From the emperor who ate his victims to the tyrant who killed his family, a new book reveals history's murderous villains. By. Simon Sebag Montefiore for Mail.

Online. Updated. 2. BST, 2. 9 October 2.

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When Caligula ordered a killing, he used to say: 'Make him feel he's dying.' When Empress Irene of Byzantium overthrew her son, she had him blinded in the room where she had given birth to him. Vlad the Impaler didn't just impale his enemies, he also burned to death all the vagrants, disabled and mentally- ill people he could find.'Mistress of poison': The Italian Lucrezia Borgia was the ultimate femme fatale. While Himmler played with his children downstairs, his study upstairs was furnished with tables made from human hips and lampshades of human skin. Soviet secret police chief Beria sent out his bodyguards to kidnap girls for him to rape. The dictators of Uganda and Central Africa, Idi Amin and Bokassa, both ate their enemies, while Colonel Mengistu of Ethiopia personally purged his own cabinet with a machine- gun.

1 I celebrate myself, and sing myself, And what I assume you shall assume, For every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you. I loafe and invite my soul. 'This is a poem that changed the course of literary history and Milton's views on freedom of the press, divorce, education, religion and parliamentary democracy still. Matthew 5:28 but I say to you that everyone who looks at a woman with lust for her has already committed adultery with her in his heart. (NASB: Lockman). They include the likes of Hitler, Himmler, Bin laden, Po Pot, Caligula and a host of other brutal characters - a bloodcurdling new book reveals history's most. Watch the latest Featured Videos on CBSNews.com. View more videos on CBS News, featuring the latest in-depth coverage from our news team. All crossword clues in our system starting with the letter M.

It is hard not to agree with the great historian Edward Gibbon, who wrote that 'history is little more than the register of the crimes, follies and misfortunes of mankind'. Of course, Gibbon was partly playing to the gallery with his cynicism: history is also a register of heroism and courage. But the horrific stories of villainous leaders over the ages still have the power to warn us of the dangers of power. Gibbon, whose Decline And Fall Of The Roman Empire revels in the depravity of the emperors, was only too aware that monsters are usually more exciting than the heroes. Anyone who has read Milton's masterpiece, Paradise Lost, will know that despite the brilliant poet's best efforts, Satan is his most compelling character.

And so it is with my own list of monsters through the ages. Ever since I was a child, I have been fascinated by the great villains of history and in my new book, Monsters, I have selected those I consider to be the worst. This begs a number of questions: How did I choose them? What makes a monster?

And what if my idea of a monster is someone else's idea of a hero? Emperor Bokassa: The African leader ate many of his victims.

Of course, the list is highly subjective, but there is no escaping the most obvious candidates. One could argue that there were mitigating circumstances for many early villains.

It was not until the Age of Enlightenment in the 1. Western culture and philosophy  -  that many countries began to consider the concept of human rights. But by the 2. 0th century, human rights were the moral foundations of civilised nations. Hitler and his gang  -  Himmler, Heydrich, Mengele and Hoess  -  are well- known, but almost forgotten today are their collaborators. People such as the vile Ante Pavelic of Croatia, who killed 6.

Jews and Serbs in a frenzy of slaughter. Or Marshal Antonescu of Romania, who murdered 3. Jews in Odessa. The Nazi slaughter of six million Jews remains the most wicked act of human history because of its rational execution, its cold- heartedness and its aim to destroy an entire race. But Hitler also qualifies because he started the most brutal war in history: 2. Russians perished on the Eastern Front alone, and 7. World War II. The 2.

Technology enabled Soviet dictators Lenin and Stalin to carry out more than 2. Watch Escobar: Paradise Lost Online Full Movie. Chinese Chairman, Mao Zedong, managed 7. It is easy to dismiss the world's monsters as insane, but this simply excuses them of their depravity.

Admittedly, there were some true madmen, such as Idi Amin and the Roman Emperors Caligula and Elagabalus, the first and only tyrannical transsexual  -  while Ivan the Terrible and Herod the Great both ultimately became clinically insane. And there was Baron Ungern von Sternberg, a warlord in the Russian Civil War, who in 1.

Genghis Khan, conquered Mongolia and ruled there for several months in a reign of terror. His favourite way of killing was to tie the victim's limbs to two trees which had been bent back to the ground.

He would then release the trees, and the man's body would be torn in half. Saddam Hussein: The dictator ruled Iraq with an iron fist, killing countless thousands. The real tragedy is that men such as Hitler, Mao and Stalin weren't mad  -  they were extremely competent and intelligent politicians, however psychopathic, ruthless and evil. The same must apply to Osama bin Laden. And this is why we need to know the real- life stories of these monsters and to understand how they rose to power. Because to treat them simply as cardboard ghouls we learn nothing. Most of the great monsters of my book  -  from Saddam Hussein and Bin Laden to Nebuchadnezzar and Vlad the Impaler, from Al Capone to the Colombian drugs baron Pablo Escobar  -  share one common feature: a messianic belief in their own unique destiny.

Some had unhappy childhoods  -  Stalin, Hitler and Saddam Hussein had drunken, violent fathers and strong mothers  -  but others, such as Lenin and Mao, had happy upbringings. All were avid self- dramatists, believing themselves to be the chief actors in a holy theatre of history. Take Nicolae Ceausescu of Romania, who renamed himself The Genius Of The Carpathians.

Or the lunatic butcher of Equatorial Guinea Macias Nguema, who insisted on being called The Unique Miracle. But perhaps the most extraordinary rebranding was that of President Mobutu of Zaire, who changed his name to The Warrior Who Knows No Defeat Because Of His Endurance And Inflexible Will, The Cockerel Who Goes From Hen To Hen, Conquest To Conquest. One of the most self- regarding monsters was surely Niyazov, the obsessional dictator of oil- rich Turkmenistan until his death two years ago, who renamed the months and weekdays after himself and his mother, and dubbed himself Turkmenbashi, Father of the Turkmen.

But there are many monstrous women in my book, too. Look at the 6th- century Byzantine empress Theodora, who earned her way as a live sex act until she married the Emperor Justinian the Great and became a most ruthless politician. Or the 1. 6th- century Queen of France Catherine de Medici, whose hatred of Protestants knew no bounds, and who ordered the Massacre of St Bartholomew in which thousands of Huguenots were killed. That beautiful Italian mistress of poison, Lucrezia Borgia, was the ultimate femme fatale. Yet few diabolical hussies can equal the 1. Maurozia, who was mistress, murderess, mother, grandmother and great- grandmother of Popes in a Vatican that resembled and sometimes served as a brothel.

Another common feature, in addition to this unbending faith in their own ability, is a belief in the panacea of a Utopian ideology, whether religion or Marxism or Nazism. This terrifying conviction in their total virtue permits the most terrifying crimes. The Crusaders, for example, were religious fanatics every bit as disgusting as the suicide bombers of Al Qaeda.

When Godfrey of Bouillon and his Crusaders took Jerusalem in 1. Muslim and Jew  -  7. Pol Pot's Khmer Rouge killed half the population of Cambodia. Religious fanatics from Savaronola  -  the 1. Italian ascetic who 'purified' Florence from corruption, burning books and works of art in his infamous Bonfire Of The Vanities  -  to Torquemada of the Spanish Inquisition share much in common with Nazi racial theorists and Pol Pot's Khmer Rouge, which killed half the population of Cambodia. In their zealotry, these monsters believed human life was almost worthless: all that mattered was history.

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