Name-Game I: Pre-1900 Female Tyrants

Lateknight

Banned
Queen Ranavalona of Madagascar for the reign that compelled forced labor and massacres that reduced the island population by half.
 
Wu Zeiten was pretty bad. She had the first ever secret police service and did some bad shit to her son. Isabella I, while she didn't direct the Spanish Inquisition, certainly supported it.
 

jahenders

Banned
Catherine the Great should be considered. She did some good stuff and wasn't generally as bad as many of her predecessors, but the serfs would likely consider her a tyrant (like most of the tsars).

She provided a venue for serfs to complain at law and did some things to limit the growth of serfdom, but she:
- ended their long-established right to appeal to the autocrat because she didn't want to be bothered
- allowed masters to send their serfs to hard labor in Siberia (formerly only for convicted criminals)
- gave away many state-owned peasants to instead be serfs to a lord, worsening their lot and reducing their freedoms
 
Countess Elizabeth Bathory; Well known for bathing in the blood of young maidens to preserve her looks and often called the female Vlad Tepes. Kill count was reputed to be in the hundreds.

Queen Mary 1; Or better known as Bloody Mary for her persecutions of British Protestants.

Isabella of Castile; Brutal towards Jews and Moors. Made them convert or be expelled and even then subjected them to Inquisition.
 
Dowager Empress Cixi (whose rule was partly in the twentieth century) seized power from the regents for her son and ruthlessly eliminated all rivals for the next forty years. She deprived her son of all power (and his favorite consort), imposed a successor and placed that emperor under house arrest for the rest of his reign when he tried to reform the government. When she was dying, she had the unfortunate imprisoned emperor poisoned.
 
Along the theme of scary Chinese Empress Dowagers, Lu Zhi (wife of the founder of the Han Dynasty). I'll just quote Wikipedia on how she dealt with one of her rivals:

" she had Qi's limbs chopped off, eyes gouged out, ears sliced off, forced her to drink a potion that made her mute, and thrown into a latrine."

Note that this is well after Concubine Qi was no longer any threat, but rather as revenge for a previous dispute.

She effectively ruled through a series of puppet emperors, and had her opponents murdered.
 
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