Times where someone is Rewarded as a Traitor Deserves in Real Life.
- Kings are historically known to be deadly to assassins of other kings, in good part from self-interest: they don't want people to start thinking regicide is morally acceptable.
- Alexander the Great is known to have done this upon the assassination of Darius III, the late king of Persia, and Alexander's primary antagonist up until that point. Upon catching the assassin, Bessus, he was turned over for Persian-style torture and execution. Darius, on the other hand, was buried in Babylon with full royal honors.
- In Snorri Sturluson's sagas of the old Norwegian kings, King Olav Tryggvasson has defeated one of the last great pagan leaders (Håkon), who's gone into hiding. The King promises "wealth and great praise" to whoever kills the latter. Håkon's thrall, Kark, who has fled with him, hears of this and kills his master for the reward... and Olav repays him by cutting his head off. It should be noted, however, that Kark was not actually killed for being a traitor, but for being a thrall who killed a nobleman. In fact, Håkon had already warned Kark about this: had Kark been a freeman, he would have received the promised reward. The original moral of the story was basically "slaves should know their place", but due to Values Dissonance, modern readers often prefer to assume that the 'noble' Tryggvasson simply despised traitors.
- This was the Roman Empire's modus operandi, usually speaking:
- Pompey's nemesis Quintus Sertorius (a rebellious Roman general who essentially tried to create a second Rome in Hispania) was assassinated by one of his own generals. Said general surrendered to Pompey, who had him killed on the spot.
- When Pompey lost the Civil War against Julius Caesar, he fled to Egypt, where he was assassinated by the very people he thought would give him shelter. Caesar travelled to Egypt in pursuit of Pompey and he was presented with Pompey's head by Ptolemy XIII's chancellor, Pothinus. Pothinus planned to win Caesar to his side with this action, but this backfired because of Values Dissonance: rather than grateful, Caesar was enraged to see that a consul of Rome and lifelong personal friend of his like Pompey had been betrayed, butchered and insulted by "barbarians"note , and demanded the beheading of Pothinus, which he was granted.
- Averted with Quintus Dellius, who betrayed Mark Antony during the Battle of Actium and took the battle plans with him, which led to the latter's decisive defeat. While Octavian, later Emperor Augustus, praised him, later historians gave Dellius the derogatory name "horse changer of the civil war", having earlier defected from Caesar's assassin Cassius to Mark Antony.
- However, when Theodorus, the tutor of Mark Antony's heir Antyllus, betrayed him to Octavian, the future emperor sentenced Theodorus to death via crucifixion, after first beheading Antyllus. Theodorus's official charge was stealing the jewellery of the deceased Antyllus, but whether this was a convenient excuse for Octavian to eliminate potential future traitors is anyone's guess.
- Roman emperors also tended to follow this policy with their predecessors' assassins; a particularly noteworthy example of this is Emperor Claudius, who followed Emperor Gaius, commonly known as Caligula today: as the Roman biographer Suetonius notes, Claudius ordered all of Caligula's assassins executed, in part because he knew some of them had probably been planning to assassinate him as well.
- Speaking of Caligula, he rather hated the way his former co-conspirator Macro kept reminding him of everything he'd done to keep him alive during the reign of his paranoid predecessor Emperor Tiberius and assure his succession to the throne, and eventually either assassinated Macro or forced him to commit suicide (depending on which Roman historian's account one believes). Considering that, according to some accounts, Macro may well have helped Caligula "hurry" Tiberius to his death with a Vorpal Pillow, this could be a kind of delayed version of the trope in play here. While Macro actually basked in his young Emperor's favor in the early months of his reign, Caligula's nervous breakdown and subsequent paranoia had him killing off everybody he deemed a potential threat to his throne, a category for which Macro certainly qualified.
- In Domitian's case, this trope ended up having to be enforced by the Praetorian Guard of all people, who pressured his successor Nerva into putting Domitian's assassins to death. The troops and commoners generally seemed to have liked Domitian, but his contempt of the senatorial class (of whom Nerva was a member) didn't win him many friends in those circles. This also resulted in Domitian being ranked among the likes of Caligula and Nero as a "bad Emperor" thanks to traditional histories written by members of the senatorial class.
