The early 15th century manual of military technology, Bellifortis, contains a passage on the chastity belt, and this illuminating sketch of what one would look like. So! Obviously the chastity belt existed then, and probably centuries earlier, since the crusader knights had to lock their women up ! Except, no. The chastity belt here is an hilarious joke. Really hilarious. No, really.
There were not, in the Middle Ages, any chastity belts. They did not exist. Really, they didn’t. They show up later, when enlighted ages say that they were used in the Middle Ages. Then, enlightened ages invented them, and now you can buy them on Amazon. Michelle explains how we know they didn’t exist, and how they got invented, and why the later ages that invented them said the Middle Ages did it. Anne, on the other hand, had a lot of fun researching the state of chastity belts now. Oh, and that hacking episode. Pro tip: don’t attach your private parts to the internet.
Galeazzo Maria Sforza is 15 in this painting from 1459 — it’s a detail from Benozzo Gozzoli’s “Journey of the Magi.” Later he will be a pretty badly behaved duke, but at the moment he’s been making friends with Lorenzo de’ Medici, who’s only 10. The friendship will serve the Duke well later on, when he becomes badly behaved.
Sometimes when our medieval rulers get assassinated we can see why, and that’s the case for Galeazzo Maria Sforza, who was a very bad sort of person. So, not surprisingly, he got stabbed to death by conspirators. Two of them were out for personal gain, but one was a poet who was, he believed, serving the greater communal good, which charms Anne. We tell you all about Sforza and the assassination, which is, really, the point of this episode, but the gem of information for Michelle was that one of the churches of Florence got burnt down on account of spectacular stage effects that were really too spectacular.
There are many affecting paintings of the death of Leszek Bialy, but this statue, erected in Morcinkowo at the place he was assassinated, is powerfully simple. The original was sculpted by Jakub Juszczyk in 1927; the Nazis destroyed that version in WWII; it was reconstructed in 1973.
During the Fragmentation of Poland, which lasted from 1138 to 1320, Leszek Bialy — Leszek the White — managed to reign as the High Duke of Poland four times, the last reign going on for 16 years before it ended, on account of his having been assassinated. That’s a long reign, during the age of fragmentation, when the realm was, well, fragmented, and the position of High Duke got passed around pretty often. Leszek was attending a conference of several dukes when he was attacked in his bath, escaping naked on his horse for a short distance before the attackers caught up with him. So, he’s well known for that, because it’s dramatic, and a great subject for painting, but he’s also famous for refusing to go on crusade because there was no beer in the Holy Land. Which is a really true thing; there’s documentation.
In this helpful illustration of the murder of Henry d’Almain by his de Montfort cousins, you may see an accurate depiction of the crime. Mass is happening; the church has no walls; the Montforts stand outside the church but only one of them can stab his cousin at a time; there are all sorts of soldiers accompanying the de Monforts on their vile mission. Actually, none of the things listed here are true. But there was a murder, and the cousins did it, and a church was involved. (By Giovanni Villani, Nuova Cronica – ms. Chigiano L VIII 296, Vatican Library, 14th century.)
Henry d’Almain didn’t really want to fight in the Second Barons’ War, because the leaders of the two sides were both his uncles, and when his uncle Simon de Montfort was killed and mutilated in the last battle, he wasn’t part of that, so it was really unseemly for his cousins, the sons of Simon de Montfort, to find him in a church in Italy and slaughter him while he was clinging to the altar. As vengeance goes, it was a really stupid vengeance that didn’t settle anything, and only got the de Montfort boys into more trouble. (Their father wouldn’t have done such a thing; the de Montforts were going downhill, that generation.) Anne wrassles with her grudging respect for Simon de Montfort, and Michelle finds a really badly behaved Victorian scholar. Because bad behavior transcends the Middle Ages.
In 1865, John Usser, a member of the Royal Geographic Society, who had gone traveling about, published his travel journal, which had many lovely illustrations. This is a painting of Circassian dance. What has this got to do with Maddelena? Well, she was Circassian, and there is no Circassia anymore, though there are lots Circassians keeping their culture alive, and Anne did not like the images that came up when she went looking for Crimean slave trade images, so here are Circassians dancing in 1865. In remembrance of Maddelena, who left her homeland and had to go hang out in Florence. With the de Medicis. Sorry.
We thought it would be interesting to talk about the Crimean Slave Trade, but we had not known that would, essentially, cover all of written history and all of the Old World. But it was on the schedule, and we found it interesting. So! We’ll start with the mother of Carlo de Medici, Maddelena, who was captured in or sold from Circassia (it’s over on the northeast shore of the Black Sea), and then sold in Crimea to a Venetian who took her to Venice and sold her to Cosimo de Medici, who took her to Florence. The Crimean slave trade was the major location of international slave trading from the 15th century until the 18th century, though it had existed much earlier. Maddelena was one of millions of people who were forcibly passed through the ports of Crimea. We distill a giant topic! But we mention Cervantes. He was one of the millions. Oh, and Captain John Smith. Pocahontas gets a mention. She wasn’t one of the slaves. She just got stuck with one of the stories.
Michael Servetus was burned in effigy once, and then burned at the stake with his books, and then later one of his effigies got burnt again –the Nazis melted down the first version of this monument, to make useful war stuff. It got remade in 1960, and is over at the City Hall in Annemasse, France.
