so, whos your favorite crappy leader of history?

[Xen]

the title say it all, what is your favorite bumbling disgracew of a national leader BEFORE MODERN TIMES- just to make this safe, lets say pre-industrial times...

I'll post my ownb list later, as I havent decided on y top three yet

 

[SeleucusNicator]

Elagabalus.

 

[Ossric]

The Persian king that fought against Alexander The Great, Darius III.

 

[privatehudson]

Ambrose Burnside was always my favourite overall, but since he's post industrial and I know next to damn all about pre-industrial wars except overall details I couldn't even begin to answer that question...

 

[Esckey]

I was going to go with Herman Goering(Luftwaffe supreme commander in WW2 he's not a supreme leader but my favorite idiot of a leader) but this is pre-indust so I'm going with.............................................I can't think of the guy now. He's ancient greek

 

[Mongoloid Cow]

The best thread title I've seen in ages

Elagabulus was crappy and pretty funny so I pick him.

Originally posted by Ossric
The Persian king that fought against Alexander The Great, Darius III.

I don't reckon he was a crappy leader; just unfortunate. He inherited a much-weakened kingdom following the double regicides of the eunuch Bagoas and was rebuilding his empire when he was attacked by a far superior army. Also, he came close to defeating Alexander the Great several times; just unfortunate circumstances resulted in his defeat and his title 'the Doomed'

 

[Djarum Kretek]

Originally posted by Mongoloid Cow

Elagabulus was crappy and pretty funny so I pick him.

Uhm... sorry to ask this....

Who is Elagabulus? His name already sounds funny... Why is he a crappy leader?

 

[Mescalhead]

I would agree with notion Elagabulus being the worst, but he was just a puppet to Julia Measa. She is who I would nominate with Caracalla being a close second.

 

[Al Zan]

Hiter(spelling) he kill Germany as world power!

 

[Xen]

Originally posted by Al Zan
Hiter(spelling) he kill Germany as world power!

please read the first post, I said PRE-INDUSTRIAL

 

[privatehudson]

Which spoils half the fun

 

[Ossric]

yeah, otherwise i could pick general Custer to name one...

 

[Sims2789]

Louis XIV. he was the king of France before the first republic, right?

 

[Al Zan]

Originally posted by Xen


please read the first post, I said PRE-INDUSTRIAL

sorry for that i dumb!

 

[Hayek]

Originally posted by sims2789
Louis XIV. he was the king of France before the first republic, right?

I think you're refering to Louis XVI (16th).

 

[Mongoloid Cow]

Originally posted by Djarum Kretek
Uhm... sorry to ask this....

Who is Elagabulus? His name already sounds funny... Why is he a crappy leader?

I *think* Kafka wrote something about him in another thread, but it could have been anyone else.

Basically he was the High Priest of El-Gabal in Emesa (Syria), in those times an autonomous theocratic state. He became emperor but being a horny teenage transvestite who spent most of the treasury on luxuries he was pretty shocking. His mother tended to rule the Empire and she was a b!tch to say the least. He was killed in a revolt.

 

[privatehudson]

Originally posted by Hayek

I think you're refering to Louis XVI (16th).

Yup, IIRC the XIV was the sun king, not exactly a blundering fool really.

 

[Pangur Bán]

Nero. He wasn't all that bad you know. Most of the stuff ascribed to him is absolute garbage. Trajan said that the first 5 years of Nero's reign was a golden age. His foreign wars went well. He spent a lot on the arts and on great monuments, which, had they survived, we would have praised him for. But his excitable side made him offensive to the Roman aristocracy, who went on the slander him and tarnish his memory. He's my favorite because he gets a bad deal, but most people still think of him as a crappy ruler!


Charles the Bold, the last Duke of Burgundy, is probably up there too. When he met Emperor Frederick III to arrange a marriage, he demanded that Frederick make him a king. The Emperor, not wishing to offend the French, was chased down the Rhine. He got away, and so the Burgundian dukes never became kings. All the renaissance dukes of Burgundy are funny, but Charles was the crappiest!

 

[samildanach]

Since we are onto to Romans and I'm suprised this guy wasn't being derided by Xen in his first post-he must be going soft- my choice is the most excellent Flavius Honorius

 

[Kafka2]

Aha. My specialist subject.

Elagabulus certainly was entertainingly useless, and shagged anything that could climb out of a bucket, but at least he never brought a nation to its knees.

Here are a few contenders extracted from "Historical Filth" aricles-

Commodus 161- 192 AD. Rome.

