Read THE WORLD'S MOST EVIL PEOPLE (True Crime) for Free Online Page A

cliff.
    Following the India campaign, Tamerlane turned his attention to Syria to exact revenge on those who had failed to assist him in his earlier campaigns. He seized Aleppo and sacked it. He occupied Damascus in 1400. He sacked Baghdad, still reeling from the atrocities inflicted by Halagu a hundred years before, and set it on fire, killing 20,000 people. By 1402, he had moved on into Turkey, where he beheaded 5,000 Ottoman soldiers at the end of a siege; their Sultan was captured, put in an iron cage and killed.
    The reign of Tamerlane was a nightmare revisitation of an earlier era - just as he had hoped it would be. It came to an end with Tamerlane’s death. He was on his way, with his army, to attack China, when he fell ill at a campsite beside the Syr Daria river. It was there that he died, like Genghis Khan before him, of natural causes. By chance, he died at Otrar, whose governor had triggered the violent anger of Genghis Khan three centuries before. Along with his bloodthirsty forebear, Tamerlane died with the blood of hundreds of thousands of people on his hands.

Part Two: Medieval & Renaissance Monarchs

Vlad The Impaler
    (1431–1476)

     
    If Dracula had any real-life existence outside the fiction of Bram Stoker’s novel, then it was in the form of Vlad Tepes or Vlad III – or Vlad the Impaler.
    Vlad was born late in 1431, in the fortress of Sighisoara, in Transylvania. Vlad the Impaler’s mother was called Barbara. His father, Vlad II Dracul, was given the nickname ‘Dracul’ (Dragon), because he was a member of a crusading Catholic order of chivalry with that title. Vlad II had been admitted to the Order of the Dragon a year before the young Impaler was born. ‘Dracul’ was the nickname the Romanian boyars (noblemen) decided to call him. ‘Draculea’ means ‘son of Dracul’, and was often used by Vlad III to describe himself, which brings us to the familiar name Dracula. Vlad III supplied another element of Bram Stoker’s story with his habit of drinking the blood of his victims, of whom there were many. Stoker borrowed another element in the form of the Order of the Dragon’s official uniform, a black cloak over a red robe.
    His terrible reputation sprang from the horrible methods he used for killing his enemies. He sat down to dinner on one occasion, surrounded by a crowd of slowly dying victims. His dinner guests were nauseated by the screaming and the stench. One of them made the mistake of objecting and was himself impaled.
    It was late in 1436 that Vlad became Prince of Wallachia, one of three Romanian provinces, the others being Moldavia and Transylvania. He took up residence at the palace in Targoviste, the capital. In 1442, Vlad III and his brother Radu were taken hostage by Sultan Murad II; he was held in Turkey until 1448, though Radu was kept until 1462. This period of Turkish captivity played a key role in the development of Vlad’s black personality. He became profoundly pessimistic. The Turks set him free only when news broke that his father had been assassinated, at the orders of Vladislav II, who wanted the Wallachian throne for himself. He also then learned of the death of his older brother Mircea. Vlad was 17 and, supported by a force of Turkish cavalry, he made a move to seize the throne of Wallachia, but Vladislav was defeated only two months later. Then, in August 1456, Vlad was able to kill Vladislav and begin his longest reign (6 years). During this time he committed many cruel atrocities.
    His first major atrocity was, inevitably, an act of revenge aimed at the boyars of Targoviste who had conspired to kill his father and his brother Mircea. On Easter Day 1459, he invited all the boyar families who were involved to a feast. He impaled the older ones and forced the rest to march 50 miles to the town of Poenari, where they were made to build a fortress overlooking the Arges River; many died during this ordeal. This building is what is today known as Castle