Brutal queens of the world part 2

6. Her name was Queen Ranavalona I and she ruled Madagascar between 1828 and 1861.

Once her husband had kicked the bucket, she took over, and she became known as an avid isolationist who spent much of her time keeping European colonists at bay, something which made European powers quite displeased. Many of the horror stories about this queen came from European explorers in the region, so we must take everything written about her with a slight pinch of salt. Still, it’s we know for sure that she amassed a great army, but she didn’t ensure they were fed well. It’s said her forces died wholesale from general ill health, forced labor, but also starvation. If you were against her, she would put you through what we now call a “Trial by Ordeal”, meaning she’d find out someone’s innocence or guilt by making them endure some terrible, sadistic torture.

With so many of her soldiers dying and so many civilians also becoming ill and dying, the population of Madagascar pretty much halved. So, that’s certainly a black mark against her name.

But she also came down hard on Christians, sometimes putting them through those trials of ordeals after accusing them of some kind of witchcraft.

It was this widespread oppression of people that have made some historians call her a tyrant ruler, although other academics have said some of her misdeeds were exaggerated. One of those misdeeds, which may or may not be true, was her starving her own mother to death.

The next lady on the list wins for just being plain weird.

5. Her name was Juana la Loca and she was the Queen of Castile from 1504 to 1516.

It seems at the start of her reign she didn’t do much ruling at all. She was confined for much of itas she was deemed unfit to rule. So, without any real power, we can’t blame her for any special brutalities. But it was because of her and her family arguing about who would rule that led to the country falling into disorder. This was really bad news for much of the poorer population who died in famines or from the plague. It’s thought half of the population of Castile died during those horrific years.

Things didn’t get any better as she got older, and it’s said she lost her mind, thinking everyone was out to get her – including some nuns who were only trying to take care of her. She would barely eat, and she refused to wash or change her clothes.

There is some chance that she might have suffered from a severe mental condition such as schizophrenia, but there is also a chance that the many people who contended with her for power said this about her so they could say she was not fit to rule.

Some of the stories they told, which could have been true, included her going back again and again to her dead husband’s coffin and asking for it to be opened. She would then stroke the dead body and kiss his very cold feet. There are also rumors that when she traveled, the coffin and its occupant went with her, asking for it to be placed under her bed.

If you want to know what made her that crazy, just look at her mother.

4. That was Isabella I of Castile. She ruled Spain at the side of King Ferdinand II from 1451 through 1504, a period in time that saw the start of the notorious Spanish Inquisition. We cannot place all of the blame on her for kicking off this ghastly time in history, but she played a really big part in it.

Isabella was the one who created the formal mass expulsion decree leading to the expulsion of Jews and Muslims as well as mass toruture of whoever she thought threatened her position.

That itself would be enough to label someone a little bit brutal, but it gets worse.

Many of those people who weren’t expelled had to face the music of the investigations, which we call the inquisition. This often included being tortured and the woman we just talked about, Joanna, grew up watching her mother order such tortures. In fact, it’s said that because Joanna’s faith didn’t seem strong enough, sometimes Isabella would suspend her from ropes, and to cause excessive pain she would add weights to her limbs. By all accounts, Joanna was just skeptical about faith, but for Isabella, that was about as bad as it gets for a child.

We imagine this next monarch would have done something similar given the chance.

3. She was Princess Olga of Kyiv and she was a monarch in the 900s in what is present-day Ukraine.

Her husband, Igor of Kyiv, died in 945 at the hands of a tribe called the Drevlians.

It’s totally understandable that Olga would be a bit peeved about losing her husband, but it’s the brutality of what she did next that really makes her stand out.

The Drevlians told her that the best thing to do would be for her to marry one of their own.

They sent many ambassadors to her with this proposition, and she had them all buried alive. She even bent down as they were struggling to breathe and said something along the lines of, “How’s that for a reply?” Olga later had some of the higher-ranking Drevlians invited to a great party at her house, which was perceived as a sign of goodwill and forgiveness. It wasn’t. She invited them into the bathhouse, and then had the doors locked and ordered the place burned to the ground.

Later, she and her men massacred thousands of Drevlians in one attack alone. The people that were left barricaded the city and a siege ensued. Months passed and the people inside were starving, but then Olga got the idea to send in birds with burning cloth attached to their feet.

The birds did their job and landed on the wooden houses and burned them down. Anyone seen running from the town was executed on the spot. So, this was about as hardcore as it gets in the realms of revenge. Olga was a badass without a doubt. She also went about converting people to Christianity and so she was later canonized as a saint of the orthodox church.

