Kings Who Lost Their Minds transcript

Today, we're going over the most unhinged kings in history. And I don't mean rulers who were a little eccentric or had some weird hobbies. I'm talking about kings who were so completely out of their minds that their own advisers, families, and entire countries had to figure out how to survive a leader who had genuinely lost the plot. Let's get into it. Number one, Emperor Justin II, the one who ate people. It's 565 AD and Justin II has just become emperor of the Eastern Roman Empire.

He inherits the throne from his uncle, Justinian the Great, one of the most accomplished rulers in Roman history. Big shoes to fill. And to his credit, Justin starts off fine. He's sharp, ambitious, and immediately begins trying to restore the empire's military strength. Then, his mind breaks. By around 573, the stress of running an empire under constant attack begins to take its toll. The Persians are invading from the east, the Lombards are rampaging through Italy, the treasury is empty because Justinian spent all the money on building projects and wars.

Justin starts hearing voices. He starts screaming at people who aren't there. His behavior becomes erratic and violent to the point where his own palace guards are afraid of him. According to the historian John of Ephesus, who was actually present at the court during this time, Justin had to be physically restrained by attendants. He would bite people. Not metaphorically, he would literally try to eat his servants. The palace staff reportedly wheeled him around on a small cart to keep him contained, and they would play organ music to calm him down because, for whatever reason, that was the only thing that worked.

When music wasn't available, his attendants would try to distract him by rolling him past windows while they ran alongside making funny faces. The Empress Sophia eventually convinced him to appoint a general named Tiberius as co-emperor to actually run things. In one of his rare moments of lucidity, Justin supposedly told Tiberius, "May God be with you. I myself am nothing now." He died in 578, having spent the last 5 years of his reign as a restrained, biting, screaming man being wheeled around a palace on a cart.

The organ music thing is somehow the detail that makes it most sad. Number two, Charles the VI of France, the Glass King. It's 1392 and 23-year-old King Charles the VI of France is riding through a forest with his men when a barefoot man suddenly appears on the road and grabs his horse's bridle. The man screams at the king, "Stop, noble king. You are betrayed." Charles' guards shove the man away and the party continues.

But something has shifted inside Charles. He's agitated. His eyes are darting. His hands are trembling. A few hours later, one of his pages accidentally drops a lance and it clangs against a helmet. The noise triggers something. Charles draws his sword, spins his horse around, and begins attacking his own men. He kills four of his own knights before his companions can wrestle him to the ground. When they finally subdue him, Charles has no memory of what just happened.

This was the first major episode in what would become a 30-year descent into madness. Charles became convinced that he was made of glass. Not metaphorically. He genuinely believed his body was constructed of glass and that if anyone touched him, he would shatter. He refused to let people near him. He had iron rods sewn into his clothing to prevent his glass body from breaking. He would stand perfectly still for hours, terrified that any movement would crack him.

He also forgot who he was repeatedly. He would look at his own coat of arms and not recognize it. He didn't recognize his wife. He didn't recognize his children. He would wander the hallways of the palace screaming that he was not the king and demanding to know who all these people were. During his rare periods of sanity, which could last anywhere from a few weeks to a few months, Charles would be horrified by what he'd done during his episodes.

He'd apologize to everyone, try to govern responsibly, and desperately pray that the madness wouldn't return. It always did. His illness created a power vacuum in France that his relatives immediately began fighting over. His brother, the Duke of Orléans, and his cousin, the Duke of Burgundy, waged what was essentially a civil war for control of the kingdom while the king wandered around the palace convinced he was made of glass.

This internal chaos is what allowed Henry the fifth of England to invade France and win the Battle of Agincourt in 1415. If Charles had been sane, the Hundred Years' War might have gone very differently. Charles died in 1422, having been king for 42 years, most of which he spent in a state of complete disconnection from reality. The Glass King. It would be funny if it hadn't destroyed an entire country. Number three, Emperor Zhengde of China, the emperor who played pretend.

It's 1505 and 13-year-old Zhu Houzhao has just become Emperor Zhengde of the Ming Dynasty. He has absolute power over the largest empire on Earth. He could do literally anything. Build monuments, conquer nations, reform society. Instead, he builds himself a fake city inside the palace grounds so he can play shopkeeper. Zhengde had a building constructed called the Leopard Quarter, a mini town complete with fake shops, fake restaurants, and fake market stalls.

He would wander around this pretend city dressed as a commoner, haggling over prices with eunuchs who were forced to pretend to be merchants. He'd buy things with fake money and and congratulate himself on getting a good deal. His officials would watch this grown man, the ruler of 100 million people, pretending to buy vegetables from his own servants, and they just had to nod and smile. But it got weirder. Zhengde decided that being emperor was boring, and what he really wanted was to be a military general.

So he gave himself a fake military rank under a false name, Zhu Shou, and began issuing orders to himself. He'd write official documents from General Zhu Shou, requesting permission from Emperor Zhengde to do various things. Then he'd switch hats and approve his own requests. His ministers had to process these documents through the actual imperial bureaucracy, a real empire's paperwork being consumed by one man's elaborate game of pretend.

When an actual military campaign against Mongol raiders presented itself in 1517, Zhengde was thrilled. He personally rode out to fight, and to everyone's genuine surprise, he actually wasn't terrible at it. He killed at least one enemy soldier in close combat, a fact he bragged about for the rest of his life. But the battle itself was basically a skirmish, and Zhengde reported it as a massive victory with inflated casualty numbers.

