An uproarious, eye-opening history of Europe's notorious royal houses that leaves no throne unturned and will make you glad you live in a democracy.

Do you want to know which queen has the unique distinction of being the only known royal kleptomaniac? Or which empress kept her dirty underwear under lock and key? Or which czar, upon discovering his wife's infidelity, had her lover decapitated and the head, pickled in a jar, placed at her bedside?

Royally dishing on hundreds of years of dubious behavior, Royal Babylon chronicles the manifold appalling antics of Europe's famous families, behavior that rivals the characters in an Aaron Spelling television series. Here, then, are the insane kings of Spain, one of whom liked to wear sixteen pairs of gloves at one time; the psychopathic Prussian soverigns who included Frederick William and his 102-inch waist; sex-fixated French rulers such as Philip Duke D'Oreleans cavorting with more than a hundred mistresses; and, of course, the delightfully drunken and debauched Russian czars - Czar Paul, for example, who to make his soldiers goose-step without bending their legs had steel plates strapped to their knees. But whether Romanov or Windsor, Habsburg or Hanover, these extravagant lifestyles, financed as they were by the royals' badgered subjects, bred the most wonderfully offbeat and disturbingly unbelievable tales - and Karl Shaw has collected them all in this hysterically funny and compulsively readable book.

Royal Babylon is history, but not as they teach it in school, and it underlines in side-splitting fashion Queen Victoria's famous warning that it is unwise to look too deeply into the royal houses of Europe.

• We started tracking this book on August 19, 2010.
• This book was $9.99 when we started tracking it.
• The price of this book has changed 139 times in the past 5,242 days.
• The current price of this book is $6.99 last checked one day ago.
• This book is at its lowest price in the past 90 days.
• This lowest price this book has been offered at in the past year is $4.99.
• The lowest price to date was $4.99 last reached on August 12, 2024.
• This book has been $4.99 3 times since we started tracking it.
• The highest price to date was $14.99 last reached on June 17, 2018.
• This book has been $14.99 one time since we started tracking it.

• Biographies & Memoirs

• Text-to-Speech: Disabled
• Lending: Disabled
• Print Length: 338 Pages
• File Size: 1,304 KB