Absolute Power. The Real Lives of Europe's Most Infamous Rulers

481 Pages·2011·4.51 MB·English

ABSOLUTE
POWER
The Real Lives of Europe's Most Infamous Rulers
C.S. Denton
This edition published in 2011 by Arcturus Publishing Limited
26/27 Bickels Yard, 151–153 Bermondsey Street,
London SE1 3HA Copyright © 2006 Arcturus Publishing Limited All rights
reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval
system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical,
photocopying, recording or otherwise, without written permission in accordance
with the provisions of the Copyright Act 1956 (as amended). Any person or
persons who do any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable
to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages.
ISBN: 978-1-84858-474-7
AD000016EN
Cover image: Ivan the Terrible © Corbis UK
Illustrations by Barrington Barber
Acknowledgements
In the two long years this book was both a job and an obsession, many people
offered me their advice and support. First I would like to thank the staff at the
Alderman Library at the University of Virginia. Without their assistance and the
resources there, my research simply wouldn't have made it very far. Also I thank
Bruce Gordon, webmaster of 'Regnal Chronologies', and Mariusz Pazdziora's
'Sovereigns, Kingdoms and Royal Landmarks of Europe'
(http://homepage.mac.com/crowns/) for providing invaluable resources of
information on dates and burial sites.
Then there are my friends who provided both moral support and editorial
insights: Michelle Branco, Matt Michaels, Lauren Martella, Keith Barber, Brad
and Jennifer Medas, Sarah Rose-Jensen, Andre Bennett, Michael Rash, Sarah
Warden, Suzanne Grub and Nathan Shumate.
Contents
ROME
Tarquin 'The Proud'
Tiberius
Caligula
Nero
Domitian
Commodus
Caracalla
Elagabalus
IBERIA
Egica
Abdallah Ibn Muhammad
Muhammad III
Pedro IV 'The Ceremonious'
Pedro I 'The Cruel'
Juana 'The Mad'
Sebastian
Don Carlos
Afonso VI
Carlos II
Philip V
Fernando VI
Maria I
FRANCE
Fredegund
Charles VI
Catherine de' Medici
Henri III
Louis XVI
Napoleon
THE BRITISH ISLES
Maelgwyn (Maglocunus, Malgo) 'The Tall'
Ethelred II 'The Unready'
Macbeth
William II 'Rufus'
Stephen
John
Edward II
Robert III
Richard II
Henry VI
Richard III
Henry VIII
'Bloody' Mary I
George III
SCANDINAVIA
Erik 'Bloodaxe'
Harald IV 'Gilchrist'
Christian II
Erik XIV
Christian VII
GERMANY AND AUSTRIA
Wenceslas (Wenzel or Václav) 'The Drunkard'
Rudolf II
Friedrich Wilhelm I
Ferdinand
Ludwig II
ITALY
Giovanna I
Cesare Borgia
Lucrezia Borgia
Cosimo III
Gian Gastone
HUNGARY AND THE BALKANS
Vlad III 'The Impaler'
Elizabeth Bathory
Gabor Bathory
Alexander Obrenovic V
THE BYZANTINE AND OTTOMAN EMPIRES
Phokas
Justinian II
Irene
Constantine VIII
Mustafa I
Murad IV
Ibrahim
Abdul Aziz
RUSSIA
Sviatopolk 'The Accursed'
Ivan IV 'The Terrible'
Fyodor I 'The Sanctified Tsar'
Peter I 'The Great'
Anna
Peter III
Paul
Nicholas II
Introduction
Throughout the history of Europe, all monarchs who had any real degree of
power have lived with that strange dichotomy of simultaneously being human
and more than human. Absolute kingship was perhaps the most unique condition
into which any human being could have been born. Imagine a life with
seemingly no limits on your freedom or your wealth, where honest friends are
hard to find but flattering sycophants are everywhere, where you are raised from
birth to believe that you embody the voice of God and the nation, and day to day
live with the knowledge that anyone could turn into a traitor and at any time take
your crown and your life. Under this strange life and its all too dangerous
pressures, it is possible that being conditioned to rule as king, queen, or emperor
was itself a cause of mental illness and all monarchs were, in their own ways,
mad. After all, even the 'good' monarchs had their dark sides. Queen Elizabeth I
of England nearly strangled one of her ladies-in-waiting, whose only crime was
marrying without her explicit permission. Constantine the Great, celebrated for
being the first Christian Emperor of Rome, ordered the execution of his own son
and, later, his wife. Isabel and Fernando of Spain, besides being connected with
the infamous Spanish Inquisition, exiled thousands of Jews from the country,
and rebuked the Pope himself when he gave some of the expatriates refuge in
papal lands. But what about the monarchs whose lives are detailed in this book?
