Evil Psychopaths, page 2
The Emperor was helpless, spending his time devising new tortures with which to punish the rebels when he finally defeated them The only man who could have helped him, Tigellinus, was seriously ill and without him, he was lost. The Senate voted to condemn him to death by flogging. But, reluctant to die in this manner, he slashed his own throat as the soldiers approached to take him away. Not quite dead, he was finished off by a servant. ‘What an artist the world is losing!’ he cried as he prepared for death. His high opinion of himself continued to the end.
Charles VI of France
What a strange sight he must have been. Wild and unwashed – he had not washed for five months, in fact – and with iron bars in his clothes as supports and protection. The problem was that he had come to believe in recent months that he was made of glass and was terrified of being broken. He had also decided that his name was George and did not have a clue who his wife was when she came to visit him.
Charles VI was very ill. It is suggested nowadays that he suffered from schizophrenia, many of his symptoms being those of a schizophrenic. Porphyria, the disease that blighted the life of Great Britain’s King George III, is also suggested. Porphyria is a hereditary illness that results in delirium and visual and auditory disturbances as well as giving its victims painful physical symptoms such as inflammation of the bowels, painful weakness in the limbs and loss of feeling. Porphyria has certainly been diagnosed as existing amongst a number of Charles’s ancestors.
Indeed, the French monarchy had its share of mad rulers, the first of which was probably Clovis II, known as ‘the Do-Nothing’. His great-grandson, Childeric III was known, for obvious reasons, as ‘the Idiot’ and Robert of Clermont, an ancestor of the Bourbons, who lived at the end of the thirteenth century, seems to have become a psychopath after receiving several blows to the head during a tournament. The 16th century King Charles IX was mentally unstable with sadistic tendencies and uncontrollable rages. In the 18th century, the sisters, Princess Marie Louise and Princess Louise Elizabeth were sadly deranged.
Of them all, however, it was Charles VI who was worst. He became king in 1380 at the age of twelve and seems at that time to have been a pleasant and agreeable young man. He was unfortunate in his regents however, because his uncles, the Dukes of Anjou, Berry, Burgundy and Bourbon, increased the tax burden on the people for their own gain, plundering a treasury already short of funds due to the cripplingly expensive Hundred Years’ War against the English. There was social unrest in France as a result, particularly during the year 1382. Finally in 1388, Charles dispensed with the dukes’ services, replacing them with a group of councillors from humbler backgrounds.
He was married in 1385 to a beautiful fourteen- year-old Bavarian princess, Isabeau, with whom he had fallen head over heels in love with the moment he had seen her. To begin with, the marriage was a very happy one, although Isabeau made no effort to learn to speak French. She would turn out to be a spoilt and selfish woman interested only in getting what she wanted.
Charles’s life seems to have changed following a mysterious illness he suffered in April 1392 when he developed a fever and his hair and nails fell out. While still not fully recovered, in August of that year he undertook an expedition to punish those responsible for an assassination attempt on one of his advisers. Leading a small army, he was impatient at the slow progress they were making. His bad mood was exacerbated by the fact that he was still suffering from periodic bouts of fever.
While riding through a forest, a barefoot man dressed in rags is said to have suddenly ran out of the trees and grabbed the bridle of Charles’s horse, shouting at him to turn back, that he had been betrayed. The man was dragged away from the king’s horse but followed the army, persisting in his warnings to the king.
A little later, as the band of knights emerged from the forest, a page, drowsy in the summer heat, dropped the king’s lance. It clanged against a steel helmet being carried by another page. This sudden noise seemed to do something to Charles because he shuddered and drew his sword, yelling ‘Charge the traitors! They wish to hand me over to the enemy!’ He spurred his horse forward into his own men and started to swing his sword wildly amongst them. Eventually, a chamberlain and a number of his men pulled him from his horse and restrained him on the ground where he slipped into a coma-like trance. Around him lay four dead men.
