History for Sleepyheads | 10 Most Insane Rulers in History (And Their Crimes)

Settle in for a calm, deep-dive documentary on the 10 most insane rulers in history and the shocking crimes they committed. This feature-length episode from History for Sleepyheads is designed for focused listening or to help you fall asleep, exploring the darkest chapters of the past with a steady, soothing narration.

Join us as we uncover the chilling madness of Caligula, who declared war on the sea, and the brutal paranoia of Ivan the Terrible. We will chronicle the calculated cruelty of King Leopold II, whose greed led to a genocide, and the narcissistic fantasies of Commodus, the emperor who thought he was a god. These are the unforgettable stories of what happens when absolute power falls into the hands of the unhinged.

Ideal for those who enjoy dark history and true crime, this video weaves together the terrifying reigns of history’s worst tyrants. Let the calm storytelling guide you through these epic tales as you wind down for the night.

CHAPTERS:
00:00 – Intro: The Shadows of History
01:10 – 1. Gaius Caligula: The Mad Emperor
06:30 – 2. Pope John XII: The Sinner Saint
11:40 – 3. King John: The Lackland Tyrant
17:00 – 4. Ivan the Terrible: The Tsar of Fear
22:30 – 5. Richard II: The Vain King’s Fall
27:50 – 6. Mary, Queen of Scots: The Doomed Queen
33:20 – 7. Emperor Rudolf II: The Occult Recluse
38:30 – 8. Ranavalona I: The Ruthless Queen
43:50 – 9. King Leopold II: The Butcher of Congo
49:30 – 10. Commodus: The Gladiator Emperor
54:30 – Outro: Lessons from the Throne

If you appreciate these deep dives into the shadows of the past, be sure to like this video and subscribe to History for Sleepyheads for more.
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History remembers the victors, but its shadows 
hide the monsters. Tonight, we look past the heroes to the tyrants, the madmen, and the rulers 
who brought only chaos. These are tales of power unearned, sanity lost, and legacies written in 
blood and fear. Settle in and try to sleep if you can. These are the worst rulers in history. 
Our descent into darkness begins in the heart of the world’s greatest empire with a man named Gaes 
Caligula. On a warm August day in the year 12c, a child was born into the very center of power. 
His name Gaees Julius Caesar Germanicus. But history would give him a different name, a 
chilling whisper through the ages, Caligula. It was once a term of endearment, meaning little 
boots, given to him by the hardened legionaries who adored the boy marching beside his father, the 
beloved General Germanicus. For a fleeting moment, he was Rome’s golden prince, the hope of an 
empire. But the boy who charmed the legions would soon descend into a chasm of madness, 
becoming a monster who would test the very limits of Rome itself. Gaese was the son 
of Germanicus, a general so popular he was seen as the true heir to Augustus, an Agraina the 
elder, a woman of unshakable nobility. As a child, he was the army’s mascot, a symbol of a brighter 
future. But the sun sets quickly in Rome. In 19, Germanicus died under mysterious circumstances. 
His body racked with a sudden illness. Whispers slithered through the Senate. Whispers of poison 
with fingers pointing toward the reigning emperor, Tiberius, Gaes’s own greatuncle. Germanicus’ 
death shattered the family. Agraina, fierce and protective, openly defied Tiberius, a fatal 
mistake. One by one, Caligula’s family was erased. His mother and brothers were exiled, starved, 
or executed, victims of the emperor’s chilling paranoia. Young Gaes alone was spared, summoned 
to the island of Capri to live under the watchful, predatory eye of the man who had destroyed his 
world. Capri was not an island of paradise. It was a den of paranoia and depravity. Here the aging 
Tiberius ruled from the shadows, indulging in cruelties that would make a soldier blush. It was 
in this crucible of fear and vice that Caligula learned the brutal art of survival. He became a 
master of deception, hiding his rage behind a mask of obedience, charming the court while his soul 
curdled with a desire for vengeance. He watched, he learned, and he waited. In 37 C, Tiberius died 
and Rome erupted in celebration as Caligula was proclaimed emperor. The people wept with joy. 
They saw in him the ghost of his noble father, a beacon of hope after the cold, distant terror 
of Tiberius. And at first, Caligula played the part of the savior beautifully. He freed political 
prisoners, burned Tiberius’s treason and records, and showered the people with gifts and games. Rome 
became a city of endless celebration. It seemed a golden age was dawning. But then, less than a year 
into his reign, the golden prince fell gravely ill. A fever seized him, and for weeks he lingered 
at the edge of death. The empire held its breath. When he finally recovered, the man who stood up 
was not the same one who had fallen. The fever, it seemed, had burned away the charming prince 
and left a monster in his place. What followed was a reign of spectacular, terrifying insanity. 
Caligula’s rule became a theater of cruelty. He bled the treasury dry on floating palaces and 
lavish feasts. Once boasting he had spent the modern equivalent of billions in a single year. 
