Weirdest Things Royals Did With Their Power
In a Nutshell
Absolute power removes all external constraints, allowing rulers' pre-existing obsessions to manifest without limit. Examples include Frederick William I's kidnapping campaign for 3,000+ giants, Qin Shi Huang's mercury poisoning from his immortality quest, and Louis XIV's daily ritual forcing nobles to compete for the privilege of dressing him. The pattern across centuries shows that power doesn't create madness—it simply eliminates everything that would normally stop someone's particular fixation from consuming everything around them.
These notes were generated by AI and may contain inaccuracies.
Power is the strangest drug in human history. Not because it corrupts, but because of what happens when someone gets so much of it that nothing remains to stop them. No budget, no consequences, no one who can say no and be heard. History is full of people who got there.
Go back to Prussia, early 1700s. Frederick William I became king of Prussia in 1713 and spent 27 years building one of the most disciplined military machines in Europe. He was efficient, frugal, and capable. He laid the groundwork his son Frederick the Great would use to turn Prussia into a major power. He was also one of the most bizarre individuals to hold a throne in European history.
Frederick William created a personal regiment composed entirely of extremely tall men. The Grand Grenadiers of Potsdam, the Potsdam Giants, had one entry requirement: at least 6 ft 2. Pay was determined by height alone. The taller you were, the more you earned. Their uniforms included 18-in grenadier caps to make them look even more imposing. They ate the best food, slept in the best quarters, and were never once sent into battle because Frederick considered them too precious to risk.
When he was depressed, he had 300 of them march past him, led by turbaned drummers and a live bear on a chain, to cheer himself up. When he was ill, they paraded through his bedroom. He painted their portraits from memory and showed them to visiting heads of state like a collector displaying rare objects.
Frederick found tall men by any means available. Some volunteered for the pay. Foreign rulers sent tall men as diplomatic gifts. Peter the Great of Russia sent over 50. Frederick paid fathers for tall sons, bought farmhands from landowners, had teachers identify tall children, and had promising newborns marked with red scarves for future collection. When men refused, he had them kidnapped.
An Irishman named James Kirkland, 7 ft and 1 in tall, was lured to London under the pretense of a job with the Prussian ambassador. He was taken to a ship in Portsmouth, grabbed, bound, and gagged, and transported to the continent. He never went home. A preacher was reportedly snatched mid-sermon. An Austrian diplomat was nearly abducted. For a period, Frederick had soldiers stretched on racks to add height, discontinued after several died. He admitted in writing, "The most beautiful woman in the world meant nothing to him." But tall soldiers were his weakness.
At his death, the regiment stood at 3,000 men. His son, Frederick the Great, sent most of them to regular infantry units immediately. The Potsdam Giants dissolved in 1806. What remained was a record of one of history's stranger obsessions, and a eugenics program for height that historians note with discomfort as a precursor to certain ideas that returned in Germany two centuries later.
Move west across Europe now to France, the second half of the 17th century. Every morning at Versailles, around 100 nobles filed into a gilded bedchamber to watch the King of France wake up and get dressed. Louis XIV had turned getting out of bed into a political weapon. The ceremony was called the lever du roi. It began at 8:30 a.m. in strict graded waves. The valet entered first, then the physician, then the court in ranked order. Specific nobles had specific roles. One person presented the royal shirt, another held the mirror, a designated duke handed the King his right sleeve, another his left. The privilege of fastening the royal garter belonged to one particular nobleman.
These were not servants. These were the most powerful men in France competing every morning for the honor of handing another man his socks. If you wanted to speak to the King about anything at all, this was when it happened, which meant if you were absent, you didn't exist at court. Louis would simply say, "I never see him." And your career was finished without confrontation.
The entire French aristocracy, the class that had revolted against the crown during his childhood, became people whose primary daily concern was being in the right room at the right moment to watch a man get dressed. He kept them at Versailles permanently, surrounded by ceremony and ritual that consumed their lives. Knocking on doors was banned. Courtiers scratched the doorframe with their left pinky fingernail instead, and many grew that nail long specifically for this purpose. Red-heeled shoes were restricted to nobles the king specifically approved, making footwear visible proof of royal favor.