- After having a lot of trouble with the Lusitanian rebel leader Viriathus in Hispania, the Romans decided to deal with him by bribing his own ambassadors to assassinate him. They killed him in his sleep and returned for their reward, but the Roman general, Quintus Servilius Caepio, replied that "Rome does not pay traitors" and had them executed.
- According to ancient Roman historical legend, the Tarpeian Rock (which was used as a place of execution) got its name from Tarpeia, who let a Sabine invasion force into the city in exchange for "what they bore on their arms." She meant their gold bracelets; instead, they bludgeoned her to death with their shields.
- In Roman legend, Camillus was approached by the schoolmaster of neighboring city Faleria, with which Rome was at war. The schoolmaster had lured his charges out of the city and offered them to the Romans as hostages. A shocked Camillus ordered the schoolmaster to be stripped naked, beaten, and bound, and had the schoolboys drive him back to Faleria, where their parents had found out that they had been lured away and were lamenting. When the boys came back, driving their traitorous schoolmaster ahead of them and singing Camillus' praises, the Falerians were so happy that they called off the war and became loyal allies and friends of the Roman people.
- The Roman general Sulla, after seizing control of the city, had a number of his political opponents declared enemies of the state: one of these, Sulpicius, was betrayed by one of his slaves; Sulla rewarded the slave for his aid in killing an enemy of the state, and then had the slave thrown to his death from the Tarpeian Rock as punishment for betraying his master.
- During Sertorius' rebellion in Iberia, the Roman general Metellus offered anyone who would betray his foe a hundred silver talents and amnesty. One of Sertorius's subordinates, Perpenna, murdered him at a banquet. Metellus then promptly had Perpenna executed for his treachery.
- According to Plutarch, during the proscriptions conducted by the Second Triumvirate, Cicero almost escaped his killers only for Philologus, one of Cicero's freedmen, to give up his location. After Cicero was killed, the Triumvirate handed Philologus over to Cicero's family to be subjected to a Cruel and Unusual Death.
- During the Macedonian Succession Wars over Alexander's empire, rival generals Antigonus and Eumenes clashed at the Battle of Gabiene to an inconclusive result. However Antigonus had managed to capture the baggage train of Eumenes' army containing thirty years' worth of loot and families of the Argyraspides ("Silver-Shields"), an elite forced of experienced veterans of Alexander's campaigns. One of their commanders Teutamus went to negotiate with Antigonus and secured their return by handing over their commander Eumenes. Antigonus mistrusted their willingness to switch sides and took steps to break them up by scattering them to Arachosia and other remote provinces with order that they they should be sent out on dangerous missions to quickly thin their numbers.
- Genghis Khan:
- He finally united the Mongol tribes when, after defeating his main rival (and childhood friend) Jamukha and forcing him to flee, two of Jamukha's generals betrayed him and brought him to Genghis, expecting to be rewarded. Jamukha was offered to join his side and, when he refused, given a quick and honourable death, while the two generals were boiled alive. Genghis Khan made "do not betray your khan" a universal rule even when the khan wasn't himself.
- Targutai, a chieftain Genghis Khan had a serious grudge against, was captured by three men from a subordinate clan and put in a cart to be handed over to Genghis Khan. However, they worried about this happening to them and eventually released Targutai. Genghis approved of their refusal to betray their khan and took the three men into his service.
- In 1220 General Subotai clashed with the remnants of enemy forces cloistered in a walled city. The citizens broke out into a civil war between those who wanted to surrender and those who wanted to keep resisting. Subotai's forces broke through their defenses just as the conflict concluded in favor of those who wanted to surrender. Subotai had them executed, finding them untrustworthy.
- During his punitive invasion of the Khwarezmian Empire, while besieging the city of Otrar for five months in 1219, where the man responsible for provoking the invasion, Inalchuq note was holed up, a traitorous sub-commander named Qaracha defected with his men and opened the city gates to the Mongols. Qaracha and his fellow defectors were killed along with the rest of the city's defenders by the Mongols, who declared they would not trust traitors to serve them.
- Here are a few examples from England:
- Pre-Norman Conquest English nobleman and Heel–Face Revolving Door Eadric Streona switched sides multiple times during the wars between the Danes and the English and gave terrible advice to the English king Aethelred the Unready.note When the Viking king Cnut the Great had finally conquered England with the help of Eadric's treachery he invited him to a feast where he handed out titles to all of his followers. When Eadric's turn came, Cnut bade him kneel and then told his right-hand man Eirik jarl to "Give this man what we owe him". Eirik jarl took an axe and chopped off Eadric's head.
