Ruthless/Evil Kings/Rulers of History

[daft]

Let's see if this topic better suits the audience.
Especially looking for names of famous antiheroes of high standing among their people during their time/reign but not restricted to it. Lets see how they compare and try to determine who was the worst.
Of course some of you will elect Hitler, but is that really the case?

to moderator: Please remove if discussed before (likely). ty.

 

[sydhe]

I'd pick Stalin before Hitler. And I'm sure the people of Samarkand loved Timur as he went from country to country building pyramids out of people's heads. (Mostly Muslim heads at that, except maybe in India.) He did manage to lead a sizable empire to his immediate successors, which is more than Attila accomplished.

 

[Louis XXIV]

Evil is a word I hesitate to use when describing historical figures, particularly heads of state. But, if I were to use it, I would reserve it for those whose actions were considered abhorrent by standards of the time and served no legitimate purpose in advancing the interests of the state which he or she is governing. Under that standard, I tend not to call Stalin evil (although, if he weren't a historical figure but were, instead, a contemporary figure, I might very well call him that). Hitler, on the other hand, gets about as close as possible towards that end. The holocaust shocked the conscience of countries who generally weren't all that sympathetic towards Jews and served little to no legitimate purpose in helping the German state (to the extent that war was a desirable state for them, it actually hurt it by diverting resources. And, whether or not war was a good idea, certainly ineffectively fighting a war is a bad idea).

I'd like to go farther back in history, but I'll admit that a lot of individuals run into difficulties of propaganda. Were they evil or were they just hated by the historians whose work survives. Suetonius's Lives of the Twelve Caesars comes to mind there. Was Caligula, Nero, Claudius, Tiberius, or whoever evil or just disliked?

 

[Plotinus]

I'll throw in Edward III. Not exactly Hitler, but he's an interesting case of someone who was a Great Leader by the standards of his time but an aggressive warmongering psychopath by ours. For that matter one could say much the same about his son, Edward the Black Prince, and indeed Edward I as well. Basically, anyone from the Middle Ages called Edward.

 

[Kyriakos]

Not a King, but Lord of Byzantine Italy and almost Emperor (he managed to die after having won the decisive battle near Philippoi), Georgios Maniakes ^^

He was very brutal. For measure: Harald of the Sagas, who served as the leader of the Varangian guard and fought with Maniakes in the Byz reconquest of Sicily from the arabs, viewed the latter as a mountain.

I wouldnt term him 'evil', though. It was more of an 'honor' kind of thing.

Generally only the vermin usurpers are for practical purpose reduced to purely negative, in my view. Eg most of the Ducae, or the Angeloi.

 

[Knight-Dragon]

Like Louis said, 'evil' is a very relative term to use to describe persons of the past. Care shld be exercised so as not to pass moral judgement on historical personages based on the prevalent code of morality in use today.

That said... my pick will also be Hitler and his Nazis. The Jewish Holocaust is just pure evil, considering it was in the 20th century.

 

[PhroX]

That said... my pick will also be Hitler and his Nazis. The Jewish Holocaust is just pure evil, considering it was in the 20th century.

I can't disagree with this. For all that there have been some truly terrible leaders and regimes, the Nazi's were truly on another level. What really seals it for me is that even the Holocaust arguably isn't the worst of the things the Nazi's planned to do - look at the so called "Hunger Plan" for instance: they wanted to deliberatly starve pretty much the entire urban population of the western Soviet Union and ship the food that would've otherwise been eatern by said population to Germany. Had they succeded in that, at least in terms of pure casualties, we might be looking at the Holocaust almost as a footnote they way the genocide of the Jews overshadows such crimes as the killing of over a million Soviet prisoners in '41.

