It's called political smear, user. Most of history is upside down and people hardly realize it.
Take a look at some historical figures and what they did IN CONTEXT instead of believing ((historians)) wich were state-sponsored. It also has a lot to do with locality and religion. Christians are the most disgusting at rewriting history to suit their goals, but other parts of the world did it too, the jews foremost amongst them, as i'am sure you are very well aware. Sulla for example, the first roman dictator, was actualy a conservative hero, but caesar shat all over his legacy of public duty and restoring order to a degenerate rome wich was being ruled by criminals. Another good example is Genghis Khan, wich did nothing out of the ordinary for his time period, the problem was the quadrillion chinese scholars writing about he "had 3 testicles and was satan" to please the chinese emperos afterwards. Christians outright stole lore from many religions, not just pagan europeans, more than half of what christians think are saints were actualy local pagan warlords who simply took gold to kill people the church disliked (if thou shall not kill, at least pay someone to do it :^) ). Christians also often stole inventions and research from "witches" like burning a witch, taking over all his writings and findings and trying to pass them as your own to the pope, much of medieval effective medicine was "developed" this way, priest moves to pagan lands, steals everything and gets rid of the person who did in a fire, rinse, repeat, the pope then proceeded to proclaim they were godly, curiously, this behavior was mostly found amongst catholics and very rare in orthodox, arian or coptic places. Charlemagne was a crazy psycopath who both mocked the church and, ironicaly, won the battle that saved europe because hhe was reinforced by a germanic pagan warlord, wich he then preceded to betray and murder after the battle (typical saint, eh).
All in all, to really understand history i highly recommend you read upon character from at least 3 different perspectives. The people who benefited by his/her actions, the people harmed, and the neutral observers (wich are a bit rare, since the religious authorities went out of their way to destroy writings wich tarnished its less than stellar reputation).
Oriental history is much more convoluted due to the fact the only peope who really gave a shit about writing stuff down were the chinese, and the chinese were as imperialistic and lying as fug. Japan on the other hand made a point of being respectful to the memory of eachother, regardless of sides, a quite unique historical cultural trait.
Hope this post helps you understand the world a bit better.
And remember, Hitler had three testicles, was homosexual, crossdressing, an alien, insane, a monster, had no dick, had two dicks, loved men secretly, loved jewish girls secretly, was actualy posses by satan, was satan himself, was an atheist, was a religious fanatic, and finaly, was not even real.
[/spoiler] Its all true, it says so here in my ((history)) book aproved by the ((church)) and the ((government)) [/spoiler]
