History's 9 Most Insane Rulers

Scott Rank

• Publisher: Regnery History
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9781684510061
• eBook ISBN: 9781684510252
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Political Biographies
• Index: History

Madness and Power. Can the insane rule? Can insanity be a leadership quality? Scott Rank says yes (well, sometimes) in this fascinating look at nine of history's most notorious rulers, from the Roman emperor Caligula to the North Korean Communist dictator Kim Jong-il. Rank paints intimate portraits of these deeply flawed but powerful men, examining the role that madness played in their lives, the repercussions of their madness on history, and what their madness can tell us about the times in which they lived. In History's 9 Most Insane Rulers, you will meet: • King Charles VI of France, who thought he was made of glass
• Sultan Ibrahim I, who was driven mad by the sadistic succession battles of the Ottoman Empire
• Caligula, who built temples to himself and whose reign highlighted the lethal tensions between the power of the new Imperial Rome and the prerogatives of the old Roman Republic
• The Russian tsar who became known as Ivan "the Terrible"
• King George III of Britain, who not only lost his American colonies, but lost his mind as well
• Bavaria's "Mad" King Ludwig II, who left the world richer for his fabulous fairy tale castles and his patronage of the composer Richard Wagner Insane rulers did not die off with the last of the mad monarchs who inherited their power. Rank also examines the rise to power of crazed modern rulers, such as Idi Amin, who began as a lowly army cook and rose to the presidency of Uganda, and Saparmurat Niyazov, who ruled Turkmenistan and promoted a bizarre cult of personality around himself. Both entertaining and illuminating, History's 9 Most Insane Rulers is a must-read for anyone interested in the role insanity has played in history.

CHAPTER ONE ROMAN EMPEROR GAIUS CALIGULA

AD 12—AD 41

When Salvador Dalí set out to paint a depiction of the infamous Roman emperor Caligula in 1971, he chose to depict the thing nearest and dearest to the emperor’s heart: his favorite racehorse, Incitatus. The painting Le Cheval de Caligula shows the pampered pony in all his royal glory. It is wearing a bejeweled crown and clothed in purple blankets. While the gaudy clothing of the horse is historically correct, the Spanish surrealist artist managed perhaps for the only time to understate the strangeness of his subject matter.

Gaius Julius Caesar Augustus Germanicus (Caligula) was born in AD 12 and reigned from 37–41. He was the first emperor with no memory of the pre-Augustan era—that is, before emperors were deified—and had no compunction about being worshipped as a god. As the object of a cultus, the boy emperor believed in his own semidivine status and saw no reason not to follow whatever strange desire entered his mind, such as treating his horse better than royalty. The Roman historian Suetonius writes that Caligula gave the horse eighteen servants, a marble stable, an ivory manger, and rich red robes. He demanded that it be fed oats mixed with flecks of gold and wine in fine goblets. Dignitaries bowed and tolerated Incitatus as a guest of honor at banquets. Caligula repeatedly mocked the system of imperial decorum in Roman upper-crust society. His actions would eventually lead to his violent death at the hands of political rivals.

The emperor was not called Caligula in his lifetime but instead by the formal title Gaius; the epithet Caligula (“Little Soldier’s Boots”—a demeaning name from his infancy when his mother Agrippina dressed him in miniature soldiers’ outfits) was used after his death. In his four years as emperor, he built a religious cult around himself, satisfied every sexual desire imaginable (and unimaginable), all while emptying the imperial treasury. Mostly, he did this to antagonize Roman senators and patricians.

More recent studies have taken a sympathetic view of his reign, suggesting that Caligula repeatedly insulted the members of the Roman aristocracy to marginalize them and return Rome to its pre–Augustan era status quo. But, as this thesis goes, he failed, and his enemies wrote the histories of this period, leading to his unfair maligning.