- King Henry I of England had a man pushed off the tower of Rouen Castle for breaking an oath with Henry's enemy (and brother), Robert.
- In the 1280s, Dafydd ap Gruffydd conned his brother, the Prince of Wales Llewelyn ap Gruffydd, into betraying a peace agreement with King Edward I of England. He then turned on Llewelyn, got him killed, and proclaimed himself the Prince of Wales. He was ultimately captured, sentenced to death for "high treason", and became the first recorded example of someone in England being "hanged, drawn, and quartered".
- Hungarian tradition has the story of György Szondi, who heroically defended a small fort against the Turkish forces led by Hadim Ali Pasha in the 16th century. The story goes that a tanner from the fort snuck over to the enemy camp and offered to give away the weak points of the fort to Ali in return for "as much gold as his skins can hold". One guess on how Ali (an honorable man)note decided to pay the reward after they won.
- In 1306, Kildrummy Castle in Aberdeen was betrayed to Edward I of England by the castle blacksmith, Osborne, in exchange for gold. When the battle was won and Osborne came to collect, the English rewarded him by pouring molten gold down his throat.
- Averted in the case of Benedict Arnold, despite being one of the most famous traitors in history (at least for Americans.) While disliked by many British, and despite the fact that his treasonous plot failed, he was still paid for switching sides and given a high-ranking job in the British Army. He died in debt, but this was because of misadventures later in life (failed to convince the government to give him a better-paying job, failed to profit as a merchant in Canada, and failed to profit as a privateer against Revolutionary France). Note also that the British saw him as a loyalist, not a traitor, since he abandoned a rebellion against the King to fight for the King.
- In the 1842 British retreat from Kabul
, Major General Elphinstone abandoned his army to its fate during battle and surrendered himself to the Afghan leader Akbar Khan. The Afghans, perhaps disgusted with the feeble, sickly old coward, left him to die in a dungeon. Eventually, his remains were sent to British India, where he was buried in an unmarked grave. - Nazi Germany (the SS in particular) was even more brutal to Jewish traitors than to other traitors.
- In the end, the Nazis "rewarded" all Jews equally: it didn't matter how enthusiastically you collaborated with them, in the end, you would be shot or sent to the gas chamber. You could win a bit more time and better surroundings for yourself if you turned traitor, however. A big example would be the Sonderkommando, who assisted the SS in burning the bodies of dead prisoners and ushering other prisoners into the gas chambers but was taken out and shot on a fixed basis for knowing too much. (However, not all Sonderkommando collaborated willingly.)
- Jewish collaborators were also often subject to this treatment. Both Chaim Rumkowski, head of the Lodz Ghetto, and Moshe Merin, head of the Sosnowiec Ghetto, ended up in Auschwitz. In general, members of the Judenrat and the Jewish Ghetto Police could expect to be deported to the camps as soon as they outlived their usefulness.
- Karol Hochberg, Nazi-appointed head of the Jewish community in Slovakia, got this from both sides. He was first removed from office and imprisoned in a labour camp when the Nazis felt he was no longer useful, prompting him to escape and try to defect to the partisans. However, the partisans were unwilling to work with Hochberg, who had been involved in the deportation of two-thirds of Slovakia's Jews, and executed him for his collaboration as soon as they got the chance.
- Non-Jewish traitors, however, were mostly exempt from this treatment. Even Slavs, whom the Nazis considered the next worst scum after the Jews. There were exceptions to the rule, however, like in the case of Bronislav Kaminski, the leader of the Russian SS Brigade, who was shot by the Germans after they learned about his marauding actions during the suppression of the Warsaw uprising. During the closing stages of the war, when the army was beginning its final retreat from the Saló Republic puppet regime in northern Italy, German troops also gladly handed over Italian collaborators to be lynched by the Partisans in exchange for safe passage out of the country.
- German General Friedrich Fromm had known about the 20 July plot to assassinate Hitler but had allowed it to proceed and refused to take action to arrest the plotters; however, when the plot failed he turned on the plotters and ordered the immediate summary execution of all those within his reach. The Nazis saw through this transparent attempt to cover his ass and had him shot for "cowardice before the enemy".
