I didn't realize until I started reading Jerusalem: The Biography that "many of Jerusalem's rulers were far worse than Herod and had wonderfully redolent names, like the priapic and violent 12th- century warlord Zangi the Sanguine, the rapacious Crusader King Fulk the Repulsive (he really was) or one of his successors, Baldwin the Big."
This was not taught in high school world history class!
And I certainly didn't learn in Sunday School that Empress Theodora of Byzantium, a former showgirl, “was said to be a gymnastically gifted orgiast whose specialty was to offer all three orifices to her clients simultaneously.”
