The Cruelest Rulers In History

When we think about history's most-villainous dictators,

our minds conjure up images of Mussolini, Stalin, and Hitler--

the top three picks for humanity's Worst Person award.

But there's plenty of competition throughout history.

As it turns out, more than one ruthless dictator

wanted a shot at that brass ring.

So today, we're going to take a look

at some of the cruelest rulers in history

who were not Adolf Hitler.

But before we get started, make sure you subscribe

to the Weird History channel.

And once you've done that, leave us a comment letting

us know what other historically malevolent rulers

you want to hear about.

OK, time to draft a team of the worst dudes ever.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

In the 800 years since he created and ruled the Mongol

Empire, Genghis Khan has become somewhat of a household name.

Known as a ruthless ruler who wiped entire cities

off the map, and was not shy about executing everyone

who got in his way, the sheer brutality of his conquest

can sometimes be glossed over or forgotten.

Nobody can rise to the top without a little creativity.

And Khan was no exception.

This was especially true when it came to offing people.

Khan's army of Mongols believed that if your blood spilled

on the ground, you would not be allowed into the afterlife.

So they became proficient at bloodless eliminations.

To accomplish this, the Mongols were

prone to snapping necks, strangulation,

or the more popular approach of throwing a killer party.

But it's not any party you would want to be invited to.

It usually involved piling captured nobles

under a large board, which would then

become the floor of a great banquet,

slowly crushing those stuffed underneath as the Mongol

army enjoyed a nice meal and presumably did

the electric slide.

Khan also once made a rival wear a face

mask of molten silver, which is a harsh but effective

exfoliation technique.

And he would use captives as human shields in combat.

Khan was so effective in his brutality

that he wiped out an estimated 40 million people--

roughly 11% of the population of the time.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

You can call him Tamerlane the Great.

You can call him Timur.

Just don't call him late for dinner,

or you may just find your head sitting

atop a massive pile of skulls.

The undefeated Tamerlane was a Turkish conqueror

who is lauded by historians as one

of the greatest military tacticians ever to live.

Timur believed he was a descendant of Genghis Khan

and, as such, claimed an empire of his own,

which stretched from Russia to India and the Mediterranean

region.

Tamerlane also invoked his ancestors legacy,

military prowess, and utter lack of concern for human life

by adopting a no-mercy approach to conquering.

One such method was the construction

of towers of human skulls, of which there were

believed to have been hundreds.

Oof.

How many skulls is that?

Let's do a little math here.

Carry the 2, just for inflation.

Hmm.

Oh, that's a [BLEEP]-load-load of skulls.

The story says that Tamerlane ordered each of his soldiers

to return to him with at least two heads, which

would be used to build his freaky decorations.

And-- we get it-- a tower of skulls

is a great way to get your point across,

provided that point is never make

direct eye contact with me.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

Vlad the Impaler may just be the inspiration

for modern horror, a title which was

earned many times over during his rule in the 15th century.

He is often cited as the inspiration for Bram Stoker's

Dracula, for reasons that will soon be pretty obvious.

As a young man, Vlad and his brother

were taken hostage in the Ottoman Empire

to ensure the loyalty of Vlad's father.

But when young Vlad was finally released,

he learned that the Ottoman overlords

had whacked his father anyway.

Vlad did what anyone who subsequently

inspired several decades of Goth poetry would do--

he took on the title of Vlad, III, Dracula, or son of Dracul,

and set off on a series of crusades

against those who wronged his family.

And when we say crusades, what we really mean

is a revenge rampage.

Vlad had several greatest-hit tactics

he would employ against his enemies,

each more gruesome than the last.

But of all the sinister tools in his belt,

Vlad's absolute favorite was impaling,

which is both exactly what it sounds like

and exactly how he got his name.

Vlad's alarming gift for violence

became a legend that continued to live on

through folklore, which added embellishments about his--

[CLEARS THROAT] --eating habits that

would eventually evolve into the inspiration for Dracula.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

Qin Shi Huang is known for unifying the Chinese empire

by creating the Qin Dynasty in the early 220s BCE.

How did Huang manage it?

With a simple three-pronged initiative--

dismantle the entire education system,

be unreasonably erratic in the way you govern,

and work the general populace to death.

That sounds like the world's grimmest infomercial.

When Huang seized power in 221 BCE,

he stuck to a pattern of severe punishment,

speaking incoherently, and issuing completely nonsensical

orders to his constituents.

