Which famous historical figures had deaths proportionally brutal to their level of fame?

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Which famous historical figures had deaths proportionally brutal to their level of fame?

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  1. PC_Chair_Sloth2 Avatar

    Francois l’Olennais – sadistic pirate dismembered and burned alive.

  2. IsabeauThorne Avatar

    Rasputin. Dude survived poisoning, getting shot, beaten, and still didn’t die until they drowned him. Honestly sounds like a final boss fight.

  3. JackC1126 Avatar

    Caesar’s death is pretty insane. Stabbed to death on the senate floor by people he thought were his political allies and personal friends.

  4. Obvious-Water569 Avatar

    JFK.

    That was fucking gnarly.

  5. RosySkylune Avatar

    I remember Rasputin, poisoned him (didn’t work), shot him (still alive), shot him again (still crawling), beat him, and finally drowned him.

  6. InternationalLab812 Avatar

    Hitler went out the coward’s way instead of atoning for his atrocities so I’d say that’s pretty apropos

  7. Mullin20 Avatar

    Gaddafi

    Caucescu

    Hussein

    King Charles I

    King Louis XVI

  8. donfam Avatar

    Jeanne d’Arc

  9. MajesticPiece4k Avatar

    Lincoln. Proportionally inverse, but the man did not deserve to bleed out slowly from a hole in his skull over the course of eleven hours.

  10. TacitusJones Avatar

    Crassus.

    Having molten gold poured down your throat is a bad way to go

  11. malu_saadi Avatar

    Gilles de Rais

  12. Czarcasm1776 Avatar

    Lavrentiy Pavlovich Beria

    One of the most evil humans on earth

    A man once quoted as saying “show me the man and I’ll show you the crime”. A rapist of Women & Children, Murdering Psychopath who met his end via on his knees wailing and begging for his life

    To this day, Russians are still finding the bones of murdered people he had buried at his various houses

  13. abstractengineer2000 Avatar

    Crassus, the most wealthy man of Rome was killed by pouring molten gold down his throat.

  14. Bokbok95 Avatar

    Genghis Khan, according to one story, was having sex with a Tangut princess he had taken from that kingdom after destroying it. The princess supposedly put a metal contraption in her vagina that ripped his dick off when he entered, causing him to die in horrible pain.

    It’s a legend and exceedingly likely not how he died, but considering how many women he is famed to have raped during his conquests, it would be a fitting way to go.

    Source: Genghis Khan and the Making of the Modern World by Jack Weatherford (2004)

  15. TrespianRomance Avatar

    Anne Boleyn

    Henry VIII must have actually loved her at one point to then turn around and have her not only executed, but then as erased as he could possibly make her afterwards. He felt so betrayed (despite being the betrayer himself), he tried to erase her existence

  16. flightist Avatar

    Qaddafi getting sodomized with a bayonet has to be up there.

  17. Johhnymaddog316 Avatar

    Blackbeard the Pirate (Edward Teach). Cornered by the British Navy he went down fighting. When his body was examined he had been shot five times and had twenty sword cuts. The British sailors fired another 20 shots into his body and cut off his head to be displayed as a warning to other would be pirates.

  18. notbossyboss Avatar

    James Cook. Stabbed to death for trying to kidnap Kalaniʻōpuʻu.

  19. -Just_Some_Girl- Avatar

    Hypatia of Alexandria

  20. msprang Avatar

    Mussolini and Ceaucescu are definitely up there. Add in concentration camp prisoner revenge, too.

  21. Pantastic_Studios Avatar

    Jamestown governor John Ratcliffe, the villain in Disney’s Pocahontas. Had his skin peeled off and thrown in a fire in front of him. There was a TIL on reddit not long ago with more details.

  22. drulaps Avatar

    Robespierre. Shot in the jaw, unable to speak which is what helped start the Terror in the first place, his words. Taken to the guillotine like so many others

  23. PineDude128 Avatar

    The man who created the Brazen Bull was the first person to be used for it.

  24. petitecrivain Avatar

    Roland Freisler died a fittingly brutal death. He was a Nazi judge who oversaw a lot of torture and thousands of death sentences. Differing accounts say that he was killed either when a piece of his courtroom crushed him in an air raid, or when shrapnel hit him and he ran out only to bleed to death on the courthouse steps. 