When the money ran out, he turned to extortion, accusing wealthy senators of treason simply 
to seize their estates. He declared himself a living god, demanding he be worshiped as Jupiter 
incarnate. He replaced the heads on statues of deities with his own and forced proud senators 
to gravel and kiss his feet. His madness had a creative humiliating streak. He planned to appoint 
his favorite horse, Incitatus, as a consul, the highest office in Rome. The horse lived in a 
marble stable, ate from an ivory manger, and was draped in royal purple, a constant living mockery 
of the political elite Caligula. so despised. His cruelty was boundless. Executions became his 
personal entertainment. He was rumored to have engaged in incestuous relationships with all three 
of his sisters, becoming obsessed with Drusilla. When she died, he had her deified, forcing the 
entire empire into a period of mourning where to laugh was a capital crime. Perhaps most bizarre 
was his war on the sea. Believing himself a divine conqueror, he marched his legions to the English 
Channel and declared war on Neptune. The soldiers in full battle armor were commanded to wade into 
the surf and attack the water with their swords before collecting seashells as the spoils of war 
to be paraded in a triumph. But a throne built on terror is a fragile thing. The Ptorian Guard, 
the elite soldiers sworn to protect the emperor, had seen enough. On January 24th, 41C, as Caligula 
walked through a secluded palace corridor, a group of guards cornered him. They struck and a man who 
called himself a god fell to the marble floor, bleeding and pleading for his life. He was stabbed 
over 30 times. His wife and young daughter were murdered shortly after, ensuring no heir could 
rise to avenge him. Thus ended the reign of Caligula, the emperor consumed by madness. His 
name would be etched in history not as a builder, but as a warning, a dark fable of what happens 
when absolute power falls into the hands of the unhinged. So sleep well, dear dreamer, and know 
that even the mightiest empire can be brought to its knees by the fevered dreams of a single broken 
mind. Next, we journey from the marble halls of a fallen empire to the sacred heart of the church 
to find a sinner on the papal throne, Pope John 12th. In the year 937C, a boy named Octavianis 
was born into a world of chaos. The once mighty Holy Roman Empire was crumbling and Rome was 
ruled not by emperors but by powerful feuding families. Octavianis was the son of Alberto of 
Spolo, the undisputed tyrant of Rome. He was born into immense privilege but not an ounce of piety. 
History would remember him as Pope John I 12th, a man who would turn the sacred halls of the 
Vatican into his personal den of vice. a ruler whose sins were so profound they nearly shattered 
the faith of Christendom itself. This was the era known as the seculum obscurum the dark age 
of the papacy where the throne of St. Peter was a political prize passed between the mistresses 
daughters and grandsons of corrupt aristocrats. John the 12th was the ultimate product of 
this rot. As his father Alberic laid dying, he forced the nobles of Rome to swear an oath that 
they would elect his teenage son as the next pope. At the tender age of 18, Octavianis was handed 
the keys to the kingdom of heaven. But instead of devotion, the Vatican found itself ruled by 
a reckless, immoral boy king. From the moment he ascended in 955 C, John I 12th transformed the 
Lateran palace, the holy residence of the popes into a brothel. The sacred spaces where prayers 
should have echoed were filled with the sounds of gamblers, the laughter of cortisans, and the 
drunken songs of his cronies. Dice rattled louder than rosaries. His depravity was legendary. 
He was accused of open fornication within the hallowed walls of St. Peter’s Basilica itself. 
Cardinals whispered in horror that he had toasted to the devil during feasts, invoked the names of 
pagan gods like Jupiter and Venus while gambling, and ordained a bishop in a stable. He was 
said to have turned the church into a herum, taking lovers from among noble women and nuns 
alike. His lust so insatiable that holy sights became scenes of unspeakable vice. But his sins 
were not confined to the flesh. He was a master of simony, selling church offices to the highest 
bidder. He blinded his own spiritual father, mutilated a cardinal who dared to criticize 
him, and gambled away sacred chalicees and golden crucifixes on games of chance. He spent 
more time hunting with his dogs and falcons than he did celebrating Massachusetts. The leader of 
the Christian world had become the very embodiment of sin. This debauchery might have been ignored if 
he were a competent political leader, but he was a fool. In a desperate bid for military protection, 
he allied with Otto the Great, King of Germany, crowning him Holy Roman Emperor in 962C. But 
almost immediately, the treacherous young Pope betrayed him, secretly plotting with Otto’s 
enemies. Otto, no fool, marched his army back to Rome in 963C and convened a Senate of bishops. 
John the 12th was formally charged with murder, perjury, adultery, and incest. He was deposed 
in absentia, but John was not so easily removed. He fled into the mountains and when Otto left 
Rome, he returned at the head of a vengeful army, reclaiming the Vatican through bloodshed. His 
brief return was a reign of terror. He had the hands, noses, and fingers of his enemies cut off. 
His end, however, came not from an army, but from his own sin. In May of 964 C, at the age of just 
27, he died suddenly. The circumstances were as scandalous as his life. Some chronicers claim he 
suffered a fatal stroke in the bed of a married woman. A more popular and fitting rumor insists 
he was caught in the act of adultery and beaten to death by the woman’s enraged husband. His papacy 
became a cautionary tale, a grim reminder that even the most sacred institutions are not immune 
to the darkest corners of human vice. His name is whispered not as a saint but as a warning. So 
sleep well, dear dreamer, and remember that power, even when draped in holy robes, can be corrupted 
absolutely, leaving a stain that centuries cannot wash away. Our next tale of a crown wororn 
takes us to the rainswept fields of England, to a king whose name would become synonymous with 
failure, King John. In the year 1166, in the grand halls of the Plantaginate dynasty, a child was 
born who was never meant to be great. He was John, the youngest son of the formidable King Henry II 
and the legendary Eleanor of Aquitane. He was a prince born in the shadow of giants. His older 
brothers were warriors and statesmen. Richard, the famed Lionheart, was a living legend. 
