20 of History’s Biggest Trolls

The internet age may have invented the terminology of trolling, but it didn’t invent the type of person who trades in it. Throughout history, there have always been those whose only motivation in life is to confuse people, piss them off, or ideally, both. They might earn some material gain by scamming their audience or accomplishing some real feat as a side effect, but the primary goal is always the lulz.

Most of those people don’t get immortalized in the history books because, well, they usually don’t accomplish anything. Sometimes, they’re otherwise notable people whose reputations historians don’t want to tarnish. If a story is big enough, though, not even those fussy gatekeepers can suppress them, as proven by the responses when user drbdrbdr asked r/AskReddit, “Who is the biggest troll in history?”