2. The King Who Thought He Was Made of Glass
French king Charles VI (1368 – 1422) started his reign well, and was known as “Charles the Well-Loved”. By the time he died over four decades later, he had earned the nickname by which he is best known to history: “Charles the Mad”. His crazy episodes included hacking and killing his knights in a manic fit, imagining that he was Saint George, and going into prolonged bouts of amnesia in which he was able to recognize his courtiers, but not his wife and children.
The weirdest manifestation of his mental illness might have been his delusion that he was made of glass. It made him extremely frightened of shattering if he fell or was jostled, so he tried to avert the danger by inserting iron rods in his clothes. Going to the opposite extreme, he would abandon all fears of fragility, and run wildly at top speed on the streets or in the halls of his palace. It got so bad, that to keep him inside his Parisian residence, its entrances were bricked up. The unfortunate king kept slipping in and out of insanity until his death in 1422.
