Cruelest Figures of History

I recall a teacher in middle school who had an expression that has stayed with me over the years: “There are means and there are ways; and there mean ways”. Indeed. If there is one thing that history has shown, it is that bad people exist and often rise to the top. There have been many outright evil characters who have gained significant control of the political workings in their country and impacted the course of world history with their wicked ways. This list presents some of the worst offenders of breaking the trust that is given by the public to a leader.

15. Queen Ranavalona I

Queen Ranavalona I, best known as the villain in George Fraser’s novel Flashman’s Lady, ascended the throne of Madagascar in 1835. Known abroad as the Bloody Mary of Madagascar, the Queen’s favourite methods of execution included half-boiling and tossing off of cliffs, and over a third of her population died under her reign. Although she and her court wore French dress, Ranavalona banned Christianity and drove Europeans off the island. Nevertheless, she united Madagascar and kept it free of French or British control at a time when other African nations were brought into the growing empires.

14. Attila, King of the Huns

Attila, King of the Huns, was the Emperor of the Huns from 434 until his death in 453, ruling over an empire that stretched from Germany to the Ural River and from the River Danube to the Baltic Sea. During his rule, he was one of the most fearsome of the Western and Eastern Roman Empires’ enemies. The question remains one of the central dilemmas in revisionist history: was he a bad guy or simply a harsh yet fair and visionary leader? In much of Western Europe, he is remembered as the epitome of cruelty and rapacity. However he is regarded as a hero and his name is revered and used in Hungary, Turkey and other Turkic-speaking countries in Central Asia. Some histories and chronicles describe him as a great and noble king, and he plays major roles in three Norse sagas: Atlakviða; Völsunga; and Atlamál.

13. Emperor Caligula

The emperor Caligula, whose birth name was Gaius Julius Caesar Germanicus and was a distant cousin to Julias Caesar, is one of the most well known of the Roman Emperors yet actually held the job for less than 4 years. Today this would not even merit a lapel pin by corporate standards, yet in that short time Caligula managed to fall into the depths of madness and turn his world upside down. Among some of his more bizarre habits were having dinner parties hosted by his favorite horse, opening a brothel in the Imperial Palace and reinstating treason trials, the bloodthirsty trials which had given an air of terror to the latter years of Tiberius’ reign. Caligula had four wives, three of them during his reign as emperor and he was said to have committed incest with each of his three sisters in turn. In 24 January AD 41, Caligula was murdered by the praetorian officer Cassius Chaerea, together with two military colleagues.

12. Emperor Nero

Some historians describe the life of Roman Emperor Nero as a series of excesses in sport, music, orgies and murder. In AD 62 he divorced Octavia and then had her executed on a trumped-up charge of adultery. All this to make way for Poppaea Sabina whom he married. (But then Poppaea too was later killed. – Suetonius says he kicked her to death when she complained at his coming home late from the races). Had his change of wife not created too much of a scandal, Nero’s next move did. Until then he had kept his stage appearances to private stages, but in AD 64 he gave his first public performance in Neapolis (Naples). – Romans saw it indeed as a bad omen that the very theatre Nero had performed in shortly after was destroyed by an earthquake. Within a year the emperor made his second appearance, this time in Rome. The senate was outraged. The next year – July AD 64 – the Great Fire ravaged Rome for six days, from which comes the famous vision of Nero fiddling while Rome burned. Nero, a man desperate to be popular, looked for scapegoats on whom the fire could be blamed and found it in an obscure new religious sect, the Christians. Many Christians were arrested and thrown to the wild beasts in the circus, crucified or burned to death at night, serving as ‘lighting’ in Nero’s gardens, while Nero mingled among the watching crowds. It is this brutal persecution which immortalized Nero as the first Antichrist in the eyes of the Christian church.

11. King John “Lacklands”