Huang grew paranoid about the danger

posed by an educated public, so he waged war on book-learning.

He burned priceless books and bumped off 460 Confucian

scholars in a single year because they were

unable to make him immortal.

Didn't anyone tell him?

All you have to do is record one really great album,

and you'll live forever, man.

Huang tried to establish an elaborate transportation

system, as well, as a wall so great

it could keep out his enemies.

But that's not the Great Wall of China.

That came later.

To support these infrastructure projects,

Qin established a peasant class by declaring

all to be equal under one law and imposed massive taxes.

Poor leadership, high taxes, and the strict overseeing

of hard labor led to disaster for his people.

Thousands starved, succumbed to disease, or were simply

worked until they collapsed into their graves.

Pretty steep price to pay for a vanity construction project.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

Ivan IV of Russia, often referred to

as Ivan the Terrible, has a supervillain back story

full of political conspiracy and corruption.

Because you don't earn a nickname

like that by volunteering at a church.

He watched as power was snatched away

from his mother, who was allegedly poisoned by rivals

in 1547.

In response, Ivan sought revenge by destroying everything

in his path.

Because guys like him tend to overreact.

For instance, after Ivan invaded Novgorod,

he dressed their archbishop in bear skin

and literally hunted him down with dogs.

Many others not lucky enough to be clad in warm fur

were tied to sleighs and driven into freezing waters.

His family wasn't safe, either.

After a heated argument, Ivan clubbed his heir

so severely that he suffered brain damage

and eventually perished.

On another occasion, Ivan attacked

his pregnant daughter-in-law until she miscarried.

Ironically, Ivan passed away relatively gently,

suffering a heart attack in 1584 while playing chess.

Whoever had been brave enough to play the game with him

probably breathed a huge sigh of relief.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

In the late 19th century, Belgian King Leopold II

established the world's first private colony,

the Congo Free State located in the heart of Africa.

Leopold saw himself as a protector

of the Democratic Republic of the Congo,

but his desire to spread Christianity

and to make fat, fat stacks of cash

led to decades of forced labor and violence

against the local population.

Leopold became rich in the ivory trade and even richer

when he realized his land was abundant with rubber trees.

The rise of cars and bicycles shifted Leopold's business

interests to the rubber trade.

And he was willing to do whatever it

took to keep business booming.

How lucrative can rubber be?

It literally grows on trees.

To ensure the rubber exports never stopped,

Leopold ordered that the locals be forced to work constantly.

This was enforced by a rise in kidnappings, assaults,

and vicious beatings visited upon anyone who resisted

or who simply didn't work fast enough.

Being a ghoulishly practical man,

Leopold wanted confirmation that his subordinates

weren't wasting any ammunition on animals.

So he instructed them to bring him

the heads of any workers they offed

to prove they weren't needlessly throwing away bullets.

Today, historians estimate that Leopold and his colonizers

took the lives of as many as 10 million people.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

The US forces in Vietnam during the 1960s and 1970s

incited a political revolution in Cambodia,

with Pol Pot right at the center of it.

He wanted to root out any shred of capitalism in Cambodia

and established a full-on Agrarian communist society.

Whether the Cambodian people wanted it or not,

Pol Pot's Khmer Rouge party took power in 1975

and swiftly put his plan into action.

2 million Cambodian people were forced out of the city

and set to work in the fields.

The goal was to create a peasant class

and eliminate Cambodia's urbanites and intellectuals.

In fact, the peasant class was so ill-regarded

that they were told, "To keep you

is no benefit, to destroy you is no loss."

That's a pretty harsh motivational poster.

Pol Pot had a broad spectrum of brutality

that included rampant starvation, disease,

and routine capital punishment.

Many peasants who managed to avoid all of that

were fatally overworked in the fields.

Even though he was only in power for a four-year period

between 1975 and 1979, he was responsible for the loss

of approximately 1.5 million lives.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

Maximilien Robespierre is a controversial figure

in history.

He was an advocate for universal voting rights.

And he fought against racial and religious discrimination.

But he wouldn't be in this video if there

weren't proverbial headless skeletons in his closet--

or literal ones for that matter.

First of all, Robespierre was the foremost ruler

during the revolutionary time known

as the French Reign of Terror.

During his time in the big chair,

he imprisoned over 300,000 people suspected of crimes

against the government.

