The Tragic Life of the Most Powerful King in History

The king opens his eyes, and the world rushes to serve. Dozens of hands move in perfect rhythm, layering him like a cake. Scented cloths are rubbed, gold-laced silk wraps and lace-carfs-farsant. Then velvet drops and curls are locked onto the towering wick. Finally, the red-heeled shoes are slid on as the sweet and heavy perfume settles. The bedroom fills with hundreds more people, all eyes drawn to his burning presence. Louis XIV, the sun king, the OG, of absolute rulers. His existence is scripted without intermission. A calendar and a watch are all it takes to know his every move throughout the day. Louis XIV wields power over millions, but he's trapped by his own supremacy. A force that will tear his body apart and torture him with unimaginable pain. The theatre of absolute power. It's 1682, and the king has finally moved into Versailles, his permanent home. More than 20 years in the making, this extension was among Louis' first royal projects. It's still unfinished, but it already outshines every royal estate, past and future. Its grounds could fit more than 40,000 tennis courts. And it isn't just a palace, but a trap wrapped in gold. Beyond the royal family and servants, some 5,000 nobles from every corner of France live here. Far from home, they have no power, and that only makes Louis stronger. In return, he gives them glittering titles, tax breaks, and the illusion that they matter. Nearly one-fifth of the nation's government spending flows into Versailles to keep the king's friends close and enemies closer. He starts the day with breakfast and a bowel movement. Doctors inspect the royal poop while he heads to mass. Drums, five smarkers entrance, as the choir starts to sing. The music changes daily, the personal players compose just for him. God may reside in heaven, but here Louis is his left tenant. And duty calls. By 11, he's back in his quarters buried in letters, finance, and strategy with his ministers. The kingdom flows through his hands. The sun king knows the status of every fortress and troop, and not just because he has to, he loves war. It's his favourite kind of glory. The goal is unapologetic. French territory everywhere, with his colonies stretching across the globe. Just like Kangxi, the Qing emperor, Louis, is obsessed with grandeur. Yesterday a ship of Chinese porcelain arrived, so he sends back a cannon. The afternoon continues with more diplomacy. Saimi's envoys have travelled for two years, finally show up. Their jaws drop as the king greets them, draped in a coat completely encrusted in diamonds. He showers them with gifts worth around two million dollars today, a small price for the publicity this spectacle will bring. All that work has Louis staffing. His orchestra performs as hundreds of eyes track each bite of his role mukbang. He couldn't care less about cutlery and loves devouring food with his bare hands. And his appetite is perfectly matched by tonight's obscene menu. Soups and pigeons in gold-crusted pies. Tows of chicken fricacy, partridges, tart-strenched in syrup. The smell of perfume, candle wax, butter and wine give the palace a heady aroma. But the real intoxication is not food, it's extraviganza. Tonight 24,000 candles set the gardens ablaze. Rockets trace the king's initials in fire across the sky. Cortiers brag about partying through the night and sleeping through the day for weeks, lost in powdered wigs and champagne laughter. Louis' ego thrives on this indulgent chaos. But outside all the glitter and glam, the world looks quite different. Beyond the golden walls. Beyond Versailles, Europe is a giant strategy game of paranoid kings. France, the most populous kingdom, is leveling up fast. This is freaking out Spain, the Holy Roman Empire, England and the Dutch, who all team up to stop Louis XIV from eating the map. His ambition is to expand his realm to the natural borders of France, the Rhine, the Alps, the Pyrenees. He commissions over a hundred star-shaped fortresses and strengthens the old ones, wrapping France in defenses with 400,000 soldiers and 13,000 cannons standing ready. Louis delights in joining his army on the battlefield. During his 72-year reign, he would engage in five major wars both on land and at sea. Genoa, one of the wealthiest ports in Italy, becomes the first European city to face the terror of his bomb-kecher's explosive shells. A 10-day bombardment destroys half of the city. The message is clear, resist French annexation and fire will reign from the sky. Each conflict reshapes the map of Europe absorbing Belgium, Lorraine, Azaz and Strasbourg into France. The price of glory is brutal. Even when the cannons fall silent, the army eats more than half the kingdom's money. In wartime, the treasury bleeds dry and peasants are squeezed with taxes until their pockets are empty. The people grow angry, riots erupt, and the king answers with military crackdowns. To bolster his image, he funds newspapers that inflate his victories and downplay domestic problems. He orders the construction of hospitals in Paris to care for wounded soldiers and the poor who crowd the streets. But the hospitals are filthy, designed less to heal than to confine. Instead of curing, 17th-century medicine is mostly just lessons in bearing pain. And the sunking will face that himself. His glory doesn't just demand tribute from his people, it's about to turn on him as well. The body becomes a battleground. Before we close in on the sunking, let's zoom out for a moment. Absolute rulers know that knowledge is power, and then just like now, this includes getting the full picture. This is why we've been working with today's sponsor Ground News for over two years now. Ground News is a website and app designed to empower you, the reader, and to help you think critically about the information all of us consume. Every day they gather thousands of articles from around the world and organize them by story. You don't just see one source, you see every source. Their unique