The sociologist Norbert Elias spent years studying Versailles and called it the most sophisticated trap for a ruling class ever constructed. Louis never lost sleep over the nobility again. He had replaced their independence with an addiction to proximity, then made himself the only source.
Travel much further, over 2,000 years back, and to the other side of the world entirely. In 221 BC, Qin Shi Huang became the first person to unify China. He standardized currency, writing, and roads across a continent. He built the Great Wall. He buried himself with 8,000 terracotta warriors. By any measure of historical scale, what he accomplished was extraordinary.
By the final decade of his reign, he was completely consumed by terror of losing all. The fear was operational. He had elevated walkways built connecting his building so he would never walk outside exposed. He rotated constantly between 270 palaces and made it a capital offense to reveal his location. Anyone who disclosed where he slept had everyone nearby executed. He sent expeditions of hundreds of young men and women to mythical islands in the Eastern Sea where immortal sages were said to live with instructions to return with the elixir of eternal life. None of them came back.
He brought alchemists to court with unlimited resources. They gave him mercury. In ancient Chinese alchemy, this had internal logic. Mercury was the only metal liquid at room temperature. It transformed from red mineral to silver liquid and back again. It seemed to pass through states of being without dying. If a substance could do that, perhaps a person who consumed it could too. The reasoning was wrong. The chemistry was real. Qin Shi Huang drank it regularly for years.
Modern soil surveys around his tomb have found mercury concentrations far above background levels consistent with accounts describing rivers of flowing mercury inside his mausoleum. The paranoia and violent rages of his final years, historians now attribute much of this to heavy metal poisoning progressing through his brain. The thing he believed was protecting him was destroying him. He died at 49 on a road tour in 210 BC. His advisers kept the death secret for weeks delivering food to his sealed carriage twice daily as if he were still responding inside. The empire collapsed within four years of his death. The cure was the poison.
Forward now to 19th century Bavaria, a different kind of royal entirely and a story that ends in a shallow lake with no adequate explanation. Ludwig II became king of Bavaria in 1864 at 18. He had almost no interest in governing from the beginning. His ministers waited hours for meetings he never attended. State documents sat unsigned.
What Ludwig cared about was Wagner. He had attended one of the composer's operas at 16 and it had affected him completely. Within weeks of taking the throne he summoned Wagner to court, paid his debts, funded his work, and built his reign around someone else's creative vision.
Then he started building. Neuschwanstein first, the white castle on the cliff in the Alps, all towers and spires and romantic battlements. Not a fortress or seat of government, a stage set for the operas he loved. Disney modeled Sleeping Beauty's castle on it. Then a Versailles replica on an island in a lake with a hall of mirrors longer than the original. Then Linderhof, which included a man-made cave beneath the palace containing an artificial lake, artificial waves, an artificial rainbow from colored electric lights, and a golden shell boat in which Ludwig would sit alone at night and be rowed across his underground lake.
Bavaria's treasury was draining. Ludwig borrowed against future revenues on an enormous scale. His ministers spent years failing to stop him. In 1886 they had him declared mentally unfit, deposed him, and placed him in custody. Two days later, Ludwig and the psychiatrist who had signed his evaluation were both found drowned in a lake. The water was shallow, knee-deep. Neither should have been able to drown in it accidentally. No official explanation was ever produced. The investigation closed quickly. Neuschwanstein opened to tourists 7 weeks after his death. A million people visit every year. The king who nearly bankrupted Bavaria building fantasy worlds accidentally created one of the most visited landmarks in Europe.
