In this instance, he was struck several times, before Houdini protested. Whitehead reportedly continued hitting Houdini several times afterward, and Houdini acted as though he were in some pain. Price recounted that Houdini stated that if he had had time to prepare himself properly, he would have been in better position to take the blows.

Houdini’s funeral was held on November 4, 1926, in New York, with over two thousand mourners in attendance. He was interred in the Machpelah Cemetery Queens, New York, with the crest of the Society of American Magicians inscribed on his gravesite. The Society holds their “Broken Wand” ceremony at the gravesite on the anniversary of his death to this day. Houdini’s wife, Bess, died in February 1943, and was not permitted to be interred with him at Machpelah Cemetery because she was a not Jewish. Bess Houdini is interred at Gate of Heaven Cemetery in Hawthorne, New York.

In Houdini’s will, his vast library was offered to the American Society for Psychical Research on the condition that research officer and editor of the ASPR Journal, J. Malcolm Bird, resign. Bird refused and the collection went instead to the Library of Congress.

Fearing spiritualists would exploit his legacy by pretending to contact him after his death, Houdini left his wife a secret code—ten words chosen at random from a letter written by Doyle—that he would use to contact her from the afterlife. His wife held yearly séances on Halloween for ten years after his death, but Houdini never appeared. In 1936, after a last unsuccessful séance on the roof of the Knickerbocker Hotel, she put out the candle that she had kept burning beside a photograph of Houdini since his death, later (1943) saying “ten years is long enough to wait for any man.” The tradition of holding a séance for Houdini continues to this day, and is currently organized by Sidney H. Radner.

 

Harem

Harem (Turkish, from Arabic: حرم‎ ḥaram “forbidden place; sacrosanct, sanctum”, related to حريم ḥarīm, “a sacred inviolable place; female members of the family” and حرام ḥarām, “forbidden; sacred”) refers to the sphere of women in what is usually a polygynous household and their enclosed quarters which are forbidden to men. It originated in the Near East and is typically associated in the Western world with the Ottoman Empire.

Etymology

The word has been recorded in the English language since 1634, via Turkish harem, from Arabic ḥaram ‘forbidden because sacred/important’, originally implying ‘women’s quarters’, literally ‘something forbidden or kept safe’, from the root of ḥarama ‘to be forbidden; to exclude’. The triliteral Ḥ-R-M is common to Arabic words denoting forbidden. The word is a cognate of Hebrew ḥerem, rendered in Greek as haremi (ha-re-mi) when it applies to excommunication pronounced by the Jewish Sanhedrin court; all these words mean that an object is “sacred” or “accursed”.

Female seclusion in Islam is emphasized to the extent that any unlawful breaking into that privacy is ḥarām “forbidden”. A Muslim harem does not necessarily consist solely of women with whom the head of the household has sexual relations (wives and concubines), but also their young offsprings, other female relatives, etc. The Arabic word حرمة ḥurmah, plural حريم ḥarīm, was traditionally a term for a woman of the speaker’s family, regardless of status; it has since become the standard word for “woman” in Iraqi Arabic. It may either be a palatial complex, as in Romantic tales, in which case it includes staff (women and eunuchs), or simply their quarters, in the Ottoman tradition separated from the men’s selamlık. The zenana was a comparable institution.

It is being more commonly acknowledged today that the purpose of harems during the Ottoman Empire was for the royal upbringing of the future wives of noble and royal men. These women would be educated so that they were able to appear in public as a royal wife.

History

The word harem is strictly applicable to Muslim households only, but the system was common, more or less, to most ancient Oriental communities, especially where polygyny was permitted.

The Imperial Harem of the Ottoman sultan, which was also called seraglio in the West, typically housed several dozen women, including wives. It also housed the Sultan’s mother, daughters and other female relatives, as well as eunuchs and slave servant girls to serve the aforementioned women. During the later periods, the sons of the Sultan also lived in the Harem until they were 16 years old, when it was considered appropriate for them to appear in the public and administrative areas of the palace. The Topkapı Harem was, in some senses, merely the private living quarters of the Sultan and his family, within the palace complex. Some women of Ottoman harem, especially wives, mothers and sisters of sultans played very important political roles in Ottoman history, and in times it was said that the empire was ruled from harem. Hürrem Sultan (wife of Süleyman The Magnificent, mother of Selim II) and Kösem Sultan (mother of Murad IV) were the two most powerful women in Ottoman history.

Moulay Ismail, Alaouite sultan of Morocco from 1672 to 1727, is said to have fathered a total of 525 sons and 342 daughters by 1703 and achieved a 700th son in 1721. He had over 500 concubines.

Outside Islamic culture

Ancient Egyptian pharaohs are said to have made a “constant demand” of provincial governors for more beautiful servant girls.

Ashoka, the great emperor of the Mauryan Dynasty in India, kept a harem of around 500 women. Once when a few of the women insulted him, he had the all of them burnt to death.

In Mexico, Aztec ruler Montezuma II, who met Cortes, kept 4,000 concubines; every member of the Aztec nobility was supposed to have had as many consorts as he could afford.

Harem is also the usual English translation of the Chinese language term hougong, 後宮 “the palaces behind.” Hougong are large palaces for the Chinese emperor’s consorts, concubines, female attendants and eunuchs. The women who lived in an emperor’s hougong sometimes numbered in the thousands.

A similar institution existed among the Ōoku during the Edo period in Japan.

Depictions in contemporaneous Western culture

The institution of the harem exerted a certain fascination on the European imagination, especially during the Age of Romanticism, and was a central trope of Orientalism in the arts, due in part to the writings of the adventurer Richard Francis Burton. Many Westerners falsely imagined a harem as a brothel consisting of many sensual young women lying around pools with oiled bodies, with the sole purpose of pleasing the powerful man to whom they had given themselves. Much of this is recorded in art from that period, usually portraying groups of attractive women lounging nude by spas and pools.

