10 of History's Least Competent Rulers

ALA AD-DIN MUHAMMAD II

The Khwarezmian Empire stretched from the Sea of Oman to the Oxus River and encompassed what sociologists refer to as "Greater Iran," incorporating parts of modern-day China, Iraq, Pakistan, and Afghanistan, but you can be forgiven for not having heard of it before today as its 200-year history ended as the result of a single spectacularly bad decision.

Legendary Mongol ruler Genghis Khan came across Muhammad II's territory relatively early in his career and decided to play it safe, sending in a trade mission of Mongol and Muslim merchants to explore diplomatic and commercial possibilities. Muhammad, nervous over the real military skill of the Mongols and the exaggerated accounts of their brutality, arrested the merchants and seized their goods.

Khan, who was way more diplomatic than people generally gave him credit for, sent three envoys to Muhammad to offer him an easy out-blame the arrest of the merchants on a local governor, chop off his head, everything will be cool and we can discuss trade opportunities-but the paranoid Khwarezmian ruler had all or most of the envoy and merchant mission killed.

It was at this point, after having two reasonable proposals rebuffed in the most insulting way possible, that Genghis Khan decided to buck wild. 200,000 elite Mongol troops stormed Khwarezmia, lead by Genghis' three greatest generals with orders to kill everything in their path-the great cities of Khorasan in particular were to be scoured of all living things, even pets. Muhammad II ran from hiding place to hiding place before finally dying of pleurisy on a remote island of the Caspian Sea... like a wuss.

LUDWIG II OF BAVARIA

Called "The Swan King" to his face and "Mad King Ludwig" to his back, Ludwig II was a promising prospect for royalty in his teens: strikingly handsome, highly intelligent, and not even a little bit deformed by inbreeding, the other young Bavarian was thought highly of by other German nobles.

His first significant acts after ascending to the throne were dedicated to turning Munich into a seat of culture, rescuing Richard Wagner from his creditors and staging plays and concerts from all of Europe in several new theaters built for the purpose.

The legend of Ludwig's "madness" was an exaggeration of his somewhat eccentric and creative nature and was based on two of his life-long hobbies-building gorgeous palaces and having gay sex. Ludwig II was unfortunate to be a homosexual monarch in one of the relatively few times and places where that would be looked upon as a significant scandal instead of being excused as an amusing eccentricity.

The palace-building came after the Franco-Prussian war and the loss of Bavarian independence; stripped of any real duties besides marrying and reproducing with a suitable woman, Ludwig focused his considerable intelligence and refinement into the design and construction of a series of beautiful French-influenced palaces.

Although he paid for the castles out of his own pocket, the vast expense was still harming the state economy, and his court conspired against him to have him declared insane and unfit to rule. Sad King Ludwig was exiled to Castle Berg off of Lake Stamberg, where he was later said to have drowned in a mysterious death that today remains unsolved. Ironically, the expensive palaces that convinced his counselors to depose him are now the greatest generators of tourist revenue for Bavaria today.

EDWARD II OF ENGLAND

Son of the badass Edward "Hammer of the Scots" Longshanks, Ed II's reign managed to undo most of his father's accomplishments and did not earn him any awesome nicknames. Lacking in confidence and experience, Edward II spent most of his time scheming against his barons and hanging out suspiciously closely with various hunky knights under his employ-which wouldn't have been that much of a problem if he didn't keep giving them gifts and power way above their station.

Worst of all was his handling of the Scottish campaign, fleeing in a panic from the Battle of Bannockburn and abandoning most of his troops in the worst English defeat since the Battle of Hastings. Ed returned to London in a sulk, finding consolation in the arms of yet another foxy young gentleman and causing his long-suffering wife Isabella to finally say "screw it," leave for France, and come back at the head of an invasion force.

Edward II had even less success dealing with his pissed-off wife than a horde of marauding Scots, and was soon deposed, imprisoned, and murdered.

COMMODUS

Commodus, son of renowned strategist, legislator, and Stoic philosopher Marcus Aurelius, was concerned primarily with reminding everyone in Rome how strong, handsome, and literally God-like he was, spending his time commissioning hundreds of statues of himself as Hercules while neglecting important matters of state.

While the death of the warlike Aurelius meant that the Empire experienced a term of relative peace, Commodus' gullible nature and lack of interest in imperial duties meant that any number of sneaky intrigues and political conflicts began to fester while Commodus was working on his pecs; historians like Edward Gibbon would later label his rule the beginning of the Roman decline.

Commodus was especially fond of gladiatorial combat and even participated in battles himself, scandalizing the Roman elite and costing the city of Rome a million sesterces for each special appearance, during which most of his battles would end with a submission to the Emperor (ironically he was said to have regularly killed his practice opponents).