Michael Servetus was one of those brilliant people who can be a bit annoying. He read and/or spoke Spanish and French and Hebrew and Latin and Arabic and Greek and who knows what all. He studied and/or wrote books on theology, medicine, mathematics, law, and some other stuff. He wrote poetry. He had a bunch of degrees. But he had to leave the Studium of Zaragoza because of a fight with the High Master; he nearly got the death penalty in Paris for translating Cicero’s De Divinatione (but they decided to just make him withdraw the book instead); he was in prison for a few days for injuring a physician who attacked him out of jealousy; he was arrested in France for heresy, and the Catholics were going to burn him at the stake; but he escaped — and then, instead of going to Italy, he went to Geneva, where John Calvin, who disagreed with Servetus in lots of ways, was instrumental in getting him burned at the stake there. So it was the Protestants who finally killed him, rather than the Catholics. It wasn’t John Calvin’s finest moment. But on the other hand, Calvin had argued for cutting Servetus’s head off rather than burning him with his books. Well, almost all of his theology. Three copies of the theology text survived, and Michelle will tell you all about them.
William Bradford was shocked, shocked I tell you, to discover that the young men of Plymouth who said they couldn’t work on Christmas were able to play games in the street. Worse than praying and meditating in your house on Christmas. Illustrated here by Howard Pyle, The Puritan Governor Interrupting the Christmas Sports, 1883
On the second Christmas that the Pilgrims spent in Plymouth (the first had been spent cutting down trees and building houses), the governor of the colony, William Bradford, gathered the men together so that they could all go do the Lord’s work (which was probably cutting down trees and building houses). Some of the colonists were newly arrived, and hadn’t come for religious reasons, but more for finding wealth and opportunity in the New World. This portion of the men did not think that Christmas didn’t exist and should not be recognized. They thought it did exist and they should get to have celebratory fun. So they talked Bradford into letting them go, and they went back and played games in the street. Bradford was surprised when he found them, since he thought they were praying and meditating in their homes about whether or not Christmas actually existed, and when they had prayed and meditated enough, they would figure out that it didn’t, and then they would come help out with the Lord’s work. Which was not, at all, in any way, playing games in the street. Anne gets to talk about Christmas and Colonial America, and Michelle found a rabbit hole that was so seductive she didn’t read anything about William Bradford and the Naughty Boys, because she had to learn all about John Taylor, Water Poet, who had a lot to say about the dreadfulness of banning Christmas and, we’ve decided, is the protagonist of Michelle’s next historical novel. Happy Holidays!
In this affecting painting by James Northcote, 1786, we see an imagined version of what happened to King Edward V and Richard of Shrewsbury, Duke of York — the princes in the Tower — which is that Sir James Tyrell smothered them with pillows. Maybe he did. Or maybe Henry Stafford did it. Or even Richard III. But neither one of these poor doomed children is Lambert Simnel or Perkin Warbeck. They were pretending.
So, there were those two boys in the Tower of London, Edward V, King of England, who was 12, and Richard of Shrewsbury, Duke of York, who was 9, and they disappeared one summer after their uncle Richard declared them illegitimate and became King Richard III. And it was a total mystery as to what happened to them, and still is, and Richard III was not king for very long before Henry Tudor, who was on one side descended from Tudur ap Gronwy Fychan, which made the English no never mind, but on the other side descended from King Edward III, and so was a claimant to the throne of England by blood if you squinted your eyes and looked sideways, was a very good claimant to the throne on account of winning the Battle of Bosworth, after which King Richard was buried under a future car park. Henry was king, then, and there weren’t any more men left from the family of Richard III and Edward IV, because the princes in the tower had disappeared and everybody, including us, thought they were dead. But maybe they weren’t ! Maybe they got away! They maybe escaped the Tower and went to Flanders! And that kind of imagining allowed for Lambert Simnel and Perkin Warbeck, both of whom, four years apart, claimed to be either Edward V, or Richard Duke of York, or even their cousin George. Both of them became the center of rebellions. Both of them lost the fight for the crown. One was allowed to be a castle worker and the other was kept at court until he misbehaved once too often and got executed. So we explain all that. And Anne explains all of the pretenders to the English throne. And what is Michelle’s rabbit hole, this episode? The ACTUAL BED that was made for the wedding of Henry and Elizabeth. No, really. She got a book about it and it’s her favorite part of this whole hoopla.
Here we may observe the end of the Jacquerie, when the French nobility ended the peasants’ revolt by slaughtering the peasants. Apparently they threw a bunch of them into the river. You’re welcome. (Loyset Liedet, miniature in Grandes Chroniques de France by Jean Froissart, held in Bibliotheque Nationale de France)
In the summer of 1358, French peasants took up arms — this means mostly sticks — and attacked the nobility. They did indeed murder some of them, but mostly, almost entirely, the burnt down property. They didn’t even loot. They just destroyed stuff. The nobility had gotten problematic, certainly, what with running away from important battles and then trying to squeeze more out of the peasantry so they could pay for further military adventures, though apparently not any training. So the peasants were fed up, and they put great fear into the nobility, who then imagined that the peasants were committing lots and lots of atrocities, so the nobility had to go commit atrocities on the peasants, so as to make them harmless. It was a really really really bad summer.
Here you may see a rendition of the monastery founded by Vasvilkas, Monk Prince of Lithuania, who gave up his throne to be a monk here but alas got assassinated. Napoleon Orda was the artist here, so Veiselga Monastery in this picture is about 600 years old. Now it would be over 700 years old, but it’s gone. However, the archaeologists think they’ve found it. Michelle wants to know where it is. Please let her know, if you do.
Vasvilkas, the Grand Duke of Lithuania, got assassinated for a reason that Michelle considers the stupidest assassination reason the podcast has seen so far, that being that when Vasvilkas, the Monk Prince, decided to give up the throne so he could go back to being a monk, he gave it to a brother in law, and another brother in law thought that Vasvilkas should have made him a co-ruler, so he murdered Vasvilkas. As MIchelle points out, he still didn’t get to be co-ruler. So she went off to read about the changing legend of Vasvilkas, and Anne got to find out about the sacred grass snakes of Lithuania, and they were worth it, let me tell you.
