10 Most Cruel Rulers In History

One man's hero is another man's tyrant, a popular aphorism goes.But while we can argue the validity and virtue of certain political agendas, the callous methods by which some leaders attain their goals are less up to interpretation.After all, no matter how a historian tries to spin it, ordering a tower to be constructed out of live men stacked and cemented together with bricks and mortar is pretty brutal.Business Insider put together a list of the most ruthless leaders of all time featuring men and women who employed merciless tactics to achieve their political and military agendas.History is replete with tales of evil people performing evil acts. Sadly they are so many in number that Amazing world has been able to feature many top 10 lists of evil humans – men, women, and even children. This list looks at ten people from history who were especially cruel and who, in many cases, are remembered for that reason alone.It is so interesting that many of the ruthless people are also most powerful leaders in history. Check out our top ten.

10 – Maximilien Robespierre

He was the leader of the French Revolution, but when he gained power he became obsessed with guillotining people. He saw everyone around him as an enemy. He suspected even his closest friends.He killed people for not supporting the Revolution, for hoarding, rebellion and other things he saw as crimes .He guillotined entire families of aristocrats and ordinary people with no trial. In 1794, he received his punishment and was guillotined without trial.He is perhaps best known for his role in the French Revolution's Reign of Terror. He was named as a member of the powerful Committee of Public Safety launched by his political ally Georges Danton and exerted his influence to suppress the left-wing Hébertists. As part of his attempts to use extreme measures to control political activity in France, Robespierre later moved against the more moderate Danton, who was accused of corruption and executed in April 1794. The Terror ended a few months later with Robespierre's arrest and execution in July, events that initiated a period in French history known as the Thermidorian Reaction. Robespierre's personal responsibility for the excesses of the Terror remains the subject of intense debate among historians of the French Revolution.Influenced by 18th-century Enlightenment philosophes such as Rousseau and Montesquieu, Robespierre was a capable articulator of the beliefs of the left-wing bourgeoisie. His steadfast adherence and defense of the views he expressed earned him the nickname l'Incorruptible (The Incorruptible)

09 – Attila The Hun

Attila (Attila the Hun), was the ruler of the Huns from 434 to 453. He is considered one of the most evil rulers in history. He crossed the Danube twice and plundered the Balkans, but was unable to take Constantinople. He also attempted to conquer Roman Gaul. He invaded Italy, devastating the northern provinces, but was unable to take Rome. He died in the early months of 453.During his reign, he was one of the most feared enemies of the Western and Eastern Roman Empires. He crossed the Danube twice and plundered the Balkans, but was unable to take Constantinople. His unsuccessful campaign in Persia was followed in 441 by an invasion of the Eastern Roman (Byzantine) Empire, the success of which emboldened Attila to invade the West. He also attempted to conquer Roman Gaul (modern France), crossing the Rhine in 451 and marching as far as Aurelianum (Orléans) before being defeated at the Battle of the Catalaunian Plains.He subsequently invaded Italy, devastating the northern provinces, but was unable to take Rome. He planned for further campaigns against the Romans but died in 453. After Attila's death his close adviser Ardaric of the Gepids led a Germanic revolt against Hunnic rule, after which the Hunnic Empire quickly collapsed.
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08 – Pol Pot

Pol Pot was the leader of the Khmer Rouge and the Prime Minister of Cambodia from 1976 to 1979. His radical communist government killed and displaced millions of innocent people and left behind disease, hardship and starvation. At least one million people died from forced labour, torture and execution during his regime.He presided over a totalitarian dictatorship, in which his government made urban dwellers move to the countryside to work in collective farms and on forced labour projects. The combined effects of executions, strenuous working conditions, malnutrition and poor medical care caused the deaths of approximately 25 percent of the Cambodian population. In all, an estimated 1 to 3 million people (out of a population of slightly over 8 million) perished as a result of the policies of his four-year premiership.After Cambodia lost the Cambodian–Vietnamese War in 1979, Pol Pot relocated to the jungles of southwest Cambodia, and the Khmer Rouge government collapsed. From 1979 to 1997, he and a remnant of the old Khmer Rouge operated near the border of Cambodia and Thailand. Until 1993, they clung to power as part of a coalition government that was internationally recognized as the rightful government of Cambodia. Pol Pot died in 1998, while under house arrest by the Ta Mok faction of the Khmer Rouge. Since his death, rumours that he committed suicide or was poisoned have persisted