A centuries-old theme in Western culture is the depiction of European women forcibly taken into Oriental harems – evident for example in the Mozart opera Die Entführung aus dem Serail (“The Abduction from the Seraglio”) concerning the attempt of the hero Belmonte to rescue his beloved Konstanze from the seraglio/harem of the Pasha Selim; or in Voltaire’s Candide, in chapter 12 of which the old woman relates her experiences of being sold into harems across the Ottoman Empire.

“The Lustful Turk”, a well-known British erotic novel, was also based on the theme of Westen women forced into sexual slavery in the harem of the Deyof Algiers, while in “A Night in a Moorish Harem”, a Western man invades a harem and enjoys forbidden sex with nine concubines. In both works, the theme of “West vs. Orient” is clearly interweaved with the sexual themes.

In popular culture

The same theme was and still is repeated in numerous historical novels and thrillers. For example, Angélique and the Sultan, part of the bestselling French Angélique series by Sergeanne Golon, in which a 17th century French noblewoman is captured by pirates, and sold into the harem of the King of Morocco.

In Leonid Solovyov’s well-known Russian novel Tale of Hodja Nasreddin (translated to English as The Beggar in the Harem: Impudent Adventures in Old Bukhara), a central plot element is the protagonist’s efforts to rescue his beloved from the Harem of the Emir of Bukhara – an element not present in the original tales of the Middle Eastern folk hero Nasreddin, on which the novel was loosely based.

H. Beam Piper used the theme in a science fiction context, portraying a gang which kidnaps girls from a Western-dominated, technologically advanced timeline and sells them to a Sultan’s harem in an Asian-dominated timeline.

In the Soviet movie White Sun of the Desert the main character is a Red Army soldier protecting woman from an abandoned harem, while also inciting them to live a Soviet lifestyle.

Much of the plot of The Janissary Tree – a 2006 historical crime novel by Jason Goodwin, set in Istanbul in 1836  – takes place in the Sultan’s harem, with the main protagonist being the eunuch detective Yashim. The book in many ways aims to overturn the above stereotypes and rooted conventions. For example, in one scene the Sultan groans inwardly when a new concubine is brought to his bed, since he does not feel sexual at all and would much rather send her away and curl up with a book. He does not, however, have that option; were he to reject the concubine, “she would spend the whole night crying bitterly, by the morning the whole palace will hear that the Sultan has become impotent, by noon all Istanbul will know it, and within a week the rumour will reach the entire empire.”

Mehmed II

Mehmed II (March 30, 1432 – May 3, 1481),  was Sultan of the Ottoman Empire (Rûm until the conquest) for a short time from 1444 to September 1446, and later from February 1451 to 1481. At the age of 21, he conquered Constantinople and brought an end to the Byzantine Empire, absorbing its administrative apparatus into the Ottoman state. Mehmed continued his conquests in Asia, with the Anatolian reunification, and in Europe, as far as Belgrade. Mehmed II is regarded as a national hero in Turkey, and his name has been given to Istanbul’s Fatih Sultan Mehmet Bridge.

Early reign

Mehmed II was born on March 30, 1432, in Edirne, then the capital city of the Ottoman state. His father was Sultan Murad II (1404–51) and his mother Valide Sultan Hüma Hatun, born in Devrekani county of Kastamonu province.

When Mehmed II was eleven years old he was sent to Amasya to govern and thus gain experience, as per the custom of Ottoman rulers before his time. After Murad II made peace with the Karaman Emirate in Anatolia in August 1444, he abdicated the throne to his 12-year-old son Mehmed II. Sultan Murad II had sent him a number of teachers for him to study under.

This Islamic education had a great impact in molding the mindset of Mehmed and reinforcing his Muslim beliefs. He began to praise and promote the application of Sharia law. He was influenced in his practice of Islamic epistemology by contemporaneous practitioners of science – particularly by his mentor, Molla Gürani – and he followed their approach. The influence of Ak Şemseddin in Mehmed’s life became predominant from a young age, especially in the imperative of fulfilling his Islamic duty to overthrow the Byzantine empire by conquering Constantinople.

In his first reign, he defeated the crusade led by János Hunyadi after the Hungarian incursions into his country broke the conditions of the truce Peace of Szeged. Cardinal Julian Cesarini, the representative of the pope, had convinced the king of Hungary that breaking the truce with Muslims was not a betrayal. At this time Mehmed II asked his father Murad II to reclaim the throne, but Murad II refused. Angry at his father, who had long since retired to a contemplative life in southwestern Anatolia, Mehmed II wrote: “If you are the Sultan, come and lead your armies. If I am the Sultan I hereby order you to come and lead my armies.” It was only after receiving this letter that Murad II led the Ottoman army and won the Battle of Varna in 1444.

It is said Murad II’s return to the throne was forced by Çandarlı Halil Paşa, the grand vizier at the time, who was not fond of Mehmed II’s rule, because Mehmed II’s influential teacher had a rivalry with Çandarlı. Çandarlı was later executed by Mehmed II during the siege of Constantinople on the grounds that he had been bribed by or had somehow helped the defenders.

During his early reign, he married a Christian Albanian, Âminā Kul-Bahar Khātûn, the step-mother of his successor and son Bayezid II whose biological mother was Mükrime Hatun.

