The Banality of Medieval Evil

My name was Georgios. At the age of 26, I secretly assassinated the emperor. The dead emperor’s thirteen-year-old son Theodoros ascended the throne of the Byzantine Empire and, desperate for wise and loyal counsel, appointed me imperial spymaster. Within a year I led a surprise rebellion to unseat the boy emperor and claim his title for my own. Theodoros languished in my dungeon for the next decade as I stripped away his remaining titles.

Theodoros eventually escaped, but by then I was established as Basileus Georgios I, and my reach was long. I recaptured and imprisoned him once again, and this time Theodoros was—in the Greek tradition—tortured, castrated, and removed of what little he still possessed in the world. Then I released him, out of pity or perhaps distaste.

Over the course of the next twenty years as emperor, I personally murdered 26 people through direct order and conspiracy, mostly foreign rulers and their families. Miscellaneous heretics and infidels were burned at the stake if unfortunate enough to be captured in my numerous wars, or if they just innocently crossed my path.

Last year, I—Chris, not Georgios—spent a little side project energy on a newsletter chronicling a playthrough of Crusader Kings 3, the massive medieval dynasty simulator. This year, I’d been toying with ways to try another “season” of the newsletter, but I’d lost the taste for endlessly cataloging genealogy, battles, and recurring incest scenarios.

I hit upon the idea of two quick Sliding Doors-style playthroughs starting from the same family and time: one where I played as a pacifist dynasty only interested in accruing power peacefully through marriage and diplomacy, another where I played utter cutthroat maniacs who would always take the most evil path forward. I tried the evil family first.

Left to my own devices in video games where there are choices and a rudimentary moral system, I play some version of Good Guy. I might behave a little rogueishly, maybe act a little mercenary or even power-hungry, but not gratuitously evil. Even if the game encourages or rewards evil, I find it hard to act that way, as I squeamishly humanize the virtual victims. At least a little.

That’s not to say I haven’t gone buck wild causing citywide destructive chaos in Grand Theft Auto or similarly unhinged universes. Something about that level of spectacle feels depersonalized, carnivalesque, and even less real—or less human—than the usual animated carnage. So what if I drove a bus into a busy sidewalk cafe and fired grenades at responding police? It’s just another day in this town.

Therefore, yes, I have many, many simulated virtual deaths to atone for when called to account by the AI robots who eventually take over the real world. But Crusader Kings’ mechanics are personal in nature. You control a single person-character at a time, as part of a larger family dynasty that takes hundreds of years to play out. And your family lineage exists in a worldwide context where thirty thousand other characters are simultaneously pursuing their own agendas. When you murder a character in this game, it’s a person with a name, history, and family of other characters, most of whom will grieve their death and potentially come after you if they know you did the deed.

Sure, that’s still a thin facade of humanity, but it’s enough to give me pause when doing bad things to people in other playthroughs of this game. But despite having the technical ability to be evil in Crusader Kings, it actually takes a lot of work. All characters in the game exist in a global system of positive and negative Opinion of each other, influenced by reputation, actions, culture, religion, and personality traits. Doing bad things and being a bad person makes people dislike you, which makes them harder to persuade and more likely to obstruct or attack. And if you have any “good” personality traits yourself—like Compassionate or Honest—doing bad acts can increase your Stress levels enough to cause mental breakdowns ranging from depression to insanity.

Determined to unhinge my moral compass for the purposes of this experiment, I calculated my first objective was to get strong enough such that my heir could be a bad person without their bad traits inspiring their vassals to unseat them. So after a few generations, I gained control of one of the kingdoms making up the Byzantine Empire. Then I had to rear a very bad child who could do whatever it took to claim the imperial throne, unbothered by conscience or petty ethics.

So it was with little baby Prince Georgios. He got his first milk tooth? Who cares, don’t bother me punk. (Georgios loses Opinion of his father and gains baby Stress.) Georgios sees a criminal hanged for a trivial offense? Just goes to show you justice is a sham, Georgie. A peasant questions his lowly lot in life? Beat him till he cries for mercy from his lord. Whom should you trust in this world? Absolutely no one, Georgie, not even me. So what should young Georgios study? Focus your mind on intimidation, deception, and inflicting pain.

Georgios grew up to be a master of Intrigue, as well has having the traits Callous, Paranoid, and Arbitrary. He was not a good guy, at all. Everyone hated him, but thanks to another system—called Terror—everyone was too afraid of him to stand in the way of his plans. He sewed up the empire on behalf of the family dynasty and spent the rest of his life on the throne murdering and conquering his way through nearby lands.

When Georgios finally died of a coughing fit at age 60, the Byzantine Empire was larger and richer than ever. Nearby competing kingdoms were controlled by teetering dynasties thinned out by his assassinations and betrayals. But the whole time Georgios was behaving like an utter bastard, he had one secret virtue: raising his own heir as an Extra Good Boy. After this evil emperor had served his purpose, I was determined to reforge the imperial lineage as a chain of decent, kindly rulers. We’d still be doing wars, but we wouldn’t be murdering and castrating people, which has to count for something. Thus I abandoned the evil family experiment. Being evil not only made me feel bad at times, it failed to make me feel good even when it made me successful in the game. I just wasn’t enjoying being evil, which has to be the least moral and most lazy reason to not be evil, ever.

But while Georgios was definitely evil, did I, Chris, feel evil while playing him? Yes and no. Somehow it felt worse to do specific evil things to virtual characters, such as torturing them, even though ordering the torture is as sterile as checking a box in a spreadsheet. There’s no illustration or description of the torture, just a bit of menacing dialogue and a picture of the victim looking distraught in the dungeon, presumably pre-torture. And this was definitely the first time I’d ordered a castration, which (along with blinding) is a punishment unique to the Greek culture in Crusader Kings. Even though the act was equally abstracted in game, that still made me feel bad. The murders, assassinations, and executions are depicted with even less detail, translating into popup notifications and bullet points.

You can actually keep track of the life and times of any character in Crusader Kings even if you can’t directly affect them anymore. The one-time deposed boy emperor Theodoros survived all the abuse Georgios perpetrated and eventually married, even though he was now a landless wanderer incapable of producing heirs of his own. He outlived Georgios, which I imagine brought some small satisfaction to his virtual heart. But he only outlived his nemesis by a year, drinking himself to death in obscurity. A few generations later, I named the new heir to the empire Theodoros, and I made sure he turned out Compassionate, Brave, and Just. Long may he reign.