07 – Genghis Khan

Genghis Khan was the founder and the emperor of the Mongol Empire, which became the largest contiguous empire in history after his demise. He came to power by uniting many of the nomadic tribes of northeast Asia. He conquered most of Eurasia and he brought all the nomadic tribes of Mongolia under his rule in a rigidly disciplined military state.He came to power by uniting many of the nomadic tribes of Northeast Asia. After founding the Empire and being proclaimed "Genghis Khan", he started the Mongol invasions that conquered most of Eurasia. Campaigns initiated in his lifetime include those against the Qara Khitai, Caucasus, and Khwarazmian, Western Xia and Jin dynasties. These campaigns were often accompanied by wholesale massacres of the civilian populations – especially in the Khwarazmian and Western Xia controlled lands. By the end of his life, the Mongol Empire occupied a substantial portion of Central Asia and China.

Before Genghis Khan died, he assigned Ögedei Khan as his successor and split his empire into khanates among his sons and grandsons.[6] He died in 1227 after defeating the Western Xia. He was buried in an unmarked grave somewhere in Mongolia. His descendants extended the Mongol Empire across most of Eurasia by conquering or creating vassal states in all of modern-day China, Korea, the Caucasus, Central Asia, and substantial portions of modern Eastern Europe, Russia, and Southwest Asia. Many of these invasions repeated the earlier large-scale slaughters of local populations. As a result, Genghis Khan and his empire have a fearsome reputation in local histories

06 – Vlad Tepes

Prince of Wallachia, Vlad the Impaler was known for killing his enemies by impalement. He imposed cruel punishments during his reign and he served as inspiration for the vampire legends. He used many types of torture such as: disemboweling, rectal and facial impalement, skinning, boiling, decapitating, strangling, hanging, burning, burying people alive etc.The Ottoman Sultan, Mehmed II, ordered Vlad to pay homage to him personally, but Vlad had the sultan's two envoys captured and impaled. In February 1462 he broke into Ottoman territory, massacring tens of thousands of Turks and Bulgarians. Mehmed launched a campaign against Wallachia to replace Vlad with Vlad's younger brother, Radu. Vlad attempted to capture the sultan at Târgovişte during the night of 16–17 June 1462. The sultan and the main Ottoman army left Wallachia, but more and more Wallachians deserted to Radu. Vlad went to Transylvania to seek assistance from Matthias Corvinus, King of Hungary, in late 1462, but Corvinus had him imprisoned. Vlad was held in captivity in Visegrád from 1463 to 1475. During this period, anecdotes about his cruelty started to spread in Germany and Italy. He was released at the request of Stephen III of Moldavia in the summer of 1475. He fought in Corvinus's army against the Ottomans in Bosnia in early 1476. Hungarian and Moldavian troops helped him to force Basarab Laiotă (who had dethroned Vlad's brother, Radu) to flee from Wallachia in November. Basarab returned with Ottoman support before the end of the year. Vlad was murdered before 10 January 1477. Books describing Vlad's cruel acts were among the first bestsellers in the German-speaking territories. In Russia, popular stories suggested that Vlad was only able to strengthen central government through applying brutal punishments, and a similar view was adopted by most Romanian historians in the 19th century. Vlad's reputation for cruelty and his patronymic gave rise to the name of the vampire Count Dracula in Bram Stoker's 1897 novel Dracula