Conquest of Constantinople

When Mehmed II ascended the throne in 1451 he devoted himself to strengthening the Ottoman Navy, and in the same year made preparations for the taking of Constantinople. In the narrow Bosporus Straits, the fortress Anadoluhisarı had been built by his great-grandfather Bayezid I on the Asiatic side; Mehmed erected an even stronger fortress called Rumelihisarı on the European side, and thus having complete control of the strait. Having completed his fortresses, Mehmet proceeded to levy a toll on ships passing within reach of their cannon. A Venetian vessel refusing signals to stop was sunk with a single shot and all the surviving sailors beheaded.

In 1453 Mehmed commenced the siege of Constantinople with an army between 80,000 to 200,000 troops and a navy of 320 vessels, though the bulk of them were transports and storeships. The city was now surrounded by sea and land; the fleet at the entrance of the Bosphorus was stretched from shore to shore in the form of a crescent, to intercept or repel any assistance from the sea for the besieged.

In early April, the Siege of Constantinople began. After several failed assaults, the city’s walls held off the Turks with great difficulty, even with the use of the new Orban’s bombard, a cannon similar to the Dardanelles Gun. The harbor of the Golden Horn was blocked by a boom chain and defended by twenty-eight warships.

On April 22, Mehmed transported his lighter warships overland, around the Genoese colony of Galata and into the Golden Horn’s northern shore; eighty galleys were transported from the Bosphorus after paving a little over one-mile route with wood. Thus the Byzantines stretched their troops over a longer portion of the walls. A little over a month later, Constantinople fell on May 29 following a fifty-seven day siege. After this conquest, Mehmed moved the Ottoman capital from Adrianople to Constantinople. On his accession as conqueror of Constantinople, aged 21, Mehmed was reputed fluent in several languages, including Turkish, Greek, Hebrew, Arabic, Persian, and Latin.

Reference is made to the prospective conquest of Constantinople in a hadith (a saying attributed to the Prophet Muhammad): “Verily you shall conquer Constantinople. What a wonderful leader will he be, and what a wonderful army will that army be!” Ten years after the conquest of Constantinople Mehmed II visited the site of Troy and boasted that he had avenged the Trojans by having conquered the Greeks (Byzantines).

When Mehmed stepped into the ruins of the Boukoleon, known to the Ottomans and Persians as the Palace of the Caesars, probably built over a thousand years before by Theodosius II, he uttered the famous lines of Persian poetry:

The spider weaves the curtains in the palace of the Caesars;

the owl calls the watches in the towers of Afrasiab.

After the Fall of Constantinople, Mehmed claimed the title of “Caesar” of Rome (Kayser-i Rûm). The claim was not recognized by the Patriarch of Constantinople, or Christian Europe. Mehmed’s claim rested with the concept that Constantinople was the seat of the Roman Empire, after the transfer of its capital to Constantinople in 330 AD and the fall of the Western Roman Empire. Mehmed also had a blood lineage to the Byzantine Imperial family; his predecessor, Sultan Orhan I had married a Byzantine princess, and Mehmed may have claimed descent from John Tzelepes Komnenos. He was not the only ruler to claim such a title, as there was the Holy Roman Empire in Western Europe, whose emperor, Frederick III, traced his titular lineage from Charlemagne who obtained the title of Roman Emperor when he was crowned by Pope Leo III in 800 – although never recognized as such by the Byzantine Empire.

The Byzantine historian Doukas, stated that after the conquest of Constantinople, Mehmed II ordered the 14-year old son of the Grand Duke Lucas Notaras brought to him “for his pleasure”. When the father refused to deliver his son to such a fate he had them both decapitated on the spot. Another contemporary Greek source, Leonard of Chios, professor of theology and Archbishop of Mytilene, tells the same story in his letter to Pope Nicholas. He describes Mehmed II requesting for the 14 year old handsome youth to be brought “for his pleasure”. This story was originally recorded by Doukas, a Byzantine Greek living in Constantinople at the time of the fall of the city, and does not appear in accounts by other Greeks who witnessed the conquest. Some modern scholars believe that this tale is merely one of a long series of attempts to portray Muslims as morally inferior, and point to the story of Saint Pelagius as its probable inspiration.

Conquests in Asia

The conquest of Constantinople allowed Mehmed II to turn his attention to Anatolia. Mehmed II tried to create a single political entity in Anatolia by capturing Turkish states called Beyliks and the Greek Empire of Trebizond in northeastern Anatolia and allied himself with the Crimean Khanate in the Crimea. Uniting the Anatolian Beyliks was first accomplished by Sultan Bayezid I, more than fifty years earlier than Mehmed II but after the destructive Battle of Ankara back in 1402, the newly formed Anatolian unification was gone. Mehmed II recovered the Ottoman power on other Turkish states. These conquests allowed him to push further into Europe.

Another important political entity which shaped the Eastern policy of Mehmed II was the White Sheep Turcomans. With the leadership of Uzun Hasan, this Turcoman kingdom gained power in the East but because of their strong relations with the Christian powers like Empire of Trebizond and the Republic of Venice and the alliance between Turcomans and Karamanid tribe, Mehmed saw them as a threat to his own power. He led a successful campaign against Uzun Hasan in 1473 which resulted with the decisive victory of the Ottoman Empire in the Battle of Otlukbeli.

Conquests in Europe

After the Fall of Constantinople, Mehmed would also go on to conquer the Despotate of Morea in the Peloponnese in 1460, and the Empire of Trebizond in northeastern Anatolia in 1461. The last two vestiges of Byzantine rule were thus absorbed by the Ottoman Empire. The conquest of Constantinople bestowed immense glory and prestige on the country.

Mehmed II advanced toward Eastern Europe as far as Belgrade, and attempted to conquer the city from John Hunyadi at the Siege of Belgrade in 1456. Hungarian commanders successfully defended the city and Ottomans retreated with heavy losses but at the end, Ottomans occupied nearly all of Serbia.

