The Caligula / Literature

• The 120 Days of Sodom by the Marquis de Sade centers around four French aristocrats who use their vast wealth and power to have sixteen young teenagers kidnapped. They lock themselves in a secluded castle with those teenagers, their own daughters, four old prostitutes, eight massively endowed men, and the four ugliest old women they can find. Over the next four months, they have the "ultimate in orgies" — they rape, torture, dismember, and murder all but a few of those guests. The film adaptation of this story, which replaces the aristocrats with Italian Fascists, is widely regarded to be one of the most sickening films ever made.
• At least as portrayed in the 1632 series, Charles I of England seems to qualify. The Stuart monarchs, in general, were firm believers in the Divine Right of Kings; they were also generally pretty feckless as rulers. 1632 Charles has heard what will happen to him and is lashing out at his future enemies. True to form, he's messing it up (he's driven his historical best supporter into working with Cromwell, who's still alive, if on the run). Odds are the English Civil War will come early in this world. This makes him a particularly incompetent Caligula.
• The Age of Fire series has SiDrakkon, a lazy and hedonistic dragon who never gets off his tailvent unless it's to fight. When he eventually becomes Tyr, his refusal to actually do anything related to leadership brings the Lavadome to the brink of civil war, and the last time we see him before SiMevolant assassinates him, he's in his bath, ranting about how everything that isn't silver is corrupt and impure.
• The Queen of Hearts in Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, arguably. Adaptations have played it up even more.
• AlternateHistory.com:
  • In the story Fear, Loathing and Gumbo on the Campaign Trail '72, the Lesser Mao is a depraved maniac who takes control of China and turns the country into a giant Pol Pot-style killing field. Imagining himself as the second Qin Shi Huangdi and surrounding himself with the Terracotta Army statues is just the start of his madness. When his troops rise up against his lunacy, he obliterates them- and the entire Kwangsi region — with a nuclear bomb.
  • In Twilight of the Red Tsar, Josef Stalin survives the stroke that killed him in 1953. Confined to a wheelchair, the man lives to unleash another reign of terror upon Russia, sending many apparatchiks, including loyal followers like Molotov and Khrushchev to torture and death, and turning the Doctor's Plot into a pogrom against Russia's Jews, and later ethnically cleanses Russia of Baltic and Caucasian people. Just before his death, he obliterates the People's Republic of China in a brutal war, complete with nuclear weapons and poison gas.
  • A More Personal Union, has the revolutionary known as Red Tiger, upon installing himself as the Emperor of China. Aside from the cannibalism he and his followers partake in, his first decree is to start purging all "enemies of the people", which he defines as nobles, bureaucrats, scholars, and people who wear shoes. It gets worse from there, with Kangaroo Courts and torture for said "criminals", starting a side war with Korea just to kill off his own allies, and intentionally infecting people with smallpox and unleashing them in areas of the country he doesn't directly control.
  • Piecing Together the Ashes: Reconstructing the Old World Order has the man known to history only as "the Beast". A far-right American military figure who leads a coup against a leftist administration and installs himself as the new President, he proceeds to persecute Muslims, crush protesters with soldiers, invade neighboring countries that disagree with him, and finally nuke the world back into the Dark Ages. And as a POV chapter from his perspective shows, he did all this because he honestly believed that everyone who disagreed with him was possessed by demons who secretly ruled the world and that God had tasked him with purging all of them in nuclear fire.
  • In The Fountainhead Filibuster: Tales from Objectivist Katanga, Ayn Rand becomes the despot of a territory she envisions as based on Galt's Gulch from Atlas Shrugged but is more along the lines of Heart of Darkness. She goes into screaming tirades when ordering her thugs around, casually murders people who set off her Hair-Trigger Temper, enslaves anyone she deems "mundane" and is fanatically obsessed with her dream of an Objectivist "utopia."
  • The Footprint of Mussolini has several:
    • Heinrich Himmler takes over Germany after Hitler's death, and proceeds to enact Stalin-style purges of the military and civilian populations, while also authorizing nerve gas attacks on Allied forces every chance he gets, even when it kills his own soldiers too.
    • Jiang Qing takes over Red China after Mao is arrested by the Soviets and handed over to his enemies. As it becomes clear that her country is little more than an impoverished Soviet puppet state, she retreats into an obsession with film, making a series of terrible movies starring herself and forcing her people to watch them.