The monarchs mentioned above were not only successful rulers, but also
talented figureheads. They knew what their societies expected from them and
met those demands brilliantly, making themselves into legendary figures in their
own time. Today we tend to look at such a monarch as a dictator of sorts, but
occupying the top of the political hierarchy was only one aspect of the role. As
strange as it may seem to us in this democratic age, the core duty of a monarch
was to serve as a representative of the people, a sacred duty passed directly from
the hand of God. For example, in the peasant villages of Russia, the Tsar was
often called in Batiushka, literally 'the Father of the Russian people', up until the
twentieth century.
What unites all the figures in this book is that they had badly disappointed the
high, semi-divine hopes placed on them and, because of that, they have been
judged by history as a bizarre curiosity, a living catastrophe, or both. A few, such
as George III, might have been well-remembered or unremarkable if not for
some mental illness or psychological nightmare that transformed them into
novelties. Some, like Louis XVI, were unfairly written off as tyrannical or
depraved villains by propaganda, and then there were some, like Caligula, who
might have rightfully earned their reputations, exaggerated as they were. Finally,
there are the ones celebrated as great men and denounced as monsters in equal
proportion, sometimes in the same breath, like Peter the Great or Henry VIII. All
were carried away, or even overwhelmed, by their exalted status . A few were
driven completely mad by it.
The great age of the European monarchs came to a halt in the opening decades
of the twentieth century with the 'Great War'. If the Second World War was the
bloody birth of the modern world, the First World War brought with it the dying
convulsions of the old. During the course of the war, the last great dynasties of
Europe – the Hohenzollerns of Germany, the Romanovs of Russia, and the
Habsburgs of Austria–Hungary – were swept away while the empires of the
Ottomans, the Russians, the Germans and the Austrians were dismantled,
leaving in their ruins what was quite literally a new world order.
There are, of course, still kings, queens, princesses, and princes in Europe; not
only in Great Britain, but also in Norway, Spain, Denmark, the Netherlands,
Belgium and Sweden, not counting smaller principalities. Yet very few
monarchies today serve much more than a ceremonial role (although the Prince
of the small European state of Liechtenstein recently, as of this writing, assumed
considerable political power). In our time, when monarchies seem little more
than tourist curiosities and democracy is taken for granted, it is easy to look at
the old great monarchs as living lives out of a fantasy book, completely detached
from our world and our ancestors, and it is easier to forget that for nearly two
thousand years monarchy was almost the only form of government acceptable, if
not imaginable, across Europe and the world. Compared to that record,
democracy in Europe – and elsewhere – seems like only a sudden fad.
As extravagant as the personalities of rulers such as Catherine de' Medici or
Ivan the Terrible may seem, they are far from unreal, but have sprung from the
condition of being born or raised to a position from where they were expected to
steer the fates of entire nations. These people, either through their own actions or
through circumstances beyond even their control, were all condemned by the
history books. In our era it is hard to imagine what it would be like to have been
a prince, a king, or an emperor during the apex of monarchy, but something of
our own selves can be seen in these otherwise legendary figures. Although
history would have us look at them as gods, monsters or both, in the final
analysis they were simply people, after all.