Laskarina Bouboulina

Anyone asking who was Laskarina Bouboulina usually begins with the unusual circumstances of her birth. She was born on 11 May 1771 inside a prison in Constantinople, the capital of the Ottoman Empire. Her father, Stavrianos Pinotsis, a sea captain from the island of Hydra, had been jailed by Ottoman authorities for his part in the failed Orlov revolt of 1770, a Russian-backed uprising of Greeks in the Peloponnese. Her mother, Skevo, was visiting him in his cell when she went into labor. Pinotsis died shortly afterward, and mother and infant returned to Hydra ^[1].

When Laskarina was still a young child, Skevo remarried. Her new husband, Dimitrios Lazarou-Orlof, was a captain from the neighboring island of Spetses, and the family settled there. Spetses, like Hydra, was a maritime community whose Albanian-speaking Greek population, the Arvanites, had grown prosperous through shipping and trade under Ottoman rule. Laskarina grew up surrounded by ships, cargoes, and the talk of captains, an environment that shaped everything she later did ^[2].

She received no formal schooling, which was typical for island girls of her generation, but contemporaries and later biographers describe her as forceful, sharp with numbers, and unafraid of the men who dominated the shipping trade. The stepfamily's household brought her eight step-siblings and a wide web of connections among the seafaring clans of Spetses ^[1].

Bouboulina married twice, and both marriages ended with her husband killed at sea. At seventeen she wed Dimitrios Yiannouzas, a Spetsiot captain, with whom she had three children. He died in a fight with pirates in the waters off North Africa while defending his ship. In 1801 she married a second time, to Dimitrios Bouboulis, a wealthy shipowner and captain whose surname, in its feminine form, she carried for the rest of her life. Bouboulis was killed in 1811, also in combat with pirates, leaving her a widow for the second time at forty ^[1].

The two marriages left her with seven children in total and a substantial fortune in ships, cash, and property. Rather than retire on the inheritance, she managed and expanded it. She bought shares in Spetsiot vessels, ran trading ventures of her own, and eventually commissioned new ships outright. By the 1810s she was among the wealthiest figures on Spetses, a rare position for a woman anywhere in the Mediterranean at that time ^[2].

Her wealth attracted the attention of the Ottoman state. Around 1816 the authorities moved to confiscate her property on the grounds that her late husband's ships had fought for Russia against the Ottomans during the Russo-Turkish wars. Bouboulina sailed to Constantinople to contest the seizure. Tradition holds that she sought the protection of the Russian ambassador, Count Pavel Stroganov, and that the mother of Sultan Mahmud II, the Valide Sultan, intervened on her behalf. She returned to Spetses with her fortune intact, an episode that displayed the political skill she would later put to revolutionary use ^[3].

In the years before 1821, Greek merchants, clergy, and captains were quietly organized by the Filiki Eteria, the secret society founded in Odessa in 1814 to prepare an armed uprising against Ottoman rule. Bouboulina is widely reported to have joined the society, which admitted very few women, and to have placed her wealth at its disposal. Whether or not she was formally initiated, her practical support for the conspiracy is well documented: she bought arms and ammunition abroad, smuggled them into Spetses hidden in cargoes, and stockpiled supplies for the fight to come ^[3].

Her most visible preparation was a ship. Between 1819 and 1820 she financed the construction of the Agamemnon, a heavily armed corvette that ranked among the largest warships in Greek hands when the revolution began. Building a vessel of that size was itself risky, since Ottoman regulations restricted the armament of Greek merchant ships, and accounts hold that she paid bribes to keep officials from interfering. Alongside the Agamemnon she armed several smaller ships from her fleet and recruited crews from Spetses at her own expense ^[1].

Any factual account of Laskarina Bouboulina achievements has to reckon with the scale of this outlay. She spent most of her personal fortune on ships, men, munitions, and food for the revolutionary forces, and she did so before the outcome of the war could be guessed. Few of the revolution's financiers committed so much, so early ^[2].

The Greek War of Independence broke out in March 1821, and Spetses was among the first islands to raise the revolutionary flag. Bouboulina, then nearly fifty, took to sea in command of the Agamemnon and her other vessels. She joined the naval blockade of Nafplio, the strongly fortified Ottoman garrison town on the Argolic Gulf, and her ships also took part in operations against Monemvasia and in the blockade that supported the siege of Pylos in the western Peloponnese ^[3].

She did not confine herself to the sea. Bouboulina supplied and paid land forces besieging Ottoman strongholds, and she was present at Argos and in the camps of the Peloponnesian fighters. When Tripolitsa, the Ottoman administrative center of the Peloponnese, fell to the Greeks in September 1821, she was there. Accounts of the aftermath credit her with intervening to protect women of the Ottoman governor's household during the sack of the city, sheltering members of the harem from the massacre that followed the town's fall ^[4].

Nafplio surrendered to the Greeks in late 1822 after a long blockade in which her squadron had shared. Bouboulina afterward settled in the town, which became the seat of the young Greek administration. Her family ties deepened her involvement in revolutionary politics: her daughter Eleni married Panos Kolokotronis, son of Theodoros Kolokotronis, the most famous Greek commander of the war ^[2].

Victory over the Ottomans in the field did not bring unity. Between 1823 and 1825 the revolutionaries fought two rounds of civil war, with military chieftains led by Kolokotronis on one side and the politicians of the central government on the other. Bouboulina stood with the Kolokotronis faction. When the government arrested Theodoros Kolokotronis and killed his son Panos, her son-in-law, in 1824, she protested loudly and paid for it. The authorities arrested her twice and finally expelled her from Nafplio, and she returned to Spetses with what little remained of her fortune ^[3].

By then the wealth that had built the Agamemnon was gone, spent on the war. She lived her last months on Spetses in reduced circumstances, still a famous name but politically sidelined. There is no record that she received repayment from the revolutionary government for the ships and supplies she had provided ^[1].

Her death came suddenly and violently, and not at Ottoman hands. On 22 May 1825 members of the Koutsis family came to her house during a dispute that began when her son Georgios Yiannouzas eloped with Eleni Koutsi, a daughter of the family. In the confrontation that followed, a shot fired from the street struck Bouboulina in the head as she stood at a window, killing her. No one was ever convicted for the killing ^[4].

Bouboulina's reputation grew steadily after her death. Russia is traditionally said to have granted her the honorary rank of admiral, an extraordinary distinction for a woman of her era, and in 2018 the Greek state formally promoted her posthumously to rear admiral of the Hellenic Navy, making the honor official in her own country nearly two centuries after her death ^[5].

Her memory saturates modern Greece. Her portrait appeared on the Greek 50 drachma banknote issued in 1978, streets and squares across the country carry her name, and several ships of the Hellenic Navy have been called Bouboulina. Her mansion on Spetses, still owned by her descendants, operates as the Bouboulina Museum and preserves her weapons, documents, and household effects. Statues of her stand on Spetses and in other Greek towns, usually showing her with a raised arm directing her crews ^[6].

For readers of any Laskarina Bouboulina biography, the essential Laskarina Bouboulina facts are quickly told: a woman born in a prison, twice widowed, self-made in a man's trade, who spent her fortune to arm a revolution and commanded warships in it. Historians of the Greek revolution treat her, together with Manto Mavrogenous, as one of the two great female figures of the independence struggle, and her example is regularly cited in studies of women in war and in Greek national commemoration each year on 25 March ^[4].