    • Grand Mufti Muhammad ibn Ibrahim, ruler of the Islamic State of Arabia, is a massive luddite who bans all "non-Islamic" technology, causing entire villages to be wiped out by disease outbreaks they couldn't treat.
  • The Death of Russia: During Lebed's campaign in Siberia, he encounters Nikolai Kuryanovich, effective warlord of Irkutsk and the surrounding countryside, ruling over an area from Krasnoyarsk to Buryatia and one of the few NSF warlords to align himself with Nevzorov's Fascists as opposed to Anpilov's Stalinists. Nicknamed "the Warlord", he was notable for his cruelty and insanity with how he was someone who carried out massacres of all non-Slavic populations under his authority and was rumored to turn the skulls of his enemies into cups or ashtrays while wearing their skins.
• Visser Three from Animorphs fits this trope like a glove. In the main series, he's an Ax-Crazy Evil Overlord who executes subordinates at the drop of a hat, meets every threat that comes his way with overwhelming force, and due to being the only Andalite-Controller and having a bastion of Eldritch Abomination morphs is a Physical God by the definitions of this series. The prequel Chronicles books show his backstory as a quite sane and capable Manipulative Bastard who climbed from obscurity by studying the Andalites when no one else would. This study led to his obsession with becoming the first Yeerk to infest an Andalite, a goal he eventually reaches. Once he hits that high mark, there's nowhere else to go but down. The Animorphs often conspire to keep him in charge of the invasion, as his leadership makes the Yeerks less effective. For instance, Visser Three is convinced that the resistance are "Andalite bandits". Some of his underlings have begun to suspect they may actually be humans who can morph, but since people who offer unsolicited opinions to Visser Three tend to end up sans head, they keep this suspicion to themselves. If Visser Three weren't such a Caligula, he might have caught them.
  • Crayak, before he became something that could not be properly described in English, just wanted to destroy all other life he came across, just for fun. Now…
• The Crackling Prince in Walter Jon Williams's Aristoi seems to qualify, although he never appears and is referred to only in discussing the past. He planned on "artistically" reconfiguring planetary landscapes with gravity generators — with the people still living on them and expected to be grateful. Understandably "a commission had been formed in Perseopolis to examine his behavior", but he was somehow persuaded to retire before the other Aristoi actually did anything.
• The Belgariad:
  • The ruling Urga line of Cthol Murgos all reliably go insane before late middle age. Taur Urgas is said to execute people for stepping on his shadow and encourages his sons to kill each other so the strongest one can claim the throne; when the king of Algaria kills him, he turns completely animalistic in his death throes.
  • Urgit, his successor in the Mallorean, survived to that point by stealing a key to the treasury and hiring assassins; he's actually sane, if a Deadpan Snarker, but that's because he's not Taur Urgas's son at all — his mother had an affair with Silk's father, and he was the result. Thankfully for Cthol Murgos, the Urga bloodline has died out.
  • Urgit does seem a bit unstable at first, though more flippant than bloodthirsty, that is because he is very well aware of the 'all reliably go insane before late middle age' rule. If you know you'll descend into insanity soon enough, why bother? As soon as he learns why his mother is so insistent the Urga curse won't affect him, he quickly drops the flippancy and becomes an effective ruler.
• In Castle Hangnail, the ghost Edward recalls that the king back in his day was Mad King Harold, who believed he was a cuttlefish, proclaimed himself the Emperor of All Oceans, and tried to declare war on the clouds for not paying tribute.
• Cats vs. Robots: The rulers of both the Great Feline Empire and the Great Robot Federation are both this. Chairman Meow of the former simply wishes to laze about on his throne of cat towers, while SLAYAR would prefer to admire himself from all angles with a whole bunch of mirrors.
• Meet High Lord Kalarus from Codex Alera: exploited his people for every speck of wealth, perfected discipline collars, tried to overthrow the First Lord by allying with Alera's oldest enemies, and when that failed, tried to take the entire country with him. Not a nice guy, and a few legionnaires short of a cohort.
• This is a concern raised about Maeve in Cold Days. If her mother Mab is killed, then Maeve will inherit the mantle of Queen of Winter. Harry begins to realize just how bad this would be when he starts learning more about Mab's job: The Winter Court's army outnumbers that of the Summer Court by a huge margin, and could probably take over all of Faerie if their Queen willed it. However, the vast majority of Winter's troops are stationed at the Outer Gates, where they are constantly holding off a siege by the Outsiders. If the Outsider army ever got in, they'd destroy reality, and Mab isn't crazy enough to sacrifice reality in favor of her own personal goals. Maeve, however, probably is.