In 1463, after a dispute over the tribute paid annually by the Bosnian kingdom, Mehmed invaded Bosnia and conquered it very quickly, executing the last Bosnian king Stephen Tomašević and his uncle Radivoj.

In 1462 Mehmed II came into conflict with Prince Vlad III Dracula of Wallachia, who had spent part of his childhood alongside Mehmed. Vlad had ambushed, massacred or captured several Ottoman forces, then announced his impalement of over 23,000 captive Turks. Mehmed II abandoned his siege of Corinth to launch a punitive attack against Vlad in Wallachia but suffered many casualties in a surprise night attack led by Vlad, who was apparently bent on personally killing the Sultan. Confronted by Vlad’s scorched earth policies and demoralizing brutality, Mehmed II withdrew, leaving his ally Radu cel Frumos, Vlad’s brother, with a small force in order to win over local boyars who had been persecuted by Vlad III. Radu eventually managed to take control of Wallachia, which he administered as Bey, on behalf of Mehmet II. Vlad eventually escaped to Hungary, where he was imprisoned on a false accusation of treason against his overlord.

In 1475, the Ottomans suffered a great defeat at the hands of Stephen the Great of Moldavia at the Battle of Vaslui. In 1476, Mehmed won a pyrrhic victory against Stephen at the Battle of Valea Albă. He besieged the capital of Suceava, but could not take it, nor could he take the Castle of Târgu Neamţ. With a plague running in his camp and food and water being very scarce, Mehmed was forced to retreat.

The Albanian resistance in Albania between 1443 and 1468 led by George Kastrioti Skanderbeg (İskender Bey), an Albanian noble and a former member of the Ottoman ruling elite, prevented the Ottoman expansion into the Italian peninsula. Skanderbeg had united the Albanian Principalities in a fight against the Empire in the League of Lezhë in 1444. Mehmed II couldn’t subjugate Albania and Skanderbeg while the latter was alive, even though twice (1466 and 1467) he led the Ottoman armies himself against Krujë. After death of Skanderbeg in 1468, Albanians couldn’t find a leader to replace him and Mehmed II eventually conquered Krujë and Albania in 1478. The final act of his Albanian campaigns was the troublesome siege of Shkodra in 1478-9, a siege Mehmed II led personally.

Mehmed II invaded Italy in 1480. The intent of his invasion was to capture Rome and “reunite the Roman Empire”, and, at first, looked like he might be able to do it with the easy capture of Otranto in 1480 but Otranto was retaken by Papal forces in 1481 after the death of Mehmed.

Administrative actions

Mehmed II amalgamated the old Byzantine administration into the Ottoman state. He first introduced the word Politics into Arabic “Siyasah” from a book he published and claimed to be the collection of Politics doctrines of the Byzantine Caesars before him. He gathered Italian artists, humanists and Greek scholars at his court, allowed the Byzantine Church to continue functioning, ordered the patriarch to translate Christian doctrine into Turkish, and called Gentile Bellini from Venice to paint his portrait. Mehmed invited Muslim scientists and artists to his court in Constantinople, started a University, built mosques (for example, the Fatih Mosque), waterways, and Istanbul’s Topkapı Palace.

Mehmed II allowed his subjects a considerable degree of religious freedom, provided they were obedient to his rule. After his conquest of Bosnia and Herzegovina in 1463 he issued a firman to the Bosnian Franciscans, granting them freedom to move freely within the Empire, offer worship in their churches and monasteries, and to practice their religion free from official and unofficial persecution, insult or disturbance. His standing army was recruited from the Devshirme, a group that took first-born Christian subjects at a young age that were destined for the sultans court. The less able, but physically strong were put into the army or the sultan’s personal guard, the Janissaries.

Within Constantinople, Mehmed established a millet or an autonomous religious community, and appointed the former Patriarch as religious governor of the city. His authority extended only to the Orthodox Christians within the city, and this excluded the Genoese and Venetian settlements in the suburbs, and excluded Muslim and Jewish settlers entirely. This method allowed for an indirect rule of the Christian Byzantines and allowed the occupants to feel relatively autonomous even as Mehmed II began the Turkish remodeling of the city, turning it into the Turkish capital, which it remained until the 1920s.

Personal life

Mehmed II had several wives: Validā Khātûn Âminā Kul-Bahar Khātûn, a Christian Albanian, who died in 1492, Gevher Khātûn; Gül-Şâh (Kulshah) Khātûn; Mûkrîmā (Sitt-î Mükrime) Khātûn; Çiçek Khātûn; Helenā Khātûn, who died in 1481, daughter of Demetrios Palaiologos and the Despot of Morea; briefly Anna Khātûn, the daughter of the Emperor of Trebizond; and Alexias Khātûn, a Byzantine princess. Another son of his was Cem Sultan, who died in 1495.

Death

Mehmed died on May 3, 1481, at the age of forty-nine. Mehmed’s primary doctor, “Jacob Pasha” an Italian born convert to Islam was suspected of administering poison to Mehmed over a period of time and was executed.

Another source states that: “The likeliest possibility is that Mehmed was also poisoned by his Persian doctor. Despite numerous Venetian assassination attempts over the years, the finger of suspicion points most strongly at his son, Bayezit.”

Mehmed was buried in his Türbe in the cemetery within the Fatih Mosque Complex

Legacy

After the fall of Constantinople, he founded many universities and colleges in the city, some of which are still active. Mehmed II is also recognized as the first Sultan to codify criminal and constitutional law long before Suleiman the Magnificent and he thus established the classical image of the autocratic Ottoman sultan.

