Throughout the history of mankind, there have been many cruel rulers that use terror to gain control of the public. They rule with an iron fist and an unrelenting thirst for power and recognition. Unfortunately for society, there was too many for them all to fit on the list, so here’s the worst of the worst. From bad to worst, here are the top 5 evil men, 5 most cruel rulers ever in history.
5. Vlad Tepes
Vlad III, Prince of Wallachia (Vlad the Impaler) known for executing his enemies by impalement, and was a three-time Voivode of Wallachia, ruling mainly from 1456 to 1462, the period of the incipient Ottoman conquest of the Balkans. Vlad is best known for the legends of the exceedingly cruel punishments he imposed during his reign and for serving as the primary inspiration for the vampire. He was a fan of various forms of torture including disemboweling and rectal and facial impalement. He tortured thousands while he ate and drunk among the corpses. He impaled every person in the city of Amlas nearly 20,000 men, women and children. Vlad tortured the people ordering him to be skinned, boiled, decapitated, blinded, strangled, hanged, burned, roasted, hacked, nailed, buried alive, stabbed, etc. He also liked to cut off noses, ears, sexual organs, and limbs.
4. Ivan IV of Russia
Ivan IV of Russia (Ivan IV Vasilyevich), also know as Ivan the Terrible was the Grand Duke of Muscovy from 1533 to 1547 and was the first ruler of Russia and the first to be proclaimed tsar of Russia (from 1547). Historic sources present disparate accounts of Ivan’s complex personality: he was described as intelligent and devout, yet given to rages and prone to episodic outbreaks of mental illness. He enjoyed burning 1000s of people in frying pans and was fond of impaling people. Ivan’s soldiers built walls around the perimeter of the city in order to prevent the people of the city escaping. Between 500 and 1000 people were gathered every day by the troops, then tortured and killed in front of Ivan and his son. He is also remembered for his paranoiac suspiciousness and cruel persecution of nobility. Ivan died from a stroke while playing chess with Bogdan Belsky on 28 March.
3. Leopold II of Belgium
Leopold II was the King of the Belgians and is chiefly remembered for the founding and brutal exploitation of the Congo Free State. Born in Brussels the second son of Leopold I and Louise-Marie of Orléans, he succeeded his father to the throne on 17 December 1865 and remained king until his death. Leopold created the Congo Free State, a private project undertaken to extract rubber and ivory in the Congo region of central Africa, which relied on forced labor and resulted in the deaths of approximately 3 million Congolese.
2. Adolf Hitler
Adolf Hitler was an Austrian-born German politician and the leader of the National Socialist German Workers Party. He was chancellor of Germany from 1933 to 1945 and dictator of Nazi Germany from 1934 to 1945. Hitler was at the center of the founding of Nazism, the start of World War II, and the Holocaust. By the end of the second world war, Hitler’s policies of territorial conquest and racial subjugation had brought death and destruction to tens of millions of people, including the genocide of some six million Jews in what is now known as the Holocaust. On 30 April 1945, Hitler committed suicide, shooting himself while simultaneously biting into a cyanide capsule.
1. Josef Stalin
Joseph Vissarionovich Stalin was the Premier of the Soviet Union from 6 May 1941 until his death on 5 March 1953. Among the Bolshevik revolutionaries who brought about the Russian Revolution in 1917. Stalin probably exercised greater political power than any other figure in history. In the 1930s, by his orders, millions of peasants were either killed or permitted to starve to death. Stalin brought about the deaths of more than 20 million of his own people while holding the Soviet Union in an iron grip for 29 years.