John, however, was given no lands, no titles of substance, earning him the humiliating nickname 
his father bestowed upon him. John Lackland. This early neglect planted a seed of bitter resentment 
in him, a desperate ambition that would one day poison his entire kingdom. Though he lacked 
the military genius of Richard or the cunning of his other brothers, Jon possessed a different 
set of skills. He was manipulative, treacherous, and pathologically selfish. When his father died 
and Richard the Lionheart descended the throne, the great warrior king promptly left England to 
embark on the third crusade. With the king away, the jackal began to play. John conspired with King 
Philip II of France, plotting to seize his own brother’s throne. When Richard was captured and 
held for ransom on his journey home, John actively tried to keep him imprisoned. But Richard’s legend 
was too powerful. He returned to England and in a moment of astonishing mercy, he forgave his 
younger brother for his treason, stating, “He is only a child who has had evil counselors. 
It was a mistake England would pay for in blood and treasure.” When Richard died in 1199, John’s 
moment finally arrived. He seized the throne, but the crown did not grant him the qualities 
of a king. He was cruel where Richard had been chivalous, cowardly where Richard had been brave, 
and profoundly incompetent where Richard had been a master strategist. His reign was a cascade of 
disasters. His first great failure was the loss of his family’s ancestral lands in France. He 
inherited a vast empire, but through military blunders and diplomatic ineptitude, he lost the 
duche of Normandy and other key territories to the French king. This crushing humiliation earned 
him the scorn of his barren, who saw their own wealth and power dwindling under his failed 
leadership. His response was not to regroup, but to tax. Desperate to fund his failing wars, 
he bled England dry, extorting the church, seizing the lands of his barren, and imposing 
crushing taxes on the common folk. His paranoia and cruelty extended even to his own blood. His 
young nephew, Arthur of Britany, had a stronger claim to the throne in the eyes of many. Fearing 
this rival, Jon captured the boy in 1203. Arthur was imprisoned and never seen again. The chilling 
rumor that spread across Europe was that Jon in a drunken rage murdered the boy with his own hands 
and cast his body into the river, saying, “Whether he committed the act himself or ordered it, the 
stain of a kinslayer never washed away. As his failures mounted, so did the opposition. John made 
an enemy of the church, quarreling so fiercely with Pope Innocent III that England was placed 
under a papal interdict for 6 years, a devastating punishment where all church services from baptisms 
to burials were forbidden. By 1215, the English barren could take no more. They rose in open 
rebellion, not merely to protest, but to cage the tyrant. At Runny, they forced Jon to a negotiating 
table, compelling him to sign one of the most important documents in human history, the Magna 
Carta, the great charter. It was a revolutionary idea, declaring that not even the king was above 
the law. John signed it with a quill in one hand and a dagger behind his back. He had no intention 
of honoring it. Almost immediately, he appealed to the Pope, who declared the charter null and 
void, plunging England into a brutal civil war. John unleashed foreign mercenaries on his own 
people, burning towns and castles in a final, desperate rampage. The baronss in turn offered the 
English crown to the prince of France, so despised was their own king. As his kingdom crumbled, 
fate delivered one final humiliating blow. While fleeing across a treacherous estuary known 
as the wash, a sudden tide swept away his entire baggage train. Lost to the mud and sea where the 
crown jewels and all his royal treasure. Broken, sick, and now truly a blackland, John retreated to 
Newark Castle. There in October 1216, he succumbed to dysentery, dying in agony, abandoned by his 
allies and hated by his people. Few mourned him. Yet in a profound twist of historical irony, 
the legacy of this disastrous king was the very document he tried to destroy. The Magna Carta 
would outlive him, becoming the foundation for constitutional law in England and inspiring the 
ideals of liberty and justice across the world. So sleep well, dear dreamer, and remember the story 
of King John, for it teaches us that sometimes from the reign of the very worst of men, the 
seeds of the greatest ideas can unexpectedly grow. We now travel east to the vast frozen expanse of 
Russia, to a ruler whose name became a synonym for terror itself, Ivan the Terrible. In the harsh 
Russian winter of 1530, a child was born in the gilded heart of Moscow who would forge an empire 
in fire and fear. His name was Ivan Vasilovich. At just 3 years old, his father died, making him 
the Grand Prince of Moscow. His mother acted as regent, but she too was dead before he was eight, 
likely poisoned. The boy prince was now an orphan, a pawn in the cruel games of the Boars, the 
powerful noble families of Russia. Ivan’s childhood was a living nightmare. He grew up 
in the Kremlin, a palace filled with intrigue and betrayal. He was neglected, humiliated, and 
often starved by the Boars who ruled in his name. He watched them plunder the treasury, mock his 
authority, and murder his allies. These years of torment did not break him. They forged him into 
something hard and terrible. They filled his soul with a deep, abiding paranoia and a burning hatred 
for the nobility that would one day be unleashed upon all of Russia. But Ivan was no simple brute. 
He was fiercely intelligent, devouring books on history and religion. He saw himself not as 
a prince but as an instrument of God’s will destined to transform Russia into a mighty holy 
empire. In 1547 at the age of 16 he did something unprecedented. He declared himself Zar of all 
Russ title derived from the Roman Caesar. It was a declaration of absolute divine authority placing 
him far above the bouars who had tormented him. His early reign was one of brilliant reform. 
