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Plenty of ancient monarchs have had strange deaths. For example, King George II of the U.K. died suddenly after waking up and defecating into a close stool, an early version of a toilet. Others deaths were more grim and violent. Ottoman Sultan Osman II, a teen, died in 1622 through an excruciating compression of the testicles. And yet other kings, known for their shrewdness and ruthlessness, certainly weren’t too smart, which sometimes led to their untimely deaths. One such king was the Persian Shah Agha Mohammad Khan, also sometimes referred to as Agha Mohammad Shah. The 18th-century ruler ushered in the Qajar dynasty of Iran that ruled until 1925. Khan was childless, having been castrated in his youth while imprisoned by Adel Shah, a previous ruler. Khan gained a reputation for being intelligent and pragmatic while also very brutal. These traits did not help him at the time of his death. According to a post on Reddit, he foolishly postponed an execution that he ordered, and got killed as a result: This account has been corroborated by a number of reputable historians. The killing took place around three days after the Shah entered and took over the city of Shusha with little opposition. At the time, he was leading his second campaign into Georgia, a region he had largely conquered and where he systematically pillaged, enslaved, and massacred people. The book A History of Iran: Empire of the Mind by Michael Axworthy, a noted academic and historian, described Khan’s death below: In Volume 7 of The Cambridge History of Iran, his death is described in more detail: Agha Mohammad was succeeded by his nephew Fath Ali Shah. According to the Encyclopædia Iranica, a research initiative run by the Encyclopaedia Iranica Foundation Inc. started by Columbia University Professor Ehsan Yarshater, Khan was an interesting personality: Given that his death has been widely documented by numerous reputable historians, we rate this claim as True. Sources: Axworthy, Michael. A History of Iran: Empire of the Mind. Basic Books , 2010. Accessed 28 Oct. 2021. Black, Jeremy. George III: America’s Last King. Yale University Press, 2009. Accessed 28 Oct. 2021. Curtis, Glenn E., and Eric Hooglund. Iran: A Country Study. Field Research Division, Library of Congress, 2008, https://www.loc.gov/rr/frd/cs/pdf/CS_Iran.pdf. Accessed 28 Oct. 2021. Dash, Mike. The Ottoman Empire’s Life-or-Death Race. Smithsonian Magazine, 22 March 2012. https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/the-ottoman-empires-life-or-death-race-164064882/. Accessed 28 Oct. 2021. Encyclopaedia Iranica Foundation. Welcome to Encyclopaedia Iranica. https://iranicaonline.org. Accessed 28 Oct. 2021. History. A Short History of Qajar Iran. https://www.soas.ac.uk/gallery/qajar/history/. Accessed 28 Oct. 2021. Melville, C., and Ehsan Yarshater, G. R. G. Hambly, Ilya Gershevitch, John Andrew Boyle, P. Avery, Richard Nelson Frye, William Bayne Fisher. The Cambridge History of Iran: Vol. 7. Cambridge University Press, 1968. Accessed 28 Oct. 2021. Ross, J. Keith. The Death of King George II, with a Biographical Note on Dr Frank Nicholls, Physician to the King. Journal of Medical Biography, vol. 7, no. 4, Nov. 1999, pp. 228–233, doi:10.1177/096777209900700409. Accessed 28 Oct. 2021.
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