num_pages: 114
description: This frank and fascinating book ransacks the remarkable history of forty of Europe's most dumb, deluded, and downright dangerous monarchs, to reveal a legion of kings and queens who have sat upon the pedestal of power and abused it in spectacular style. The respectability of the royal position is well and truly tossed aside by the whimsy and the wanton depravity of generations of mad European monarchs, including: 
   The queen who murdered her husband with a red-hot spit. 
   The bloodthirsty monarch who impaled tens of thousands of his subjects. 
   The vampiric ruler who bathed in the blood of young women.  
   The king of excess who beheaded his wives.  
 Mad Kings and Queens is a spectacular celebration of seven hundred years of royal eccentricity, detailing a catalogue of madness and exploring the finer intricacies of royal breeding that lay at its root. 
title: Mad Kings & Queens
publisher: Barnes & Noble Books