Other biographers take a less sympathetic view of his reign. Anthony Barrett writes that if Caligula was mad, he was not an insane ruler along the lines of Ludwig of Bavaria (an unhinged but harmless ruler who kept to his castles that looked straight out of a fairy tale), but a much more frightening, iron-fisted, Stalinesque figure, capable of rational decisions and statesmanlike acts (when it suited him), but morally cold to the financially ruinous and murderous impact his choices had on others.¹ He was a profligate spender who seized more money than any previous emperor. Only a few months into his reign, he managed to waste the entire fortune left by Tiberius, a sum it had taken the former emperor twenty-two years to collect in tribute. Caligula spent the funds on three-month-long inaugural celebrations, accompanied by over 160,000 animal sacrifices.

For Caligula to elevate himself to an object of worship was not unprecedented in the ancient world (the practice has a long history, especially in ancient Egypt and Mesopotamia). However, no previous Roman emperor had ever claimed divinity for himself. Julius Caesar and Augustus were deified after their deaths, but Caligula fully embraced emperor worship and encouraged others to worship him as a god in his lifetime. While earlier emperors tolerated this practice, he allowed and promoted it in the Roman provinces. Caligula tried to commission a huge statue of himself inside the Temple in Jerusalem, the center of Jewish worship. This action would have nearly guaranteed a revolt from the Jews, who would have considered the construction a pagan slap in the face of their religion. Even Herod Agrippa, a descendant of the man who according to the traditional biblical account slaughtered dozens of infants in a failed attempt to kill Jesus, considered this a terrible idea and convinced the emperor to relent.

He began by likening himself to demigods such as Hercules and Bacchus, but then he went further and entered the sacred space of the supreme deities of the Roman world, claiming a seat with Mercury, Apollo, and Mars.² Roman historian Philo writes that Caligula convinced himself of his divinity by the bizarre rationale that as the leader of men, he was as much above them as a human shepherd was above his animal flock; it was “fitting that I who am the leader of the most excellent of all herds, namely the race of mankind, should be considered as a being of superior nature, and not merely human, but as one who has received a greater and more holy portion.”³

Believing in his own deity, Caligula brutalized Roman citizens of high rank by sending them to prison for insulting his vanity. He once burned alive an author of Atellan farces in front of a crowded amphitheater as punishment for a double entendre he had made about Caligula. He disfigured men with branding irons and condemned them to work in the mines or build roads. He shut others up in cages on all fours like animals or had them sentenced to death by sawing.⁴

Caligula’s terrible reputation made chroniclers depict him as a physically monstrous creature that was part man, part goat, a creature of uncontrolled lust and energy. Suetonius describes him as very tall and extremely pale, with an unshapely body but a thin neck and legs. His eyes were hollow, his forehead “broad and grim,” his head crowned with male-pattern baldness, even though his body was hirsute. “Because of this to look upon him from a higher place as he passed by, or for any reason whatever to mention a goat, was treated as a capital offense.” His outer ugliness was a reflection of his inner barbarity, and he labored to make his appearance worse: “While his face was naturally forbidding and ugly, he purposely made it even more savage, practicing all kinds of terrible and fearsome expressions before a mirror.”⁵

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Gaius Caligula was the third child born to Germanicus (a Roman general and adopted son of the emperor Tiberius) and a grandson of the emperor Augustus on his mother’s side. He grew up around rough soldiers and stern officers; when Caligula was a small child he lived with his parents on the Rhine frontier, where his father Germanicus was forced to deal with unrest among troops. Germanicus responded to the mutiny by mass executing the ringleaders in public. Young Caligula witnessed the spectacle. He remained in the Rhine war zone until the age of four.⁶

Germanicus died three years later under mysterious circumstances, putting Caligula, his family, and his mother Agrippina at the mercy of his adoptive grandfather, Tiberius. They were now one coup away from losing their protection and having an enemy political faction kill them. Shortly after Germanicus’s death, Caligula went to live with his great-grandmother (and Tiberius’s mother) Livia. When she died two years later, he went to live with his grandmother, Antonia. Caligula’s absence from the court of Tiberius was a blessing, as his family was mostly exiled and killed; his brother Nero (not the emperor) died in exile, and his other brother, Drusus Caesar, was imprisoned on charges of treason.

