Tom Phillips - Humans - A Brief History of How We F*cked It All Up

His distaste for actually doing any of the work of ruling, when he’d much rather be off hunting tigers or sleeping with absurd numbers of women, was one thing. Not ideal, but, eh, you work with what you’ve got.

What was weirder was when he invented an alter ego for himself—a dashing military leader called General Zhu Shou—and started giving this imaginary general orders to go and fight battles in the north, which, in character as Zhu Shou, he would of course dutifully follow. And which, by a remarkable coincidence, just happened to take him away from his work for many months.

That was definitely weird.

But probably not quite as weird as the fact that he had a full-size replica of a city market built inside the palace grounds, and would force all his most senior officials and military leaders to dress up as shopkeepers and play-act at being tradesmen so that he could dress like a commoner and walk around the market pretending to buy things. And if he caught any of them looking even a bit grumpy about this profoundly humiliating waste of time, they’d be fired, or worse.

Yep, that bit was probably the weirdest.

Oh, and there was also that time he decided it was a good idea to store all his gunpowder inside the palace just before a lantern festival. Which ended pretty much exactly how you would expect it to: explosively. (He survived the fire, but then died at the age of 29 from a disease he caught falling out of a boat. Twat.)

One problem with hereditary systems is that they do quite often end up with someone being in charge who clearly would rather be doing anything else but ruling. It was the case with the Zhengde Emperor, and it was also the case with poor Ludwig II of Bavaria. Unlike most of the other rulers on this list, “Mad King Ludwig” was mostly harmless; he just wasn’t remotely into any of the things that were expected of the King of Bavaria. Instead, he preferred to devote his life to making things extremely fabulous.

When you look at the history of supposed madness in rulers, it’s hard not to spot that many cases that feature on lists of “maddest monarchs” have something in common. Namely, the people in charge of writing history seem to be using “insanity” or “eccentricity” as a code for “insufficiently heterosexual.” (Shout-out in particular to Queen Christina of Sweden, who refused to marry, preferred wearing masculine clothing and having uncombed hair and had what today would probably be referred to as a “gal pal.” When put under pressure to find a husband, she instead renounced the throne, left Sweden dressed as a man and moved to Rome, where she entered the city on horseback dressed as an Amazon.)

We can only ever tentatively guess at the actual sexual orientation of historical figures (and we need to remember that the idea of “gay” as a specific, distinct identity only became solidified in Western societies within the last 150 years or so). That said, it still seems a pretty safe call to state that Ludwig II was super-super-gay.

Ludwig was a shy, creative daydreamer who was profoundly uninterested in the business of politics or leading an army. Instead, when he became king in 1864 at the relatively tender age of 19, he withdrew from public life and dedicated his reign to becoming a patron of the arts. What’s more, he was pretty good at it.

He poured resources into the theater, hiring top talent and turning Munich into a cultural capital of Europe. He was a devoted fan of Wagner and became his personal patron, funding and supporting the composer to produce his late-career masterpieces after everybody else tried to run him out of town for being a knob. And above all, there were the castles.

Ludwig wanted Bavaria to be filled with fairy-tale castles. Getting theatrical stage designers rather than architects to plan them, he spent extravagantly on a series of increasingly ornate and flamboyant palaces—Schloss Linderhof, Herrenchiemsee and particularly the dramatic Schloss Neuschwanstein, perched on a rocky Alpine outcrop near his childhood home.

All of this was very troubling to the great and the good of Bavaria. It wasn’t exactly that Ludwig was inattentive to his duties—he would speed through his paperwork so he could get back to his true passions—but he was piling up debt to fund his artistic endeavors, hated appearing at public functions and his main interest in military matters seems to have been that the cavalry was full of hot guys.

And then there was the issue of an heir. As kings usually were, Ludwig was under constant pressure to marry and have children. He got engaged to a duchess who shared his love of Wagner, but as the wedding date came closer, he postponed it over and over again, before finally calling it off. He never even came close to marrying again.

Eventually, as Ludwig’s debts increased and his plans for future castles got more and more elaborate, his enemies at court decided to act, and followed the time-honored route of having him declared insane. Now, the idea that some mental health issues might have run in Ludwig’s family isn’t out of the question (his aunt Alexandra thought she had a glass piano inside her body, although that didn’t stop her going on to have a literary career). But of the four eminent doctors that the conspirators persuaded to sign off on Ludwig’s diagnosis, none had ever examined him, and only one of them had ever even met him (12 years earlier). Among their evidence of his clear unfitness to rule was the damning fact that he forbade a servant to put milk in his coffee.

But the ruse worked, and despite the best efforts of a friendly baroness who temporarily fought off the government commissioners with her umbrella, Ludwig was deposed, and taken to be imprisoned (sorry, “treated for his health”) in a castle south of Munich. The suspicion that not everything was entirely aboveboard about all this is only increased by the fact that three days later, Ludwig and his doctor were both found dead in a shallow lake, in what can only be described as “mysterious circumstances.”

But in some ways, Ludwig had the last laugh. All those castles that he spent so lavishly on? They’re now globally famous—Schloss Neuschwanstein is the iconic representation of Bavaria around the world—and attract millions of visitors a year, all of which is pretty good news for the Bavarian economy. If the plotters hadn’t stopped Ludwig’s future plans by deposing him, who knows how much more the Bavarians might have now. The person who fucked up here wasn’t poor daydreaming Ludwig. It was them.

Even if you’ve never heard of Schloss Neuschwanstein, you’ve still seen it a hundred times. Its romantic turrets and spires were the direct inspiration for the castles in Disney’s Cinderella and Sleeping Beauty , which themselves became synonymous with the world’s biggest entertainment company. Any time you see that shooting star sprinkling its fairy dust over the castle in Disney’s logo, you’re watching Ludwig’s dream living on.

Ludwig was far from the only leader whose dreams and talents lay in a different direction to the business of ruling. His love of building castles was at least a vocation that sits in vaguely the right ballpark for a monarch. A less suitable career would be one, say, as an enthusiastic and indefatigable pickpocket.

Now, if the only notable thing that Farouk I of Egypt had done in his life was to pickpocket Winston Churchill’s watch while taking part in a crucial meeting during World War II, then he might be remembered a bit differently. He would have gone down in history at worst as a mild eccentric; at best, as an absolute legend who was basically the King of Banter.