The Most Notorious Drug Addicted Emperors and Kings in History

Añadido: 2026-06-04

[00:00:00]Marcus Aurelius is remembered as the philosopher emperor, the stoic, the author of meditations, >> [music] >> the last of the five good emperors of Rome. But behind the philosophy was a man chained to opium for the final 20 years of his life. He came to power in 161 AD. He inherited an empire stretching from Britain to the Euphrates. He was 40 years old. He suffered from chronic chest pain, stomach ulcers, and crippling insomnia.

[00:00:27]His personal physician was Galen, the most famous medical mind of antiquity.

[00:00:32]Galen prescribed him theriac. Theriac was a compound of 70 ingredients including raw opium mixed with honey and wine. Marcus took a piece the size of an Egyptian bean every single day. He started taking it during the Marcomannic Wars on the Danube frontier in 170 AD.

[00:00:49]At first he hated how drowsy it made him. He tried to quit. He couldn't sleep. The withdrawal [music] kept him awake for days. He told Galen to add the opium back to the recipe. Galen recorded it in his own medical writings. The emperor was hooked. The Roman satirist Lucian wrote at the time that the emperor was drugged with mandragora.

[00:01:09]Mandragora was a known narcotic. Court observers noticed Marcus speaking in vivid disconnected phrases. His Meditations describes dreams that opium addicts recognize immediately. He writes of being given help through dreams. He writes that all things of the mind are dreams and delusions. He campaigned on the Danube for eight years on a daily opium regimen. He executed thousands of Germanic tribesmen. He purged his own senate of suspected conspirators. He died on March 17th, 180 AD at the age of 58. The historian Cassius Dio claimed he was poisoned by his own physicians at the request of his son Commodus. Some modern scholars believe the opium habit itself eventually killed him. Galen's own writings describe the emperor's dependency in detail. Galen wrote that Marcus was obliged to have recourse again to the compound which contained poppy juice since this was now habitual with him. Modern academic papers identify Marcus Aurelius as one of the most likely cases of opium addiction in the entire ancient world. The philosopher emperor wrote his greatest work on stoicism while quietly enslaved to a poppy and historians spent 1900 years pretending the addiction didn't exist. Mithridates the sixth [music] ruled the kingdom of Pontus on the Black Sea coast from 120 BC to 63 BC. He was Rome's most feared enemy in the East for 60 years.

[00:02:30]>> [music] >> He was also the most poisoned man in history. His own father had been murdered with poisoned wine when Mithridates was 11 years old. He swore he would never die the same way. He started eating poisons. He took small doses of every venom and toxin known to the ancient world. Arsenic, hemlock, [music] snake venom, aconite, henbane.

[00:02:49]He took them every single morning for 50 years. He invented an antidote called Mithridate. The recipe contained over 60 ingredients including a strong base of opium dissolved in honey. He took the antidote alongside the poisons. He became physiologically dependent on both. His body could no longer function without daily doses of the toxic regimen. The Roman naturalist Pliny the Elder described his condition. [music] So did the Greek physician Andromachus who later modified the recipe for Emperor Nero. Mithridates fought three brutal wars against Rome. He massacred 80,000 Roman citizens in Asia Minor in a single day in 88 BC. He poisoned wells.

[00:03:29]He executed his own family members when they showed disloyalty. He killed his own sister and his own son. He even killed several of his own wives by his own hand to prevent them from being captured. His paranoia grew with every passing year. When the Roman general Pompey finally crushed him in 66 BC, Mithridates fled to the Crimea. In 63 BC, his own son Pharnaces led a revolt against him. Mithridates tried to kill himself with poison. The poison did nothing. His decades of immunity had worked too well. [music] He could not poison himself. He begged a Celtic soldier in his bodyguard to run him through with a sword. The soldier obeyed. The greatest poisoner in history died because no poison would kill him.

[00:04:13]His antidote outlived him by 1500 years.

[00:04:16]Roman pharmacists kept manufacturing Mithridate until the 19th century.

[00:04:20]Pompey carried the original recipe back to Rome as a war trophy. Nero's personal physician Andromachus modified it for the Imperial Palace. Galen later perfected it for Marcus Aurelius. Every emperor of Rome for the next three centuries dosed himself with a recipe invented by a paranoid Pontic king who poisoned himself for 50 years.

[00:04:40]Mithridates lost his empire. He lost his throne. He lost his children. But he taught Rome how to feed an addiction.