When the emperor Tiberius took ill and secluded himself on the island of Capri in AD 31, he remanded Caligula to help him on the island. Meanwhile, his mother and brother Drusus had died in prison. Suetonius claims that Caligula showed no remorse at the death of his family and remained opportunistically obedient to Tiberius—noting that “no one had ever been a better slave or a worse master.”⁷ Tiberius granted him an honorary quaestorship, or public office, in AD 33.

An observer said that even in his illness, Tiberius could tell that Caligula, whom he had appointed joint successor in AD 35 along with his grandson Tiberius Gemellus, was not suitable to reign. The emperor later referred to him as a viper unleashed on Rome. When Tiberius died in AD 37, Caligula and Gemellus received his estate and titles in order to serve as joint heirs of the Roman Empire. Factions quickly formed. The Praetorian prefect Macro, who led the imperial guard, sided with Caligula. He had Tiberius’s will nullified to remove Gemellus, ironically on grounds of insanity. Caligula assumed sole powers of the principate, a term for the early Roman Empire, and triumphantly entered Rome.

Crowds received their new emperor with open arms, based on affection for his father Germanicus. Philo of Alexandria described Caligula as the first emperor beloved by “all the world, from the rising to the setting sun.” The people were hopeful for a ruler who would demonstrate more warmth and charity than Tiberius had. Tiberius was a gifted military commander but a poor politician and a paranoid loner who used charges of treason to exile or execute anyone he suspected of disloyalty.

The beginning of Caligula’s rule went well. He tried to right the wrongs of Tiberius and ended the deceased emperor’s treason trials that were still open. He paid off all the former emperor’s debts. He recalled all those whom Tiberius had exiled and compensated those whom he thought had been wrongly taxed. To shore up political support, Caligula gave the Praetorian guard, the city troops, and the army outside Italy all a significant bonus. He also honored his slain family by retrieving their bodies and giving them a proper Roman burial in the tomb of Augustus.

Not long into his reign, however, he fell ill and slipped into a coma. When he awoke, he was a completely different man. Roman biographers mark his awakening as a turning point in his reign. His narcissism grew and his empathy diminished. Whatever concern Caligula had for the welfare of his empire, it was swallowed by his vanity. He began to treat the state treasury like his own personal expense account. One biography of the emperor estimates that when Tiberius passed away, the treasury held approximately 2.7 billion sesterces, or five to six years of revenue.⁸ These funds were depleted before the end of Caligula’s first year of rule.⁹

Caligula quickly ratcheted up his honorary titles, accumulating more than a Hapsburg count who ruled kingdoms, territories, and duchies. He began with Pius (Pious), Castrorum Filius (Child of the Camp), Pater Exercituum (Father of the Armies), and Optimus Maximus Caesar (Greatest and Best of Caesars). These excessive titles were soon not enough. Caligula, as Suetonius notes, overheard several kings who had come to Rome to pay their respects to him. At dinner, they disputed the nobility of their descent. Caligula cried, “Let there be one lord, one king.” He began from that time to claim kingship and divine majesty. Caligula ordered that Greek statues of the gods famous for their sanctity or artistic merit, including one of Jupiter of Olympia, be moved to Rome, have their heads removed, and have his put in their place. To religious Romans, this would be equivalent to a modern-day Catholic seeing a new pope declare that icons of saints should have their heads destroyed and replaced with his own.

