Some royals collected jewels, and some built palaces, but then there were those who did such weird things that it’s hard to believe they’re true.
A cold night routine
Empress Elisabeth of Austria had a beauty regimen that put every other one to shame. Instead of your usual creams and lotions, she wrapped raw veal around her face every night and went to sleep with it on top of her face. Yes, really.
Some nights, it was crushed strawberries, some nights, it was veal, both with the goal of keeping her skin looking good. The empress also took a cold shower each morning and went to bed after a bath in olive oil.
When daylight could wait
Ludwig II of Bavaria wasn’t your average royal, mostly because he didn’t stick to the ordinary hours of doing things. He completely swapped his schedule by staying up through the night and sleeping during the day.
Work, rides, castle life, it all happened at night. He would go for sleigh rides in the moonlight, and it’s part of the reason why he became known as the Moon King. When you’re a royal, even the time of day has no meaning anymore.
Close enough for comfort
Grief is difficult for anyone to deal with, including royals. Gustavus Adolphus of Sweden died in 1632, and his wife, Maria Eleonora of Brandenburg, struggled to cope with that fact. What did she do?
She had his heart removed, wrapped in cloth, and placed in a golden box near her bed. But if that wasn’t bad enough, Maria also forced her daughter to sleep in the bed, with her father’s heart hanging over the pair of them. Grief really can make you do weird things.
Handle with care
In the 1400s, Charles VI of France suffered from a lot of mental illness episodes, and one of his most famous involved him believing that he was made of glass. He was such a strong believer that he feared other people touching him, in case he broke.
So, he refused to let anyone get close. Charles also had his clothing reinforced with iron rods to stop him from shattering, and he wrapped his lower body in heavy cushions and blankets.
A bitter little habit
Mithridates VI of Pontus, part of modern-day Turkey, was another royal with intense fears, although his were slightly more rational. He was terrified of being poisoned. So much so, in fact, that he would take small doses of poison to try and build immunity to it.
The technique became known as mithridatism because of him. Mithridates’s technique worked, but perhaps too well, because he couldn’t use poison to commit suicide when he was captured in 63 BC. He had to ask his bodyguard to kill him with a sword instead.
Court life got awkward
The French court of Louis XIV sure was strange, and one of the weirdest parts of it involved the king’s own habits. Namely, his love for enemas. Yes, you read that right, enemas. Louis XIV received around 2,000 of them during his time as king, sometimes during court itself.
He thought that the procedure would give him good health and longevity, right until his death in 1715. The enemas actually had a positive effect, though, because they made people see surgeons as legitimate medical professionals who were trying to help.
A portable little crowd
Tiny dogs are so cute. Even Henry III of France thought so, but maybe not in the way you’d expect, as he carried several small dogs in a basket around his neck. He’d walk into the royal court during the 1500s with a bundle of dogs attached to him.
He’d sit still the entire time to make sure he didn’t disturb the dogs. Henry would only carry around toy spaniels and Bichon Frises because they were his favorite breeds.
A royal medicine cabinet
Medicine was already pretty strange by the time that Charles II of England took the throne, so people didn’t think his approach to health was that weird. It was. He had a ‘medicine’ called King’s Drops that was made using human skulls.
He actually took the drops after having a seizure in 1685, believing that the skull would help cure him. Because, apparently, telling someone ‘take this, it has skulls in it’ was completely normal back then.
Something heavy on the desk
You’d think that someone with a diamond weighing around 185 carats would treat it well. But no. Mir Osman Ali Khan, the last monarch of Hyderabad, India, used the Jacob Diamond like a paperweight, and there were even stories of him finding it in his father’s shoe.
In all fairness, however, he didn’t actually realize how much the diamond was worth at first. It currently belongs to the Indian Government and is kept in the Reserve Bank of India’s vaults in Mumbai.
A sticky old story
Nobody likes flies, and that includes Pepi II of Egypt, who disliked them so much that he had his servants covered in honey. This way, they’d attract the flies to them and away from him, eventually getting stuck on his servants.
What a nice job that must’ve been. Interestingly, not all ancient Egyptians saw flies the same way, and some of them actually valued them a lot because of how fast and persistent they are.
Alone with a sharp point
That’s not all for flies, and Roman Emperor Domitian had his own way of dealing with them. Sources from after his death claimed that he’d sit alone for hours with a stylus, a kind of small writing tool, and stab the flies.
He would actually take time away from the courts to find flies to kill because he enjoyed it so much. In fact, Domitian became so famous for doing it that one servant, when asked who was in the Emperor’s room, said there was ‘Not even a fly.’
Fur went everywhere
Ibrahim I was the ruler of the Ottoman Empire from 1640 to 1648, and it was during this time that lots of strange stories appeared about him. One of them said that he loved fur so much that he lined rooms in his palace with sable and lynx, and made women around him wear sable.
He also took it one step further by having cats walk around his palace dressed in fur, too. Most of us would settle for a normal blanket, but no, not Ibrahim I.
A dangerous morning mask
Elizabeth I of England had a famously pale face, and it was all because of her makeup. She used something called ceruse, a mixture made from white lead and vinegar, on her face practically every day.
The weird habit started after she came down with smallpox in 1562. She recovered, yes, but the sickness left her with marks all over her skin, leading to her covering it up with ceruse and poisoning her own skin with lead.
Sources: Please see here for a complete listing of all sources that were consulted in the preparation of this article.
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