The Romans, to their credit, weren't that sold on the idea of strict hereditary monarchy. For long periods Emperors were chosen on merit rather than through accident of birth, such as the 80 years preceding the accession of Commodus. Those 80 years saw some rather good Emperors as a result.
Commodus changed all that. He was groomed to succeed his father from infancy, but his reign resulted in him being used as the bad guy in the film "Gladiator". He was one of the very worst- mad, cruel, arbitrary and vicious.
The edited lowlights of Commodus' reign are as follows. He kept a harem of 300 women and girls and 300 boys (a sizeable proportion of them kidnap victims) for his immense orgies. He also sold public offices to the highest bidder, appointing 25 consuls in a single year.
However he's best known for his gladiatorial exploits. Commodus' own claim was that he had slain 12,000 men in combat. This figure is explained by the fact that his opponents in the ring were provided with light wooden "swords", or were tied up or hamstrung before meeting the armed-to-the-teeth emperor. In one day he killed 100 bears- all of which were firmly tied up, the crowd struggling to suppress their laughter at the deranged emperor's firm belief in his own heroics.
He was jealous of these exploits too. On hearing that a gladiator named Julius Alexander had killed a raging lion with a single javelin, he had him executed. The public really started to lose patience with him when he demanded one million sesterces from the gladiatorial fund for every appearance. Finally he pushed his luck too far and was strangled by a wrestler.



James V (reigned 1513- 1542) Scotland . Became King aged 17 months, he is described as a "cruel man" (and that's by the standards of 16th century royalty who were, nearly to a man, murderous butchers). Had Janet, Lady Glamis (ancestor of the late Queen Mother) tortured burned at stake for witchcraft because he was feuding with her husband.James V, even by the standards of the Scottish kings, was a really warped and vicious man. His grudge against the Douglas family stems from the fact the he really didn't see eye-to-eye with his stepfather, Archibald Douglas. This may have something to do with the fact that Douglas kept James a virtual prisoner and effectively ruled Scotland, and this could leave anyone a bit twitchy and dysfunctional, but let's not get too sympathetic to the murderous little ****, shall we?
The unfortunate Janet was Archibald Douglas's sister. As soon as Lord Glamis popped his clogs, James seized Glamis Castle and had Janet and little John locked in a cell. By 1537 the incarceration in darkness had left Janet nearly blind, but the incredibly venomous James hadn't finished yet. He accused Janet and John of witchcraft, obtaining confessions by torturing them both, along with all of their servants. He made of point of torturing Janet in front of her son. In 1537, Janet was burned alive at the stake.
John too was sentenced to death, but the sentence was not carried out, probably because James was quite clearly going insane. He then kicked off a reign of terror in Scotland, but made the classic mistake that many other Scottish Kings made- he attempted to invade England. His army was routed by Henry VIII's forces at Solway Moss, and James promptly went insane, and died shortly after at the age of 30.


Carlos II 1661- 1700 Spain.

Ah, yes. The Habsburgs. Their genetic legacy polluted just about all of the European aristocracy at some point, and that's why Euro royals tend to look the way they do. In short- a right old bunch of munters. You've only got to sneak a glance at Prince Michael of Kent to spot a distinct hint of Habsburg throwback.

The Habsburgs built their power through some well-chosen dynastic marriages. Having gained control of the Holy Roman Empire and Spain, they then had a brainwave. Further dynastic marriages could provide an advantage to rival noble houses, just as they had to the Habsburgs, but what if they started keeping the weddings "in-house", so to speak? A handy niece here, a first cousin there, a maiden aunt somewhere else....

Carlos II was the crowning glory of this rampant inbreeding. His "Habsburg jaw" was so deformed that he could barely eat. His tongue was so large that he could barely speak. His body resembled that of an invalid child, he could barely walk and he had a huge and mis-shapen head. To top it all, he was ******ed. Worse still for the Habsburgs, he was both chronically impotent and a sufferer of spontaneous premature ejaculation, and the efforts of teams of physicians and two wives were unsuccessful in getting Carlos to play "hide the sausage" successfully. The male line of the Spanish Habsburgs ended there. Closely followed by strife, war, misery, etc.....


Cheng-Te 1491- 1521. China.

The Chinese emperors were so wonderfully decadent. All that absolute power over countless millions tended to go to their heads in truly spectacular fashion. Cheng-te is an old favourite of mine. Now Cheng-te took one look at the whole business of running a country and decided that he really couldn't be arsed with it, so he handed over power to his court eunuchs, lock stock and barrel. Anyone recalling the Historical filth article "Eunuchs with balls" will know that massive corruption and reigns of terror resulted.
Meanwhile, Cheng-te got himself a hobby. He would travel around China in disguise and strike up conversations with people, trying to lure them into saying something vaguely critical about the emperor. If they did, he'd have the entire village crucified, burned or buried alive. He like his pleasure boats too, and all of China breathed a sigh of relief when he ended up at the bottom of the sea in one.