The young emperor also transformed other Roman holy items to bear his likeness. Suetonius writes that Caligula extended a part of the palace as far as the Roman Forum and turned the temple of Castor and Pollux, a sacred site built to commemorate a 484 BC military victory, into a vestibule. He often took his place between statues of the demigod sons of Zeus to be worshipped. To make matters worse, he set up a temple solely for worship of himself, attended by priests. In the temple was a life-size statue of him in gold.¹⁰

The grossest display of Caligula’s twisted sense of grandeur came from his attempt to mimic Xerxes’s Pontoon Bridges. Greek historian Herodotus describes this “bridge” in his Histories as a row of ships that allowed the Persian ruler to cross the Hellespont, the strait separating Anatolia from Greece, which he did in 480 BC during the second Persian invasion of the Greek peninsula. Caligula, as recounted in the works of Suetonius and fellow historian Dio, decided to copy Xerxes’s legendary crossing to project the image of a conquering hero to his subjects. He ordered the construction of the Bridge of Baiae, by which the gap between the mole of Puteoli (a pier formed of large stones and earth) and the Gulf of Baiae, a distance of three miles, was bridged by bringing together merchant ships and anchoring them in a double line, heaping a mound of earth on them and fashioning the structure in the style of the Appian Way, a major Roman road. Caligula rode over this bridge back and forth for two successive days. On the first day, he rode a richly decorated horse, himself adorned with a crown made of oak leaves, along with a buckler, a sword, and a cloak made of golden cloth. On the second day, he wore the dress of a charioteer in a vehicle drawn by a pair of horses, carrying before him a hostage boy from the Parthian Empire, Rome’s eastern enemy.

On the bridge were rooms and even whole houses with drinking water in them. While Caligula rode across these ships in his gorgeous raiment, he gave a banquet to his men but in the end hurled many guests off the bridge into the sea; many drowned. The entire Praetorian guard was called to attend this spectacle, along with a company of his friends in Gallic chariots. Caligula believed himself to have outdone Xerxes, since the Hellespont was much narrower than the gap between Baiae and the mole at Puteoli. Caligula may have also done this to inspire fear in the northern European provinces of Germania and Britannia (ancient analogues to Germany and Britain), which he had designs to conquer, by demonstrating his construction abilities and showing off his “military prowess.”

Classicist M. P. Charlesworth doubts Dio’s and Suetonius’s accounts of the Bridge of Baiae. He considers the latter prone to basing his stories on the wildest gossip about Caligula (including stories of Caligula committing habitual incest with all three of his sisters, or wallowing in gold, or planning for universal poisoning). Simple physics also refutes the boat bridge story. Bridging the three-mile distance between Puteoli and Baiae would be impossible due to the number of ships needed. Deploying so many ships would bankrupt the empire. Dio at least acknowledged the complications of this shipping project; he wrote that so many boats were requisitioned that it disturbed the Mediterranean importing of grain from Egypt to Italy, triggering a famine. Different writers also place this story at separate times in Caligula’s reign: Josephus and Seneca place the story a few months before Caligula’s assassination; Dio and Suetonius put it two years into his four-year reign. While it is plausible that Caligula was mad enough to try to outdo Xerxes with a boat bridge, the fantastic details make the facts of the story unlikely.¹¹

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Whatever the historicity of Caligula’s Bridge of Baiae, Suetonius rattles off other examples of Caligula’s “innate” madness and brutality. Gladiatorial shows were notably violent under his rule. For the spectacle wild beasts were fed cattle, but the empero...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Dedication
• Introduction
• Chapter One: Roman Emperor Gaius Caligula
• Chapter Two: King Charles VI of France
• Chapter Three: Russian Tsar Ivan the Terrible
• Chapter Four: Ottoman Sultan Ibrahim I
• Chapter Five: King George III of England
• Chapter Six: King Ludwig II of Bavaria
• Chapter Seven: President Idi Amin of Uganda
• Chapter Eight: President Saparmurat Niyazov of Turkmenistan
• Chapter Nine: Supreme Leader Kim Jong-il of North Korea
• Conclusion
• Acknowledgments
• About the Author
• Notes
• Index
• Copyright