His thirty-one year rule and several wars expanded the Ottoman Empire to include Constantinople, and the Turkish kingdoms and territories of Asia Minor, Bosnia, Kingdom of Serbia, and Albania. His many internal administrative and legal reforms put his country on the path to prosperity and paved the way for subsequent sultans to focus on expansion into new territories.

Mehmed left behind an imposing reputation in both the Islamic and Christian worlds. The Fatih Sultan Mehmet Bridge was named after him that straddles the Bosporus Straits in Istanbul in the twentieth century. His name and picture appeared on the Turkish 1000 lira note between 1986 to 1992. He is the eponymous subject of Rossini’s 1820 opera Maometto II.

 

Rufaida Al-Aslamia

Rufaida Al-Aslamia  was the first female Muslim doctor who lived during the time of the Islamic prophet Muhammad. She went with Muhammad on many wars to treat the sick soldiers. During the Battle of the Trench, she started a small clinic in the mosque, where Muhammad visited the sick men. She is well known in Islamic history for providing medical care in the battlefields. Later on, Muhammad asked the men to put up a mobile tent. Rufaida treated and kept the injured soldiers in the tent. This was the beginning of the first military hospital. Rufayda Al-Aslamiyyah is a woman from the tribe of Aslam in Madeenah; it is for this reason that she was called Al-Aslamiyyah. She was a woman from the women of Ansaar, and she had a tent by Muhammad’s mosque (in Madeenah) where she used to treat the sick as reported by Al-Bukhaari in “Al-Adab Al-Mufrad”, in a Hadeeth which was classified by Al-Albaani as Saheeh [sound]

When Sa’d Ibn Mu’aath was injured in the battle of Al-Khandaq (The Trench), Muhammad ordered that he be placed and treated in her tent.

However, we have not come across any evidence that suggests that she used to go out in some battles to treat the injured. However, this matter is confirmed about other female Companions among whom was Umm ‘Atiyyah, Umm Sulaym, Hamnah Bint Jahsh, Layla Al-Ghifaariyyah (the wife of Abu Tharr), Umm Ayman, and Rubayyi’ Bint Mu’awwith.

Moreover, Anas Ibn Maalik said: “Muhammad used to go out to the battles taking Umm Sulaym and some other women of the Ansaar with him; when he fights in the battle, they [i.e. the women] would give water to the soldiers and treat the injured.”

Besides, when An-Nawawi commented on this Hadeeth, clarifying some of its benefits, he said: “This is evidence that women used to go out in battles and the men benefit from them as they give water to the soldiers and treat the injured and the like, but this treatment was for their Mahrams and their husbands, and if they were to treat other than their Mahrams and their husbands, they would not touch the body of the person except at the place of necessity [i.e. the place of injury].”

However, the permissibility of women treating men is conditioned upon the necessity or dire need, like if there is no male doctor, and there is a need for the woman to treat a man, and what those women did at the time of Muhammad was when men were busy in the battle.

In addition to this, precautions were taken in this regard as it was only the elderly women who would do so. Al-‘Ayni stated in his commentary (on Saheeh Al-Bukhaari): “Her statement “and we treat the injured…”, if you say ‘how would this be permissible’, I would say: this was permissible for the women who were elderly amongst them…. Also, one generally does not feel a desire by touching the place of injury.”

recognized as the first Muslim nurse. Her full name was Rufaidah bint Sa’ad of the Bani Aslam tribe of the Khazraj tribal confederation in Madinah. She was born in Yathrib before the migration of Muhammad. She was among the first people in Madina to accept Islam and was one of the Ansar women who welcomed Muhammad on arrival in Madina.

Rufaidah’s father was a physician. She learned medical care by working as his assistant. Her history illustrates all the attributes expected of a good nurse. She was kind and empathetic. She was a capable leader and organizer, able to mobilize and get others to produce good work. She had clinical skills that she shared with the other nurses whom she trained and worked with. She did not confine her nursing to the clinical situation. She went out to the community and tried to solve the social problems that lead to disease. She was both a public health nurse and a social worker.

When the Islamic state was well established in Madina, Rufaidah devoted herself to nursing the Muslim sick. In peace time she set up a tent outside the Prophet’s mosque in Madina where she nursed the sick. During war she led groups of volunteer nurses who went to the battlefield and treated the casualties. She participated in the battles of Badr, Uhud, Khandaq, Khaibar, and others. Rufaidah’s field hospital tent became very famous during the battles and the Prophet used to direct that the casualties be carried to her.

At the battle of the trench (ghazwat al khandaq), Rufaidah set up her hospital tent at the battlefield. Muhammad instructed that Sa’ad bin Ma’adh who had been injured in battle be moved to the tent. Rufaidah nursed him, carefully removed the arrow from his forearm and achieved homeostasis. Muhammad visited Sa’ad in the hospital tent several times a day. Sa’ad was to die later at the battle of Bani Quraidhat.

Rufaidah had trained a group of women companions as nurses. When Muhammad’s army was getting ready to go to the battle of Khaibar, Rufaidah and the group of volunteer nurses went to Muhammad . They asked him for permission “Oh messenger of Allah, we want to go out with you to the battle and treat the injured and help Muslims as much as we can”. The Prophet gave them permission to go. The nurse volunteers did such a good job that Muhammad assigned a share of the booty to Rufaidah. Her share was equivalent to that of soldiers who had actually fought. This was in recognition of her medical and nursing work.

Rufaidah’s contribution was not confined only to nursing the injured. She was involved in social work in the community. She came to the assistance of every Muslim in need: the poor, the orphans, or the handicapped. She looked after the orphans, nursed them, and taught them.