• In Robert E. Howard's Conan the Barbarian story "A Witch Shall Be Born", Queen Taramis' subjects think she's gone mad after her sister Salome, the title witch, imprisons and replaces her.
• Vlad the Impaler in Count and Countess, though he will try to tell you otherwise.
• Swemmel, king of Unkerlant, in Harry Turtledove's Darkness novels, who's really just a Fantasy Counterpart Culture equivalent of Josef Stalin.
• Discworld throws a few examples at us:
  • There was King Gurnt the Stupid of Lancre, whose attempt at training an aerial attack force of armored ravens never got off the ground.
  • Duke Felmet, also of Lancre, might have been stable before he gained the throne through regicide, but afterwards, he would regularly try to remove the blood from his hands via sandpaper or cheese grater and be surprised that this only generated more.
  • His wife is even worse, being nothing more than a card carrying Social Darwinist sociopath.
  • Ankh-Morpork has had its share of unbalanced rulers as well, like King Ludwig the Tree, who once issued a royal proclamation on the need to develop a new type of frog and thought up the city motto "Quanti Canicula Ille In Fenestra" (which is pseudo-Latin for "How much is that doggy in the window?"), and King Lorenzo the Kind, who was "very fond of children". King Lorenzo was the last straw; after his execution, Ankh-Morpork became a republic, led by the Patrician — although actually, it was more like the nobles appointed one of their number to wield power. By the time of the books, the Council chooses the Patrician and includes nobles and Guild leaders. Safe to say there is no electing in the modern sense going on. Some of the Patricians weren't much better:
  • Homicidal Lord Winder turned Ankh-Morpork into a police state out of paranoia.
  • The aptly named Psychoneurotic (sometimes merely Mad) Lord Snapcase — who, in a Shout-Out to Caligula, made his horse a councilor. (Although it apparently wasn't a bad one compared to the others: a vase, a heap of sand, and three people who had been beheaded.)
  • The Agatean Emperor in Interesting Times, who is liable to order people tortured to death or rewarded based upon the slightest whim (since no one ever dared to tell him that this is wrong).
• King Jeffrey in Dragomir's Diary is a moody, capricious, fickle ruler who constantly changes the laws in his castle to suit his bizarre whims. Jeffrey is enough of a jerk that the only visible path into his castle, a bridge called the Neck, has been rigged with a horrifying buzzsaw trap that will cut up anybody he deems dangerous — but because the Neck is constantly clogged with guts, it tends to go off whether Jeffrey wants it to or not. Yet he won't have it removed...
• In Dragon Age: The Stolen Throne, the Orlesian usurper Meghren, who is given control of Ferelden by The Emperor, really hates being stuck in this "backwater" part of the Orlesian Empire. As such, he forces the Ferelden nobles to go out of their way to please him... and then randomly executes a few just for kicks. He doesn't care about ruling the land and only wants to get back into the Emperor's good graces so that he will be allowed to return to the Orlesian capital.
• The Kingpriest of Istar from Dragonlance. Once a heroic cleric who served the Gods of Good, he steadily became more paranoid and extreme in his efforts to battle evil, dragging his whole nation with him and turning it into a fascistic theocracy that perverted the will of the Gods. In time, he began to commit so much nightmarish evil in the name of good (including carrying out genocidal campaigns on "bad" races, burning rival priests at the stake, brainwashing people to act according to his will to, and much more) that he started to singlehandedly upset the cosmic balance, forcing the Gods to throw a meteor at his city to stop him from tearing apart the fabric of reality itself with his madness. Now that's a Caligula!
• The Harkonnens in Frank Herbert's Dune novel were a family of Caligulas. Gladiatorial death sports, hunting humans as game, raping slaves, murdering random servants, obscenely expensive luxuries, drug addiction, torture as entertainment—they did it all.
  • In the prequels, Vladimir Harkonnen's brother (Rabban and Feyd's father) is weird because he isn't like that.