Charles remained in his coma-like state for two days but then began slowly to recover. He was distraught when he learned of the men he had killed and was never the same man again, his bouts of insanity becoming increasingly frequent. On one occasion, his irrational behaviour almost cost him his life. On 28 January 1393, Queen Isabeau staged a masked ball. Charles was a member of a group of courtiers who dressed as wild men for the party, wearing costumes of linen cloth soaked in either resinous wax or pitch to hold a covering of frazzled hemp, giving them the appearance of being hairy from head to foot. This was obviously a great fire risk and the torch-bearers were, consequently, ordered to stand around the walls of the room, far away from the cavorting men who were chained to one another. Unfortunately, the king’s brother, Louis de Valois, Duke of Orléans, was unaware of the danger. Arriving late and carrying a torch, he approached one of the wild men to see who it was and accidentally set fire to him. Panic broke out and the wild men desperately tried to escape the flames. One of them was close to the Duchess of Berry who quickly threw the train of her dress over the man to protect him. The man under her dress was the king and she had unwittingly saved him from an ignominious and horrific death.
A couple of months later, Charles was in the grip of another debilitating attack. In an attempt to ease the pressure on his brain, a surgeon drilled a couple of holes in his head and, indeed, he did seem to experience some relief for a while. In 1395, however, he was once again in the throes of insanity. In 1397, believing that he was perhaps the victim of an act of witchcraft or sorcery, priests tried to exorcise him. It made no difference, however, and the attacks began to last longer. Even in his periods of clarity, his mood swings were extreme. When ill, he was delusional, denying he was king and that he had a wife and children. He would run dementedly from room to room in his palace, claiming that he was being pursued by his enemies until he collapsed from exhaustion. He was locked in darkened rooms and would attack anyone who came near him, servants and doctors. He smashed furniture and wet himself and in 1405 refused to wash, shave or change his clothes. They tried a primitive form of shock treatment, a number of men blackening their faces and leaping out at him in his room. It seemed to do the trick and he finally agreed to be washed and to change his clothes.
His relationship with his wife was, of course, very bad. She was terrified of him and he began to hate her. She provided him with a young mistress to divert his attention from her. It suited her, as she had for some time been openly having an affair with the king’s brother, Louis. People actually questioned the legitimacy of Charles’s children, especially when the heir to the throne, Charles, was born.
Eventually, the king became unable to govern. Even when not suffering from one of his bouts of anxiety, he found it difficult to make decisions or concentrate and a power struggle developed between his brother Louis and John the Fearless, Duke of Burgundy. It had a huge impact on France that was manifested when an English army led by King Henry V defeated a French army five times its size at the Battle of Agincourt in 1415.
Over the years, Queen Isabeau’s looks had faded and she became fat and suffered from gout. She had to be pushed around in a wheelchair and became agoraphobic. The interests of the royal children were protected by Bernard of Armagnac who learned that Isabeau was plotting against the king with John the Fearless. Charles, in a period of good health, was furious. He was also angry at Isabeau’s dissolute behaviour and decided to do something about it. He, his son and Bernard of Armagnac rode to Vincennes to deal with her latest lover, Louis de Boisbourdon. They seized him, tortured him savagely, strangled him and threw him into the Seine in a leather sack. As for Isabeau, she was banished to Tours. Released in 1418 by John the Fearless, she took her revenge on Bernard of Armagnac, ordering her new lover, Jean de Villiers, to kill him and carve the cross of Burgundy on his chest.
Isabeau did not have a monopoly on mindless violence, of course. When John the Fearless had a meeting with Prince Charles, in 1419, the sixteen-year-old Dauphin hacked him to death. Isabeau responded by disinheriting Charles.
Meanwhile, the king had been living in a condition of neglect at Senlis, near Paris. Following his marriage to Princess Catherine, daughter of Charles and Isabeau, however, and the naming of him by Isabeau as heir to the French throne, Henry V of England brought Charles back to Paris. He was, by this time, very ill, but is said to have recovered somewhat, thanks to a diet of oranges and pomegranates. In the autumn of 1422 he became ill again and this time he did not recover. He died surrounded by strangers, aged fifty-four.
Vlad the Impaler
When Vlad III came to power in the Balkan country of Wallachia in the 15th century, life was harsh. They were ruthlessly violent times and members of his family had experienced extreme brutality. His brother Mircea II, for instance, had been captured by dissident boyars – nobles – and had his eyes burnt out with red-hot pokers before being buried alive. His father, Vlad III, had suffered a horrific death on the orders of John Hunyadi, regent of Hungary, by being face-scalped – the edges of his face were cut and the skin was then peeled off, while he was still alive.