Rufaidah had a kind and empathetic personality that soothed the patients in addition to the medical care that she provided. The human touch is a very important aspect of nursing that is unfortunately being forgotten as the balance between the human touch and technology in nursing is increasingly tilted in favor of technology.

History has recorded names of women who worked with Rufaidah: Umm Ammara, Aminah, Umm Ayman, Safiyat, Umm Sulaim, and Hind. Other Muslim women who were famous as nurses were: Ku’ayibat, Aminah bint Abi Qays al Ghifariyat, Umm ‘Atiyyah al Ansariyat, and Nusaibat bint Ka’ab al Maziniyyat.

 

“The Iceman” Kuklinski

Richard Leonard “The Iceman” Kuklinski (April 11, 1935 – March 5, 2006) was an American contract killer. The 6’5″ (196 cm), 300 pound (135 kg) Kuklinski worked for Newark’s DeCavalcante crime family and New York City’s Five Families. He claimed to have murdered over 250 men between 1948 and 1986. He claimed to have committed his first murder at the age of 13. Richard Kuklinski spent the last years of his freedom living with his wife and three children in suburban Dumont, New Jersey.

Early life

Kuklinski was born in a housing project in Jersey City, New Jersey, to a family of mixedPolish and Irish-American descent. His father, Stanley Kuklinski, was an alcoholic who frequently abused his wife and children. He had a brother, Joseph Kuklinski (1944–2003) who was convicted of raping and murdering a 12-year-old girl.

Kuklinski spent the remainder of his life fantasizing about murdering his father. When asked about his brother Joseph’s crimes, he replied: “We come from the same father.” His mother, Anna McNally Kuklinski, was also abusive to Richard, hitting him with broom handles and other household objects to stop him from stealing.

In 1940, Stanley Kuklinski beat his son, Florian, to death. In the aftermath, the Kuklinski family lied to the police, saying that Florian had fallen down a flight of steps.

By the age of 10, Richard Kuklinski began acting out against the priests and nuns at the Roman Catholic parochial school that he attended.

First murder

In 1949, Kuklinski, 14, ambushed and beat Charley Lane, the leader of a small gang of teenagers known as “The Project Boys,” who had bullied him for some time. Following a particularly bad beating Kuklinski sought revenge, attacking Lane with a thick wooden dowel, eventually beating him to death, although he denied wanting to kill Lane. Kuklinski then dumped Lane’s body off a bridge in South Jersey after removing his teeth and chopping off his finger tips with a hatchet in an effort to prevent identification of the body. He then went on to savagely beat the remaining six boys in Lane’s gang. He later joked that, “Giving is better than receiving.”

Gangster

By the mid-1950s, Kuklinski had earned the reputation as being an explosive pool shark who would beat or kill those who annoyed him. Eventually, his criminal acumen brought him to the attention of Newark’s DeCavalcante crime family, who employed him in his first gangland slayings.

Beginning in the spring of 1954, Kuklinski began prowling Hell’s Kitchen in a search for victims. According to author Philip Carlo,

“He came to Manhattan numerous times over the ensuing weeks and months and killed people, always men, never a female, he says, always someone who rubbed him the wrong way, for some imagined or extremely slight reason. He shot, stabbed, and bludgeoned men to death. He left some where they dropped. He dumped some into the nearby Hudson River. Murder, for Richard, became sport. The New York police came to believe that the bums were attacking and killing one another, never suspecting that a full fledged serial killer from Jersey City was coming over to Manhattan’s West Side for the purpose of killing people, to practice and perfect murder. Richard made the West Side of Manhattan a kind of lab for murder, a school, he says.”

Kuklinski later recalled,

“By now you know what I liked most was the hunt, the challenge of what the thing was. The killing for me was secondary. I got no rise as such out of it… for the most part. But the figuring it out, the challenge — the stalking and doing it right, successfully — that excited me a lot. The greater the odds against me, the more juice I got out of it.”

Gambinos and Roy DeMeo

Kuklinski became associated with the Gambino crime family through his relationship with the soldier, Roy DeMeo, which started due to a debt Kuklinski owed to a DeMeo crew member. DeMeo was sent to ‘talk’ with Kuklinski and proceeded to beat and pistol whip him. Although Kuklinski was carrying a pistol at the time, he decided against using it; this earned him DeMeo’s respect.

After Kuklinski paid back the money he owed, he began staging robberies and other assignments for DeMeo and the Gambino family, one of which was pirating pornographic tapes.

According to Kuklinski, DeMeo took him out in his car one day and they parked on a city street. DeMeo then selected a random target, a man walking his dog. He then ordered Kuklinski to kill him. Without hesitating, Kuklinski got out, walked towards the man and shot him in the back of the head as he passed by. From then on, Kuklinski was DeMeo’s favorite enforcer.

According to Kuklinski, he killed numerous people over the next 30 years. Lack of attention from law enforcement was partly due to Kuklinski’s ever-changing methods; he used guns, knives, explosives, tire irons, fire, poison, asphyxiation, and even bare handed beatings, “just for the exercise.” The exact number has never been settled upon by authorities, and Kuklinski himself at various times claimed to have killed more than 200 people. He favored the use of cyanide since it killed quickly and was hard to detect in a toxicology test. He would variously administer it by injection, putting it on a person’s food, by aerosol spray, or by simply spilling it on the victim’s skin. One of his favorite methods of disposing of a body was to place it in a 55-gallon oil drum. His other disposal methods included dismemberment, burial, or placing the body in the trunk of a car and having it crushed in a junkyard. He also claimed to have left bodies sitting on park benches.