[00:04:47]Theophilus was Byzantine emperor from 8 29 to 842 AD. He inherited the throne from his father Michael II at the age of 25. He was educated as a philosopher. He spoke Greek, Arabic, and Latin.

[00:05:01]>> [music] >> He ruled Constantinople at the height of its medieval power. He also suffered from chronic dysentery from his late 20s onward. His personal physicians treated the illness with opium-laced wine on a daily basis. Byzantine medical texts of the period describe the preparations as containing crushed poppy seeds mixed with sweet Cypriot wine and powdered henbane. The compound was administered three [music] times a day. Theophilus drank it for over 10 years. The chronicler Theophanes Continuatus recorded his behavior in his final years. The emperor became suspicious of everyone around him. He executed his uncle Constantine and several court officials on charges of conspiracy. He launched paranoid purges against suspected iconoclast opponents. He personally interrogated prisoners while clearly under the influence of his medication. He fought a series of disastrous wars against the Abbasid Caliphate. He lost the city of Amorium to the Caliph Al-Mu'tasim in 838 AD after a vicious siege. 42 of his nobles were captured and executed in Samarra.

[00:06:03]The defeat broke him. His dysentery worsened. His physicians increased the opium doses. He could no longer hold court for more than a few hours at a time. He suffered constant tremors and what contemporary witnesses described as visions and waking dreams. He died on January 20th, 842 AD at the age of 38.

[00:06:23]The official cause of death was dysentery, [music] but Byzantine chroniclers writing within 50 years of his death openly blamed the physicians and their medications as much as the illness itself.

[00:06:34]>> [music] >> The empire he inherited was vast and prosperous. The empire he left to his 3-year-old son, Michael the 3rd, was fractured, defeated, and run by regents.

[00:06:43]His widow, Theodora, ruled as regent for the next 14 years. The opium and wine medication tradition continued in the Byzantine court for the next 200 years.

[00:06:53]Every emperor from the Macedonian dynasty was treated with the same compounds. The patterns of paranoid behavior and erratic decision-making recurred across multiple reigns.

[00:07:04]Theophilus [music] established the template for medicated rule that would haunt Constantinople until the city fell to the Ottomans. The medications killed the emperor before the dysentery could.

[00:07:14]Frederick the 2nd was called Stupor Mundi, the wonder of the world. He was Holy Roman Emperor, King [music] of Sicily, King of Germany, King of Italy, and King of Jerusalem. He ruled from 1198 to his death in 1250. He spoke six languages, including Arabic. He kept a personal harem in Palermo. He kept dancing girls, [music] exotic animals, and a private staff of Sicilian Arab physicians who served him from childhood. Those physicians supplied him with opium-based preparations from the Islamic medical tradition. The compounds were called Mufarri and they contained [music] heavy doses of opium dissolved in saffron and honey. Frederick took them daily for over 30 years. His behavior reflected the dependency. He executed his own son Henry the VII [music] in 1242 after Henry rebelled against him. Henry died in prison at the fortress of Matorano either by suicide or by Frederick's order. Frederick had his alchemist Pier della Vigna blinded with red-hot irons and thrown into prison in 1249. Pier killed himself by smashing his own head against the prison wall. Frederick became convinced that every member of his court was plotting against him. He ordered the executions of dozens of officials in the last five years of his reign. He grew suspicious of his Saracen bodyguards. He grew suspicious of the very physicians who supplied his medications. The chronicler Salimbene de Adam described the emperor's final years as paranoid and erratic. Frederick fought a 30-year war against the papacy. He was excommunicated four separate times by three different popes. He launched the Sixth Crusade in 1228 and negotiated the return of Jerusalem to Christian control by treaty rather than warfare. He died on December 13th, 1250 at Castel Fiorentino in southern Italy after a final attack of dysentery. He was 55 years old. His Saracen bodyguard escorted his body in red silk wrappings to the cathedral at Palermo. He was buried in a sarcophagus of red porphyry mounted on four carved lions. The wonder of the world died still under the heavy medications that had defined his entire adult life. His sons inherited a fractured empire. The Hohenstaufen dynasty collapsed within 20 years of his death. The papacy hunted down every male heir and executed them. His grandson Conradin was beheaded in the public square of Naples at the age of 16 in 1268 AD. The medications had not just destroyed an emperor, they had destroyed a thousand-year dynasty. Bayezid the First was nicknamed [music] the Thunderbolt. He became Ottoman Sultan in 1389 after his father Murad the First was assassinated on the battlefield of Kosovo. He inherited an empire still building itself. He spent the next 13 years expanding it through relentless warfare. He conquered most of Anatolia.

