Unbelievable Facts - Strange Facts - Royal Rotten Rulers

Rotten Rulers

Catherine the Great of Russia was so outraged to discover the presence of dandruff on her collar that she imprisoned her hairdresser in an iron cage for three years to stop the news spreading.

Ferdinand II of Sicily was so vain that he would only permit the country to have its own postage stamps on condition that his portrait was not tarnished by an ugly franking mark.

To deter unwanted flies, King Pepi II of Egypt always kept a supply of naked slaves handy, their bodies smeared with honey.

Louis XIV of France hated washing and tool only three baths in his entire adult life. But he loved beds and owned 413 of them.

Henry VIII went off for a game of tennis while his wife, Anne Boleyn, was being beheaded.

When Russian ruler Peter the Great discovered that his wife Catherine had been unfaithful, he had the head of her lover, William Morris, chopped off and placed in a large jar of alcohol. Peter insisted that the jar remain on Catherine’s bedside table to remind her of her adultery.

Murad IV, who ruled Turkey in the 17th century, found a highly effective way of demonstrating that smoking can seriously damage your health. He ordered that anyone caught smoking be executed in the spot, and that their bodies be left where they were slain as a deterrent to others. Murad was intolerant of many things. He once had a party of female picnickers drowned because they were making too much noise.

Gustav I of Sweden hacked the royal goldsmith to death because he had the nerve to take a day off without asking.

In 1924, Pope Urban VIII threatened to excommunicate snuff users.

George IV clipped off a tiny lock of hair from each woman he slept with and kept them in individual envelopes, each bearing the owner’s name. When he died, over 7000 such envelopes were found in his bedroom.

At the court of Louis XIV, only the king and queen were allowed to sit in chairs with arms.

Vlad the Impaler was the prototype for Dracula. As well as drinking his victims’ blood, he forced wives to eat the cooked flesh of their husbands, and parents to eat their own children. He took his name from the fondness for wooden stakes. Between 1456 and 1476 it is estimated that he had over 20,000 of his enemies impaled on stakes.

King John employed a Royal Head Holder to counter seasickness. Whenever the king took to sea, servant Solomon Attefeld was on hand to hold the royal head steady. Attefeld’s devotion was rewarded with the gift of large areas of land.

Alfonso XIII of Spain was so tone deaf that he had to employ a servant to tell him when the Spanish national anthem was playing. That way, the king knew when he had to stand.

When Mahomet IV became Turkish ruler in 1648, he employed a scribe named Abdi to keep a diary of his reign. At the end of one particularly uneventful day, Mahomet learned that Abdi’s entry was blank. So the king picked up a spear and impaled Abdi with it, telling him: “Now you will have something to write about.”

Kind Edward VI was an unruly child at school but, being royal, it was not permissible to cane him. So whenever Edward was to be punished, another boy, Barnaby Fitzpatrick, stepped forward to provide a substitute bottom. So the unfortunate Fitzpatrick took the beating while the king looked on.

Henry IV had his closely cropped because it was infested with head lice.

Ivan the Terrible of Russia was so pleased with the newly built Moscow church of St Basil that he blinded the two architects so that they would never be able to come up with anything better.

Having fallen out with the Archbishop of Novgorod, Ivan the Terrible arranged for the cleric to be sewn into a bearskin and hunted down by a pack of hounds.

Ironically for one who led such a blood-thirsty life, Ivan the Terrible died playing chess.