Despite Kuklinski’s claims that he was a frequent killer for DeMeo, none of DeMeo’s crew members who later became witnesses for the government admitted that Kuklinski was involved in the murders they committed. He was only photographed on one occasion at the Gemini Lounge, having reportedly visited the club to purchase a handgun from the Brooklyn crew. Kuklinski claimed to have been responsible for DeMeo’s murder, although the available evidence and testimony points to the murderers being fellow DeMeo crew associates Joseph Testaand Anthony Senter, as well as DeMeo’s supervisor in the Gambino crime family, Anthony Gaggi.

According to Kuklinski, at the same time he was allegedly a career hit man, he met and married Barbara Pedrici, and later fathered two daughters and a son. His family and neighbors were never aware of his activities, instead believing that he was a successful businessman. Sometimes he would get up and leave the house at any time of the day or night to do a job, even if it was in the middle of dinner.

Kuklinski earned the nickname “Iceman” following his experiments with disguising the time of death of his victims by freezing their corpses in an industrial freezer. Later, he told author Philip Carlo that he got the idea from fellow hitman Robert Pronge, nicknamed “Mister Softee”, who drove a Mister Softee truck to appear inconspicuous. Pronge taught Kuklinski the different methods of using cyanide to kill his victims. Kuklinski also claimed to have purchased remotely detonated hand grenades from Pronge. Pronge allegedly asked him to carry out a hit on Pronge’s own wife and child. In 1984, Pronge was found shot to death in his truck.

Kuklinski’s method was uncovered by the authorities when he failed to let one of his victims properly thaw before disposing of the body onClinton Road on a warm summer’s night, and the coroner found chunks of ice in the victim’s heart.

State and federal manhunt

When the authorities finally caught up with Kuklinski in 1986, they based their case almost entirely on the testimony of undercover agent Dominick Polifrone, and the evidence built by New Jersey State Police detective Pat Kane who began the case against Kuklinski six years earlier. The investigation involved a joint operation with the New Jersey Attorney General’s office and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms. Kuklinski claims in the HBO interview that there was only one friend he did not kill (Phil Solimene). He believed this was the reason for his being arrested.

ATF Special Agent Dominick Polifrone had undercover experience specializing in Mafia cases. The New Jersey State Police and ATF began a joint operation. Detective Kane recruited Phil Solimene, a close friend of Kuklinski, who introduced undercover agent Polifrone to the killer. Polifrone acted as if he wanted to hire Kuklinski for a hit, and recorded him speaking in detail about how he would do it.

Arrest

On December 17, 1986, Kuklinski met with a federal agent to get cyanide for a planned murder. He was arrested at a roadblock two hours later. A gun was found in the car and his wife was charged with trying to prevent his arrest. He was charged with five counts of murder and six weapons violations, as well as attempted murder, robbery and attempted robbery.

Incarceration and death

In 1988, a New Jersey court convicted Kuklinski of five murders and sentenced him to consecutive life sentences, making him ineligible for parole until age 110. In 2003, he pleaded guilty to the 1980 murder of NYPD detective Peter Calabro and drew another 30 years. In the Calabro murder, in which Sammy “The Bull” Gravano was also charged, Kuklinski said he parked his van on the side of a narrow road, forcing other drivers to slow down to pass. He lay in a snowbank until Calabro came by at 2 a.m., then stepped out and shot him with a shotgun.

During his incarceration, Kuklinski granted interviews to prosecutors, psychiatrists, criminologists, writers, and television producers about his criminal career, upbringing, and personal life. Two documentaries, featuring interviews of Kuklinski by Park Dietz (best known for his interviews with and analysis of Jeffrey Dahmer) aired on HBO after interviews in 1991 and 2001. Philip Carlo also wrote a book in 2006, entitled The Ice Man.

In one interview, Kuklinski claimed that he would never kill a child and “most likely wouldn’t kill a woman”. However, according to one of his daughters he once told her that he would have to kill her and her two siblings should he happen to beat her mother to death in a fit of rage. At the same time, his wife Barbara has stated that he never actually did hurt the children.

He also confessed that he once wanted to use a crossbow to carry out a hit but not without “testing” it first. While driving his car, he asked a random man for directions, shot him in the forehead with the crossbow, and stated that the arrow “went half-way into his head.”

In a 1992 interview, Kuklinski recalled what he considered his most sadistic murder.

“It was a man and he was begging, and pleading, and praying, I guess. And he was, ‘Please, God, no,’-ing all over the place. So I told him he could have a half an hour to pray to God and if God could come down and change the circumstances, He’d have that time. But God never showed up and He never changed the circumstances and that was that. It wasn’t too nice. That’s one thing, I shouldn’t have done that one. I shouldn’t have done it that way.”

Kuklinski died at the age of 70 at 1:15 a.m. on March 5, 2006. He was in a secure wing at St. Francis Medical Center in Trenton, New Jersey, at the time, although the timing of his death has been labeled suspicious; Kuklinski was scheduled to testify that former Gambino crime family underboss Sammy Gravano had ordered him to murder New York Police Department Detective Peter Calabro. Kuklinski had admitted to murdering Calabro with a shotgun on the night of March 14, 1980. He denied knowing that Calabro was a police officer, but said he would have murdered him regardless. At the time Kuklinski was scheduled to testify, Gravano was already incarcerated for an unrelated charge, serving a 19-year prison sentence for running an ecstasy ring in Arizona. Kuklinski also stated to family members that he thought “they” were poisoning him. A few days after Kuklinski’s death, prosecutors dropped all charges against Gravano, saying that without Kuklinski’s testimony there was insufficient evidence to continue. At the request of Kuklinski’s family, forensic pathologist Michael Badenexamined the results of Kuklinski’s autopsy to determine if there was evidence of poisoning. Baden concluded he died of natural causes.

