A CRIMINAL HISTORY OF MANKIND

he was imprisoned in Hungary for twelve years, and unable to satisfy his taste for torture of
prisoners, he tortured animals. He was killed in battle - against the Turks - in 1476, probably by his
own men.
Ivan the Terrible - born in 1530 - was a fairly normal Russian tsar - except for a tendency to rape
any woman who took his fancy - until the death of his wife, when he was twenty-seven. He then
became pathologically suspicious, subject to insane rages and a devotee of cruelty and violence.
Here we can see the typical ‘Right Man’ syndrome in its most naked form. When he became
convinced that the citizens of Novgorod were planning rebellion - which was almost certainly
untrue - he had a wooden wall built round the city to prevent any of the inhabitants from fleeing.
Then for five weeks he sat and watched them being tortured to death; husbands and wives were
forced to watch each other being tortured; mothers had to watch their babies being ill-treated before
themselves being roasted alive. Ivan looked on with insane satisfaction as sixty-four thousand
people were killed in this way. But his blood-lust had been sated; when he marched on Pskov to
inflict the same punishment, the inhabitants received him on their knees, and he was placated.
When he besieged a castle in Livonia, the defenders preferred to blow themselves up with
gunpowder rather than fall into his hands.
But as we have seen, the pathology of such cases is relatively simple. A man with a natural ‘spoilt’
temperament is placed in a situation where he can indulge every whim. He could be compared to a
glutton who is placed in a situation where he can eat himself to death. Every one of us wants ‘his
own way’ as a child, but contact with adult discipline forces us to learn restraint. The Caligulas,
Draculas and Ivans are allowed to grow like unpruned trees until they are a tangled mass of
overgrown emotions. Their inability to discipline the negative aspect of themselves intensifies their
problems. The ego turns into a kind of cancer that consumes them.
Yet fortunately the circumstances that produce these freaks are rare. Most of us are enslaved - and
disciplined - by material circumstances from the moment we are born. Our fathers and mothers
have to discipline themselves to stay alive, and they make sure that the lesson is passed on to us.
The result is that nearly all the ‘monsters’ of history are to be found amongst absolute rulers. They
are rare even among the barons and dukes, for people who have daily contact with other people
have to learn some kind of restraint. Most of us realise, for example, that to encourage our own
anger is one of the lesser forms of self-destruction. Dracula’s contemporary Gilles de Rais is an
interesting landmark in the history of crime, for he is one of the first known examples of a man
whose political power is limited, yet who developed all the characteristics of the sadistic egoist. But
then, he was one of the richest men in France - probably in Europe - and was thoroughly spoilt and
pampered as a child. In his twenties - he was born in 1404 - he fought bravely at the side of Joan of
Arc and helped to drive the English out of France. Then he went back to his estates and proceeded
to spend money with spectacular abandon. He also began to indulge his favourite perversion - the
torture and murder of children. His method was to have the children kidnapped, or lured to his
castle on some pretext. He would commit sodomy - even with female victims - while strangling the
child or cutting off the head. He also enjoyed disembowelling his victims and masturbating on the
intestines. Dismembered bodies were then thrown into an unused tower - about fifty bodies were
found there after his arrest. Gilles’s downfall came when he beat and imprisoned a priest; he was
arrested and tried as a heretic. He had undoubtedly been attempting to practise black magic to
repair his fortunes. Threat of excommunication led him to confess, and he was executed - strangled,
and then burned - in October 1440. But although Gilles retains a place as one of the first ‘non-