  25. DemophonWizard Avatar

    He may or may not have been famous in his time, so maybe it doesnt really apply here: Lindow Man. He was given the triple death, strangled, throat cut, and bludgeoned.

  26. Realistic_Actuary_50 Avatar

    Attila died a simple, but brutal, death. He bled from the nose, while lying in bed. The blood from the nose went down his throat. The Scourge of God died from a nosebleed. Just like that.

  27. Glittering-Round7082 Avatar

    Gadaffi died with a bayonet up his ass. So that worked out well.

  28. maejaws Avatar

    Ulysses S. Grant, but it was still a noble death

    After losing all his money to a Ponzi scheme, he defied a throat cancer diagnosis in order to write his memoirs (published by Mark Twain) so that the proceeds would sustain his wife after his death. He wrote ten thousand words a day, every day, until the cancer left him too weak to write. At this point he hired a stenographer and dictated the final chapters through the pain of advanced throat cancer, for which he was denied morphine so as to keep his mind sharp. At the end, he was forced to wear a wool scarf at for all public appearances to hide the fist sized tumor in his front of his neck.

    After a year’s work and 366,000 words written, he gave the manuscript to Mark Twain to publish and was told that 100,000 copies had been pre-ordered. One week later he succumbed to cancer. Julia Grant and their children received the modern equivalent of 12 million dollars. The work was such a commercial success, it outsold Twain’s other work “The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.”

  29. MinuteCow8927 Avatar

    Charles of Navarre (Charles the bad) died a quite terrible death. At 54 years old (1387) he fell seriously ill and on doctors advice, they wrapped him in linen soaked in brandy. Because … you know….medieval medicine.

    Unfortunately the maid tripped and dropped a candle which set the brandy ablaze, burning the alive.

  30. YourCutePrincess Avatar

    Julius Caesar. Built and empire, walked like a god among men.. and still got Swiss cheesed by his own friends in broad daylight. Fame level legendary. Death level: Shakespeare had to invest new drama for it 😅🤣

  31. Humble_Intruder Avatar

    Marie Antoinette. Famous or rather infamous for her allegedly saying of “Let them eat cake” referring to starving peasants, followed up by her now “iconic” beheading.

  32. Flintstones_VRV_Fan Avatar

    Klaus Stortebeker was a German pirate executed by the Danes in 1401.

    He asked that they line his men up by rank from lowest to highest and free as many men as he could walk past after they took his head. Legend says he freed 11 of his men by walking as many steps, headless.

  33. qw46z Avatar

    (Disputed) Edward II (of England) had a red hot poker shoved up his bum. Because homosexuality.

  34. ImperatorMundi42 Avatar

    Charles II ‘the Bad’, king of Navarre. After living the kind of life that gets you called ‘the Bad’, he developed some kind of skin disease (not sure if we know exactly what) that left him in near-constant pain. To try and ease the pain, he spent most of his time in bed, wrapped in alcohol-soaked bandages.

    One night, a maid was tasked with changing the bandages. To better see what she was doing in the dingy room where the king lay, she was holding a candle. Unfortunately for all involved, she accidentally dropped it…

  35. Sick_and_destroyed Avatar

    The assassination of the Romanov family was really brutal, considering they killed the children too.

  36. Spice-Fairy04 Avatar

    Martin Luther King Jr: As the most visible leader of the Civil Rights Movement, his assassination was a brutal act of racial violence intended to silence his powerful message. Instead, his death became a rallying cry for the movement and further elevated his status as a global icon of peace and justice

  37. Redmudgirl Avatar

    Ghadaffi was paraded on a leash, slapped around a bit and then was shot dead like a dog in the street. Then they let his body lay on a carpet for 3 days while people came by to check out the fact he really was dead. Seriously disrespectful to the dead. Totally deserved imho.

  38. Paige_Railstone Avatar

    Sigurd the Mighty. A Norwegian Jarl of Shetland who conquered part of Northern Scotland. At one point he challenged Máel Brigte the Buck-Toothed, a local leader, to a battle with 40 men to each side. Dishonorably, he brought 80 men to the battle instead of 40 and, as you might imagine, easily won. Máel Brigte was beheaded, and Sigurd rode home victorious with the head strapped to his saddle. That victory proved to be his last, however, as Máel Brigte the Buck-Toothed proved that his nickname was well earned. As Sigurd rode, the teeth of the severed head rubbed up against his leg, causing an open sore which became infected, leading to the death of Sigurd the Mighty.