 

Peter Kürten

Peter Kürten (26 May 1883–2 July 1931) was a German serial killer dubbed The Vampire of Düsseldorf by the contemporary media. He committed a series of sex crimes, assaults andmurders against adults and children, most notoriously from February to November 1929 inDüsseldorf.

Early life

Kürten was born into a poverty-stricken, abusive family in Mülheim am Rhein, the third of 13 children. As a child, he witnessed his alcoholic father repeatedly sexually assault his mother and his sisters. He followed in his father’s footsteps, and was soon sexually abusing his sisters. He engaged in petty criminality from a young age, and was a frequent runaway. He later claimed to have committed his first murders at the age of nine, drowning two young friends while swimming. He moved with his family to Düsseldorf in 1894 and received a number of short prisonsentences for various crimes, including theft and arson. As a youth he was employed by the local dogcatcher, a job which allowed him to indulge in animal cruelty.

Kürten progressed from torturing animals to attacks on people. He committed his first provable murder in 1913, strangling a 10-year-old girl, Christine Klein, during the course of a burglary. His crimes were then halted by World War I and an eight-year prison sentence. In 1921 he left prison and moved to Altenburg, where he married. In 1925 he returned to Düsseldorf, where he began the series of crimes that would culminate in his capture, sentencing to death and execution.

Murders

On 8 February 1929 he assaulted a woman and molested and murdered an eight-year-old girl. On 13 February he murdered a middle-aged mechanic, stabbing him 20 times. Kürten did not attack again until August, stabbing three people in separate attacks on the 21st; murdering two sisters, aged five and 14, on the 23rd; and stabbing another woman on the 24th. In September he committed a single rape and murder, brutally beating a servant girl with a hammer in woods that lay just outside of Düsseldorf. In October he attacked two women with a hammer. On 7 November he killed a five-year-old girl by strangling and stabbing her 36 times with scissors, and then sent a map to a local newspaper disclosing the location of her grave. The variety of victims and murder methods gave police the impression that more than one killer was at large: the public turned in over 900,000 different names to the police as potential suspects.

The November murder was Kürten’s last, although he engaged in a spate of non-fatal hammer attacks from February to March 1930. In May he accosted a young woman named Maria Budlick; he initially took her to his home, and then to the Grafenberger Woods, where he raped but did not kill her. Budlick led the police to Kürten’s home. He avoided the police, but confessed to his wife and told her to inform the police. On 24 May he was located and arrested.

Trial and execution

Kürten confessed to 79 offenses, and was charged with nine murders and seven attempted murders. He went on trial in April 1931. He initially pleaded not guilty, but after some weeks changed his plea. He was found guilty and sentenced to death.

As Kürten was awaiting execution, he was interviewed by Dr. Karl Berg, whose interviews and accompanying analysis of Kürten formed the basis of his book, The Sadist. Kürten stated to Berg that his primary motive was one of sexual pleasure. The number of stab wounds varied because it sometimes took longer to achieve orgasm; the sight of blood was integral to his sexual stimulation.

Kürten was executed on 2 July 1931 by guillotine in Cologne.

Analysis

Kürten said to the legal examiners that his primary motive was to “strike back at oppressive society”. He did not deny that he had sexually molested his victims, but he always claimed during his trial that this was not his primary motive.

In 1931 scientists attempted to examine irregularities in Kürten’s brain in an attempt to explain his personality and behavior. His head was dissected and mummified and is currently on display at the Ripley’s Believe It or Not! museum in Wisconsin Dells.

Cultural references

Fritz Lang’s 1931 film M, in which a serial child killer terrorizes a big city, is often said to have been based upon Kürten, but Lang denied that Kürten was an influence. Because of the similarities between Kürten and the film’s villain, Hans Beckert, the film was known as The Vampire of Duesseldorf in some countries. While the location is never mentioned in the film, the dialect used by the characters and the several maps used throughout the film bearing the city’s trademark bear symbol heavily suggest that the action takes place in Berlin.

The first biopic about Kürten was Robert Hossein’s The Secret Killer (Le Vampire de Düsseldorf, 1965).^[5] Kürten was subsequently played by Nigel Green in the LWT play Peter and Maria, written by Clive Exton and broadcast on 9 October 1970.

Playwright Anthony Neilson’s 1991 work Normal: The Düsseldorf Ripper is a fictional account of Kürten’s life, is told from the point of view of his defense lawyer. It was adapted for the screen as Angels Gone, and also released under the title Normal.

Randy Newman’s song “In Germany Before the War” from the album Little Criminals is based on Kürten’s life, with some poetic license (the song is set in 1934, for example, despite the fact that Kürten was executed in 1931).

In 1981 the British noise band Whitehouse released an album titled Dedicated to Peter Kürten.

The American death metal band Macabre recorded a song called “Vampire of Düsseldorf” about Kürten.

A number of novels have made substantial mention of Kürten. In the 1975 novel Salem’s Lot by Stephen King, Kürten’s history is summarized by Matt Burke as part of his research into vampirism, though Kürten is referred to as ‘Kurtin’ throughout. In Chapter 4 of D.M. Thomas’s The White Hotel (1981), the main protagonist, Frau Lisa Erdman, is haunted by Kürten’s story, which she experiences as a “compulsive daylight nightmare”. In the novel Swimsuit (2009) by James Patterson, Henri Benoit, a serial killer himself, makes a reference to Kürten while recounting his own crimes for an autobiography. In the Arianna Franklin novel City of Shadows, one of the main characters is a police inspector who helped to catch Kurten.

In the movie Copycat (1995), a serial killer uses “Peter Kürten” as an alias (the protagonist, played by Sigourney Weaver, explains the reference).