05 – Ivan IV of Russia

Also known as Ivan the Terrible, he was the Grand Duke of Muscovy from 1533 to 1547 and was the first ruler of Russia and the first to be proclaimed tsar of Russia (in 1547). He was fond of impaling people as well and he burned alive at least 1000 people.He ordered his soldiers to build strong walls around the city, so that people cannot escape.Everyday, between 500-1000 were brought to him by his troops, then tortured or killed in front of him.During his reign, Russia conquered the Khanates of Kazan, Astrakhan and Sibir, becoming a multiethnic and multicontinental state spanning approximately 4,050,000 km2 (1,560,000 sq mi). Ivan exercised autocratic control over Russia's hereditary nobility and developed a bureaucracy to administer his new territories. He transformed Russia from a medieval state into an empire, though at immense cost to its people, and its broader, long-term economy.Historic sources present disparate accounts of Ivan's complex personality: he was described as intelligent and devout, yet given to rages and prone to episodic outbreaks of mental instability that increased with his age. In one such outburst, he killed his son and heir Ivan Ivanovich. This left his younger son, the pious but politically ineffectual Feodor Ivanovich, to inherit the throne.

04 – Adolf Eichmann

He was born in March 19, 1906, in Solingen, a small industrial city in the Rhineland. He was one of the major organizers of the Holocaust. He was hanged by the state of Israel for his part in the Nazi extermination of Jews during World War II. “The death of five million Jews on my conscience gives me extraordinary satisfaction.”he said.After an unremarkable school career, Eichmann briefly worked for his father's mining company in Austria, where the family had moved in 1914. He worked as a travelling oil salesman beginning in 1927, and joined the Nazi Party and SS in 1932. After returning to Germany in 1933, he joined the Sicherheitsdienst (SD; Security Service), where he was appointed head of the department responsible for Jewish affairs—especially emigration, which the Nazis encouraged through violence and economic pressure. After the outbreak of World War II in September 1939, Eichmann and his staff arranged for Jews to be concentrated into ghettos in major cities with the expectation they would be transported farther east or overseas. Eichmann drew up plans for a Jewish reservation, first at Nisko in south-east Poland and later in Madagascar, but neither of these plans were ever carried out. As the Nazis began the invasion of the Soviet Union in June 1941, their Jewish policy changed from emigration to extermination. To co-ordinate planning for the genocide, Heydrich hosted the regime's administrative leaders at the Wannsee Conference on 20 January 1942. Eichmann collected information for Heydrich, attended the conference, and prepared the minutes. Eichmann and his staff became responsible for Jewish deportations to extermination camps, where the victims were gassed. After Germany invaded Hungary in March 1944, Eichmann oversaw the deportation of much of that country's Jewish population. Most of the victims were sent to Auschwitz concentration camp, where 75 to 90 per cent were murdered upon arrival. By the time the transports were stopped in July 1944, 437,000 of Hungary's 725,000 Jews had been killed. Historian Richard J. Evans estimates that between 5.5 and 6 million Jews were killed by the Nazis. Eichmann said towards the end of the war that he would "leap laughing into the grave because the feeling that he had five million people on his conscience would be for him a source of extraordinary satisfaction

03 – Leopold II of Belgium

Leopold II was the King of the Belgians and he is mainly remembered for the brutal exploitation of the Congo Free State. Leopold actually created the Congo Free State, project which had the sole purpose to extract rubber and ivory in the Congo region of central Africa.He used forced labour which resulted in the deaths of more than 3 million Congolese.Leopold was the founder and sole owner of the Congo Free State, a private project undertaken on his own behalf. He used explorer Henry Morton Stanley to help him lay claim to the Congo, an area now known as the Democratic Republic of the Congo. At the Berlin Conference of 1884–1885, the colonial nations of Europe authorized his claim by committing the Congo Free State to improving the lives of the native inhabitants. From the beginning, however, Leopold essentially ignored these conditions. He ran the Congo using the mercenary Force Publique for his personal enrichment. He used great sums of the money from this exploitation for public and private construction projects in Belgium during this period. He donated the private buildings to the state before his death, to preserve them for Belgium.Leopold extracted a fortune from the Congo, initially by the collection of ivory, and after a rise in the price of rubber in the 1890s, by forced labour from the natives to harvest and process rubber. Under his regime millions of the Congolese people died; modern estimates range from 1 to 15 million, with a consensus growing around 10 million. Human rights abuses under his regime contributed significantly to these deaths. Reports of deaths and abuse led to a major international scandal in the early 20th century, and Leopold was ultimately forced by the Belgian government to relinquish control of the colony to the civil administration in 1908.

