APPENDICES

APPENDIX I.

Blood-madness.  See Chapter iii, p. 109.

One of the most striking instances afforded by history of Haematomania in a tyrant is Ibrahim ibn Ahmed, prince of Africa and Sicily (A.D. 875).  This man, besides displaying peculiar ferocity in his treatment of enemies and prisoners of war, delighted in the execution of horrible butcheries within the walls of his own palace.  His astrologers having once predicted that he should die by the hands of a ‘small assassin,’ he killed off the whole retinue of his pages, and filled up their places with a suit of negroes whom he proceeded to treat after the same fashion.  On another occasion, when one of his three hundred eunuchs had by chance been witness of the tyrant’s drunkenness, Ibrahim slaughtered the whole band.  Again, he is said to have put an end to sixty youths, originally selected for his pleasures, burning them by gangs of five or six in the furnace, or suffocating them in the hot chambers of his baths.  Eight of his brothers were murdered in his presence; and when one, who was so diseased that he could scarcely stir, implored to be allowed to end his days in peace, Ibrahim answered:  ’I make no exceptions.’  His own son Abul-Aghlab was beheaded by his orders before his eyes; and the execution of chamberlains, secretaries, ministers, and courtiers was of common occurrence.  But his fiercest fury was directed against women.  He seems to have been darkly jealous of the perpetuation of the human race.  Wives and concubines were strangled, sawn asunder, and buried alive, if they showed signs of pregnancy.  His female children were murdered as soon as they saw the light; sixteen of them, whom his mother managed to conceal and rear at her own peril, were massacred upon the spot when Ibrahim discovered whom they claimed as father.  Contemporary Arab chroniclers, pondering upon the fierce and gloomy passions of this man, arrived at the conclusion that he was the subject of a strange disease, a portentous secretion of black bile producing the melancholy which impelled him to atrocious crimes.  Nor does the principle on which this diagnosis of his case was founded appear unreasonable.  Ibrahim was a great general, an able ruler, a man of firm and steady purpose; not a weak and ineffectual libertine whom lust for blood and lechery had placed below the level of brute beasts.  When the time for his abdication arrived, he threw aside his mantle of state and donned the mean garb of an Arab devotee, preached a crusade, and led an army into Italy, where he died of dysentery before the city of Cosenza.  The only way of explaining his eccentric thirst for slaughter is to suppose that it was a dark monomania, a form of psychopathy analogous to that which we find in the Marechal de Retz and the Marquise de Brinvilliers.  One of the most marked symptoms of this disease was the curiosity