He modernized the army, introduced new laws, and centralized the administration, breaking the 
power of the corrupt nobles. He expanded Russia’s borders, conquering the great Tataranates of Kazan 
and Astrachan, securing the entire length of the Vular River. For a time, it seemed he would be 
Ivan the Great. But the demons of his childhood were never far away. His anchor to sanity was his 
beloved wife, Anastasia Roman Nova. Her sudden death in 1560 shattered him. Convinced the Boars 
had poisoned her, Ivan fell into a spiral of grief and vengeful madness. The darkness that had been 
festering within him finally broke free. In 1565, he unleashed his wrath. He created the operina, a 
state within a state, a personal dominion ruled by his own private army, the dreaded operi. Dressed 
in black, riding black horses, they were that SARS instruments of terror. Their insignia was a dog’s 
head to sniff out treason and a broom to sweep it away. They became a death squad loyal only to 
Ivan, and they plunged Russia into a decade of bloodshed. The boy families were purged. Their 
lands were seized. Their fortunes confiscated. Thousands were arrested, tortured, and executed 
on the tsar’s slightest whim. Some were impaled, others boiled alive or torn apart by wild bears. 
The horror culminated in 1570 with the massacre of Navgarod. Believing the ancient city was plotting 
against him, Ivan led his operi in a month-long sack. Tens of thousands of men, women, and 
children were slaughtered. The streets ran red, and the folkhoff river was choked with bodies. 
As the years passed, Ivan’s paranoia consumed him entirely. He saw enemies everywhere, even in his 
own family. In 1581, in a fit of uncontrollable rage during an argument, he struck his own son 
and heir, Ivan Ivanovich, on the head with his iron tipped staff. The blow was fatal. The zar, 
realizing what he had done, cradled his dying son, howling in grief and madness. He had murdered his 
own future and the future of his dynasty. The act broke him. On March 18th, 1584, Ivan the Terrible 
died while preparing to play a game of chess. He left Russia leaderless and scarred. His death 
ushered in the time of troubles, a period of civil war, famine, and foreign invasion that nearly 
destroyed the nation he had built. He had forged an empire, but at the cost of his own soul and the 
peace of his people. So sleep well, dear dreamer, and remember that a ruler consumed by the ghosts 
of his past will inevitably create a nation of ghosts in his future. From the brutal certainty 
of the tsar court, we traveled to an England of pageantry and poetry, a kingdom ruled by a man 
who saw himself as a living work of art, a king who would be undone by his own vanity, Richard II. 
On a cool spring day in 1367, a prince was born in Bordeaux who was destined for the throne. He 
was Richard, son of the valiant black prince and grandson of the mighty king Edward III. He was 
born into an England of chivalry and grandeur, but his reign would become a cautionary tale 
of betrayal, tyranny, and a spectacular fall. History would not remember him as a warrior like 
his father, but as the golden king who believed he was untouchable, only to lose everything. Tragedy 
defined his youth. His legendary father died when Richard was just nine, and a year later, his 
grandfather, the king, also passed away. Suddenly, a 10-year-old boy was crowned king of England. 
Too young to rule, his kingdom was governed by a council of powerful nobles, including his 
ambitious uncle, John of Gaunt. Richard grew up a king in name only, overshadowed and controlled, 
and a deep resentment for these hardened old lords took root in his heart. His first true test came 
just four years into his reign. In 1381, England erupted in the peasants revolt. Fueled by high 
taxes and feudal oppression, tens of thousands of rebels marched on London, burning palaces and 
executing the Archbishop of Canterbury. With his kingdom on the brink of collapse, the 14-year-old 
king did something extraordinary. He rode out to meet the furious mob himself. As the rebel leader 
what Tyler was struck down by the king’s men, the crowd surged forward, arrows drawn. But 
Richard with a courage that stunned all who saw it, cried out, “I am your captain. I am 
your king. Follow me.” He diffused the crisis, a moment of astonishing bravery that promised a 
great future. But this heroism would curdle into arrogance. As Richard came of age, his belief in 
his divine right to rule became an obsession. He despised the old warrior nobility, seeing them as 
relics of a bygone era. He surrounded himself with a circle of favorites, young men who flattered 
his ego and shared his love for art, fashion, and lavish spectacle. He turned his court 
into a glittering stage, spending fortunes on extravagant clothes and grandiose projects. 
