- You know, in grade school
I had this vicious old woman teacher named Ms. McClellan,
and she'd be like,
"Did you finish your homework?"
And if there was a number 11 on this list, she'd be it.
Generally when we think
of the most vicious rulers in history,
we think of names like Genghis Khan,
Attila the Hun, or Vlad the Impaler.
However, although those men were brutal rulers,
it might surprise you that some of the most ruthless
and fearworthy rulers were actually female.
Here are the 10 most vicious female rulers in history.
Number 10 is Empress Julia Agrippina of Rome.
Julia Agrippina, the Empress of Poison,
was the sister of Emperor Caligula
and mother of Emperor Nero.
She outmaneuvered all of the men in her life,
beginning with her second husband whom she poisoned,
so that she could marry her uncle, Emperor Claudius,
poisoning countless other women competing for his attention.
But before poisoning Claudius,
Agrippina convinced her pushover uncle,
as well as her husband,
to adopt her son Nero from her first marriage
and name him his successor.
Nero took the throne as a teenager,
but Agrippina ruled on his behalf,
intervening in his salacious affairs,
which led Nero to banish her.
And after many failed attempts on her life,
including a boat designed to sink,
he finally executed his mommy dearest in 59 AD.
Ha okay, let's just back that up for a second.
Did she really have to marry her uncle?
I mean okay, this is kind of gross.
Let's go onto number nine.
Number nine is Queen Zenobia, the Warrior Queen of Palmyra.
Septimia Zenobia challenged the Roman Empire's global rule
by personally leading her army into battle.
In 258 AD, she became second wife
to King Septimius of Palmyra,
but he was assassinated along with his first wife,
leaving her young son heir to the throne.
She was his regent,
but really just ruled herself as the Warrior Queen,
sacking Egypt in 270,
claiming Alexandria was her ancestral city
and Cleopatra her distant ancestor.
Zenobia went on to conquer
what is modern-day Syria, Lebanon, and Palestine,
dominating Asia Minor's trade
that created bread shortages in Rome,
and even printed coins with her likeness.
Rome's leader Aurelius destroyed Zenobia's army at Antioch
and later paraded her around Rome as his prisoner,
before she later committed suicide in 274 AD.
Dang, that's quite the reign,
and you gotta be especially confident
to print your face on coins.
That's just some badassery.
Number eight is Empress Wu Zetian of China.
Imperial China had only one female ruler
in the 4,000 years
before Chairman Mao and his little red book
wiped it out with the Cultural Revolution.
Wu Zetian's rise is all the more impressive
because she was the daughter of a low-ranking general,
who began as a consort.
She was Machiavellian in her rise
through the Tang Dynasty court,
and is said to have killed her sister,
older brothers, her ineffectual lover Emperor Gaozong,
and even her infant daughter on her way to the throne.
Wu also banished and executed anyone
who threatened her rule,
including her children and grandchildren,
the irony being the consort of her exiled son
convinced him to depose his mother at 80 years old
and become emperor.
Here's a safe little check to see if you're power-hungry.
If you feel the need to off your kids,
you might be a little out of control with the power.
Number seven is Queen Tamar of Georgia.
Queen Tamar of Georgia
is sainted in the Georgian Orthodox Church,
appears on the Georgian 50 lira note,
and helped create Georgia's golden age.
But she did some rather unsaintly things along the way.
She was the apple of her father's eye, King George III,
who she co-ruled with until his death in 1184 AD.
She ascended to the throne
after ruthlessly vanquishing the noblemen
who dared to question the rule of a female.
Tamar later murdered all clergymen
in the Georgian Orthodox Church hierarchy
who questioned her rule,
and replaced them with lawyer sycophants.
Later she married Russian Prince Yuri,
who was an excellent military commander,
who helped expand the Georgian territory.
But he was too much of a ladies man,
so the pious queen banished him
and later married the Honorable David Solsan,
Prince of Ilan.
I know that all sounds like a crazy love puzzle,
but all you really need to know is she was tired of her man.
♪ And she don't want no scrubs ♪
So she moved on.
Number six is Queen Isabella I of Spain.
Nobody expected the Spanish Inquisition,
except for Queen Isabella I of Castile,
the wicked queen of Spain
who started the campaign to purify her country.
Isabella is also known
for financing Christopher Columbus's famed voyage of 1492,
but is best known for her famous mean streak,
beginning with her four-year war of Castilian succession
against her niece Joanna.
