The Weirdest Royals Throughout History

Royal Title: Queen of Sweden

Crazy Quirk: She tried to kill her daughter when she couldn’t give the king a male heir.

Maria Eleonora’s goal as queen was the same as many other women of her era: give her husband a male heir. When she didn’t achieve her goal, she went crazy. Maria Eleonora bore her husband, King Gustavus Adolphus, a girl named Christina in 1626, and she immediately rejected her daughter, calling her a monster. More than once, she allegedly tried to kill Christina by pushing her down stairs and dropping her.

When the king died, Maria Eleonora's insanity went next level. She refused to bury Gustavus's body for more than a year and slept below a hanging casket that contained his heart.

Royal Title: Emperor of Rome

Crazy Quirk: A narcissist and sadist, he had his mother killed and let Rome burn to the ground.

When it comes to Nero’s rule, it’s clear he got his Machiavellian inclinations from his mother. Nero’s mom, Agrippina, orchestrated Nero’s rise to the throne in 54 AD by marrying her uncle, Claudius, and convincing him to install Nero as Emperor instead of his own son, before poisoning Claudius to death. When Nero came to power, he took a lesson from his mother’s playbook and set about taking down everyone who threatened or even bothered him, including his mom. He also dispatched with his own wife, Octavia, when she got in his way.

Despite instituting some positive social and political forms, Nero’s hedonism continually got the best of him. He took multiple wives and lovers, spent massive amounts of money on personal sexual pursuits, and murdered anyone who dared to criticize his ways. In 64 AD, a great fire struck Rome, taking out 75% of the city. Many Romans contended that Nero himself started the fire to make way for a new castle. Even if he didn’t, he did nothing to stop it, blaming Christians and initiating a period of oppression and torture of Christians in Rome.

Nero also married a man he randomly saw on the street who looked like his second wife (who he murdered), and made the man dress in his wife's clothes and act like a woman, while having a separate relationship with a slave in which Nero played the role wife.

Royal Title: Emperor of Rome

Crazy Quirk: Elagabalus was a hedonist who delighted in watching people suffer.

Elagabalus, who took the throne in 218 AD, was a lesser-known Roman Emperor whose behavior rivals that of the most vicious, cruel, and self-indulgent rulers of all time. Here’s a list of some of Elagabalus’s weirdest royal activities:

• He chained naked women to chariots, like horses, and whipped them as they pulled him around.
• He released poisonous snakes into the audience of the gladiator games and watched as crowds panicked and died from poisonous bites.
• He tied dinner guests to a water wheel to watch them slowly drown.
• He tossed gold and silver from the balcony of a tower and reveled in commoners fighting and dying over the money.
• He let loose lions and leopards during a feast.
• He filled positions in the government based on the sizes of the men's penises.
• When his chief adviser warned him that he should live a moderate life to prevent revolt over the effects of his taxation, he stabbed the adviser to death.

The full catalog of his perversity deserves a list unto itself, but there might not be enough room for all of his eccentricities and atrocities to fit. 

Royal Title: Princess of Bavaria

Crazy Quirk: Princess Alexandra was convinced she swallowed a glass grand piano. 

As the 23-year-old Princess of Bavaria, Alexandra became convinced she swallowed an entire glass grand piano as a child and that any sudden movement would shatter the instrument. She was said to walk sideways through doorways and corridors to avoid breaking. Although the princess's delusion has become a part of her quirky reputation, scholars speculate she suffered from something Robert Burton calls "The Glass Delusion" in his psychological study, The Anatomy of Melancholy in 1612.

The Glass Delusion is thought to be a form of melancholy in which the sufferer believes they are made of glass. Another notable victim is King Charles VI of France who did not think he'd swallowed any fragile instruments, but rather believed his body to be especially breakable. 

Royal Title: King of France

Crazy Quirk: Charles believed he was made of glass.

Charles VI ruled France during a time of great chaos, and that turmoil existed within him as well. After his first bout of madness in 1392, when he suffered from fever and convulsions, Charles lived out the rest of his life plagued by insanity. His paranoia and violent rages made him dangerous and homicidal to anyone in his close proximity.  During his spells of madness, he often had to be restrained, and he gave up on his personal hygiene to the point that he had to be cut out of his clothes.

Most famously, Charles suffered from a “glass delusion"—belief that his body was made of glass. He faded in and out of this delusion, and it caused radical changes to his character. When he wasn’t in its grips, he was an outdoorsy athlete. When the glass delusion struck, he refused to move, sitting still for hours on end.

Royal Title: Tsar of Russia

Crazy Quirk: A child in a man’s body, Peter may have never consummated his marriage because he was too busy playing toy soldiers in bed.

Catherine the Great’s husband, Peter III, had a much less successful royal career than his wife. Poor treatment by a sadistic tutor left Peter in a state of arrested development, making him unfit to rule. In 1742, when he was 14, his aunt, the Empress of Russia, brought him from Germany to Russia with the intention of making him her heir. Peter hated Russia, and the Russian people hated him just as much.

When Peter married Catherine at 17, it was clear from the start they were a bad match. Catherine was intelligent and driven, while Peter was a stunted man-child. Peter and Catherine’s sex life was not much better. It is unclear whether they ever consummated their relationship, as Peter was more content to play toy soldiers in bed and make his wife dress up in military gear to run drills. He was also a mean-spirited drunk who called Catherine a "stupid whore" in the middle of a banquet. One story about Peter contends that when a rat bit the head off one of his beloved toy soldiers, he gave the rat a proper court martial and trial before he had the vermin hung from tiny gallows he constructed.