While the powerful baronss of England watched, alienated and furious. This resentment boiled 
over in 1387. A group of powerful nobles, calling themselves the Lord’s appellent, seize control 
of the government. They purged Richard’s court, executing or exiling his closest friends. Richard, 
humiliated and powerless, was forced to submit. It was a bitter lesson he would never forget, and 
he would spend the next decade nursing his grudge, waiting for the perfect moment to exact his 
revenge. That moment came in 1397. With his power base secure, Richard struck back with chilling 
precision. He arrested the Lord’s appallet, accusing them of treason. One was executed, 
another exiled, and a third murdered in his prison cell. Richard’s vengeance was absolute. He 
declared that the law resided in his own breast, ruling as a tyrant. Parliament became his rubber 
stamp, and he funded his lavish lifestyle with forced loans and illegal taxes. He was no longer 
a king. He was a desperate ordained by God, untouchable by mortal men. His greatest mistake, 
however, was born of this arrogance. In 1399, his powerful uncle John of Gaunt died. Gaunt’s 
son, Henry Ballingbrook, was in exile, but was the legal heir to his father’s vast lands and 
fortune. In a stunning act of royal overreach, Richard seized the entire inheritance for the 
crown. It was a fatal miscalculation. He had not just stolen land. He had violated the sacred 
laws of inheritance that protected every nobleman in his kingdom. If the king could do this to the 
powerful duche of Lancaster, no one’s property was safe. Henry Ballingbrook, furious and now with 
a legitimate cause, returned to England not just to reclaim his inheritance, but to reclaim the 
kingdom. The nobility, weary of Richard’s tyranny, flocked to his banner. Richard, believing himself 
invincible, was on a campaign in Ireland. By the time he returned, it was too late. His kingdom had 
abandoned him. He was captured and imprisoned in the Tower of London. In a heartbreaking ceremony, 
he was forced to abdicate, to symbolically hand over the crown to his cousin, who would become 
King Henry IVth. Richard was moved to the cold, lonely prison of Pontiffract Castle. His final 
months are shrouded in mystery. By February 1400, he was dead, either starved to death by his 
capttors or murdered on the new king’s orders. His fall was immortalized by Shakespeare, 
who portrayed him as a tragic poet king, a man who lost his kingdom because he believed 
his own divine myth. So sleep well, dear dreamer, and remember the tale of Richard II, for it is a 
warning that those who believe they are above the law may find themselves waking in a prison, their 
golden crown forever lost. From a king who lost one throne, we turn to a queen who was promised 
two, but was destined to hold either. Her story is one of beauty, betrayal, and blood. The tragic 
life of Mary, Queen of Scots. On a cold December night in 1542, a baby girl was born in Linlithko 
Palace who was from her first breath a queen. Her name was Mary Stewart. Just 6 days after her 
birth, her father, King James V of Scotland, died, leaving his infant daughter, the ruler of 
a wild and treacherous kingdom. She was a queen before she could walk. a crown placed upon a head 
that could not yet support it. Her very existence was a threat. King Henry VIII of England sought to 
seize her, to force a marriage to his own son and unite the crowns under his control. To protect 
her, at the age of just five, Mary was spirited away to the glittering, sophisticated court of 
France. There she was raised as a princess, betrod to the young French heir, Francis. She grew into 
a woman renowned for her beauty, intelligence, and charm. A Catholic rose in the most powerful 
court in Europe. At 16, she married Francis, and a year later, she was queen of France. She was now 
a queen of two nations, standing at the pinnacle of power. But her happiness was tragically 
fleeting. Her young husband died suddenly in 1560, leaving Mary a widow at just 18. No longer welcome 
in the French court, she made the fateful decision to return to Scotland, a homeland she barely 
remembered. The Scotland she returned to was not the Catholic Kingdom she had left. It was a 
nation torn apart by the Protestant Reformation, ruled by grim feuding lords who saw their Catholic 
queen not as their savior but as a dangerous outsider. Mary’s reign was a tightroppe walk over 
a pit of vipers. But her downfall would come not from politics but from passion. Her choice in 
husbands proved to be her undoing. Her second husband, her cousin Lord Darnley, was handsome and 
ambitious, but also a violent, arrogant drunkard. Consumed by jealousy, he orchestrated the brutal 
murder of Mary’s private secretary, David Rizio, having him stabbed to death in front of the 
heavily pregnant queen. The love she may have had for Darnley curdled into hatred. The marriage and 
Mary’s fate was sealed in a flash of gunpowder. In 1567, the house where Darnley was staying 
was blown up in the middle of the night. His body was found in the garden, apparently 
strangled. The chief suspect was the dashing and dangerous Earl of Bathwell, a man Mary had grown 
increasingly close to. The scandal was immense, but it became catastrophic when just 3 months 
later, Mary married Bothwell. Whether she was a willing accomplice in her husband’s murder or a 
victim forced into the marriage by both Scotland did not care. The people and the Protestant 
lords rose against her. She was imprisoned, forced to abdicate her throne in favor of her 
infant son James and eventually fled to England, throwing herself on the mercy of her cousin, Queen 
Elizabeth I. It was a fatal error. Elizabeth, ever wary of her Catholic rival, who held a 
strong claim to the English throne, saw Mary not as a guest, but as a threat. For 19 years, 
Mary was a prisoner, moved from castle to castle, a queen in name only. She became the center 
of countless Catholic plots to assassinate Elizabeth and place her on the throne. Finally, 
in 1586, she was implicated in the Babington plot. Elizabeth’s spy master had all the proof 
he needed. Mary was tried for treason and sentenced to death. On February 8th, 1587, Mary 
walked to the scaffold in Feathering Hay Castle, dressed in deep red, the color of Catholic 
martyrdom. She was regal and composed to the end. The execution itself was a gruesome, botched 
affair. The first blow of the axe missed her neck, striking the back of her head. The second did not 
sever it. Only with a third hacking blow was the life of Mary, Queen of Scots, ended in a final 
Macob twist. When the executioner lifted her head to show the crowd, her Auburn locks came away in 
his hand. It was a wig hiding the thin gray hair of a woman aged by years of suffering. Yet even 
in death, Mary achieved a victory that had eluded her in life. Her son James would one day inherit 
the throne of England after Elizabeth’s death, uniting the crowns of England and Scotland. The 
bloodline of the Queen Elizabeth had executed would rule over all of Britain. So sleep well, 
dear dreamer, and remember the story of the doomed queen. A testament to the fact that in the 
great game of thrones, the final move is sometimes played from beyond the grave. From the cold steel 
of the executioner’s axe, we journey to a palace where the greatest threat was not a blade, but the 
slow creeping decay of a mind lost in the cosmos. We travel to the heart of the Holy Roman Empire to 
the strange and haunted reign of Emperor Rudolph 2. In 1552, a child named Rudolph was born into 
the mighty Hapsburg dynasty, destined to wear the imperial crown. He was raised not in Vienna, 
but in a suffocatingly rigid and devout Catholic court of his uncle, King Philip II of Spain. 