- On the subject of the Nazis, some were on the receiving end of this trope just after the war when many high-ranking Nazis offered to testify against their comrades in order to avoid prosecution for their own crimes. In some cases the Allies honoured the deal, but in others they didn't; for example, Josef Bühler, deputy to Governor-General of occupied Poland Hans Frank, testified against his boss at Nuremberg in the hope of escaping punishment only to be handed over to the Polish government for execution anyway. The same fate befell SS commander Jürgen Stroop, who, after being sentenced to death for murdering nine American prisoners (having given evidence in his defence that led to several of his subordinates being executed) was promised that his sentence would be commuted and he would be spared extradition if he testified about the Holocaust. He duly did so, and was outraged when the Americans went back on their word and handed him over to the Poles on the basis of what he had admitted to in his statement.
- The dealings between Britain and Hussein bin Ali can be classified as this, although the 'reward' was more a result of British opportunism than a principal stance against betrayal. Hussein, a subject of the Ottoman Empire, was persuaded during World War I to start an Arab revolt against the Ottomans, being promised an Arab kingdom in exchange. Due to other secret deals, the British had made on the side, however (the Sykes-Picot agreement being the most prominent one), said kingdom turned out to be much smaller than Hussein had envisioned. Furious about the betrayal, he refused to ratify the treaty of Versailles or any other treaty with the British and as a result, the British stood by as his kingdom was conquered by the Saudis.
- In World War II, during the Allied invasion of Vichy-held North Africa, French soldiers cut vital communication lines so orders to fire on the invading American forces couldn't go through. The pro-Nazi Vichy government (which was allowed to continue in power in North Africa for political reasons) later sentenced those soldiers for treason, and General Patton refused to exert pressure to get them released because to him a traitor was a traitor, no matter what the cause. This was averted when most other Western Allied leaders of note threatened the Vichy admin with annihilation if they went through with it, on the basis that the French soldiers were not traitors to the Vichy government (which was itself a traitorous regime of collaborators to the Nazis) but loyal to the Free French. Pretty much all of them were quietly transferred over to De Gaulle in order to avoid the resulting stink.
- American voters seem to feel this way in regard to people who switch parties to win elections. Pennsylvania Senator Arlen Specter lost his primary after switching to a Democrat after over thirty years as a Republican senator.
- In Alabama, Representative Parker Griffith switched to the Republicans barely a year after being elected as a Democrat and was hammered in a huge defeat in the Republican primary. On the other hand, Richard Shelby (also from Alabama) jumped ship to the Republicans in 1994 (the day after the party's midterm landslide!) and was easily reelected in every election until his retirement in 2023.
- A ridiculous example with Louisiana Governor Buddy Roemer, who switched to the Republican Party late in his term and was rewarded in the following election by coming in third to a former Grand Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan.
- In Alabama, Representative Parker Griffith switched to the Republicans barely a year after being elected as a Democrat and was hammered in a huge defeat in the Republican primary. On the other hand, Richard Shelby
- John Wilkes Booth was - by historical notes - expecting to be hailed as a hero in the south for assassinating Abraham Lincoln. What he found instead was that the southern politicians condemned him as a traitor to the newly reunited nation and left him to his fate because the war had ended and they were now very concerned that the north would retaliate to extremes and tax them to oblivion - if not just send the army to wipe them out. They wept with the rest of the nation at Lincoln's death and shed no tears when Booth was finally caught up to by the military, trapped in a burning barn, and shot through the neck by a rogue Union soldier 12 days after Lincoln's murder. To add insult to injury, the family housing Booth betrayed him by locking him in the barn in his sleep and planned to report him under suspicion that he and his partner would steal horses from them (though they were unaware he had assassinated Lincoln).
- In the commercial/industrial aspect, there's this story about a woman who worked at and sought to sell Coca-Cola trade secrets... who was busted by PepsiCo. She was sentenced to 8 years in jail.