He purportedly slew as many as 40,000 of these prisoners.

Robespierre was elected to the head

of the committee of public safety

in 1793, at the start of the French Revolution.

It was then that he began to tighten his suffocating grip

on the people of France, silencing

any voices of opposition that began to form

against the new Republic.

Robespierre's ego started to get the better of him.

And his increasing paranoia led him to find a good friend

in the guillotine.

It is estimated that Maximilien sent almost 17,000 people

to the guillotine, including former allies such as Georges

Danton.

Once Robespierre attempted to instill a national religion,

in contradiction to his earlier-held beliefs,

his people began to turn on him.

In a twist of fate worthy of an Alanis Morissette song,

Robespierre was made a few inches shorter

by the guillotine in 1794.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

In the early 20th century, the Ottoman government

began to see the rise of a new political body known

as the Young Turks, led by Talaat

Pasha, a political activist and noted critic

of the sultan Abdul Hamid II.

The goal of the Young Turks was to establish a new secular

order that could slowly siphon power from the sultan.

The sultan would remain head of the state in title,

but the Young Turks began to run the show behind the scenes.

The start of World War I saw the Young Turks siding

with Germany and Austria.

Many Armenians living under control of the Ottomans

joined forces with the Russians, hopeful

of achieving independence should Russia win the war.

Because he wasn't a terribly flexible or reasonable man,

Pasha viewed this as open insubordination.

And it enraged him.

He forcefully relocated more than a million Armenians

from Anatolia, Constantinople, and other provinces

in Syria and Mesopotamia, which were

sympathetic to Russian forces.

The relocation was not a pleasant one.

Deportees who weren't immediately eliminated

were ordered onto death marches.

Those who were displaced endured a year of hardship

and brutality referred to as the Armenian Genocide, which

claimed the lives of as many as 1.5 million people.

Eventually, the Ottomans were forced

to surrender to Allied forces.

Pasha resigned his Grand Vizier position

and fled with the Young Turks.

He lived in exile until an assassin finally

punched his ticket in 1921.

So what do you think?

Which of these rulers was the worst?

Let us know in the comments below.

And while you're at it, check out some of these other videos

from our Weird History.

When we think about history's most-villainous dictators,

our minds conjure up images of Mussolini, Stalin, and Hitler--

the top three picks for humanity's Worst Person award.

But there's plenty of competition throughout history.

As it turns out, more than one ruthless dictator

wanted a shot at that brass ring.

So today, we're going to take a look

at some of the cruelest rulers in history

who were not Adolf Hitler.

But before we get started, make sure you subscribe

to the Weird History channel.

And once you've done that, leave us a comment letting

us know what other historically malevolent rulers

you want to hear about.

OK, time to draft a team of the worst dudes ever.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

In the 800 years since he created and ruled the Mongol

Empire, Genghis Khan has become somewhat of a household name.

Known as a ruthless ruler who wiped entire cities

off the map, and was not shy about executing everyone

who got in his way, the sheer brutality of his conquest

can sometimes be glossed over or forgotten.

Nobody can rise to the top without a little creativity.

And Khan was no exception.

This was especially true when it came to offing people.

Khan's army of Mongols believed that if your blood spilled

on the ground, you would not be allowed into the afterlife.

So they became proficient at bloodless eliminations.

To accomplish this, the Mongols were

prone to snapping necks, strangulation,

or the more popular approach of throwing a killer party.

But it's not any party you would want to be invited to.

It usually involved piling captured nobles

under a large board, which would then

become the floor of a great banquet,

slowly crushing those stuffed underneath as the Mongol

army enjoyed a nice meal and presumably did

the electric slide.

Khan also once made a rival wear a face

mask of molten silver, which is a harsh but effective

exfoliation technique.

And he would use captives as human shields in combat.

Khan was so effective in his brutality

that he wiped out an estimated 40 million people--

roughly 11% of the population of the time.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

You can call him Tamerlane the Great.

You can call him Timur.

Just don't call him late for dinner,

or you may just find your head sitting

atop a massive pile of skulls.

The undefeated Tamerlane was a Turkish conqueror

who is lauded by historians as one

of the greatest military tacticians ever to live.

Timur believed he was a descendant of Genghis Khan

and, as such, claimed an empire of his own,

which stretched from Russia to India and the Mediterranean

region.