He also kept a private zoo filled with exotic animals, including the leopards that gave the leopard quarter its name. He reportedly tried to wrestle a tiger at one point, which went about as well as you'd expect. He survived, but was badly injured, and his officials nearly had heart attacks. Zhengde died in 1521 at age 29 after falling off a boat while drunk. He had been emperor for 16 years. The Ming Dynasty survived him, but his reign is basically a case study in what happens when you give unlimited power to someone who would rather play dress-up.

Number four, Ibrahim I of the Ottoman Empire, the Mad Sultan. It's 1640 and Ibrahim has been locked inside the kafes, a gilded cage within the Topkapi Palace, for 22 years. The kafes was where the Ottoman Empire kept spare princes. Rather than executing all potential rivals to the throne, the Ottomans would just lock them in a luxurious prison for their entire lives. >> Ibrahim had watched from inside his cage as his brothers were strangled one by one.

When his brother, Sultan Murad IV, died, Ibrahim was the last surviving male of the Ottoman dynasty. The doors of the kafes opened and Ibrahim was told he was now the Sultan. He refused to come out. He was convinced it was a trick to get him out so they could kill him. His mother, Kosem Sultan, had to physically bring his brother's dead body to the door to prove Murad was actually dead. Only then did Ibrahim cautiously step out. 22 years of isolation had not been kind to Ibrahim's mental health.

Within months of taking the throne, his behavior became increasingly bizarre. Ibrahim developed an obsession with fur. Not a preference, an obsession. He had his entire palace draped in fur, walls, floors, ceilings. He demanded that his concubines wear nothing but fur. He had a fur-lined room where he would spend hours rolling around by himself. According to some accounts, he became sexually obsessed with a particular cow because he thought its body resembled a woman's and he had someone search the empire for a woman who matched the cow's proportions.

They allegedly found one, a woman of enormous size from Armenia, and she became one of his favorites at court. He would throw gold coins into fish ponds and watch them sink. He'd pour expensive perfumes into fountains. When his advisers told him the treasury was running low, he responded by demanding more gold from the provinces to dump into more ponds. The breaking point came when one of his concubines was rumored to have been unfaithful.

Ibrahim's response was to have 280 of his concubines bound, loaded into weighted sacks, and thrown into the Bosphorus Strait to drown. 280 women because one might have been unfaithful. Only one reportedly survived by escaping her sack. By 1648, Ibrahim's own mother, the same Kösem Sultan who had freed him from the kafes, agreed that he had to go. She authorized a coup. Ibrahim was seized, thrown back into the kafes that had been his prison for 22 years, and strangled with a bowstring 10 days later.

He'd been sultan for eight years. The Ottoman court moved on like nothing had happened. Number five, King Christian VII of Denmark, the king who couldn't stop. It's 1766, and 17-year-old Christian VII becomes king of Denmark and Norway. He's intelligent, well-educated, charming when he wants to be, and absolutely everyone in the Danish court has high hopes for his reign. Those hopes last about six months. Christian begins exhibiting behavior that alarms everyone around him.

He bangs his head against walls until he bleeds. He slaps people in the face mid-conversation for no reason. Dignitaries, servants, his own advisers. He runs through the streets of Copenhagen at night with his friends, smashing windows and getting into fights with random strangers. He visits brothels so frequently that it becomes a diplomatic incident. When he's married to Caroline Matilda, the 15-year-old sister of King George III of England.

He treats her terribly. He ignores her, insults her publicly, and continues his nightly rampages through the city. He develops a compulsive habit of self-harm. He mutilates his own hands to the point where they're permanently scarred. His most persistent delusion was that he was being controlled by invisible forces and that his real self was trapped somewhere else. He would stare at his own reflection for hours trying to find the real Christian.

He would also fall into states of complete catatonia, sitting motionless and unresponsive for days at a time, only to suddenly snap back and resume slapping people. Into this mess walks Johann Friedrich Struensee, a German physician who is brought in to treat the king. Struensee quickly realizes that Christian is never going to be able to actually rule. So, he does something audacious. He befriends the king, gains his trust, and gradually takes over the entire Danish government.

For about 16 months in 1770 to 1772, Struensee was the de facto ruler of Denmark, issuing over 1,000 royal decrees in Christian's name while the king wandered the palace in a daze. Struensee also began an affair with Queen Caroline Matilda and the two of them had a daughter together while the king was too mentally absent to notice or care. When the Danish nobility found out, they staged a coup. Struensee was arrested, tried, and publicly executed.

His right hand was cut off first, then he was beheaded, and his body was drawn and quartered. Caroline Matilda was exiled. And Christian? He remained king for another 36 years. He never recovered his sanity, but nobody bothered to officially remove him. He just existed in the palace as a figurehead, slowly deteriorating, occasionally slapping someone, while a series of regents ran the country around him. He died in 1808 at age 59 having been nominally king for 42 years and actually in charge for approximately zero of them.

So, there you have it. Five kings and emperors who proved that absolute power doesn't just corrupt absolutely. Sometimes it just goes completely off the rails. Justin the second tried to eat his staff. Charles the sixth thought he was made of glass. Zhengde played shopkeeper with his own servants. Ibrahim drowned 280 women because of a rumor. And Christian the seventh spent 42 years as king while being incapable of doing literally anything except slap people and stare at mirrors.

The next time someone says they wish they were born into royalty, maybe show them this video first.