Vlad was, himself, not averse to cruel practices in his castle at Târgoviste in order to retain power and control in his domain. In one story, he is reported to have received a group of foreign visitors who slighted him in some way. It may have been that they committed the insult of failing to remove their hats in his presence. He punished them by ensuring that their hats would never come off – he had them nailed to their heads.
Because of his fight to remain independent of the Ottoman Empire, Romanians view Vlad as a great hero and an effective, although often harsh ruler, but it is easy to understand why the writer Bram Stoker turned him into one of literature’s great villains, the blood-sucking vampire, Count Dracula. He is said to have killed around 100,000 people in various cruel ways, his brutality extending to torturing, burning, skinning, roasting and boiling, feeding people human flesh – normally their friends or relatives – cutting off limbs and drowning. However, his favourite method of dispatching his enemies and those he, quite simply, did not like, was to impale them.
The victim’s legs were each attached to a horse and a sharpened stake was forced slowly into the body through the anus or, sometimes, the chest. When inserted through the anus, it was forced upwards until it emerged from the mouth. The point of the stake was oiled but was not sharpened to a great extent as that would kill the victim too quickly and spoil Vlad’s enjoyment. Children were impaled on a stake forced through their mothers’ chests.
Death by impalement could take days and was, of course, agonising, the height of the stake indicating the rank and power of the victim. They were often organised in geometric patterns by Vlad and the bodies were left to rot for months.
On one occasion, in 1460, he is said to have impaled 10,000 people in the Transylvanian city of Sibiu. The previous year saw him impaling 30,000 merchants, officials and citizens in Brasov that he claimed were questioning his authority – never a good idea.
Impaling was just one of a menu of horrific punishments used by Vlad. He was also partial to blinding, cutting off limbs, strangulation, cutting off the nose and ears and mutilating the sex organs. Now and then he would also scalp or skin his victims.
In terms of controlling his people and keeping crime down, the cruelty of his punishments seems to have delivered results. One story tells how he left a gold cup in the middle of the street for several days and no one touched it for fear of the punishment they would receive if they did.
Wallachia was Vlad’s native land, but his family had lived in exile in Transylvania after losing the throne to pro-Ottoman boyars. His father was a member of the noble Order of the Dragon, a fraternal order of knights sworn to uphold Christianity and defend the Holy Roman Empire against the Ottoman Empire to the east. Vlad’s father, Vlad II, enthusiastically adopted the symbol of the dragon and used it on clothing, flags and coinage. In Romanian, the word for dragon is drac and ul is the definite article. Thus, did Vlad’s father become known to all as Vlad Dracul – Vlad the Dragon. Vlad himself became Vlad Dracula – son of the Dragon – when he was accepted into the order at the age of five.
Wallachia was caught between the advancing Turkish Ottoman Empire that had in 1453 finally captured the city of Constantinople, the capital of the Byzantine Empire. For centuries, the Byzantine Empire had acted as a buffer between the Muslim east and Christendom and now, with its fall, Wallachia was caught between the Ottomans and the Hungarians to the north, appeasing each and forming alliances with one or the other. When Vlad came to power, the Ottomans were the sworn enemy of him and his people. He had developed a great knowledge of them through spending a part his childhood living amongst them. His father had been forced to hand over his children as hostages in return for the Turks not invading Wallachia. They were harsh times for Vlad. He was cruelly whipped for being stubborn and insulting to his captors and he developed a hatred for the future sultan, Mehmed. He also grew to distrust his father for giving in to the Turks, an act that, to Vlad, was a betrayal of all that the Order of the Dragon stood for. He was a faithful adherent to the principles of the Order, festooning flags, banners and his clothing with its imagery.
When Vlad Dracul did not provide support to the Hungarian leader, John Hunyadi, in the Varna Crusade in the 1440s, he was assassinated and the Turks released the young Vlad III from captivity, putting him forward as a candidate for the Wallachian throne, while John Hunyadi established his own man as leader. In 1448, at the age of seventeen, Vlad briefly seized the throne, but Hunyadi forced him to flee. Then, when Hunyadi’s man turned pro-Turkish, Hunyadi turned to Vlad to replace him. In 1456, Vlad succeeded in seizing the throne again. He would reign for six bloody years.