Back to Rome now. The empire at its most extreme. Commodus became emperor in 180 AD and made one decision that defined his reign. He believed himself to be Hercules reincarnated and his true purpose was gladiatorial combat. He appeared in the arena in lion skins carrying a club, declared himself undefeated, and arranged his opponents accordingly. He charged the city of Rome 1 million sesterces per arena appearance from the public treasury. He renamed Rome after himself. He renamed the months of the year after his own titles. He had Romans with physical disabilities brought to the arena, tied together, dressed as mythological monsters, and clubbed to death with a padded mace while the crowd watched. Cassius Dio, a senator who witnessed some of this personally, recorded it in detail. He was strangled in his bath in 192 AD in a conspiracy organized by his chamberlain, his mistress, and a Praetorian Prefect. The man who did it was his personal wrestling partner named Narcissus. Rome declared him a public enemy and tried to erase his name from history.
Stay in Rome, but go back a few decades. Elagabalus became emperor in 218 AD at 14. His reign lasted 4 years. He reportedly had tame lions and leopards released into rooms where his dinner guests were sleeping specifically to terrify them on waking in the dark and finding large predators beside them. The guests were not told the animals were trained. That was the point. He was assassinated at 17, his body thrown in the Tiber. He was the third emperor to end up in the Tiber after death.
Cross the continent and move forward 1,500 years to Russia, 1762. Peter the Third became Tsar in January of that year and held the throne for 6 months before his wife staged a coup. In those 6 months, he reversed Russia's position in the Seven Years War, alienated the military, and antagonized the Orthodox Church. He also held a formal military tribunal for a rat. The rat had chewed the head off one of his toy soldiers. Peter had it arrested. A full military court assembled. The rat was tried, found guilty of conduct unbecoming, and publicly hanged. His wife Catherine took the throne 2 months later. She ruled Russia for 34 years and is remembered as one of the most capable monarchs in European history. The rat trial does not appear in her memoirs.
Back to Rome one final time. Nero became emperor in 54 AD. He wanted to be a great performer, a singer, a lyre player, an artist recognized for genuine talent. He performed on stage. He performed for hours. He also had the theater doors locked so no one could leave until he finished. Ancient sources record audience members feigning death to be carried out. One senator reportedly climbed through a window. Suetonius records that when Nero performed in cities, the gates were closed and residents were forbidden from leaving town for the duration. He was overthrown in 68 AD and died at 30 with no one willing to help him. His last recorded words were, "What an artist dies in me?" He meant it completely.
And finally, to 897 AD and what may be the single most deranged official proceeding in the history of organized religion. Pope Formosus died in April of 896. His successor, Pope Stephen VI, had accumulated a fierce hatred for him during years of rivalry. In January of 897, Stephen VI had the body exhumed. Formosus had been dead approximately 9 months. The body was dressed in full papal vestments, placed on a throne in a courtroom, and put on trial. Pope Stephen VI stood before the decomposing corpse and personally shouted the charges at it. A deacon was appointed to speak in the dead man's defense. The trial proceeded. Formosus was found guilty. The vestments were stripped, the three fingers of his right hand used to give blessings were cut off. The body was dragged through Rome and thrown in the Tiber. All of Formosus's ordinations were declared invalid, creating immediate administrative chaos since he had ordained many serving clergy. The Roman public revolted. Stephen VI was seized, imprisoned, and strangled in his cell. A subsequent pope recovered Formosus from the Tiber and reversed the verdict. Another pope reversed the reversal. Another reversed that. A dead man's guilt or innocence was formally contested across multiple papacies over several years.
What runs through all of this is not really madness. Some of these people were certainly that, but what they share is something simpler. The ordinary friction that life provides to everyone. Other people's objections, financial limits, social consequences, the basic reality that other humans can say no. All of it was gone. What remained was just the person with nothing left to push against them. Frederick William was already obsessed with tall men before the throne. Qin Shi Huang was already terrified of death. Ludwig already wanted to disappear into Wagner's world. Nero already believed he was a great artist. The throne did not create those things. It removed everything that had been preventing them from going all the way.
Most people spend their whole lives inside constraints and never find out what's underneath. These people found out, and the answer, almost every time, was something stranger than anyone watching from the outside could have predicted. Power does not change people. It reveals them. History has been demonstrating this for thousands of years in courts and arenas and underground caves and papal courtrooms, and it will keep demonstrating it because the people who acquire power rarely read history closely enough to know.
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