• A.E. van Vogt's Empire of the Atom and The Wizard of Linn has the most prominent characters as analogues of Roman history, starting with Clane/Claudius. "Calaj" is the obvious Caligula stand-in, the grandson of Lydia/Livia and related to Clane and Tews/Tiberius.
• Most of the gods portrayed in the series Everworld fit this description perfectly. Almost every god that the main characters encounter, regardless of what mythology they originate from, has an utterly apathetic regard for life in general (being gods and all) and shows a certain degree of sadism, though some of them (especially Neptune) are simply bat-shit insane.
• Mad King Alan II in Stephen King's The Eyes of The Dragon is a good example of this, although his madness tended more towards harmless debauchery. It was only through the malevolent influence of the story's Big Bad that he inflicted genuine suffering on the populace.
• The Marcus Didius Falco novels by Lindsey Davis are set in ancient Rome during the Flavian dynasty, and approach this idea in two different ways. In the first series, private investigator Marcus Didius Falco, a Republican Roman at heart, reluctantly takes on work for the hard-headed, pragmatic, and very sane, Emperor Vespasian. Falco, a man old enough to remember what went before ^note The certifiably psychopathic Emperor Nero, reluctantly admits that if you have to have an Emperor, better he be a sane man who doesn't shirk the responsibility of running the Empire well. He also reluctantly concedes that he can say to this Emperor's face that he'd far rather live in a Republic.^note Vespasian appreciates this display of independent thought on the part of his Imperial Agent, knowing Falco isn't a sycophant or a yes-man, and he can be relied on to be substantially honest in his work. The second series featuring Falco's daughter Flavia Albia is set in the reign of the mad, or at least hyper-paranoid, Emperor Domitian. In which people keep their heads down and try not to attract their god-Emperor's attention.
• The Hunger Games has President Snow, who shares numerous historical parallels with the despised Roman emperor Nero. And also President Coin, who is so bad that Katniss chooses to assassinate her when she is supposed to kill President Snow.
• Caligula is a central character to the novel I, Claudius by Robert Graves, and he is as insane as you would think.
  • He declares himself a god, which he feels justifies murdering his father and sleeping with his sisters (all 3 of them!)
    • Modern historians generally agree that Germanicus was actually poisoned on the orders of Caligula's somewhat less insane great uncle Tiberius so that he wouldn't become his competitor for the throne (Julii-Claudii were like that), but little Bootsie seems to actually follow his uncle and not his father. Unfortunately for Rome, while Tiberius (probably) was a psychopath and sadist in private life, he was largely a shrewd and successful ruler, Caligula on his part…
  • And when he actually becomes emperor... you'd better watch out.
• The "Gentleman With the Thistle-down Hair" from Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell both in his dealings with humans and management of his kingdom in Faerie. Which is, admittedly, pretty common among faeries.
• Julian: Gallus was always a bit of a sociopath, but he goes downhill fast once made Caesar. Libanius comments that much of what he did copied Caligula and Nero's reigns as if he deliberately studied Roman history to find new atrocities to commit.
• The central dilemma of "The Lady, or the Tiger?" happens because the "semi-barbarian" ruler has absolute authority and an absolutely wild imagination. He wants a replica of the Roman Coliseum? Done. He wants to use it to hold trials where opening the door to a tiger means 'guilty and dead' and opening the door to a lady means 'innocent and married'? Why not? He wants to throw his own daughter's boyfriend down there? Well, he's the King...
• The original one is mentioned in Lord Chesterfield's Letters to His Son. "A silly tyrant said, 'oderint modo timeant'" (letter 164)
  • Also, "A tyrant with legions at his command may say, Oderint modo timeant [they shall hate me as long as they fear me]; though he is a fool if he says it, and a greater fool if he thinks it."
• In the New Jedi Order, Supreme Overlord Shimrra of the Yuuzhan Vong is loony even by the standards of his bloodthirsty subjects, prone to killing failed (or just annoying) subordinates in creative ways, laughing uproariously while overseeing executions and even declaring war on the gods themselves (when there's still a very real and present war with the New Republic going on, for context), among other strange and cruel actions. Got a head start at the age of seven, when he practiced for future Caligula-hood by murdering his own twin brother. At least some of the weirdness is the result of his being under the control of The Man Behind the Man, who is brilliant but also insane; some of it is his real personality, and some of it is the result of the two of them fighting for control as said puppetmaster's attention starts wandering late in the war. But in any case, Harrar sums it up thusly: "Shimrra hates the sound of reasoned words."