Tamerlane also invoked his ancestors legacy,

military prowess, and utter lack of concern for human life

by adopting a no-mercy approach to conquering.

One such method was the construction

of towers of human skulls, of which there were

believed to have been hundreds.

Oof.

How many skulls is that?

Let's do a little math here.

Carry the 2, just for inflation.

Hmm.

Oh, that's a [BLEEP]-load-load of skulls.

The story says that Tamerlane ordered each of his soldiers

to return to him with at least two heads, which

would be used to build his freaky decorations.

And-- we get it-- a tower of skulls

is a great way to get your point across,

provided that point is never make

direct eye contact with me.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

Vlad the Impaler may just be the inspiration

for modern horror, a title which was

earned many times over during his rule in the 15th century.

He is often cited as the inspiration for Bram Stoker's

Dracula, for reasons that will soon be pretty obvious.

As a young man, Vlad and his brother

were taken hostage in the Ottoman Empire

to ensure the loyalty of Vlad's father.

But when young Vlad was finally released,

he learned that the Ottoman overlords

had whacked his father anyway.

Vlad did what anyone who subsequently

inspired several decades of Goth poetry would do--

he took on the title of Vlad, III, Dracula, or son of Dracul,

and set off on a series of crusades

against those who wronged his family.

And when we say crusades, what we really mean

is a revenge rampage.

Vlad had several greatest-hit tactics

he would employ against his enemies,

each more gruesome than the last.

But of all the sinister tools in his belt,

Vlad's absolute favorite was impaling,

which is both exactly what it sounds like

and exactly how he got his name.

Vlad's alarming gift for violence

became a legend that continued to live on

through folklore, which added embellishments about his--

[CLEARS THROAT] --eating habits that

would eventually evolve into the inspiration for Dracula.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

Qin Shi Huang is known for unifying the Chinese empire

by creating the Qin Dynasty in the early 220s BCE.

How did Huang manage it?

With a simple three-pronged initiative--

dismantle the entire education system,

be unreasonably erratic in the way you govern,

and work the general populace to death.

That sounds like the world's grimmest infomercial.

When Huang seized power in 221 BCE,

he stuck to a pattern of severe punishment,

speaking incoherently, and issuing completely nonsensical

orders to his constituents.

Huang grew paranoid about the danger

posed by an educated public, so he waged war on book-learning.

He burned priceless books and bumped off 460 Confucian

scholars in a single year because they were

unable to make him immortal.

Didn't anyone tell him?

All you have to do is record one really great album,

and you'll live forever, man.

Huang tried to establish an elaborate transportation

system, as well, as a wall so great

it could keep out his enemies.

But that's not the Great Wall of China.

That came later.

To support these infrastructure projects,

Qin established a peasant class by declaring

all to be equal under one law and imposed massive taxes.

Poor leadership, high taxes, and the strict overseeing

of hard labor led to disaster for his people.

Thousands starved, succumbed to disease, or were simply

worked until they collapsed into their graves.

Pretty steep price to pay for a vanity construction project.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

Ivan IV of Russia, often referred to

as Ivan the Terrible, has a supervillain back story

full of political conspiracy and corruption.

Because you don't earn a nickname

like that by volunteering at a church.

He watched as power was snatched away

from his mother, who was allegedly poisoned by rivals

in 1547.

In response, Ivan sought revenge by destroying everything

in his path.

Because guys like him tend to overreact.

For instance, after Ivan invaded Novgorod,

he dressed their archbishop in bear skin

and literally hunted him down with dogs.

Many others not lucky enough to be clad in warm fur

were tied to sleighs and driven into freezing waters.

His family wasn't safe, either.

After a heated argument, Ivan clubbed his heir

so severely that he suffered brain damage

and eventually perished.

On another occasion, Ivan attacked

his pregnant daughter-in-law until she miscarried.

Ironically, Ivan passed away relatively gently,

suffering a heart attack in 1584 while playing chess.

Whoever had been brave enough to play the game with him

probably breathed a huge sigh of relief.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

In the late 19th century, Belgian King Leopold II

established the world's first private colony,

the Congo Free State located in the heart of Africa.

Leopold saw himself as a protector

of the Democratic Republic of the Congo,

but his desire to spread Christianity

and to make fat, fat stacks of cash

led to decades of forced labor and violence

against the local population.

Leopold became rich in the ivory trade and even richer

when he realized his land was abundant with rubber trees.

