Heroes of the medieval era

01

Basil II

He blinded 15,000 Bulgarian prisoners and sent them home in columns of a hundred, each led by one man with a single eye. Tsar Samuel collapsed and died of shock two days later.

02

Vlad the Impaler

He lined the road to his own capital with 20,000 impaled Ottoman corpses as a greeting for Sultan Mehmed II. Mehmed turned his army around and went home.

03

Timur

Outside Delhi in 1398, Timur's men assembled towers of 90,000 skulls. He killed perhaps 17 million people — roughly 5% of the world's population at the time.

04

El Cid

El Cid's corpse was strapped upright on his horse Babieca and sent into battle after his death — and the Almoravid army reportedly broke and fled from a dead man.

05

Egill Skallagrímsson

Egil Skallagrímsson committed his first killing at age seven with an axe at a ball game. He later composed a poem so good it talked an enemy king out of executing him.

06

Tomoe Gozen

Tomoe Gozen beheaded at least one enemy general during the Battle of Awazu in 1184, then vanished — no grave, no confirmed death, no record of where she went after the war.

07

Harrowing of Crécy

After Crécy in 1346, Philip VI of France pounded on a stranger's castle gate after dark, bleeding and unrecognized, begging shelter — a king reduced to a beggar by English longbows.

08

Skanderbeg

Taken from Albania as a child hostage, raised as an Ottoman janissary, Skanderbeg defected at 38 with three hundred men and held off the full Ottoman army 25 times over 25 years.

09

Nikephoros II Phokas

The Byzantine emperor who reconquered Cilicia, Cyprus, and parts of Syria slept on a hair shirt on the floor and petitioned to have soldiers killed in battle canonized as martyrs by the Church.

10

Jebe

Jebe shot Genghis Khan's horse from under him in battle — and when asked who fired the arrow, admitted it to the Khan's face. Khan named him a general on the spot.