feature is the ability to compare all these kinds of media sources in real time. The political bias, reliability, ownership, even specific differences in phrases and framing. This way, you can make up your own mind instead of just seeing one angle. To get 40% off their vantage plan with unlimited access to all features, go to Ground.News/Night or scan the QR code on the screen. Using this link supports our channel and helps make the media landscape a more transparent place. And now, back to the sunking. On the outside, he looks unstoppable, fighting, hunting, dancing every day. It's glamorous and absolutely exhausting. But he knows that weakness is dangerous and the court can never see him crack. So he hides sleepless nights and smiles through fevers and joint pains. As he nears 50, his body slows and stiffens. Decades of gluttony and extravagance begin to take their toll. His frame grows rounder and he's increasingly suffering from toothaches. With no anesthesia and only the dentist holding his head still, the teeth are wrenched and poked. One of the root snaps and Lully can hear the bone crack as his mouth fills with blood. At night, he tries to dull the pain with wine, but as he chugs, it shoots up through his nostrils. The dental work has opened a tunnel from the king's upper jaw to his nose. In a few days, his mouth starts tasting of rot, his breath reeks and people flinch when he speaks. The doctors try to burn this whole shut, leaving Lully unable to eat for days. And this nightmare was just a dress rehearsal for the center's most infamous surgery. Months later, he develops a truly raw agony, a swollen lump near his anus. The doctors try piercing it, burning it, injecting mysterious potions. Nothing works, and soon an open saw develops. The last option is surgery. The problem is that his chief surgeon has never performed anything like this before. Surgery at this time is just glorified bushery, amputations and haircuts both done by barbers. So the surgeon needs guinea pigs. He practices on condemned prisoners, perfecting both his courage and his cuts. Finally, it's the sun king's turn. As the blade slices into the infected flesh, the king clasps the hand of his war minister and whispers "Monger" only twice. Three hours later, it's over. And though the operation was done in secret, a new fashion sweeps the court. Bandages wrapped around everyone's buttocks. Lully smiles, but he knows deep down he survived, not thanks to his doctors, but despite them. the age of gory. The 17th century is Europe's medical twilight zone and probably the worst time to get sick. Doctors will blame everything on your blood, so for a thousand years, the go-to cure has been to cut a vein and let the sickness flow out. Bleed between the eyebrows for headaches, cut under the tongue for a sore throat, and if a woman's period is irregular, well, better get out the knife again. By the mid-1600s blood circulation is discovered, and the invention of the microscope unveils a hidden universe of microorganisms, pulling medicine out of the dark ages. But this progress doesn't help sick people much. Doctors still use ancient treatments that can kill you faster than smallpox. Ironically, no one suffers more from outdated medicine than the most powerful man in the kingdom. By the turn of the century, the sunking is in his early 60s, a miraculous age most people never make it to. He launches his longest and most expensive war for the Spanish throne, but gout, arthritis and rheumatism keep him off the battlefield. Now, his main enemy is himself. The doctors do their usual bleeding and colonic cleanses, but nothing helps. With all his teeth gone, raw feasts adjust to memory. All he wants now is to secure his dynasty, but a wave of measles tears through the raw family, killing his son, his grandson and almost every other heir to his throne. They all receive the same treatment of bloodletting and laxatives. Still, death claims everyone around Louis. He is somehow spared, but not forever. The final performance. It begins with a chill running through his bones on a summer day when everyone else complains about the heat. With a sharp pain in his left leg, a black spot begins to bloom on the skin. It's gangrene, his flesh starving for blood. The rot crawls upwards, his flesh consuming itself and turning black. The sickly stench overpowers the incense in his bedroom. The blood the doctors draw is thick and dark. And donkey milk, praised for its healing powers, doesn't help. The night's drag on and nothing quenches his terrible thirst. He tries to keep working, but ministers can see death in his eyes. He faces it the way he faced everything else, as theatre. He summons his five-year-old great grandson, the future Louis XV, and tells him, "Try to remain at peace with your neighbours. I loved war too much. Do not follow me in that." Over the next few days, he says farewells to ministers, courtiers, and princes. "I am leaving, but the state will always remain," he says, "before he goes out like a candle." The Afterglow The last few decades of Louis XIV's life were a complete medical nightmare. But still, for 72 years, longer than any other ruler, he embodied the idea that one man could be the state. But the system he built was too costly, and way too dependent on one megalomaniac trapped in a body with limits. Once reliable like clockwork and the source of his power, his robust physique started to fail. While he endured the brutal medical treatments of the time, the perfect image he demanded of himself began to fall apart until the sunking was only a suffering, toothless man. The dream of Versailles refuses to end. Frederick the Great of Prussia and Ludwig II of Poveria went full fanboys, building their own glittering replicas of this fantasy. Even today, some leaders chase that same mix of ambition and ego, surrounding themselves with gold and spectacle to prove their godlike. Their panaces are the Afterglow of a desire for absolute power. But their human bodies still mark the limit of their influence.