You can pick up interesting details when you read first-hand accounts of history.
Here a Byzantine lord, shortly before the Fourth Crusade, advises how to dispose of Andronicus, who has just been deposed as the emperor of Byzantium:
"....I have at home a camel which is the foulest beast and the most bedunged and ugliest in the world. Now we will take Andronicus, and we will strip him stark naked, and we will bind him to the camel's back in such fashion that his face shall be against its rump, and we will lead him from one end of the city even unto the other...."
Andronicus was beaten to death by Constantinople's inhabitants as the camel carried him through the city.
Who says history is boring? Not I, certainly. :)