Wu is a good example of a ruler whose aims and actions have come down to us very largely via sources written by her enemies. I addressed the issue of her reputation and the difficulty of creating a neutral account of her reign for the Smithsonian a few years ago, and that essay discussed the issue of the various killings that were attributed to her. To a significant degree, she was the victim of the blatant double standard that has always existed when it comes to judging the actions of female rulers, rather than males. Male emperors were praised for doing far worse things than she was ever accused of.

Here's the essay [1/3]. For images and comments, go here.

Most nations of note have had at least one great female leader. Not the United States, of course, but one thinks readily enough of Hatshepsut of ancient Egypt, Russia’s astonishing Catherine the Great, or Trung Trac of Vietnam.

These women were rarely chosen by their people. They came to power, mostly, by default or stealth; a king had no sons, or an intelligent queen usurped the powers of her useless husband. However they rose, though, it has always been harder for a woman to rule effectively than it was for a man–more so in the earlier periods of history, when monarchs were first and foremost military leaders, and power was often seized by force.

So queens and empresses regnant were forced to rule like men, and yet roundly criticized when they did so. Sweden’s fascinating Queen Christina was nearly as infamous for eschewing her sidesaddle and riding in breeches as she was for the more momentous decision that she took to convert to Catholicism–while, mustering her troops in 1588 as the Spanish Armada sailed up the Channel, even Elizabeth I felt constrained to begin a morale-boosting address with a denial of her sex: “I know I have the body of a weak and feeble woman, but I have the heart and stomach of a king, and a king of England too.”

Of all these female rulers, though, none has aroused so much controversy, or wielded such great power, as a monarch whose real achievements and character remain obscured behind layers of obloquy. Her name was Wu Zetian, and in the seventh century A.D. she became the only woman in more than 3,000 years of Chinese history to rule in her own right.

Wu (she is always known by her surname) has every claim to be considered a great empress. She held power, in one guise or another, for more than half a century, first as consort of the ineffectual Gaozong Emperor, then as the power behind the throne held by her youngest son, and finally (from 690 until shortly before her death in 705) as monarch. Ruthless and decisive, she stabilized and consolidated the Tang dynasty at a time when it appeared to be crumbling–a significant achievement, since the Tang period is reckoned the golden age of Chinese civilization. T.H. Barrett’s recent book even suggests (on no firm evidence) that the empress was the most important early promoter of printing in the world.

Yet Wu has had a pretty bad press. For centuries she was excoriated by Chinese historians as an offender against a way of life. She was painted as a usurper who was both physically cruel and erotically wanton; she first came to prominence, it was hinted, because she was willing to gratify certain of the Taizong emperor‘s more unusual sexual appetites. “With a heart like a serpent and a nature like that of a wolf,” one contemporary summed up, “she favored evil sycophants and destroyed good and loyal officials.” A small sampling of the empress’s other crimes followed: “She killed her sister, butchered her elder brothers, murdered the ruler, poisoned her mother. She is hated by gods and men alike.”

Just how accurate this picture of Wu is remains a matter of debate. One reason, as we have already had cause to note in this blog, is the official nature and lack of diversity among the sources that survive for early Chinese history; another is that imperial history was written to provide lessons for future rulers, and as such tended to be weighted heavily against usurpers (which Wu was) and anyone who offended the Confucian sensibilities of the scholars who labored over them (which Wu did simply by being a woman). A third problem is that the empress, who was well aware of both these biases, was not averse to tampering with the record herself; a fourth is that some other accounts of her reign were written by relatives who had good cause to loathe her. It is a challenge to recover real people from this morass of bias.

The most serious charges against Wu are handily summarized in Mary Anderson’s collection of imperial scuttlebutt, Hidden Power, which reports that she “wiped out twelve collateral branches of the Tang clan” and had the heads of two rebellious princes hacked off and brought to her in her palace. Among a raft of other allegations are the suggestions that she ordered the suicides of a grandson and granddaughter who had dared to criticize her and later poisoned her husband, who–very unusually for a Chinese emperor–died unobserved and alone, even though tradition held that the entire family should assemble around the imperial death bed to attest to any last words.

Even today, Wu remains infamous for the spectacularly ruthless way in which she supposedly disposed of Gaozong’s first wife, the empress Wang, and a senior and more favored consort known as the Pure Concubine. According to the histories of the period, Wu smothered her own week-old daughter by Gaozong and blamed the baby’s death on Wang, who was the last person to have held her. The emperor believed her story, and Wang was demoted and imprisoned in a distant part of the palace, soon to be joined by the Pure Concubine. Having risen to be empress in Wang’s stead, Wu ordered that both women’s hands and feet be lopped off and had their mutilated bodies tossed into a vat of wine, leaving them to drown with the comment: “Now these two witches can get drunk to their bones.”

Mostly, it's about the sources you have for an event.

The first criterion is obviously the number of different sources that present an event has true : If only one sources talks about something, and the others don't mention it, it's probably not true. That can be tricky to determine, as for older sources, authors often rewrite information that was written before them, without quoting their sources (which was perfectly normal, even for historian, for a long time).

Second, you have to be critical of the sources you find: who writes, when does he writes, does he have a agenda of some sort, does he plan to write history or fiction ? For instance, in Roman history, Suetonius is not considered the most reliable of sources, because he wrote his "Twelve Caesars" a century after the fact, and was trying to compose a history to glorify the said Ceasars. Although he was an historian, and used a lot of previous historian works, he is not considered as reliable as Tacitus, who were fully an historian.

Finally, you have to confront sources to other historical evidence, such as archealogy, epigraphy...

Sometime, indeed, it's not possible to confirm or invalidate certain elements. In which case, you considere it as doubtfull, and resort to commun sens: is this event likely to have occured ? Is it possible ? In your exemple (I'm not even remotly an expert on the subject), there is apparantly several sources that mention it, and the event is believable. But Wu Zetian was not a really popular monarch (the fact that she make it to a list of the "7 most terrible tyrants from history" is quite telling), so it could have been invented later to emphasize her cruelty. Hard to be sure, but it's a valid hypothesis, and so is considered true, with some caution, as many facts in history, especially about great leader, both of good and bad reputation.

As others have said, it's mainly a numbers game -- if multiple sources corroborate a fact, it's more likely to be true. The reliability of the source of the information is also an important factor. If we only have one source of a fact, but we know that source to have been well placed and generally reliable, we're more likely to believe it.

It's also worth noting that people of the past did not always conceive of fact and fiction in the black and white way that we usually do today. (Chris Given-Wilson's Chronicles: The Writing of History in Medieval England has an excellent discussion on this, which I urge you to check out if you're interested in medieval history.) So what we would call a 'rumour' or 'lie' about a historical figure might at the time have been seen as something that illustrated an important truth about that person, whether or not it actually took place.

These questions are important because historians aren't only interested in the question of what actually happened. Distinguishing historical fact from rumour is interesting, but the rumour itself can also be interesting, as its presence raises different questions. Who spread the rumour? What motivation would they have had to do so? By what means did they spread it? Who believed it, or pretended to believe it? When was the rumour spread -- was it during the subject's lifetime, after their death, or even many centuries later? The answers to these questions lead to the discovery of new historical facts that we might not have considered otherwise.