The Ottomans, for their part, were afraid of Vlad, especially as stories grew about his cruelty towards captured soldiers. They told how he cut off their noses and sent them to Hungary to demonstrate how many he had killed.
There is one story, known as the ‘forest of the impaled’ that horrified the Turks.
Following an unsuccessful attack by a large force under Sultan Mehmed, Vlad took revenge by leading an army across the Danube in the winter of 1462 and laying waste to the lands between Serbia and the Black Sea. His army killed more than 20,000 people.
Mehmed raised an army of 90,000 a few months later in spring, and marched on Wallachia. As they approached Vlad’s lands, however, they were sickened by the sight of a forest of stakes on which Vlad had impaled around 30,000 Turkish captives. Nonetheless, they proceeded with the attack and captured Târgoviste, ousting Vlad and forcing him into a guerrilla campaign against the occupiers who had installed his hated brother, Radu the Handsome as a puppet ruler. Vlad was pursued as far as Transylvania where the Hungarian king, Matthias Corvinus, imprisoned him for four years.
Meanwhile, while Vlad’s castle at Poienari was being besieged, someone – probably a servant delivering a warning – fired an arrow through one of the windows with news that Radu’s army was approaching. Rather than be captured and taken into captivity by the Turks, Vlad’s wife threw herself from a tower into the river that flowed past the castle, legend having her say that she would rather rot and be eaten by the fish than be led into captivity by the Turks.
Vlad was imprisoned from 1462 until 1474, but he gradually began to win round the Hungarian king and even married one of his cousins while in captivity. He was released and reconquered Wallachia in 1476 with a force of dissatisfied boyars, some Transylvanians and a force of Moldavians. By this time, Radu was dead and had been replaced by another Turkish puppet king, Basarab the Elder, a member of a rival clan. As Vlad approached, the king and his supporters fled.
His triumph would be short-lived, however. When his allies departed, he was left weakened and the Ottomans returned to restore their candidate Basarab to the throne. The nobles failed to support Vlad and the peasants were sick of his cruelty. He marched against the Ottomans with a force of only 4,000 men.
It is not known exactly how Vlad the Impaler died. Some say he died in the ensuing battle near Bucharest, fighting the Turks. Others report that he was assassinated, like his father, by disloyal Wallachian boyars. Another story has him being killed by one of his own men. One accounts says that he was decapitated by the Turks who sent his head preserved in honey as proof of his death to Istanbul. He may have been face-scalped, however, just as his father had been.
When his tomb was discovered many years later and opened, his face was covered by a piece of cloth, a sign that he had, indeed, suffered the same fate as his father. Unfortunately, it could not be proved, because, moments after the tomb was opened and the corpse was exposed to light and air, it crumbled to dust, as in all the best vampire movies.
The Borgias
According to the diary of Johannes Burchard, Master of Ceremonies to successive popes in the 15th and early 16th centuries, a gang of unfortunate prisoners, shackled at the wrist, would be dragged into St. Peter’s Square, in front of the Vatican in Rome, while lines of guards protected every exit from the square. On a balcony high above stood the seventy-year-old pope, Alexander VI, the man who had been Rodrigo Borgia prior to his elevation to the papacy. Beside him stood his beautiful twenty-year-old daughter, Lucrezia. On a balcony to one side of them stood another figure, Alexander’s son, Cesare Borgia, accompanied by a servant. In Cesare’s arms he cradled a rifle, taking careful aim into the ragged crowd beneath him. Suddenly a shot rang out, echoing round the vast square. A prisoner collapsed to the ground, blood pouring from a wound. The servant calmly handed Cesare another rifle, fully loaded and ready for use. He fired another round and another unfortunate man folded to the ground. This continued until all the prisoners lay dead, blood pooling around them. A wagon pulled into the square and the limp bodies were tossed onto the back of it. His day’s sport over, Cesare turned and strolled back into his apartment, his father and sister taking one final look around the magnificent holy square before doing the same.