Later gladiator appearances got seriously weird as Commodus got deeper into his Hercules kick, cruelly slaying wounded POWs to the horror of the Roman military and slaughtering a horrific number of animals: he was rumored to have killed 100 lions in a single day, killed a helpless giraffe just for the hell of it, and decapitated a running ostrich with a specially-designed dart as a bizarre warning to his political opponents.

After Commodus officially declared himself simultaneously the new Romulus and a god, the Senate had enough and had him strangled in his bath. All glory to the Imperial Himbo!

KIM JONG-IL

It's hard to establish an honest-to-goodness royal dynasty in the 20th Century, what with all this democracy this and socialism that and international spy agencies generally ready to shoot ricin into you at a moment's notice, but the career and behavior of Kim Jong-Il fit right in with the excesses of any number of mad kings of history.

There are some reports that Kim even "accidentally" caused the drowning of his elder brother Kim Pyong-Il at the age of five, a classic evil monarch move and an incident that has been said to be the reason his younger brother (also named Pyong-Il) has always been kept far, far away on ambassadorial duty.

The stories of Kim Jong-Il's madness are too many to list here: the boatloads of expensive cognac, his obsession with cheap action and monster movies, the bizarre and amazing legends of his sporting ability and magical powers, etc., etc.

It's an open question how much of Jong-Il's cult of personality was based on effective propaganda and brainwashing vs. simple fear and/or continuing respect for his no-nonsense father Kim Il-Sung, and some think that one reason Kim Jong-Un is being such a dick right now is that he's desperately hoping to appear as crazy and dangerous as his father to audiences at home and abroad.

LIU SHAN

There are some historians who think that Liu Shan, last emperor of Shu Han, was an uncommonly clever and subtle ruler, highly skilled in manipulating others and controlling people's perceptions of him. This is to be balanced against the fact that his infant name "Adou" is even today a Chinese slang term for "severely mentally deficient."

If the "subtle manipulator" theory is right, Liu Shan was better than anyone else in history at pretending to be incompetent: his "reign" consisted of a series of regencies as a number of different nobles took on the duties of defending Shu Han against the Chinese kingdoms not currently being ruled by man-children.

After the inevitable fall of Shu, Adou and his family were relocated to the Wei capital and he was decreed the "Duke of Peace and Comfort," suiting the laid-back emperor right down to the ground.

As his powerless advisors moped around the compound, the curious Wei regent asked the chillaxed Duke if he missed his home and status as emperor, to which Liu Shan infamously responded "I enjoy life here and do not think of Shu at all," inspiring another Chinese idiom referring to a condition of blissfully ignorant negligence. The child-like emperor died peacefully six years later.

FYODOR I, THE BELL-RINGER

Whereas China only experienced one famously slow (or subtly sandbagging) ruler, Imperial Russia and its famously kinked bloodlines featured a number of Tzars so mentally disabled that a few were believed to be little better than vegetative. Of these, the most famous and celebrated was Fyodor the Bell-Ringer, the unlikely son of the genuinely terrible Ivan the Terrible and the last of the Rurikian dynasty.

Fyodor's interests included praying, visiting churches to ring the bells, and (in stark contrast to his father) generally not raping and murdering people by the thousands, and as a result his subjects came to regard his simple-mindedness as a sort of divine childishness, and even today Russian historians tend to refer to him not as Fyodor the Bell-Ringer but Fyodor the Blessed.

The de facto rule of Russia fell to the clever Boris Godunov, a member of Ivan's personal guard and friend of the family who managed the country's affairs with a striking lack of insanity and rage. He arranged Fyodor's marriage to his sister Irina, guaranteeing the Godunov family's claim to the throne should the gentle, pious Tzar of All the Russias ever figure out how to have sex.

SAPARMURAT NIYAZOV

Unlike everyone else on this list, Saparmurat Niyazov wasn't really part of a dynasty, either as the beginning or the end of one. Niyazov merits inclusion on this list because he was so off-the-charts crazy he made Kim Jong-Il look like Dwight Eisenhower. After becoming the first elected leader of Turkmenistan in an election where he was the sole candidate, Niyazov took on the additional title Turkmenbashi, meaning "leader of Turkmen" and granting him power over all the Turkmen of the world, most of which were conveniently still located in Turkmenistan.

His legislative accomplishments included bans on lip synching, TV makeup, beards and long hair, dogs and cultural performances that he judged "decidedly unturkmen-like"; the construction of an ice palace and skating rink outside the capital to help the residents of the desert country learn how to skate; the renaming of the nearly everything he could after himself and his family members, and the closing of public libraries (Niyazov's position being that the only books anyone needed were the Koran and his personal book of poetry).

The main reason Niyazov never managed to grab the kind of headlines Kim did was his firmly neutral stance on everything, most visibly commemorated by the famous "Neutrality Tripod" in Ashgabat, surmounted by a 12-foot-tall gold-plated statue of himself that would gradually rotate throughout the day in order to constantly face the sun.