[00:10:02]He defeated a Christian Crusader army at the Battle of Nicopolis in 1396 AD. He besieged Constantinople for eight years.

[00:10:10][music] He earned his nickname because of how fast his armies moved across the Balkans and Anatolia. But behind the conqueror was a heavy drinker. Ottoman chroniclers wrote about Bayezid's nightly drinking long after his death. He drank fortified wine in defiance of Islamic prohibition.

[00:10:27]He drank inside his own palace tents and inside the harem at every campaign halt.

[00:10:32]The Byzantine ambassadors who met him noted his red eyes and slurred speech in afternoon meetings. He grew increasingly impulsive and cruel as his drinking deepened. He executed Christian prisoners by the thousands after the Battle of Nicopolis. He ordered the public mass beheading of 10,000 captives over the course of a single afternoon.

[00:10:50]Then the man called Timur came east.

[00:10:53]Timur was the Turco-Mongol conqueror who claimed descent from Genghis Khan. He had built his own empire stretching from Persia to India. He met Bayezid at the Battle of Ankara on July 28th, 1402 AD.

[00:11:06]Bayezid's army was 80,000 strong.

[00:11:08][music] Timur's army was larger. Bayezid was crushed. His soldiers were slaughtered or scattered. Bayezid himself was captured on the battlefield.

[00:11:17]Timur put him in a cage. Some sources say it was an iron cage [music] carried with the army for public humiliation.

[00:11:23]Bayezid was given no wine. He was a heavy daily drinker stripped of his supply in captivity. Multiple chroniclers attribute his rapid decline to alcohol withdrawal combined with the humiliation of his defeat. He died in March 1403 AD at the age of 53. Some Ottoman sources claim he committed [music] suicide by smashing his own head against the iron bars of his cage. Other sources claim his wife was forced to serve naked at Timur's table while Bayezid watched from inside the cage.

[00:11:53]The humiliation broke him. The Ottoman Empire collapsed into civil war for the next 11 years. His four surviving sons fought each other for the throne in a conflict the Ottomans called the Fetret Devri or the Interregnum. Three of them died in the war. A bottle in a cage had destroyed the Thunderbolt. Charles VI of France was crowned king at the age of 11 in 1380 AD. He inherited a kingdom recovering from the Black Death. He was healthy, intelligent, and competent for the first 12 years of his reign. Then in August 1392 AD, something broke inside his mind. He was riding through a forest near Le Mans with his army. A man jumped out and grabbed his bridle. Charles drew [music] his sword. He killed four of his own knights in the panic that followed.

[00:12:38]He mistook them for enemy assassins. He had to be tackled and disarmed by his own bodyguard. The episode marked the start of a 45-year decline into what historians have always called madness.

[00:12:49]His physicians began treating him with opium-based drafts called electuaries.

[00:12:54]The compounds contained crushed poppy heads dissolved in wine. They were given to him whenever he showed signs of agitation. The treatments produced periods of catatonic withdrawal followed by violent psychotic episodes. He suffered attacks of delusion lasting weeks at a time. He believed he was made of glass. He had iron rods sewn into his clothing to prevent himself from shattering. He failed to recognize his own wife and children. He refused to bathe for months. He attacked his courtiers with knives. The physicians increased the doses. Charles became completely dependent on the medication during his lucid periods. France collapsed [music] around him. The Burgundian and Armagnac factions tore the kingdom apart in civil war. The English King Henry V invaded France in 1415 [music] AD. The French nobility was annihilated at the Battle of Agincourt.

[00:13:44]Charles signed [music] the Treaty of Troyes in 1420 AD. He disinherited his own son and made the English king his heir. He died on October 21st, 1422 AD at the age of 53. His body was found surrounded by empty vials of medication.

[00:14:01]The opium had managed his madness for 30 years. It had also helped destroy a kingdom. France did not fully recover for another generation. Joan of Arc would launch the counterattack against the English 7 years after his death. The Hundred Years War continued until 1453 AD. The Treaty of Troyes that Charles signed under the influence of opium handed France to the English crown. Joan of Arc and Charles VII had to claw it back at the cost of tens of thousands of lives. A drugged king had sold his country to its enemies. Selim II became Ottoman Sultan in 1566 AD. His father was Suleiman the Magnificent. His mother was Hurrem Sultan. He inherited the largest empire on earth. It stretched from the gates of Vienna to the Persian Gulf, from Crimea to Yemen. He inherited it because his three older brothers had all died first. One died of smallpox.