Queen Isabella and her husband Ferdinand
expanded the monarchy's power
by purging the noble's influence
and reinstalling Catholicism
as the supreme religion of Spain.
Pope Alexander VI declared them the Catholic monarchs,
in part because of the Spanish Inquisition
that oppressed the Jewish and Muslim minorities
that were murdered or banished if they did not convert.
Number five is Queen Mary I of England.
Mary was the daughter of the infamous King Henry VIII,
who sent her away at the age of nine to Wales,
where she suffered bad health, failed courtships,
and daddy issues while her brother Edward VI
became king at only nine.
Mary took the throne
after the boy king Edward died at only 15,
and embarked on a cruel campaign
to reverse her father's Protestant reforms.
A devout Roman Catholic,
Mary had 300 Protestants burned at the stake
and another 800 exiled
while she attempted to return England
to a Catholic majority.
But history has a way of carrying out karma,
because despite marrying Prince Philip of Spain
Mary was unable to produce an heir
and died of ovarian carcinoma at only 42 years old.
Okay, that is truly savage.
Your 15-year-old brother dies and all you can say is,
"Oh yeah, that's terrible.
"So is this where I sit for the crown?
"Okay, that's great."
Number four is Countess Elizabeth Bathory of Hungary.
The 16th century Hungarian countess Elizabeth Bathory
may have been a vampire
because she was born in Transylvania in 1560
and consumed the blood and flesh
of at least one of her victims.
"You know what?
"You kind of ticked me off.
"I'm just gonna have a little nibble of you."
The countess was untouchable for most of her life
because she was from a distinguished family
and married the local ruler Count Nadasdy,
who built her a torture chamber to use on peasant girls.
But her bloodlust evolved beyond torture
to killing some 650 young females,
whose blood she drained and bathed in,
believing that she could maintain her own youth
by consuming theirs.
But justice did not catch up to Bathory until 1610,
when she started kidnapping, torturing,
and killing the daughters of noblemen.
It was that that led to her prosecution
and eventual imprisonment in a castle,
where she was found dead in August of 1614.
Oh, so nobody cared
that she bathed in the blood of her victims
and drank it as well.
I'm sure that wasn't a warning sign at all,
nor was her only going out at night
and sleeping upside down from the roof.
Yeah, it's all good.
Number three is Queen Ranavalona I,
the Mad Monarch of Madagascar.
Queen Ranavalona, the Mad Monarch of Madagascar,
decimated the population that she ruled
from five million to 2.5 million
by the end of her 33-year rule.
When the king died in 1828,
Ranavalona named herself queen,
claiming the gods intended her to rule,
and proceeded to murder her rivals.
Yeah, but that wasn't all.
She also sold her subjects into slavery,
beheaded French and British missionaries,
and boiled Madagascan Christians alive.
Well, at least she didn't eat them
like the previous one,
so you know, that's a step up.
Number two is Queen Rani Lakshmi Bai of India.
Queen Rani Lakshmi Bai enjoys mythic status
for leading the 1857 Great Indian Rebellion
against Imperial British rule.
She grew up mastering martial arts
before finally being married off young
to a man who died just a year-and-a-half later.
The 26-year-old refused to abdicate her throne
to the East India Company that controlled India
and launched a rebellion.
According to historians,
she charged onto the battlefield with reins in her teeth
and two swords in her hands,
and laid siege to the fort
where they slaughtered every British man, woman, and child.
Sir Hugh Rose, commander of the British Army,
used artillery to thwart the rebellion,
but remained in awe of her,
calling her the Indian Joan of Arc.
See, kids?
Never give up on what you believe,
unless that involves slaughtering people,
in which case you should just...
You should just give up.
And number one is Jiang Qing, the Madam of China.
Jiang Qing was not royalty,
but became Chairman Mao Zedong's fourth wife in 1938,
and was one of the architects
and executioners of the Cultural Revolution.
Prior to marrying Mao,
she was an actress with many failed marriages,
and later purged all embarrassing information about herself
to maintain her power.
Jiang Qing was a member of the Gang of Four
at the top of the Communist Party food chain,
and oversaw the destruction of ancient Chinese culture,
literature, art, and architecture.
She referred to herself as Mao's dog
and would bite whomever he commanded,
which included a large portion of the Chinese population.
Oh okay, she thought she was a little doggy.
(barking)
That's mental illness.
Their rule led to the return of agrarian roots,
which led to famine and the deaths
of as many as 500,000 people from 1966 to 1969.
So yeah, like I said, vicious.
So those were the 10 most vicious female rulers in history.
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