02 – Adolf Hitler

As you probably already know, Hitler deserves the title of the most evil dictator in history. Hitler was the main cause of World War II and the Holocaust. Six million jews were killed under his rule and tens of millions of people suffered and died because of his madness.Hitler was born in Austria, then part of Austria-Hungary, and raised near Linz. He moved to Germany in 1913 and was decorated during his service in the German Army in World War I. He joined the German Workers' Party (DAP), the precursor of the NSDAP, in 1919 and became leader of the NSDAP in 1921. In 1923 he attempted a coup in Munich to seize power. The failed coup resulted in Hitler's imprisonment, during which he dictated the first volume of his autobiography and political manifesto Mein Kampf ("My Struggle"). After his release in 1924, Hitler gained popular support by attacking the Treaty of Versailles and promoting Pan-Germanism, anti-semitism, and anti-communism with charismatic oratory and Nazi propaganda. Hitler frequently denounced international capitalism and communism as being part of a Jewish conspiracy. By 1933, the Nazi Party was the largest elected party in the German Reichstag, which led to Hitler's appointment as Chancellor on 30 January 1933. Following fresh elections won by his coalition, the Reichstag passed the Enabling Act, which began the process of transforming the Weimar Republic into Nazi Germany, a one-party dictatorship based on the totalitarian and autocratic ideology of National Socialism. Hitler aimed to eliminate Jews from Germany and establish a New Order to counter what he saw as the injustice of the post-World War I international order dominated by Britain and France. His first six years in power resulted in rapid economic recovery from the Great Depression, the effective abandonment of restrictions imposed on Germany after World War I, and the annexation of territories that were home to millions of ethnic Germans—actions which gave him significant popular support.

01 – Joseph Stalin

Hitler and Stalin were equally cruel, although some argue that Stalin was the most dangerous dictator of all times.It is said that Stalin exercised greater political power than any other figure in history. In the 1930s, by his orders, millions of peasants were either killed or permitted to starve to death. Stalin is guilty for the deaths of more than 20 million of its own people during the 29 years of leading Russia.Stalin was one of the seven members of the first Politburo, founded in 1917 in order to manage the Bolshevik Revolution, alongside Lenin, Zinoviev, Kamenev, Trotsky, Sokolnikov, and Bubnov. Among the Bolshevik revolutionaries who took part in the Russian Revolution of 1917, Stalin was appointed General Secretary of the party's Central Committee in 1922. He managed to consolidate power following the 1924 death of Vladimir Lenin by suppressing Lenin's criticisms (in the postscript of his testament) and expanding the functions of his role, all the while eliminating any opposition. He remained General Secretary until the post was abolished in 1952, concurrently serving as the Premier of the Soviet Union from 1941 until 1953.Under Stalin's rule the concept of "Socialism in One Country" became a central tenet of Soviet society, contrary to Leon Trotsky's view that socialism must be spread through continuous international revolutions. He replaced the New Economic Policy introduced by Lenin in the early 1920s with a highly centralised command economy, launching a period of industrialization and collectivization that resulted in the rapid transformation of the USSR from an agrarian society into an industrial power. The economic changes coincided with the imprisonment of millions of people in Gulag labour camps. The initial upheaval in agriculture disrupted food production and contributed to the catastrophic Soviet famine of 1932–33, known in Ukraine as the Holodomor. Between 1934 and 1939, he organized and led the "Great Purge", a massive campaign of repression of the party, government, armed forces, and intelligentsia, in which millions of so-called "enemies of the working class" were imprisoned, exiled, or executed, often without due process. Major figures in the Communist Party and government, and many Red Army high commanders, were arrested and shot after being convicted of treason in show trials