Rulers Whose Blunders Cost Them Everything

"Caligula marched his legions to the coast, declared war on the sea god Neptune, and ordered the men to stab the water and gather seashells as spoils. Qin Shi Huang, hunting immortality, swallowed mercury pills every day and shortened his life with each dose. When one person's judgement is the only safeguard a country has, the results tend to be memorable. In this episode: Farouk of Egypt, a practising pickpocket who worked official receptions and lifted a guest's watch Ferdinand I of Austria, remembered chiefly for one recorded sentence about wanting dumplings James II of England panicking during the revolution and dropping the Great Seal into the Thames Francois Duvalier of Haiti ordering every black dog in the capital killed over a suspected rival Muammar Gaddafi travelling to Paris and New York with a Bedouin tent pitched wherever he stayed Hereditary and absolute systems share a single flaw. They hand a nation's decisions to whoever happens to have been born or shot their way into the chair."