Indeed. It’s like asking why Gnaeus Pompeius Magnus isn’t called Gnaeus Pompeius Magnus the Great.
HA!
But they only called him that after he died.
Yeah, and why wasn’t Charlemagne named “Charlemagne the great”?
But some do, witness Antiochus III who decided he was “Great” by at least age 43, if not 38.
Hmmm…you know I’ll be 43 in January. A title alteration may in fact be in order ;). Going around calling myself “lame” all the time seems just a little overly modest.
It’s all about your public relations. Try “indian the Great” if you like. If you can pull it off, then you are great, otherwise, sadly overreaching.
Genghis Khan wouldn’t fit the Blank the Great formula. You need a single name like Alexander or Alfred or Catherine or Frederick or Peter. Genghis Khan the Great sounds silly.
Alexander was Alexander III of Macedon. He was called “the Great” to distinguish him from the other rulers of the same name.
Since there were no other Genghis Khans, it was unnecessary to distinguish him from any others.
Likewise, King Alfred the Great is distinguished from King Alfred Aetheling.
At least these guys got “the Great” to distinguish them from other monarchs of the same name. We also have had:
Ethelred the Unready
Charles the Bald
Charles the Bad
Louis the Fat
Juana the Mad
Ivan the Terrible
And my personal favorite - Vlad the Impaler
I like Louis the Sluggard (Louis V of France).
William the Conqueror, previously William the Bastard, was the illegitimate son of Robert the Devil. According to many medieval legends it wasn’t an honorific (though he was far from the only medieval figure said to be of satanic ancestry: Justinian I, his wife Theodora, and the entire House of Angevin all had those rumors)
Eleanor of Aquitaine’s first husband was Louis the Pious; not once to my knowledge was she ever called Eleanor the Pious.
Juana the Mad was married to Philip the Handsome.
You’re sure? This is the standard Louis the Pious. I don’t think I’ve seen that nickname for Louis VII.
Personally I’m fond of Johann der Kindermacher, aka ‘John the Babymaker’. He was no Augustus the Strong, but 63 bastard children isn’t bad ;).
My bad. Her husband was a King Louis and he was known for his piety, but he wasn’t King Louis the Pious. Which must have really irked him. (“I’m at least as pious as that dipwad ever was!”)
The Diadochi and their dynasties had some fantastic names. By far the best was Demetrius Poliorcetes, besieger of cities, so named on account of his gigantic siege of Rhodes.
Sage Rat here expresses something of an 19th century view of the conquests of Alexander that is tragically at odds with contemporary history. The conquest itself was a personal adventure that left behind pretty much none of the apparatus Sage Rat suggests. Rostovsteff is pretty out of date, but he is surely right about this.
Perhaps it was because, unlike Alexander, he didn’t have an L.A. apartment house named after him.
Though he does have an eponymous bar and restaurant in West Hollywood.
The Byzantine Emperor Basil II was known as “the Bulgar Slayer” or as “the Eye-taker” for the time he killed thousands of Bulgars on the battlefield and captured thousands more. Per the account, he had 9 in ever 10 Bulgars blinded and every 10th he had blinded in one eye so that they could lead the others the hundreds of miles to their home, where when few survivors arrived the Bulgarian Tsar dropped dead of a heart attack. (Ain’t saying it’s true, but that it was reported as true.)
There are some who say Philippe V was nicknamed “le Long” (lit. the Lengthy, but translated as the Tall) not because he was tall but because of, ah, other outstanding measurements.
I used to be particularly fond of Pépin le Bref myself - but that’s back when I thought it meant “Pepin the Terse” rather than “the Short”. It’s undignified, being remembered as the midget of the lot. Well, maybe not as much as John I the Posthumous, I guess.
On the opposite hand, you can hardly get yourself a more badass honorific than Charles Martel. Charles the Hammer(er). That’s straight up metal.
As for your concerns re: Elizabeth I, well, she *was *wimminfolk. Had she conquered the entire world and ushered everlasting peace on Earth, the best she could have hoped for was “Elizabeth the Not Quite Totally Inferior”.
n/m
Off-topic trivia note: Iron Maiden has songs called “Genghis Khan” and “Alexander the Great”
Bear in mind that the Russians, who are not notably less misogynistic than the English, had no problem calling their own Tsarina “Catherine the Great”. My guess that it’s more a matter of the English constitutional approach to monarchy - ever since the Magna Carta, the Brits have been suspicious of monarchs who think too highly of themselves.
There was only one Juana of Castille. She got “the Mad” because she wasn’t very right in the head (plus she’d been educated to be a good breeding cow, not a ruler) and her enemies used every bit of leverage they could against her (including bad publicity), not to distinguish her from anybody else by the same name.