It was a world of unyielding order and piety, but it could not contain Rudolph’s wandering mind. 
He was a quiet, introspective boy, plagued by what was then called melancholy, bouts of profound 
depression that would shadow his entire life. While his tutors drilled him on state craft 
and war, his heart was elsewhere, in the stars, in the forbidden books of alchemists, and in the 
beautiful, bizarre wonders of the natural world. In 1576, he was crowned Holy Roman Emperor. His 
vast realm, teetering on the brink of religious war, needed a strong, decisive leader. Instead, it 
got a dreamer. Rudolph abandoned the political hub of Vienna and retreated to Prague, transforming 
his castle into a sanctuary of secrets, a laboratory of dreams. He was not a king who 
held audiences. He was a recluse who communed with magicians. Under Rudolph’s reign, Prague became 
the occult capital of Europe. He gathered the most brilliant and eccentric minds of the age. 
He had the visionary astronomer Taiko Braheed the brilliant Johannes Kepler to unravel the 
mathematical secrets of planetary motion. But alongside these men of science were figures from 
a stranger world. The English mystics John D. and Edward Kelly who claimed to speak with angels 
through a scrying mirror. Alchemists toiled in castle laboratories funded by the emperor 
in their quest for the philosophers stone, the key to eternal life and limitless gold. 
Rudolph’s obsession was his [ __ ] his cabinet of curiosities. It was one of the greatest 
collections in the world, a microcosm of his fractured mind. It held priceless works of 
art alongside unicorn horns, celestial globes, bizarre mechanical automatons, and the legendary 
CEX gigas, the devil’s bible. He was a man desperately trying to possess and understand 
the entire universe. While the world he was meant to rule slipped through his fingers, while 
Rudolph locked himself away, his empire began to rot from within. He neglected diplomacy, ignored 
the growing Protestant rebellion in his lands, and allowed the simmering tensions that would 
soon explode into the catastrophic 30 years war to fester. His melancholy deepened into a crippling 
paranoia. He refused to marry or produce an heir. Terrified of assassination and convinced 
that magic could grant him immortality, he withdrew from public life for years at 
a time, a ghost haunting his own palace, his behavior growing ever more erratic. By605, his 
family had had enough. His younger brother Matias, seeing the empire leaderless and on a path to 
ruin, led a revolt of the Hapsburg archdukes. Rudolph, once the most powerful man in 
Christrysendom, was systematically stripped of his lands and authority. He became a prisoner in his 
own castle, a king ruling only over his collection of curiosities. In 1611, he was forced to abdicate 
the last of his titles. Abandoned and broken, he spent his final months wandering his silent 
galleries, speaking to the ghosts of a past that no longer existed. He died in January 1612 alone 
in his castle. In a strange and beautiful irony, this failed emperor left behind an invaluable 
legacy. Without his patronage, the scientific breakthroughs of Kepler and Brahi might have been 
delayed for decades. He was a terrible ruler, but a great patron. He was a man who dared to 
search for the meaning of life in the stars, even as his own world fell apart around him. So 
sleep well, dear dreamer, and remember that those who seek to unlock the secrets of the universe 
may find themselves consumed by them, becoming just another strange and forgotten relic in the 
cabinet of history. From an emperor who lost his grip on reality, we sailed to a distant island to 
a queen whose grip on her kingdom was absolute, an iron fist of tradition in a world besieged by 
change. She was Ran of Alona, the ruthless queen of Madagascar. She was not born to rule. In the 
late 18th century, she was born a commoner, but her father uncovered a plot against the king and 
as a reward, she was adopted into the royal family and married to the heir, Prince Ratima. When her 
husband became King Ratima, he opened Madagascar to the outside world. He forged alliances with 
the British, welcomed Christian missionaries, and encouraged European education and customs. 
But his wife, Ranavalona, watched this influx of foreign influence not with hope, but with a cold, 
simmering suspicion. She saw it as a cultural poison, a threat to the traditions and ancestral 
spirits of her people. When Ratima died in 1828, a power struggle erupted. Ranavalona, with the 
backing of the army and traditionalist factions, moved with shocking speed. She executed her rivals 
including the rightful heir and seized the throne for herself. The commoner’s daughter was now queen 
ran of Alona and her first act was to declare war on the modern world. She systematically reversed 
every one of her husband’s policies. She expelled the Christian missionaries, banned the practice 
of Christianity and made European customs illegal. Her reign became a brutal isolationist fortress. 
