The lives and times of history’s worst tyrants. From Ivan the Terrible, infamous for having beaten his own son to death, to Saddam Hussein, responsible for poison gas attacks on his own people, here are the stories of history’s most ruthless tyrants.From the Roman Empire to the present day, including General Pinochet, Ida Amin, Pol Pot, Hitler, Stalin, Mao, Caligula, Enver Hoxha, Jean Bedel Bokassa, Nicolae Ceausescu and Than Shwe.

          Caligula — a famous Roman megalomaniac who threatened to make his horse a consul and is thought to have had incestuous relationships with his sisters.

          Genghis Khan — undoubtedly the greatest conqueror of all time who practised benevolence towards those who sided with him, but terrorized and annihilated those who opposed him.

          Jean Bedel Bokassa — spent the equivalent of the Central African Republic’s GDP on his Napoleonic-style coronation as Emperor and had children clubbed to death for not buying uniforms made in his factory.

          Nicolae Ceausescu — insisted on having his name mentioned at least forty times on every page of every newspaper and visited the ruined countryside of Romania to inspect displays of meat and fruit made out of polystyrene.

          Mao Zedong — whose legacy includes more than fifty million dead, most of them starved to death, but many executed for criticism, real or imagined, of the Communist Party, or for "unrevolutionary" acts.