100 Interesting Facts about Kings

Following a decisive battle, Byzantine Emperor Basil II ordered the blinding of 15,000 Bulgarian captives, while leaving 150 only partially blinded so they could guide the others to Tsar Samuil. On seeing this, the Tsar died of a stroke.

52. King Louis XIV was offered biological weapons by an Italian chemist. He refused to buy and paid the chemist an annual salary to never sell his weapon to anyone else.

53. After Hawaiian King Kamehameha was hit in the head with a paddle by a frightened fisherman during a battle, he not only spared the man's life but decreed a "Law of the Splintered Oar" protecting civilians in a war. It is still part of Hawaiian law in the State Constitution.

54. The late King Olav V of Norway used public transport. He was nicknamed Folkekonge, "The People's King".

55. Alexander the Great had Heterochromia Iridum. One of his eyes was blue and the other was brown.

There was a Polish King Augustus II nicknamed “The Strong” because he could break horseshoes with his bare hands and loved fox tossing, a sport where you throw foxes with a sling. One of these events had 1235 foxes, hares, badgers, and wildcats. He had several mistresses and fathered as many as 382 children.

57. Queen Elizabeth (an experienced Army driver during World War 2) once took King Abdullah for a drive in her Land Rover. As she accelerated through narrow Scottish roads while talking the King was so nervous that he implored the Queen to slow down and concentrate on the road ahead.

58. King Tutankhamun's beard was broken off by museum workers, who glued it back on. The mistake wasn't discovered until months later.

59. A completely random dude known as Stephen the Little convinced much of Western Europe he was Tsar Peter III of Russia (who was actually dead), then brought about unprecedented peace in Montenegro as its leader.

60. In 15 years of conquest, Alexander the Great never lost a battle.

Alexander the Great was simultaneously the King of Macedonia, Pharaoh of Egypt, King of Persia, and King of Asia.

62. King Leonidas was actually 60 years old when he fought king Xerxes.

63. When Jai Singh, Maharaja of a princely state of India, visited the Rolls-Royce showroom in London, he was offended when the salesman implied that he couldn't afford to purchase the car. He purchased ten, shipped them to India, and ordered to use them for collecting and transporting garbage.

64. Roland The Farter was a professional flatulist who was given a manor and 30-acres of land in exchange for entertaining King Henry II.

65. King Herod "The Great" was so concerned that no one would mourn his death that he ordered a large group of distinguished men be killed at the time of his death to cause more widespread grief. His son and sister never carried out his request.

Upon his second defeat to Alexander the Great, King Darius III of Persia offered Alexander 30,000 talents (780 tons of silver, worth around £500,000,000 today) as part of an unconditional surrender. Alexander refused and proceeded to conquer Persia and rule all the way up to the Himalayas.

67. King Tutankhamun's penis was mummified while erect.

68. In 1776, a lead statue of King George III located in Boston was torn down by revolutionaries. The lead from the statue was then melted down and cast into musket balls to be used against the British.

69. Aztec kings wore cloaks made entirely of hummingbird skins. It would take about 8,000 hummingbirds to create an adult-size cloak.

70. A commonly-repeated anecdote claims that the word Sirlion is derived from an occasion when King James I of England, while being entertained at Hoghton Tower during his return from Scotland in 1617, was so impressed by the quality of his steak that he knighted the loin of beef, which was referred to thereafter as "Sir loin". There is no reliable evidence for this explanation and scholars generally hold it to be a myth.

When Columbus first sailed to America his ship's captain (Rodrigo de Triana) spotted land first but Columbus later claimed he had already seen it a few hours earlier, thereby claiming for himself the lifetime pension that had been promised by King Ferdinand to the first person to sight land.

72. Why the ancient Greek civilization of Sparta had no walls:"'The Spartan king Agesilaus simply pointed to his fellow citizens, armed to the teeth, the most formidable soldiers in Greece: 'Here are the walls of the Spartans.'"

73. Alexander the Great once organized an Olympic Games to honor a dead religious leader in India. However, since the Indians weren't familiar with Greek sport, he opted for a wine-drinking contest instead. 41 contestants died and the winner lived for just four days after his victory.

74. The last king of Greece, Constantine II, won Greece's first Olympic gold medal since 1912 in the 1960 Summer Olympics. He also lived in exile for 40 years.

75. George Washington had the public support to become king of America, gave up the power to congress, and was called the greatest man in the world by King George III for doing so.