To enforce her will, she employed a terrifying method of justice, the Tanga ordeal. Anyone 
accused of a crime, from treason to practicing the forbidden Christian faith was forced to swallow a 
poison extracted from the nut of the Tangina tree, followed by three pieces of chicken skin. If 
the accused vomited up all three pieces of skin, they were declared innocent. If they died from 
the poison or failed to vomit the skin, they were guilty. It was a horrific system of random justice 
that claimed tens of thousands of lives. Entire Christian communities were massacred. Suspected 
traitors were subjected to other cruel fates, being boiled alive, buried up to their necks and 
left for insects or thrown from the high cliffs of Antinanarivo. Her paranoia fueled endless purges, 
and countless more died in forced labor projects, building fortresses and palaces for their 
queen. Her kingdom was a land of fear, where loyalty was bought with blood. Yet for all 
her internal brutality, Renovala was a master strategist in foreign policy. At a time when the 
scramble for Africa saw European powers carving up the continent, she kept Madagascar fiercely 
independent. She expertly played the British and French against each other. When a joint 
Anglo French naval force attacked in 1845, her formidable army crushed the invasion. The heads 
of the defeated European soldiers were placed on pikes along the coast, a grim warning to any who 
would challenge her rule. For 33 years, she ruled with absolute power, a figure of both terror and 
patriotic pride. She was a tyrant to many of her own people, but she was also the queen who kept 
the colonial powers at bay. She died peacefully in her sleep in 1861, an unusually quiet end for 
a reign so steeped in violence. Her son Ratimatu immediately reopened the country, but the legacy 
of his mother was indelible. To this day, she remains one of history’s most complex figures. Was 
she a bloodthirsty, paranoid tyrant? Or was she a pragmatic nationalist, a decolonizer before her 
time? who understood that the only way to fight the brutality of colonialism was with a brutal 
defense of her own. The answer is likely both. So, sleep well, dear dreamer, and remember the tale of 
the ruthless queen, a story that reminds us that power is a double-edged sword, and the line 
between a monster and a savior is sometimes written only by the survivors. We now turn from 
the follys of individual minds to a crime of continental scale, an atrocity engineered not by 
a man man, but by a king of chilling, calculated greed. He was a modern monarch in a civilized 
European court who built his fortune on a mountain of skulls. He was King Leupold of Belgium. In the 
late 19th century, as the great powers of Europe carved up Africa in a frenzy of colonial ambition, 
the small nation of Belgium had been left behind. Its king, Leopold 2, watched with burning envy. He 
was a man of immense ambition, trapped in a minor kingdom. He believed that greatness was measured 
in overseas possessions, and he was determined to have an empire of his own by any means necessary. 
His target was the vast mysterious Congo River basin. At the Berlin Conference of 1884, a meeting 
where European leaders drew lines on maps of a continent they barely knew, Liupold performed 
a master stroke of public relations. He did not ask for a colony. He asked to be the steward of 
a humanitarian project. He promised to create the Congo Free State, a territory 76 times the size 
of Belgium, dedicated to protecting the native inhabitants from Arab slave traders, opening 
the heart of Africa to Christian missionaries, and establishing free trade. He presented himself 
as a philanthropist, a noble king, bringing light to the dark continent. The world applauded his 
vision. It was all a lie. The Congo Free State was not a Belgian colony, nor was it free. It was the 
world’s first and only privatelyowned continent, the personal property of King Leupold, too. And 
he would rule it not as a king, but as a slave master. The charade of philanthropy quickly 
dissolved into a nightmare of exploitation. The true treasure of the Congo was not its 
people, but its resources. First, it was ivory. Then with the invention of the inflatable bicycle 
tire and the automobile, a global boom in rubber created an insatiable demand. The Congo was rich 
with wild rubber vines and Liupold saw his chance for unimaginable wealth. He declared all vacant 
land, which was virtually the entire country, to be his own, and he unleashed a private 
army, the force public, to enforce his will. This army was made up of Belgian officers 
commanding native soldiers, often kidnapped from their own villages and brutalized into submission. 
Their task was to force every congalles man, woman, and child to meet impossible quotas of 
rubber collection. The system they created was a vision of hell on earth. Villages were given 
quotas. To meet them, men were forced deep into the jungle for weeks at a time, often dying of 
starvation or disease. If they failed to bring back enough rubber, their wives and children were 
held hostage, starved, or mutilated. The signature atrocity of Liupold’s regime was the severing of 
hands. To prove they were not wasting bullets on hunting animals, soldiers of the force public were 
required to bring back the right hand of every person they killed. When quotas weren’t met, they 
would simply cut the hands off living men, women, and even small children. The condo became 
a vast labor camp. Villages were burned, populations were massacred, and a society was 
systematically destroyed. The death toll was apocalyptic. Historians estimate that in 
the 23 years of Liupold’s personal rule, the population of the Congo was reduced by as much 
as 50%. Between 10 and 15 million people died from murder, starvation, exhaustion, and disease. 