[00:14:55]Two were strangled to death on his own father's orders during succession purges. Selim took the throne at the age of 42. He had no military experience. He had no interest in governing. He had only one passion, Cypriot wine. He was already nicknamed Selim the Drunkard before he became Sultan. His drinking was so extreme that he created his own personal motto, "Keep Selim drunk." He handed the entire administration of the empire to his grand vizier Sokollu Mehmed Pasha. He retreated into the harem at Topkapi Palace. He held orgies, wine festivals, [music] and feasts that lasted for days. His Jewish financier and advisor Joseph Nasi held the official monopoly on wine sales across the entire Ottoman Empire. Nasi convinced Selim in 1571 AD to invade Cyprus because the island produced his favorite vintage. The Ottoman army crushed the Venetian defenders and took the island. Selim got his wine supply.

[00:15:50]The strategic cost was catastrophic. A combined fleet from Venice, Spain, Genoa, and the Vatican met the Ottoman navy at the Battle of Lepanto on October 7th, 1571 AD. The Holy League destroyed 90% of the Ottoman fleet. 30,000 Ottoman sailors were killed or captured in a single afternoon. Selim never recovered the navy. He drank more. He died on December 15th, [music] 1574 AD at the age of 50. He slipped on the wet marble floor of an unfinished bathhouse at Topkapi Palace while drunk. He cracked his skull. He was the first Ottoman sultan to surrender real power to his ministers. Every sultan after him followed his example. The Ottoman decline started in a wine cup. His son, Murad III, inherited a weakened throne and continued the pattern. The Ottoman Empire would never again reach the heights it had achieved under [music] Suleiman the Magnificent. Selim's wine habit cost the Ottomans their naval supremacy. It cost them their reputation as the terror of the Christian Mediterranean. The empire would limp on for another 300 years. But the Battle of Lepanto in 1571 AD was the high water mark of Ottoman expansion. And it was lost by a drunk. Murad IV became Ottoman sultan in 1623 AD at the age of 11. His mother, Kösem Sultan, ruled as regent through his teenage years. When he took personal control of of empire at age 21, he launched a reign of terror unmatched in Ottoman history. He banned coffee. He banned tobacco. He banned opium. He banned alcohol. The penalty for violating any of these prohibitions was immediate public beheading. He carried out many of the executions personally.

[00:17:33]Murad walked the streets of Istanbul at night in disguise. He carried a 100-lb broadsword with him. When he caught citizens drinking, smoking, or using opium, he decapitated them on the spot.

[00:17:45]>> [music] >> Contemporary witnesses described him executing soldiers for minor infractions and running half-naked through the streets in blind nighttime rages. He executed an estimated 25,000 of his own subjects during his 15-year reign. He killed two of his own brothers to secure the throne. He killed several of his own court officials in fits of paranoid rage, but Murad drank. He drank heavily and constantly [music] in private. The man who beheaded citizens for public drinking was secretly the worst alcoholic in his own empire. Ottoman court physicians described [music] him drinking morning until night. He drank Hungarian wine. He drank Greek raki. He drank everything his court suppliers could smuggle into the palace. He believed his own laws did not apply to him. He believed the executions purified his subjects without affecting his own divine right to drink.

[00:18:35]>> [music] >> He reconquered Baghdad from the Persians in 1638 AD. He led the assault personally. He massacred 30,000 Persian defenders after the city fell. He sat on the captured throne and drank for 3 days straight. He returned to Istanbul a conquering hero, but his liver was destroyed. He died on February 8th, 1640 AD at the age of 27. The official cause was cirrhosis. He was killed by the same substance he had publicly executed thousands of his own citizens for consuming. His brother Ibrahim I inherited the throne after him. Ibrahim was known to be mentally unstable and was nicknamed Ibrahim the Mad. He was eventually deposed and strangled to death by his own court. The Ottoman court purges Murad had set in motion continued for another generation. The hypocrite sultan was succeeded by a madman. The cycle of dysfunctional Ottoman rule that Selim the Drunkard had begun was now permanent. Charles II of Spain was the last Habsburg king of Spain. He was born on November 6th, 1661 AD. He was the product of 200 years of dynastic inbreeding. His parents were uncle and niece. His grandparents were first cousins. His genetic damage was visible at birth. He could not properly chew solid food until he was 5 years old. He could not walk until he was 8.