Ibrahim 1616- 1648. The Ottoman Empire

Background info- when an Ottoman Emperor succeeded, he tended to either kill all his brothers or lock them up in a palatial prison called "Kafes". Here they would be left with just a large selection of concubines who practised strict birth control under pain of death. This was considered to be the humane alternative to being killed, but the drawback was that if they subsequently became Emperor they tended to be fairly ill-equipped to deal with anything that wasn't actually lying in front of them with legs spread.

Ibrahim is the classic example. Making up for the fact that he's spent his first 23 years locked up he went on a bender of mammoth proportions, but started to suffer from impotence with accessible women and could only be aroused by unavailable women, such as the wives and daughters of powerful muftis. He tended to solve this problem by kidnapping and raping them.

Ibrahim had a son, Mehmed, but didn't like him much and preferred other people's sons. He made an unsuccessful attempt to drown Mehmed when his son was just a baby, and while Mehmed was still a little boy Ibrahim stabbed him in the face with a dagger for making a poor joke. Amazingly Mehmed survived to succeed his father.

Faced with his increasingly frequent impotence, Ibrahim started looking for new pleasure. He became so enraptured with the appearance of a wild cow's genitals that he had them cast in gold and conducted a massive search for a woman possessing similar "lady bits". On finding her (the 150 kilo Sechir Para) he took her as his favourite. It was at Sechir Para's urging that he had his 280 harem women drowned in the Bosphorus.

Ibrahim was finally deposed by a Grand Mufti who objected to the fact that Ibrahim had raped his daughter. He was imprisoned, and strangled shortly after.


Don Carlos 1545- 1568. Spain.

Let's talk about great-grandparents, shall we? Normal people have eight great-grandparents. Don Carlos, however, didn't. Don Carlos only had four great-grandparents. Two of whom were sisters. That's serious inbreeding, the like of which is rarely seen outside of the Appalachians, or Norfolk.

If that's not bad enough one of Don Carlos' great-grandmothers was Juana "The mad" of Castile, an heir of the Portuguese royals who specialised in their own distinctive brand of hereditary insanity. Yup- you guessed it. Don Carlos was another Habsburg.

Of course, that means young Don Carlos already had to contend with insanity, facial deformity and low intelligence- like so many other Habsburg nobles. However he also had much more up his sleeve. He was a hunchback, pigeon-breasted and had one leg shorter than the other. Worse still was the fact that he had a violent temper and a seriously sadistic nature. This became obvious from an early age, because he loved torturing animals, children and servants- he was particularly fond of genital mutilation. This reached a head when he broke into the royal stables and maimed the horses so badly that 20 died.

He showed little interest in conventional sexual relations with women, but in keeping with his trend for sadism he loved beating them. This pretty much ruled out any chance of him continuing the line. Don Carlos never became king- he was suspected of plotting against his father Philip II, who had his nutter son locked up. The vicious little git died shortly after, and in keeping with Habsburg tradition Philip II commemorated the occasion by marrying his niece. There's nothing sweeter than a family that sticks together.

My personal pick would be one who might just be excluded-

Francisco Solano Lopez 1827- 1870

One of the worst rulers of all time, young Francisco watched his father steadily build up Paraguay's military power, and became over-confident. Pausing briefly to marry Eliza Lynch (an Irish prostitute) he started making aggressive interventions in the war between Brazil and Uruguay, which resulted in him declaring war and invading Brazil in 1864. When Argentina refused to allow Paraguayan troops to move through their territory, Lopez declared war on them too. Finally the new Uruguayan puppet government declared war on Paraguay, which meant that Paraguay was at war with nearly all of its neighbours simultaneously, hopelessly outnumbered and out-gunned.
Within two years, suicidal attempts to invade Brazil and Argentina had shattered the Paraguayan army and the country was being invaded from all directions. Massacres and disease decimated the population. Frantic Paraguayan Generals tried to persuade Lopez to seek peace, but he refused to stop fighting and had them all executed (usually by having them tied to anthills to be eaten alive by the ants). When his 70 year old mother and two sisters tried to make him see reason, he had them all repeatedly beaten savagely and kept them nailed into wooden crates, from which they were only removed for further beatings. His two brothers and two brothers-in-law were executed.
Finally, and mercifully, Lopez was killed in battle. The War of the Triple Alliance caused the death of an estimated 70% of Paraguay's population (over 90% of the male population), making it pro rata the bloodiest war ever. By the final days, the Paraguayan army consisted of children as young as six attacking enemy artillery placements with clods of earth.