Immortalised by the Boney M song Rasputin, and as the fiery-eyed antagonist of hit films The King’s Man, Hellboy and Anastasia, Grigori Rasputin’s mythology still burns brightly more than a century after his death. A peasant mystic and faith healer, he became an unlikely advisor and confidante of Russia's last empress, the Tsarina Alexandra, outraging Russian society in the run-up to the Russian Revolution.

Rumours swirled that his ecstatic rituals involved untold debaucheries with female devotees – and even that he shared the Tsarina's bed. His influence at court eventually saw him assassinated in 1916 by disgruntled noblemen, one of whom later wrote that they’d had to poison him, shoot him repeatedly and throw him into a frozen lake to finally put him down.

15 common myths about European history