• Don Lopez de Meruel, the Dictator of Santa Barbara in Odtaa. He's overthrown by a rebellion shortly after he proclaims himself God and announces that henceforth no other religion shall be permitted in Santa Barbara.
• Tatiana Moskalev in The Power is a female example. A former Trophy Wife to the dictator of Moldova, she overthrows her husband after the Mass Super-Empowering Event that gives all women electrical powers, and as she grows Drunk with Power, she turns Moldova (rechristened the Republic of Bessapara) into a Lady Land in which men are subjected to increasingly brutal persecution, all while she lives like a Mafiya gangster in her former husband's palace with a harem of Bodyguard Hunks and assorted male personal servants who she publicly humiliates just because she can.
• The Prophet's House Quintology loves this trope, featuring the deranged twenty-something dictator Anora, as well as her nephew/husband Anaias (who's even worse).
• The Reluctant King: Nervos the Daft, Vindium's king, was a bloodthirsty lunatic who wasted most of his treasury getting made gold statues of himself, had tons of people near him killed (including family), and entertained himself through having his army pretend to be frogs. Not surprisingly, a group of his nobles and officials killed him.
• In Remnants, Tamara's baby. It was damaged by whatever they were exposed to on the journey over, and grew up quickly into a monster, who led humans and then some of the aliens.
• In Raymond E. Feist's Riftwar series, King Rodric IV descended into insanity as the Riftwar proceeded. Subverted at the end of his reign, when the blow to his head that eventually killed him also released him from his lunacy sufficiently to allow him to appoint a good successor.
• Autarch Sulepis of Shadowmarch has it all — bizarre behavior, tyrannical style of rule, unhealthy fondness for recreational inflicting of pain and designs on godhood which fall spectacularly flat when the god he's trying to enslave proves less than cooperative.
• In Shadow of the Conqueror, Dayless the Conqueror became a complete sociopath after gaining power, and filled the rest of his reign with a Long List of atrocities: raping hundreds of young girls, genocide, blackmail, betraying his allies, destroying entire cities, seizing and redistributing all wealth, beheading children, executing people for annoying him, and countless other depraved acts. It's no surprise that by the end of his reign, most of the nations in the world were fighting to destroy him and the Dawn Empire by any means necessary.
• King Ademar of Gorhaut in Guy Gavriel Kay's A Song for Arbonne has rabid dogs tearing each other to pieces before the throne and maids give him blowjobs right in front of a very discomfited court, among many other strange hobbies.
• A Song of Ice and Fire:
  • King Aerys II "The Mad" Targaryen was the worst king that Westeros ever had, and a powerful 300-year old dynasty was overthrown because of his Ax-Crazy pyromania. Bonus points for being killed by one of his bodyguards.
  • Aegon IV 'the Unworthy' manifested the Targaryen madness as complete, unchecked hedonism plus a total lack of impulse control that made him perhaps the most Chaotic Stupid monarch in Westeros's history. Among many, many other misadventures, he created a Succession Crisis of unprecedented scope thanks to his sexual incontinence siring hundreds of sons, and his Hair-Trigger Temper causing him to deliberately stoke conflict between his potential heirs as one after the other fell out of favour for absurd, petty reasons. After he finally died aged forty-nine from sheer apocalyptic overindulgence, the realm promptly descended into chaos.
  • King Joffrey Baratheon's reckless, childish cruelty and love of ordering executions result in a continent-wide civil war. Ironically, if Joffrey's father actually was who he thinks it was, then Joffrey would be distantly related to Aerys,^note via his supposed father's paternal grandmother being a Targaryen, and far more indirectly by House Baratheon being an illegitimate cadet branch of House Targaryen, going back to Aegon I's bastard brother Orys but Joffrey was actually fathered by his mother's twin brother and his grandparents were Kissing Cousins, so this streak of insanity, for once, has nothing to do with being related to the Targaryens. Thankfully, his siblings Tommen and Myrcella have shown no signs of following his path despite identical lineage.
