Curated category
Leaders who took power by coup
- NapoleonNapoleon Bonaparte was born Napoleone di Buonaparte on the 15th of August 1769, on the island of Corsica, to a family of Italian origin.
- Bumin QaghanBumin Qaghan died in 552 AD, just months after achieving something no Turk had ever done: founding a khaganate of his own.
- Fidel CastroFidel Alejandro Castro Ruz delivered the longest speech ever heard before the United Nations General Assembly, speaking for four and a half hours in 1960.
- Benito MussoliniBenito Mussolini was named after a Mexican president. His father, a blacksmith and a socialist, chose the name Benito for the liberal Mexican leader Benito…
- Mahmud IIMahmud II clung to the roof of the Ottoman Imperial Harem while assassins searched for him below. A Georgian slave girl named Cevri had bought him precious…
- SuhartoSuharto ruled Indonesia for 31 years, longer than any other president in the country's history. He was born on the 8th of June 1921 in a…
- Edward IIIEdward III was born at Windsor Castle on the 13th of November 1312, and a contemporary prophecy described him as "the boar that would come out of Windsor".
- Józef PiłsudskiJózef Piłsudski was 40 degrees below zero on the first night of his imprisonment in Siberia. That single night nearly killed him, and the health problems it…
- Hafizullah AminHafizullah Amin held supreme power over Afghanistan for a little over three months in 1979. In that time he seized the presidency, executed his own mentor…
- Elizabeth of RussiaElizabeth Petrovna seized the Russian throne on the night of the 25th of November 1741 wearing a warrior's metal breastplate over her dress and gripping a…
- Catherine the GreatCatherine the Great was born Princess Sophie Auguste Friederike von Anhalt-Zerbst-Dornburg, on the 2nd of May 1729, in the Ducal Castle of Stettin in…
- GalbaGalba put on a linen corset on the morning of the 15th of January AD 69, knowing it would offer little protection against so many swords.
- OthoMarcus Salvius Otho stabbed himself in the heart on the 16th of April 69 AD, one day after losing the Battle of Bedriacum. He was 36 years old.
- Francisco FrancoFrancisco Franco was shot in the abdomen in 1916, aged 23, during an assault on Moroccan positions at El Biutz, in the hills near Ceuta.
- TrajanTrajan was born Marcus Ulpius Traianus on the 18th of September in AD 53, in a modest Roman colony called Italica, in what is now the Andalusian province of…
- Vladimir LeninVladimir Ilyich Ulyanov, the man the world would come to know as Vladimir Lenin, took the name from no person at all. He first used it in December 1901, and…
- Mobutu Sese SekoMobutu Sese Seko was born Joseph-Désiré Mobutu on the 14th of October 1930 in Lisala, in the Belgian Congo. His father was a cook for a Belgian judge.
- Carlos Castillo ArmasCarlos Castillo Armas was shot dead on the 26th of July 1957, inside the presidential palace in Guatemala City, by a member of his own guard.
- Paul BarrasPaul Barras, born on the 30th of June 1755 in the small Provencal town of Fox-Amphoux, rose from a noble family to become the most powerful executive in…
- SullaSulla composed his own epitaph. Carved into his tomb on the Campus Martius, it read: "No friend ever served me, and no enemy ever wronged me, whom I have not…
- Efraín Ríos MonttEfraín Ríos Montt died of a heart attack at his home in Guatemala City on the 1st of April 2018, at the age of 91, without ever completing a criminal trial.
- SomerledSomerled died in 1164, yet his birth remains a historical ghost. No contemporary pedigree outlines his ancestry with certainty.