The History of the History

History is in just a bunch of names and dates and facts.

It's the collection of all the stories throughout human history that explained how and why we got here.

Welcome to the History Unplugged Podcast, where we look at the forgotten, neglected, strange, and even counterfactual stories that made our world what it is.

I'm your host, Scott Rank.

Welcome back to the last episode in the series on History's Most Insane Rulers.

As I mentioned at the top of this episode, I'm doing this because I have released a new book called History's Nine Most Insane Rulers.

I'm only covering a few of the people in the book.

This last person, Ludwig Ovgraveria, ruled from 1845 to 1886.

Other people in the book that I won't be doing in this podcast series include Sopar Murat Niazove, or Akbar Turkman Bashi, the leader of Turkmenistan from the 90s to the 2000s, who had the 80-foot tall gold statue of himself.

I also have Edie Amine, the butcher of Uganda, who ruled in the 70s and killed up to 200,000 of his own people.

And lastly, Kim Jong Il, who turned North Korea into a giant prison camp, claimed that the first time he golfed, he shot 36 under par, and 6 holes in one, and that when he was born, the heavens parted a new star shown in the sky and winter turned into summer.

This person that we're going to be looking at, Ludwig Ovgraveria, in a way he is sort of the hero of this book, or somebody who, yes, he is arguably insane, he is very mentally ill, but he wasn't malicious, he wasn't sadistic, like other people that we've looked at in this series.

He arguably did a lot of good.

He took his province, Bavaria, from what was considered a backwater of Germany, and some in Germany, so we consider that.

But when people think of Germany, they think of the architectural and artistic achievements of Bavaria. They think of the castles there. They think of the compositions that Ludwig patronized by Richard Wagner.

So he did ill to Bavaria, he wasted a lot of its money, but he also arguably did a lot of good, so I think his story is looking into.

In a story begins at midnight in the Bavarian Alps. On many dark nights like this, a dark figure would race through the foothills on a gilded sleigh.

The sleigh had a high curving prowl that ended in a pair of putti holding up a lantern. Four white horses drew the sleigh, and it crossed a snow-covered landscape that glittered in the moonlight, with the forest fur sagging under the weight of ice and snow.

The person in the sleigh was wearing blue velvet. Outriders surrounded him, and they dawned powdered wigs and elaborate costumes, lighting the path with torches and clearing the roads.

If you saw something like this today, you would think a group of extras had wandered off the set of a movie because it was so unnatural compared to what normally passed on those paths.

Peasants stared at wonder at the procession even though they were forbidden to look through their windows.

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