Why do evil rulers came to power

For there is no authority except from God, and those which exist are established by God. But God also holds those leaders accountable to honor him with the authority he gives them. The fact that some leaders do terrible things does not make God terrible. It means those leaders are terrible. Romans 13 gives leaders the authority to lead their nation into war, but it also holds them accountable to do so in a justifiable and proper manner.

In many of our lifetimes both Richard Nixon and Bill Clinton nearly got themselves disordained. It often justifies slavery, intolerance and war. The men who wrote the Bible served their own ends in declaring their opinions had divine provenance. Before I go on to our second question, please know that all the many religious believers I am close to reject any notion that their supreme spiritual beings bless war, or that anything in their holy writings justifies war.

A group of rebels freed Joanna in and pronounced her sane and fit to rule—but changed their minds after she refused to support them instead of her son and sometime tormentor Charles.

He took great pleasure in bringing members of the nobility to heel through torture and sadistic executions. Fed up with rule, Ivan attempted to resign in but was convinced to return a year later. In Ivan murdered his own son and heir, striking him with a pointed staff in a fit of rage. One of the most eccentric rulers of the European Renaissance, Rudolf II was perhaps the greatest collector of his age and an enthusiastic patron of the arts, sciences and pseudo-sciences.

His castle complex at Prague featured a vast menagerie of animals, including lions, tigers, an orangutan and a live dodo bird. His cabinet of curiosities included a dizzying array of human and natural artifacts, organized by genre.

Throughout his life Rudolf alternated between bouts of elation and melancholy. As a ruler, he would withdraw from court from weeks on end, or speak in an inaudible voice. He gave generous support to the astronomers Tycho Brahe and Johannes Kepler, helping to lay the foundation of the Scientific Revolution. Blessed and cursed with, as one historian put it, a willingness to believe almost everything, Rudolf was an equally enthusiastic supporter of astrologers, alchemists and mystics of every stripe.

George III ruled during a tumultuous era that including the American Revolution—the Declaration of Independence is addressed to him—as well as the French Revolution and the Napoleonic Wars that followed it. It would be hard to imagine a stranger life than the one led by Carlota, the first and only Habsburg empress of Mexico. At a young age she was married to Maximilian, then the archduke of Austria, and went to live with him in a castle in Italy.

Eventually the Habsburgs had to agree to replace Rudolf with his brother, Matthias, who restored the religious peace in Germany and signed treaties with the Turks and Hungarians, only for Rudolf to fly into a rage and start up the Turkish war again. Rudolf reluctantly signed the letter of majesty granting freedom of worship to Protestants in Bohemia but then embarked on a programme of persecution. The Bohemians appealed to Matthias for help, and in Rudolf was forced to hand power over to his brother.

At a time when the Europeans were spreading their colonial holdings around the world, Queen Ranavalona was able to keep Madagascar free of British and French control, but she did so by establishing a rule so ruthless that it has been estimated that the population of her kingdom was halved during her reign.

Queen Ranavalona maintained her power by retaining the loyalty of the Malagasy army and imposing regular periods of forced labour on the rest of the population in lieu of taxation. On one notorious occasion she organised a buffalo hunt for herself, her nobles and their families and followers, and she insisted that an entire road be built in front of the party for them all to advance to the hunt in comfort: an estimated 10, people died carrying out this particular piece of folly. Queen Ranavalona faced several plots and at least one serious coup attempt; as she grew more paranoid she forced more people to undergo the notorious tangena test: eating three pieces of chicken skin before swallowing a poisonous nut that caused the victim to vomit if it did not actually poison them, which it often did.

If all three pieces were not found in the vomit, the victim was executed. Having encouraged Christianity at the start of her reign, Queen Ranavalona changed policy and instituted ruthless persecution of native Christians. She survived all plots against her and died in her bed. The CFS was presented to the world as a model of liberty and prosperity, devoted to the elimination of slavery. Only gradually did the world learn that it was in fact a slave state in which the Congolese were ruled by terror.

Mutilation was also widely used as a punishment for workers who ran away or collected less than their quota.

An investigation by the British consular official Roger Casement revealed that the Belgian Force Publique regarded the Congolese as little more than animals to be killed for sport. The king fought a high-profile legal battle to prevent details of his regime in Congo from being made public, and it took an international campaign to force him to hand Congo over to the Belgian government. Sign in. Back to Main menu Virtual events Masterclasses. Home Period Medieval 9 of the worst monarchs in history.

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