16 Princess Olga of Kiev buried her matchmakers alive, slaughtered 5000 people during a feast and was named as a Saint by the Christian Orthodox Church.

Take your Red Wedding and move away, Game of Thrones. It doesn’t get any more hardcore than this.

This Russian Princess was a direct descendant of the Vikings, and she totally lived up to her ancestors’ reputation. Olga was the wife of Igor of Kiev, who was killed rather brutally by the Drevlians. Since her son Svyatoslav was but a three-year-old child, she was declared the official ruler of Kievan Rus’. The Drevlians were ambitious, and expressed their desire for Princess Olga to marry their Prince Mal; an association that would make a Drevlian the ruler of the land.

When the Drevlians sent 20 of their best men to persuade Olga, she responded by having her servants dig a deep trench and dumping their boats – envoys and all – into it. They were buried alive. The revenge did not stop there. She invited Prince Mal’s best warriors to use her bathhouse and burned it down as they were bathing. When the Drevlians held a massive feast after Igor’s funeral, Olga waited until they were drunk and had them slaughtered – all 5000 of them. What followed was a total declaration of war. Olga marched into the Drevlian community with her armies and had them set fire to their homes. They perished overnight.

In 1547, she was named as a Saint by the Orthodox Church, one of only five women to have received such an honour.(source)

17 During the Nanking Massacre of 1937-38, soldiers severed the bellies of pregnant women, raped children and infants after cutting them open and even forced family members to rape each other.

Also known as the Rape of Nanking, an estimated 300,000 Chinese civilians were murdered by the Imperial Japanese Army. Aside from setting fire to nearly one-third of the city, Japanese soliders disemboweled children, infants and young girls, followed by rape. Pregnant women’s bellies were cut off and killed, or their vaginas were penetrated with bayonets, bamboo sticks or other sharp objects. John Rabe, leader of the Safety Zone, recalling the day of December 17 writes in his diary,

“Last night up to 1,000 women and girls are said to have been raped, about 100 girls at Ginling College. . . alone. You hear nothing but rape.”

In yet another extract from Celia Young’s 2006 paper The Memorial Hall for the Victims of the Nanjing Massacre: Rhetoric in the Face of Tragedy,

“The soldier abruptly stabbed her in the belly with a bayonet. She gave a final scream as her intestines spilled out. Then the soldier stabbed the fetus, with its umbilical cord clearly visible, and tossed it aside.”

(source)

18 Christopher Columbus ran a sex slave ring with pre-pubescent Native American girls.

The history books certainly don’t tell you this.

Upon arriving at Hispaniola in 1492, Columbus and his men took nearly 2000 of the Taino Indians who came to greet them as slaves. Pre-pubescent Taino girls were made into sex slaves, even being exported overseas to wealthy Europeans buyers. It was common practice for Columbus to reward his men with girls for them to rape if they had done a job particularly well. Columbus’ inhuman treatment of the Taino Indians was well documented by the literate members of his crew. If the slaves misbehaved, he would order his men to cut off their ears or noses. In extreme cases, Columbus set the dogs on them, skewered them with pikes or resorted to shooting.(source)

19 Pythagoreans believed that urinating while facing the sun was a heavily punishable sin.

Pythagoras rose to fame with his ground-breaking mathematical and philosophical theories. Apart from being a genius and acquiring a cult-like following from people all over the world, he was also weird. Being a part of the Pythagorean school’s “inner circle” meant following strange rules, such as abstaining from eating beans and not facing the sun while urinating. He is widely known today for the Pythagorean theorem, and legend has it that he sacrificed 100 cattle to the gods after its discovery. He is also rumoured to have killed the philosopher Hippasus for disagreeing with him, but the authenticity of the rumor remains to be seen.(1,2)

20 Mozart was obsessed with feces and even wrote songs about anilingus.

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart sure had a sense of humour. Family, close friends and acquaintances knew his penchant for bathroom humour, as evidenced by the letters he wrote to them during his lifetime. Ben Skinner, an endocrinologist, studied Mozart’s letters and discovered that 39 of them included “scatological passages”. He even composed a few canons (musical pieces) with anilingus imagery. One of them is titled “Leck mir den Arsch fein recht schön sauber“, which literally translates to “Lick me in the ass right well and clean”.(source)