The next lady was not quite so heroic. She was just bad to the bone.

2. She was known as Fredegund, and was the queen consort to King Chilperic I who was part of a dynasty within the Frankish kingdom which encompassed most of modern day France and parts of western Germany.

Her rule stretched from 584 until 597 and according to the few historians that wrote about her, it was a bloody career she had. What was written creates a picture of a woman who at times could be one very mean, murderous sadist. As the story goes, she wasn’t born into any kind of highly-influential royal family, but the king took a special liking to her from a young age. He didn’t marry her, though, and instead married a woman named Galswintha.

It seems that Fredegund didn’t much like this, and she either convinced the King that Galswintha needed to die or she just went about killing her by herself. Whatever happened, Fredegund was partly behind Galswintha being strangled to death. Fredegund then began a decades-long conflict with Galswintha’s sister, Brunhilda.

The latter married Sigebert I of Austrasia, and it seems that it was Fredegund who ordered his assassination. She also might have ordered the assassination of one of his sons, but that one didn’t work out. There were other successful assassinations, though, of people who had gotten on the wrong side of Fredegund for various perceived transgressions.

She even hated her own daughter, Rigunth. That’s because once the daughter grew up and became attractive she told her Fredegund that she should become the consort of the king instead of her mother. The Roman historian Gregory of Tours said this happened next: “Fredegund waited for her opportunity and under the pretense of magnanimity took her to the treasure room and showed her the King's jewels in a large chest. Feigning fatigue, she exclaimed ‘I am weary; put thou in thy hand, and take out what thou mayest find.’ The mother thereupon forced down the lid on her neck and would have killed her had not the servants finally rushed to her aid.”

So yes, this was a brutal woman if ever there was one. But now let’s talk about a woman with way more blood on her hands.

1. Her name was Mary I of England and she ruled over England and Ireland from 1553 to 1558.

There’s a kind of giveaway as to her brutality with the name she acquired.

That was “Bloody Mary”. But this had nothing to do with a spicy cocktail that people often drink. During Mary’s short reign, she went to great lengths to reverse

England’s split with the Catholic Church. This was known as the English Reformation and was started by that well-known killer of wives, King Henry VIII.

It’s a long and complicated story, but all you need to know is that once she rose to power, she went about releasing some of the main Catholics in England that had been previously imprisoned. It was now payback time, and there was a hell of a lot of reformers that Mary took aim at. She is known for something called the “Marian Persecutions” which in short meant going after Protestants.

Some were sent into exile, while others were captured, tortured, and burned at the stake. This didn’t just include high-level clergy but a lot of normal folks, too, which included women and children. During the torture, some of them might have been asked to renounce their faith, but in the end, as many as 300 folks were burned at the stake.

About 30 people also just died while in prison. Of course, there were many powerful players at the time and we can’t blame all the carnage on Mary alone, but it’s a fact that all those people died in horrific circumstances under her rule. She did at least once say,

“None may be burnt without some of the Council's presence and good sermons at the same.” You’d be right to think that a lot of scared people wanted to overthrow this bloody queen, which at times ended with rebellions. One of them was called the Wyatt Rebellion and it involved a lot of powerful people in England. These people had not wanted Mary to marry Philip of Spain, but it’s likely they just wanted to get rid of her in general.

Mary might not have done the torturing herself, but what happened to some of those rebels before their execution was terrible. In order to spill the beans about other rebels, some of them had to live through horrific torture methods such as being stretched on the rack.

Once they had talked or not talked most were burned at the stake, with the unfortunate ones being hanged, drawn, and quartered. This consisted of hanging them while making sure they didn’t die. Their guts would then be ripped out and their bodies chopped into quarters.

The head was usually saved and stuck on a pike someplace to remind people of what happens when you start thinking about rebelling. Some historians put the number of deaths in this rebellion at 200 although a more conservative estimate is 100.

When people were burned en masse, historians write that the air would be full of the smell of burning flesh. That was about to happen on November 17, 1558, when a bunch of Protestants was lined up. As they were preparing themselves to be burned, suddenly everything went quiet. That’s because someone stopped the process and handed in a letter saying,

“The Queen is dead.” British law made it that now those people couldn’t legally be executed.

So, was Mary any worse than other European leaders that executed scores of folks back then simply because of their faith? Maybe not. Her half-sister, Elizabeth I, would also execute people for that same reason once she was sitting on the throne.Still, in the carnage that happened during this period of time in that part of the world, it’s the name Bloody Mary that seems to stand out the most.

Now you need to watch “Most Evil Monarchs In the History of Mankind.” Or, have a look at…