It was a genocide fueled by greed. For years, Liupold concealed his crimes behind a wall of 
propaganda. But the truth began to leak out. Missionaries, shipping clerks, and disillusioned 
officials began to tell stories of the horror. An English journalist named Ed Morell and 
a British diplomat named Roger Caseaseman launched the world’s first major international 
human rights campaign. Armed with photographs of mutilated children and firsthand testimony, 
they exposed Leopold’s charade to the world. The international outcry was so immense that 
in 1908, Liupold was forced to sell his private continent to the Belgian state. He died a year 
later, one of the richest men in the world, having never set foot in the Congo and never 
facing a single day of justice for his crimes. He used his blood money to adorn Belgium with 
grand parks and museums, earning the nickname the builder king from a public who remained 
largely ignorant of the source of his wealth. So sleep well, dear dreamer, and remember the 
story of the king who owned a continent, for it is a chilling lesson that the greatest of evils 
are often committed not with a crazed scream, but with the quiet, calm signature on a balance 
sheet. Our final journey takes us back to the heart of Rome to an emperor who inherited a golden 
age and chose to trade it for the fleeting glory of the circus. He was the son of a philosopher 
who chose to live as a beast. He was Comeodus, the gladiator emperor. In the year 161C, a child 
was born who represented the culmination of an era. He was Comeodus, the son of the great Marcus 
Orurelius, the last of the five good emperors. For nearly a century, Rome had been ruled by wise 
adopted heirs who had brought it to the zenith of its power and prosperity. Comeodus was the first 
emperor in a 100 years to be born in the purple, the natural son of a reigning monarch. He was 
the heir to a philosopher king and the hopes of the entire empire rested on his shoulders. He 
grew up on the northern frontier surrounded by the grim reality of his father’s wars against the 
Germanic tribes. But while Marcus Aurelius was a man of duty, discipline, and stoic philosophy, 
his son was a creature of vanity, indulgence, and profound narcissism. The father’s virtues did 
not pass to the son. In 180, Marcus Aurelius died, likely from the plague, in his military camp. 
His final act was to commend his son to his most trusted advisers, begging him to complete the war, 
and secure the empire’s borders. Comedus did the opposite. Within weeks, he declared victory, 
signed a hasty and dishonorable peace treaty, and abandoned his father’s life’s work. His only 
desire was to return to Rome and bask in the glory he had not earned. His reign was a study in 
imperial neglect. He had no interest in governing, in law, or in the military. He handed the reigns 
of the empire to a series of corrupt favorites who bled the treasury dry and terrorized the 
Senate while Comeodus indulged his fantasies. He saw himself not as a statesman but as 
a celebrity, a physical god who deserved the adoration of the masses. His true passion, 
the obsession that would define his reign and seal his infamy, was the gladiatorial arena. He 
became convinced that he was the reincarnation of the demigod Hercules. He began appearing in 
public dressed in a lion skin carrying a club. This obsession soon moved from costume to combat. 
Comedus, the emperor of Rome, began to perform in the coliseum as a gladiator. It was a spectacle of 
profound shame for the Roman elite. The emperor, the sacred heart of the empire, was debasing 
himself in an entertainment meant for slaves and criminals. His performances were a carefully 
staged farce. He would fight terrified, often crippled opponents who were armed 
with wooden swords or slaughter helpless exotic animals like giraffes and ostriches 
from a safe platform. For each appearance, he charged the Roman treasury an exorbitant fee, 
bankrupting the state to applaud his own ego. His megalamania grew with each performance. He renamed 
Rome Colonia Commodana. He renamed the months of the year after his own various titles. The Senate, 
terrified of his paranoia and his executioner, was forced to declare him a living god. He was 
no longer an emperor. He was the star of his own grotesque empirewide reality show. But an emperor 
who rules by fear will eventually be consumed by it. By 192 C, his inner circle had had enough. 
His mistress, his chamberlain, and the prefect of the Pritorian Guard conspired to kill him. On 
New Year’s Eve, they gave him poison wine. But Comeodus, having vomited up the poison, survived. 
Desperate, the conspirators sent in the one man the emperor trusted completely, his personal 
wrestling partner, an athlete named Narcissus. He found the emperor in his bath and with the 
strength of a professional wrestler strangled the life out of the man who called himself Hercules. 
His death was celebrated. The Senate immediately declared him a public enemy and his statues were 
torn down. The golden age of the Antonyines was over and the reign of Comedus had plunged 
the Roman Empire into a new era of civil war and instability from which it would never fully 
recover. So sleep well, dear dreamer, and remember the tale of the gladiator emperor. It is the 
final tragic lesson that the greatest empire in the world can be brought to ruin not by a foreign 
army, but by the rod of narcissism when a man who is given everything chooses to be nothing more 
than a bloody spectacle. And so our chronicle of chaos comes to a close. We have walked through the 
blood soaked halls of history. From the paranoid palaces of Rome to the frozen courts of Russia, 
from the shores of a stolen continent to the heart of a holy sea. We have seen how the crown can be 
a poison, how absolute power can forge a monster, and how the legacy of a single terrible rain 
can leave scars that last for centuries. These are the ghosts of history, the cautionary 
tales that whisper to us from the pages of the past. They remind us that the throne is 
only as noble as the one who sits upon it, and that the darkest shadows are often cast by 
the brightest crowns. Thank you for joining us on this long journey into the night. But history 
is a vast and haunted landscape, and our list is far from complete. Who do you believe was the 
worst ruler of all time? Was there a monster we failed to mention? Let us know in the comments 
below. The discussion is often as fascinating as the history itself. If you appreciate these 
deeper dives into the shadows of the past, a like is always a welcome signal for us to continue. 
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miss our next descent into history’s forgotten chapters. Until next time, sleep well and may 
your dreams be more peaceful than their rains.