[00:19:57]He could barely speak intelligibly until his teens. He suffered constant seizures, fevers, and intestinal disorders. [music] He had a jaw so misshapen it could not close properly. Spanish court physicians treated him from infancy with the most aggressive medications available in 17th century Europe. They gave him mercury.

[00:20:15]They gave him powdered gold. They gave him opium-laced sleeping draughts. They bled him constantly. They administered enemas containing arsenic and powdered emeralds. He swallowed mercury preparations daily for over 30 years.

[00:20:29]His body absorbed catastrophic levels of toxic metals. The mercury poisoning compounded his genetic damage. By his 20s, he was being described by foreign ambassadors as a walking corpse. The French ambassador wrote that he looked older than his grandfather. The papal nuncio reported that his hair was falling out in clumps. He could not father children. Two marriages produced nothing. He was carried to court appointments in a chair. He spoke through long pauses and unintelligible mumbles. His mother Mariana of Austria ruled in his name for most of his reign.

[00:21:02]He died on November 1st, 1700 AD at the age of 38.

[00:21:06]>> [music] >> The autopsy described his organs as ruined. His heart was the size of a peppercorn, his lungs were corroded, his skull was full of fluid. The Habsburg line of Spain died with him. His will named the French Bourbon Prince Philip of Anjou as his successor.

[00:21:23]Europe erupted into the War of Spanish Succession the following year. It lasted 13 years and killed an estimated 400,000 people.

[00:21:31]A genetically broken king medicated into ruin from childhood had reshaped European politics for the next century.

[00:21:38]Spain lost most of its European territories in the Treaty of Utrecht in 1713 AD. The Habsburg dominance that had begun under Charles V 200 years earlier ended in the body of his last and most damaged heir. The mercury that had been fed to a child king as medicine had poisoned [music] the future of an entire continent. Daoguang became emperor of Qing China in 1820 AD at the age of 38.

[00:22:04]He inherited an empire of 400 million people. He inherited the gold and silk and porcelain trade of half the world.

[00:22:11][music] He also inherited an opium epidemic spreading through every province of his empire. The British East India Company had been smuggling Bengali opium into China for 50 years by the time he took the throne. By 1838 AD, the British were shipping 900 long tons of opium into China every single year. Up to 12 million Chinese citizens were addicted.

[00:22:34]Daoguang was one of them. The emperor smoked opium privately for years [music] before he ordered the crackdown. Qing court records show that he had used opium since his time as Prince G before his coronation. His own personal staff smuggled the drug into the Forbidden City for his use. The hypocrisy was complete. The emperor who would soon execute thousands of opium dealers was a daily smoker himself. By the late 1830s, the opium drain on Chinese silver was destroying the Imperial economy. Tax revenues collapsed. The Imperial Army was riddled with addicts incapable of fighting. Daoguang appointed Lin Zexu as special Imperial Commissioner in 1839 AD. Lin confiscated 20,000 chests of British opium and dumped them into the sea mixed with lime and salt. The British retaliated. The First Opium War began that same year. The British Navy crushed every Chinese fleet sent against it. The Treaty of Nanjing in 1842 AD surrendered Hong Kong to Britain permanently. China was forced to legalize the opium trade. Daoguang died on February 26th, 1850 AD at the age of 67. He had failed to defeat his addiction. He had failed to defeat the British. He left behind an empire entering what Chinese historians call the century of humiliation. The man who tried to ban the drug ruling himself died still using it. 10 rulers, 10 centuries, 10 empires brought low by the substances their own emperors could not control. From Marcus Aurelius writing Meditations on a daily opium regimen >> [music] >> to Daoguang signing away Hong Kong with an opium pipe in his hand, every one of these men ruled the most powerful states on Earth. They commanded armies of hundreds of thousands. They held the lives of millions in their fists. And every single one of them was a slave to something he could not put down. The drugs killed some of them. The drugs destroyed the empires of others. If this video hit different, make sure you [music] hit subscribe right now. Comment below which addicted ruler you want a full video on next. [music] More forgotten history is coming and it will only get darker. You're watching The Unknown Explained. And now you know a little more.