The rise of cars and bicycles shifted Leopold's business

interests to the rubber trade.

And he was willing to do whatever it

took to keep business booming.

How lucrative can rubber be?

It literally grows on trees.

To ensure the rubber exports never stopped,

Leopold ordered that the locals be forced to work constantly.

This was enforced by a rise in kidnappings, assaults,

and vicious beatings visited upon anyone who resisted

or who simply didn't work fast enough.

Being a ghoulishly practical man,

Leopold wanted confirmation that his subordinates

weren't wasting any ammunition on animals.

So he instructed them to bring him

the heads of any workers they offed

to prove they weren't needlessly throwing away bullets.

Today, historians estimate that Leopold and his colonizers

took the lives of as many as 10 million people.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

The US forces in Vietnam during the 1960s and 1970s

incited a political revolution in Cambodia,

with Pol Pot right at the center of it.

He wanted to root out any shred of capitalism in Cambodia

and established a full-on Agrarian communist society.

Whether the Cambodian people wanted it or not,

Pol Pot's Khmer Rouge party took power in 1975

and swiftly put his plan into action.

2 million Cambodian people were forced out of the city

and set to work in the fields.

The goal was to create a peasant class

and eliminate Cambodia's urbanites and intellectuals.

In fact, the peasant class was so ill-regarded

that they were told, "To keep you

is no benefit, to destroy you is no loss."

That's a pretty harsh motivational poster.

Pol Pot had a broad spectrum of brutality

that included rampant starvation, disease,

and routine capital punishment.

Many peasants who managed to avoid all of that

were fatally overworked in the fields.

Even though he was only in power for a four-year period

between 1975 and 1979, he was responsible for the loss

of approximately 1.5 million lives.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

Maximilien Robespierre is a controversial figure

in history.

He was an advocate for universal voting rights.

And he fought against racial and religious discrimination.

But he wouldn't be in this video if there

weren't proverbial headless skeletons in his closet--

or literal ones for that matter.

First of all, Robespierre was the foremost ruler

during the revolutionary time known

as the French Reign of Terror.

During his time in the big chair,

he imprisoned over 300,000 people suspected of crimes

against the government.

He purportedly slew as many as 40,000 of these prisoners.

Robespierre was elected to the head

of the committee of public safety

in 1793, at the start of the French Revolution.

It was then that he began to tighten his suffocating grip

on the people of France, silencing

any voices of opposition that began to form

against the new Republic.

Robespierre's ego started to get the better of him.

And his increasing paranoia led him to find a good friend

in the guillotine.

It is estimated that Maximilien sent almost 17,000 people

to the guillotine, including former allies such as Georges

Danton.

Once Robespierre attempted to instill a national religion,

in contradiction to his earlier-held beliefs,

his people began to turn on him.

In a twist of fate worthy of an Alanis Morissette song,

Robespierre was made a few inches shorter

by the guillotine in 1794.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

In the early 20th century, the Ottoman government

began to see the rise of a new political body known

as the Young Turks, led by Talaat

Pasha, a political activist and noted critic

of the sultan Abdul Hamid II.

The goal of the Young Turks was to establish a new secular

order that could slowly siphon power from the sultan.

The sultan would remain head of the state in title,

but the Young Turks began to run the show behind the scenes.

The start of World War I saw the Young Turks siding

with Germany and Austria.

Many Armenians living under control of the Ottomans

joined forces with the Russians, hopeful

of achieving independence should Russia win the war.

Because he wasn't a terribly flexible or reasonable man,

Pasha viewed this as open insubordination.

And it enraged him.

He forcefully relocated more than a million Armenians

from Anatolia, Constantinople, and other provinces

in Syria and Mesopotamia, which were

sympathetic to Russian forces.

The relocation was not a pleasant one.

Deportees who weren't immediately eliminated

were ordered onto death marches.

Those who were displaced endured a year of hardship

and brutality referred to as the Armenian Genocide, which

claimed the lives of as many as 1.5 million people.

Eventually, the Ottomans were forced

to surrender to Allied forces.

Pasha resigned his Grand Vizier position

and fled with the Young Turks.

He lived in exile until an assassin finally

punched his ticket in 1921.

So what do you think?

Which of these rulers was the worst?

Let us know in the comments below.

And while you're at it, check out some of these other videos

from our Weird History.