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Subject: Excerpt Of History
Date: Thu, 23 Sep 2004 19:53:42 EDT
Ivan the Terrible
"Monarchs aren't often as fearsome as their nicknames imply. But Ivan IV,
Czar of Russia in the mid 1500s, was worse. As a child, he amused himself by
throwing cats and dogs from the 1200 foot high towers of the Kremlin. As Czar,
when a group of seventy citizens complained to him of injustices in their town,
he ordered hot wine poured over their heads and had them lie naked in the snow.
When it was rumored that the city of Novogorod was conspiring to defect to
neighbouring Lithuania, Ivan exterminated the city, torturing its citizens for
five weeks and killing 60,000 people.
He was so terrifying that he could actually scare people to death. In 1569
the girl he picked to be his third wife had a heart attack and died when she
heard the news."
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