Top medieval bad guys – Kings to Popes!

Here they are – the TOP medieval bad guys!

MEDIEVAL BAD GUY: King John of England

• Just an all round terrible monarch
• Took on the barons and lost, then made to sign Magna Carta
• Excommunicated by the Pope
• Mislaid the crown jewels in a marshy swamp
• Fled in the face of an invasion of England by the King of France

MEDIEVAL BAD GUY: Philip the Fair of France

• Never seemed to have enough money
• So shook down the church and France’s Jewish population
• Then saw how much wealth the Templars when he fled to their Paris headquarters during a riot against his proposed currency devaluation
• Issued secret orders to arrest all Knights Templar on trumped up charges of sodomy and heresy then attempted to seize the wealth he’d seen

MEDIEVAL BAD GUY: Pope Honorius III

• The Inquisition really got going with Honorius
• He sanctioned the new Dominican order to go heretic hunting
• Wrote a very odd book called the Grimoire of Honorius with helpful tips on how to summon up demons in order to control them and how human sacrifice could be used to root out sorcerers

MEDIEVAL BAD GUY: Enrico Dandolo

• The Doge of Venice who funded the Fourth Crusade only so he could direct it against another Christian state instead of the Muslims
• Though blind and very old, he led the crusaders against the Byzantine empire
• Constantinople, the Christian jewel of the east, was comprehensively smashed up by the Venetians and their allies – and never really recovered until conquered by Muslim forces 250 years later
• The city’s treasures were ransacked and taken back to Venice including the four horses you can still see in St Mark’s Square

MEDIEVAL BAD GUY: Andronikos I Komnenos

• A Byzantine emperor who ruled using terror between 1183 and 1185
• His own people could take it no longer, rose up and overthrew him
• A mob in Constantinople tied him to a post and beat him for three days
• Then they cut off his right hand, pulled out his teeth, hair and eyes and poured boiling water over his head
• A prolonged and awful death!

MEDIEVAL BAD GUY: Frederick II Barbarossa

• A very medieval approach to science, this absolute ruler conducted experiments on living people
• This included imprisoning somebody in a cask with a hole to see if their would escaped from that opening at the point of death
• Feeding two prisoners and then sending one out to hunt and the other to bed. Then disembowelling them to see which had digested his food better
• Raising two children without any human interaction to see which language they ended up speaking