- Making this even stupider is that any decent food chemist can reproduce the Coke formula. Pepsi even said that "If we wanted to be Coke, we would be Coke." The formula is actually protected by two major legal factors. One is that due to trade secret law the formula is protected as a trade secret and anyone that recreates it exactly will be sued for stealing their IP. The other major one is that only The Coca-Cola Company has FDA and DEA approval to still use coca leaves in their product. No one except them in most countries can even touch the deactivated coca leaves needed to accurately produce Coke.
- Non-lethal variant; one day when Theodore Roosevelt was working as a rancher in the badlands, he caught one of his men trying to brand another rancher's cow with his, Roosevelt's, brand. Roosevelt promptly fired him, saying "if you steal for me, you will steal from me."
- Another common not-so-fatal variant is often discussed in advice columns when mistresses write in seeking advice on the adulterous men they're trying to persuade to get a divorce. As the columnist almost invariably points out, if a man was willing to dump his wife for you because he got tired of her, how long do you really think you have before he'll get tired of you and start cheating on you too? Therefore, the best bet for a mistress is to "beat the rush" and dump her adulterous boyfriend preemptively.
- Yet another non-lethal example would be the aftermath of Marshal Marmont's betrayal during the 1814 Campaign of France. Talleyrand had convinced him to abandon Napoleon at a crucial moment, accelerating his defeat, and then was the first to paint him as a dirty traitor, to the point that the word "ragusade"note entered the French language as a synonym for "betrayal". He did receive some honors from Louis XVIII during the Restauration, but he was hated by both Napoleon's partisans and the Royalists and spent thirty-seven years - almost half of his life - as a complete outcast, despised and shunned by almost everyone. Talleyrand, the "shit-in-silk-stockings" who also switched allegiances at the drop of a hat if it was of convenience to him, seems to have avoided this fate.
- There is a legend concerning Napoleon's invasion of Russia. When he finally reached Moscow, he saw a golden cross on one of the Kremlin's towers and wanted it as a trophy. None of his soldiers could reach it, so a Russian bellringer stepped forward and offered to climb up and get it. The moment the bellringer came down with the cross, Napoleon confiscated the cross and ordered the bellringer to be shot for treason against Russia.
- A spectacularly damaging political example from Canada came in the form of Alberta politician Danielle Smith. Head of the far-right Wildrose Party, which had spun off from the governing centre-right Progressive Conservative Party over concerns it had shifted too far away from traditional conservative ideals, Smith was considered one of the rising stars of conservatism in Canada and continually held the government's feet to the fire over real and alleged misdeeds. However, when the Progressive Conservatives ditched their unpopular centrist leader, Allison Redford, in favour of the more right-wing Jim Prentice, Smith and he devised a deal that saw Smith, along with over half of the sitting Wildrose MLAs, cross the floor to rejoin the PCs in what was easily the largest party-to-party defection in the history of the province (and one of the largest in the country). Smith and Prentice had hoped this would spark the reunification of the PCs and the Wildrose into a single party and there were rumours that Smith had been promised a cabinet post for the defection, but those were never confirmed because voter reaction to the defection was overwhelmingly negative and the punishment came swift and furious. Every single one of the floor-crossers that ran in the next election was soundly defeated; Smith didn't even make it that far, as her new party's voters rejected her in a nomination battle, effectively ending her once-promising political career. And, as the icing on the cake, both the PCs and the Wildrose lost the 2015 election to the left-wing NDP, ending almost five consecutive decades of Progressive Conservative rule and terminating one of the longest-standing political dynasties on the continent.
- However, Smith didn't stay in the political wilderness forever. The PCs and Wildrose merged in 2017, forming the United Conservative Party, which won a majority mandate in the next provincial elections in 2019. After UCP premier Jason Kenney announced he would resign in 2022, Smith was chosen as the new UCP leader, and she led the party to a renewed mandate in 2023.
- Some of Stalin's first victims in the purges were people who abused the trust of the Tsar's government, the whites, or other anti-communist forces to aid the revolution; he made the (mostly accurate) assumption that these people had a little genuine love for communism but could simply see the writing on the wall and chose to aid who they perceived would win in the end: if these people had betrayed one government, in Stalin's mind, nothing would stop them from doing so again. Then he effectively purged the bolsheviks as soon as he could get younger loyal followers to act as enforcers. After all, these people had proved that they had a revolutionary streak.