  • Indeed, the whole Targaryen dynasty had this trope going on multiple times along the way, to the point that Jaehaerys II said that when Targaryens were born the gods flipped a coin between madness and greatness, although this is an exaggeration. Most of them were either good and competent rulers like Jaehaerys the Conciliator and Daeron the Good or simply unremarkable, with Mad King Aerys, Maegor the Cruel, and Aegon the Unworthy being the only Caligulas to actually sit the throne, though there were other Caligulas who didn't become king but tended to get away with their excesses because of their family. King Baelor the Blessed was not all there but his crazy took the form of extreme piety, peacefulness and charity (such that he died of fasting to death), so most people remember him as one of the gooduns.
  • Of Aerys's three children (that survived infancy), his son Rhaegar was a Byronic Hero of questionable sanity given his fixation on prophecy and his abduction of Lyanna Stark igniting the civil war, and his daughter Daenerys is clearly sane (with even Aerys's former Lord Commander of the Kingsguard, Ser Barristan, certifying that she's nothing like her father), while his other son Viserys was the next Caligula-to-be. The dynastic tradition of Brother–Sister Incest might have had something to do with this, to the point that Daenerys's great-grandfather, the fifth Aegon (who married a non-Targaryen) intended to end this practice and was quite displeased when his children Jaehaerys II and Shaera copied his Marry for Love decision but married each other and then forced their own children, the aforementioned Aerys and Rhaella, into this themselves against their will because it was foretold The Chosen One would be born of Aerys and Rhaella's line (which seems to be true, since the most obvious candidates for The Chosen One in the series are their daughter Daenerys, Jon Snow, who is likely to be their son Rhaegar's son with Lyanna Stark, or both).
  • There is Cersei as Queen Regent, as well. Not quite as bad as her son Joffrey when it comes to the pointlessly petty bonkers though (not like that's particularly hard). Although... she is currently being far more effective at ruling spectacularly badly, mainly thanks to being a drunk, spoiled and narcissistic adult on the throne.
  • He's not the king, but Robert Arryn, a six-year-old who still literally suckles his mother's teat and likes to watch "bad men fly" (people he doesn't like being thrown from the top of his mountain keep), is the hereditary heir to the title of Lord of the Vale and Warden of the East, essentially putting the keeping of one-fourth of the kingdom in his care. And now he's got Littlefinger as his chief counselor...although it seems that Littlefinger has made him less of a brat, teaching him to respect his inferiors at least a little bit.
• Randall Flagg from The Stand barely remembers most of his own life, is prone to childish fits of anger, and doesn't even seem to understand his own motivations; he just seems driven by some instinct or outside force to cause as much mayhem and destruction as he possibly can. And he may or may not be the devil.
• In Barry Hughart's The Story of the Stone, the infamous Laughing Prince committed all sorts of horrors on the peasants in his valley, some of them in pursuit of immortality, some just because he was crazy. He was named for his cheerful, laughing demeanor and charming little dance step. Li Kao diagnoses him as brain-damaged from repeated consumption of a mercury-laced "elixir of life."
• Terror the mastiff mix from Survivor Dogs cruelly beats up the dogs in his own pack for even the slightest hint of doubt about him and the "Fear Dog". It's soon revealed that the pack will fight for Terror because they're scared of him. But once Lick kills him, a new leader rises in his place: Twitch.
• Tarzan and the City of Gold tells the tale of the Lord of the Jungle's entanglement with Queen Nemone of Cathne, a distaff Caligula whose increasing insanity led to her final victim being herself. Some time later, in Tarzan the Magnificent, Lord Greystoke returns to the city to find Nemone's brother Alextar on the throne, nearly as mad as his sister, and eventually suffering the same fate.
• The Trials of Apollo: Triumvirate Holdings is a company headed up by the three most violent, insane, and power-hungry rulers Rome had ever known: Nero, Commodus, and Caligula himself (who ironically is the most pragmatic of the three), all of whom avoided death by making themselves into minor gods and hiding in the shadows of history to fulfill their ultimate plan of gaining a chokehold on all sources of prophecy and literally controlling the future.
• Lois McMaster Bujold's Vorkosigan Saga:
  • The Barrayaran Empire had a Mad Emperor Yuri about a generation before the Vorkosigan series starts.
  • Prince Serg would certainly have qualified, had he not... conveniently died... before succeeding to the throne.
  • There is a widely-mentioned historical case where a Count Vortala did appoint his horse, Midnight, as his heir, but there is no indication that Vortala was either crazy or evil. He just did it as a Take That! to his previous heir, with whom he was having an argument. "If a horse's ass can be a Count, why not the whole horse?"

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