If you want to do a podcast entirely centered on psychotic rulers who did weird shit, allow me to interest you in the tale of Justinian II, the last emperor of the Byzantine Empire's Heraclian dynasty. He pissed off a bunch of people after landing on the throne, and got unseated by a rebellious general. His nose was then mutilated, a practice that was a very common way in the Byzantine Empire to render someone unsuitable for the throne (as an emperor wasn't supposed to have visible physical deformities), and he was packed off to Cherson in Crimea. There, he made an alliance with the Khagan of the Khazars, a local Turkic empire, married the khagan's sister, and returned to the throne. But how did he try to hide the fact that his nostrils had been sliced open (he is sometimes known as "Justinian the Slit-nosed")? According to the records, he hid it with a fake nose made of gold. Unsurprisingly, when he returned to the throne bent on revenge, he was not a better ruler than before, and he was beheaded in a revolt, while his six-year-old son was dragged out of the church where he and his mother had sought sanctuary and murdered. Byzantine history is fun.