- Suffice to say, when it came to the Great Purge, this was a favorite of Stalin's. Most notably Nikolai Yezhov, the NKVD boss and Stalin's right hand for the Purge, was among the many who denounced his fellow part members. After Yezhov executed some of the backstabbing denouncers in the second round of trials, he himself became one of the last victims of his own Purge. Stalin quickly replaced him with Lavrentiy Beria the moment he looked like he was getting too powerful. Beria himself avoided this fate, though karma caught up to him after Stalin's death, where he was killed by fellow Politburo members for his various atrocities and to clear the way for Khruschev's ascension.
- On a related note, in this interview with Yuri Bezmenov (himself a traitor, as a former KGB agent who had been assigned to India), he notes that a major step in the Soviet Union's infiltration and subversion of other countries was getting politicians and other figures of major public influence to undermine people's faith in non-communist government and setting the people loyal to them against all who disagree, with the expectation that, when the Soviet Union took over, they would be rewarded for betraying their country and its original principles. As he elaborates afterwards (in his own words):Yuri Bezmenov: [...] When their job is completed, they are not needed any more. They know too much. Some of them, when they get disillusioned, when they see that Marxist-Leninists come to power—obviously they get offended—they think that they will come to power. That will never happen, of course. They will be lined up against the wall and shot.
- Aung San Suu Kyi was a well-known activist known for her various periods of exile from, or imprisonment by, Burma/Myanmar in the latter quarter of the 20th century and into the 2000s. After her final release from prison in 2010, she stood for election, and was voted into Parliament in 2012, then became State Counsellor (their equivalent to a Prime Minister) in 2016. Once promoted, some agencies were noticing her silence in regard to the Myanmar junta's treatment of the Rohingya Muslim minority. She defended the junta's actions against the Rohingya in the International Court of Justice in 2019. Since 2017, she has been stripped of many of her humanitarian awards. She was arrested and deposed by the junta in February 2021, and sentenced to four years in prison for purported election improprieties on December 6, 2021. She was promptly given a partial pardon, and her sentence was commuted to two years before an additional four years was added for rule violations.
- This was the cause of the so-called "X-odus" of artists from Marvel Comics in the early 1990s, when they formed Image Comics. When creators such as Rob Liefeld, Jim Lee, Whilce Portico and Marc Silversti started selling massive numbers of books the editor Bob Harras kept giving them more and more authority, steamrolling the other creatives involved and alienating people who had worked for Marvel for decades and made it the powerhouse it was. The most notable case of this was the alienation of Chris Claremont, which led to him leaving the X-Men after writing it for nearly thirty years. The move to Image was at the time perceived as being ego-driven, with people assuming the artists left because they wanted even more power than they already had. However, many years after the fact, Rob Liefeld said that they were actually shocked at how badly Marvel had treated Claremont, and realized that once they were no longer the flavor-of-the-day the editors would turn on them as well.
- When Ottoman Sultan Osman II was deposed in a revolt by the Janissaries in favour of his uncle Mustafa I, Janissary leader and newly appointed Grand Vizier Kara Davud Pasha ordered him murdered in prison, cutting his ear off and presenting it to Mustafa as proof. Unfortunately for Davud, the Ottoman people were outraged that a Sultan had been so cruelly defiled and slain, and pressure from the army forced Mustafa to have Davud and all those who had participated in Osman's murder put to death.
- A non-fatal example: On the verge of a government shutdown, for which he knew he'd be blamed, then-Speaker of the House Kevin McCarthy made deals with Democrats to ensure that enough of them would vote for a continuing resolution for it to pass. This infuriated his party, the Republicans, who threatened to remove him from his position, and thus, in an attempt to appease them, McCarthy went on TV and publicly blamed the Democrats for almost allowing the government to get shut down. One of his colleagues, Matt Gaetz, filed a motion to remove him anyway for petty reasonsnote , and the Democrats, incensed over McCarthy's ingratitude after they'd bailed him out, were only too happy to vote along with eight Republicans to make McCarthy the first Speaker in US history to be ousted from the Speakership in the middle of a congressional term.
- Mob boss Vito Genovese reportedly had a reputation for this, as he didn't want to be seen to encourage snitching. According to mobster Joseph Valachi, if you reported another mobster who had done something wrong to him, he would have the person in question killed, then have you killed for ratting them out.