 

[Kyriakos]

I can't disagree with this. For all that there have been some truly terrible leaders and regimes, the Nazi's were truly on another level. What really seals it for me is that even the Holocaust arguably isn't the worst of the things the Nazi's planned to do - look at the so called "Hunger Plan" for instance: they wanted to deliberatly starve pretty much the entire urban population of the western Soviet Union and ship the food that would've otherwise been eatern by said population to Germany. Had they succeded in that, at least in terms of pure casualties, we might be looking at the Holocaust almost as a footnote they way the genocide of the Jews overshadows such crimes as the killing of over a million Soviet prisoners in '41.

It's a good thing those people magically disappeared after '45

 

[reddishrecue]

Osama Bin Laden.. he took responsibility for dropping the world trade center on 911, killing many people that were inside the twin towers and the airplanes.

 

[Ajidica]

Osama Bin Laden.. he took responsibility for dropping the world trade center on 911, killing many people that were inside the twin towers and the airplanes.

Not sure I would consider bin Laden a ruler though.

I would probably put Mobutu on the list. Absolutely vile man.

 

[Flying Pig]

Evil is a word I hesitate to use when describing historical figures, particularly heads of state. But, if I were to use it, I would reserve it for those whose actions were considered abhorrent by standards of the time and served no legitimate purpose in advancing the interests of the state which he or she is governing. Under that standard, I tend not to call Stalin evil (although, if he weren't a historical figure but were, instead, a contemporary figure, I might very well call him that). Hitler, on the other hand, gets about as close as possible towards that end. The holocaust shocked the conscience of countries who generally weren't all that sympathetic towards Jews and served little to no legitimate purpose in helping the German state (to the extent that war was a desirable state for them, it actually hurt it by diverting resources. And, whether or not war was a good idea, certainly ineffectively fighting a war is a bad idea).

I'd like to go farther back in history, but I'll admit that a lot of individuals run into difficulties of propaganda. Were they evil or were they just hated by the historians whose work survives. Suetonius's Lives of the Twelve Caesars comes to mind there. Was Caligula, Nero, Claudius, Tiberius, or whoever evil or just disliked?

If I may throw my hat into the ring on these ones, I think Roman emperors had a particularly bad time of things - essentially, their reputation seems to have boiled down to how much they respected/protected/toadied to the senators who eventually wrote the history books.

If you look at the sources on Nero with an eye to find a favourable account, it's not that difficult. He was clearly popular with the people, as there was huge mourning on his death from everyone who wasn't rich - Tacitus sneers that they were sad that they would no longer be benefiting from his largesse, but then I'm not convinced that providing for ordinary people is necessarily a vice - and several people, particularly in the East, set themselves up as Nero reborn and were acclaimed with joy for centuries after. There's a story in one of the accounts where the Senate were arguing about a law which, if passed, would give them the legal right to rescind the emancipation of any freed slave that they didn't think deserved it - they were rather upset and worried that freed slaves, former soldiers and the like were in positions of power previously unavailable to anyone without distinguished ancestors - and Nero insisted that each case be tried on its own merits.

So it's not hard to see Nero at least as an emperor who supported the interests of the majority of people over the Senate. I don't think we should immediately assume that he did this out of decency - it might just as much have been a way of leveraging power. Quite a few of Suetonius' smear stories can be read in a similar way. Several of the stories concerning 'bad' emperors, such as Domitian, who held a banquet for several senators with armed guards around and a mock-funeral theme, at which they were (wrongly) convinced they were going to be murdered, and Caligula, who apparently laughed at a banquet and said when asked why that he'd just remembered that he could have the consuls executed if he wanted to, focus on them intimidating senators and thereby trying to reduce their power in government. The famous one about Caligula threatening to make his horse a senator is a great example - no doubt it originated in a frustrated remark to the effect of 'my horse could do a better job than you lot', and is more generally indicative of an emperor (in a system where his powers were largely informal and based on a hodge-podge of precedents, laws and force) trying gradually to wrestle power away from the history-writing elite.

 

[daft]

Sorry, forgot to mention the word "Bloodiest" (leaders/rulers of history), in the thread's title, besides the ruthless one.